Donald Trump has made antipathy to China a cornerstone of his campaign to return to the White House next year, but according to a new book, he allowed another obsession, over women and sex, to derail a White House meeting with a senior US tech executive meant to address Chinese threats to US telecoms networks.
“You don’t say no to the president,” Randall Stephenson, then chief executive of AT&T, tells the New York Times reporter David Sanger about a summons to the Oval Office in 2019.
[...]
“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes in his book, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.
“It was all about women and private planes, he claimed. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels, the former porn star who claimed she had had an affair with him. It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’, Stephenson later recalled … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure.’”
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The Christian Nationalist Hydra: In Era of Trump, Christian Nationalism Has Many Faces
From traditional Christian-right figures to secret societies envisioning a ‘national divorce,’ a growing contingent of radical activists is planning for Christian supremacy.
By Sarah Posner (Many internal links at source)
I am a journalist who has covered the Christian right for two decades. Over the past three years, I began to more frequently use the term “Christian nationalism” to describe the movement I cover. But I did not start using a new term to suggest its proponents’ ideology had changed. Instead, the term had come into more common usage in the Trump era, now regularly used by academics, journalists, and pro-democracy activists to describe a movement that insists America is a “Christian nation” — that is, an illiberal, nominally democratic theocracy, rather than a pluralistic secular democracy.
To me, the phrase was highly descriptive of the movement I’ve dedicated my career to covering, and neatly encapsulates the core threat the Christian right poses to freedom and equality. From its top leaders and influencers down to the grassroots — politically mobilized white evangelicals, the foot soldiers of the Christian right — its proponents believe that God divinely ordained America to be a Christian nation; that this Christian nation has come under attack by liberals and secularists; and that patriotic Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to rid America of demonic forces, and in political action to restore its Christian heritage. That includes taking political steps — as a voter, as an elected official, as a lawyer, as a judge — to ensure that America is governed according to a “biblical worldview.”
If you want to see that definition in action, look no further than the career of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Seventeen years ago, when I interviewed Johnson, then a lawyer with the Christian right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, I would have labeled him a loyal soldier in the Christian right’s legal army trying to bring down the separation of church and state. He is a product of and a participant in a sprawling religious and political infrastructure that has made the movement’s successes possible, from politically active megachurches, to culture-shaping organizations like Focus on the Family, to political players like the Family Research Council, to the legal force in his former employer ADF.
In today’s parlance, Johnson is a Christian nationalist — although he, like most of his compatriots, has certainly not embraced the label. But Mike Johnson the House Speaker is still Mike Johnson the lawyer I interviewed all those years ago: an evangelical called to politics to be a “servant leader” to a Christian nation, dedicated to its governance according to a biblical worldview: against church-state separation, for expanded rights for conservative Christians, adamantly against abortion and LGBTQ rights, and especially, currently, trans rights.
That mindset is still the beating heart of the Christian right, even as the movement, and other movements in the far-right space, have radicalized in the Trump era, taking on new forms and embracing a range of solutions to the apocalyptic trajectory they see America to be on. Different movements imagining a version of Christian supremacy exist side by side — different strains that often borrow ideas from one another, and that fit comfortably under the banner of Christian nationalism.
The term “Christian nationalism” became popularized during Trump’s presidency for a few reasons. First, Trump, who first ran in 2016 on a nativist platform with the nationalist slogan “Make America Great Again,” was and still is dependent on white evangelicals to win elections and maintain a hold on power. He is consequently willing to carry out their goals, bringing their ambitions closer to fruition than they’ve ever been in their 45-year marriage to the Republican Party. They have been clear, for example, in crediting him for the downfall of Roe v. Wade, among other assaults on other peoples’ rights.
Second, the prominence of Christian iconography at the January 6 insurrection, and the support for Trump’s stolen election lie before, during, and after January 6 by both Christian right influencers and the grassroots, brought into stark relief that Christian nationalist motivations helped fuel his attempted coup.
Finally, sociologists studying the belief systems of Christian nationalists pushed the term into public usage, as did anti-nationalist Christians, especially after January 6, in order to elevate awareness of the threats Christian nationalism poses to democracy. (The paperback edition of my book, Unholy, which was published in mid-2021 and included a post-January 6 afterword, reflected the increasing usage of the term Christian nationalists by including the term in a fresh subtitle.)
Quote:Christian nationalism takes on different forms, and despite organizational or even ideological differences, ideas can penetrate the often porous borders between different camps.
