Michelle Goldberg: The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie

In a cease-and-desist letter to the filmmakers, a lawyer for Trump claimed, absurdly, that the movie is “direct foreign interference in America’s elections,” citing the fact that its director, Ali Abbasi, is Iranian Danish and that the movie received funding from Denmark, Ireland and Canada.

“If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote. Should he become president again, he’ll have greatly expanded options for pursuing this vendetta.

It’s common to read about movies that are shown in most of the world but not released in, say, Russia or, more often, China. Should “The Apprentice” end up widely available globally but not, for political reasons, in the United States, it will be a sign of democratic decay, as well as an augur of greater self-censorship to come. After all, if anxiety about enraging Trump is already shaping what you can and cannot watch, it’s probably bound to get even worse if he actually returns to power. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/opinion/the-apprentice-trump-movie.html/

Leah Litman: Something’s Rotten About the Justices Taking So Long on Trump’s Immunity Case

For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-undecided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/opinion/supreme-court-trump-immunity.html
 

Bess :Levin: Trump Demanded Mike Johnson Use the Federal Government to Overturn His Conviction, and Johnson’s Response Was Basically, “I’m on It, Boss!”

Something you’ve probably picked up on over the last eight years and change is that the Republican Party is embarrassingly, slavishly devoted to Donald Trump, a man they treat like a cult leader who can do no wrong and for whom they’d happily drink cyanide if he asked. That’s how, for example, you can explain their deranged response to Hunter Biden being prosecuted and found guilty on gun charges, and it’s also how you can explain the leader of the House of Representatives agreeing to use the full weight of the federal government to go after Trump’s enemies and help him overturn a conviction by a jury of his peers.

Politico reports that shortly after he was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York, Trump called House Speaker Mike Johnson and, in between “frequent F-bombs,” told the Louisiana lawmaker that Congress must destroy the Democrats he claims have been “weaponizing” the Department of Justice against him. He also specifically demanded Johnson do something about his guilty conviction, reportedly saying, “We have to overturn this.”

Did Johnson respond by reminding Trump that he was found guilty in state court (over which Congress has no jurisdiction) or by telling the ex-president that he should set an example and respect the rule of law? Did he also remind Trump that he’s a devout Christian who uses special software to prevent himself from looking at pornography, so the idea that he would go to bat for a guy found guilty on charges stemming from paying hush money to a porn star would go against everything he claims to believe? We’ll give you two guesses, but you’ll likely only need one!

While it’s not clear exactly what Johnson could do to help Trump overturn his conviction, the Speaker has already put pressure on his pals at the Supreme Court, saying in an interview earlier this month: “I think that the justices on the Court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/report-trump-demanded-mike-johnson-use-the-federal-government-to-overturn-his-conviction-and-johnsons-response-was-basically-im-on-it-boss

 

Charlie Savage, Reid J. Epstein, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan: The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started

Opponents of Donald Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.

A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/us/politics/trump-2025-democratic-resistance.html

 

David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s Message to Milwaukee

“Milwaukee, where we are having our convention, is a horrible city,” the former president reportedly told congressional Republicans.

Donald Trump has long cultivated an image as a salt-of-the-earth, everyday American who loves the parts of the nation that elitist liberals dismiss as flyover country. That’s why the Republican National Convention this year is in Milwaukee, the largest city in Wisconsin—a state that Trump narrowly lost in 2020, and which is a must-win for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. 

Now that the RNC has fixed its website to feature a picture of Milwaukee rather than Ho Chi Minh City, the former president has his own words of praise.

Trump’s disdain for American cities is one of his most consistent personality traits. His aspersions on Milwaukee were cast from Washington, D.C., another city for which he has little use. “It was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C., and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” he said last year after a trip to the capital to plead not guilty to federal charges related to his attempt to steal the 2020 election. He also called the city a “filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation,” which is funny from someone accused of committing crimes there. Lately he has been complaining about his own hometown, following his felony conviction in New York City in May.

