Eugene Robinson: Trump keeps warning us about his second term. Are you listening?

How catastrophic would a second Trump presidency be? Worse than you think. Worse, even, than I had feared — before I read his recent Time magazine interview in which Donald Trump lays out his plans. They are, in a word, insane.

Imagine the National Guard, perhaps aided by active-duty military units, fanning out across the country to round up and deport all undocumented migrants, believed to number roughly 11 million. Imagine these men, women and children being held pending deportation in vast detention camps.

That’s what Trump told Time he would do. He said he would ask local police departments to help in this nationwide pogrom, adding that jurisdictions that refuse to participate would be denied federal funding. As he phrased it, “they won’t partake in the riches.”

Imagine the National Guard also being sent into cities to fight crime, whether or not governors request such assistance. When Time correspondent Eric Cortellessa noted that violent crime is declining across the country — homicides fell by 13 percent last year, according to the FBI — Trump insisted, without evidence, that the data is rigged. “It’s a lie,” he claimed.

Think about what our lives would be like if Trump even tries to do those two things. This is not the kind of country where troops in military gear set up highway checkpoints and raid residential neighborhoods, demanding to see everyone’s papers. This is not a country where camo-clad soldiers patrol shopping malls and nightlife districts. Not yet, that is.

Do you like the rule of law? If so, you probably won’t like Trump’s pledge that “yes, absolutely” he would consider pardoning all the defendants charged with or convicted of crimes stemming from participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “I call them the J-6 patriots,” he told Time.

Those “patriots” smashed through police lines and into the seat of U.S. democracy, injuring 140 officers and forcing members of Congress first to cower in fear for their lives and then to flee the building. “Hang Mike Pence,” they shouted, as they sought Trump’s vice president for the stated purpose of lynching him. Trump, meanwhile, sat passively in the White House for hours and watched all of this unfold on television. Now, since the insurrectionists believed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he would consider absolving them all of any wrongdoing.

In fact, upholding the “big lie” appears to be a prerequisite for serving in a second Trump administration. Asked about hiring anyone who acknowledges that Joe Biden legitimately won, Trump told Time: “I wouldn’t feel good about it.”

On foreign affairs, Trump reiterated his threat not to honor our commitment to defend a NATO ally that does not, in his opinion, spend enough on collective defense. “If you’re not going to pay, then you’re on your own,” he said. Asked specifically about continued U.S. aid to Ukraine (not a NATO member), Trump said, “I wouldn’t give unless Europe starts equalizing.”

Europe actually gives about as much aid to Ukraine as the United States does, but who cares about facts? Judging by Trump’s record, his election would be calamitous for the freedom fighters of Ukraine — and also for the Palestinians, since Trump told Time that a two-state solution, the long-standing goal of U.S. policy, “is going to be very, very tough.”

Think about all of this when you decide whether and how to vote in November. Read the interview. And don’t say Trump didn’t warn us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/02/time-magazine-interview-donald-trump/

Dana Milbank: To the Gaza protesters helping to elect Trump: Give it a rest

Trump positions — including the restoration of white power, the rejection of a Palestinian homeland, the willingness to mobilize troops against peaceful demonstrators — show how deeply misguided those on the far left are as they protest Biden’s policies on Gaza. Their frustration with the president’s support for Israel is understandable. But in making Biden the enemy, including with chants of “Genocide Joe,” the plans to trash the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the proliferation of vows of the “uncommitted” never to vote for Biden, they are in effect working to elect Trump. This isn’t principled protest; it’s nihilism.

They are working to help return to office an authoritarian who just last week said the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville in 2017 was “like a peanut compared to the riots and the anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country.” In recent months, Trump said Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and boasted about cutting off aid to Palestinians. And he has vowed, if elected, to reimpose his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and “expand it even further.”

