Michelle Goldberg: Trump Says Abortion Will Be Left to the States. Don’t Believe Him

When Donald Trump was asked about the recent Florida Supreme Court decision upholding his adopted state’s abortion ban, he promised that he would announce where he stands this week, a sign of how tricky the politics of reproductive rights have become for the man who did more than any other to roll them back. Sure enough, on Monday, he unveiled his latest position in a video statement that attempted to thread the needle between his anti-abortion base and the majority of Americans who want abortion to be legal.

Trump’s address was, naturally, full of lies, including the absurd claim that “all legal scholars, both sides,” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, and the obscene calumny that Democrats support “execution after birth.” But the most misleading part of his spiel was the way he implied that in a second Trump administration, abortion law will be left entirely up to the states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case the law of the state,” said Trump.

Before Monday, Trump had reportedly considered endorsing a 16-week national abortion ban, but the fact that he didn’t should be of little comfort to voters who want to protect what’s left of abortion rights in America. Should Trump return to power, he plans to surround himself with die-hard MAGA activists, not the establishment types he blames for undermining him during his first term. And many of these activists have plans to restrict abortion nationally without passing any new laws at all. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/opinion/trump-abortion-states.html

Molly Jong-Fast: None of This Is Normal

On Monday morning, Axios’s Mike Allen blasted out his early morning email with the subject line: “Scoop: Trump’s retaliation plan.” It seems that Republicans, after failing to find actual evidence to support their vibes-based impeachment of Joe Biden, are plotting how to prosecute the president and his family if Donald Trump returns to power. One Trump ally argued that there is precedent for a second Trump administration to investigate and prosecute the Bidens: the current federal charges against Trump.

Let’s pause for a moment from today’s latest campaign “scoop” to make something clear: None of this is normal. None of this is how American democracy is supposed to work. Trump is not a normal candidate, despite how the media often covers him. He has autocratic ambitions, having told supporters, “I am your retribution,” and has promised to be a “dictator”—a dictator!—on “day one” in office.

Trump is a presidential candidate unlike any other, just as he was a president unlike any we had before. We have never had a president who didn’t accept the peaceful transfer of power and encouraged rioters (“will be wild”) to storm the US Capitol. We have never had a president who was impeached twice, including for trying to incite said insurrection. We have never had a former president who faces 88 charges across four criminal cases, and is scheduled to be in court next week for a hush money trial. (This is also a person who is now opposed by many of the people who worked closest to him the last time around; even Mike Pence won’t endorse Trump.) The situation we’re in, and will be in for the next seven months, is without precedent. And there is no handbook for US media outlets covering the rise of authoritarianism on its own shores.

Taking Trump literally and seriously doesn’t mean taking him credulously. One of the truths of autocrats is that they lie. As The Economist has noted, “the arsenal of deceit is highly effective at keeping malign leaders in power, which is perhaps why global democracy has been in retreat for the past decade.” That’s why the media needs to call a lie a lie, and not worry if doing so appears partisan, while making clear that Trump’s authoritarian agenda would mark a radical break from America as we know it. This isn’t just another normal presidential race. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/donald-trump-2024-election-none-of-this-is-normal

Marc A. Caputo: MAGA Takes Aim at RFK Jr.: ‘Radical F—ing Kennedy’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s beliefs and campaign-trail rhetoric have so much appeal to MAGA voters that Donald Trump and his top political supporters are starting to take steps to ensure that the Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate doesn’t stray too far into the Republican’s lane.

For months, the conventional wisdom has held that Kennedy was more of a problem for Democrats—that he would siphon votes from President Biden. The Biden campaign launched a full-scale assault on Kennedy, defining the scion of Democratic royalty as a “stalking horse” for Trump, filing election complaints against the independent’s campaign, and trying in some states to block him from qualifying for the ballot.

“RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far,” Trump posted on Truth Social, predicting that the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket would take more votes from Biden because Kennedy’s “a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!! … I love that he is running!”

Trump’s message, which he repeated in conservative media interviews last week, is just one of several prongs in the Republican effort to Make Kennedy Liberal Again.

Conservative media, which once lavished uncritical attention on Kennedy, has turned on him. On his eponymous Fox News show, Sean Hannity devoted a segment Thursday to blasting Kennedy as a “devout, radical environmentalist.” In June, Hannity held a friendly town hall with Kennedy when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primary. After Kennedy in October announced he would run as an independent against both Trump and Biden, he fell out of favor with Hannity as well as Trump advisers like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.

