John Bowden: POLL: Voters think Trump is a criminal, Biden is too old and DeSantis is a fascist, new poll finds

With the GOP primary now in full swing, Americans are getting a good look at the alternatives the Republican Party will present to the re-election of President Joe Biden, who was already the oldest president ever to take office when he did so in 2021.

But the top contenders in the GOP, former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, each have debilitating labels to overcome if they have any shot of picking up ground with a general election audience, according to the survey. For Mr Trump, voters were most likely to describe him in one word as a “criminal”; others were even less flattering, such as “disgusting”, “liar”, “evil” and “dangerous” (though “patriot” also made a top-10 appearance).

The Florida governor got off arguably worse. The top two responses from voters describing Mr DeSantis were “fascist” and “unsure”, the latter indicating possible unfamiliarity with his political record or a lack of name recognition.

And while Mr Biden fares better than either of his would-be opponents, the incumbent president nevertheless remains chained to concerns about his age, which dominated the minds of the most voters asked for their one-word summation of him.

Altogether, the poll results signaled that Americans are largely unsatisfied with the options they have for leadership over the next half decade. https://news.yahoo.com/voters-think-trump-criminal-biden-155844311.html

Jackie Calmes: Talk about ‘American carnage’ — Walt Nauta is the latest casualty of Donald Trump’s malicious selfishness

For loyal service to Donald Trump both in the White House and since — as valet, Diet Coke gofer and occasional box mover — Walt Nauta misplaced loyalty puts him at the front of an immeasurably long line of people, both famous and obscure, who’ve had their lives upended somehow by the egomaniacal Trump.

Perhaps the single most compelling argument for Trump’s unfitness for the presidency is his cruelty, his willingness to use people for his own ends, regardless of the peril for them and their families, and his entirely selfish maliciousness toward countless others, for any reason or no reason.

Cohen, the ex-con ex-Trump lawyer who speaks from experience, has been quoted using both phrases. He laments that Nauta hasn’t aided prosecutors to save himself jail time: “Loyalty, to Donald Trump, is like 1st Avenue in Manhattan: one way.” On MSNBC, Cohen looked straight into the camera as if talking to Nauta and said, “Run as fast as you can, my friend ... because Donald Trump will throw you under the bus faster than you could possibly imagine.”

Another former Trump lawyer, Ty Cobb, likewise feels sorry for Nauta. “I’d be shocked if Trump said 10 words a day to him,” Cobb told the Washington Post. And two of those words, Cobb added, would not be “Thank you.”

After the indictment of Trump and Nauta, the former president praised his valet and protested on his social media site that the FBI and the Justice Department “are trying to destroy his life, like the lives of so many others.”

Trump was projecting again. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-06-19/donald-trump-walt-nauta-federal-indictment-mar-a-lago-classified-documents

Maureen Dowd: To Jail or Not to Jail

Studying Hamlet, the revenge play about a rotten kingdom, I tried for years to fathom Hamlet’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions.

His consciousness was so complex, Harold Bloom wrote, it seemed bigger than the play itself.

Now I’m mired in another revenge play about a rotten kingdom, Trump. I’ve tried for years to fathom Donald Trump’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions.

The man who dumbed down the office of the presidency is a less gratifying subject than the smarty-pants doomed prince. Hamlet is transcendent, while Trump is merely transgressive. But we can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.

Trump is feral, focused on his own survival, with no sense of shame or boundaries or restraint.

As Axelrod wrote in The Atlantic, Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions — not just media, but law enforcement and the election system itself.

It remains to be seen, as Axelrod has noted, whether indictments will serve as kryptonite against Trump or energy packs fueling his return to the Oval Office. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/opinion/to-jail-or-not-to-jail.html

Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat and Carlos Lozada; Just When You Thought There Was Nothing New to Learn About Donald Trump

After believing time and time again that Trump had self-destructed — after he denigrated John McCain, after we found out he had pretended to be his own spokesman, after the Access Hollywood tape, and after he shared classified material with Russian diplomats — I have learned to wait and see whether Trump will preposterously get away with things. He has spent his entire life cutting corners and dancing on the edge of legal. But Jack Smith, the special counsel, is teaching him that you can’t conduct a presidency that way.

