By now, we’ve seen poll after poll showing that voters look back fondly on Donald Trump’s presidency. The polls suggest that millions of people forget completely, for example, Trump’s shambolic panic when the pandemic was coming, his total failure to order up ventilators and masks, his serial lies that the 15 Covid cases would soon be down to zero, and so on—behavior so obviously disqualifying that failing to see it is, to my mind, akin to seeing a man holding a smoking gun over a dead body and denying that the man was the shooter.
Lately, these polls have been joined by other polls that say something just as false and just as dangerous. These polls show people giving Trump credit for things that Biden has accomplished and people being miffed at Biden for all manner of bad stuff that just isn’t real. In the latter category, we find a Harris Poll (yes, Mark Penn, but even so) showing the following hall-of-mirrors results, as Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect: 56 percent of Americans think the country is in a recession, 49 percent believe the stock market is down, and 49 percent also believe unemployment is at an all-time high.
We are not close to a recession, which is a decline in gross domestic product in two consecutive quarters. That did happen in early 2022, but the second-quarter dip was very shallow, and most economists didn’t call it a recession. The Dow is up 8,000 points since Biden took office. Unemployment is at its lowest level in half a century.
Meyerson fingers—correctly, I think—the fact that so many people get their “news” from social media, which is usually just a collection of video and photo images that can pack an emotional punch but that explain and contextualize nothing. Social media, as Meyerson wrote, “has a built-in bias for the negative, the apocalyptic, the unedited, and uncurated.” A steady stream of clips showing high gas prices or rubble in Gaza or students being arrested is bound to lead the consumer of said clips to some dark conclusions about the country teetering on the knife’s edge of chaos and collapse, which, once formed, facts are powerless to dislodge.
There’s another recent survey, one of the most depressing and telling I’ve seen this year, that seems to confirm this too. This was an NBC News poll that divided respondents based on where they got their news. Pay attention here. Among people who don’t follow political news at all, Trump led Biden 53–27. Among social media users, Trump led 46–42. But among people who actually read newspapers, Biden led—ready?—by 70–21.
Pretty grim. But it’s even worse. This week on his Substack, New America fellow Lee Drutman wrote a really interesting piece about how our brains process thoughts about the past and the present. When we think about the past, he writes, we always remember it as better than it was. It’s called nostalgia bias.
But when we think about the present? We tend to think of it as worse than it actually is. This is called negativity bias. As Drutman put it: “Our brains are deeply attuned to possible threats, and so we have a strong negativity bias in how we process the present. In an environment of nonstop national media and hyper-partisan confrontational politics, we are constantly getting triggered. This makes us especially likely to see the present moment as a crisis.”
Social media of course plays a key role here too. A 10-second video of undocumented people crossing the Rio Grande tells the brain: “Chaos!” And Biden is doing nothing. The people may have been apprehended or turned back, who knows. But those 10 seconds have done their job.
Our brains have always worked liked this, as Drutman readily acknowledges. But Trump has made it all worse by constantly carrying on about how awful things are today—the sweeping and totally false generalizations about how no one is safe anywhere anymore; the unprovable (but, crucially for his purposes, un-dis-provable) assertions that Ukraine and Gaza and so on would never have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.
And what Trump is doing, by the way, isn’t simple nostalgia. Nostalgia is an innocent pining for our younger days, when we looked better and our backs didn’t hurt and we had more sex. What Trump is doing is much darker. What Trump is doing is fascism, which throughout its history, as Drutman notes, is obsessed with tropes of social decline.
This is where we are, and this is really what Biden is up against—what perhaps any president would be up against in this jittery and overcaffeinated age. Even Trump fell victim to it in 2020 to some extent. But on balance, Trump benefits, and I’d say tremendously, because a media environment that encourages people not to think but only to react is a perfect mate for a political candidate who does the same.
Yet I’m not saying all is lost. I don’t think it is. There are millions of Americans who reject Trumpism outright. There are millions of people who seek facts, remember the awful things Trump did, read newspapers. Trump has lost a lot more elections (if you count the ones since 2016 when he was “on the ballot,” as it were) than he’s won. Still, it’s different now that Trump is out of office and can spin myths about his tenure and himself that too many people are willing to believe.
The best counter to Trump’s mythmaking about the past? Insistently telling people about the ugly future Trump promises. Read Jamelle Bouie today on Trump’s deportation plans. I have to believe most Americans do not want their country to do that. The Democrats’ answer to Trump’s obsession with the past is to warn people about a Trump-led future.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
Donald Trump came out shooting blanks with his usual baggy, insecure rhetoric after agreeing to two debates with Joe Biden. “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced,” “He can’t put two sentences together!” et cetera. He does it because he knows the media reports it and there are still people who fall for it.
The truth, of course, is that Trump is a terrible debater. In this as in everything else, he wants people to forget the past and ignore the truth. So let’s remind him, and everyone, of what happened when Trump and Biden met in 2020.
The first debate, hosted by Fox, took place in Cleveland on September 29. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died; Trump had nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court three days before, so the court was on everyone’s mind, and of course the pandemic.
Trump did two main things. First, he lied a lot. He’d reduced prescription drug prices by “80 to 90 percent”; insulin was getting “so cheap, it’s like water”; he’d “brought back [college] football.” Second, he interrupted and interrupted. He turned the whole thing into a shitshow, because he knows that shit benefits from shitshows.