For those student protesters too young to remember, this is the guy who led the anti-Muslim “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama; who claimed thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks; who said “Islam hates us” and employed several anti-Muslim bigots in his administration; who wanted to have police surveillance of U.S. mosques; who called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; who retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos by a white supremacist; and who told figures such as Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

None of this should be surprising, either, for this is the same guy who called thousands of National Guard troops to Washington and federal police to Oregon to combat racial-justice demonstrators after the George Floyd killing; who held a Bible-wielding photo op in Lafayette Square after authorities cleared a peaceful demonstration with tear gas; who, according to his own former defense secretary, suggested to military leaders that they shoot demonstrators; who calls the free press the “enemy of the American people”; who defended the “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville; and who called those convicted of attacking the Capitol “hostages.”

Yet the pro-Palestinian activists, through their actions, would return the author of this ugliness to the White House. They must have been doing for the past eight years what Trump has been doing in court the past three weeks: napping. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/03/trump-napping-gaza-protestors-hush-money-trial/

Joyce Vance: How It’s Done

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker estimated Trump made 30,573 “false or misleading claims,” as they termed it, while he was in office. And the rate accelerated over time. Almost half of Trump’s lies came in the final year of his term in office. He started with claims of excessive crowd size on inauguration day, leading his advisor Kellyanne Conway to coin the term “alternative facts,” which was an attempt by the people handling him to reframe Trump’s lies. Instead, it became a mantra on the left, watching first in surprise and then in horror as Trump was permitted to spew lies without any check from people in his own political party.

Among the many lies the Post’s Fact Checker documented are the following:

• The coronavirus would disappear on its own, along with pitching bogus cures;
• Trump created the best economy in U.S. history;
• Caravans of criminals were approaching the southern border every time an election loomed;
• Trump passed the biggest tax cuts of any president;
• A modified map altering the scientific assessment of a hurricane’s path in Sharpie marker, and of course, the biggest lie;
• The 2020 election was rigged, and Trump lost due to fraud.

Trump, unchecked, has been free to repeat those lies over and over again, even when the falsehood has been thoroughly exposed and his claims debunked. So it was refreshing to read that Judge Merchan was having none of that in court in Manhattan Friday morning. On Thursday, Trump lied, telling a gathering of reporters outside of the courtroom where he is on trial that he would not be able to take the stand and testify in his own defense, because of the gag order imposed by Judge Merchan. Of course, that’s a lie. Trump has been promising he would testify—perhaps he was looking for a way to walk that back as the reality of being on trial settled in. But Trump was peddling trash in classic fashion, blaming the Judge and lying about the gag order.

Judge Merchan got right to the point Friday morning in court, before the jury was brought in. He told Trump the gag order “does not prohibit you from taking the stand.” He continued, “As the name of the order indicates, it only applies to extrajudicial statements.” That means Trump is only limited in statements he makes outside of the courtroom. In other words, Trump is free to testify in court; the choice is his. That’s it, just like that. The authority Trump was lying about refused to bend the knee and called Trump on the lie. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/how-its-done

Susan B. Glasser: Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020—or Both?

Trump’s announcement that he has no intention of peacefully accepting another defeat this fall, by the way, was only one of many extreme statements he made on his campaign swing. A day after being found in contempt of court for defying a gag order that prohibited the former President from posting social-media attacks on witnesses and the judge in his New York case, Trump disparaged the charges against him as “bullshit” and mocked the “kangaroo court” where he is being tried on allegations that he sought to tilt the 2016 election by paying the former adult-film star Stormy Daniels a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to buy her silence before the voting. Amid familiar complaints about electric cars and his favorite false claim that, when he was President, the U.S. had the greatest economy in the history of the world, there was a palpable threat of violence in his rhetoric. At one point, Trump announced, theatrically, “If we don’t win this election, I don’t think our country is going to survive. I’ve never said that publicly, I don’t think, but I’ve felt it for a long time. I actually think our country’s not going to survive.”

