Susan B. Glasser: I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

I’m sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than watch Donald Trump rant for nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His speech was rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing. In his first rally since effectively clinching the Republican Presidential nomination, Trump made what amounted to his response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. It’s hard to imagine a better or more pointed contrast with the vision that, two days earlier, the President had laid out for America.

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/i-listened-to-trumps-rambling-unhinged-vituperative-georgia-rally-and-so-should-you

Zachary Basu: Elon Musk's MAGA alliance


In public and in private, Elon Musk is increasingly treating the prospect of President Biden's re-election as an urgent — even existential — threat to America.

Musk hasn't endorsed former President Trump. But the billionaire X owner has made no secret of his disdain for Biden's policies, leveraging his massive online platform to denigrate Democrats and promote Trump's messaging on the 2024 election's top issues.

Chief among them is immigration. Musk has shared the conspiracy theory that Biden is intentionally "importing" millions of undocumented immigrants to boost Democrats' political power, as well as numerous posts portraying immigrants as security threats."If Dems win President, House & Senate (with enough seats to overcome filibuster), they'll grant citizenship to all illegals & America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state," Musk posted last week.

"There is either a red wave this November or America is doomed," Musk posted this weekend, responding to a video about New York City's migrant crisis. "Imagine four more years of this getting worse."

One thing is certain: Through his anti-Biden crusade — and his shaping of X as a public square for the right — Musk's political influence will be put to the test in 2024. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/19/elon-musk-trump-endorsement-don-lemon

Jonathan Chait: Why Won’t Rich Republicans Loan Money to Upstanding Businessman Donald Trump?

The Republican Party is united in its belief that Donald Trump’s court-ordered financial distress is the product of Democratic Party “lawfare.” Liberal prosecutors and courts have set out to persecute an upstanding businessman, hounding him over minor or nonexistent financial discrepancies. He is being forced to liquidate his extremely solid business to pay trumped-up fines.

The conservative talk-show host Mark Levin has absorbed these complaints and earnestly raises a natural follow-up question: Why aren’t any patriotic conservative businesspeople stepping in to rescue Trump with a loan?

This is a perfectly natural response to the premise that Trump’s totally legitimate business is facing a sudden cash crunch. And yet, none of the Republican billionaires have stepped forward to loan Trump the funds to get him through this short-term crisis.

Let me propose an alternative explanation for the paradox Levin is observing: Wealthy Republicans are hesitant to extend large loans to Trump because he is, in fact, a crook. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-fines-broke-court-fraud-rich-republicans-loan.html

Tom Nichols: Trump Crosses a Crucial Line

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/11/trump-crosses-a-crucial-line/676031/

Greg Sargent: Trump’s plan for giant detention camps points to a brutal 2024 reality

Donald Trump’s advisers have declared that if he regains the presidency, he will launch an extraordinarily cruel crackdown on immigration. Given that Trump lost reelection in 2020 after attempting a far tamer agenda, advertising such plans might seem like foolish political malpractice.

But the politics of immigration can be peculiar. The public tends to turn on the president in power when the situation on the border goes wrong, leading voters to seek a diametrically different approach — no matter what policies the incumbent has adopted or what their opponent proposes.

Few voters are familiar with the finer points of asylum policy. Nor do most harbor strong ideological opposition to immigration; large majorities have generally regarded legal immigration as a good thing through both presidencies.

Instead, all indications suggest that voters think the border should be managed and don’t understand why that’s not happening. Under both presidents, imagery of disorder and migrant suffering filled the media, creating the powerful impression that the executive was failing to handle the situation. Naturally, in both cases, majorities disapproved of that handling of it.

Ideologues such as Trump and Miller might truly believe the resulting disapproval of Biden means the public will fully embrace their radical vision. It’s telling that Trump, who recently declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” is trumpeting designs with clear White-nationalist implications, such as a revived ban on Muslims and a vision of detention and deportations that appears designed to showcase maximum cruelty for base-thrilling kicks.