The Trump era, along with the rise of openly Christian nationalist social media sites like Gab, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, have given space for otherwise unknown figures, like the rabidly antisemitic Gab founder Andrew Torba, co-author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, and Stephen Wolfe, author of the racist book The Case for Christian Nationalism, to enter the Christian nationalism discourse. Although Torba and Wolfe have made waves online, and extremism watchers are rightly alarmed that their tracts could prove influential and radicalizing, they remain distinct from the Christian right. Torba’s antisemitism is so extreme, for example, that Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — himself extreme — was forced to create some daylight between himself and his supporter Torba in his 2022 run. Torba’s site platformed the antisemitic rantings of the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, and Torba himself has said Jews aren’t welcome in his envisioned Christian nation. The Republican Jewish Coalition called Gab “a cesspool of bigotry and antisemitism.” Mastriano’s move seemed motivated more by self-preservation than contrition (and he lost the race anyway).
That’s not to say, of course, that the Christian right and the conservative movement more broadly haven’t tolerated racists and other extremists in their midst — Trump’s endurance as their savior itself proves just how much that tolerance persists. Their entire alliance with Trump is one of sharing political and ideological space with the overtly antisemitic, racist, Islamophobic, nativist extremists he elevated to mainstream status in the GOP. But the Christian right is also committed to Christian Zionism, an ideology that claims to love the state of Israel while imagining it as the locus of Jesus’s violent return, and which is, in its philosemitism and bloody apocalyptic fantasies, antisemitic. Still, it would make it difficult for them to form explicit alliances with someone like Torba, a self-described Christian nationalist who repeatedly and unabashedly promotes some of the world’s oldest and ugliest antisemitic tropes like the Jews killed Jesus and secretly control the world.
What’s more, Torba advocates for a “parallel society” for Christians to escape the supposedly debauched America he deplores. This is not unlike the Benedict Option advocated by conservative Christian (and Viktor Orbán admirer) Rod Dreher, or the secret, hyper-patriarchal Society for Civic American Renewal exposed by TPM’s Josh Kovensky, which is recruiting “unhyphenated” men of only certain denominations to run a Christian government after an anticipated “national divorce.” The language of SACR’s internal documents, to me, as a student of evangelicalism, is quite distinct from the sort of statement of faith you’d see from a church or evangelical organization, which would emphasize one’s salvation in Jesus Christ, commitment to the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God, and the imperative for Christians to preach the gospel around the world.
The conventional Christian right does not want a parallel society or a divorce. They believe they are restoring, and will run, the Christian nation God intended America to be — from the inside. They will do that, in their view, through faith (evangelizing others and bringing them to salvation through Jesus Christ); through spiritual warfare (using prayer to battle satanic enemies of Christian America); and through politics and the law (governing and lawmaking from a “biblical worldview” after eviscerating church-state separation). Changes in the evangelical world, particularly the emphasis in the growing charismatic movement on prophecy, signs and wonders, spiritual warfare, the prosperity gospel, and Trumpism, has intensified the prominence of the supernatural in their politics, giving their Christian nationalism its own unmistakable brand.
For decades, Christian right has been completely open about their beliefs and goals. Their quest to take dominion over American institutions by openly evangelizing and instituting Christian supremacist policies sets the Christian right apart from other types of Christian nationalists who might operate in secret, or imagine utopian communities as the ideal way to save themselves from a secular, debauched nation.
The fact that far-right extremists like Torba or Wolfe embrace the Christian nationalist label gives the more conventional Christian right leaders and organizations space to disassociate themselves from it. Some also berate journalists who use it to describe them, accusing them of hurling a left-wing slur at Christians.
The bottom line is that Christian nationalism takes on different forms, and despite organizational or even ideological differences, ideas can penetrate the often porous borders between different camps. Someone who receives the daily email blast from the Family Research Council might also be drawn to Wolfe’s book, for example. On a more unnerving, macro level, major right-wing and GOP figures, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and the CEO of the Daily Wire, the podcast consortium run by conservative influencer Ben Shapiro, have embraced the rabidly antisemitic, Hitler-admiring antagonist Nick Fuentes, who is Catholic but also is accurately described as a Christian nationalist. The increasingly influential Catholic integralist movement, which seeks a Catholic-inflected replacement for the “liberal order,” is yet another unique form of Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism is a serious threat to democracy, because it is premised on the supremacy of Christianity and rejects the democratic values of freedom and equality for all. It is crucial to understand that it takes various forms, how its numerous proponents differ, and how they intersect. Some pose a threat because of their proximity to political and legal power; others because they accelerate racist and antisemitic rhetoric; and still others because they might incite violence. These distinctions show how Christian nationalism is varied, very combustible, and critical to combat.
