Tom Nichols: Trump Delivers Another Autocratic Tirade

The former president of the United States went off on an autocratic soliloquy at CPAC this weekend—happily ditching his teleprompter for some of it—to a group that included self-identified Nazis. He again warned that he was the singular figure, the “last chance” standing between ordinary citizens and that “bloodshed, chaos, and violent crime” that he claims has now arrived at the hands of roving gangs of terrorists and criminals. At the ballot box, he said, “they” will get a “reckoning, like they haven’t even imagined before. We’re gonna straighten out our country,” he said.

Who is “they”? you might wonder. “They” are the people, it seems, who do not support Donald Trump, the fellow American citizens who are in his eyes “vermin” and whom he referred to at CPAC as “thugs and tyrants and fascists, scoundrels, and rogues.” Meanwhile, he decried the incarceration of the “hostages” who are serving time for the January 6 insurrection, claiming that “there’s never been in the history of our country a group of people treated the way they’ve been treated.”

Every dictator needs a loyal corpus of people willing to do violence on his behalf, and Trump seems to think he has such brigades, biding their time and stewing in federal prisons, merely awaiting his return. He may well be right. For now, however, too many Americans seem oddly disconnected from these and other authoritarian plans Trump continues to share so openly and candidly. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/02/trump-cpac-speech-autocratic/677577/

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump's Holiness Rises as His Corruption is Revealed, in the Best Authoritarian Tradition

How could anyone believe former president Donald Trump's claim that he, of all people, was chosen by God to lead America? It's a logical question to ask of a man whose voluminous and multi-faceted criminal behavior is hard to keep up with. Many criminals specialize: think of white-collar criminals dedicated to insider trading or Ponzi schemes. Not Trump. His charges, indictments, convictions, and settlements for fraud, serial sexual assault and rape, election interference, retention of national defense information, falsifying business records, inciting insurrection and more span the personal, business, and political realms.

Add in Trump's total lack of empathy and his use-and-discard attitude toward humanity (his request that Iowans caucus even if ill, adding "even if you vote and pass away, it's worth it," is just the most recent example) and Trump might not seem the most obvious individual to be anointed in this fashion.

That's why political enablers with connections to faith communities have long been tasked with proclaiming his sanctity, especially when his corruption is in the news. The more Trump’s crimes come to light, and justice moves to hold him accountable, the more he must be elevated as a being who is in some fashion not bound by the laws of ordinary men.

“I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become President,” said former White House Press Secretary and noted Christian Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Jan. 2019, as special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election came to a close. In 2023, in reward for her good works, Sanders was in turn called to fill the role of Arkansas governor, with Trump's benediction.

For those familiar with authoritarian history, it is no wonder that the talking point of Trump's holiness has become prominent as more of his malfeasance and illegal behavior has been made public. Nor is it surprising that Trump would share a depiction of himself as Jesus-adjacent during his Oct. 2023 civil fraud trial. The image implies that Jesus is with him on his righteous path and that, even in court, Trump thinks holy thoughts. https://lucid.substack.com/p/trumps-holiness-rises-as-his-corruption

Chauncey DeVega: Dr. John Gartner on a tale of two brains: "Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing"

Donald Trump has demonstrated, in repeated and dangerous ways, that he appears to be profoundly unwell mentally and emotionally. Some of the country’s and world’s leading mental health professionals have concluded that based on his behavior, Trump is likely a sociopath if not a psychopath.

Whatever one may think about the specifics of his policies, President Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a responsible leader and an institutionalist who believes in America and the democratic experiment. By comparison, Donald Trump hates democracy, attempted a coup on Jan. 6, and is a megalomaniac who believes that he is some type of god or messiah.

The 2024 election might turn on this issue of who is cognitively capable: Biden or Trump? It's a major issue that will affect some people's votes. Not enough people are sounding the alarm, that based on his behavior, and in my opinion, Donald Trump is dangerously demented. In fact, we are seeing the opposite among too many in the news media, the political leaders and among the public. There is also this focus on Biden's gaffes or other things that are well within the normal limits of aging. By comparison, Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia. This is a tale of two brains. Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing.

I predicted over a year before the 2020 election that Trump wouldn't surrender power willingly. Trump's threats to put immigrants and other "undesirables" in camps is also predictable and not at all surprising. I was warning the public years ago that Trump should be compared to Hitler. The media and other people told me I was exaggerating, and that Trump wouldn't have concentration camps. He did it. He is now promising an even bigger concentration camp system and the largest deportation program in history. When a person tells you who they are, believe them. Trump is now quoting Hitler and Mein Kampf and talking about "vermin" and "poison" in "the blood" of the country. It's not a dog whistle anymore. It's a foghorn. https://www.salon.com/2024/02/23/dr-john-gartner-on-a-tale-of-two-brains-bidens-brain-is-aging-brain-is-dementing/

Eric Tucker: With one single word Trump employs the same old tactic to divert attention

Each time Donald Trump refers to a Georgia prosecutor's colleague as her “lover,” he's invoking a strikingly familiar turn of phrase.

