Bess Levin: Wonton Killings, Gazpacho Police, Peach Tree Dishes: Lauren Boebert And Marjorie Taylor Greene Make The Case For Congressional IQ Minimums

Dana Milbank:  Hey QAnon! Republicans are playing your song

At a Trump rally in Ohio on Saturday, the former president closed his speech to the strains of a melody widely associated with the QAnon conspiracy movement, which holds that the government is run by a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles.

En masse, audience members fully extended their right arms and pointed their index fingers as Trump proclaimed them to be “one movement,” apparently echoing the name of the song they were hearing, “WWG1WGA” — an abbreviation of the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all."

Trump had used the same theme song earlier at a rally in Pennsylvania, and in a campaign video. He reposted an image of himself on his social media site in which he wore a “Q” lapel pin under the QAnon slogan, “The Storm is Coming” — one of dozens of QAnon-themed posts he has done lately.

He’s continuing to do this despite clear evidence that the paranoid madness (the QAnon fantasy ends in Trump’s opponents being executed) inspires violence. In Michigan this month, a man allegedly shot and killed his wife and dog and injured his daughter. Another daughter told the Detroit News that her father’s mental health had deteriorated as he fell deeper into “crazy ideas,” including QAnon, since the 2020 election.

Trump, even before the QAnon melody and salute at his rally Saturday, treated his fans to a full range of delusionary conspiracy notions.

“The FBI colluded with Russia.”

“We have a president who is cognitively impaired.”

“We won the election by a lot.”

“They spy on my campaign.”

Positively everybody was conspiring in the “persecution of the MAGA movement.” The “deep state.” “Racist” (that is, Black) prosecutors. “Menacing forces.” The “enemy-of-the-people” media. FBI agents who “break into” his home.

“A vile group of corrupt, power-hungry globalists, socialists and liberal extremists in Washington has been waging war on the hardworking people of Ohio,” Trump told them. “Our biggest threat remains the sick, sinister and evil people from within our country.”

QAnon, he’s playing your song. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/19/qanon-song-trump-rally-republicans/

Maureen Dowd: How Low Can They Go?

Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.

He injected obscenities into The New York Times’s White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.

Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.

His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.

In some ways, it’s easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.

In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.

Politicians who purport to be guardians of American “values” are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.

It can be amusing to mock elites. But there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.

This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people’s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don’t want to do anymore.

With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/17/opinion/desantis-border-immigration.html

Mona Charen: Don’t Blame the Immigrants. It’s Our Laws That Are Criminal

America needs more immigrants, but we seem determined to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Those who believe the propaganda that immigration is destroying America should ponder our neighbor to the north. Is Canada a hellscape? The proportion of foreign born there is 21 percent, compared to the American average of 13.7 percent.

In truth, the vast majority of would-be immigrants have done absolutely nothing wrong. It is our own laws that are the problem. Because our political system is so steeped in bile and demagoguery, we can’t adapt to changing circumstances. We desperately need workers, yet the wait for legal immigration options is years long. People ask, “Why can’t illegal immigrants wait in line?” But there is no line. We resolutely decline to accept guest workers in large numbers, who could fill jobs and return home (without affecting voting patterns, by the way). And so the only way to gain entry is to put feet on American soil and ask for asylum. Clearly, not all of those pleading for asylum meet the criteria (a well-founded fear of persecution based on being a member of a subgroup), but the system is short of courts and judges and wait times for hearings are very long. Some never show up for their hearings. And so the word has gone out around the world that if you can manage to get to the United States and present yourself to a border guard, you have at least a shot of remaining in the country either because your asylum claim will be granted or you will melt into the country and avoid deportation.

We are fortunate that so many hard-working people want to come here. If we had our act together, we would reform our laws to take many more legal immigrants (who would begin the application process in their home countries) and hire more immigration judges to hear asylum claims while clarifying that only severe cases will be eligible for that status (not economic migrants). We are an aging population with a declining birth rate. Our national spirit needs the infusion of energy and dynamism that immigrants provide.

If our laws are clear, we can reduce the crush of hopefuls at the border. With more legal immigrants, our economy will thrive. Our tax receipts will increase. We’ll have the nurses, truckers, teachers, cooks, train conductors, and construction workers we desperately need. And we will be thanked and strengthened by people whose lives we save. https://www.thebulwark.com/dont-blame-the-immigrants-its-our-laws-that-are-criminal/

John Cassidy: Why Is Trump Openly Embracing QAnon Now?