So we must contemplate Trump’s weird preoccupation with his boxes full of state secrets.

He held onto them. Why? Mitt Romney asked reporters on Capitol Hill. That’s the question. Why is the country going to have to go through all this angst and tumult? Why didn’t he just turn the documents in?

The papers spilling out of boxes are a snapshot of Trump’s id. He raised his personality to a management style. His disordered mind has caused public disorder.

During his presidency, The Times reported, his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.

The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him.

The guy likes paper. And, like Louis XIV, he believes L’État, c’est moi. His favorite words are personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. Kevin McCarthy is my Kevin. Army officers were my generals. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was my favorite dictator. In the indictment, a Trump lawyer quotes Trump as warning, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.

Is he so addled by narcissism that he sees no distinction between highly sensitive documents belonging to the government and papers he wants to keep? He treats classified maps and nuclear secrets and a Pentagon war plan for Iran like pelts, hunting trophies, or family scrapbook items.

He’s like a child, dragging around the things that are important to him. Chris Christie joked about Trump taking some of the boxes on his jet to his club in Bedminster: He flew the boxes up to New Jersey for summer vacation. What is this? Like, they’re a family member?

It bespeaks a frailty, a need to be bolstered by talismanic items.

When he was a real estate dealer and reality star, his office in Trump Tower was papered in framed magazine covers, so that his face stared back at him from every angle, like an infinity mirror.

He must worry: Without pieces of paper to prove I am important, am I important?

Trump has said one of his favorite movies is Citizen Kane. Perhaps the boxes at Xanadu he’s obsessed with, the papers that could make him the locked-up loser he dreads being, have been revealed as his Rosebud. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/opinion/to-jail-or-not-to-jail.html

Aaron Blake: The GOP’s remarkable views of Trump’s classified documents

Multiple polls focused on the Trump classified documents case suggest that many, if not most, Republicans don’t particularly appreciate the potential gravity of the situation or its details. And it can’t simply be explained by mere partisanship.

One of the inescapable facts of the situation is that Trump got himself in trouble not because he took the documents in the first place, but because he declined to return them. The indictment only charges conduct after the government subpoenaed Trump’s documents in May 2022. After that subpoena, Trump only returned some of his remaining classified documents before the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago turned up more. The Washington Post recapped how Trump’s fateful decision not to return the documents resulted from rejecting his lawyers’ advice.

But despite it being readily apparent that Trump didn’t do what the government asked, a new YouGov poll shows Republicans, by and large, maintain that he did. It shows 53 percent say Trump ‘cooperated in returning documents,’ with just 15 percent saying he didn’t. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/15/gops-remarkable-views-trumps-classified-documents/

Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman: The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden

When Donald Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to ‘go after’ President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’ against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/us/politics/trump-indictment-justice-department.html

Evan Osnos: How Will the G.O.P. Field Respond to Donald Trump’s Indictment?

How do you campaign against a political rival for whom there is no conceivable precedent? When the Department of Justice indicted Donald Trump, last week, on counts arising from his handling of classified documents, he became not only the first former President in American history to face federal charges but also the most confounding front-runner ever in a Presidential primary. Trump is a candidate for Commander-in-Chief who now faces thirty-seven counts for refusing to return material related, according to the indictment, to United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. Trump, who first came to power assailing his rival, Hillary Clinton, for her storage of sensitive information, is now accused of urging an attorney to hide or destroy documents, and of allowing unqualified civilians to see secret files. In one instance, at his golf club in New Jersey, the former President is alleged to have told visitors about a classified plan of attack against Iran, and was recorded on tape admitting that this is still a secret.

The federal indictment came two months after Trump was indicted in Manhattan on thirty-four counts related to a hush-money case. Those charges, which he denied, gave him a boost in the polls. The latest counts, which Trump also denies, could further fortify his grip on the Republican Party or, in the fullness of time, they could blast the race wide open. The effect will depend, in part, on the strategic calculations of his opponents.

