Colbert I. King: The gunfire in Gaza might abate. Alas, not so the horror of global hatred

In the days since the Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, I have felt shock, anger and revulsion over what’s taking place on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. So have many others.

But today I’m filled with something else: a sadness that won’t let go. Because I know that even after the guns fall silent in Gaza and Israel — and they eventually will, if only for a spell — the post-Oct.7 open and global display of antisemitism will not abate. Neither will the ugly scourge of Islamophobia. Conflicts and difficult times lie ahead.

I have lived too long, and seen much too much, to think otherwise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/10/antisemitism-israel-gaza-racism-history/
 

Michael Tomasky: It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk

We’ve all often wondered whether Donald Trump understands the historical import of what comes out of his mouth. He’s so ill-informed, so proudly ignorant, that it’s easy to think that when he hurls a historical insult, he just doesn’t know.

I feel pretty safe in saying that we can now stop giving him the benefit of that particular doubt. His use—twice; once on social media and then repeated in a speech—of the word ‘vermin’ to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.

 On Saturday at 10:25 a.m., he posted on Truth Social: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”

This is straight-up Nazi talk, in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word. https://thenewrepublic.substack.com/p/its-official-with-vermin-trump-is

Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose

Sorry! I know! You are sick of hearing about Donald Trump!

“Don’t worry,” people keep saying. Donald Trump did just promise to “root out” the internal enemies who “live like vermin” in our country, but he only might be the next president.

I don’t mean to worry you, but people are running around with their hair on fire, saying they are suffering from intense, nauseating levels of déjà vu, and those people are historians. I don’t like seeing historians this stressed out. If something in my house has to emit an ominous beeping, I want it to be the alarm clock, not the smoke detector.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump announced on Veterans Day. And when people complained that sounded like something Adolf Hitler would say, a spokesman responded that “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Which, to be fair, also sounds like something Hitler would say. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/donald-trump-dictator-vermin-2024-satire/

Greg Sargent: Trump’s plan for giant detention camps points to a brutal 2024 reality

Donald Trump’s advisers have declared that if he regains the presidency, he will launch an extraordinarily cruel crackdown on immigration. Given that Trump lost reelection in 2020 after attempting a far tamer agenda, advertising such plans might seem like foolish political malpractice.

But the politics of immigration can be peculiar. The public tends to turn on the president in power when the situation on the border goes wrong, leading voters to seek a diametrically different approach — no matter what policies the incumbent has adopted or what their opponent proposes.

In political science jargon, these wild swings against prevailing policy are known as “thermostatic” public opinion. This is particularly pronounced on immigration given its fiendish complexities, meaning disapproval of the incumbent could allow Trump to win even though he is campaigning on an extreme alternative.

That second-term agenda would revolve around what the New York Times calls “giant camps.” While detention centers already exist, the Times reports that Trump and adviser Stephen Miller envision a vastly expanded network that would facilitate the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, including longtime residents with deep ties to communities. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/trump-mass-deportation-immigration-stephen-miller/

Margaret Hartmann: Trump Goes Full Hitler by Calling Political Foes ‘Vermin’

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, the question of whether it’s appropriate to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler has come up repeatedly. Trump has used a slogan popularized by Nazi sympathizers, dined with antisemites, evoked white supremacist tropes, and demonized the press and his political foes as the “enemy of the people,” to cite just a few examples of his allegedly Nazi-like behavior. Plus, days before the Capitol riot, the nation’s top general, Mark Milley, reportedly warned aides that America was facing a “Reichstag moment” because Trump was preaching “the gospel of the Führer” with his stolen-election lies.

When people point out that this is all a little too Hitler-y for comfort, they’re often told they’re being hysterical. However, it’s getting harder to deny that Trump is using Nazi rhetoric. Last month, Trump said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler repeatedly described Jews and migrants as “poisons” to the “blood” of Germany and the Aryan race. Trump’s remark generated a few headlines but largely flew under the radar as it came 37 minutes into a video interview with the obscure right-leaning website the National Pulse.

Over the weekend, Trump used some Nazi terminology in a far more high-profile setting. During a Veterans Day speech on Saturday, he told a crowd in Claremont, New Hampshire, that his political enemies are “like vermin.” Both Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini compared their enemies to rodents during their rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/trump-vermin-hitler.html

David A. Graham: Trump Isn’t Merely Unhinged

With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.

The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want to let him occupy their headspace; or perhaps because he got kicked off Twitter (now X) and they had no interest in joining Truth Social. Or maybe it’s because the more sinister material gets mixed up with his strange elocutions (“We’re gonna have a great country—it’s gonna be called the United States of America”), contrarian hot takes (“You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart”), and gibberish (“All of these indictments that you see—I was never indicted. Practically never heard the word. It wasn’t a word that registered”).

Whatever the case may be, Trump has continued to make plainly dangerous and stunning remarks. Notwithstanding his rival Governor Ron DeSantis’s recent claim that Trump has “lost the zip on his fastball,” the former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.