Tom Nichols: Trump’s New Recruits

Susan B. Glasser: So Many Trump Scandals, So Little Time

Bess Levin: Trump All But Calls For Another January 6 If He’s Indicted Over Classified Documents

Something you might have noticed over the last several years is that Donald Trump is a big fan of violence. Not directly getting involved in violence—he’d never dirty his hands in that way—but inciting people to engage in it on his behalf, the most famous example being the time he incited an insurrection at the US Capitol that left multiple people dead. Which is why it was more than a little disturbing when he warned on Thursday that there would be big problems if he were indicted for hoarding top secret government documents at his house.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said that he didn’t believe the people of the United States would stand for charges against him from the Justice Department, adding that such charges would lead to problems in this country, the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. Asked exactly what he meant by problems, Trump continued to use coded language that few would find difficult to parse. I think they’d have big problems. Big problems, he said. I just don’t think they’d stand for it. They will not sit still and stand for this ultimate of hoaxes.

Obviously, at no point in the interview did Trump literally tell his supporters to engage in violent acts if he is prosecuted, but that’s probably because he knows he doesn’t have to. While Trump’s allies have insisted that he never explicitly told people to attack the Capitol on January 6, many of the rioters interpreted as much from his speech, as the ex-president encouraged his supporters to fight like hell. Asked by Hewitt how he would respond to legacy media calling him out for inciting violence this time around, Trump said: That’s not inciting. I’m just saying what my opinion is. I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it.

Trump, of course, had a long history of inciting violence even before January 6. In addition to telling rallygoers to knock the crap out of anyone who showed up to one of his events holding a tomato, he’d also previously instructed police officers to let suspects’ heads knock against the side of their squad cars; told supporters, in reference to a protester who’d been ejected from an event, I’d like to punch him in the face; fantasized about Second Amendment people preventing the appointment of liberal judges; and endorsed the assault of reporters. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/09/donald-trump-classified-documents-charges-big-problems

Eric Lutz: From Martha’s Vineyard To Kamala Harris’s Home, Republican Governors Escalate Anti-Immigrant Political Stunts

Republicans are ramping up their use of grotesque, anti-immigrant political stunts. After months of busing migrants to the nation’s capital and other sanctuary cities as a kind of depraved protest against President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday said he sent two more buses of over 100 migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home in Washington, D.C.

We’re sending migrants to her backyard to call on the Biden Administration to do its job & secure the border, Abbott wrote in a tweet Thursday morning, as videos emerged showing a large group of migrants standing outside the United States Naval Academy.

The move from Abbott came a day after Florida’s Ron DeSantis took credit for sending two planes of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. About 50 people were on the planes, according to a local state senator, who said Massachusetts officials were apparently given no warning. The island scrambled to respond, Democrat Julian Cyr told CNN, adding that officials set up shelter within hours on Wednesday and quickly provided the migrants with meals and COVID tests. We have the governor of Florida…hatching a secret plot to send immigrant families like cattle on an airplane, Dylan Fernandes, another state senator representing Martha’s Vineyard, told NPR. It is an incredibly inhumane and depraved thing to do.

For months, Abbott and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey have been busing migrants from the border to Washington, D.C. That, along with what local organizers describe as a lack of support from Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser, has forced everyday citizens to accommodate the influx of immigrants and refugees. We’re crowdfunding a resettlement effort, as one local organizer told me in August. Other sanctuary cities, including New York City and Chicago, have also received buses in recent weeks. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday issued an emergency declaration to access additional resources for the hundreds of migrants who have arrived in the state and accused Abbott of failing to collaborate with his administration. While other states may be treating these vulnerable families as pawns, Pritzker said, here in Illinois we are treating them as people.

In a statement Wednesday, the Florida governor’s office blasted sanctuary states for incentivizing illegal immigration. However, many of the migrants GOP governors have sent to sanctuary cities or states are not in the country illegally; a significant swath are legal asylum-seekers fleeing desperate situations, only to find themselves being used as political pawns by the GOP. It may be true that border crossings have surged this year, but the reasons for that are complex, as The Wall Street Journal reported last month: Some of the uptick appears to have stemmed from the apparent leniency of Biden’s border policies relative to his predecessor. But the spike in border crossings is also COVID-related, as the Journal notes: Latin America suffered more under the pandemic than any other region, leading migrants to seek opportunity in the U.S., where the economy has recovered more quickly. Moreover, Donald Trump’s still-active Title 42 rules — the pandemic-era policy that Biden has sought to end — appear to have contributed to a rise in repeat crossings, according to the Journal.

