David Frum: The Ruin That a Trump Presidency Would Mean

In 2016, Republicans could profess some uncertainty about the kind of president Donald Trump would be. Maybe the office would change the man? Maybe the party elite could bend Trump to its will?

But in 2024, there’s no uncertainty. Trump’s party is signing up for the ride, knowing exactly what the ride is. Pro-Ukraine senators are working to elect a president who will cut off Ukraine, knowing that he will cut off Ukraine. Pro-NATO senators are working to elect a president who will wreck NATO, knowing that he will wreck NATO.

Many top Republicans have been hoping for a way out of their Trump dilemma. That’s why Nikki Haley has raised tens of millions of dollars and Ron DeSantis has raised hundreds of millions. It’s why, even now, more than half of the Republican senators have not endorsed a primary candidate. And that’s why so many conservatives get twitchy when told that the 2024 presidential race is already a binary choice between Trump and Joe Biden. It’s also why the lopsided nomination contest will continue its fictional progress for some while longer.

But the exits are blocked. The many criminal and civil legal processes against Trump were too slow to rescue his party from him. The thesis that Trump might be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment awaits a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Republican contest will be over within weeks.

That heralds potential disaster for American allies, for the United States’ standing in the world, and above all for the invaded democracy of Ukraine. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/donald-trump-republican-nomination-ukraine/677144/
 

Matt Flegenheimer and Maggie Haberman: After Iowa, Trump Is Back to Command the National Psyche. He Never Actually Left.

There was a time, not so long ago, when those wearied and horrified by the presidency of Donald J. Trump could almost convince themselves that the man was gone.

He was ostensibly a movement leader in exile, simmering in Florida, his flailing election lies confined to private monologues and modest platforms. He was no longer appearing on Fox News, the most powerful media organ of the right. His screeds on Truth Social did not land with the force of their tweeted predecessors. Even as a declared presidential candidate for the past 14 months, Mr. Trump often ceded the campaign trail to his rivals (who mostly fought one another, instead of him), skipping debates and appearing only episodically at public engagements that were not matters of the courts. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/us/politics/trump-iowa-election-campaign.html

But with his landslide victory in Iowa, codifying his double-fisted hold on wide swaths of the Republican electorate, two conclusions were inescapable by Tuesday morning.

Mr. Trump is back as the dominant figure in American political life — destined again to be ubiquitous, his entwined legal and electoral dramas set to shadow the nation’s consequential year. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/us/politics/trump-iowa-election-campaign.html

Joe Klein: Iowaste

Iowa always seemed a classic, American place to me. I visited towns with names like Mason City and Ames and Council Bluffs and Cedar Rapids, counties with names like Linn and Story and Polk. Politics was serious business, and Iowans were stubborn about their right to question candidates, change their minds, and change their minds again. There was very little rancor. Questions were asked with respect. Rationality—sanity—was the rule. The public schools were famously good. Literacy was high. Iowa may not have reflected the diversity of America, but it was a place you could trust, even if the candidates they chose never quite made it all the way to the nomination.

That ended last night. Something very terrible has happened in Iowa. Reality doesn’t live there anymore, at least among Republicans, who have come to dominate the state. (Iowa was purple when I started visiting, with liberal populists like Tom Harkin to match every stolid conservative like Chuck Grassley). Iowa has gone nuts. How else can you explain the 62% of caucus goers last night who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to the entrance polls; how else could a similar number say they would vote for Trump even if he were convicted of a crime? https://josephklein.substack.com/p/iowaste

Rick Hasen: The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs

The history of voting in the United States shows the high cost of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.

Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides that when it comes to election of the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”

As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/opinion/voting-rights-constitution-28th-amendment.html

Mona Charen: Iowa’s Silver Lining

NO QUESTION THAT A 30-POINT VICTORY for Trump was not the ideal outcome of the Iowa caucuses. Voters have only two opportunities to prevent the return to power of a Putin-besotted, antisemite-praising, Constitution-terminating, multiple felony indictee—the primaries and the general.

It would have been better if Trump had been rebuked early and hard by Republican voters. But that was not to be. Once the first indictment was handed down in New York in the hush money for porn star case, the die was cast. The party faithful—partly because the Bragg indictment was legally shaky and pretty easily dismissed as politically motivated—rallied round their prosecuted, persecuted hero. I said partly because it wasn’t just that the indictment was a stretch, it was also that MAGA Republicans so dearly want the accusations to be false. To admit otherwise opens the door to considering that he may really have obstructed justice and blithely endangered national security in the classified documents case, lied about and attempted to steal an election, and looked on with depraved satisfaction as his minions searched for Mike Pence—to commit murder. (Even now, despite everything we’ve witnessed, I still cannot believe I must write those words.)