They are the sorts of ideas that would have been shocking to hear from any mainstream politician just a decade ago. And yet, today, Trump—arguably the single most influential figure in the United States—says these things, and they hardly register. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/donald-trump-15-most-dangerous-statements/675970/

Susan B. Glasser: The Warnings About Trump in 2024 Are Getting Louder

Donald Trump often takes the breath away with his defiance of the basic norms of American public life. (See: January 6th.) But sometimes it’s the smaller encroachments on decency that serve as a reminder of how far outside the bounds he operates. "Can you control your client?" Judge Arthur Engoron demanded of Trump’s lawyer, during the former President’s testimony on Monday in Manhattan, where he stands accused of running a fraudulent business in the state of New York. "This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom." Later, after yet another Trump soliloquy in response to a yes-or-no question, Engoron repeated his entreaty. ""I beseech you," the judge said, "to control him if you can."

On Thursday, in an interview with Univision, Trump again made explicit what is often implicit in his vengeance-fuelled campaign: his willingness to use the justice system to go after his opponents if he is returned to the White House. Any other prospective President would have denied with all possible force a recent Washington Post report that Trump has already demanded that his aides make plans to target some former advisers who have become public critics, including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Instead, Trump all but confirmed the story when he told the Spanish-language network that he would use the courts against his political rivals. "If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’"  Trump told Univision. "They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election."

There should be no surprise in this, of course. When Trump ran in 2016, he promised to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and laughed and cheered and egged on his crowds when they chanted, "Lock her up! Lock her up!"

In an appearance this week on "The View," Clinton compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, who was, she noted, "duly elected" before he dismantled Germany’s democracy and turned himself into a dictator. Her main point—and it bears endless repetition between now and whatever awaits us next November—is that Trump has clearly spelled out exactly how he plans to go after core tenets of American democracy. There is no mystery here. "Trump is telling us what he intends to do," Clinton said. "Take him at his word. The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values."

It’s worth noting that Clinton made those comments before Trump’s incendiary interview. He’s said it all before; he’ll say it all again. The question, with one year left on the clock, is: Who’s listening? https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-warnings-about-trump-in-2024-are-getting-louder

Dana Milbank The House is most definitely not in order

Before Mike Johnson became speaker, the House of Representatives had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times in 100 years. Since Johnson became speaker, members of the House have tried to censure each other eight times in two weeks.

In the latest effort, the successful censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for antisemitic statements, the House floor degenerated into sobs, heckling, fist shaking and screaming.

It would be unfair to dismiss the Johnson speakership as entirely unsuccessful so far. After all, he has presided over a golden age of censure. To recap:

Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.

Greene filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.

Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) filed a resolution to censure Bowman.

Greene filed another resolution to censure Tlaib.

Miller filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.

McCormick filed a resolution to censure Tlaib.

In retaliation, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) filed a resolution to censure Greene, and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif) filed a resolution to censure Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.).

"If we are going to start censuring anybody who says something we don’t like, all we will do from now on is censure each other all day," Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) pointed out during the debate. "My Republican colleagues go on and on about cancel culture and here they are today trying to cancel someone."

Maybe Johnson will step in and tell his censorious colleagues to cease their censures. Or maybe he will continue to refuse to put people over politics.

Trust him? Not after this start. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/10/new-speaker-mike-johnson-censure-resolutions-tlaib-shutdown/

James Surowiecki: Why Americans Can’t Accept the Good Economic News

Are you better off today than you were four years ago? That question, first posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 presidential-campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, has become the quintessential political question about the economy. And most Americans today, it seems, would say their answer is no. In a new survey by Bankrate published on Wednesday, only 21 percent of those surveyed said their financial situation had improved since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, against 50 percent who said it had gotten worse. That echoed the results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll from September, in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they were worse off financially since Biden’s election. And in a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, 53 percent of registered voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally.

As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer Finances.

The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period.

So, even allowing for the high inflation we saw in 2022, no one could really look at the U.S. economy today and say that the policy choices of the past three years made us poorer. Yet that, of course, is precisely how many Americans feel.

Although that pessimism does not bode well for Biden’s reelection prospects, the real problem with it is even more far-reaching: If voters think that policies that helped them actually hurt them, that makes it much less likely that politicians will embrace similar policies in the future. The U.S. got a lot right in its macroeconomic approach over the past three years. Too bad that voters think it got so much wrong. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/american-household-income-improvement-voter-sentiment/675959/

Zoë Schlanger: One Huge Contradiction Is Undoing Our Best Climate Efforts

The math isn’t adding up.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake now. Sales of electric vehicles could surpass those of gas-burning cars in the next six years. The world’s biggest powers are putting huge sums toward infrastructure to usher in some form of energy transformation. Pledges are being made; legislation is being passed. The world, it seems, is finally lurching in the right direction.

But none of that is enough, practically speaking, because of one enormous hitch: The world is still using more energy each year, our consumption ticking ever upward, swallowing any gains made by renewable energy. Emissions are still rising—more slowly than they used to but, nonetheless, rising. Instead of getting pushed down, that needle is fitfully jiggling above zero, clawing into the positive digits when it needs to be deeply pitched into the negative. We are, in other words, simply not making a dent.

