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Trump denies that he planned to start a 3rd Party to punish Republicans. But he certainly did:

Does everyone remember this from January 23, 2021?

Former president Donald Trump threw himself back into politics this weekend by publicly endorsing a devoted and divisive acolyte in Arizona who has embraced his false election conspiracy theories and entertained the creation of a new “MAGA Party.”

In a recorded phone call, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for another term for Arizona state party chairwoman Kelli Ward, a lightning rod who has sparred with the state’s Republican governor, been condemned by the business community and overseen a recent flight in party registrations. She narrowly won reelection, by a margin of 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent, marking Trump’s first victory in a promised battle to maintain political relevance and influence after losing the 2020 election.

In recent weeks, Trump has entertained the idea of creating a third party, called the Patriot Party, and instructed his aides to prepare election challenges to lawmakers who crossed him in the final weeks in office, including Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), according to people familiar with the plans.

Multiple people in Trump’s orbit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, say Trump has told people that the third-party threat gives him leverage to prevent Republican senators from voting to convict him during the Senate impeachment trial. Trump advisers also say they plan to recruit opposing primary candidates and commission polling next week in districts of targeted lawmakers. Trump has more than $70 million in campaign cash banked to fund his political efforts, these people say.

According to Jonathan Karl’s new book, he got into a knock down drag out with the RNC at the same time and was only dissuaded by the fact that he would no longer have access to their money for legal costs and the big email list:

In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party — and that he didn’t care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars, Karl writes his upcoming book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.”

The book gives a detailed account of Trump’s stated intention to reject the party that elected him president and the aggressive actions taken by party leaders to force him to back down.

The standoff started on Jan. 20, just after Trump boarded Air Force One for his last flight as president.

“[RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel] called to wish him farewell. It was a very un-pleasant conversation,” Karl writes in “Betrayal,” set to be released on Nov. 16.

“Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes,” Karl writes. “He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn’t exist anymore.”

With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.

“I’m done,” Trump told McDaniel. “I’m starting my own party.”

“You cannot do that,” McDaniel told Trump. “If you do, we will lose forever.”

“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.”

They should have let him do it. He’s dragged them into a political quagmire:. It was his moment of greatest weakness:

Following the tense conversion, McDaniel informed RNC leadership about Trump’s plans, spurring a tense standoff between Trump and his own party over the course of the next four days.

While Trump, “morose in defeat and eager for revenge, plotted the destruction of the Republican Party … the RNC played hardball,” according to the book.

“We told them there were a lot of things they still depended on the RNC for, and that if this were to move forward, all of it would go away,” an RNC official told Karl.

According to the book, “McDaniel and her leadership team made it clear that if Trump left, the party would immediately stop paying legal bills incurred during post-election challenges.”

“But, more significant, the RNC threatened to render Trump’s most valuable political asset worthless,” Karl writes, referring to “the campaign’s list of the email addresses of forty million Trump supporters.”

“It’s a list Trump had used to generate money by renting it to candidates at a steep cost,” says the book. “The list generated so much money that party officials estimated that it was worth about $100 million.”

Five days after revealing plans that could have destroyed his own political party on that last flight aboard Air Force One, Karl writes, Trump backed down, saying he would remain a Republican after all.

It was reported at the time that he was threatening this. But he and Ronna deny it now:

“This is false, I have never threatened President Trump with anything,” McDaniel told ABC News. “He and I have a great relationship. We have worked tirelessly together to elect Republicans up and down the ballot, and will continue to do so.”

Trump, responding to the story, said, “ABC Non News and 3rd rate reporter Jonathan Karl have been writing fake news about me from the beginning of my political career. Just look at what has now been revealed about the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It was a made up and totally fabricated scam and the lamestream media knew it. It just never ends!”

Trump has long denounced news reports that he had considered starting his own party as “fake news.” In Karl’s final interview with the former president for his book, Trump claimed to not recall his conversation with McDaniel on Jan. 20, saying, “a lot of people suggested a third party, many people” — but that he himself had never even thought about leaving the GOP.