The increasingly influential Catholic integralist movement, which seeks a Catholic-inflected replacement for the “liberal order,” is yet another unique form of Christian nationalism.
Catholic integralism is an interpretation of Catholic social teaching that argues for an authoritarian[12] and anti-pluralist Catholic state,[1][2] wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible; it was born in 19th-century Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Romania. It was a movement that sought to assert a Catholic underpinning to all social and political action, and to minimize or eliminate any competing ideological actors, such as secular humanism and liberalism.[1][2] Integralism arose in opposition to liberalism, which some Catholics saw as a "relentless and destructive ideology".[13]: 1041 Catholic integralism does not support the creation of an autonomous "Catholic" State Church, or Erastianism (Gallicanism in French context). Rather, it supports subordinating the State to the moral principles of Catholicism. Thus it rejects separating morality from the State, and favours Catholicism as the proclaimed religion of the State.[2]
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies (FedSoc) is an American conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.[4][5][6] Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has chapters at more than 200 law schools and features student, lawyer, and faculty divisions; the lawyers division comprises more than 70,000 practicing attorneys in ninety cities.[1] Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, it provides a forum for legal experts of opposing conservative views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, and the legal academy.[7] It is one of the most influential legal organizations in the United States.[8][9]
After Iran’s attack on Israel, further escalation must be stopped
Iran’s airborne military attack on Israel, launched on Saturday night, has the potential to turn the crisis in Gaza into a full-scale Middle East war, drawing in the US and other countries including Britain. This is the scenario that western and Arab governments have been dreading ever since the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas, Iran’s close ally. Now that the worst has come to pass, no one can know where or how it will end. This unprecedented head-to-head confrontation between Israel and Iran must be defused before it spins completely out of control.
First reports from Israel, quoting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said Iran had launched dozens of drones at presumed Israeli targets. Then came news, impossible to verify, that Iran was also firing cruise missiles – a far greater and swifter menace. Israel said its air defence and anti-missile systems were on full alert and that Israeli air space was being shut down. Jordan and Iraq announced similar measures. Saudi reports said the US had intercepted some of the drones over Syria and Iraq. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi forces in Yemen also fired missiles at Israel in what looked like a concerted offensive.
“A short time ago, Iran launched unmanned aerial vehicles from its territory towards the territory of the state of Israel … the IDF aerial defence array is on high alert, along with Israel air force fighter jets and Israeli navy vessels that are on a defence mission in Israeli airspace. The IDF is monitoring all targets,” an Israeli army spokesperson said. The White House confirmed that an Iranian airborne attack had begun, and said President Joe Biden was being updated by his national security advisers.
It must be assumed that if the Iranian drones and missiles hit targets on Israeli territory or hit Israeli cities, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu will respond in kind, as it has threatened to do. Last week Biden indicated that the US would support and possibly join any retaliatory Israeli military action. Israel, he said, had America’s “iron-clad” backing. In such a situation, the pressure on America’s and Israel’s allies to assist in any subsequent clashes will be considerable. Rishi Sunak must think very carefully about what he does next.
What is needed now above all are cool heads. Netanyahu and his extremist coalition allies are not renowned for such qualities. That makes it all the more important that the Americans, and Britain, use all their persuasive powers and all available diplomatic means to try to moderate Israel’s reaction and stop further attacks by Iran. Netanyahu’s first instinct, if Israel is badly hit, may be to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which he has threatened to do in the past, and possibly, regime leadership targets in Tehran, too. To do so that would be to risk another twist in the spiral of escalation, leading inexorably to all-out war.
It is vital that this conflagration be extinguished with the utmost speed for, if not, it may quickly spread across the region, igniting the already smouldering Occupied West Bank and beyond. Such a calamity would prolong Gaza’s misery, wreck hostage talks and extend instability into Lebanon and maybe Iraq, Syria, the Gulf and the Red Sea, too.
An open-ended US-Iran confrontation would divide the western democracies, chill the global economy, destabilise pro-western Arab states, boost China’s geopolitical ambitions and sideline the fight against intensifying Russian aggression in Ukraine. More than that, it would be a gift to Netanyahu and his far-right allies, whose only policy is perpetual war.