But the main thing he did was send that little message to the Proud Boys: “Stand back and stand by.” Those words seemed self-contradictory to me, but not to the Proud Boys themselves, who took it as a clear order to await his further instructions, which came in the build-up to January 6, 2021.
Result? Biden mopped the floor with him. A CNN poll found that viewers favored Biden’s performance by—get this—60 to 28 percent. Think about that 28. It means that even a good chunk of MAGA-heads couldn’t bring themselves to say he won. Some polls were closer, but Biden won them all.
For the second debate, October 22, 2020, in Nashville, NBC decided to cut the microphones when Biden and Trump weren’t speaking, which limited the interruptions. Well, wait! Actually, Nashville was supposed to be the third debate. The second debate, scheduled for October 15 in Miami, never happened; it was canceled because Trump had tested positive for Covid. The debate commission suggested holding it virtually. Biden said yes. Trump backed out and held a rally instead. This is worth remembering.
OK, back to Nashville, which did happen: Trump said he’d done more for Black Americans than any president with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln. He made a lot of comments ducking responsibility on the pandemic. It was less of a madhouse. And Biden won that debate, CNN found, by 53 to 39 percent.
Flash-forward. Biden is four years older and definitely a step slower. No use denying it. It’s hard to imagine him delivering a dominating performance. For my money, the best thing he can do on a stage with Trump has nothing to do with policy. He should needle Trump and get under his skin: about Trump constantly confusing Biden with Barack Obama; about confusing Jimmy Carter with Jimmy Connors; about praising Hannibal Lecter as a “wonderful man.” And about more consequential things too, like his stated plans for his second term that would turn the country into a fascist state (on this, read our new issue, it is excellent and chilling). But no, Biden probably does not have it in him to crush Trump in a debate.
In sum: Biden may not win these debates, but Trump will definitely lose them. He’ll lose them the same way he lost them last time, by lying and interrupting and sneering and being an off-putting bully. It’s true that Biden has a record to defend this time, and Trump will attack attack attack. He’ll probably score some points. But he’ll overdo it. He always does.
That is, if he shows up. This week, he started yelping instantly about the debate format—the absence of an audience, the cutting off of the mics. Amanda Marcotte in Salon noticed that Republicans “are already spinning Trump’s faceplant even before it happens.” Lara Trump whined on Fox that the debates are “rigged so heavily in Joe Biden’s favor, but everything always is.”
My guess is that the first one will happen. Trump is delusional enough to believe that he’s going to wipe the floor with Biden. Then he’ll see that Biden isn’t the blithering idiot he believes him to be and can actually hold his own on a debate stage, and the debate won’t have any clear winner or loser, but because Biden simply isn’t an aggressive asshole and raging egomaniac and will come across as more empathetic, he’ll win the insta-polls by 10 to 15 points, and Trump will eventually find an excuse to skip the second one and identify some little Nuremberg where he can hold a rally and whimper about being the most persecuted man in the history of the planet.
The last few days remind me more broadly that we must always bear in mind all the constituent elements of authoritarian fascism. There are the obvious ones we think of immediately, like contempt for democracy and reliance on a narrative of resentment against the “vermin” who are destroying the country. But the less obvious ones are important too. Staggering corruption is always, always, always a characteristic of fascist regimes, and Trump already proved this in term one, with the flagrant and constant violations of the emoluments clause.
And another constant feature is the whining. The system is so unfair to us. Mussolini used this trope, as did Hitler, as have they all. Everything is everybody else’s fault. And these people try to say that liberals are snowflakes?
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
As many have observed, democracies don’t die overnight. There’s no One Big Event that does it. It happens bit by bit. Noticing it requires paying very close attention and connecting the dots as you go along, and most people don’t have the time or dedication to do that.
So I draw your attention to a new and ominous development this week: It’s now basically settled that Donald Trump’s running mate will be with him 1000 percent on denying unfavorable election results. Doing so became a litmus test this week. South Carolina GOP Senator Tim Scott is chiefly to blame, but of course it’s also Trump, and the entire cast of craven jellyfish who are today’s Republican Party.
As you’ve probably read, Scott was on Meet the Press Sunday and, under questioning from host Kristen Welker, refused six times to say he’d accept the election results. The things he did say were ludicrous: “This is an issue that is not an issue so I’m not going to make it an issue.” “I’m not going to answer your hypothetical question when, in fact, I believe the American people are speaking today on the results of the election.” “This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat Party.”
The same day, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum ran for the hills when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked him about potential political violence after the election. He spat out some evasive nonsense about how the important thing about the election is that “both sides feel good about how it was counted.” We all know what that means: If one party (gee, which one?) doesn’t “feel good” about the vote count, then violence might be justified.
These are, in one way, dismissible men. But these are not dismissible comments. This is new. And it’s worth thinking about.
In 2016, Trump went around saying things like, “I will totally accept” the election results “if I win.” But it wasn’t yet holy scripture. In fact, that fall, Trump’s running mate avowed that the GOP would play by the rules. “We will absolutely accept the results of the election,” Mike Pence told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on October 16.
This was very important at the time. It allowed people to think Trump was just blustering, wasn’t to be taken seriously. And his position was seen as a clear liability. Three days after Pence’s Meet the Press appearance, Trump debated Hillary Clinton. Trump refused to affirm to moderator Chris Wallace that he’d accept the election results. Even Republicans asked by Politico agreed that it was Trump’s worst moment of the debate. Said an Ohio Republican: “His answer on not accepting the results of the election [is] disqualifying—and that’s not an ‘elite’ position.” Added a New Hampshire GOPer: “Refusing to accept the outcome of a legitimate American election and refusing to commit to the peaceful transition of power is disqualifying. Stunning.”
