Charlie Sykes: And Now, the Narrative Changes

So even though the shouting will continue a bit longer, today marks decisively the pivot from the primaries to the general election. As Mona Charen and I discussed yesterday, the next few weeks will be Trump’s high-water mark, as he triumphantly struts amid the ruins of his GOP opposition and reasserts his imperium.

But watch how quickly the vibe now shifts.

For months, the punditocracy has focused on the obdurate post-indictment loyalty of the MAGA base, the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of the culture wars, and the party’s race to the right. This has been bookended with (often quite justified) pearl-clutching over Joe Biden’s weakness and the incumbent’s many vulnerabilities.

Now that the primary is over, however, attention will be paid to something else: Donald Trump, who has throttled opposition in the minority party he heads, has a much more serious problem with the voters who will decide the actual election in November. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/and-now-the-narrative-changes
 

Thomas Edsall: We Are Normalizing Trump. Again

Over the past nine years, Donald Trump has been variously described as narcissistic, mendacious, authoritarian, unbalanced, ignorant, incompetent, egotistic and racist — as someone who demonizes minorities and fans ethnic hostility. These assessments are a major reason roughly half of American voters, according to polls, say they will not vote for him.

But even as Trump has steadily escalated his defiance of behavioral norms, a substantial share of the American electorate remains willing to cast a ballot for him. Approximately half of the electorate views Trump as a legitimate 2024 presidential contender, repeatedly demonstrating in surveys that they plan to vote for him in a matchup with President Biden.

In other words, these voters have normalized perhaps the least normal president in American history. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/opinion/trump-republican-nomination-coalition.html
 

Peter Wehner: The Party of Malice

Eighty-two percent of Republicans across the country agree with Trump’s immigrants ‘poisoning the blood’ rhetoric. In addition, two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers said Biden did not legitimately win the presidential election in 2020.

And about two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers said they would consider Trump to be fit for president even if he were convicted of a crime. No previous nonincumbent presidential hopeful has ever been in so dominant a position at so early a stage of the race. For Republicans, there is Trump, and there is really no one else. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/haley-trump-gop/677212/

Philip Elliot: Johnson At Risk of Becoming a SINO: Speaker In Name Only

Judging from the defections, detractors, and open defiance coming from his own nominal allies, Johnson’s grip on the gavel may be far weaker than his predecessor; Kevin McCarthy lasted a grand 269 days, the third-shortest in history. Johnson just hit 90 days in so-called power, and already is staring down a mutiny from his right flank…

Johnson is about as conservative as they come, but, as ridiculous as it may sound, his willingness to keep the government funded is quickly proving disqualifying. And while Democrats are willing to reach across the aisle to keep the lights on, there is considerably less appetite for helping any Republican grab or hold on to the gavel. Privately, senior Democrats are counseling House members that they must draw the line at playing any role in picking a Speaker in a Republican-controlled House. Anyone Democrats might help to take over after Johnson would immediately find themselves viewed as untrusted by much of their own party. That leaves House Democrats in the awkward position of holding disproportionate power that they are unwilling to flex. https://time.com/6564951/mike-johnson-house-speaker-weak/
 

Jonathan Chait: Republicans Did This to Themselves

Incumbent presidents who are running for reelection almost always win the nomination. Why? Because they won last time, and parties like nominating winners. Defeated candidates who run for the nomination usually lose. Why? Because they lost last time, and parties hate nominating losers.

If Republicans wanted their party to nominate somebody other than Donald Trump — and most of the party’s elected officials and donors did, at least secretly — then they needed their voters to understand that he lost the 2020 election. But doing so required hard steps they were never willing to take. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/donald-trump-republican-nomination-big-lie-january-6-nikki-haley-desantis.html
 

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Trump on the Trail and on Trial

Trump’s trials, in which he faces ninety-one felony counts, have often been described as a potential distraction for the candidate. But Trump, who complained in Atkinson that he has been indicted more times than Al Capone, did not sound distracted or gloomy about the prospect of spending that time in court. Quite the opposite.

Is it clever, or deluded, for Trump to see his trials as a political opportunity? He has already been found liable for sexual abuse, in the Carroll case, and he still faces charges of financial fraud, taking documents marked classified from the White House and refusing to give them back, and conspiring to overturn a federal election—not exactly a winning roster. On the icy campaign trail this month, Trump’s presence has been something short of overwhelming. His events are held mostly in hotel ballrooms and country clubs, rather than the arenas of yore; he says little that is new; the crowds tend to thin noticeably as he rambles on. They chuckle when he says crooked Joe Biden, but there is nothing like the cascading chants of Lock her up! directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even Trump’s Iowa landslide consisted of just fifty-six thousand votes, and half of Republicans wanted someone else. Lately, Trump has been working into his stump speech an attack on Fani Willis, the Fulton County D.A., who indicted him for conspiring to pressure Georgia officials to invalidate his loss in the state in 2020—and whom one of his co-defendants has accused of an alleged conflict of interest. For Trump, the attraction of the trials, in an election characterized so far by general indifference, may be quite basic. They give him something to talk about. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/29/trump-on-the-trail-and-on-trial

Zeynep Tufekci: A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.

Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters. All the politicians say things like that in private, countless Trump supporters asserted to me and argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.

Projecting strength and being seen as authentic are common themes among other leaders whom political scientists would call “competitive authoritarians.” In their regimes, many of the basic tenets of liberal democracy are violated, but elections, largely free of widespread fraud, are regularly held. Many political scientists place Narendra Modi of India (his party recently won major victories in state elections, and a third term is possible), Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (on his third term as president, after three stints as prime minister) and Viktor Orban of Hungary (in his fourth consecutive term) in this category.

Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world. Right after his recent landslide re-election, Orban said his party had won despite everyone being against them, and now he would ensure that Hungary would be “strong, rich and green.” In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”

It’s easy to see why Trump’s political message can override concerns about the process of democracy for many. What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?

Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/opinion/trump-voters-iowa-caucus.html

 

Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump: Presidents Must Be Allowed to Commit Crimes What do you call a system in which the chief executive is not bound by law?

Donald Trump’s lawyers have been arguing since last month that presidents of the United States cannot be charged with any crimes for abusing their powers. Lawyers make whatever arguments they have to, and those legal arguments don’t always reflect deeply rooted beliefs by their client. But now Trump is forcefully making the case in public for total presidential immunity.

Here is Trump’s argument, which is best appreciated in its full all-caps original format:
 

A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT “CROSS THE LINE” MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL “ROGUE COP” OR “BAD APPLE.” SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH “GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.” ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR TH    E AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!
 

Trump’s legal and political arguments have a contradiction. He is asking the courts to establish a ruling that presidents cannot be criminally charged for their official duties, a request that implies that such protections do not exist. At the same time, he insists that the lack of such protection would make it impossible for any president to govern effectively.

Yet every previous president has managed to conduct his job without ever having been assured he is free from prosecution. This only became a problem when we elected a career criminal as president.

The Trump argument is that as an elected president he should be permitted to commit any crimes whatsoever, and there should be no legal consequences. What do you call a system in which the chief executive is not bound by law? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/donald-trump-total-immunity-president-crimes-authoritarian.html

Eugene Robinson: House Republicans are practicing political nihilism

If House Republicans refuse to fix the border crisis, nobody will be able to deny the obvious: The GOP is more interested in nursing grievances and stoking anger than actually solving problems. That’s exactly what Donald Trump has trained them to do.

Bipartisan Senate negotiators and the White House say they are close to a deal on legislation to alleviate what everyone agrees is an emergency. It would give Republicans much of what they want regarding the southern border — beefed-up security against illegal crossings, tightened asylum rules, provision for more detentions and expulsions, perhaps even limits on President Biden’s authority to “parole” certain groups of immigrants into the country.

The package would also approve billions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine, which the administration says is urgently needed but some House Republicans oppose. This is how bitterly contested issues are resolved in Washington: One side gets some wins and makes some concessions, the other side does the same, and both sides claim they got the better of the deal. And maybe, in the end, some good gets done.

But after Biden met with congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) immediately threw doubt on the very idea of an agreement that addresses both the border and Ukraine. His position has been that the border question has to be resolved first, and that any solution has to be based on draconian House-passed legislation that would, among other things, require building 900 miles of Trump’s border wall. For both the Senate and Biden, Johnson’s demand is a non-starter.

Why would House Republicans balk at a chance to ease the crisis at the border that they’ve been braying about for years? Because they would rather have the issue as a cudgel for Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee, to use against Biden in November. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/18/house-republicans-no-immigration-deal/

Tom Nichols: The Age of Incoherent Partisanship

The Democrats, as a party, are in favor of American constitutional democracy, and when so much of our politics has become nothing but blue flags and red flags, that is enough. As John F. Kennedy once said to Richard Nixon (in the context of foreign policy, but with a sentiment that is more than applicable today): “I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?”

The Republicans, meanwhile, have in the course of a decade sublimated from a solid party into a miasmic gas of partisan incoherence. As I wrote in the summer of 2022, when I tried to define why I still thought of myself as a conservative, the GOP is not identifiably “conservative” in any way that people like me ever understood that word. I was a Republican because I wanted a small, efficient government that believed in constitutional limits on its own power, a strong national defense, and the advancement of free markets. That party no longer exists.

Partisan inconsistency is hardly news: Political scientists have known since at least the 1960s that voters are attached to parties but are far less coherent about policies. (Although much of this work is about the American system, plenty of evidence indicates that irrational partisanship is something of a natural human tendency that’s affecting other democracies as well.) But one American party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile, but so far dominant, prodemocracy coalition. In this unprecedented situation, our politics have been largely emptied of meaning beyond the existential question of democracy itself. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/01/the-age-of-incoherent-partisanship/677188/
 

Washington Post Editorial Board: The 1.5-degree climate goal is out of reach. Here’s what to do now

For those who like clutching at straws, it’s still technically possible to believe civilization can prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the average of the preindustrial era — the strong recommendation of climate scientists. But most people can surmise that the world is missing this goal.