Amid the present tumult, it should not be forgotten that this Iranian attack was provoked, according to Iran’s leadership at least, by Israel’s unacknowledged bombing on 1 April of an Iranian embassy annex in Damascus that killed several senior commanders. In Tehran’s not unreasonable view, that attack crossed a red line by targeting diplomatic premises. For the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it amounted to an assault on sovereign Iranian territory. It could not go unanswered.
A complex spider’s web of calculation, ambiguity and hidden motives lies behind last night’s confrontation. Iran has sought to capitalise on the Gaza war, expanding its regional influence through proxy forces in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon – the “axis of resistance”. While denying advance knowledge of the 7 October attacks, it has maintained support for Hamas and applauded Hezbollah’s ensuing bombardment of northern Israel. But it had avoided, until now, direct confrontation with Israel.
Its decision to attack, ultimately ignoring the pleadings of European and Arab foreign ministers and a direct intervention by David Cameron, the foreign secretary, reflects the dominance in Tehran of the hardliners who hold the levers of power. Their ideological hatred of Israel and the US is visceral.
For them, confrontation with the west is the ultimate, perhaps only justification for the terrible sacrifices and disastrous policies the Islamic theocracy, founded after the 1979 revolution, has foisted on the Iranian people.
A not totally dissimilar dynamic is evident inside Israel, where Netanyahu’s extreme rightwing coalition is up against a wall. Its shameful conduct of the Gaza war has heaped international opprobrium on Israel’s head while failing to defeat Hamas. Opponents say Netanyahu is prolonging – and expanding – the war to save his skin.
On this reading, the Damascus embassy attack was a deliberate escalation designed to fortify his political position, flush out Iran and draw the blind-sided Americans back to his side.
On this reading, the Damascus embassy attack was a deliberate escalation designed to fortify his political position, flush out Iran and draw the blind-sided Americans back to his side.
There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.
While these two stories are related, they are not the same.
For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone.
But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.
But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.
Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill.
But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Republican senators then declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.
The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists.
It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time.
That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable.
He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.
Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.
Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced.
Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”
Today, on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting former president Trump.
“Just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said, “You support [Trump] for president even if he's convicted in [the] classified documents [case]. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”
Sununu answered: “Yeah. Me and 51% of America.”
Aside from its overstatement of Trump’s national support, Sununu’s answer illustrated the triumph of politics over principle. Earlier in the interview, Sununu explained that he could swallow all of Trump’s negatives because he wanted a Republican administration. “This is about politics,” he said.
Sununu is part of the Republican faction that focuses on cutting taxes and slashing regulations. Trump has promised further tax cuts, while Biden has said he will raise taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations to make sure the nation does not have to cut Social Security benefits and Medicare. Republicans have suggested they will make those cuts to balance the budget, although at least 90% of the current budget deficit not due to emergencies like Covid is a result of tax cuts under George W. Bush and Trump.
Sununu may be embracing Trump for his fiscal policies. But there is possibly another dynamic at play in the shift of Republican leaders behind Trump. As Thomas Edsall outlined in the New York Times on April 10 in a piece about donors, they appear to be afraid of retaliation if they don’t join his team. Certainly he has worked to instill that fear, warning in January that anyone who contributed to Haley’s campaign “from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”
Trump has been very clear that he intends to use the power of the state to crush those who he feels have been insufficiently supportive of him. There is every reason to take him at his word, as he tried to do exactly that during his presidency. He used the Internal Revenue Service to harass former FBI director James Comey—who refused to kill the investigation into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives as Trump demanded—and Andrew McCabe, who took over as acting FBI director after Trump fired Comey.
He demanded investigations and indictments of former president Barack Obama and then–former vice president Joe Biden, former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as well as a Democratic lawyer. Former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, whom Trump appointed after he fired Preet Bharara, recalled: “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining—in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
That dynamic already appears to be at work as people are obeying in advance. On April 10, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Hume Kennerly resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation after his fellow trustees declined to present the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of concern that a future President Trump would retaliate against the organization by taking away its tax-exempt status.
“The historical irony was completely lost on you,” Kennerly wrote. “Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.”