“You mean I was going to form another party or something?” Trump asked Karl incredulously. “Oh, that is bulls**t. It never happened.”

Yeah it did. And if the RNC had any balls they would have taken him up on his offer and waited for him to land in jail or shuffle off his mortal coil and rebuild from there. But apparently they like being his bootlicking supplicants.

It looks possible

Axios reports:

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus took an official position against the two-tiered stopgap funding bill aimed at averting a government shutdown just hours before it is set to come to the floor for a vote on Tuesday.

New Speaker Mike Johnson met with the group of conservative hardliners on Monday evening in hopes of selling the bill to skeptics. The group isn’t pleased with the legislation, but doesn’t plan to try to oust Johnson over the move.

HFC members are furious that the legislation keeps 2023 funding levels intact.

Johnson has repeatedly argued that the “laddered continuing resolution” — with some funding lasting until January and the rest until Feb. 2 — would prevent the House from being rolled by a sweeping omnibus spending bill from the Senate.

Eight conservatives joined with Democrats in October to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), citing his decision to bring up a resolution that extended current spending levels.

That’s a funny way of putting it, don’t you think? The Democrats didn’t file the motion to vacate the chair and they didn’t vote against McCarthy because of it. They just had the opportunity to vote for their own leader and they did. The whole thing was on Republicans who ostensibly couldn’t stomach working with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution with no cuts.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told reporters “Here we are, we’re doing the same thing,” noting that they’ll oppose the plan but want to give Johnson time to find footing in his new role.

Anyway, it appears that the Freedom Caucus won’t oust Mike Johnson for doing the same thing McCarthy did. They’ll vote against it and let Johnson pass it with Democratic help. (Dems will do it because it doesn’t feature any spending cuts and they aren’t children who just want to hold their breath until they turn blue no matter who it hurts.)

But Johnson should remember, it only takes one to file it and only four to turn him out. He’d better mind his ps and qs. There are a lot of renegades in the House GOP right now. And they’re feeling feisty.

Good news, right?

This seems like good news. I wonder if people will finally start to “feel” it. So far Americans seem to believe we are in a great depression. Paul Krugman had an interesting insight into this phenomenon today:

Surveys of consumer sentiment and political polls continue to show that Americans have a very negative view of the Biden economy. There’s still no consensus about the reasons for this disconnect. But there are some new studies that shed some light on what’s going on, and I have a new way of looking at the numbers that may also clarify things.

[…]

Americans say that things are bad; shouldn’t we take them at their word?

One answer is: Look at what they do, not at what they say. As it happens, the plunge in consumer sentiment during the Biden years has been similar in magnitude to the plunge during and after the 2008 financial crisis — which is itself a remarkable observation, given that the post-2008 slump dragged on for years, while after Covid we rapidly returned to full employment. However, consumer spending, which stalled during the last crisis, has just kept powering along this time. Here’s a table, with all variables shown as percentage changes from the start date:

So consumers may say that it’s a lousy economy, but their spending suggests that they’re feeling quite good about their personal financial situations. I guess they believe bad things are happening, but only to other people.

Anyway, the analysts at Briefing Book delved into one possible reason for this disconnect, which I speculated about right from the start — but they’ve done the math. It’s now a well-established fact that partisan orientation affects expressed views about the economy: Democrats are more positive when a Democrat holds the White House, Republicans more positive when the president is a Republican. What Briefing Book shows is that this effect isn’t symmetric: It applies to both parties, but the partisan effect on sentiment is two and a half times as large for Republicans as it is for Democrats.

And it estimates that this “asymmetric amplification,” all by itself, accounts for 30 percent of the gap between economic sentiment and economic fundamentals.

Wait, there’s more. The importance of partisanship in shaping economic perceptions tells us that a lot of what people say about the economy reflects what they hear, either from news organizations or on social media, rather than their own experiences. And it’s a running joke among economists I talk to that even mainstream news organizations apparently find it hard to say nice things about the Biden economy. When, say, a new employment report comes in, the headlines don’t usually say things like “Job growth comes in above expectations”; they’re more likely along the lines of, “Rapid job growth may slow soon, experts say, posing problems for Biden.”

