Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, explained why the newspaper’s coverage annoys Trump supporters:
Archives for category: Trump
Thom Hartmann warns that we will install a fascist regime if Trump should be re-elected.
Every one of us must do what we can to prevent this from happening.
Our democracy has many defects and it sorely needs fundamental change, but it needs change for the better, not change for the worse. We need a government that will roll back the rule of the oligarchy, we need more equality of wealth and income, we need fewer billionaires, we need Medicare for all, we need to reverse Citizens United. We need many changes. But we don’t need fascism.
Hartmann writes:
Fascism doesn’t typically take over countries by military means (WWII’s temporary order notwithstanding); instead, it relies on rhetoric.
Words. Speeches. News conferences. Rallies. Media. Money. And they all point in one direction: violence in service of the fascist leader.
The rhetorical embrace and appreciation of violence is one of the cardinal characteristics of fascism, and a big step was taken this week in a New York City courtroom to push back against the current fascist campaign being waged by Donald Trump against our American form of government.
Noting that Trump’s “statements were threatening, inflammatory, [and] denigrating” Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order on the orange fraudster and rapist, forbidding him from further attacks against the court’s staff, the DA’s staff, witnesses, and jurors.
Why? Because all were concerned about becoming the victims of Trump’s fascist army.
Because the judge omitted himself from the list, as its his job to try send bad guys to prison, Trump got slick and attacked the judge’s daughter (who’s also not on the list). Now she’sgetting death threats.
This isn’t the first time. Whenever Trump finds himself in trouble, fraud or violence follow, as has already been determined by a court in New York this month and we saw in the pattern of his presidency….
Analysts of fascism from Umberto Eco to Hannah Arendt to Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat generally agree on a core set of characteristics of a fascist movement. It includes:
— A romantic idealization of a fictional past (“Make America Great Again”)
— Clear definition of an enemy within that is not quite human but an “other” (“vermin,” “rats,” “animals,” all phrases Trump has used just in past weeks to describe immigrants and employees of our criminal justice system)
— Vilification of the media (“fake news” or lugenpresse)
— Repeated attacks on minorities and immigrants as a rallying point for followers (shared hatred often binds people together)
— Disparagement of elections and the rule of law (because neither favors the fascist movement)
— Glorification of political violence and martyrdom (the January 6th “patriots” and Ashley Babbitt)
— Hostility to academia and science leading to the elevation of Joe Sixpack’s ability to “do his own research” (simple answers to complex questions or issues)
— Embrace of fundamentalist religion and the moral codes associated with it
— Rejection of the rights of women and members of the queer community as part of the celebration of toxic masculinity
— Constant lies, even about seemingly inconsequential matters (Hannah Arendt noted in 1978: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”)
— Performative patriotism that replaces the true obligations of citizenship (like voting and staying informed) with jingoistic slogans, logos, and mass events: faux populism
— Collaboration with oligarchs while claiming to celebrate the average person
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement check every single box.
So did the American Confederacy and the Democratic Party it seized in the 1860s. And the American fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s (albeit, they were much smaller). And the white supremacy movement of the mid-20th century, from the KKK to the White Citizens’ Councils (ditto).
This is not our first encounter with fascism, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Nor will it be our last: fascism has a long history and an enduring appeal for insecure, angry psychopaths who want to seize political power and the great wealth or opportunity that’re usually associated with it…
Preventing a fascist takeover is not particularly complex, and there are encouraging signs that America is beginning to move in this direction. It involves a few simple steps:
— Recognize and call out the fascists and their movement as fascists
With Trump and his fascist MAGA movement, this is happening with greater and greater frequency. Yesterday, for example, the Financial Times’ highly worldwide-respected columnist Martin Wolf published an article titled Fascism has Changed, but it is Not Dead.
“[W]hat we are now seeing,” Wolf writes, “is not just authoritarianism. It is authoritarianism with fascistic characteristics.” He concludes his op-ed with: “History does not repeat itself. But it rhymes. It is rhyming now. Do not be complacent. It is dangerous to take a ride on fascism.”