Those Republicans reflected a consensus then among the Republicans Politico asked, and to some extent among rank-and-file Republicans too—53 percent of Republicans even told Politico that Clinton won that debate. The idea that a major party candidate would reject election results was disqualifying, or seemed to be.
Of course, Trump won, so the proposition wasn’t tested then. In 2020, he did the same thing, casting doubt on the veracity of the pandemic-era results throughout the campaign. And we know what came of that: January 6. On that day, remember, 139 House members voted against certifying the election results, while 72 voted to certify (or were absent). Eight GOP senators voted not to certify, while 43 voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory.
Those voting results were depressing enough, but it must be asked: Would we get similar results today? Or will we next January 6, if Trump is declared the loser and contests the results, as he all but inevitably will?
I think this time it would be worse, maybe far worse. As Scott’s and Burgum’s dodges testify, conventional wisdom has changed. Now, it is assured that Trump’s vice presidential choice will, instead of offering Pence’s 2016 reassurances, be right there with Trump in threatening not to accept the results. The new Trump-installed chair of the party, Michael Whatley, is a 2020 election denier whose chief appeal to Trump was that he’s “a Stop the Steal guy.” And the new co-chair, of course, is Lara Trump. Around 60 RNC employees were handed their papers in March. The new application process includes asking job-seekers whether they think the 2020 election was stolen.
The upshot here should be clear enough. This November, the entire party will be armed to fight an adverse election result. This is new—worse, even, than 2020 and 2021. Scott and Burgum helped cement this posture as the new conventional wisdom this week. But really, they were shaping conventional wisdom far less than they were allowing themselves to be shaped by it. If they hadn’t said what they said, they’d be instantly tossed from Trump’s short list.
And the rest of the party? Please. They’ll fall into one of two camps. They’ll enthusiastically parrot the accepted line. Or they’ll use the “It’s not an issue, because Donald Trump will be elected our next president” dodge. And those in the latter camp know very well that the road is littered with the political carcasses of Republicans who defied Trump.
So, again: If January 6, 2025 comes around, and Congress is confronted with a situation similar to that other January 6, how many Republicans will stand up for democracy this time? Jellyfish may not have backbones, but they can still sting.
It’s always worth taking note when a legislator casts an unexpected vote. So it caught my eye Wednesday morning as I was scanning the House roll-call vote on H.R. 6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
It passed by a wide margin, 320–91; 187 Republicans and 133 Democrats voted for it, and 21 Republicans and 70 Democrats against. I scrolled down to look at the “no”s, because votes like this one—which right and left approach, let us say, from different moral universes—always offer an amusing coalition of the unwilling. GOP “no”s included hard-rightists like Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democratic “no”s mostly all came from the Progressive Caucus, even the progressive wing of the Progressive Caucus—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, and more.
Then a surprising name caught my eye: Jerry Nadler of Manhattan. And another: Jan Schakowsky of Evanston, Illinois. These are both liberal Democrats, of course. But they’re also both Jewish, and they represent heavily Jewish districts. This was interesting.
Thursday, I spoke with Nadler about his vote. I should say that I’ve known and respected Jerry for many years. We met (can it be?) in 1987, when I was a young reporter covering New York politics. Before I get to the matter at hand, a quick story from those days that made me realize that Nadler was willing to take unpopular positions.
There were neighborhood political clubs in those days in Manhattan (they still exist, but their heyday was long ago). In Greenwich Village, there were two clubs: an older and more established one that opposed Mayor Ed Koch, very unpopular by the late 1980s among progressives, and a newer, pro-Koch club. An issue arose at some county Democratic meeting I was covering, I don’t even remember what it was exactly, but I do recall that Nadler, then a state assemblyman, rose to speak in defense of the pro-Koch club’s First Amendment rights. He was booed. I was no Koch fan then, but I thought it was kind of a gutsy thing to do.
Flash-forward. Why did a Jewish congressman from the most famous Jewish district in America (the Upper West Side) oppose an antisemitism resolution? “It’s violative of free speech,” Nadler told me, “and it’s totally unnecessary.”
H.R. 6090 would require the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to use the definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association in 2016 when investigating complaints of bias at institutions that receive federal funds. That means college campuses (even private universities like Columbia receive federal grants and so on).
The IHRA definition, debated for years, has been adopted by around 20 countries, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, and more. Its definition is mostly nonproblematic, but to Nadler, one aspect of it threatened to squelch free speech on campuses. “You could read it as saying that criticism of Israel is antisemitic,” he said.
And this is where we get to the question of the Republicans’ motivation in introducing this bill. The IHRA definition is not without controversy, precisely because of some language about criticism of Israel that many consider blurry. Two other definitions of antisemitism have been promulgated—the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document. Choosing to rely solely on one of the three definitions struck some critics as concerning. Even the author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, has become a sharp critic of using it with respect to speech on college campuses, and Nadler told me that Stern opposed this bill.
But: The IHRA definition did have a notable champion in the United States: Donald Trump. As president in 2019, he signed an executive order to protect Jewish students under the Civil Rights Act, using the IHRA definition. Sounds good and uncontroversial, but numerous critics, including progressive Jewish groups, worried about its potential chilling effect on campuses. Stern, writing in The Guardian, argued that his definition “was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude.… It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week.”
