Brian Klaas: Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley. America’s response is distracted and numb

Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.

That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump.

And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.

Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trump-milley-execution-incitement-violence/675435/.

Doyle McManus: Trump has a second-term agenda, and it’s more terrifying than ever

In speeches, interviews and campaign videos, Trump has promised to:

● Use the military to participate in the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in American history;
● Order the National Guard into cities with high crime rates, whether local officials want it or not;
● Prosecute Californians who protect minors coming to the state for gender-affirming care;
● Impose a 10% tariff on almost all foreign goods, increasing prices for consumers;
● Appoint a special prosecutor to go after his political opponents, beginning with Biden;
● Purge the federal civil service of anyone who questions his views.

Some of those pledges may turn out to be illegal or impractical, but they’re more than bluster. Most of them reflect views Trump has held for decades; he’ll try to act on them even if laws and judges get in his way. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-09-24/mcmanus-column-trump-second-term-agenda

Jeffrey Goldberg: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president, one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a unique challenge for Milley, Dubik said.

Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/

Harry Litman: What Trump’s assistant told investigators about classified records — and why it’s so damning

News reports this week led with the startling new detail that Trump sent Michael notes and to-do lists carelessly scrawled on the back of classified documents. It’s a memorable snippet that drives home Trump’s indifference to classification and national security.

For a prosecutor, however, that was among the least of the revelations from Michael, known as ‘Trump Employee 2’ in the first federal indictment of the former president. What marks Michael as a blockbuster witness is her singular ability to tell the story of Trump’s conspiracy to obstruct justice in unimpeachable terms. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-09-20/donald-trump-classified-records-indictment-mar-a-lago-molly-michael-harry-litman

Susan B. Glasser: House Republicans Refuse to Host Zelensky Because They’re Too Busy Fighting One Another

Politics is all about contrast. And one of the sharpest contrasts going in Washington has been exposed by the brewing opposition among House Republicans to Ukraine funding. It’s a cause that many of Trump’s loudest adherents on Capitol Hill have taken up with increasing fervor as polls have shown that the initial, strongly bipartisan support for assistance is ebbing and a majority of the G.O.P. electorate is now opposed to continuing to fund the war effort.

President Biden has made backing Ukraine the signature foreign policy of his tenure, securing congressional approval for more than forty-five billion dollars in military aid and rallying nato allies against Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression on its neighbor. On Tuesday, in his annual speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Biden framed support for Kyiv as a basic test of the international order: If we allow Ukraine to be carved up, he said, is the independence of any nation secure? On Thursday, he hosted Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the White House. Mr. President, we’re with you, and we’re staying with you, Biden promised.

Biden’s steadfast defense of Zelensky, commitment to allies, and opposition to Putin are among his strongest claims to international leadership, not to mention the strongest possible contrast with Trump. Have we forgotten so soon Trump’s excruciating meeting with Zelensky in 2019, when the young Ukrainian leader squirmed like a hostage as he sat alongside Trump and awkwardly claimed that nobody pushed him to investigate Biden, hours after Trump released the transcript of his infamous phone call with Zelensky showing that he had done just that? When he was President, Trump rarely missed a chance to excoriate the nation’s allies and praise its adversaries and parroted Russian talking points on Ukraine. After the 2022 invasion, he even went so far as to laud Putin’s strategic genius. Just a few days ago, Trump revelled once again in praise from Putin, who has all but endorsed the former President’s campaign to return to the White House in 2024.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill this week, McCarthy bowed down to his Trump-inspired anti-Ukraine fringe—seventy House Republicans, or one-third of the G.O.P. conference voted to cut off aid in a vote earlier this summer—and refused to agree to Zelensky’s request to address a joint session of Congress, or to convene a meeting between Zelensky and all House members. McCarthy claimed that the chamber was too busy with spending negotiations, which, given the embarrassing chaos that swirled all day in the House after the defense appropriation rule was defeated, seemed like a particularly lame excuse. Once again, the contrast could not have been starker.  Over on the Senate side of the Capitol, where the Republican leader Mitch McConnell is an outspoken supporter of Ukraine, he and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hosted Zelensky for a special session in the old Senate chamber, where the Ukrainian President received two standing ovations. According to Schumer, Zelensky summed up the stakes of the present Washington debate with admirable succinctness: If we don’t get the aid, he told the senators, we will lose the war.

Most of the seasoned Hill watchers I’ve spoken with in recent weeks still believe that support for Ukraine is there, at least for now. The bigger problem is the American political calendar: 2024 looms, and, with it, the prospect of Trump—or another Republican taking his pro-Putin line—returning to power. No wonder the boss in the Kremlin is paying such close attention. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/house-republicans-refuse-to-host-zelensky-because-theyre-too-busy-fighting-one-another\

Rick Hasen: The Supreme Court Needs to Make a Call on Trump’s Eligibility

There’s an old saying that sometimes it is more important for the law to be certain than to be right. Certainty allows people to plan their actions knowing what the rules are going to be.