You don’t have to look too hard to see a couple of common threads here: These cities are all overwhelmingly Democratic, and most of them are heavily Black. Washington gave Trump just 5.4 percent of its vote in 2020, though that was up from 4 percent in 2016. Huge numbers of Democratic votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, big Black population centers, helped Biden win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia in 2020. (Trump continues to insist this was only because of fraud, as Fitzgerald and Grothman suggested, but no evidence exists for fraud that would have affected the result.)

That’s part of Trump’s game here. Insulting a town like Milwaukee won’t help him inside the city limits, but he wasn’t going to win many votes there anyway. Blue cities are often in tension with more conservative areas of their home states. By attacking these urban centers as hellholes, he smight gin up anger among white suburban, exurban, and rural voters outside of them, and use that to make up his margin. It’s a microcosm of his broader political strategy, which is less to win over swing voters than to run up margins with his base.

“We are a failing nation,” Trump said last year. “We are a nation that lost its confidence, willpower, and strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.” One starts to wonder why he wants to lead it—and whether he even likes it much in the first place. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/donald-trump-milwaukee/678681/
 

Dana Milbank You have no idea how hard it is to be Donald Trump

Decapitation, electrocution and expectoration are just a few of the emerging hazards.

Donald Trump has been spending a lot of time lately fantasizing about his own demise.

“Haul out the Guillotine!” he wrote in a fundraising appeal on Wednesday, asserting that his beheading is “the Sick Dream of every Trump-Deranged lunatic out there!” A second email added that “THEY WANT TO SENTENCE ME TO DEATH!” and warned that he would be terminated if his supporters didn’t give him money immediately: “If we fail to have a MASSIVE outpouring of patriotic support — right here, right now — they’ll TAKE ME OUT and move on to their real target: YOU!!”

This was the most alarmed Trump had been about his own well-being since Sunday, when he addressed a rally under the blazing Las Vegas sun. Dozens of his supporters required medical care and six were sent to the hospital because of the 110-degree heat, following a similar episode at a Trump event in Phoenix a few days earlier. But Trump’s greater concern was for himself. During planning for the event, “everybody was so worried yesterday about you, and they never mentioned me,” he complained to the crowd. “I’m up here sweating like a dog. ... I’m working my a-- off.”

Trump did assure his heat-exhausted supporters that people were on hand to “throw water” at them if they lost consciousness. “I don’t want anybody going on me,” he reasoned. “We need every voter. I don’t care about you, I just want your vote.” He then predicted: “See, now the press will take that and they’ll say, ‘He said a horrible thing.’”

In a sign that the heat had, in fact, gotten to him, the fatality-fascinated former president further imagined himself having to choose his manner of death aboard a battery-powered boat that was foundering. “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?” he wondered aloud to the Vegas crowd. “Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/14/trump-beheading-shark-republicans/

 

Philip Bump: On immunity, too, Republicans grant Trump a different standard

Most Americans, if asked, say they don’t believe that presidents should have broad immunity from prosecutions for actions taken while in office. That isn’t surprising; there’s never been an expectation that presidents should have such immunity. And were broad immunity given to presidents, political scientists warn, it would pose a dire risk to American democracy.

Over and over, Republicans hold Trump to a different standard. They were 57 points more likely to say they’d vote for someone convicted of a felony after it happened to Trump. They’re 69 points more likely to approve of the Hunter Biden verdict than the Trump verdict. And they’re 22 points more likely to say that Trump should have immunity than they are to say that presidents should overall.

Those divergences are unique. The views of Americans overall are more consistent. A majority opposed voting for someone convicted of a felony both before and after the Trump verdict. A majority supported both trial verdicts. A majority opposes granting presidents immunity. Those are all true of Democrats as well.

This is instructive in part because it gives the lie to the idea that some new development in Trump’s criminal trials or indictments will shift the presidential race against him. His conviction should have turned his party against him, according to that April poll — but instead, the party changed to accommodate him. In the unlikely-but-not-impossible event that the Supreme Court grants presidents broad immunity from prosecution, Republicans might be expected to oppose it — except that the case centers on immunity for Trump personally.