For a top columnist in one of the world’s senior financial publications to call a candidate for US president and his movement fascists would have been unthinkable at any other time in modern American history. And it’s happening with greater and greater frequency across all aspects of American media.
— Debunk and ridicule extremism while ostracizing fascists from “polite company”
Increasingly, Trump’s fascist movement and those aligned with it are becoming caricatures of themselves. Book-banners and disruptors of public education are reaching the end of their fad-like existence. Moms for Liberty is a sad joke founded by some of the country’s more bizarre examples of hypocrisy; the former head of the RNC was fired from NBC for her participation in Trump’s fascist attempt to overthrow our government; and CPAC has shriveled into a hardcore rump (pun intended) faction of the conservative movement.
Political cartoonists lampoon Trump followers as toothless rubes and obese, gun-obsessed men; so many women are rejecting Republicans as dating partners that both sociologists and media have noticed; and the GOP is looking at a possible bloodbath (to use Trump’s favorite term) this November, regardless of how many billions in dark money their billionaires throw into the races. We saw the first indicator of that this week in Alabama.
— Support democratic institutions and politicians who promote democracy
The media landscape of America has become centralized, with a handful of massive and mostly conservative corporations and billionaires owning the majority of our newspapers, radio and TV stations, and online publications.
Nonetheless, there are many great online publications beating the drum for democracy, and many allow subscriptions or donations. My list includes Raw Story, Alternet, Daily Kos, Common Dreams, Salon, Talking Points Memo, The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, The Guardian, Democratic Underground, Jacobin, OpEdNews, Slate, and Free Speech TV. In addition, there are dozens of worthwhile publications that share this Substack platform with Hartmann Report: you can find my recommendations here. And I’m live daily on SirusXM Channel 127 (Progress) and on Free Speech TV, as are many of my progressive colleagues. Read, use, listen, share, and support them.
There are also multiple organizations dedicated to promoting democracy and democratic values in America. They range from your local Democratic Party to Indivisible, Progressive Democrats of America, Move to Amend, MoveOn.org, Roots Action, Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), EMILY’s List, Run for Something, NextGen America, Advancement Project, League of Women Voters, Democracy Initiative, Common Cause, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
Other democratic institutions we should be supporting by joining, donating, or participating in their governance include public schools, libraries, city councils, county government groups, etc. When MAGA fascists show up to disrupt these institutions and intimidate their members, we should be there to defend them.
President Biden, speaking last fall at an event honoring John McCain, laid it on the line and challenged all of us:
“As I’ve said before, we’re at an inflection point in our history — one of those moments that only happens once every few generations. Where the decisions we make today will determine the course of this country — and the world — for decades to come.
“So, you, me, and every American who is committed to preserving our democracy carry a special responsibility. We have to stand up for America’s values embodied in our Declaration of Independence because we know MAGA extremists have already proven they won’t. We have to stand up for our Constitution and the institutions of democracy because MAGA extremists have made clear they won’t.
“History is watching. The world is watching. Most important, our children and grandchildren are watching.”
If you look back at old photos and videos of Trump, you are likely to see one of two scenarios. Either Trump with a beautiful babe on his arm, entering a restaurant or nightclub, or Trump selling something to the naive, whether it’s his “university” (where you will learn Trump’s secrets to getting rich), his wines, his steaks, or now his gold sneakers or his Trump-branded USA Bible. It must have been Trump-lovers who rushed to invest in the new DJT stock, because no one understands how a company could be valued at $8 billion when it reported $3.3 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023 and a loss of $49 million. The stock opened at $70.90 a share, rose to $79.38, and settled two days later at $61.96. USA Today quoted a stock observer who predicted that the vanity stock might sink to $2 a share or less.
Michael Tomasky of The New Republic is betting that the people who buy Trump schlock are wising up to the con and realizing that they have been conned and should stop sending money to help a billionaire.
Tomasky writes:
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.
*Apparently Barnum never said that famous oft-quoted line about a sucker born every minute, but he did believe in selling frauds to the gullible. https://www.thedailybeast.com/pt-barnum-makes-trump-look-like-a-clown
As one listens to Trump’s speeches, it’s hard not to hear the disjointed sentences that have no ending, the rants about “Fascists, Communists, radical leftists, Socialists,” and other targets of his rage, the non sequiturs, the slurred and meaningless words.
