Friday, February 21, 2020

AMERICAN TRAGEDY - THE DONALD TRUMP PRESIDENCY

11 Months From Today

 

A second term for Trump seems more possible than ever. But what would it look like?

Photo: Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Source Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images (Crowd); Robert Alexander/Getty Images (Trump Lettering)
Here is one starting point for contemplating a second Trump term: The Ukraine scandal only became a Trump scandal because Ukraine refused to submit to a pair of presidential demands that would have been fairly easy to satisfy. If Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had merely announced that he was looking into a mysterious missing Democratic server and corruption by the Bidens, then the whole affair probably wouldn’t have become a Trump scandal at all. It would have become, to the American news-consuming public, a Biden scandal. Ukraine held off, though, for a very sensible reason. Ukrainians, analyzing American politics, calculated that Trump may not stay in office much beyond this year. It was a hedge against forever Trumpism.
Trump’s favorable rating fell faster than any other president-elect’s in the history of polling, dropping below 50 percent even before his inauguration, a fact that made him look to most civilians as well as politicians like a probable one-termer from the get-go. The assumption that his election was a terrible mistake that would be corrected in four years has been an invisible force propping up the resistance both domestic and international to his agenda. The Iran nuclear deal has primarily kept its head above water because Europe is still respecting the deal rather than joining in Trump’s saber-rattling. When Trump gutted the Obama administration’s fuel-mileage standards, auto companies steered clear, no doubt because it wouldn’t pay for them to invest in gas-guzzlers if a Democrat was to come in and force them to change again.
Only in the past few months has Trump’s reelection started to appear as likely as not. If he wins, a basic calculation about how to deal with him will tip for a whole range of players. Trump has leaned on social-media companies and the owners of such important organs as CNN and the Washington Post to suppress criticism and scrutiny of his administration and to dial up the praise. He has openly promised pardons to anybody who violates the law in the effort to deport migrants or complete his border fence, and as of yet, nobody has taken him up on the offer.
The natural assumption among those rooting for his failure is that four more years will be as unbearable as the first four. But they could in fact be significantly worse than that if a chunk of the resistance to Trump’s power suddenly gives way, revealing something enduring, even permanent, about America. Who else — in the bureaucracy, in business, in governments overseas — is holding off full collaboration with Trump on the premise that he’s just a passing fever? Here are 19 visions of this possible near future.
—Jonathan Chait
Illustration: Fede Yankelevich. Source Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Impeachment Redux

If he wins again, he’ll be impeached again; I guarantee that with 100 percent certainty. Pelosi cannot stop that freight train, and it’ll be Democrats’ only outlet, since we’ll keep the Senate. And if it’s for the same nothingburger they impeached him on this time, it’ll end the same way. I just don’t think Pelosi can control her caucus.
We’ll see Trump unleashed. Frankly, some of the stuff in the week since he’s been acquitted — even Hope Hicks coming back and Johnny McEntee, his former body guy, becoming head of the Office of Presidential Personnel — show that the guardrails that keep him in the boat have come completely off. So if anyone tells you what that means, policywise, they’re guessing. Nobody knows. There are signals from the conservatives in the administration that the second term is when deficit reduction starts, but that’s complete and utter b.s. I don’t think the president has ever campaigned on deficits or cared about deficits. Look at his budgets: Conservatives at the Office of Management and Budget have cut programs only for the president to try to walk back their decision days later. There may be another run at health care — not Obamacare repeal, but another run at some sort of health-care overhaul. Like the USMCA trade deal, a mushed-up version of reforms that nobody’s excited about.
It will be interesting to see politically, if he’s not on the ballot, if he still has the hold on the party that he does now. Half of the GOP senators are queasy every morning over tweets. Do they start to distance themselves or is it still MAGA town, where you have to stick with him or you will get your ass beat in the primary? Personally, I think the president makes life harder on himself and Republicans at times, but you cannot call yourself a Republican and not be happy about the last four years. All in for four more.
—Anonymous GOP Hill staffer