Last year, Stone said Trump-Kennedy would be a “dream ticket.” Last week, Stone authored a web article titled “RFK Jr.’s VP Pick Ends All Delusions He is Worth Supporting for President.” https://www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-takes-aim-at-rfk-jr-radical-kennedy

Dan Pfeiffer: Why Is the Press Making Trump Seem More Normal?

The press didn’t cover Trump accusing Biden of using cocaine on during the Hugh Hewitt interview because it was obviously false and they doubt their own ability to persuade their readers.

They know that most people don’t click the link and read the article, so it’s easier to ignore. I understand the instinct, but if Trump is dumb and dishonest enough to say Joe Biden delivered the speech while high on cocaine, the public should know.

Trump accusing Biden of using drugs didn’t come out of thin air. Ever since the State of the Union, Right Wing media figures have been trying to square Biden’s fiery performance with their caricature of him as a doddering, senile old man. The only explanation these yahoos could come up with was that Biden used some performance-enhancing drugs. Sean Hannity called Biden “Jacked Up Joe” after the speech.

Instead of explaining this Right Wing conspiracy or highlighting Trump’s direct accusation that Biden was on drugs, the press focused on Trump’s comments on Gaza. On one level, Israel and Gaza is a major issue in the campaign and Trump has tried very hard to obscure his position. But by focusing on the one quasi-serious moment in an entirely unserious interview, the press gave the public the sense that Trump was a more normal candidate.

I often have to watch a whole Trump rally to prepare for the podcast, and no one has ever needed an editor more than Trump. The press shouldn’t do that job for Trump because it ends up hiding relevant information from the public. https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/why-the-press-ignored-trump-accusing

Dana Milbank: Trump swindles his followers — again

Let’s say you’re an ardent supporter of Donald Trump and you decided to invest $100,000 of your retirement savings into Trump Media because your favorite former president says it’s a “highly successful” company.

Well, if you bought in during last week’s initial public offering at the peak of $79.38 a share, your $100,000 nest egg was worth only $57,000 this week when the stock hit a low of $45.26 after an April Fool’s Day crash — a 43 percent loss in just three trading days.

Not for the first time, Trump has played his supporters for suckers.

I thought about the Trump stock bubble while watching the former president and presumptive GOP nominee address adoring supporters on Tuesday here in Green Bay, where he held his first rally in 17 days. In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether persuading them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers or selling them on election lies and white nationalism.

Three thousand die-hard Trump fans had come to the convention center to see him in the teeth of a winter storm that dumped up to a foot of snow on northern Wisconsin. In their rapturous reception for the “real president,” as election-denying pillow magnate Mike Lindell called Trump during a warm-up speech, I saw the kind of unshakable faith in a man that could lead someone to invest hard-earned money in a worthless company.

And Trump was, as always, rewarding their adoration by selling them one self-interested swindle after another.

He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: "The appellate division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)

He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes.)

At the heart of the speech was his original swindle, and still his go-to scam: convincing his supporters that their lives were being destroyed by dark-skinned invaders. It was the story of how “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/05/trump-swindle-crowd-green-bay-rally/

Dean Obeidallah: Trump’s Wealthy Donors Will Gladly End Our Democracy To Make More Money

The wealthy people bankrolling Trump are traitors to the United States. I know that sounds extreme but let’s be clear, these people are not the run of the mill MAGA supporter who Trump has conned into believing the 2020 election was stolen. These people – like billionaire investor John Paulson who has an MBA from Harvard Business School — know full well that Trump attempted to end our democracy in 2020, both by way of a behind the scenes coup and the Jan 6 attack. These wildly rich people also fully grasp Trump has vowed to pardon his MAGA terrorists, has literally channeled Hitler with his language about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, intentionally incited violence, spoken about being a dictator, repeatedly praised autocrats, vowed to “liberate” America from Trump’s political opponents and more that are all flashing red warning signs for our democracy.

Nearly 60% of those who voted for Trump in 2020  are people with a high school education or less.  These people may or may not fully grasp the threat Trump poses to our nation. They may not get what fascism is or how the fascist leader utilizes corruption to reward wealthy supporters with even more wealth. But I can guarantee that the obscenely wealthy people at Trump’s event on Saturday do.