Yet the depravities of Trump’s first effort at mass deportations generated intense backlash, and his first attempt at a Muslim ban inspired furious outcry precisely because it offended many Americans’ vision of inclusive national identity. While the mere promise of a better-managed border would be a formidable argument against Biden, Trump and Miller seem determined to telegraph unbridled nativist savagery, which could well constitute political overreach in 2024.

Alternatively, voters could see the 2024 immigration debate as merely a referendum on Biden, while largely forgetting the horrors that Trump’s agenda visited on the country last time and tuning out his threats of more to come. Given what we know about public opinion, that unbearably perverse possibility is very real. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/trump-mass-deportation-immigration-stephen-miller/

Greg Sargent: Elon Musk’s silly lawsuit offers a glimpse into the Musk-MAGA alliance

Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.

Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.

Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.

Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/22/elon-musk-lawsuit-media-matters-republicans/

Thomas L. Friedman: Netanyahu Is Making Israel Radioactive

Israel today is in grave danger. With enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, Israel should be enjoying the sympathy of much of the world. But it is not. Because of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition have been conducting the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, Israel is becoming radioactive and diaspora Jewish communities everywhere increasingly insecure.

I fear it is about to get worse.

No fair-minded person could deny Israel the right of self-defense after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis in one day. Women were sexually abused, and children were killed in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. Scores of abducted Israeli men, women, children and elderly people are still being held hostage in terrible conditions, now for more than 150 days.

But no fair-minded person can look at the Israeli campaign to destroy Hamas that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, about a third of them fighters, and not conclude that something has gone terribly wrong there. The dead include thousands of children, and the survivors many orphans. So much of Gaza is now a wasteland of death and destruction, hunger and ruined homes. Urban warfare brings out the absolute worst in people, and that is certainly true for Israel in Gaza. This is a stain on the Jewish state. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/opinion/israel-hamas-war-netanyahu.html

Anjali Huynh and Michael Gold: Trump Says Some Migrants Are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if He Loses

Donald Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.

With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.

The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.

If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”

He asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”

Border officials, including some who worked in the Trump administration, have said that most migrants who cross the border are members of vulnerable families fleeing violence and poverty, and available data does not support the idea that migrants are spurring increases in crime. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/16/us/politics/trump-speech-ohio.html

Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers: How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation

In the wake of the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, a groundswell built in Washington to rein in the onslaught of lies that had fueled the assault on the peaceful transfer of power.

Social media companies suspended Donald J. Trump, then the president, and many of his allies from the platforms they had used to spread misinformation about his defeat and whip up the attempt to overturn it. The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress and even some Republicans sought to do more to hold the companies accountable. Academic researchers wrestled with how to strengthen efforts to monitor false posts.

Mr. Trump and his allies embarked instead on a counteroffensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives.

While little noticed by most Americans, the effort has helped cut a path for Mr. Trump’s attempt to recapture the presidency. Disinformation about elections is once again coursing through news feeds, aiding Mr. Trump as he fuels his comeback with falsehoods about the 2020 election.

“The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed, and it must happen immediately,” he thundered at the start of his 2024 campaign.

The counteroffensive was led by former Trump aides and allies who had also pushed to overturn the 2020 election. They include Stephen Miller, the White House policy adviser; the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans; and lawmakers in Congress like Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who since last year has led a House subcommittee to investigate what it calls “the weaponization of government.”