This is history as a cautionary tale. The Biden-Humphrey, Gaza-Vietnam, Trump-Nixon parallels may be inexact, but remind me, again, just why the Democrats decided to pick Chicago for this year’s convention? Already, activist groups are promising major protests over Biden’s support for Israel during the August gathering, all but guaranteeing bad split-screen visuals emphasizing young progressives’ disillusion with a President who urgently needs a strong youth turnout to beat Trump. “It looks like a repeat in the making,” the Democratic consultant Don Rose, who, in 1968, served as a spokesman for one of the main antiwar groups, told Chicago’s CBS News affiliate this week. “At this moment, there’s a perfect parallel.” With confrontations between campus protesters and police spreading nationwide in the wake of Columbia’s crackdown, Meghan McCain, somewhat more crudely, summed up the emerging conventional wisdom about 2024 in a tweet on Thursday: “The DNC convention this summer is going to be a fucking shit show.”

The truth is that it’s far too early to know whether the historical dread that many Democrats feel about a 1968 redux is warranted. Maybe, by the fall, the war in Gaza will no longer be front and center. Perhaps, by then, the students will be more focussed on Trump’s threats to their reproductive freedom, their democracy, or consumed by some other Trumpian outrage that has yet to occur. What’s already both knowable and known, however, is that if Trump is once more defeated, he’s planning on pulling a 2020 all over again. On this, at least, take him at his word. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/is-2024-doomed-to-repeat-1968-or-2020-or-both

Peter Wehner What’s Left to Restrain Donald Trump?

Courtesy of Donald Trump, America continues its journey into the political twilight zone.

MAGA world has stood with Trump—in fact, its support for him has deepened—through everything he has done, including encouraging the January 6 mob to kill his vice president and being found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming a woman. And those are just a fraction of his legal and moral transgressions. Yet Republicans have never been close to taking the exit ramp away from the former president. The closer we get to November’s election, the more emphatically they will defend him.

The identity of MAGA world has fused with Trump’s; to turn on him would be to turn on themselves. They won’t admit to themselves, and they certainly won’t admit to others, the sheer expanse of Trump’s degeneracy. To do so would be self-indicting; it would cause enormous cognitive dissonance. They made a Faustian bargain, and they’re not about to break it. They will follow him anywhere he goes.

Where Trump might go in a second term is of course a matter of speculation. But if his actions track at all with his last months in office, with his rhetoric since his defeat, and with the actions his lawyers are saying their client might be legally immune for committing, we are heading to an exceedingly dark and dangerous place. We can’t say we haven’t been warned. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/donald-trump-republicans-immunity/678277/\

Maureen Dowd: The Three Faces of Don

It is telling to read the new Time magazine cover story at this bizarre moment, when Trump is both a grumpy, sleepy defendant in a criminal trial in a city where he once towered, and a confident former president campaigning to get the Oval back and leading in many polls.

The guises of Trump add up to a fascinating triptych: In the trial, we see who Trump was; at his campaign rallies, we see who Trump is; and in his Time interview, we see who Trump would be.

The lighthearted, human side that Trump shows in rallies and funny posts is belied by the dark-hearted, inhumane side he sometimes reveals.

In the new “If He Wins” Time cover piece, Eric Cortellessa extracted insights from Trump about how far he would go if elected.

Trump shared schemes about “an imperial presidency.” If he returns, there will be no eminences grises. He will lead his hard-core crew and there will be no pushback on his authoritarian lunacy. No aides will be hiding his papers or sneaking around behind his back to protect the country.

In a second term, Trump told Time, he would deport more than 11 million migrants, using the military and detention camps. He also wants to go full Margaret Atwood, letting red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute violators. He is mulling pardoning the insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, and he may fire any U.S. attorney who is not a lackey.

We have seen the truculent face Trump shows at trial and the affable face he shows at rallies. But the most important face is the one Trump has when he conjures the years ahead — because his vision of America’s future is terrifying and apocalyptic. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/opinion/donald-trump-time-magazine.html

Geoff Duncan: Why I’m voting for Biden and other Republicans should, too

It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind former president Donald Trump. This includes some of his fiercest detractors, such as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who raised eyebrows during a recent interview by vowing to support the “Republican ticket.”

This mentality is dead wrong.

The alternative to President Biden is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star.

