War is on the rise everywhere. When the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published its authoritative Armed Conflict Survey in early December, it counted 183 conflicts globally in 2023 — higher than had been recorded in 30 years. The most remarkable episode of this harrowing new era of global violence is an astounding spate of military takeovers in what has come to be known as the coup belt, stretching uninterrupted across Africa’s Sahel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea: six countries enduring 11 coup attempts, eight of them successful, since just 2020.
When Steven Pinker’s sweeping history of violence, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” was published a little more than a decade ago, it quickly became a touchstone for a cohort of geopolitical optimists making broad claims of human progress. The book’s core empirical claim was about death: that global rates of murder and war had been declining both notably and steadily for a very long time and that the world was now far more peaceable than it had ever been.
On the time scale of human civilization, this might still be true, particularly when it comes to interpersonal violence. But on the time scale of human memory, it isn’t true any longer, particularly when it comes to warfare. Counting by the number of conflicts, the world as a whole is a more violent place than it has been for at least 30 years. By some measures, it’s more conflict ridden than at any point since the end of World War II. Nonstate violence — conflict between nongovernmental armed groups, such as gangs — has more than tripled, according to Sweden’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, since a low point in 2007. Violence by state forces against civilians has more than doubled since 2009, and assassination attempts are on the rise.
These conflicts are also producing much more bloodshed. In 2011, when Pinker published “Better Angels,” there were nearly 40,000 deaths from warfare worldwide, Uppsala estimates. In 2022, they say, the number was above 238,000 — a nearly sixfold increase and almost double that of 2021. It had nearly doubled in a single year.
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As in many unstable parts of the world, climate change may not be directly causing political disruptions, but it is pressuring already fragile systems. “The patient, as it were, is suffering from lots of different kinds of ailments,” the political scientist Kenneth Schultz told me. “But this is another one.” Last August, Roland Ngam, of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, wrote in South Africa’s Daily Maverick that “behind all the coups” are “weak institutions and especially climate change which has caused a massive ecosystem collapse over the last century.” And in November Abdoulie Ceesay, the deputy majority leader of the Gambian National Assembly, wrote in The New Internationalist: “The simple fact is that the rise of militarism has gone hand in hand with the rise in poverty, food insecurity, economic crises and extreme weather. His conclusion: “To belittle the role of climate change in these crises seems to me obscene.” source
Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.
Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power.
The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan.
The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.
The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.
The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”
Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.
Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races.
But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it.
Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago.
But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.
It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again.
The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.
Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.
In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.
Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.
As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.
Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”
After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all.
The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.”
That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government.
But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt.
“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.”
Back in 2016, just 6 percent of Black voters backed Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, per data from the Pew Research Center. That number rose, albeit slightly, to 8 percent in 2020.
But a Gallup survey from earlier this month revealed that 19 percent of Black adults identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.
Trump, ever the opportunist, has sought to use that data to his advantage — in spite of his long-standing background of racist actions and comments. Might the Republican frontrunner, who once declared himself “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” become convinced that a Black running mate will give him an electoral edge over President Joe Biden?
During a town hall-style forum in South Carolina last week, Trump acknowledged the possibility. And not only is Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) — the nation’s only Black Republican senator — on his vice presidential shortlist, but so, too, is Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL).
Donalds, a Black lawmaker who has represented the Sunshine State’s 19th Congressional District since January 2021, is not yet a household name nationally. But the 45-year-old has risen quickly in the Republican Party, a fact evidenced by his spot on Trump’s shortlist.
Which begs the question: How did Donalds get to this point, and does he have a legitimate chance at being Trump’s running mate?
When asked about being on Trump’s shortlist, Donalds deflected.
“Man, it’s cool. It’s kinda surreal,” he told Spectrum News on Thursday, after his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md. “But, you know what, you just work hard, do your job, don’t worry about much else.”
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) attends the Florida Freedom Summit at the Gaylord Palms Resort on Nov. 4, 2023, in Kissimmee, Fla. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Donalds’ press team did not reply to a request for comment.
Modesty aside, Donalds has been angling to be in Trump’s corner for some time now.
An unsuccessful Tea Party candidate in the 2012 election to represent the 19th District in the House of Representatives, he later was elected to the Florida House in 2016.
During his 2020 House campaign, Donalds was unequivocal about his political identity, deeming himself a “Trump-supporting, liberty-loving, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment Black man.”
Since taking office, his legislative focus has been more granular. A member of the Financial Services and Oversight and Accountability committees, Donalds has sponsored bills to promote the use of nuclear energy and expand the oversight authority of the Small Business Administration.
He also launched a short-lived candidacy for speaker of the House last year. Prior to current Speaker Mike Johnson capturing the gavel, Donalds received 119 votes across four separate ballots.