Those involved draw financial support from conservative donors who have backed groups that promoted lies about voting in 2020. They have worked alongside an eclectic cast of characters, including Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter and vowed to make it a bastion of free speech, and Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who previously produced content for a social media account that trafficked in posts about “white ethnic displacement.” (More recently, Mr. Benz originated the false assertion that Taylor Swift was a “psychological operation” asset for the Pentagon.) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/trump-disinformation-2024-social-media.html

Will Bunch: Trump 47 Won’t Be Like Trump 45

The truth is that whatever you think about the 45th presidency — whether you remember 2017-21 as when lunch at Five Guys wasn’t $24 or whether you recall the Muslim ban or families ripped apart at the border — doesn’t really matter much. That’s because a Trump 47 presidency would look nothing like the first one, and nothing like anything most Americans have even seen before, unless they’ve been hanging out in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

The reality of an American dictatorship is not some kind of MSNBC-watching Trump Resistance dystopian alarmist fantasy. Instead, we know Trump’s third run for the White House centers on plans to rule as an autocratic ‘Red Caesar’ because he has told this to voters in rallies and interviews, again and again. What’s more, the specific blueprint is hardly secret, but spelled out explicitly by the candidate’s advisers in reams upon reams of publicly available documents — especially the nearly 1,000-page Project 2025 plan drafted by the Heritage Foundation and other far-right think tanks. https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/trump-47-second-term-dangers-authoritarianism-20240314.html
 

G. Elliot Morris: Trump is leading the polls, but there's plenty of time for Biden to catch up

So far, the Biden campaign’s strategy has been to publicly dismiss the polls rather than confront their bad numbers head-on. For instance, at the opening ceremony of a campaign field office in Manchester, New Hampshire, Biden disparaged polls as inaccurate and stuck using old-fashioned technology.

Biden is wrong about that. Despite the challenges facing the industry, polls remain as accurate as ever. But that doesn’t mean that polls taken eight months before Election Day are reliable predictors of the final outcome. My analysis of polling from past elections reveals that there is plenty of precedent for a candidate like Biden to gain enough ground to win the election. Moreover, I find there is more uncertainty in the polls now than in previous cycles, further casting doubt on the early gloomy prognostication about Biden’s odds. https://abcnews.go.com/538/trump-leading-polls-plenty-time-biden-catch/story

Eugene Robinson: Harris’s dogged fight for abortion rights should scare Republicans

No sitting president or vice president had ever visited an abortion clinic before Vice President Harris did so on Thursday. That fact says pretty much everything you need to know about how Donald Trump’s ideological stacking of the Supreme Court has shifted the politics of abortion. Democrats are leaning in, while Republicans bicker and fret.

The Biden-Harris reelection campaign sees reproductive rights as one of its most powerful issues heading into the fall. Trump reportedly understands that he is vulnerable on abortion, and he is already trying to have it both ways — boasting to the Republican base about overturning Roe v. Wade, while dissembling before wider audiences. The task for President Biden and Harris will be to make Trump and his party own the consequences of taking away women’s freedom to control their own bodies.

Politically, this should be a layup for Democrats. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling nullifying abortion rights, voters across the country — even in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio — have approved ballot measures to restore those rights to the extent possible.

Meanwhile, however, Republican officials are rushing to fill the vacuum created by the demise of Roe with ever-more-draconian restrictions on reproductive rights — six-week bans on abortion as legislated (but not yet imposed) in Florida, for example, or even total bans as now in effect in South Dakota. The most extreme example, so far, is the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent ruling that threw into question the future of in vitro fertilization, which state legislators have scrambled to try to reverse.

Horror stories are legion about women whose lives have been threatened or whose health has been damaged by the denial of abortion care. Women who have been emotionally tortured by laws forcing them to carry unviable fetuses to term. Women forced to travel hundreds of miles to obtain abortions in states where the procedure is still legal.

Some GOP strategists, including former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, have urged Republicans to stop pushing extremist policies and instead propose a “compromise” 16-week national abortion ban. Trump has flirted with taking that stance, though he hasn’t fully settled on it.

But a recent KFF poll found that 58 percent of adults surveyed said they would oppose such a federal law. One wonders what it is about the concept of bodily autonomy that Republicans don’t understand. It turns out that what Americans want — or want to reclaim — is the legal framework we had for nearly 50 years, before Trump’s three far-right appointees tipped the balance on the Supreme Court; women should have the fundamental right to choose, and abridgment of that right can only go so far. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/14/kamala-harris-abortion-campaign-2024/

Jonathan Last: What If Americans *Can't* Understand the Trump Crazy?