About two-thirds of self-identified conservatives told YouGov that they supported broad immunity for Donald Trump’s actions as president. The right didn’t change Trump. Trump changed the right. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/14/immunity-too-republicans-grant-trump-different-standard/

 

Bess Levin: Trump and Co. Come Up With Most Deranged Theory Yet: Joe Biden Wanted Hunter Biden to Be Found Guilty

Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s yearslong claim that the Department of Justice has been exclusively weaponized against the GOP ran headfirst into reality when Hunter Biden was indicted—by his father’s DOJ—last September on three firearms-related charges. And while such an inconvenient turn of events might’ve caused the party to drop the weaponization argument, that’s obviously not how Republicans roll. Instead, they kept it up, and then, in the days leading up to the verdict being announced, came up with their most unhinged theory yet: The DOJ prosecuted Hunter Biden—and later, orchestrated his guilty verdict—to help the president.

On Sunday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insanely claimed: “The DOJ is ‘prosecuting’ Hunter Biden on gun charges and trying to create sympathy for Joe Biden.”

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Then, on Tuesday, after the guilty verdict was handed down, Trump adviser Stephen Miller claimed that the DOJ—whose investigation led to the president’s son becoming a convicted felon—is “running election interference for Joe Biden.”

Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno declared on X that the DOJ’s decision to go after Biden on gun charges—which the GOP wanted to happen!—was done to “insulate and protect the Big Guy,” a claim Senator J.D. Vance appeared to endorse: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-and-co-come-up-with-most-deranged-theory-yet-joe-biden-wanted-hunter-biden-to-be-found-guilty

 

David Frum: The Most Dangerous Bias in Today’s America Detroit remains a troubled place, certainly. But for the first time in a long while, its trajectory is clearly going up, not down.

As Detroit’s improvement is real, so Trump’s Detroit event was fake.

Trump’s team, and some stenographic news reports, described the event as taking place in a “Black church,” leaving the impression that he spoke to a church congregation. One of Trump’s talkers claimed that 8,000 people attended the event in a building that holds only a few hundred people when all the pews are full, which they weren’t. Trump’s media allies insinuated that the crowd was mostly made up of Black worshippers; the TV cameras showed a crowd that seemed at least half white and was apparently nonlocal.

The contrast between the reality of reviving Detroit and the falseness of Trump’s self-advertising symbolizes a challenge for voters and the media in this year’s presidential election. Trump tells stories that are not true. “Trump Portrays Rampant Crime in Speech at Black Church in Detroit,” was how The Washington Post headlined its story about the visit. Yes, that is what Trump portrayed. But the portrayal was deceptive.

The deception is one, though, that we are primed to accept. Our brains do not always adapt as quickly as the world can change. Nationwide, in 2024, crime is dropping; inflation is subsiding; real wages are rising—and rising fastest for the lowest-paid workers.

Yet the good news is taking time to register. Trump is racing against that time, with some success.

The United States has suffered two severe economic shocks in the past two decades: the Great Recession of 2008–09 and the pandemic shutdown of 2020–21. Recovery from the recession was slow and uncertain, and was followed by a wave of social troubles—the opioid epidemic, rising crime, and other pressures that Trump exploited in the 2016 election.

Recovery from the pandemic shutdown, however, has so far been rapid and strong. Has the memory of the first shock distorted our perception of the second? Or is some other barrier preventing us from seeing the world as it is?

The election of 2024—and the fate of American democracy—may turn on whether we can look past outdated stereotypes to grasp current realities. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/detroit-station-donald-trump-election/678722/
 

Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Tariff Is a Scheme to Shift the Tax Burden to the Non-Rich Why do we keep calling this “populism”?

Since Donald Trump began his golden escalator voyage nine years ago, the word populist has enveloped him like a protective cloak. His dangerous rhetoric gave him enough of an air of menace to help expand his party’s appeal to working-class voters without having to follow it up with any substantive moves that would alienate its healthy funding base.