He and his allies frequently accuse President Biden of senility. Could Trump be projecting his own fears?
The Washington Post reported that Donald’s father suffered from dementia:
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.”
Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signs of early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this month that he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018.
Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, said in an interview that if an individual in their 70s had not taken the Montreal test since 2018, the results would not be valid to cite today.
Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent…
Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
The full story of Trump’s father’s illness, and the family turmoil it sparked, casts new light on his views of an issue that’s become central to the presidential campaign, with pollsters finding a majority of voters have concerns about the mental fitness of both Trump and Biden. Those concerns have sharpened as both candidates have had lapses on the trail, with Biden mixing up the names of the leaders of Mexico and Egypt and Trump confusing former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley with former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and warning that the United States could face “World War II” under Biden…
In the early 1970s, as Donald took a leading role in the firm, Fred Trump Sr. told the New York Times that “Donald is the smartest person I know.”
By 1990, though, the claims of Trump’s business genius were being questioned as he fell into desperate financial condition. He eventually filed six corporate bankruptcies, and he faced the prospect of personal bankruptcy as his first wife, Ivana, sought $1 billion in a divorce settlement. His high-profile casinos in Atlantic City were badly faltering.
That’s when Trump sought to change his father’s will.
Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors. He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. But Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back…”
Experts said much remains unknown about how people get Alzheimer’s, but research has shown that genetics may play a role.
In a 2020 article about the health of Biden and Trump in the journal Active Aging, the authors wrote that “Trump does face an elevated familial risk of late onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as this was a major contributor to his father’s death.” S. Jay Olshansky, the article’s lead author and professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that “the genetic risk hasn’t changed” and that he is awaiting a new medical report from Trump to update the analysis.
[Dr. Ronny] Jackson said he had never discussed genetic Alzheimer’s risks with the former president but said he would have told him “it’s nothing he should be worried about.” (A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, told The Post via email that neither of Biden’s parents had dementia.)
I promise I won’t put up a post every time Trump lies, because he lies multiple times a day. But since CNN considers this lie newsworthy, here goes.
Daniel Dale, the CNN fact-checker, wrote:
Former President Donald Trump has falsely claimed, again, that he had to post a bond in order to appeal a $454 million civil fraud judgment against him – and falsely claimed, again, that Judge Arthur Engoron did something unusual in forcing him to post a bond during the appeal process.
On Tuesday, the morning after Trump posted the $175 million bond necessary to prevent New York’s attorney general from beginning to collect on Engoron’s judgment, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee wrote on social media: “I had to pay New York State in order to appeal a corrupt decision by a biased, crooked and highly overturned judge. It’s supposed to be the other way around – you appeal before you pay. Is a crooked New York Judge allowed to make you pay for the ‘privilege’ of appealing a wrongful & corrupt decision??? NOT IN AMERICA!!!”
Trump made similar claims in March, claiming, for example, that “Engoron wants me to put up the ridiculous fine (I DID NOTHING WRONG!) before I get a chance to Appeal his crazed ruling – A first!”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are comprehensively untrue. He was not required to post a bond in order to appeal Engoron’s ruling; he began the appeal process in February, more than a month before he posted the bond. And the requirement he actually faced – to post a bond to prevent collection during the appeal process – was not “a first” or some unusual requirement created by Engoron. In fact, the requirement is set out by New York state law, and it is regularly applied in civil cases in the state.
“This is literally the way that the NY rules of court are designed to work, and actually work every day,” Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who is now a litigator in private practice in New York, told CNN in March. He said at the time that the rules being applied to Trump “are applied every day in New York courts, on verdicts of all sizes,” though the size of the judgment against Trump was notably large. Epner added: “Donald Trump is either horribly misinformed or lying.”
And there is no evidence for Trump’s repeated claims that Engoron is “crooked” or “corrupt.”