Harking back to Ford’s service in the World War II Navy, Kennerly wrote: “Did [Lieutenant] Gerald Ford meet the enemy head-on because he thought he wouldn’t get killed? No. He did it despite that possibility. This executive committee, on the other hand, bolted before any shots were fired. You aren’t alone. Many foundations, organizations, corporations, and other entities are caught up in this tidal wave of timidity and fear that’s sweeping this country. I mistakenly thought we were better than that. This is the kind of acquiescent behavior that leads to authoritarianism. President Ford most likely would have come out even tougher and said that it leads directly to fascism.”
As Princeton sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppele told Edsall, those still operating under the impression that they will curry favor with a dictator are painfully unaware of how dictators actually operate: like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, if he is returned to power, Trump will use the power of the state to squeeze the wealthy as well as his political opponents, threatening them with investigations, audits, regulation—even criminal charges—unless they do as they are told.
But Sununu’s cynical announcement that he would destroy American democracy if it meant his party could stay in power is not only a misguided approach to trying to appease a dictator. It is a profound rejection of the meaning of American democracy: that we all are created equal and have a right to a say in our government. Throughout our history, Americans have found those principles so fundamental to human self-determination that they have given their lives for them.
It’s hard to miss that Sununu’s statement fell on the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who stood at the cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where those who had died to defend the United States in July 1863 were buried and asked his fellow Americans to rededicate themselves “to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
David Cay Johnston@DavidCayJ
3h
So today, @realDonaldTrump moved to water his stock, selling more shares, which reduces the value of existing shares. The market didn't react well.
DJT shares fell even more today, down to $26.58 right now, a 66% decline from the March 26 peak of $79.38.
Josh Marshall@joshtpm
5h
You'd think having your company lose almost 20% of its value in a single day (again) would be enough to keep someone awake.
Right Wing Watch@RightWingWatch
5h
Former Trump administration official William Wolfe told of group of fellow hardcore Christian nationalists/abortion abolitionists that Trump is just cloaking his position on abortion and will govern in a far "more aggressive fashion in the White House." https://bit.ly/4aVzHmi
Justice Clarence Thomas misses Supreme Court arguments
The conservative justice wasn't present for oral arguments Monday, and the court didn't say why.
April 15 is a curiously fraught day in American history.
In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down a rebellion in the southern states.
In 1865, Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m., and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who adored the president, said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
In 1912 the British passenger liner RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m. after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
In 1920, two security guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, were murdered on this date; Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti would be accused of the crime, convicted, and, in 1927, executed.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color line in baseball’s major leagues.
In 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others.
And on April 15, 2024, the criminal case of The People of New York v. Donald J. Trump began in Manhattan.
For the first time in history, a former president is facing criminal prosecution.
The case has been dubbed a “hush money” case by the media, but it is really a case about election interference. In 2016, shortly after the Access Hollywood tape in which then-candidate Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women became public, Trump allegedly falsified business records of the Trump Organization to hide payments to individuals who possessed damaging stories about him, especially about his behavior with women, before the election.
Then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged she had had an affair with Trump, $130,000 through a shell company. He also set up a $150,000 payment from the publisher of the National Enquirer to Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also claimed to have had an affair with Trump. That money would give the National Enquirer exclusive rights to the story, meaning they could decline to publish it and she could not take it elsewhere. This practice is known as “catch-and-kill.”
Trump then allegedly falsified business records to reimburse Cohen for “legal expenses.” Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying those records. The case might last as long as 8 weeks.
In many ways, this trial is a vindication of the rule of law. Despite his many attempts to delay it, a former president is facing accountability for his actions just as any American should.
The trial schedule reflected that standard practice. Presiding judge Juan Merchan set out the terms of the trial, covering what information the jury can hear about Trump and reminding Trump that, per the laws of New York, if he fails to appear in court as required, a warrant will be issued for his arrest.
But as jury selection began today, it was also clear that this is no normal trial. The names of the jurors will not be released outside the courtroom out of concerns for their safety, underscoring the degree to which Trump has urged his supporters to violence. And the country is so deeply divided over Trump and his movement that more than half of the first batch of jurors were excused when they said they could not judge the case impartially. No jurors were chosen today.
Trump has used this case—like his others—to try to undermine the rule of law. Rarely arguing that he didn’t commit any of the offenses for which he was charged in four different cases—two civil, two criminal—he has insisted instead that he is being unfairly prosecuted. The Democrats have rigged the judicial system against him, he repeatedly claims, and enough of his loyalists have bought that idea that today some of them urged Trump supporters in the jury pool to undermine the rule of law by lying to get on the jury, then refusing to convict (a plea that observers noted sounded like jury tampering).