The ruse was given just enough plausibility by Trump’s congenital ignorance of economic substance. His vague, contradictory rhetorical gestures created ambiguity, out of which pundits could discern the hazy outlines of an emerging workers’ party.

By this point, however, it should be abundantly clear that no such party is forthcoming. Trump has had nearly a decade to firm up his brand of economic populism, and he is farther away from anything coherent than he was when he started. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-tariff-is-a-scheme-to-shift-tax-burden-to-non-rich.html
 

Hussein Ibish: For Hamas, Everything Is Going According to Plan

The leaders of both Israel and Hamas seem content for the war in Gaza to grind on into the indefinite future. Such is the upshot of their ambiguous, but essentially negative, responses to President Joe Biden’s peace proposal, which is now fully backed by the United Nations Security Council. And the reasons are obvious.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have concluded that the best way to stay out of prison on corruption charges is to stay in office, and the best way to do that is to keep the war going. Hamas, meanwhile, believes that it is winning. On October 13, I wrote in these pages that Hamas had set a trap for Israel. The trap has sprung; Israel is fully enmeshed in it, with no evident way out, and Hamas is getting exactly what it hoped for.

Biden’s three-phase proposal was meant to end the war and establish an unspecified postconflict reality in Gaza. Phase 1 involves a 42-day cease-fire and the release of hostages held by Hamas and prisoners held by Israel, as well as negotiations for a complete end to the fighting. Phase 2 includes, as its centerpiece, a permanent cessation of hostilities. According to Biden’s plan, if the talks at the end of Phase 1 don’t produce a clear understanding of how to implement Phase 2, negotiations would then continue for as long as both parties abide by their Phase 1 commitments. The trouble is that this would, in effect, indefinitely freeze the war at its current stage.

Netanyahu won’t accept that. On May 31, Biden declared, “It is time for this war to end.” 

Netanyahu effectively replied that this is no time for the war to end, and has insisted that the war will continue until Hamas is destroyed.

By saying that the war must continue until his poorly defined military and political objectives are achieved, while at the same time saying that he is open to the 42-day cease-fire of Phase 1, Netanyahu is signaling that he would like to pocket the release of Israeli hostages and then return to conflict—exactly the scenario Biden seeks to avoid. Hamas, too, might eventually agree to try to implement Phase 1, in order to gain the release of some Palestinian prisoners and regroup its remaining forces for the next round of fighting. But neither has any real interest in the all-important Phase 2.

So why would Hamas possibly want the war to continue, given the devastation of Gaza and its beleaguered Palestinian population, and the decimation of the group’s organized military strength? The answer is that Hamas leaders in Gaza almost certainly believe that the war is going according to plan.

The scale of the destruction can’t be a surprise to Hamas. Provoking the Israelis and luring them into Gaza was in fact Hamas’s intent. Once Israel blundered into reoccupying the Strip’s urban centers, its forces could serve as a lightning rod for a long-term insurgency, which was what Hamas was counting on all along.

The grim reality is that the only people left in the world who seem to want the war to continue into the indefinite future are also the only ones who could stop it: the Hamas leaders and Netanyahu. Biden deserves credit for trying, but he has almost no chance of success. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/06/hamas-everything-going-according-plan/678690/


 

Tom Nichols: Trump World Seems Worried

As the presidential candidates head into their first debate next week, Trump’s people should be happy. Their candidate, of course, is dragging around a sled loaded with politically toxic baggage: 

He’s a convicted felon; he was found liable for sexual abuse; he tried to incite an insurrection; his speeches include gibberish about sharks and a movie cannibal. He multiplies his own troubles at every turn, even undermining surrogates who keep trying to explain away his darker or weirder statements. And yet, against every rule of political physics, Trump is running even or perhaps pulling ahead of a reasonably successful incumbent.
 