The indictment in the documents case could be followed by others—in Washington, Georgia, or elsewhere. It’s tempting to dismiss the field of long shot candidates for their hypocrisies or their eccentricities, but American elections are long and mercurial, and, with Trump engulfed in legal woes, it’s not inconceivable that one of them could end up in the White House. More immediately, their very presence in the race is shaping it, because they stand to split the opposition to Trump and improve his prospects. For that reason, the most vital question Americans face is not who has the confidence to enter the campaign but who will have the courage to speak frankly about Trump and, ultimately, who will have the sense to exit it.

Trump Says He’ll Never Leave ’24 Race, Even If He’s Rotting in a Prison Cell, Which He Just Might Be. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/19/how-will-the-gop-field-respond-to-donald-trumps-indictment

Fintan O’Toole: The Ultimate Deal

Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned.

To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.

Before the publication of the grand jury’s indictment, it was possible to believe that Trump’s retention of classified documents was reckless and stupid. The indictment reveals that recklessness and stupidity are the least of his sins. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/06/10/the-ultimate-deal/

Bess Levin: Donald Trump Says He’ll Never Leave ’24 Race, Even If He’s Rotting in a Prison Cell, Which He Just Might Be

The 2024 presidential race took an incredible turn last Thursday night when Donald Trump, late of being indicted by the Manhattan district attorney, was charged by the Justice Department with a whopping 37 felony counts including conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, and making false statements and representations. (If it wasn’t clear: The charges against the former guy, which were the result of special counsel Jack Smith’s months-long investigation, are extremely serious and he is facing decades behind bars.) At this time, a normal candidate—i.e., someone who doesn’t stash national security secrets next to the toilet, or talk like critical components of his brain were removed during a routine teeth cleaning—would likely deliver a speech in which he or she announced that they were dropping out of the race. But Trump, obviously, is not a normal candidate, which is why he’s vowed to keep his campaign for president going even if he’s convicted of federal crimes.

On Saturday, in an interview on his plane, Trump told reporters, “I’ll never leave,” adding that if there was ever a time that he would have dropped out of a presidential race it would have been in 2016. He also said he did not anticipate accepting a plea deal but suggested he would do so in a scenario in which the government pays him damages. In a separate interview, Alina Habba, one of the few Trump attorneys who hasn’t quit, told Fox News, “You take a plea deal to make something go away. That’s an admission of guilt. He would never admit guilt. Because there was nothing wrong with declassifying documents, taking documents with you.” (Habba forgot to mention the part where Trump wasn’t just accused of “taking documents” with him but obstructing justice and lying to the feds.)

Of course, what happens to Trump with regard to a potential conviction and sentence is not actually up to him but rather the justice system. Should he be found guilty on all counts, he is facing a fine of more than $9 million and 400 years in prison. And even if he’s found guilty of just one count, he could be headed to prison for an amount of time that, at his age, might as well be 40 to life. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/donald-trump-2024-race-prison

Dan Balz, Ann E. Marimow and Perry Stein: Trump’s indictment plus candidacy could endanger democracy and the rule of law

America’s institutions have been attacked repeatedly over the past half-dozen years, thanks principally to the conduct and actions of Donald Trump. The next 18 months could further undermine confidence in democracy and the rule of law as the former president seeks a return to the White House while defending himself against federal and state criminal charges.

Not since the Vietnam War in the 1960s or perhaps the mid-19th century before the Civil War has the country’s governing structure faced such disunity and peril, given the unprecedented nature of a federal criminal indictment of a former president compounded by the fact that Trump has been charged by the Justice Department in the administration of the Democrat who defeated him in 2020 and who is his likeliest general election opponent in 2024, if Trump is nominated again by the Republican Party.

Scholars, legal experts and political strategists agree that what lies ahead is ugly and unpredictable. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/17/trump-indictment-candidacy-democracy-institutions/

Damon Linker: A Trump Pardon Won’t Save Us

David A. Graham: Chris Christie, Liberal Hero