Nowhere is this principle more urgent than when it comes to the question of whether Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results have disqualified him from becoming president again. As cases raising the question have begun working their way through the courts in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere, the country needs the Supreme Court to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/supreme-court-needs-make-call-trumps-eligibility/675416/

Max Boot: If you want to save democracy in 2024, Biden is the only viable choice

I fear for America’s future and hence the world’s — more so now than ever. I had relaxed a bit after the last two national elections, which had seemed to signal a return to normalcy. Donald Trump was decisively defeated in 2020 and, in 2022, most of his fellow election deniers also lost in their bids to take over the election machinery of swing states.

But now we’re back in Crazytown. Trump is the almost certain Republican nominee in 2024. And, if current polls are to be believed, he has an excellent chance of winning the presidency again — despite his two impeachments, his incitement of an insurrection, and the 91 felony counts he currently faces in four criminal cases.

A year ago, I naively imagined that Trump would be politically hurt by being indicted. Once again, I either overestimated the American public or underestimated Trump. If anything, the criminal cases seem to have helped him politically. He leads all his Republican challengers by a very wide margin: In the FiveThirtyEight polling average, he is at nearly 56 percent among Republican voters.

The prospect of another Trump term is the greatest foreseeable disaster that can befall the United States and the world. Trump is likely to be 10 times more dangerous this time around, because he won’t allow any adults in the White House to act as a check on his worst instincts — no more Jim Mattis as defense secretary, John F. Kelly as chief of staff or H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In a second term, Trump is likely to only appoint advisers as unhinged as he is.

We can only speculate what this will mean, but the likelihood is that Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine, pull out of NATO, eviscerate the civil service and the military’s top ranks, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute his enemies. For a start. He was eager to do all of those things in his first term but was dissuaded or blocked by the “deep state.” He’s unlikely to allow that to happen again. He has become even more radical and more authoritarian since leaving office, and he now has much more experience in getting what he wants out of the government.

The consequences will be dire enough domestically, imperiling U.S. democracy, but they will be even worse internationally. Among other alarming consequences, a Trump presidency could allow Russian leader Vladimir Putin to defeat Ukraine and remake the 21st-century global order in favor of tyrants and aggressors. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/25/biden-realistic-trump-alternative-democracy/

Charlie Sykes: Old School Bribery

There’s something almost nostalgic about reading the indictment against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. By which I mean clownishly nostalgic, because it’s a throwback to an age when our corrupt politicians were old-school crooks, and frankly, rather stupid. There are no seven-levels of separation influence-peddling, no elaborate shell-companies or conspiracies.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a throwback — a house full of gold bars, envelopes stuffed with cash ($480,000), and a shiny new Mercedes parked in the garage. A slightly modern twist: DNA linking all of this boodle to the guys who paid cash for their own U.S. senator. https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/cassidy-and-the-guys

David Cay Johnston: Judge Gives Trump Organization the Corporate Death Penalty

Donald Trump is no longer in business.

Worse, the self-proclaimed multibillionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the value of his properties, a judge ruled Tuesday.

His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer.

A New York State judge on Tuesday cancelled all of the business licenses for the Trump Organization and its 500 or so subsidiary  companies and partnerships after finding that Trump used them to, along with his older two sons, commit fraud.

Under the New York General Business Law you can only do business in your own name as a sole proprietor or with a business license, which the state calls a “business certificate.”  All of Trump’s businesses were corporations or partnerships that require business certificates.

The evidence and the issues were so clear cut, Judge Arthur F. Engoron ruled on Tuesday, that there was no reason to waste the court’s time trying them. https://www.dcreport.org/2023/09/26/donald-trump-liable-for-fraud/

Molly Jong-Fast: Let’s Not Sleepwalk Into Another Trump Presidency

As anyone who lived through the past eight years can attest, you underestimate Trump at your own peril. By glossing over the unhinged things Trump is saying and doing, we in the mainstream media are enabling him to do even more.

Perhaps the largest underreported story out of Trumpworld right now is his hand in the coming government shutdown. It’s very likely the government will shut down on Saturday because Republicans in the House are refusing to fund it. (Something else many in the news media aren’t saying explicitly.) Matt Gaetz, who has emerged as Kevin McCarthy’s biggest antagonist, accusing the Speaker of empty politicking rather than accomplishing things for the right, certainly isn’t ignoring the former president. “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution. Hold the line,” Gaetz recently posted on X, along with a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post urging Republicans to “defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.” Gaetz, part of the burn-it-all-down caucus, appears inspired by the biggest arsonist: Donald Trump.

After so many years of Trump’s outrageous comments, lies, grievances, and threats, it’s hard to be shocked anymore. And perhaps that’s our problem. This is the most likely Republican nominee, and a man who is leading Biden in some polls. Trump is not getting better—if anything he’s getting worse. Beyond the treason talk, he recently engaged in antisemitism toward liberal Jews on Rosh Hashanah—“Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”—he suggested—and he seemed ready to buy a glock Monday in South Carolina while out on bail, which could be a federal gun crime, you know, like the one Hunter Biden is currently being charged with. (A Trump spokesperson later clarified that he didn’t buy it, but “simply indicated that he wanted one.”)

Now, I understand the mainstream media may be bored with the crazy, but our country is once again sleepwalking into disaster, and if journalists aren’t clear about the stakes of a second Trump presidency, it will be, at least partially, our fault. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/donald-trump-democracy-media-2024-election