We’ll never know if things would have been different absent the Bragg indictment. Would the rally-round-the-mob-boss effect have been as pronounced if the classified documents in the bathroom case had gone first? Or if Ron De Santis hadn’t proved such a doofus candidate? Or if all of the GOP candidates in the race had run as Christie did? We cannot know. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/iowas-silver-lining-caucus-2024

Nahal Toosi: Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy

As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy. But, in a series of conversations with a dozen current and former diplomats, I sensed that to many of our friends abroad, the U.S. is already failing that test. The diplomats are aghast that so many U.S. leaders let their zeal for partisan politics prevent the basic functions of government.

Said one diplomat: “I don’t know if in the coming years people will be looking at the United States as a model for democracy.” https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/15/what-foreign-diplomats-say-about-u-s-politics-behind-closed-doors-00135326
 

John Avlon: Listen to what Trump’s own officials have to say about him

This is a time for choosing, as Ronald Reagan famously said, and the stakes have never been higher. In the nearly 250-year history of the United States, we’ve never had a major political party at high risk of choosing a nominee like this, someone who routinely praises foreign dictators and is running on a frankly authoritarian platform.

It’s not just Democrats and independents who are sounding the alarm. A truly stunning number of former Cabinet-level Trump administration officials are trying to warn Republican primary voters that their old boss’s reelection would be a disaster for our country.

Take them seriously as well as literally. There is no precedent for two dozen former White House officials coming out so strongly against the fundamental fitness of the man they served with on a day-to-day basis. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/opinions/donald-trump-iowa-elections-2024-avlon/index.html

Maureen Dowd: Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman

With a snow day here, I had time to contemplate the real mystery of Iowa: What has happened to America?

In January 2008, the Democratic caucuses offered a thrilling contest. In overwhelmingly white Iowa, Barack Obama showed that Americans could propel a Black candidate into the Oval Office. Race was, remarkably, not a big factor in the contest.

It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America.

How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?

Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened and they want to turn back the clock. Trump has played on that resentment, trying to drag us into the past, curtailing women’s rights, inflaming voters to “take back America” and, as he said on Jan. 6, exhorting his base to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley “Birdbrain.” Trump is 77, yet he sees himself as a spring chicken. On Thursday, he put out a video on Truth Social mocking the “White House senior living” center, featuring pictures of the 81-year-old Biden looking helpless and out of it.

Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity.

That it’s happening in a blizzard is fitting. Trump’s whole life has been a snow job. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/opinion/trump-primary-iowa-republicans.html
 

Joe Klein: The Orange Jesus Thing

Okay, this thing is getting pretty weird now. If you haven’t seen the ‘God Made Trump’ ad…you absolutely must. I thought it was a joke at first—a parody ad you might see on Saturday Night Live. But it’s not. Trump’s campaign is responsible for this satanic heresy. It represents a new level of craziness—the Orange Jesus thing made manifest. Trump is embracing his inner messiah.

And it represents a certain reality in the Republican Party: I watched a clip of a Trump voter in Iowa the other day, a woman, who said—calmly, with the utter conviction of a mind-snatched cultist—that the legal cases against Big Orange were a sign from God that Trump had been sent to suffer for our sins. We have entered the Elmer Gantry stage of the Trump candidacy. It’s getting to be overtly religious.

And Trump himself seems to think he can walk on water. He can say any outrageous thing—that he hopes, for example, the economy will crash in the next year—without consequence. This week he had his lawyers affirm in Washington’s District Court of Appeals, that as President he could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political opponent and not be prosecuted for it unless he was tried and impeached by the Congress. https://josephklein.substack.com/p/the-orange-jesus-thing
   

Paul Rosenzweig: Trump’s Lawyers Argue Biden Can Assassinate Him

One could go on and on with the absurd lengths of the hypothetical, but why bother? To state the logical consequence is to refute the illogical premise. Trump wants to be a king, immune from and above the law. But if he is immune, so is Biden.

“I would never actually advocate that Biden take advantage of such a ruling and send in the Delta Force. If only because I don’t want to wake up to the Secret Service knocking at my door.”

But what is the law coming to when a former president can seriously argue for his plenary right to kill his opponents and yet still be considered a leading contender for election? The mind boggles and the rule of law shudders on its weakened foundations. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/trump-lawyers-argue-biden-can-assassinate-him

David French: The Greatest Threat Posed by Trump

I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/donald-trump-culture-decline.html
 

Jackie Calmes: When immigrants are demonized, the U.S. betrays its ideals — and economic reality

The Republican Party was already turning against migration when Donald Trump opened his 2016 presidential campaign by tarring arrivals from Mexico as murderers and rapists. Then as now, he was playing to the base. Eight years later, as the Republicans’ likely 2024 nominee, the former president echoes Nazi-era rhetoric in claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

So much for the melting pot.

Trump promises, if reelected, to mount an unprecedented deportation of millions of undocumented residents, many of whom have been here for years and are raising children who are U.S. citizens, and to build sprawling detention camps for those newly nabbed at the borders.

To see how grossly changed the Republican Party is on this score, here’s Reagan in his farewell address: “Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas. … If we ever close the door to new arrivals, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

And here’s Trump earlier this week: “They’re coming in from prisons all over the world. … Some of these people make our prisoners look like very nice people.”