Under New York law for civil cases, it is standard to have to post a bond (or cash) in the full amount of a judgment in order to secure a stay that prevents collection during the appeal. In March, Trump falsely claimed this was an unprecedented Engoron requirement. Later in March, after Trump’s lawyers told a New York appeals court that it had proven impossible to secure a bond for more than $450 million, the appeals court decided that Trump could put up a lower amount, $175 million.
Epner told CNN at the time that “it’s highly unusual that it would be reduced at all,” and “highly unusual that it would be reduced by this amount,” though not unprecedented.
If Trump had not posted a bond and if New York Attorney General Letitia James had collected on the judgment, and then Trump had eventually won the case on appeal, James would have been required to return any collected money to Trump along with interest.
George Will is widely viewed as the dean of conservative opinion writers. He has been writing a regular column for The Washington Post for years, extolling conservative ideas and manners.
But he is repulsed by Donald Trump. Will does not like Trump’s policies, his crudeness, his vile behavior, his incivility, nor his lack of knowledge. I agree with him about that. Conservativism can’t be represented by people who have no ideas other than hatred’s, nor should they be represented by people lacking dignity.
Needless to say, Will doesn’t like the candidates who style themselves to be as vulgar as Trump.
In this column, he excoriates Kari Lake, who is running against Congressman Ruben Gallego for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat in Arizona, and businessman Bernie Moreno, who is running for Senate in Ohio. Will doesn’t want the Republicans to lose control of the Senate but as I read him, he would rather lose the Senate than see these two vulgarians elected.
He writes:
PHOENIX — From Herbert Hoover’s “a chicken for every pot” (1928) to Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” (1984), some campaign slogans have been humdingers. The slogan of Republican Kari Lake’s Senate campaign could be: “Oh, never mind.”
Here in Arizona and in Ohio, GOP Senate candidates force conservatives to choose between awful outcomes: the consequences of losing the Senate, or the disappearance of the conservative party.
Running for Arizona’s governorship in 2022, Lake practiced the kamikaze politics of subtraction. Today, she says she was joking when she told John McCain voters — they elected him to two House and six Senate terms — to “get the hell out” of a GOP event. McCain voters were not amused. She lost, then mimicked her hero, saying that her election was stolen. Courts disagreed.
Today, she seems intermittently aware that many Arizonans are weary of her high-decibel imitation of Donald Trump’s sour, self-absorbed, backward-looking, fact-free, sore-loser, endless grievance tour. So, she sometimes seems to say of her protracted harping on 2022: Oh, never mind.
In Ohio, Bernie Moreno is running against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown.
Bernie Moreno once called Trump a “maniac” and a “lunatic” akin to “a car accident that makes you sick.” He scoffed at Trump’s claims of election fraud and called the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters “morons” and “criminals.” But Trump, like a marsupial, has tucked Moreno into his pouch, and the amazingly malleable Moreno calls (as does Lake) the Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners” and says the 2020 election was “stolen,” Joe Biden should be impeached and Trump is swell.
Moreno, who projects the Trumpkins’ chest-thumping faux toughness, disdains bipartisanship. Evidently, he plans to advance his agenda with 60 Republican votes. There have not been 60 Republican senators since 1910…
The nation no longer has a reliably conservative party of sound ideas and good manners. If conservatism is again to be ascendant in their party, Republicans must stop electing the likes of Lake and Moreno. They would join other chips-off-the-orange-block in a Senate caucus increasingly characterized by members who have anti-conservative agendas, from industrial policy (government allocation of capital, which is socialism) to isolationism. And whose unconservative temperaments celebrate coarseness as an indicator of political authenticity and treat performative poses as substitutes for governance.
Gallego and Brown are mistaken about much, but they are not repulsive. Conservatives can refute them and, by persuading electoral majorities, repeal or modify progressive mischief. The new breed of anti-conservative Republicans think persuasion, and the patience of politics, is for “squishes,” a favorite epithet of proudly loutish Trumpkins, who, like Lake and Moreno, seem to think the lungs are the location of wisdom.
The current version of Moreno says: About my talk regarding the maniac, lunatic, sickening-car-accident Trump? Oh, never mind. Moreno and Lake are useful, if only as indexes of today’s political squalor. Neither, however, should be a senator.