I watched Donald Trump’s nearly two-hour campaign speech in Georgia over the weekend and concluded: When insanity becomes the norm, it ceases to be insane.

As a practical matter, it is impossible for a society to spend a decade listening to an unwell man say crazy, disassociated, garbled words for hours at a time, almost daily, and maintain the position that he is unhinged. At some point, society decides that the man they once regarded as unhinged, simply is.

It’s like sitting in a room that stinks of sulfur. At first the smell is intolerable; but after a while you can’t even notice it if you try. This is more than human nature: It’s how our brains are wired to adapt to environmental conditions.

That’s one of my big worries about the next eight months: That it will be biologically and psychologically impossible for a crucial percentage of voters to perceive what the Republican candidate for president actually is. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/what-if-americans-cant-understand

Jennifer Rubin: Democrats should recognize their very real advantages

Democrats — freaked out by premature polls, despondent over delays in former president Donald Trump’s trials and still suffering from flashbacks of the 2016 election — are prone to forget the considerable advantages their own side has over his MAGA cult following. To say polls show President Biden would lose if the election were held today, is silly. The election isn’t today, and its outcome will largely depend on what happens between now and then.

The election is no more predetermined eight months before Election Day than a Super Bowl winner is decided before the start of the regular season. Considering how much a single speech, such as the State of the Union, or a criminal conviction in one of Trump’s four criminal indictments might change perceptions, no one should underestimate the array of factors that will affect the direction of the race.

We are all too familiar with Trump’s iron lock on his cult following and the media’s obsession with normalizing him. Shamelessness, some would say, is a superpower. But Biden has real advantages (in addition to sanity, a good governing record and experience) that Democrats should not take for granted. Since the State of the Union, several of these lesser-known advantages have become more evident.

Biden’s advantages don’t guarantee he will win any more than polls this far out (and often within the margin of error) ensure Trump will win. But Biden’s true advantages make it more likely he will reach, inspire and persuade more voters than Trump. That, after all, is what campaigns are all about. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/15/democrats-advantages-biden/

Dan Pfeiffer: How to Make Trump Pay for Embracing Jan 6th

At a rally in Ohio on Saturday night, Trump once again demonstrated the unequivocal danger of his candidacy for the White House. At one point, Trump said:

"Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it."

The man who tried to violently overturn the election promising a “bloodbath” if he loses sparked alarm across the political spectrum. Trump supporters argued that the former President was speaking specifically about the auto industry. Some pundits chastised Democrats — including the Biden campaign — for taking Trump out of context.

This is overly pedantic idiocy.

Following the logic of any Trump speech is nearly impossible. The comment came during a section about Chinese competition in car manufacturing, so maybe he was taken out of context.

But that’s so far beyond the point. Much like his legal strategy, Trump is trying to get off on a technicality. The bloodbath comment is not new nor is it out of character. If you are arguing that Trump didn’t really mean bloodbath, you lost the forest for the trees a long time ago. He has threatened violence if he gets convicted or loses the election. Just a few weeks ago, Trump warned there would be a “civil war” in the U.S. if he lost. https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/how-to-make-trump-pay-for-embracing
 

Brian Beutler: Trump Isn’t Running a Presidential Campaign

Every now and again it’s fun to hold the unfiltered public comments of normal politicians up against the Donald Trump’s ravings on social media.

If you try that this week, you’ll find Trump completely unmoored from the calendar or any national circumstance. No good tidings for St. Patrick’s Day, no particular interest in federal policy. Trump’s mind has been neatly divided between his hallmark agitprop and unrelenting obsession with evading the nearly half-billion fine he owes the state of New York for serial business fraud.

When you pan out even further it becomes clear: Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign. He might become president in spite of this, but his efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril. https://www.offmessage.net/p/donald-trump-isnt-running-presidential-campaign