Donalds has also wasted no time displaying his fealty to the 45th president. After being sworn in on Jan. 3, 2021, the then-42-year-old voted to object to the certification of electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania, two swing states won by Biden, just three days later — after Congress reconvened in the wake of the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol.
Once the 2024 race ramped up, he displayed that loyalty to Trump once again.
In April, Donalds endorsed Trump for the Republican nomination, saying, “There is only one leader at this time in our nation’s history who can seize this moment and deliver what we need to get us back on track, provide strength and resolve.”
The endorsement came despite Donalds’ longtime allyship with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was yet to officially announce his presidential campaign. DeSantis entered the race in May, but initially high hopes for the Floridian gave way to a campaign marred by public missteps, internal friction and an inability to effectively spar with the always aggressive Trump.
In August, Donalds piled on, telling The Washington Post amid DeSantis’ summer swoon that “it’s kind of what I expected to see.”
DeSantis suspended his campaign prior to January’s New Hampshire primary and endorsed Trump.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is the lone challenger left in the race. Trump easily defeated her in Michigan’s primary this week, and Super Tuesday is just over a week away — Trump is all but assured of defeating Haley in each of the 15 states and one territory in play that day.
Trump remains the frontrunner over Haley despite numerous legal woes — the former president faces 91 felony charges across four criminal cases pending within courtrooms in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C. Trump has also been found liable for sexual assault, defamation and fraud across separate civil cases.
Donalds, though, has stood by Trump. On Sunday, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Donalds said that the Trump criminal cases are a form of “political persecution from the Department of Justice and from radical DAs throughout our country.”
Former U.S. President Donald Trump visits the Iowa Pork Producers Tent with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 12, 2023 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
He even defended the former president drawing parallels between the indictments and how African Americans have been treated by the justice system, saying that he wasn’t offended by it.
“I got indicted a second time and a third time and a fourth time, and a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against,” Trump said on Friday, during the Black Conservative Federation gala in Columbia, S.C.
“What Americans don't want to see, especially Black Americans and anybody else, they don't want to see a politicized Justice Department,” Donalds said on Meet the Press. “They don't want to see a two-tier system of justice. They want justice to be followed.
“They want Lady Justice to be blind. That's what the American people want. That's what Black voters want. That's what everybody wants.”
Donalds’ reward, for now, is a spot on Trump’s vice presidential shortlist.
But does Donalds have a legitimate chance at being tabbed for the role?
According to a straw poll taken at CPAC last week, Donalds wasn’t attendees’ first (or second, or third, or fourth) choice.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy were the top two choices (both with 15 percent of the vote), followed by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii with 9 percent, and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Scott, each with 8 percent.
Then, it’s Donalds at 7 percent. He may not be the frontrunner — gambling site Oddschecker doesn’t even offer odds on him — but Trump’s mere mentioning of his name makes Donalds a factor.
One thing is certain: If Donalds is asked, he’ll accept the position.
He said so at CPAC, reiterating what he said on SiriusXM in November.
“I want to do everything to help win back the White House,” Donalds told The New York Post at CPAC last week.
That goal could include a spot as Trump’s running mate — the first Black American ever on a Republican presidential ticket.
“There is NOTHING you care about that survives a 6-3 Republican court for a generation. Nothing.
I don’t know how many times the court has to prove that to people before liberals unify and act.”
- Elie Mystal today on Twitter
It appears that even the members of the highest court of the land are willing to be chumps for Trump.
“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.”
Quote:It appears that even the members of the highest court of the land are willing to be chumps for Trump.
Aren't there two different things going on, though? Part of Snood's contention was that prosecutors and the AG are afraid to prosecute Trump, despite the fact that the ongoing Smith investigations are pretty vigorous and he's already been found guilty and fined in two civil cases. But I don't think the conservatives in the Supreme Court – or Judge Cannon – are acting out of fear. Their behavior seems much more like the process is being purposely stalled – out of favor.
Quote:“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.”
What is now absolutely clear is that no institution of American governance is coming to save the day. The only hope is maximal action directed towards citizen passion and voter turnout from now until November - nine months. Everyone has to get involved and to work harder than they've probably ever done before.
The fact that Trump's party controls the Supreme Court (which is no accident) makes it very difficult to see how anything short of anti-MAGA landslide can preserve this experiment in democracy.
I never thought I’d be grateful to the Alabama Supreme Court for anything, but now I am. With its decision deeming frozen embryos to be children under state law, that all-Republican court has done the impossible. It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling.
"I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again," Obama said.
That's the underlying assumption to my post.
...1.6 billion dollars from a single donor...