And so we are now in climate purgatory. In this zone, countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. The International Energy Agency predicts that demand for fossil fuels will peak by 2030. Yet a report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned. In total, countries that hold the world’s oil, gas, and coal deposits still plan to produce 69 percent more fossil fuels than is compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the riskier cousin to the 1.5-degree-Celsius goal each of those countries pledged to aim for. Many experts now consider that goal impossible, because of global reluctance to phase out fossil fuels. One expert who worked on the UN report called this "insanity," a "climate disaster of our own making." The climate math is not adding up. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-change-policies-contradictions/675967/

Peter Hamby: Biden’s Kennedy Curse

Washington might be fixated on Manchin and No Labels, but I’ve found it curious that he’s been getting more attention lately than the more realistic threats to Biden’s candidacy coming from his left flank—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein. All three of them are swimming in a pool of leftist populism, anti-establishment thinking, antiwar dogma and a dash of conspiracy theory. Each of them has the potential to siphon support from disaffected young people, progressives, and younger Black voters—core Democratic voting blocs that have soured on Biden since 2020.

Among those three, though, Kennedy is the candidate that Democrats should be most concerned about. I find it strange that the alarms aren’t louder. https://puck.news/bidens-kennedy-curse/
 

Anne Applebaum; The West Must Defeat Russia

They planned to take Kyiv in three days, the rest of Ukraine in six weeks.

More than 21 months later, Russian forces have withdrawn from half the territory they occupied in February of last year. At least 88,000 Russian soldiers are likely dead—a conservative estimate—and at least twice as many have been wounded. Billions of dollars worth of equipment, Russian tanks, planes, artillery, helicopters, armored vehicles, and warships have been destroyed. If you had predicted this outcome before the war—and nobody did—it would have seemed fanciful. No one would have believed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a professional comedian, could lead a country at war, that the democratic world would be united enough to help him, or that Russian President Vladimir Putin would endure such a humiliation.

Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union have achieved something remarkable: Working together, they have not only preserved the Ukrainian state, but stood up to a bully whose nihilism harms the entire world. Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe, provides thugs to support African dictatorships, and colludes with China, Iran, Venezuela, and other autocracies. From the beginning, Putin hoped the war would demonstrate that American power and American alliances can be defeated, not only in Ukraine but everywhere else. He still does, and for this purpose the war remains useful to him.


Right now, Putin’s bets are on the Republicans who repeat Russian propaganda—Senator J. D. Vance, for example, echoes Russian language about the Ukraine war leading to global disorder and escalation; Representative Matt Gaetz cited a Chinese state-media source as evidence while asking about alleged Ukrainian neo-Nazis at a congressional hearing; Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, has also called Zelensky, who is Jewish, a Nazi. Putin will have been cheered by the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, who is knowingly delaying the military and financial aid that Ukraine needs to keep fighting. The supplemental bill that he refuses to pass includes money that will keep Ukrainians supplied with the air-defense systems they need to protect their cities, as well as the fiscal support they need to sustain their economy and crucial infrastructure in the coming months.

The goal in Ukraine should be to end Russia’s brutish invasion—and to deter others from launching another one somewhere else. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/us-ukraine-support-putin-defeat/675953/

Jonathan Chait: Trump’s ‘He Did It First’ Rationale for Locking Up His Critics. The lie hiding behind the other lie

Donald Trump has been telling anybody who would listen that if he wins a second term, his plan is to lock up his political enemies. "This is third-world-country stuff: ‘Arrest your opponent,’" Trump said last month. "And that means I can do that, too." In an interview with Univision, he gave the same rationale:

"Yeah. If they do this, and they’ve already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse," he said. "It could certainly happen in reverse. What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box."

He added later: "They have done something that allows the next party — I mean, if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business; they’d be out of the election."

Obviously, Trump’s premise that he is being prosecuted by Joe Biden because he is running against him is false. Trump is being prosecuted because he is a career criminal, and there is no evidence any of the prosecutors taking him to court have communicated with President Biden.

But beneath this first lie, there’s a second lie: Trump only intends to prosecute his political enemies because they did it to him first. In fact, Trump has been planning to lock up his political opponents since he first ran for office, well before any of the current prosecutions began.

Trump ran for president threatening to lock up Hillary Clinton. Once in office, he basically never stopped demanding prosecutions against various critics.

In the spring of 2018, he told the White House counsel that he wanted to order Justice Department investigations of Clinton and former FBI director James Comey. In 2019, he repeatedly demanded investigations of Biden and attempted to extort Ukraine into announcing an investigation into the same. He commissioned intelligence agencies to find evidence that Comey, along with Andrew McCabe, Peter Stzrok, and Lisa Page, committed "treason." In addition to insisting on prosecuting various enemies an unknown number of times in private, Trump made similar demands repeatedly in public on his Twitter account.. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/trump-lock-up-enemies-biden-authoritarian-justice-department-trial.html