Most important, Trump fanned the flames of unfounded conspiracy theories that led to the horrific events of Jan. 6, 2021. He refuses to admit he lost the last election and has hinted he might do so again after the next one.

Those holding their nose and falling behind Trump tend to rely on similar arguments. Sometimes it involves, as Barr stated in his CNN interview, the, “duty to pick the person who I think would do the least damage to the country.” https://www.ajc.com/opinion/geoff-duncan-why-im-voting-for-biden-and-other-republicans-should-too/LFLE5YWCBBA6VDGJAJKMNPCDKQ/

Anne Applebaum: The New Propaganda War

Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.

Given that both Russian and Chinese actors now blend in so easily with the MAGA messaging operation, it is hardly surprising that the American government has difficulty responding to the newly interlinked autocratic propaganda network. American-government-backed foreign broadcasters—Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Farda, Radio Martí—still exist, but neither their mandate nor their funding has changed much in recent years. The intelligence agencies continue to observe what happens—there is a Foreign Malign Influence Center under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—but they are by definition not part of the public debate. The only relatively new government institution fighting antidemocratic propaganda is the Global Engagement Center, but it is in the State Department, and its mandate is to focus on authoritarian propaganda outside the United States. Established in 2016, it replaced the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which sought to foil the Islamic State and other jihadist groups that were recruiting young people online. In 2014–15, as the scale of Russian disinformation campaigns in Europe were becoming better known, Congress designated the GEC to deal with Russian as well as Chinese, Iranian, and other propaganda campaigns around the world—although not, again, inside the United States. Throughout the Trump administration, the organization languished under the direction of a president who himself repeated Russian propaganda lines during the 2016 campaign—“Obama founded ISIS,” for example, and “Hillary will start World War III.”

One could call this a secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface. Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/

Peter Baker: Gallows Humor and Talk of Escape: Trump’s Possible Return Rattles Capital

It has become the topic of the season at Washington dinner parties and receptions. Where would you go if it really happens?

Portugal, says a former member of Congress. Australia, says a former agency director. Canada, says a Biden administration official. France, says a liberal columnist. Poland, says a former investigator.

They’re joking. Sort of. At least in most cases. It’s a gallows humor with a dark edge. Much of official Washington is bracing for the possibility that former President Donald J. Trump really could return — this time with “retribution” as his avowed mission, the discussion is where people might go into a sort of self-imposed exile.

Whether they mean it or not, the buzz is a telling indicator of the grim mood among many in the nation’s capital these days. The “what if” goes beyond the normal prospect of a side unhappy about a lost election. It speaks to the nervousness about a would-be president who talks of being a dictator for a day, who vows to “root out” enemies he called “vermin,” who threatens to prosecute adversaries, who suggests a general he deems disloyal deserves “DEATH,” whose lawyers say he may have immunity even if he orders the assassination of political rivals. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/us/politics/trump-biden-election-dc.html

Dana Milbank: In court, Stormy Daniels pulled a Trump on Trump

As Stormy Daniels testified in the hush money case, Trump’s angry response was unmistakable.

“A very revealing day,” Donald Trump said on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse here after his hush money trial adjourned for the evening on Tuesday.

And how.

The trial, which on Monday had been in the doldrums of bookkeepers’ testimony about general ledgers and accounts payable, exploded into its most memorable day yet with the arrival on the witness stand of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels herself.

For nearly a decade, Trump has been the nation’s main chaos agent: He causes the mayhem, and the rest of us have to react, adjust, adapt and try to stay calm. But for one day, somebody else was causing the chaos, and Trump and his lawyers were the ones who had to react and adapt. They had to ride out Stormy’s storm.

She was a worthy adversary. Daniels attacked her target with the very blend of vulgar accusations and insinuations without evidence that Trump routinely uses on others. In effect, she pulled a Trump on Trump. She was furious, out of control and uninhibited by what even prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, out of the jury’s hearing, referred to as her witness’s “credibility issues.” Trump, glowering from the defense table, tasted his own bitter medicine. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/08/stormy-daniels-donald-trump-hush-money/