After all, Trump as president repeatedly used the same word to mock two FBI officials, including an agent who helped lead the Russia election interference probe, after revelations that the pair had an extramarital relationship and had traded pejorative text messages about him.

Throughout years of scrutiny from prosecutors, culminating in 91 felony counts, Trump has repeatedly sought to deflect attention from himself by making the personal lives of investigators ripe for derision and ridicule. He's jumped on allegations of affairs and leveled claims of bias against agents, prosecutors and judges. He's also been quick to exploit the sometimes questionable decision-making, or occasional outright protocol breaches, by officials investigating him as a means to try to discredit entire inquiries. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-trial-russia-fani-willis-b2490874.html

Mary Trump: Letitia James Is Pushing Trump to the Edge

In case you were worried that Donald might get away with refusing to pay the massive penalties (plus interest) that Judge Engoron levied against him, I wanted to share some good news.

Not only did A.G Letitia James throw cold water over any hope Donald might have of winning an appeal to this historic judgment against him, she also made it clear that she’s prepared to go to great lengths to get every penny he owes in order to satisfy the judgement.

"If [Donald] does not have funds to pay off the judgment,” Letitia James told ABC News' Aaron Katersky, “then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets."

James implies that there’s a possibility Donald does not have enough cash to satisfy the judgment; that alone is enough to enrage him. Readers of The Good in Us know that Donald is obsessed with his net worth and he goes to great lengths to convince people he is enormously wealthy. It’s a significant part of his identity.

The urgency with which he clings to the the false idea that he is richer, more successful, and more talented than he is serves to hide the truth – not just from us, but from himself – that he is, quite simply, a loser. https://marytrump.substack.com/p/letitia-james-ill-take-40-wall-street

Bill Kristol: Breaking the Bank

We’ve all gotten more or less used to Donald Trump’s robbing his supporters blind with deceptive, aggressive fundraising tactics and using the millions he raises for self-serving purposes—it’s been going on for years now, after all, and the supporters don’t appear to mind. Is there a limit to their tolerance? We may get to find out.

Campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission this week show Joe Biden is in a far stronger financial position than Trump at this point in the race. After raising an eye-popping $42 million in January, Biden’s campaign and its associated committees reported that they entered February with $130 million cash on hand. Team Trump, by contrast, has just $65 million in the bank across its committees going into February.

At this point in the cycle, a certain amount of financial lag from Trump would be expected: The GOP primary hasn’t exactly been competitive to date, but he’s been obliged to spend millions campaigning to make sure it stays that way. Biden hasn’t had those same expenses, and he’s been able to fundraise like crazy off each of Trump’s primary victories: None of the pain, all of the gain.

But the biggest hole in Team Trump’s balance sheets isn’t the primary. It’s the eye-watering amount of money his PACs have pumped into covering his legal bills: nearly $50 million in 2023 alone. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/in-south-carolina-pro-haley-groups

Jonathan Last: Russia. It's always been Russia

Trump’s political career is inextricably linked to Putin and there are many theories as to why.

The ‘why’ doesn’t really matter. It makes no difference if Putin has been blackmailing Trump with kompromat or if Trump sincerely believes that Russia deserves to dominate Europe.

But all the same, there’s a simple, non-conspiratorial explanation. Russia has a long history of playing spygames and waging information warfare against other states.

In Trump, they saw an American politician who was wholly transactional and they realized that this presented them with an opportunity: If they helped Trump in such a transparent and ostentatious way that it was basically public, then Trump would see Russia as being on his side, and so would treat them as allies. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/russia-its-always-been-russia

Jonathan Last: Na Zdorovye ("On Health")

• Russia is trying to interfere in a presidential election (again) on behalf of Donald Trump (again).
• Elected Republicans were told that Smirnov’s claims were unreliable, unconfirmed, and probably tainted goods. Yet they demanded the FBI give them access to them, and then they went around promoting them.
• It isn’t enough to say that the Russian government is trying to help Trump—it’s also the case that elected Republicans in Congress were trying to help Russia’s intelligence operation.

Michelle Goldberg: Biden Is in Danger of Losing Michigan and, With It, the Whole Election

As infuriated as she is by President Biden’s stalwart support for Israel, Layla Elabed has not ruled out voting for him in November. A progressive Palestinian American community organizer in Dearborn, Mich., a majority Arab American city near Detroit, she doesn’t want to see Donald Trump back in office.

“Donald Trump has never been a friend to our community,” she told me as we sat in an airy, modern Yemeni coffee shop. But to win her back, she said, “the very bare minimum” Biden needs to do is to completely overhaul America’s relationship with Israel, demand a permanent end to hostilities and end American military aid to Israel, at least as long as its war in Gaza drags on.

Given how strong support for Israel is in the Democratic and Republican Parties, I’m fairly confident that an aid cutoff is not going to happen anytime soon. But speaking to Elabed, the younger sister of Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic congresswoman, I sensed a chasm between my resigned assumptions about how American politics works and her convictions about what’s necessary to stave off even more mass death in Gaza.