You might say that such things can’t really matter, that people know what’s really happening. But the evidence on partisanship and perceptions suggests otherwise.

Now, I’m not saying that this is the whole story. Inflation may be slowing, but prices have risen a lot in recent years, and that still upsets people — although as I noted last week, that anger didn’t seem to last after previous temporary bursts of inflation. And general malaise over the social impacts of the pandemic may be bleeding into what people say about the economy.

Still, we can acknowledge that there are other factors at work without denying two clear facts about the economy: Most American workers are, in fact, better off than they were in the past, and a significant part of negative economic commentary reflects partisanship, not reality.

Oh, and one other point: Negative economic sentiment may not matter as much for the 2024 election as many think, since a lot of it is coming from people who would never vote for a Democrat under any conditions.

Again, the sense of chaos benefits the Republicans and they are very good at making people who don’t pay close attention to politics forget that the Trump administration was a train wreck and think that the current administration is the cause of the craziness that continues as long as Trump and the MAGA cult control the GOP.

So yes, Republicans are lying when they say they think the economy is worse than 1932. That’s just how they roll. But Democrats who say that are uniformed because the media ust can’t let go of the “sky is falling” narrative of the economy. Even today, when the stock market soared because of the new numbers CNN ran a report about how it’s nice that inflation came down year over year and month over month, some costs are only flat and that’s very bad news, so it’s not surprising that quite a few people who aren’t engaged may think that even though they’re doing ok the rest of the country is a miserable hellscape.

I just hope that the good news start to sink in with those people over the next year — and nothing catastrophic happens in the meantime.

You know, the ones that have been right instead of wrong

Abby Livingston at Puck talks to Tom Bonier about the polling. Bonier happens to have been one of those who’s been consistently right about the elections the last few years in contrast to pundits, pollsters and the media.

Abby Livingston: So, what happened last night? 

Tom Bonier: In November 2022, we learned that abortion rights and the Dobbs decision was politically salient, but that it had its limitations, that it simply wasn’t a magic wand whereby people would universally vote more Democratic. We thought that the effect was uneven in places where the issue was literally on the ballot. 

One of the challenges for Democrats over the intervening year was, how do we draw the connection between voting for Democratic candidates and protecting abortion rights?

The most interesting takeaways last night were in Ohio and Virginia. In Ohio, where there was a literal ballot initiative on guaranteeing abortion access, we saw very high turnout and a very wide margin for the “yes” vote to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. To me, that wasn’t new—it was in line with what we were seeing in other states with ballot initiatives. 

In Virginia, however, both sides leaned into the abortion rights issue, more so than we’ve seen anywhere to date. Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s closing message was that this race was about abortion rights, and that electing Republicans to the legislature would essentially be a vote for a 15-week ban. I think he believed this could provide him with a mandate, and that he believed he had a sort of middle path on this issue—that 15 weeks was the compromise that Republicans were looking for. And what we saw was massive turnout in these targeted districts—in some cases, turnout exceeding 2021 (the last gubernatorial election year), which is amazing. And you clearly saw swing voters moving over to Democratic candidates based on this issue.

There was a question going into this year of whether the salience of the Dobbs decision and abortion rights would fade over time, or grow. But given that we’ve had a year now of people living with the decision, and you had this campaign centrally focused on the issue, we see that the salience is only increasing. 

If there were ever a question of, should Democratic candidates be leaning into this more across the country—should they be leaning into it more, talking about it more, etcetera—the answer is clearly yes. 

As I noted yesterday, Republicans are divided on what to do about this. Some want to try to finesse the issue with weasel words while others say they should double down and go for a complete ban. It’s hard to see who they can come to a consensus on this.

Asked about the Times-Sienna poll that had everyone tied up in knots, he says that some of the numbers are implausible like the idea that so many Black and young people would have turned sharply Republican. He thinks the poll does accurately register national discontent because of the turbulence we’re all living through.

This is key, I think:

Election nights were pretty consistent until 2016. Then Trump enters the picture. I would say 2018 and 2021 have been the only elections that seemed to go the way everyone thought. How much of this is about Trump and the chaos he has brought to American politics? 