Needless to say, while it’s true that the federal government has treated immigration reform as something of a political hot potato, what's driving the uptick in border crossings is more complicated than Biden's policies or sanctuary cities, despite what Abbott, Ducey, and DeSantis claim. And though sanctuary cities like Chicago and Massachusetts should open their arms to the migrants, bussing them to such safe havens without advance notice — and little to no coordination — is dangerous and inhumane. Even for Ron DeSantis, this is a new low, Florida Democratic Chair Manny Diaz said of the governor in a statement. There is nothing that DeSantis won’t do, and nobody that he won’t hurt, in order to score political points.

Unsurprisingly, the governors' stunts — which harken back to ugly Civil Rights-era tactics — have earned plaudits among conservative lawmakers and pundits on Fox News. But they have also thrust an already vulnerable population into greater uncertainty. I don’t know what is going to happen to us, a migrant told NPR after arriving in Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday. The truth is I am worried…We’re here now and there’s nothing we can do. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/09/gop-governors-ramp-up-anti-immigration-stunts

Jonathan V. Last: Ron DeSantis Has Learned Trump’s Most Important Insight

Ron DeSantis is, supposedly, a Christian: Here’s DeSantis last February, talking to the Very Fine Kids at Hillsdale College:

Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes. You will face flaming arrows, but if you have the shield of faith, you will overcome them, and in Florida we walk the line here. And I can tell you this, I have only begun to fight.

Asked about his religious commitments, DeSantis’s press secretary told the Tampa Bay Times, “The governor is a Christian and there is absolutely no issue with him sharing his values or utilizing them in his decision-making as a leader.”

Let’s put aside the theology of immigration. Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that Jesus would have nothing to say about whether or not the state should seek to discourage undocumented migrants as a high-level matter of government policy.

Those planes were filled with actual human beings. People with dignity. People with hopes and dreams, problems and challenges. People with names and families.

And this Christian man used them as props. He didn’t clothe the naked or feed the hungry. He literally did the opposite: Evicted them—and not because he felt that he had to, because it was a requirement of the law. But because he saw that he could use them as a means to the ends of his personal ambition.

I’m trying—really trying—not to get too hot here. But Christians should look at this act and be revolted. They should be horrified.

Because using vulnerable human beings for your personal gratification is evil. Full stop.

One of the early truths we learned about Trumpism was that the cruelty was the point.

In previous eras, when a political actor pursued a policy that was useful but cruel, he would make excuses. He would pretend that actually the policy was okay. That no one would really get hurt. Or that, if someone was going to get the short end, that tough choices had to be made because there was no alternative. So sorry.

One of Trump’s political innovations was to realize that his followers wanted cruelty. They didn’t care about abstract ideas, like the free market or liberalism. They had various subsets of Americans whom they hated. What they wanted was a strongman who would target these othered peoples and hurt them. They wanted cruelty; policy TBD.

That lesson has been absorbed by Trump’s children, DeSantis first among them.

This episode is one more data point in support of the thesis that Christian nationalism is nationalism first and foremost. In this formulation, “Christian” is not a modifier so much as a marker, useful only to distinguish one nationalist tribe from another. https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/ron-desantis-has-learned-trumps-most

David Brooks: Why Is There Still No Strategy to Defeat Donald Trump?

One of the stunning facts of the age is the continued prominence of Donald Trump. His candidates did well in the G.O.P. primaries this year. He won more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. His favorability ratings within his party have been high and basically unchanged since late 2016. In a range of polls, some have actually shown Trump leading President Biden in a race for re-election in 2024.

His prominence is astounding because over the past seven years the American establishment has spent enormous amounts of energy trying to discredit him.

Those of us in this establishment correctly identified Trump as a grave threat to American democracy. The task before us was clear. We were never going to shake the hard-core MAGA folks. The job was to peel away independents and those Republicans offended by and exhausted by his antics.

Many strategies were deployed in order to discredit Trump. There was the immorality strategy: Thousands of articles were written detailing his lies and peccadilloes. There was the impeachment strategy: Investigations were launched into his various scandals and outrages. There was the exposure strategy: Scores of books were written exposing how shambolic and ineffective the Trump White House really was.