The Biden administration never rescinded that executive order. However, Biden did launch a different approach. In May 2023, he unveiled the first-ever national strategy to combat antisemitism. The 60-page plan outlined 100 steps that federal agencies committed to complete within a year and was based on input from 1,000 stakeholders.
Biden also proposed increasing the 2024 budget of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights by 25 percent. Republicans proposed cutting it by 25 percent. The ultimate compromise, says Nadler, is that it was flatlined. That battle is being repeated for 2025. House Republicans could shift their position on that, if they want to show that they wish to combat antisemitism in a real way. There’s also a House bill, sponsored by North Carolina Democrat Kathy Manning, that would codify the Biden administration’s approach, and it has an impressive 15 Republican co-sponsors (and 24 Democrats).
Speaker Mike Johnson could put his weight behind that. But as we see on an hourly basis, he (while pretty extreme himself) is dealing with a whole different universe of crazy. Marjorie Taylor Greene explained her opposition to the bill by saying that under it, Christians could be convicted “for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews”—an age-old and classic antisemitic fable.
I’m not sure this bill is dangerous. A lot of solid liberals voted for it. I just think it’s worth noting that some Jewish members opposed it (there were three more, in addition to Nadler and Schakowsky: Sarah Jacobs of California, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, and Rebecca Balint of Vermont), in part out of concern that criticism of the policies of Israel could be construed under law as antisemitic.
Antisemitism is certainly all too real, on college campuses and across the country, and obviously, there are times when criticism of Israel can and does include antisemitic tropes. But the laws of the United States should help clarify the difference between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, not obscure it.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
On the day Donald Trump took office in January 2017, pondering what he might do to the country’s democratic norms and institutions, I wrote these words: “Trump will destroy them, if keeping Trump on top requires it. Or try to. He might not succeed. And that is where we rest our hope—on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump. Mark my words: It will come to this.”
That hope seemed not misplaced back in 2020 and 2021, when a number of liberal and conservative judges, some of the latter appointed by Trump himself, handed Trump 60 or so legal defeats as he attempted to unlawfully overturn the election results. But after Thursday at the Supreme Court? That hope is dead. The conservative judges, or at least most of them, on the highest court in the land are very clearly choosing Trump over our institutions. And none more belligerently than Samuel Alito.
His line of questioning to Michael Dreeben, the attorney arguing the special counsel’s case, was from some perverse Lewis Carroll universe:
Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?
Let’s look to something I’d have thought lawyers and judges took seriously: historical evidence. American democracy has existed for nigh on 250 years, and power has been transferred from a president to his successor a grand total of 40 times (not counting deaths in office). On 11 occasions, a challenger has defeated a sitting incumbent—that is, a situation that creates the potential for some particularly bitter and messy post-election shenanigans.
Now, if Alito’s question really spoke to a malign condition that had hobbled American democracy throughout history and that loomed as a real problem that we had to take very seriously, it would stand to reason that our history suggested that these power transfers had had a wobbly history—that maybe, say, 12 of 40, and four or five of the 11, had been characterized by violence and unusual threats of retribution against the exiting executive.
But what does the record show? It shows, of course, that there is only one case out of the overall 40, and one case out of the more narrowly defined 11, in all of U.S. history where anything abnormal and non-peaceful happened. That, of course, was 2020.
And there was a lot of bad blood in previous transfers of power. You think John Adams loved the idea of handing power to Thomas Jefferson? John Quincy Adams was popping champagne to turn things over to Andrew Jackson? Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, who traded wins, weren’t bitter in defeat? These people couldn’t stand each other. But they did what custom required—a custom never questioned by anyone until Trump came along.
So in other words: Alito throws all that democratic history out the window and treats Trump as the new normal, assuming that the American future is ineluctably strewn with a series of lawless Trumps. Alas, with respect to the Republican Party, there’s a chance time will prove him right about that (but only a chance; my cynicism about the depths to which this GOP will sink is almost limitless, but even I think that Trump is most likely sui generis in this respect, and that your average Republican, even the neofascist ones like Tom Cotton, should we be cursed with a Cotton presidency someday, would probably yield power peacefully if he lost).
But think about what it says about both where Trump has delivered this country, and about Alito’s assumptions about democracy. On the former point: Have we now reached a place where challenges to election results are going to be the norm? Where an opposition party can be counted on to find some legal technicality on which to prosecute a former president, rather than leaving him or her in peace as we have throughout our history?
This is another twisting of reality. Trump, his defenders would protest, is the one former president who has not been left in peace. Well, that is true, I confess. But maybe there’s a reason for it! Actually, there are two. Trump has not been left in peace because a) it was always obvious he was not retired, and b) he’s the only ex-president who tried to foment a coup against the United States of America and who declassified sensitive national security documents with his beautiful brain.
And on the latter point: When George W. Bush named him to the court in 2005, experts told us—of course—that Alito was conservative, yes, but not an extremist (interestingly, Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald’s sister under whom Alito had worked as a prosecutor, was among those recommending Alito’s nomination). As The New Yorker reported in a 2022 profile, Alito was asked in 2014 to name a character trait that hadn’t served him well. His answer? A tendency to hold his tongue. Well, that problem’s been solved, eh? As writer Margaret Talbot noted of the justice, who ignored Chief Justice John Roberts’s importunings to strike a balance in the Dobbs decision, which he wrote: “He’s holding his tongue no longer. Indeed, Alito now seems to be saying whatever he wants in public, often with a snide pugnaciousness that suggests his past decorum was suppressing considerable resentment.”