Almost entirely, to the extent that he has broken so much of our ability to analyze and predict electoral outcomes based on comparisons to past precedent. And not just him, as an individual, but the outcomes of his presidency—the Dobbs decision being one of them—where we are operating largely without precedent, or at least without a precedent that hews closely enough to what we are experiencing now to be particularly useful in accurately predicting electoral outcomes. 

But another mistake we’re making is not recognizing the uniqueness of the historic moment we are in, primarily because of the Dobbs decision. There’s the state of the Republican Party, of course—the polarization, the anti-democratic elements. It’s a complex moment in our history. But in terms of recent precedent, where we look at the last two similar election cycles and try to benchmark from there, this moment doesn’t lend itself to that. 

There are so many reasons now why a voter might say, “I don’t know who I’m going to vote for,” or, “I’m gonna vote for the other guy,” more as a very low-rung form of protest rather than a realistic threat, because of two wars going on, because of the threats to democracy, because of a general negative sense about our elected officials in Washington, a frustration with their inability to seemingly get things done. I think all of those things are reasons why the polls are going to diverge more from the actual results, especially the further we get out from Election Day. 

The thing is that this narrative works well for Republicans and not for democrats. The Dems have done a lot, much more than I ever thought they could do, especially in this environment. And what we’ve learned is that actual results don’t matter if the country feels discontented with the political show they see on TV, whether it’s Republicans hating that their cult leader isn’t in the White House and is under indictment or the Democrats looking at the chaos Trump and the MAGA Republicans create every single day and think it’s all Biden’s fault for being too old and decrepit to stop it.

This is a huge advantage for Republicans and there’s really no way to counter it without cover up and normalizing what Republicans are doing. I think we just have to hope that at the end of the day, voters get a grip and recognize that the only way to put an end to this crazy era of political pandemonium is to defeat the MAGAs once and for all.

Psaki: You mention an anonymous, former high-level official in the Trump white house.. He said…” He is a traitor and a malignancy in our nation” pic.twitter.com/wMKgj3ZEbp

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 14, 2023

You’ll note that person is still anonymous. Is he keeping his options open in case Trump wins a second term? A man’s gotta make a living, amirite? What’s a little traitorous behavior between friends?

This is all obvious, of course, to any sentient being. And yet millions of people think Trump is the better choice for president again over Biden who has done an excellent job in difficult circumstances, even some who voted for Biden in 2020. (Lead in the water? What?)

This is the man they think is so terrific:

A delusional and confused Trump says he thinks he could be ‘reinstated’ as president before 2024 despite losing in 2020: You wouldn’t understand pic.twitter.com/9kttQesy4R

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) November 14, 2023

The Art of the Con

Don Jr. testified for the defense in the NY fraud trial on Monday and spent his time talking about his father’s brilliance and his company’s success:

n a return appearance at a trial that has featured a parade of Trumps on the stand as they fight for the future of their family business, the junior Mr. Trump testified in bursts of hyperbole and platitudes. His rhetoric sounded as though it had been ripped from the pages of an airline magazine or a travel brochure, and he saved the highest praise for the man who he said made it all happen: his father, a “visionary” who is “an artist with real estate” and “creates things that other people would never envision.”

Yet some of his high-flying claims clashed with present-day reality.

In recent years, the Trump Organization has shrunk, as the family name was scrubbed from some of the properties he extolled, taken off buildings in New York, Washington and, soon, Hawaii. Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street have also, at times, lost a number of tenants. Some of the former president’s properties struggled even to turn a profit.

In fact his father is just a rich kid who had a knack for self-promotion and was a dud at business. It’s just that he inherited a lot from his father and happened on a lucrative TV deal that perfectly fit his only real talent.

He’s proving that he’s nothing more than a hype artist even as we speak:

Former President Trump’s social media platform Truth Social has lost $73 million in less than two years, according to an SEC filing on Monday.

Why it matters: The filing from Digital World Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, indicates more trouble with its planned merger with Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group — including a “request and subpoena” from the SEC for documents related to its investigation into the proposed SPAC deal.