Trump’s effort to signal that he remains disgusted by the charges against him continued today. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted that “[s]hortly before court adjourned for the day, Trump’s campaign sent out a fundraising email falsely claiming he had just stormed out of court.” But it was notable that only a few dozen of his supporters showed up at the court today, and they did not stay long.
Trump has also refused to stop attacking the judge and other participants in the trial despite a gag order imposed by the judge. Today, even as prosecutors were asking Judge Merchan to find Trump in contempt for violating the gag order, Trump posted a video in which one of his allies attacked the judge’s wife as well as primary witness Michael Cohen.
Judge Merchan has scheduled a hearing on potential violations of the gag order for the morning of April 23.
Trump is trying to undermine the rule of law not only out of apparent fear of the outcome of his trials, but also because his appearance in court is likely to hurt his popularity. Last month an Ipsos poll showed that 32% of respondents said a conviction in this case would make them less likely to support Trump for the presidency. And that is before we have heard any of the new evidence that various sources have said we will hear, and which, by the nature of the case, is likely to be sordid.
Seeing Trump treated like any defendant is almost certain to damage his brand as a man who commands his surroundings. Today, Haberman noted: “One thing that is striking: Trump has used the previous court appearances in other cases to project an image of grandeur. That is hard to do in this dingy courtroom, which smells slightly off and where he is an island amid a sea of people.”
Further, the public nature of this trial will make it harder for Trump to present himself only through carefully curated appearances. Haberman also noted that Trump, who has repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” appeared to fall asleep during today’s proceedings. “Repeatedly, his head would fall down,” Haberman said. “He didn’t pay attention to a note his lawyer…passed him. His jaw kept falling on his chest and his mouth kept going slack.” (While Trump was nodding off in court, President Biden was meeting in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Mohammed Shyaa al-Sudani of the Republic of Iraq, and then with Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic.)
Outside of this case, Trump’s image as a wealthy man is also crumbling. Today was the day by which Trump’s lawyers needed to prove that the $175 million appeals bond he posted against the $454 million judgment in the fraud case would really secure the judgment. Late tonight, his lawyers filed their justification of the bond, insisting it was secure and saying there was no need for the hearing about it, scheduled for April 22. Legal analysts on social media immediately found errors in the document.
Trump’s lawyers also filed paperwork today with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue more than 20 million more shares of common stock in the Trump Media & Technology Group. The price of the company’s stock has been dropping since the spike after the initial public offering of March 26. Upon today’s news it dropped another 18%. It has dropped 62% since public trading began.
Although news from Manhattan took up most of the oxygen today, the Commerce Department also made a major announcement: through the CHIPS and Science Act it is investing up to $6.4 billion in a Samsung Electronics chip manufacturing and research cluster in Taylor, Texas. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the two proposed factories will create at least 17,000 construction and 4,500 manufacturing jobs.
In addition to its historical significance, April 15 is also Tax Day. Biden reinstated the tradition of voluntarily releasing tax returns after Trump ended it, and today Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff all released their taxes, revealing that their salaries make up most of their income.
Ken Thomas and Ashlea Ebeling of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump campaign did not answer questions about whether Trump would release his tax returns.
Today, history was made. Here’s how the Post puts it:
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A half-century after President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, Donald Trump is poised to become the first former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges.
Trump’s trial in New York this week is tied to one of four cases in which he faces criminal charges. The cases raise broader questions about the durability of the American justice system and the public’s faith in democracy, particularly with Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, barreling toward a November rematch with President Biden.
That’s an apt summary. The first criminal trial of a former American President. A dark day, if it needs to be said, for democracy.
We’re now hurtling towards the nightmare scenario: Trump, ahead in the polls, is poised to be the next President. But he’s also poised to be..convicted. And that raises the specter of all kinds of mind-boggling possibilities, which you’ve no doubt tried not to think about, as I have: a President…governing from a jail cell? What even is that—a constitutional crisis?
So much more’s going on here than meets the eye.
How We Got to “The Trump Years Were Halcyon Days,” Or, Yes, The World is Going to Hell
Right about now, Americans have something like Trump nostalgia. They seem to think of the Trump years, many of them, as veritable halcyon days. That’s why Trump’s barreling right back towards the Oval Office.