Last week, the European climate monitor Copernicus reported that the globe’s average temperature hit 14.98 degrees Celsius last year, 1.48 degrees above that of the second half of the 19th century. Two U.S. agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, followed suit, putting warming since then at 1.4 and 1.35 degrees, respectively. The synthesis by the World Meteorological Organization landed on 1.45 degrees above the preindustrial average, with an uncertainty band of plus or minus 0.12 degrees.

The evidence that global efforts have not met global ambitions does not change the nature of the task, though. Even if the world is, in fact, careening toward some catastrophic scenario, it remains true that each ton of carbon dioxide removed from the world’s energy matrix, and each ton of methane and nitrous oxide removed from the livestock and agriculture industries, will help limit climate change and its associated damage.

 Blasting past the vaunted warming ceiling could discourage countries from investing in a costly energy transition that might seem to have already failed. And yet, if failure spurs the world to double down on its climate goals, it might provide the needed incentive to take the challenge as seriously as it deserves. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/18/climate-change-target-missing-global-action/

Aaron Blak: How Democrats undermine their own anti-Trump message

Treating each Republican candidate as if he/she is interchangeable with the man you’ve labeled a unique threat, diminishes the argument that he’s actually a unique threat.

You can criticize Haley for insufficiently warning of the dangers of Trump and even for flip-flopping on him, just as you can criticize her and the more-Trump-critical Sununu for saying they’d still vote for Trump. Republicans certainly play the game to avoid offending Trump’s many supporters, at the very least, and accordingly align at least somewhat with the MAGA movement.

But the idea that Haley and Sununu — both of whom have garnered relatively positive reviews from independents and even Democrats and did not push his stolen-election crusade — are MAGA extremists akin to Trump would seem to be a pretty tough sell. And the risk is that you look like you’re just saying stuff, even when it comes to Trump.

The Hutchinson example is more head-scratching. Both he and Christie effectively ran sacrificial missions aimed at taking out Trump, which left them politically homeless — largely echoing many of Democrats’ key arguments in the process. The received message is that even that doesn’t earn you much of a pass from the other side.

At least the White House now seems to recognize that this was perhaps counterproductive to the effort to rid the country of Trumpism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/18/how-democrats-undermine-their-own-anti-trump-message/

Maureen Dowd: Can the MAGA Shrew Be Tamed?

Even after four years of Donald the Menace in the White House, I am still gobsmacked that he could be on his way to another stint as the leader of the free world. But given his landslide in Iowa, we must accept it, no matter how ludicrous it seems.

The media has been avoiding falling into Trump’s quicksand of mendacity, but it still struggles. How can it be fair without airing all the crazy garbage he spews?

He puts you in an impossible situation. Interviewing him, some say, is like interviewing a stand-up comic. You’re not asking him questions; you’re feeding him lines.

This dilemma was in evidence on Monday night, when MSNBC refused to carry Trump’s victory speech at all and CNN cut away from the 25-minute remarks after 10 minutes. Fox News, of course, played it all.

Here’s the reality people don’t want to accept: Trump is likely to be one of two candidates who will be the president in 2025. Even if we despise the things he says, we’ve got to hear them. If he engages in disinformation, we need to call him on it.

Maybe we should just run a chyron under Trump at all times: No, the election wasn’t stolen …. No, your opponents aren’t vermin. … No, migrants are not poisoning the blood of our nation. … No, Jan. 6 was not a beautiful day. … No, presidents should not have total immunity because, as we know, crooks can be president. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/opinion/trump-election-2024-primaries.html

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Trump is not a colossus. And his party is a mess.

Though there is certainly polarization between our parties, the primary cause of the deep distemper in American politics is the polarization within the Republican Party. Trump’s apparent dominance distracts from what the behavior of elected GOP politicians in Washington teaches us day after day: The party is a mess.

Democrats have their divisions, too. Party loyalists range from the center to the left, and some of their loud fights doomed parts of Biden’s program in the last Congress. But what’s remarkable is how much they did pass with narrow House and Senate margins — and, in the case of the infrastructure and technology investments, with bipartisan support.

The difference is that Democrats want to govern because they believe government has a chance to do good. This means even the party’s most left-wing members will compromise to take a step or two forward even when they want to take four.

Republicans, on the other hand, are riven between those willing to govern — even, occasionally, with Democrats — and those who will be satisfied only if Trump is president. They presume this would allow them to roll over the left, the liberals and the moderates alike.

Failing to see the GOP as a party torn asunder allows Trump to seem stronger than he is. He uses this perceived supremacy to cow Republicans who hold the quaint view that governing in a reasonable and (small-d) democratic way is the point of getting elected. Is it just wish-casting to think New Hampshire might seize the opportunity to send them the message that it’s their duty to fight back? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/21/trump-gop-division-new-hampshire/