And this week, he told us, in essence, that in his view democracy depends on allowing presidents to commit federal crimes, because if ex-presidents were to be prosecuted for such things, the United States would become a banana republic. That’s a Supreme Court justice saying that. And while Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and even Clarence Thomas didn’t go that far Thursday, it was obvious that the court’s conservatives are maneuvering to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn’t see the light of day before the election—in other words, that a sitting president who very clearly wanted Congress to overturn a constitutionally certified election result (about this there is zero dispute) should pay no price for those actions.
When I wrote seven years ago that we rested our hope on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump, trust me, I wasn’t saying I was confident that they would. I was terrified that that day would eventually come. It came yesterday. The conservative jurists chose Trump. It will stand as one of the blackest days in Supreme Court history.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
Surprised by Bill Barr? Don’t be. Oh, yes, it’s shocking that he said on Fox News on Wednesday night that if push comes to shove, he’ll be voting for what he euphemistically referred to as “the Republican ticket.” I’m not denying that it is. The frequency and ferocity with which Barr has attacked Donald Trump—a “consummate narcissist” whose second term would be “chaos” and a “horror show”—has led many people to believe that there was no way on God’s earth he’d endorse Trump.
Barr hates disorder and all the rest of it. But he hates something else more: liberalism. And when I heard the endorsement news Thursday morning, my mind raced back to October 2019, and a speech Barr gave at Notre Dame University on government, religion, and the perceived assault thereupon. It was shocking to me at the time—as extreme (though evidently quite honest) a profession of fears and lamentations about modern secular society as you’re likely to hear at an Opus Dei convention, let alone from a sitting U.S. attorney general.
The speech’s, and the man’s, core philosophy were laid out in these sentences:
No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.
But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.
On the other hand, unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous—licentiousness—the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny—where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.
Barr reaches into his hat to grab a few statistics that allegedly make his point about the sewer into which we have descended. First up, out-of-wedlock births, which have indeed gone up since the 1960s from under 10 percent to around 40 percent. Is the main culprit here that society has lost its religious moorings? Some would put that spin on it, sure.
But specifically, social science seems to have settled on these explanations: wider availability of birth control and abortion (things that Barr laments but are available in just about every developed nation in the world) and the ending, starting in the 1970s, of shotgun marriages. Barr surely thinks this an evil. I would imagine a lot of Americans consider it not a bad thing at all that two immature and incompatible 19-year-olds aren’t forced to marry out of a social convention that traps them in a probably unhappy marriage where the wife may end up the victim of some kind of abuse.
He also cites “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.” Again, all true. But the society for which he pines didn’t even measure many of these things and locked mentally ill people away in facilities where we wouldn’t put dogs today. And is the answer to these ills greater piety, or maybe more opportunity in the places that forge all these alienated young men?
It was a very revealing and, as I say, honest speech. He regrets pretty much everything that has happened in America since Elvis. He uses the phrase “moral chaos” twice. And he clearly believes we are in an age of secular tyranny.
So you see, Barr is against Trump, but not in the same way that you and I are. He eventually took a stand against Trump, but let’s recall that it did take him a long time. It wasn’t until Trump’s election denialism after the 2020 election that it all became too much for Barr to swallow. Until then, he was with Trump all the way: through the Muslim ban, through the family separation policies, through the Putin love, through the climate denialism, through the various expressions of racism, through the relentless dividing of the country into an Us and a Them, through the reactionary response to George Floyd’s killing, through the famous walk across Lafayette Park to use a Bible as a prop for the cameras, in which Barr, I remind you, was a happy participant—through every bit of it.
But he objected when Trump tried to overthrow democracy. And good on him for doing so. His was a necessary voice at a crucial, brittle time.
But now we see the real nature of Barr’s Trump opposition. Many conservatives have beheld Trump, contemplated how the GOP could have come to this, and become pretty different people than they used to be—Stuart Stevens, Nicolle Wallace, Jennifer Rubin, many others. That the party and the movement of which they were once proud members was so easily captured by Trump made them see the hollow core of its belief system, and they took on a new belief system instead.
Barr has had no such revelation. Trump the election denier was a danger to the republic. Everything else, though, was jake.
So let’s not kid ourselves. There are a lot of Barr Republicans out there, and it’s clear how they’re going to vote. “A continuation of the Biden administration,” Barr said on Fox, “would be national suicide.” The tyranny of licentiousness. He laid it all out for us back in South Bend.
It’s been pathetic over these recent years to watch people impute certain skills to Donald Trump. Oh, he’s very smart politically. He’s charismatic. It’s all nonsense. It’s political commentators trying to assess him in normal political terms, which only ends up presenting him as a normal politician, which he decidedly is not.
He isn’t smart. In fact, about politics, he’s quite dumb. He has precisely one skill: He knows how to sniff out people’s worst qualities—weakness, envy, anger—and bring them to the fore. That’s it. I’ll grant that this skill got him elected president once and may again. But that doesn’t make it admirable, and it doesn’t mean we should ascribe to him qualities he doesn’t remotely have.
He proved again this week how dumb he is about politics with his new abortion rights position. Earlier this week, I published a column based on the assumption that he was going to back a national 15-week ban. I wrote it on Sunday. It posted Monday at 6 a.m. Then, at around 7:20 a.m., he released his video that made my column moot: no 15-week ban from Trump, but an announcement that it should be up to the states.