But if Trump is doing so well, why is his campaign and its support system in right-wing media resorting to easily disproved lies? Joe Biden’s age has been a brutal factor in keeping his poll numbers low. The president is weaker of voice and stiffer of gait than he was even a few years ago, and more likely now to mangle a word or phrase. The GOP has its pick of examples to use to keep making that case, yet the party resorts to cheap tricks such as deceptive video editing.

Last week, for example, Biden was at the G7 meeting in Italy. The Republican National Committee released a video of him apparently wandering off from a group at a skydiving exhibition, like a confused grandpa looking for the van back to the senior-citizens home. The New York Post dutifully ran with the video. It looked bad—but as presented, it was a lie. Biden was turning to talk to a paratrooper just a few yards to his left.

The RNC video and the Post’s obedient amplification weren’t based on spin or interpretation. Someone had to have looked at that video of Biden in Europe and made the conscious decision to create a lie. Let’s just cut the frame right there so that Biden looks like he wandered off. By the time anyone figures it out, it won’t matter.

The video made the rounds, and maybe that’s all the RNC wanted. A lie, as the saying goes, gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. And, as I often point out, I am a grown-up who has worked with local and national politicians. I am fully aware that politics ain’t beanbag and dirty tricks are part of the game. But if your candidate is doing well, why take the risk? A party that thinks its candidate is in control doesn’t take the chance of pulling the spotlight away from the opponent, which is exactly what happens when campaign operatives get caught in a lie.

In the end, the Trump campaign has chosen the path of deception both because the weaknesses of its candidate demand it and because it’s a more reliable path to better media coverage and to winning over credulous and inattentive voters. Why bother telling the truth if lying works so well? https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/06/trump-world-seems-worried/678717/

 

Russell Berman: The Overlooked (But Real) Possibility of a Big Democratic Win

Democrats have spent the past year talking much more about the prospect of a Donald Trump victory than about their own. The relentless focus on Trump is understandable, but it has obscured a central reality of the 2024 election: Democrats have a real chance to sweep the presidency, House, and Senate. And if they do, their congressional majority would likely be more cohesive and progressive than during President Joe Biden’s first two years in office.

Biden’s deficit in the polls is much smaller than the party’s panic suggests and has narrowed since Trump’s felony convictions. Democrats need to flip only a few seats to recapture the House. Holding the Senate won’t be easy, but thanks to the retirements of a pair of maverick Democrats, even a small majority could open a path to substantial legislative achievements such as the passage of a comprehensive voting-rights bill, a federal guarantee for abortion rights, lower drug prices, and an expanded social safety net.

A wide-ranging group of Democrats—including moderates running in swing districts as well as those in the party’s left wing—wants the president to emphasize the promise of his second term as much as, if not more than, the peril of Trump’s. Because Biden focuses so much on the threat Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law, they think Biden risks losing voters who want to see tangible improvements in their lives.

“In my district, I would urge him to talk about bread-and-butter issues almost exclusively,” Representative Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, a Democrat in a competitive race for reelection, told me. “That’s not to say that preserving our democracy isn’t important, believe me. But it’s hard for people to even think about something as existential as democracy if they’re having trouble buying groceries or paying their rent.”

When Biden does talk about policy instead of democracy, he focuses more on what he did in his first term than what he would do in a second. This is standard practice for incumbent presidents, but voters’ lack of enthusiasm for Biden has convinced many Democrats that his record won’t be enough. Polling suggests they are right; surveys show that many voters—particularly those under 30—are unaware of, or unmoved by, Biden’s investments in infrastructure and decarbonization or his drug-price and gun-control reforms. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/06/biden-campaign-2024-election-senate/678691/
 

Peter Wehner: The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters

Motivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.

Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.

I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of the angels?

Some of them are cynical and know better; others are blind to the cultlike world to which they belong. Still others have convinced themselves that Trump, although flawed, is the best of bad options. It’s a “binary choice,” they say, and so they have talked themselves into supporting arguably the most comprehensively corrupt man in the history of American politics, certainly in presidential politics.

Whichever justification applies, they are giving not just their vote but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead. Many of them are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/when-are-trump-supporters-complicit/678704/