Regardless of how the 2024 election turns out, one thing is clear: These wealthy donors have chosen Trump and improving their bottom line over protecting our democratic Republic. https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/trumps-wealthy-donors-will-gladly

Phillip Elliot:  Trump’s Truth Social Stock Is an Ethics Nightmare

If you thought the conflicts of interest in Trump’s first term were problematic, consider the prospects of a President appearing to leverage others or allowing himself to be leveraged through a publicly traded company. Imagine the whole world spending four years tracking the ups and downs of Trump Media’s stock in real time as they speculate on how any movement connects to the Trump administration’s policy decisions. The nuclear codes and presidential immunity are nothing to sneeze at. But Trump’s return to the presidency carries a prospect that his even hinting that his position on a given issue was fungible could function as a flashing ‘Buy DJT Now’ sign.

If all of this seems like a messy detour from most presidential campaigns, it is. Typically, at this point, candidates are wooing mega-donors to open their wallets, super PACs—with proper distance, of course—to unleash unlimited cash, and grassroots activists to work for free knocking on doors and making calls. Trump, meanwhile, is busy fighting a legal hell, bleeding his friends dry to have his back on personal matters, and scamming his loyalists on stock prices that hinge on him simultaneously winning the White House and not cashing out as soon as his six-month golden handcuffs expire. Very few investment professionals would recommend this as a retirement kitty, but stock prices on Wednesday parked the ticker north of $6 billion. So, at least for the moment, DJT—Nasdaq’s Version—remains lucrative, even if its candidate counterpart remains just as much of a gamble. https://time.com/6963560/donald-trump-stock-djt/

Bess Levin: A new 'litmus test' rises in GOP primaries: Ukraine aid

The earliest 2024 contests show that support for Ukraine aid has become a ‘litmus test’ in GOP primaries.

And as Republican candidates compete to be seen as most aligned with former President Donald Trump, highlighting divisions over Ukraine aid has become one fast way to make the case that they are true ‘America First’ believers. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/new-litmus-test-rises-gop-primaries-ukraine-aid-rcna146039

I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base. — House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX). https://puck.news/ukraine-aid-q-and-a-rep-mccaul-on-republican-support-for-bill/

Bess Levin: Arizona Republicans Vote Yes for Bill That Would Make It Legal to Kill Migrants Suspected of Trespassing

How do Arizona Republicans think the border crisis should be solved? By giving people the legal right to shoot and kill undocumented immigrants via legislation that critics say will give the green light to more extrajudicial killings.

House Republicans in the border state are advancing HB2843, which declares: "A person may use deadly physical force" if they "believe it immediately necessary" to stop someone from trespassing or attempting to trespass on their property. While the bill does not include the words "immigrants" or "migrants," as Axios notes, Representative Justin Heap, who sponsored the legislation, said in February that its intended purpose is to close a loophole that he contends has led to "increasingly larger numbers of migrants or human traffickers moving across farm and ranch land." Current state law—the Castle Doctrine—allows deadly force to be used against home intruders for self-defense. Criminal defense attorney Jack Litwak told the Arizona Mirror the new law would give people much more cover, as it would allow the use of deadly force merely for appearing on one’s property. "The idea with the Castle Doctrine is that you are supposed to be able to defend house and home," he said. "This seems to broaden it to say you can shoot someone that’s just on your actual property."

Arguing against HB2843 last month, Democratic representative Analise Ortiz said the legislation "expands the (Castle Doctrine) law in a way that I think is very dangerous, as guns continue to wreak havoc upon our communities. I do not think there is any sense in giving a green light to more extrajudicial killings." The bill was approved in the state House by a 31-28 vote. Next, it heads to the Senate. If passed there, it is expected to be vetoed by Democratic governor Katie Hobbs.

Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly is currently on trial on charges of second-degree murder (and aggravated assault) for allegedly killing Gabriel Cuen-Butimea after shooting at a group of unarmed migrants crossing his ranch. As the AZ Mirror notes, under the proposed law, "Kelly could have been justified for allegedly killing any of the migrants." The outlet also notes that "a 2022 JAMA Network study showed that ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws were linked to an 8-11% increase in monthly rates of homicide and firearm homicide, leading researchers to conclude that the enactment of similar legislation across the country was directly related to an increase in violent and avoidable deaths."  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/arizona-republicans-vote-yes-for-bill-that-would-make-it-legal-to-kill-migrants-suspected-of-trespassing