Backing a 15-week ban would have been smart politics. He could have sold that as a “moderate” position, even though it isn’t. But fifteen weeks polls well. A February survey showed 48 percent of people backing a 16-week ban, with only 36 percent opposed. And more generally, of course, about two-thirds of Americans in poll after poll say abortion should be generally available with some restrictions.
The embrace of a 15- or 16-week ban would have left plenty of space between Trump and his party’s anti-abortion extremists. It would have enabled him to say, when some deep-red state passed some draconian ban, “No, I don’t agree with that at all; here’s my position, 15 weeks.”
But now? I remember thinking Monday morning that hypothetically, his new “states’ rights” position meant that any extremist position adopted by any state could now be hung around his neck.
The gods sure have a sense of drama because barely 24 hours passed before we went from hypothetical to all too real, when the Arizona state Supreme Court turned the clock back to General Sherman’s march to Atlanta. The decision, reinstating a near-total abortion ban passed in 1864, nearly a half-century before Arizona became a state, was politically shocking and morally repulsive to millions of Americans and Arizonans.
A Trump who’d come out for a 15-week ban could have credibly distanced himself from the decision. Everyone would have bought it. But a Trump who says, as he did on Monday, let’s let the states decide it, owns what the Arizona court did. He later tried to insist, in speaking to reporters Wednesday on the Atlanta tarmac, that he found the position too extreme. But he had just said two days before that states should set their own laws.
So he’s going to get absolutely pounded on this, and deservedly so. Vice President Kamala Harris is headed to Arizona today for a campaign event. According to Playbook, here’s what she is expected to say: “We all must understand who is to blame.It is the former president, Donald Trump. It is Donald Trump who, during his campaign in 2016, said women should be punished for seeking an abortion.”
Boom. Trump just made a huge target of himself—especially with that part of the video where he bragged about putting the justices on the Supreme Court who overturned Roe.
With his position, Trump has tacitly endorsed every severe anti-abortion law in the country. Fourteen states have made abortion illegal since the Dobbs decision. Trump owns every one of those laws. Suppose between now and November, a doctor in Texas is prosecuted for having performed an abortion—a felony punishable by up to life in prison. That will be Trump’s creation every bit as much as the prosecutor who brought the case.
And paradoxically, Trump also owns the positions of the 10 or so states that have liberalized their positions since Dobbs. Some states have enshrined reproductive freedom in their state constitutions. Trump owns that now too.
His pathetic tarmac performance this week showed that he barely knows what he’s talking about. My guess is that the position he took came from two imperatives. One, he heard from abortion rights foes in the GOP and the evangelical world that a 15-week ban was squishy and RINO-ish. Two, someone told him to say “states’ rights” because the phrase lands gently on the conservative ear, and a substanceless person like Trump just thinks that saying a phrase takes care of everything.
He is going to get slaughtered on this issue because of this new position. He says he won’t sign a federal ban. Fine. But that’s not much comfort to the large majorities who want reasonable abortion laws. And there are all those film clips of him bragging about ending Roe. And he’s a liar, so his word is as dependable as a share of Truth Social stock. He has spent his life contradicting himself, saying one thing Tuesday and the other thing Wednesday, and denying he ever said things he said a hundred times. But he’ll learn this year that people have memories.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
Finally, the Biden administration appears to be starting to get serious with Benjamin Netanyahu. The president’s 30-minute phone call with the prime minister on Thursday was tense. The same day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said with respect to Israel’s Gaza actions: “If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there’ll be changes in our own policy.”
It’s sad that it takes the tragic killing of seven workers for the great global humanitarian José Andrés, as opposed to the piles upon piles of dead Palestinian babies, to spur this change. And, of course, it’s not even really a change yet. It’s a threat of a change down the road if certain behaviors continue. As has been widely noted, on the same day the World Central Kitchen workers were killed by the Israel Defense Forces, the Biden administration approved sending more than 2,000 additional bombs to Israel. But this new tone from the White House is already yielding some results: Israel took immediate steps to increase the flow of aid to Gaza.
The invasion of Gaza is first and foremost a moral calamity. Alongside the wanton death, there is the imminence of massive famine (well, it was declared “imminent” in a March 18 report; it may be happening right now). A recent U.N. report calculated that the destruction of Gaza has been so severe that it will be—get this—2092 before Gaza is returned to its 2022 GDP levels.
But it is also a potential political calamity for Joe Biden. If this war is still happening in October, he will lose the election. Democrats right now very strongly back a cease-fire. In a March 27 poll, both Democrats and independents disapproved of Israel’s actions; just 18 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of independents approve of how Israel is prosecuting the war.
Biden has stuck with Israel, and with Netanyahu, through all this. Partly this is sincere, driven by a combination of horror at Hamas’s savage attacks last October and views on Zionism formed decades ago when Israel was a liberal democracy surrounded by hostile, mostly illiberal neighbors.
But it’s probably part political calculation too, based on another reflex that goes back many decades in Washington: that to oppose an Israeli government’s actions is to risk being tagged as “anti-Israel” by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and thereby to risk losing Jewish votes.
That may still be true. AIPAC is still very powerful. But there are also a lot of reasons to think that the politics of this situation among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have changed dramatically in the last decade, especially among young people. And between 2020 and 2024 alone, eight million new voters are aging into the electorate.