The net effect of these strategies has been to sell a lot of books and subscriptions and to make anti-Trumpists feel good. But this entire barrage of invective has not discredited Trump among the people who will very likely play the most determinant role. It has probably pulled some college-educated Republicans into the Democratic ranks and pushed some working-class voters over to the Republican side. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/opinion/strategy-defeat-donald-trump.html

John Cassidy: DeSantis’s Heartless Migrant Stunt Provides a Preview of 2024

A couple of weeks back, The Economist published a long cover story on “The Disunited States of America,” detailing how, on issues such as abortion, guns, voting rights, and immigration, America’s red and blue states are engaged in a “new politics of confrontation.” As if on cue, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who often seems as if he is campaigning to succeed Donald Trump as the nation’s Provoker-in-Chief, staged his latest political stunt: using Florida taxpayers’ money to charter two planes to fly about fifty undocumented migrants, mostly Venezuelan, to Martha’s Vineyard. DeSantis was not even relocating the group from his own state—the flights originated in Texas.

Of course, DeSantis isn’t the only Republican governor to have dispatched undocumented migrants from red states to blue states. He seems to have got the idea from Texas’s Greg Abbott and Arizona’s Doug Ducey, both of whom have been sending busloads of migrants to Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. On Thursday morning, two buses dropped off about a hundred migrants outside Vice-President Kamala Harris’s official residence. Fox News reported that they, too, were mostly Venezuelan and had been picked up in the Texas border city of Eagle Pass.

In discussing the recent escalation in tensions between red America and blue America, The Economist noted “echoes here of the tussles between southern and northern states” in the final years of the antebellum era. But the magazine also stated flatly, “America is not going to have another civil war, as some feverish pundits speculate.” That is a debate for another day. But what is abundantly clear is that the migrant stunt has provided a preview of the 2024 Presidential campaign, in which DeSantis is likely to feature prominently.

In trying to position himself as a viable conservative alternative to Donald Trump, DeSantis is using emotive issues such as immigration and abortion and school curriculums to raise his national profile as a culture warrior. His strategy reflects the makeup of today’s Republican Party. As my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells pointed out in a piece earlier this week, on the midterms, focussing on culture-war issues enables the G.O.P. to energize its electoral base of white voters without college degrees, and also to gloss over the growing chasm in the Party between those actively supporting Donald Trump and his Big Lie about the 2020 election, and those trying to maintain some semblance of independence. With Trump’s latest legal troubles dominating the news, and with the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade having detonated a bomb under what was left of the Republicans’ old base—affluent suburbanites—this strategy doesn’t seem to be working very well this year, but DeSantis will almost certainly run with it again in 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/desantiss-heartless-migrant-stunt-provides-a-preview-of-2024

Dana Milbank  Putting the ‘big lie’ to bed — in plush, luxurious comfort

Finally, the Justice Department is going to the mattresses with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow  magnate. FBI agents pinned his vehicle while he awaited his order in a Hardee’s drive-through this week and proceeded to arrest my phone, as Lindell put it. (He didn’t say whether the confiscated device was read its rights.)

The feds seized his phone in a probe into Trump allies’ breach of voting machines in Colorado, which state authorities are also investigating. In case you’ve been hitting the snooze button for the past two years, Donald Trump super-fan Lindell is also facing lawsuits by voting-technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. His phone records were subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee. And his own defamation suits against Dominion and Smartmatic were dismissed as frivolous.

He has also spent a self-reported $35 million promoting Trump’s election lie in movies, social media and conferences, and he’s a popular warm-up act at Trump rallies.

There is something exquisite about a former professional gambler, recovering crack cocaine addict, showy evangelical (Lindell often wears a cross outside his collar, like an amulet) and pillow kingpin organizing the undoing of democracy. Then consider the assortment of strange bedfellows involved with him in the Colorado scheme: a former professional surfer who claims to be a data expert, a county clerk who used to sell nutritional supplements, an owner of a hair and makeup business, and a high school math teacher who claims to have a secret algorithm.

Once more, we are left to marvel at how all these misfits and grifters find each other — and how they are inevitably drawn, by powerful oddball magnetism, to the charlatan in chief, who has bamboozled tens of millions. This full-employment plan for kooks and hucksters gives new meaning to featherbedding.

Since embracing Trump in 2016, Lindell has made conspiracy craziness his business model. His election lies have lost him tens of millions of dollars in business with respectable retailers such as Walmart, Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond. So he’s recasting himself as niche pillow purveyor to the MAGA right, marketing on Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio and Trump-friendly social media outlets. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/16/mike-lindell-phone-seized-mypillow/