Susan B. Glasser: Donald Trump’s Amnesia Advantage

It used to be an enormous advantage—or, at least, an enormous perceived advantage—to run as an incumbent in American politics. Presidents who ran for reëlection in the modern era were rarely defeated. With the notable exceptions of Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, a string of two-term Presidents—Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama—shaped much of the past several decades of American political life. But as the country’s post-millennial mood has soured its politics have turned increasingly toxic for Presidents seeking reëlection. As Doug Sosnik, Clinton’s former White House political director, recently noted, the electorate has voted against the party in power in eight of the past nine national elections, a result fully consistent with more than two decades of polls finding that a majority of the country thinks the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. This is a global trend, too; as 2024 began, not a single leader in twenty major democracies had an approval rating above fifty percent.

The incumbency bind is a real problem for Biden in 2024. So, too, is the political amnesia powering the increasingly absurd arguments from Trump and his enablers about how he’d better handle everything from Israel and Ukraine to the border. Forgetting—Trump’s own memory lapses, and those of the broader electorate—is one of the former President’s political superpowers.

On Israel, Trump spent four years essentially outsourcing American policy to Netanyahu. He bought into Netanyahu’s theory of the case—that peace could be achieved with other Arab nations while essentially ignoring the Palestinians’ plight within Israel. He cut off funding for the U.N. agency charged with aiding the Palestinians, and he did nothing when Netanyahu further expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In the current conflict, both his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, have suggested that expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza may be needed to finish the war against Hamas.

Yet, for many on the American left, it’s Biden, not Trump, who seems to be the subject of their most intense rage. Biden’s legacy is genocide, one placard read at a protest of the President’s State of the Union address, in March. One of the protest’s organizers told reporters that Democrats have lost the moral standing to use Trump as a fear tactic. I’ve seen similar arguments advanced about Biden in the wake of his recent decision to talk tougher about the need to shut down the U.S. border to stop unchecked immigration. Talk about false equivalence. Trump—he of the border wall and family separation—is now campaigning in 2024 on a promise to undertake mass arrests and deportations on a scale never before seen in the U.S. He calls undocumented immigrants animals who are poisoning the blood of our country. He claims Biden has unleashed a border bloodbath.

As for his own Presidential record, doesn’t anyone remember Trump’s Muslim ban anymore? His (incomplete) border wall with Mexico? His threats to end birthright citizenship? Or the sheer idiocy of a President who essentially sat in front of the television all day long, tweeting insults and plotting how to stay in power whether he won or lost?

Remarkably, the same Gallup poll that showed Americans losing confidence in Biden’s leadership qualities in the past four years found themselves more favorably inclined toward Trump on a variety of indicators, including his likability, good judgment in a crisis, ability to manage the government effectively, and capacity to be a strong and decisive leader. Apparently, the country is suffering from collective memory loss on an epic scale.

Call it Trump’s amnesia advantage. Headed into the fall campaign, it’s becoming more and more apparent that what Biden needs is nothing less than a triumph of memory over forgetting. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/donald-trumps-amnesia-advantage

Jackie Calmes: Biden had words with Bibi over Israel’s apocalyptic Gaza war. Only action will do

It’s a shame upon shame that it took the deaths of six foreigners in Gaza, humanitarian workers for the U.S.-based World Central Kitchen, to finally, maybe, shake President Biden to reconsider his acquiescence — his complicity — in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apocalyptic war there.

By the time the convoy from chef José Andrés’ organization was annihilated by an Israeli drone strike Monday — killing three Brits, a Pole, an Australian and a Canadian American, along with a Palestinian driver — nearly 33,000 Gazans were dead after six months of Israel’s pummeling, two-thirds of them women and children. More than a million more Gazans, half the strip’s population, have been displaced. Most of those refugees have targets on their backs, crowded as they are around Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which Netanyahu says is next in his sights despite Biden’s talk of “red lines.”

There are two more casualties of Netanyahu’s war. The first is the global goodwill toward Israel in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists from Gaza savagely murdered 1,200 Israelis and took more than 240 hostages, many of whom remain in Hamas’ hands. And the second: the international standing of the United States, given Biden’s seemingly unquestioning support to date of Israel’s right-wing government.

That support is no longer unquestioned, at least. Not since Biden’s reportedly tense call with Netanyahu on Thursday in which we’re told the president demanded that Israel take “specific, concrete and measurable steps” to alleviate civilian suffering and deaths in Gaza. U.S. policy hinges on Israel’s response, Biden told the prime minister. Also, Israel must agree soon to another hostage exchange with Hamas. For the first time, Biden called for “an immediate cease-fire.”

