Trump is wounded but not done
There is some good news out there: Democrats keep winning post-Dobbs elections. A recent poll from Univision shows Latinos trust Democrats more than Republicans to lower their cost of living (their No. 1 concern). As you saw yesterday, better polls than the Washington Post’s admitted outlier show Joe Biden better positioned for 2024 than the soon-to-be bankrupt Donald Trump.
The GOP is determined to shut down the government, doing no one any favors. The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson summed up the GOP debate Wednesday night by posting, “I’ve attended probably 30 primary debates and watched most of them over the last 30 years. This is the most shambolic trainwreck I’ve ever seen.”
Nevertheless, the threat of violence persists from the fringe right when democracy does not hand them the power they demand. Eric Levitz writes:
Last Friday, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner suggested that America’s top general deserves to die. In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump accused chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley of committing treason, “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Specifically, Trump wrote that Milley had been “dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States,” and that this “treasonous act” could have triggered a war between the two countries. The ex-president was seemingly referring to a report that Milley had called his Chinese counterpart shortly before the 2020 election, and after the January 6 insurrection, to assure him that the United States was stable and that Trump would not be ordering any attack against China on his way out the door. Given that this accurately conveyed the administration’s posture, and that the U.S. had no interest in tricking a nuclear-weapons state into believing that America was about to attack it, it’s difficult to see how Milley’s calls would have constituted treason.
Of course, it’s not remarkable for Trump to issue a baseless (yet incendiary) allegation against one of his critics. What is noteworthy — or at least, should be — is a leading presidential candidate deliberately trying to intimidate his perceived enemies through tacit threats of violence. And it seems fair to conclude that this is precisely what Trump is up to.
The ex-president’s remarks about Milley came amid a surge of violent threats against federal law enforcement, threats that his own rhetoric appears to have inspired.
For reasons that remain unfathomable, a reactionary faction of the country, and more than a few supposed “lone wolves,” remain committed to the professional fraud and blustering coward residing (for now) at Mar-a-Lago. It is clear since his mentorship with Norman Vincent Peale and Roy Cohn that the “fantasy” billionaire fancies himself some kind of bargain-basement Mafia don. Lie with abandon. When in doubt, attack. When you’ve lost, claim victory. Bluster and intimidate first, ask questions never.
As the legal walls close in on Trump and his empire of smoke and mirrors dissolves with the Trump Organization, his once thinly veiled threats are now overt. The call and response dynamic between Trump and his cult is more direct today. Trump “gets a rush” out of seeing followers act lawlessly and commit violence in his name, former Sen. Claire McCaskill told “Deadline: White House.” It makes him feel “powerful and successful.”
It brought to mind the scene (above) from Conan the Barbarian in which cult leader Thulsa Doom (James Earle Jones) beckons a young girl to step off a cliff and plunge to her death. “THAT is power!” cries Doom in triumph. Trump just does it in a much, much whinier voice. His Jan. 6 followers can contemplate that in prison.
Levitz itemizes the reel of Trump threats McCaskill wishes his followers could see for themselves rather than hear about second- or third-hand:
The most salient truth about the 2024 election is that the Republican Party is poised to nominate an authoritarian thug who publishes rationalizations for political violence and promises to abuse presidential authority on a near-daily basis. There is no way for a paper or news channel to appropriately emphasize this reality without sounding like a shrill, dull, Democratic propaganda outlet. So, like the nation writ large, the press comports itself as an amnesiac, or an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.
Referencing the Levitz essay, Ruth Ben Ghiat (“Strongmen Mussolini to the Present“) posted, “Why I continue to call attention to the threat of violence…before it is too late to speak out.”