It’s crucial, in a way, to put that in context. After he finally lost the last election, and the coup attempt of Jan 6th failed, Trump was considered out of the game, for good, by America’s elites, its power figures, from columnists to pundits right down to politicians. And yet here we are: just a few short years later, and Trump’s bringing American to the absurd brink of being the first President to possibly govern from a jail cell, and at the very least, even if you think that’s a slender possibility, the first President likely to be criminally convicted.
That’s a remarkable turnaround—it’s kind of like white noise now, we take it for granted, but it’s one of modern history’s great comebacks.
Or is it? Was it a comeback at all? Even then, as Trump was counted out, I warned, and maybe you did too, that it wasn’t going to be so simple. Because the deeper problems producing the explosive surge of Trumpism hadn’t gone anywhere, and were only, in fact, getting worse.
Why do so many American think of the Trump years as halcyon days? The truth is that in retrospect, the world has gotten much, much worse, much faster. And it’s easy to pin this blame on the nearest sitting President—even if it has little to do with them.
When I think about how fast the world has gotten worse in the last few years, I shudder. Prices have exploded, of course—and the “cost of living” crisis isn’t going anywhere. Social contracts are coming undone, as governments have limited “fiscal space,” thanks to sky high interest rates. People are stressed, depressed, and enraged, negative sentiments surging off the charts. Inequality’s reaching proportions that go well beyond absurd—this decade, we’ll see the world’s first trillionaires, even while we can’t raise a few hundred billion as a world to fight climate change. Meanwhile, its mega-scale impacts have arrived with a vengeance.
The world really is getting worse, incredibly, shockingly fast. I try to highlight this for you when we discuss macro trends. And leaders in different arenas are waking up to it, suddenly, too—the mood at the World Economic Forum was despondent, or check out Zurich’s latest risk report, or McKinsey’s new sort of alarming work on falling cooperation. That stuff is all the equivalent of a nine-alarm fire in the world of leadership, and those are some of the world’s most influential organizations.
The Fundamental Attribution Error of Politics, or the Age of the Idiot
So what does all that have to do with Trump’s resurgence? Everything. You see, people these days are committing what you might call “the fundamental attribution error” of politics.
What’s that? Here’s what the “fundamental attribution error” means in psychology—it’s sort of a Big Idea that everyone should know, because it explains a lot.
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In social psychology, fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is a cognitive attribution bias where observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality (e.g., he is late because he's selfish) and underattribute them to the situation or context.
So. This is exactly what voters are doing. They’re underattributing situational and environmental factors, and overattributing personality factors. And that’s creating this sort of wave of irrationality where people think of the Trump years as halcyon days.
In other words, they’re saying to themselves: “Things were better back then. Must be Trump!” When in fact, nothing of the sort’s the case. The world’s gone to hell, and that’s neither because of the lack of a Trump, or the presence of a Biden. It’s just…gone to hell…for far, far bigger reasons—civilizational ones, like a lack of investment, a failure to develop systems, crumbling institutions, an imbalanced capital to labor income ratio (meaning: the rich are getting way, way too rich, too fast), all at the largest level.
See what I mean? Overattributing personality factors. The world was better because…Trump fixed things. Underattributing situational and environmental factors. Things weren’t better even a few short years ago…for the simple reason that…the world’s gone to hell, not because a demagogue or authoritarian was around to yell and shout and scream.
The fundamental attribution error is a mind-killer. It’s been studied in plenty of context, from relationships to culture. But it’s rarely more damaging than in politics, because what it’s doing is warping people’s perceptions entirely, making them irrational—as all cognitive biases do—and leading them to make the wrongest choice in modern history.
Americans are poised to put Trump back into the Oval Office for a very simple reason: things suck. Especially the economy. Nothing’s more maddening than hearing tone-deaf politicians cry “the economy’s great!,” when the average person can barely make ends meet, when credit card balances are skyrocketing, when debt’s soaring off the charts, and when living standards are plummeting.
Things suck.
But they don’t suck just because Papa Trump isn’t in charge. They suck because we are failing at a much, much bigger level. They suck because we’ve reached the greatest turning point in human history, all 300,000 years of it, and we’re paralyzed, and beginning to turn backwards, They suck because we’ve failed at our major civilizational challenges, from peace to prosperity to climate to justice to equality and beyond.
And so people around the world are putting lunatics in charge because they’re making this fundamental attribution error.