DWAC said the SEC sought information “regarding, among other things, meetings of Digital World’s Board; communications with and the evaluation of potential targets,” including TMTG.

“TMTG believes that it may be difficult to raise additional funds through traditional financing sources in the absence of material progress toward completing its merger with Digital World,” the filing states.

The big picture: Truth Social launched in February 2022 as a free speech app for conservatives and Trump has become the face of the platform, but it has for months faced financial stress and been mired in legal and regulatory limbo limbo, per Axios’ Sara Fischer and Dan Primack.

He’s a failure and a loser. But for some reason he has almost half the country convinced that he’s a God. This is the nature of cults. They’re all built on a very wobbly foundation of lies. It will come crashing down at some point, they always do, but the big question is whether he’s going to take the country down with it.

Eating the Big Enchilada one bite at a time

From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada”. (2007)

 What is the largest portion of the budget in all 50 states? (2011)

Money laundering for the masses (2012)

“Folks, they want to destroy public education,” the state Senate minority leader told a room full of supporters last year. (2014)

Venture capitalist, Eric Hippeau, believes the “education market is ripe for disruption.” (2014)

Readers know by now that the promotion of school “choice” is not aboutand the diversion of public ed funds into private academies (“the money follows the child“) is not about what’s best for America’s children. Like so many other special-interest enthusiasms, it’s about the investor class chasing public money. Oh sure, they’ll leverage the religious right’s paranoia that public schools are indoctrinating little Dick and Jane in the ways of Satanic multiculturalism and science. But they’re just investors’ useful idiots. The money, you won’t be surprised, follows the market. And in rural America, there ain’t none.

Jess Piper gave a presentation on school privatization at Netroots-Chicago last summer. Here she spells out plainly why vouchers are a fraud.

The rural argument against school choice. pic.twitter.com/3iWR4BdOzW

— Jess Piper (@piper4missouri) November 14, 2023

Jay Rosen’s reporting principle

As tedious as it is commenting on Donad Trump’s latest verbal atrocities, as well as on the relentless 2024 horse-race coverage in the press, it would be far more tedious seeing Trump abolish the United States if given half a chance. Or any Republican Trump wannabes, for that matter.

I’m already musing about bumper stickers. ABOLISH AMERICA | VOTE TRUMP.

Four words. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has a six-word formulation for how the press should be reporting the 2024 presidential race instead of its reflexive horse-race framing: “Not the odds, but the stakes.”

That’s my shortand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy.

"Not the odds, but the stakes."

That's my shortand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy.

Here's an extremely clear example of "the odds" reporting. pic.twitter.com/bL4EogKYJK

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 11, 2023

Rosen thinks (in this case, anyway) Axios gets it right.

This is stakes reporting.@axios on preparations to install a "pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents." https://t.co/PnVB3Nk4IS

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 13, 2023

Stakes:

Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.

• The screening for ready-to-serve loyalists has already begun, driven in part by artificial intelligence from tech giant Oracle, contracted for the project.
• Social media histories are already being plumbed.

What’s happening: When Trump took office in 2017, he included many conventional Republicans in his Cabinet and key positions. Those officials often curtailed his behavior and power.

• Trump himself spends little time plotting governing plans. But he is well aware of a highly coordinated campaign to be ready to jam government offices with loyalists willing to stretch traditional boundaries.

If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls “Agenda 47.”

• The people leading these efforts aren’t figures like Rudy Giuliani. They’re smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.

Behind the scenes: The government-in-waiting is being orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation’s well-funded Project 2025, which already has published a 920-page policy book from 400+ contributors. Think of it as a transition team set in motion years in advance.

• Heritage president Kevin Roberts tells us his apparatus is “orders of magnitude” bigger than anything ever assembled for a party out of power.

“I am more worried for America today than I was on January 6,” Michael Luttig tells the Guardian. The retired federal judge we met during the January 6th Committee’s televised hearings in 2022 adds, “For all the reasons that we know, his election would be catastrophic for America’s democracy.”