But this isn’t just about people’s views on Israel. It’s about their views of Biden. He risks being seen here as not his own man. An old Bill Clinton quote has been kicking around in the media in recent weeks: After his first meeting in 1996 with an arrogant Netanyahu, Clinton asked his aides, “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Netanyahu has only grown more arrogant over the years, which is astonishing. Consider: He’s extremely unpopular in Israel. He’s running a hard-right government that was the target of massive demonstrations since the time it was formed. He’s holding onto his office—and thus prolonging the war—to stay out of jail. His government and military let October 7 unfold for hours with no response. Beyond that, he’s been fine with Hamas running Gaza and letting Qatar finance that for years.
And on top of all that, between now and November, he’s going to be playing a game of chicken with Biden. Cut me off, he’ll taunt, and I’ll be more open about my presidential preference (which, obviously, is Donald Trump).
Biden needs to show Netanyahu, to go back to Clinton’s question, who the superpower is here. It will be risky, sure. But I think at this point the greater risk is in the president of the United States looking like the prime minister of a country of fewer than 10 million people can push him around.
Presidents have stood up to Israeli prime ministers before. It’s not like it’s some outlandish, radical idea. As I write these words Friday morning, I just saw former TNR editor Peter Beinart on Morning Joe pointing out that Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush all attached conditions to aid to Israel when they felt Israel wasn’t acting in America’s interests—and that it usually worked.
In that last case, it was 1991 when Bush Sr. and his secretary of state, James Baker, held up $10 billion in aid that right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir wanted to use for resettlement of Soviet Jews in the occupied territories. Bush and Baker said no. Things got intense. One Israeli Cabinet minister called Bush a “liar” and even an “antisemite.” But Shamir backed down. (Yes, Bush lost the next election, but it wasn’t remotely because of Israel.)
People are questioning Biden’s ability to lead at his age. He may lose some Jewish votes in standing up to Netanyahu—although it’s hard to see a state where any such losses would make a difference in Electoral College terms (Biden is not going to lose New York or California, and no, despite this week’s little hypelet, he’s not winning Florida). But if he doesn’t draw a line, and this war is still happening and the United States is still seen as complicit in all this come the fall, he’ll likely lose a lot more.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
The standard commentary on Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA Bible” is that while of course it’s cynical and twisted and borderline sacrilegious, there’s also no doubt that his people are going to buy it by the carload, because these people would buy a bag of Trump Dogshit from the guy (“from the bowels of the best dogs, everybody says so”). Some people are just that, well, let us say easily taken in.
Trump’s dark penchant for hucksterism is endless, and P.T. Barnum’s dictum is as true today as it was when he said it. You could take slips of paper on which you write the names of 25 things these Americans like, pull out three or four, conjure up some physical manifestation of it, and Trump would sell it: NASCAR-Branson’s Famous Baldknobbers Beer, in limited-edition cans that show Trump as Rambo.
It’s endless. Or is it? Trump’s fundraising has taken a nosedive. His small-donor numbers are below where they once were. NBC News recently reported that donations to Trump of $200 or less are down 62.5 percent against 2019. He’s still raised a lot; I don’t want to mislead you here. The New York Times recently reported that Trump has more small donors than Joe Biden in some key swing states. But Biden has raised more from small donors overall, according to OpenSecrets. And in the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Trump had $33.5 million cash on hand and Biden reported having $71 million. That was March 20, before Thursday night’s Radio City Music Hall event with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, where Biden raked in $26 million.
All this is a shock to no one, because as we all know, Trump is spending a good chunk of his donations on his legal bills. The Times ran an amazing report about this on Wednesday. Of nearly $85 million in donations, almost a third, $27 million, has gone to legal bills. Hey, at least this time around, he’s apparently actually paying them.
Trump will have money. There’s no use pretending he won’t. But $400 sneakers and $60 Bibles are not signs of strength. They’re signs of weakness. Panic. Desperation. A guy who’ll sell anything that isn’t nailed to the floor.
And: He damn well should be panicked. Liberals and Democrats always impute to Republicans and right-wingers a strength they neither have nor deserve. Just because Trump tries to act like a tough guy and appeals to tough guys, liberals tend to concede he’s a tough guy. Nonsense. He’s a very weak and insecure man, as Mary Trump is always pointing out.
Physically, he’s horribly out of shape: probably couldn’t climb a 20-step flight of stairs without stopping halfway up and, Rambo iconography notwithstanding, couldn’t throw a punch that would crush a grape. A few months ago, I saw a photo of Biden biking around Rehoboth Beach, and it struck me: Has Trump even ever been on a bicycle in his life? I’d be shocked. Biden may be older, but really, who’s the more likely stroke victim here, the guy who still rides the occasional bike or the guy who eats well-done steaks and whose four major food groups are McDonald’s, KFC, pizza, and Diet Coke?
Psychically, he’s in far, far worse shape. He knows very well in some corner of his brain that he’s guilty of everything he’s accused of. He knows that if he doesn’t win the presidency, there’s a very serious chance that he ends up convicted of one of those crimes and in prison. It won’t be Angola Penitentiary, but there won’t be chandeliers in the bathroom or an 18-hole golf course for him to win phony championships on, either.
He would never admit any of this publicly, but privately Trump is surely terrified of this possible future. He knows that if he loses, the cases go forward, and he’s going to have to fight them as long as he possibly can, and it’s going to cost untold millions. Hence the sneakers and the Bible. And there’s surely more in store.