Things suck, and nobody’s happy.
In that state of mind, you can see how the average person’s process of thinking clearly shuts down, and they just retreat into infantile narcissism, meaning, Papa Trump alone can Save Me, because things were better back then. Things suck because the world’s gone to hell.
That seems to be a tough lesson for people to grasp, or at least hold. I get it, in a way. History teaches us, sadly, that in hard times, scapegoats and finger-pointing and rage are far more seductive than thinking clearly about problems, and how to solve them. It took us millennia to really get anywhere as humanity for just that reason—we were mired in an endless cycle of war, conflict, blame, retribution, and vengeance.
But now we have to think clearly. If we go right back to destroying democracy, how much of history will we lose?
Things suck, and nobody’s happy, but not thinking about them clearly is only going to make them suck even more.
Americans Want a Better Economy, But They’re Going to Get Something a Lot More Like Dictatorship
Americans are poised to re-elect Trump because things suck, especially the economy. But what they’re going to get is a big surprise. They’re going to get something very much like dictatorship.
I don’t have to tell you why by now. The thousand page plan to purge government and install loyalists. A Supreme Court that’s more interested in taking rights away. Laws being resurrected that back to centuries ago. The open championing of retribution and violence. The proclamation of dictatorship. On and on it goes. I know you know, but the average person isn’t taking any of this seriously.
Their reasoning appears to go like this. Things suck now. Things better back then. Must be Papa Trump. Vote for Trump. Things better when Papa Trump around. They don’t notice the attribution error, which is that the world’s gone to hell. Nor the conclusion that follows from it: keep on electing fanatics, and of course, the world will keep going to hell.
Americans—leaving aside the MAGA fringe—who vote for Trump, expecting a “better economy,” aka things not sucking, are going to get, instead, a taste of dictatorship. We should all know what’ll follow: rights will be severely curtailed, crackdowns will follow, opposition figures will be pursued, and the government itself will become a kind of agent of the mission of purifying society.
All of that’s going to be very, very ugly. Much uglier than last time, and Americans, at least those remembering the Trump years as halcyon days, appear to have forgotten entirely about all that. And in that regard, Trump’s constant noise-making works: it drowns out the memory of how disturbing the abuses of power then really were.
Yet here we are. Trump’s cruising back to power, right on the cusp of being the first criminal President of the United States, because people remember his first Presidency as a better time, than now—and it was, but only because the world was in a far more stable place, not quite openly hurtling towards multiple mega-disasters like it is now.
We’re Underestimating the Risk of Another Trump Era
Where does all that leave us? Emphatically not…in a good place. See how Brits massively underestimated the damage Brexit did? It destroyed their futures. Americans are making exactly the same mistake now, when it comes to re-electing Trump.
I get it, by the way. Biden…problematic. We’ll discuss that tomorrow, because this is already getting too long.
What else would the consequences of re-electing Trump be? A criminal in the Oval Office would absolutely shred America’s reputation—and it’d send what’s left of global diplomacy and order into freefall, from defense treaties to economic ones. The financial system would (will) melt down, because no matter how brave a face they’re putting on it now, the prospect of the almighty dollar and America’s treasury in the hands of Trump, again, this time—risk explodes, and it’s already cascading. And you might as well write an epitaph for poor democracy, which is already at just 20% of the world now, and would hit about 15%, and then crater much, much lower, lunatics and demagogues of every stripe inspired, empowered, and armed to win the battle.
It’s an earth-shaking and history-making mistake. And yet here America is, about to make it. Like I said, sadly, weirdly, I even get it. Even I have trouble, after the last few months, really stomaching the idea of more Biden, more Democrats. Who doesn’t feel betrayed and abandoned by them? Certainly, their coalition’s in deep, deep trouble, because it’s key constituencies, from young people to minorities to women, increasingly do. Uninspiring is putting it kindly—maybe insipid is better. So I understand the feelings. But is regret a greater evil than the satisfaction of walking away from the lesser one?
It is, but it’s hard for the human soul to really stomach all this, to make sense of it, and the mind to grasp it and grapple with it. So here we are. Watching history being made—and not in a good way, but in a startling, tragic one, which is the hallmark of this troubled age.
Erick Erickson@EWErickson
4h
There was no insurrection. That is a left/media talking point. It was a riot, yes. It was not an insurrection. Those who believe this don't actually care about the truth though. x.com/JeffreyToobin/…