Never mind that Trump’s first and third wives, the mothers of four of his five children, were immigrants. He’s leading his willing party in trying to destroy what’s been an American superpower.

There’s hope in the fact that, as just about any business owners can attest, the nation needs immigrants so badly. Eventually, perhaps Republicans will relent, if only out of self-interest. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-12/immigration-southern-border-donald-trump-joe-biden-ukraine-israel-aid

Caleb Ecarma: Florida’s Book-Banning Crusade Has Found Its Next Target: Dictionaries

The Florida education system has undergone more than two years of belligerent and reactionary upheaval at the hands of Ron DeSantis. The state’s Republican governor, straining to build a popular movement around his conspicuously unpopular presidential campaign, waged this war on educators under the guise of rooting out the “woke” excesses supposedly plaguing public classrooms. But the consequences of DeSantis’s policies are proving as absurd as they are inconvenient for an already beleaguered education force.

Of particular note: A school district in the Florida panhandle recently took dictionaries off the shelves of its school libraries to adhere to a DeSantis law designed to police descriptions of “sexual conduct,” according to the news site Popular Information. Observing the same law, a school district in central Florida has removed 673 books from its classrooms, including Paradise Lost, East of Eden, and other standard fixtures of high school literature classes, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

These inane developments are the outgrowth of a fantastical and bigoted worldview: DeSantis and his ideological allies insist that hordes of teachers and administrators are secretly conspiring to scramble the minds of students, turning them gay, transgender, or nonbinary. To combat this supposed plot, DeSantis has signed a number of laws and regulations demanding schools receive parental consent for a multitude of things. The vague wording used in the laws—along with career-threatening penalties for those who violate them—has led to educators to seek permission from parents before administering even the most basic services, like vision and hearing tests, according to a new report from The New York Times. But often, parents are not readily available. “Nurses are spending most of their time trying to obtain permission,” Florida Association of School Nurses director Lisa Kern told the Times, noting that the upshot of these new bureaucratic hurdles is a decline in the well-being of students. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/florida-book-banning-crusade-next-target-dictionaries

Jennifer Rubin The media’s worst lapse: Refusing to identify Trump as a cult leader

Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and how MAGA members cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.

“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/12/media-trump-cult/

Dana Milbank: GOP’s New Year’s resolution: Less legislating, more Hunter Biden porn

After a year of fratricide and failure, the House Republican majority took four weeks off for the holidays to cool their tempers, gather their wits, regroup and come up with a better plan for the second session of the 118th Congress. Yet within 24 hours of their return to Washington this week, they had already collapsed into their all-too-familiar dysfunction.

The only work that seems to motivate House Republicans at the moment is impeachment — of any and all. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) announced on Monday that he was introducing articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for failing to disclose his hospitalization. Also Monday, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told Newsmax that the House might move to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland. On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee held an impeachment hearing into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Above all is the attempt to impeach President Biden for his son’s business dealings — and Comer’s Oversight Committee took crucial steps in that direction this week. On Tuesday, the panel, in its still elusive search for an impeachable offense (or any offense) by the president, held a closed-door interview of Georges Bergès, the gallery owner who sells the younger Biden’s artwork. Like the other witnesses, Bergès had no evidence of wrongdoing by the president, and, as ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin (Md.) pointed out, “It’s not illegal to buy and sell abstract art in America.”

Then came Wednesday’s session setting up a House vote to declare Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear before Congress — even though the president’s son was literally appearing before Congress at that very moment. Hunter Biden has said he’s happy to testify in a public hearing, but Republicans are insisting he submit to a closed-door deposition, from which they can selectively leak.

“Who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today?” asked Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), one of the first to speak. “You are the epitome of White privilege,” added Mace, who is White and privileged, “coming in to the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here and —”

Thus began about eight hours of chaos.

It looks as though the second year of this House Republican majority is going to be just as ugly as the first. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/12/hunter-biden-hearing-republican-chaos/

Binyamin Appelbaum: The Seeds Joe Biden Has Planted

There is a famous story by the French writer Jean Giono about a man who plants trees in a barren valley. “For three years he had been planting trees in this wilderness. He had planted 100,000. Of the 100,000, 20,000 had sprouted. Of the 20,000 he still expected to lose about half, to rodents or to the unpredictable designs of Providence. There remained 10,000 oak trees to grow where nothing had grown before.”

President Biden has planted a lot of trees during his first three years in office, pushing through Congress bills that direct the investment of billions of dollars into infrastructure, research and subsidies for domestic manufacturing.

As he begins to ask voters for a second term, Mr. Biden can make a strong case for his stewardship of the American economy. His determination to treat the economic effects of the Covid pandemic with large infusions of federal aid eased the pain of the crisis and propelled a rapid recovery, notwithstanding a painful spike in inflation that has left a sour taste in the mouths of voters. His administration also has made creative use of its regulatory authorities to shift power to workers and consumers from corporations.

But it is Mr. Biden’s reinvigoration of the government’s role as the nation’s most important investor that may endure as a turning point in the nation’s political and economic history. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/opinion/biden-economy-investment.html