Trump’s recent Nazi-adjacent speeches attacking people he considers “vermin” seem to have awakened reporters from their stupor. Some of them. For now.

Washington Post: Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini

Former president Donald Trump denigrated his domestic opponents and critics during a Veterans Day speech Saturday, calling those on the other side of the aisle “vermin” and suggesting that they pose a greater threat to the United States than countries such as Russia, China or North Korea. That language is drawing rebuke from historians, who compared it to that of authoritarian leaders.

Nazis? Dictators? How dare you?! Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung made plain how ridiculous that comparison by “snowflakes” is, saying, “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Nope, no All-American fascists around here, eh?

Press critic Dan Froomkin hopes that Post headline and story from late Sunday marks a pivot:

I sensed a tonal switch, which I hope and pray will be permanent, from covering Trump as a plausible future president to covering him as a dangerous demagogue.

Some senior editor made the call and I hope there’s no looking back.

Rosen cites Dan Rather’s”not the odds, but the stakes” assessment from his substack:

Recently, reporters are becoming bolder in demanding Republicans state that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. That is a positive trend and should be followed up with questions about Trump’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law. 

This is not simply an election between a Democrat and a Republican or an incumbent and a challenger. This is not primarily about weighing polls and voter enthusiasm in battleground states. This should not be reduced to comparing advertising dollars or voter registration numbers. This is about a vote that will decide the future of our nation in ways unlike any since the Civil War. 

Trump isn’t hiding his intentions. There is no excuse for minimizing the threat he poses. What’s at stake in the upcoming election is the continuity of America’s precarious experiment in democracy.

That Big Orange Taxi means to take away your old freedoms. Know what you’ve got before it’s gone. Tell your friends what’s at stake. If nothing else, make a bumper sticker.*

*The management of Hullabaloo is not responsible for damage to your vehicle.

Mary Trump Barry died today. She was known as the protective big sister toward Donald but she knew what he was. His niece Mary Trump spoke with her about him for her book and recorded the conversation. It was something:

Maryanne Trump Barry was serving as a federal judge when she heard her brother, President Trump, suggest on Fox News, “maybe I’ll have to put her at the border” amid a wave of refugees entering the United States. At the time, children were being separated from their parents and put in cramped quarters while court hearings dragged on.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

Lamenting “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” she guessed her brother “hasn’t read my immigration opinions” in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt.

“No. He doesn’t read,” Barry responded.

No, he has never read. Barry is the one who revealed that he paid someone to take the SAT for him.

As of this writing, Trump hasn’t said anything about the loss of his sister. he’s been very busy threatening to send his enemies to mental institutions.

Nothing else matters

Philip Bump takes on the age old question of whether Trump is pushing fascism because he believes it or if he’s just a sadistic narcissist who gravitates to it like a moth to flame without understanding any of it. I vote for the latter:

There’s a forgotten moment from Donald Trump’s history that I think about with some regularity. About two decades ago, Trump got into a fight with the town of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., over a flagpole he installed at his golf course there. The pole was installed without a permit and the height violated local codes. This was not the fight he had centered on an oversized flag installed at Mar-a-Lago — a story that became part of the Trump-as-patriot lore of his followers, with details exaggerated in service to the idea that he put the display of the flag above all else.

What lingers for me about the California iteration is an interaction Trump had with Stephen Colbert, then host of “The Colbert Report.” Colbert’s shtick on the show was that he was an uncomplicated, jingoistic voice of the right, so he recorded a segment offering fake enthusiasm for the future president’s tussle. Then, at the end, he exposed Trump’s insincerity.

“What’s important is this flag,” Colbert says, with his character’s trademark bravado, “and its message of freedom — a message as important to Donald Trump as it was to the 13 original colonies.”

Cut to Trump.

“I don’t know what the 13 stripes represent,” Trump says.

This isn’t surprising, in either the specifics or the broad strokes. The story of Trump’s tenure in national politics has been that he — often coarsely — seizes on symbols of American patriotism while showing little understanding of what they represent or the traditions they embody.