Dana Milbank, columnist for The Washington Post, wrote that Trump is counting on voters to forget how chaotic it was when he was President. Even now, we are daily inundated with the chaos that, as Nikki Haley said, always follows in Trump’s wake.
Milbank reminds us of the character of the man who would be President again or dictator for a day:
The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.
This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.
“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”
Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.
The previous day, Trump held a news conference where he nailed some equally puzzling planks onto his platform.
“We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” he announced.
Also: “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already.”
And, most peculiar of all: “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”
If he can’t recall that elections frequently do overlap with political seasons, then he surely can’t be expected to remember what was happening at this point in 2020. “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” he asked last week. The poor fellow must have forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.
Or maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he’s just hoping the rest of us will forget. In a sense, Trump’s prospects for 2024 rely on Americans experiencing mass memory loss: Will we forget just how crazy things were when he was in the White House? And will we forget about the even crazier things he has said he would do if he gets back there?
This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from antiabortion forces who want to ban mifepristone, the pill used in about 60 percent of abortions. But just as the justices were taking up the case, Trump’s own proposal to ban the abortion pill vanished.
The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.
About seven in 10 Americans believe the abortion pill should be legal. So it’s easy to see why Trump might wish to erase his plan to ban the pill — just as he would like to erase his calls for the repeal of Obamacare, which has the support of 6 in 10 Americans.
The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.
Trump and some vulnerable congressional Republicans might wish that Americans will forget such things by November. But it’s all there in black and white.
Trump is a man of greatness. So says Trump. “It is my great honor to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach tonight, AWARDS NIGHT, to receive the CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY & THE SENIOR CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY,” he proclaimed over the weekend. “I WON BOTH!
So much winning. “Congratulations, Donald,” President Biden tweeted. “Quite the accomplishment.”
Trump won a more significant victory on Monday, when an appellate panel reduced the bond he needs to post as he appeals a fraud verdict against him to $175 million from $454 million. Trump didn’t have enough cash to secure the larger bond. But at a news conference he assured reporters that he was still really, really rich: “I have a lot of money … I don’t need to borrow money. I have a lot of money. … I have a lot of cash. … I have a lot of cash and a great company. … I have very low debt. … I built a phenomenal company that’s very low leverage, unbelievably low leverage with a lot of cash, a lot of everything else.”
Give that man another trophy.
Trump seemed particularly hurt that the judge in the fraud case valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million, he said, when “half of the living room is worth more than that. So it’s worth anywhere from 50 to 100 times that amount.”
Give that man $1.8 billion for Mar-a-Lago, and another trophy.
Actually, Trump’s supporters have already given him about $5 billion this week — at least on paper — for doing nothing at all. His Truth Social went public, and even though it had a loss of $49 million in the first nine months of 2023 on revenue of just $3.4 million, it was valued at more than $8 billion. That’s because Trump’s fans, wanting a piece of the action, bid up the price. The stock in the company will almost certainly collapse. The only question is whether Trump can unload his shares before then (he’s supposed to keep them for six months) and leave his supporters once again holding the bag.
Trump uses Truth Social to post doctored articles about him that omit negative details, and now he’s making up stuff about Truth Social. He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”
Trump must not have a lot of faith that he’ll make off with his billions before the Truth Social bubble bursts, because he’s actively seeking other ways to grift. This week he started hawking bibles.
“Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again,” Trump posted. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.” He directed his supporters to a website selling the Good Book for $59.99 a copy.
The website boasts: “Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” Read on and you find out that the bible mongers are using Trump’s name and likeness “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC,” a company owned by Trump.
Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.
Trump has an arms-length relationship with the Bible, which he brandished outside a church near Lafayette Square after protesters were dispersed with tear gas; he once referred to a passage from Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” and, at another point, couldn’t come up with a favorite Bible verse.
But the man does have a God complex. His campaign has promoted a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump.” He has called himself “the chosen one” and has shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus.
This week, Trump shared another post with a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion: “It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you,” the message said, along with Trump’s reply: “Beautiful, thank you!”