Some people will buy these things, there’s no question of that. But I’ll bet you that if we look hard six months from now, we’ll see that sales did not meet expectations. Of course, we’ll never know that because Trump will have full control of that narrative, and he’ll insist that sales were off the charts, and the press will print it. But we’ve seen this movie and heard this b.s. Trump Steaks were moving faster than they could cut them. Trump University was making millionaires out of many, many people. Right.
So let’s avert our gaze from the people who’d walk across hot coals for Donald Trump (while he stood off to the side, pleading bone spurs) and think instead about the ones who are slowly peeling off. They’re out there too. And they’re starting to see what you and I have so obviously seen for years: a twisted, desperate huckster who’s never cracked a Bible in his life and whose only religion is hustling the suckers who are born every minute.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
James Comer, that caged monkey with a cocaine drip, just can’t stop. He wants President Biden to come to his House committee to testify. At the end of a hearing on Wednesday that was just an abject humiliation for his party and for him personally, Comer actually said with a straight face: “In the coming days I will invite President Biden to the Oversight Committee to provide his testimony and explain why his family received tens of millions of dollars.… We need to hear from the president himself.”
The White House reacted with an appropriate “LOL,” and there’s no sign I’ve seen that Comer is planning on issuing the president a subpoena, which would be insane. But who’s to say he won’t one day?
Ah, interesting question. Because there is a precise answer to who’s to say he won’t: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, Sean Hannity, and everyone else at Fox who runs the Republican Party. This whole thing happened because Fox wanted it to happen. And therein lies a lesson for all of us about how a morally corrupt entity, which settled a lawsuit for three-quarters of a billion dollars because its executives were mortified about what the country was likely to learn about how they do business, has perverted American democracy.
As Media Matters’s Matt Gertz wrote at MSNBC.com this week, “The House Republican impeachment inquiry satisfied Fox stars’ long-standing demands for a Biden impeachment, which began before he was even elected.” Fox and the New York Post and other right-wing outlets tried to make Hunter Biden an issue in the 2020 campaign. They claimed a great victory over the snaring of Hunter’s laptop, although we still don’t know what was on it that was supposedly so incriminating.
Then, after the GOP captured the House in the 2022 midterms, Fox shoved it into overdrive. Hannity, Gertz notes, did 325 segments on Hunter in 2023. Think of that. There are only 260 weekdays in a year. So that’s many shows with two segments. Which of course the story deserved, because the Biden crime family was the biggest scandal in American history!
Except there is no story, and no Biden crime family. Everything Comer and Jim Jordan have charged has collapsed. Everything. The Democrats on Comer’s committee drew attention Wednesday to the parade of schmegegges the Republicans have marched up to the Hill. Tony Bobulinski’s testimony has been riddled with inconsistencies, and he has his own alleged Russian connections, The Daily Beast reported. Jason Galanis has said nothing of importance that we know of that’s been substantiated. Alexander Smirnov was a great key witness; then he was indicted, and suddenly Comer said he “wasn’t an important part” of the probe. But my favorite is Gal Luft, whom Comer once described as “very credible.” Luft alleged that the Bidens received payments from China—then was indicted on allegations that he himself was an agent for China (he denies this).
But Comer kept it going, and he kept it going for one simple reason: Fox News, and the rest of the right-wing media following its lead, set up a very clear reward system. Comer and Jordan, and anyone else who cared to, make allegations; they get invited on Fox to talk them up; the small-dollar donations come in from the suckers who believe this spittle; and lies get filtered out into the discourse by a non-right-wing media that wants scoops and clicks but also fears in the back of its collective mind that it’s just possible that the Republicans are onto something and that if they dismiss that possibility, they’re guilty of liberal bias.
It’s the right-wing propaganda equivalent of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous stages of grief. The five stages of right-wing propaganda: Assert, repeat, raise money, repeat again, blame the deep state when it falls apart. But now there is a sixth stage, which is when even Fox taps on the brakes and tells stooges like Comer, OK, you idiot, you have failed, it’s time to move on. This gives Fox the richly undeserved opportunity to look “responsible,” after five years of suggesting that Joe Biden was the most corrupt person in America since Boss Tweed.
None of it would have happened without the existence of this Fox doom loop. A lot of things wouldn’t have happened. Donald Trump’s march to the 2016 nomination wouldn’t have happened without Fox. Once Rupert saw that the enraged base he and Roger Ailes had spent two decades creating was demanding nothing less than an openly racist demagogue who talked smack on everyone Fox and Rush Limbaugh had taught them to despise, he decided to pave Trump’s way. Fox could have ended Trump’s rise at any point it wanted to in 2015 or 2016, but Trump was too good for business, and besides, he was the network’s unchecked id.
This is what happens to a democracy when a “news” organization becomes the command headquarters of a political party. And it is that—the command headquarters. It is not an “arm” of the GOP, as is often said; it is the brain, which sounds like a big statement but isn’t, really, since the GOP auto-lobotomized years ago.
Remember, that other lawsuit is coming—a judge ruled in January that the Smartmatic suit could proceed, rejecting Fox’s arguments. Smartmatic says Fox aired lies about the voting company as it repeated its false story line about the 2020 election. Fox says the suit is a baseless attempt to infringe upon its free speech rights.
People are reportedly being deposed now. There’s reason to think that, someday, we’ll see those depositions. They’ll tell us, again, what the Dominion lawsuit depositions told us. With any luck, this one will go to trial and Scott and others will have to place their hands on a Bible and swear to tell the truth, assuming their flesh doesn’t catch fire once it touches the good book. Then, maybe, America will finally see.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
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