“We’re looking at unprecedented times where we are watching a genocide unfold in front of our eyes,” said Elabed. Biden’s backing of Israel may be predictable, given both his own avowed Zionism and the political influence of Israel’s American champions, but to her and others like her, it’s become intolerable. That’s why Elabed is managing the Listen to Michigan campaign, which is organizing to get people to protest Biden’s handling of the war by voting “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

Biden will most likely never satisfy those most horrified by his Middle East policies, but if he doesn’t do more to try, he’s in danger of losing Michigan in November, which would almost certainly cost him the election. The state has the country’s largest percentage of Arab American voters, and within that community — as well as among many non-Arab Muslims, young people and progressives — there’s a deep sense of betrayal and fury at Biden for standing behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel pulverizes Gaza. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/opinion/gaza-biden-michigan.html

Derek Thompson: The Americans Who Need Chaos

Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why people share conspiracy theories on the Internet. He and other researchers designed a study that involved showing American participants blatantly false stories about Democratic and Republican politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. The subjects were asked: Would you share these stories online?

The results seemed to defy the logic of modern politics or polarization. “There were many people who seemed willing to share any conspiracy theory, regardless of the party it hurt,” Petersen told me. These participants didn’t seem like stable partisans of the left or right. They weren’t even negative partisans, who hated one side without feeling allegiance to the other. Above all, they seemed drawn to stories that undermined trust in every system of power.

Petersen felt as though he’d tapped a new vein of nihilism in modern politics—a desire to rip down the Elites, whatever that might mean. He wanted to know more about what these people were thinking. In further research, he and his co-researchers asked participants how much they agreed with several statements, including the following:

• “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”
• ”I need chaos around me—it is too boring if nothing is going on.”
• “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’”

The researchers came up with a term to describe the motivation behind these all-purpose conspiracy mongers. They called it the “need for chaos,” which they defined as “a mindset to gain status” by destroying the established order. In their study, nearly a third of respondents demonstrated a need for chaos, Petersen said. And for about 5 percent of voters, old-fashioned party allegiances to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party melted away and were replaced by a desire to see the entire political elite destroyed—even without a plan to build something better in the ashes.

“These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.” To sum up their worldview, Petersen quoted a famous line from the film The Dark Knight: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

The need for chaos is not a problem likely to be solved quickly. It might be more like a chronic condition in U.S. politics to be studied and understood. I ultimately see anti-elite sentiment as downstream of several very real elite failures, including the many public-health errors during the coronavirus pandemic. But although burn-it-down sentiment may come from reality, it also feeds off virtual reality, or the stories that people are told about the world. Consumers face a bonanza of news-mediated despondency about quality of life, in part because news outlets are responding to audience negativity bias by telling the worst, most dangerous, and most catastrophic stories about the world. If journalists want to understand the need for chaos, it might be useful for us to scrutinize the ways in which we are partly responsible for growing the public’s taste for narratives that catastrophize without promise of improvement. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-politicsl-science-concept/677536/

Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick: Rural Iowans have nobody to represent them; Republicans certainly aren't doing it

It’s conventional wisdom these days that America is divided between city and country, an urban-rural divide that drives our politics. Urban Democrats and rural Republicans, they say, have different cultures and rarely mingle. In this story, Democrats represent the interests of the cities and Republicans those of rural areas.

How, then, do we explain Iowa’s state government?

The allegedly pro-rural GOP has controlled the governor’s office and both houses of the state Legislature since 2017. So why are state policies so bad for rural Iowa?

Consider a few recent examples:

• Republicans’ signature accomplishment last year, public funding for private schools, has almost no benefit to Iowa’s rural counties, most of which have zero private schools.
• Gov. Kim Reynolds’ greatest priority this year has been cutting back the state Area Educational Associations, which primarily benefit smaller school districts. Iowa City can hire a multi-school speech pathologist and make its own bulk purchases; even Mason City needs access to the pooled professionals and purchasing power of the AEAs.
• Prominent Republicans back CO2 pipelines, despite their unpopularity with farmers.
• Large rural sections of the state lack mental, maternity, or reproductive health care after Republicans closed regional mental health centers and “reformed” a once-successful state family planning program.
• Meanwhile, the governor’s budget recommended zero funding for a UI initiative to better provide rural healthcare.

NY Times Editorial Board: A U.S. Call for a Humanitarian Cease-Fire in Gaza

Given the extraordinary record of American support for Israel at the United Nations — demonstrated by dozens of vetoes to block resolutions critical of Israel, including three calling for a cease-fire in Gaza — the fact of the United States is circulating a resolution that mentions the term “cease-fire” should be a signal to Israelis that American leaders are losing patience with Mr. Netanyahu’s forever war.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, the United States also sent a message to Israel when it abstained on a resolution condemning settlement construction in the West Bank, thus allowing it to pass. The resolution had no practical import, but it made an important point — which the Biden administration has reinforced — about settlements as an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.

Similarly, this resolution, however short-lived, is a moment for the U.S. to make clear to the Israeli people that its enduring support for Israel does not extend to the worst policies of its government. However divided America might be, the United States still wields a powerful voice in Israeli affairs, both as supplier of arms and aid and as its political shield on the world stage. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/opinion/gaza-ceasefire.html