Still, so far Biden’s words remain just that, words — which the self-regarding Netanyahu will likely dismiss to survive atop his extremist coalition. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-04-05/israel-gaza-joe-biden-bibi-netanyahu-cease-fire-arms

Margaret Hartmann: Trump’s Most Unhinged Plans for His Second Term

Perhaps, like me, every time you see a poll showing Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential race you comfort yourself with the thought that you already survived his first administration. How bad could a second Trump term really be?

As it turns out, pretty bad! Trump has been releasing policy papers and videos on what he calls Agenda 47 for months, and he and his advisers are openly bragging about their radical plans for a second term. Some of the worst elements of Trump’s first-term agenda were thwarted by scrupulous government officials, legal challenges, and the Trump team’s general ineptitude. But the former president and his well-funded allies in the conservative movement are already working to make sure they’ll be more successful if he winds up back in the White House.

Many of Trump’s proposals for his second term are surprisingly extreme, draconian, and weird, even for him. Here’s a running list of his most unhinged plans.

● Give the president unchecked power over federal agencies
● Restore the president’s authority to bypass Congress
● Appoint a special prosecutor to ‘go after’ Biden
● Use the Justice Department to get revenge on all of his enemies
● Expand presidential immunity
● Purge the civil service
● Install thousands of loyalists throughout the federal government
● Fill his Cabinet with people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon
● Round up, detain, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants
● Deploy U.S troops for ‘war’ on southern border
● End birthright citizenship
● Reinterpret anti-racism protections to benefit white people
● Construct ‘Freedom Cities’
● Put flying cars in Americans’ driveways

 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-second-term-agenda.html

Tom Nichols Don’t Let Trump Exhaust You

The Trump campaign is trying to turn the electoral process into a moral swamp. Voters are going to have to pace themselves to get to November.

The 2024 election has become a kind of waking nightmare in which many of us stare at Donald Trump as he unleashes some new attack on any number of targets: a judge’s daughter, immigrants, the rule of law, American national security, the Constitution. And we blink and shake our heads, stunned to think that many of our fellow citizens are eager to put this autocratic ignoramus back in the White House.

All of this is enervating and exhausting. But that’s the point: Trump is succeeding because he is, to use Steve Bannon’s infamous expression, seeking to flood the zone with shit. Trump’s opponents are flummoxed by how he provokes one new outrage on top of another, and each time they believe he’s finally—finally—gone too far. Bombarding the public space with deranged statements and dangerous threats, however, is not a mistake; it’s a strategy.

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil. His campaign’s goal is to turn voters into moral zombies who can no longer tell the difference between Stormy and Hunter or classified documents and personal laptops, who cannot parse what a bloodbath means, who no longer have the ability to be shocked when a political leader calls other human beings animals and vermin.

Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

So far, the Trump strategy is working. Every few weeks, polls indicate that the race between Trump and President Joe Biden is a toss-up. And millions of Americans are in that political fugue state called undecided, immobilized as if the events of the past eight years never happened. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/04/dont-let-trump-exhaust-you/677973/

Maureen Dowd: Donald Trump’s Insatiable Bloodlust

An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states.

Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.

If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a podium with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III and America will be devastated by “weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.”

“And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.

An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win.

That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.

The bloody-minded Trump luxuriates in the language of tyrants.

Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred. He has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last month, he called migrants “animals,” saying, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”

Trump’s obsession with bloodlines was instilled by his father, the son of a German immigrant. He thinks there is good blood and bad blood, superior blood and inferior blood. Fred Trump taught his son that their family’s success was genetic, reminiscent of Hitler’s creepy faith in eugenics.

“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told PBS. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

Trump has been talking about this as far back as an “Oprah” show in 1988. The “gene believer” brought it up in a 2020 speech in Minnesota denouncing refugees.

“A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” he told the crowd about their pioneer lineage, adding: “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” usurpers don’t ascend to the throne without complicity. Republican enablers do all they can to cozy up to their would-be dictator, even introducing a bill to rename Dulles airport for Trump. Democrats responded by introducing a bill to name a prison in Florida for Trump.

“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?” Greenblatt asked. “Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”

Like Macbeth’s castle, the Trump campaign has, as Lady Macbeth put it, “the smell of blood,” and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten” it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/opinion/trump-election-blood-bath.html