Peter Baker: Favoring Foes Over Friends, Trump Threatens to Upend International Order

Mr. Trump has never believed in the fundamental one-for-all-and-all-for-one concept of the Atlantic alliance. Indeed, he spent much of his four-year presidency undermining it while strong-arming members into keeping their commitments to spend more on their own militaries with the threat that he would not come to their aid otherwise.

But he took it to a whole new level over the weekend, declaring at a rally in South Carolina that not only would he not defend European countries he deemed to be in arrears from an attack by Russia, he would go so far as to ‘encourage’ Russia ‘to do whatever the hell they want’ against them. Never before has a president of the United States — even a former one aspiring to reclaim the office — suggested that he would incite an enemy to attack American allies.

Some may discount that as typical Trump rally bluster or write it off as a poor attempt at humor. Others may even cheer the hard line against supposedly deadbeat allies who in this view have taken advantage of American friendship for too long. But Mr. Trump’s rhetoric foreshadows potentially far-reaching changes in the international order if he wins the White House again in November with unpredictable consequences. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/11/us/politics/trump-nato.html
 

Ron Brownstein: Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door’

Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue ‘the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,’ as he put it last month on social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/
 

Mona Charen: Tucker Carlson’s Fatal Attraction

Tucker Carlson is not a useful idiot. Not precisely. The term implies naïveté, but he seems to know exactly what he’s doing. He claims to be in Moscow to interview Putin because the rest of the press refuses to do so. In fact, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, was just one of many who have pointed out that major press organizations have repeatedly requested interviews and been rebuffed. Peskov explained that Carlson had been approved because ‘he has a position that differs from the rest of Western media.’ Yes, supine.

For the past several years, Carlson’s project has been consonant with Putin’s. Both seek to sow division in the United States. Both seek to flood the zone with s— so that people won’t know what to believe or whom to trust. Both seek to undermine confidence in institutions. Both seek to subvert confidence in democratic systems—most especially in elections. And both seek to stoke feelings of persecution and existential danger in their followers.

Carlson says he went to Moscow because he’s a journalist. He isn’t. He’s a tool. Putin has kidnapped and jailed two real American journalists: the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, who has been rotting in a Russian prison for 11 months, and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who committed the crime of visiting her sick mother while being an American. But while Gershkovich and Kurmasheva are suffering God only knows what in Russian prisons, Carlson is swanning about Moscow tailed by eager regime boosters. Here he is at the Bolshoi Theater. Now he’s visiting Vkusno i Tochka, the fast food outlet that took the place of McDonalds after the golden arches pulled out.

As of this writing, it seems Carlson got the interview he craved with Putin. Doubtless Trump will find it very interesting and urge his people to “take a look,” which will be the signal for the rest of the GOP to agree that we’ve really been getting only half of the story, haven’t we? And it’s really Biden, not Putin, and certainly not Trump, who’s a threat to world peace.
What a catastrophic turn for a once-great political party. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/tucker-carlsons-fatal-attraction
 

Eugene Robinson: Move aside, Johnson and McConnell. Trump is now in charge.

At this point, we should call them “alleged House Speaker Mike Johnson” and “purported Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.” Those men no longer run their congressional caucuses. Donald Trump does — and heaven help us all.

James Lankford (Okla.), who helped negotiate the failed package and extracted unprecedented concessions on border security from Democrats in exchange for the vital Ukraine aid, spoke angrily on the Senate floor about the kind of pressure he has been under.

“I had a popular commentator,” Lankford said on Wednesday, “that told me flat-out, before they knew any of the contents of the bill … if you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”

It has long been difficult to pass significant legislation during election years, but this should have been an exception. Republicans have spent months screaming about the crisis at the border, and Lankford, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, did exactly what his party’s leader asked him to do. What senator will raise his or her hand the next time McConnell has a task to assign?

The serious question now is how Congress manages to get even its most basic and essential work done with Trump effectively directing Republicans in both the House and Senate.

No one knows from one day to the next what Republicans in the House and Senate are going to do. Maybe Johnson and McConnell should have a standing conference call with Trump to find out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/08/trump-johnson-mcconnell-republican-party-congress/
 

Stuart Stevens: Just Say It, Democrats: Biden Has Been a Great President

A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s true.

Because it is.

Yes, the desire to see the 2024 election as a choice between a normal, stable president versus an erratic thug under indictment in multiple states is seductive. But don’t base a campaign on that contrast. Don’t go into 2024 with the game plan to win because Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. That’s true, he is, but that’s only making the case that Donald Trump shouldn’t be president. It’s not the reason Joe Biden should be reelected.

Joe Biden should remain president because of his historic level of achievement here at home while standing on the side of freedom versus tyranny in the largest land war in Europe since World War II, a role no American president has played since the Roosevelt-Truman era. Be bold. Walk into this campaign with swagger and confidence and pride. https://newrepublic.com/article/178435/biden-great-president-say-it-democrats
 

Tom Nichols: Trump Encourages Putin to Attack NATO Members

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the presumptive Republican nominee, said earlier today that he would side with Russia against NATO and encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to brutalize our allies. Trump issued this unhinged threat while telling one of his “sir” stories, a rhetorical device in which some unnamed interlocutor shows Trump great deference while humbly seeking his advice. He described a meeting, ostensibly when he was in office, in which he responded to an ally about NATO funding.

One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don't pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”

Before we consider the sheer recklessness and immorality of this statement, let us first accept that this exchange almost certainly never happened.

Trump’s feelings about NATO are well-known. He is gripped by the stubbornly ignorant belief, even after four years in office, that NATO is some sort of protection racket, in which our European allies come to Washington like quivering shopkeepers and make an offering to the local mob boss from their weekly receipts. NATO funding doesn’t work that way, of course, and while European leaders no doubt had their arguments in private with Trump while he was president, it is highly unlikely that the leader of a major power “stood up”—as if in some sort of audience with Trump—to ask him if he’d stop a Russian invasion of a country “delinquent” in its accounts.

The fact that Trump apparently thinks all of this actually took place is bad enough, and it is evidence that his  detachment from reality is getting worse by the day. (As the New Yorker writer Susan Glasser noted this evening, Trump is “getting even more brazen,” and his comments today, even by the usual standards of his incendiary speeches, were “breathtaking.”) In a country tangling itself in knots over questions of age and mental competence in the White House, Trump somehow keeps getting a pass for saying things that are orders of magnitude more worrisome than forgetting a name or a date. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/trump-rally-nato/677426/
 

David Graham: Republicans Are No Longer a Political Party

When historians chronicle the end of the Grand Old Party, they may mark 2024 as the turning point. Something called the Republican Party will surely exist for years to come, like a legacy brand subsumed by a competitor, but it appears to be coming to its end as a functional party. Instead, the Republican Party has become just another subsidiary of Donald Trump Inc.

On Monday, Trump announced his effective takeover of the Republican National Committee, endorsing Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP, as chair; his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair; and one of his top campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita, as chief operating officer. LaCivita will reportedly also remain with the Trump presidential campaign, splitting time. The current chair of the party, Ronna McDaniel, is stepping down because of pressure from Trump.

Trump’s approach is familiar from the way he ran his family business, the Trump Organization, and his White House. He stocks them with ultra-loyalists who will take hits for him and with family members who are questionably qualified. The effect is to efface any organizational identity or institutional structures, to ensure that the only thing that matters, and the only person who decides, is Trump. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/republicans-are-no-longer-political-party/677437/