It’s true of the flag, the 13 stripes of which he has formed a habit of hugging during the past eight years. It’s true of the presidency itself, which by all outward appearances he entered while believing that it operated something like being the CEO of a private company. At no point did Trump indicate that he viewed the office as something he was entrusted to hold for four years, as his response to the 2020 election shows. At no point did he indicate that he viewed the presidency as a coequal branch of government with Congress and the Supreme Court.

This haphazard approach to American institutions and history is useful to consider, given Trump’s declaration over the weekend that he would target his perceived opponents as though they were disease-carrying animals.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,” he wrote on social media, “we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”

“The threat from outside forces,” he added, “is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within.”

In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s rhetoric focused heavily on the purported threats from outside the country, including immigrants and terrorists (groups he often conflated). But those targets were not personally annoying to him in the way that his political opponents — and those he claims are aligned with his opponents, such as federal prosecutors and media members — are annoying. So he has shifted.

As soon as Trump offered these comments, historians (both professional and amateur) noted that they echoed the rhetoric of fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. This raises a new question: Is Trump doing so knowingly — or is he simply following the same path those dictators walked?

The distinction here is admittedly subtle. It seems important to distinguish between a potential president whose clumsy anger at his opponents has him using language deployed by some of history’s worst actors and a potential president who is willfully modeling himself in their mold.

Stories about Trump’s flirtations with Hitler — or, at least, with some narrowly constructed vision of the mass murderer — have been around for decades. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported an allegation made by his wife as they were going through a divorce.

“Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed,” Marie Brenner reported. Asked about it, Trump claimed that he was given Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as a gift and that, “if I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Books released after Trump’s presidency contained anecdotes in which Trump offered words of praise for Nazi Germany to White House chief of staff John Kelly.

“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump told Kelly according to Michael Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election.” At a moment when he was frustrated by pushback from military leaders, Trump reportedly complained to Kelly that he wished his officers could “be like the German generals” during World War II.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly replied, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s “The Divider.”

This is true. But Trump’s familiarity with Hitler didn’t extend so far as to understanding that there was internal dissension even given the iron fist with which he controlled the country. By all appearances, Trump just sees the fist.

Over the past eight years, this has become obvious. Trump offers praise to a range of autocrats and dictators: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. These are leaders who don’t share an ideology or a system of government but share an approach to the wielding of power and a popular response that Trump finds appealing.

Jonathan Karl’s new book, “Tired of Winning,” documents a conversation between Trump and another Republican politician that gets to this point, according to an excerpt obtained by Politico.

“Trump gloated to a prominent member of Congress that [former German chancellor Angela] Merkel — who detested the 45th president privately and had trouble hiding her scorn publicly — told him she was ‘amazed’ by the number of people who came to see him speak,” Karl writes, according to Politico, “and Trump said ‘she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.’ The Trump-allied congressman knew who Merkel was comparing Trump to, but couldn’t tell if Trump, who took Merkel’s words as a compliment, himself understood.”

“Which would be more unsettling,” Karl continues, “that he didn’t or that he did?”

That, again, is the question. Is it more alarming if Trump knows very well that Hitler used rhetoric comparing his opponents to rats that needed to be eradicated or if he simply got to the same place by himself? Is it better if Trump doesn’t know how Hitler’s story ends — taking his own life as his grotesque empire collapsed having earned a reviled position in world history — or if he does? Which possibility offers a less disconcerting set of possibilities for the post-2024 future?

And, of course, how does that distinction color other reports about what Trump has planned, that he wants to scour the federal bureaucracy of disagreement, turn federal law enforcement against opponents and imprison asylum seekers in camps?

Trump didn’t spend a lot of time lingering over his “vermin” comments on social media this weekend. He was too busy sharing and resharing video clips of his applause-drenched entrance to an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at New York’s Madison Square Garden, accompanied by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and musician Kid Rock. That’s what he enjoys: the applause and the adoration of people who came to the famous entertainment venue to see two people beat each other senseless.

In 1939, Madison Square Garden also hosted a pro-Hitler rally that disparaged the media and Jewish people. The event was soaked in just the sort of patriotic iconography that Trump adores, with only a slightly elevated level of contradiction.