Robert Kagan: A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively, conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course, in the hope and expectation that something will happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not downright impossible.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/

Tom Nichols: What Trump’s Second Term Could Look Like

For years, Donald Trump’s many opponents were often accused of alarmism, and early on, this seemed a justified criticism: Before he was even sworn in, words such as fascist and autocrat were in the air. Although I was a charter member of the Never Trump movement, I worried that catastrophizing Trump and depicting him as an invincible Demogorgon would induce helplessness and resignation among American citizens. When Trump was defeated in 2020, however, many voters took that as a sign that the guardrails had held and that America was out of danger. Even January 6, 2021, has receded from the public’s consciousness, and a fair number of Americans seem unaware of just how close we came to the violent overthrow of our electoral institutions.

Trump’s autocratic instincts have now fully mutated into an embrace of fascism. And yet, America shrugs: Millions of voters think of the upcoming election as just another contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat, instead of an existential contest between democracy and authoritarianism. The early hysteria about Trump has ended up submerging deep concerns about democracy in a haze of equivocation and complacency. Even people who have no particular love for Trump typically argue that life under his administration was mostly normal, and that all of the fears about how Trump could collapse American democracy were just overheated rhetoric. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/12/trump-reelection-2024-second-term/676237/

Franklin Foer: Corruption Unbound

During Trump’s first months as president, it wasn’t yet clear how much concentrated corruption the nation, or his own party, would tolerate, which is why Trump was compelled to dispose of the occasional Cabinet secretary. Yet nearly everything about Trump’s history in real estate, where he greased palms and bullied officials, suggested that he regarded the government as a lucrative instrument for his own gain.

A week and a half before taking office, he held a press conference in front of towering piles of file folders, theatrically positioned to suggest rigorous legal analysis, and announced that he would not divest himself of his commercial interests. Instead, he became the first modern commander in chief to profit from a global network of businesses, branded in gilded letters blaring his own name.

It didn’t happen all at once. Trump spent the early days of his presidency testing boundaries. He used his bully pulpit to unabashedly promote his real-estate portfolio. His properties charged the Secret Service “exorbitant rates”—as much as $1,185 a night, per a House Oversight Committee report—for housing agents when Trump or his family members visited. By the time Trump and his cronies left the White House, they had slowly erased any compunction, both within the Republican Party and outside it, about their corruption. They left power having compiled a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-second-term-mafia-state/676128/

Jonathan Freedland: In its war against Hamas, Israel faces a tragic choice between two different routes to disaster

And on the eighth day, the war began anew. After a week of joy and relief for those Israeli families reunited with loved ones held hostage by Hamas, and of respite from Israeli bombardment for the people of Gaza, seven days of rolling ceasefires came to an end on December 1st. No more hugs, no more quiet. Instead, the war between Israel and Hamas is back on, presenting once more what moral philosophers refer to as a “tragic choice” – a dilemma where there are no good options, only two different routes to disaster. In fighting Hamas, Israel faces just such a predicament – and yet there are too many, among both those who defend Israel and those who denounce it, who refuse to see that.

The laziest form of politics is practiced by those who pretend complex problems are easy or can be solved cost-free. There is, in fact, a terrible price to pay as long as Israel keeps fighting in Gaza, in the form of the deaths of thousands of innocents. And there is a terrible price to pay if Israel stops fighting in Gaza, leaving intact a murderous, eliminationist threat. Neither option is bearable. It is a tragic choice. We cannot do much for the two peoples trapped by that choice, but we can at least admit that we see it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/01/war-hamas-israel-tragic-choice

David Frum: The Danger Ahead

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?

In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/donald-trump-reelection-second-term-agenda/676119/

Andrew Sullivan: Uh-Oh. Here We Go Again

I was one of a handful of pundits who thought in early 2016 that Trump not only could, but probably would, win the election. I could feel his appeal in my lizard brain, and had long studied the fragility of liberal democracy in my frontal cortex. But the moment I knew his presidency was almost certain was when the Brexit result was announced in June, when everyone still assumed Hillary was a shoo-in. Something was stirring. And that’s why, after my annual trip back to Britain last week, I’m feeling the nausea again.

The mood is just ugly — a deep pessimism suffused with barely stifled fury. It’s not quite right or left, as we used to understand those things. It’s more irrational than that, and less predictable. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/uh-oh-here-we-go-again

David Graham:  The Dual Threat of Donald Trump

A candidate who is running to potentially stay out of prison is a dangerous candidate. He is not just running for his own ideology or pride; he’s running for his very freedom. That warps his incentives, making him more likely to employ demagogic tactics, less concerned about the way history might judge him, and more inclined to use every avenue possible to win the election—even if it means bending or breaking the law.

Yet Trump may not be alone. In recent weeks, the former president has been more explicit about his intention, if reelected, to prosecute Joe Biden. And that means both leading candidates could have their freedom at stake. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/donald-trump-joe-biden-2024-election-avoiding-jail/676168/

Peter Wehner: Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying? He is becoming frighteningly clear about what he wants.

In our nation’s history, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served in four Republican administrations and was part of the Republican leadership in the House, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.

That Trump would say what he’s said and done what he’s done is no surprise; he is a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically. And he’s been entirely transparent about who he is. The most troubling aspect of this whole troubling drama has been the people in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to Trump’s corruptions time after time after time. Some cheer him on; others silently go along for the ride. A few gently criticize him and then quickly change topics. But they never leave him.

By now I know how this plays out: For most Republicans to acknowledge—to others and even to themselves—what Trump truly is and still stay loyal to him would create enormous cognitive dissonance. Their mind won’t allow them to go there; instead, they find ways to ease the inner conflict. And so they embrace conspiracy theories to support what they desperately want to believe—for example, that the election was stolen, or that the investigation into Russian ties to the 2016 Trump campaign was a hoax, or that Joe Biden has committed impeachable offenses. They indulge in whataboutism and catastrophism—the belief that society is on the edge of collapse—to justify their support for Trump. They have a burning psychological need to rationalize why, in this moment in history, the ends justify the means.

If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as Trump Derangement Syndrome—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP; he carried 94 percent of the Republican vote in 2020, an increase from 2016, and he is leading his closest primary challenger nationally by more than 45 points. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/trump-becoming-frighteningly-clear-about-what-he-wants/676086/