A crucial difference, however, is that Jesus was not facing a trial over hush money paid to a porn actress. The judge in that case, Juan Merchan, said the trial will begin on April 15. Trump responded to this news by attacking the judge because his daughter works for a Democratic consulting firm. The judge slapped a gag order on Trump blocking him from harassing jurors and people who work for the judge or for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and their families. Trump responded with another attack on the judge and his daughter (who weren’t included in the gag order). Merchan is “suffering from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump said of the judge, postulating that “maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump.’”
If there is a trophy for pretrial self-sabotage, Trump wins that one, too.
Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party grew yet tighter this week. The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee have been asked during job interviews whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen. (The correct answer, from the RNC’s perspective, is “Hell yes.”)
Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, installed as RNC co-chair this month as part of a pro-Trump purge, this week brought Scott Presler to party headquarters. “Exciting things to come!” she promised. No doubt: Presler was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, promotes QAnon conspiracy ideas, planned “stop the steal” events, and organized “March Against Sharia” protests in his work for an anti-Islam group.
As for the Trump effort to win over disenchanted Nikki Haley voters, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times that he has opted to “bypass any sort of reconciliation” with her. Said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon: “Screw Nikki Haley — we don’t need her endorsement.”
But the MAGA takeover goes far deeper than personnel. Consider the wild conspiracy theories that came from the Trump crowd right after a massive cargo ship lost power and struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it. “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” asked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), demanding an investigation. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo invited speculation about the “potential for foul play given the wide-open border.” Others blamed racial-diversity policies.
Nothing shows the thoroughness of the MAGA takeover of the GOP as well as the House’s Republican Study Committee budget. The group is the GOP mainstream now, counting some 172 of the 218 House Republicans as members, including many from swing districts and five — Juan Ciscomani and David Schweikert (Ariz.), Mike Garcia (Calif.), Don Bacon (Neb.) and Brandon Williams (N.Y.) from districts Biden won.
Yet here the RSC is, embracing a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions; a ban on the abortion pill, an increase in the retirement age for Social Security; defunding the police (through cuts to the Community Oriented Policing Services program); ending Amtrak funding and selling it off; eliminating broadband provided by the Affordable Connectivity Program; and blocking the “red flag” provisions that keep guns from dangerous people.
This is what Republicans will do next year if Trump wins the White House and Republicans control Congress. Don’t forget it.
Trump claims to love “law and order,” but he continually incites violence. He incited the single most violent uprising in our history against the law and the Constitution on January 6, 2021. And he treated the Capitol police with contempt, those defending law and order.
He regularly attacks the judicial system—the bastion of law and order—because he is under multiple indictments.
He writes posts on social media intended to incite hatred, division, and yes, violence.
He recently paid a visit to the wake of a New York City policeman who was murdered by a criminal. It was performative politics.
The father and brother of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after defending the U.S. Capitol, slammed Trump for playing politics. Trump did not pay a condolence call to the families of police officers who died after the riot that Trump incited. He didn’t visit any injured police officers in the hospital. Instead, he refers to those who beat up the police as “patriots.” This is sick and twisted. The people who menaced the Congress, threatened to kill the Vice-President, and damaged the seat of government are, to Trump, “patriots” and those who were convicted for their violence are “hostages.” Not the police who defended Congress. Not those who defended law and order.
Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic about Trump’s obsession with violence, about his encouragement of violence, about his threats and intimidation.
He wrote:
On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.
The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.
Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched.
But Griffin is not a former president seeking once again to become commander in chief of the armed forces and the top law-enforcement authority in the United States. And Griffin did not incite a mob of rioters—some of whom were bent on homicide—to attack the Capitol. Donald Trump is, and he did.
Meanwhile, Trump also had words last week for the people trying to hold him accountable—or, more accurately, for their children. The day before he promoted imagery depicting the torture of the sitting president, Trump fired off a Truth Social post in which he mentioned the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over his hush-money criminal trial: “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately,” Trump wrote. “His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me.”
Then, on Saturday, Trump blasted out a New York Post article that included Loren Merchan’s picture to his followers.
Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”
Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.
Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)
After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?…
Unfortunately, we’re not getting much help in making those determinations from some of the media. On Sunday morning, for example, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press noted that Trump had “stepped up his attacks on the judge and his family in the New York hush money case” and is “falsely calling the criminal proceedings ‘election interference.’” Her verdict: “It is yet another reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”
Well, sure, that’s one way to put it. More accurately, however, we might say that a mostly coherent and decent nation is under electoral assault from a violent seditionist minority that has captured one of our two national parties, and its leader encourages and condones threats against officials at every level across the country, including threats of violence against the sitting president of the United States.
Every ardent Trump supporter should be asked when enough’s enough. And every elected Republican, including the sad lot now abasing themselves for a spot on Trump’s ticket or in his possible Cabinet, should be asked when they will risk their careers for the sake of the country, if not their souls. We have reached an important moment—one of many over the past years, if we are to be honest. After all we have learned and seen, and all of the questions we might ask of Trump supporters, perhaps only one simple and direct question truly matters now:
Is this who you are?…
In my view, Trump’s behavior towards others is vile, immature, narcissistic, and pathological. Anyone who is a critic or antagonist to Trump is treated with hatred and contempt. They deserve punishment. They should be hog-tied and beaten. They should be publicly shamed. They are not competitors, they are enemies. When Trump identifies them as such, they are certain to get death threats, threats of violence.
This is not normal. Trump has the mind of a mafia boss or a ruthless authoritarian.. He demands total loyalty. Those unwilling to embrace him and his lies and hatreds are cast out. This is not normal.
The reckoning for Donald Trump’s highly overvalued social media company is coming faster than anyone expected. The stock debuted a few days ago at $70 a share, rose to $78, then dropped into the 60s. Today the stock price plunged after the company reported its losses for 2023. At 3:30 pm, it was selling for $48.07.
Drew Harwell of The Washington Post wrote:
Former president Donald Trump’s social media company said Monday it lost more than $58 million last year, sending its stock plunging roughly 25 percent only days after a highflying public debut valued it at more than $8 billion.
Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday that the company generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including less than $1 million in the last quarter of 2023.
The nosediving share price of the company — which uses the stock ticker DJT, for Trump’s initials — shaved off a quarter of its market value in a single day. It also slashed the value of Trump’s 57 percent ownership in the company by roughly $1 billion, to $3.6 billion.
The new financial figures throw into stark relief the gap between Trump Media’s highly hyped investor-driven valuation on the public stock market and the reality of its business performance.
It also raises questions about the possibility that Trump could use the company as a financial lifeline. Trump cannot sell his shares or use them as collateral for a loan for six months due to a provision in the company’s merger agreement, known as a lockup.
The company’s board could vote to waive that requirement but has yet to do so, the filings state. Cashing out early could sink the stock price further by flooding the market with shares and undermining investor confidence in Trump’s commitment to the brand, financial analysts said.
Trump, who invested no money in Trump Media, was given 78 million shares of the company last week and stands to earn tens of millions more over the next three years if the stock stays above $12 to $17, a filing shows.
Trump Media said in a filing that it expects to incur more “operating losses and negative cash flows” as it works to expand its user base but that it expects its growth will come from Truth Social’s “overall appeal.”
The company said in a filing that its management had “substantial doubt” as of the end of last year that it would have enough money to pay its debts as they come due. The company paid nearly $40 million in interest expenses last year and racked up about $16 million in operating losses.
Thanks to our friend Rick Charvet for sharing this very interesting clip from “Morning Joe,” in which Mika B. describes how Trump and Biden each spent Easter.
Trump apparently did not go to church and didn’t have much time for his family. Instead, he spent the day posting comments on his social media platform Truth Social. He posted 77 times. Seventy-seven times. He even posted notes from members of his cult likening him to Jesus.
In what ways is he like Jesus? Jesus was a teacher, a man beloved for his kindness, humility, compassion, and love for those in poverty, those in greatest need.
From Matthew:
Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
But when the young man heard this, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ll say it again—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!
What did Biden do? He went to church with family.
Diane Ravitch's blog 