A Politics of Pure Revenge

The signal victory of Trump’s first term, ratified by his impeachment acquittal, was his triumph over the rule of law. In a second term, he will help himself to all the spoils he can.
Trump doesn’t believe in the old axiom “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even” — he gets mad and even. The purge of the Vindmans and Gordon Sondland, closely followed by an induced exodus at the Justice Department and the attempted intimidation of a judge on behalf of Roger Stone, will just have been a warm-up act if Election Day empowers his mob enterprise even further.
Rudy Giuliani continues to travel to Ukraine in search of smears, in lieu of actual dirt, that can soil the Bidens. But surely that is not his entire brief. What “evidence” is now being manufactured by Giuliani and passed to William Barr to wreak vengeance on former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and other diplomats who testified before the House? Meanwhile, Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, having followed up Trump’s acquittal by handing over Hunter Biden’s financial documents to a tarring-and-feathering committee of the Republican Senate, can be counted on to find pretexts to burrow into the finances of the Clintons, Mike Bloomberg, and their respective foundations, as well as the tax returns of Nancy Pelosi’s wealthy husband.
Perhaps highest on the White House enemies list is Mitt Romney, who has already been warned by a key Trump flunky, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, that he might face physical violence were he to show up at CPAC’s annual conclave. If that line of revenge fails, one can imagine Trump finding a way to go after tax breaks and other federal benefits bestowed on Romney’s beloved Mormon church, which the president mocked as his nemesis’s “crutch” after his lonely vote to convict. Mormons, however conservative and Republican, have not signed on fully to Trump, and he has been less popular in Utah than in any other solid-red state. Trump does not need them, and one of his most powerful Christian supporters, the Dallas Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, has labeled Mormonism “a heresy from the pit of hell” besides. The president’s servile Evangelical base will delight in whatever pain he inflicts on Romney and his co-religionists.
When Trump claimed “America First” as a mantra, he called it “a brand-new, modern term,” oblivious of its historical provenance as a movement that attracted Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in America in the years before World War II. It’s a rare time when he probably was telling the truth. Such is his illiteracy that he probably hasn’t heard of the Night of the Long Knives either. But the evidence suggests that, if nothing else, he has mastered the fundamentals of Godfather 2.
—Frank Rich

The Justice Department Brought to Heel

Photo: Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Source Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images (Background and Trump body); Alex Wong/Getty Images (Trump head)
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch often said the Department of Justice is the only Cabinet agency named for an ideal. If Trump wins a second term, it is not clear whether that ideal can hold.
Any concerns about criminal activity by Trump or his campaign in winning the 2020 election? Those will die a quiet death under Attorney General William Barr’s new policy that he must approve any investigation into presidential campaigns before it may be opened. The Office of Legal Counsel will continue to issue opinions protecting Trump, such as those that the president cannot be criminally charged or investigated and that his aides need not respond to congressional subpoenas. The late Roy Cohn will become known as Joseph McCarthy’s William Barr.
On the civil side, DOJ could be used as a sword in the name of religious liberty by filing lawsuits challenging reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Barr could starve for resources the divisions of DOJ that protect civil rights, voting rights, and the environment and use the Antitrust Division to promote the business interests of Trump’s political supporters while fighting mergers of companies he opposes. DOJ will fail to prioritize threats to national security by using a zero-tolerance approach to immigration enforcement, charging every undocumented grandmother they encounter instead of focusing resources on suspected terrorists.
Lawyers of integrity will continue to leave DOJ, replaced by Trump cronies who disrespect the rule of law and support authoritarian rule. Another four years of Trump, and the Department of Justice will no longer deserve its revered name.
—Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade

A Big Tech Détente

Trump understands that what TV was to John F. Kennedy, what radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Twitter is to him. These companies have done nothing but help him. And he loves the stock market, and the first trillion-dollar companies are all tech stocks. It’s going to be hard for him to punish them.
At the same time, he has a huge antipathy for people richer than himself and with more accomplishments than him. He will continue to go after Jeff Bezos, because it’s a personal, weird obsession he has with conflating Amazon and the Washington Post. As long as the Washington Post keeps pressing on the Trump administration, Bezos will be linked to that and he will suffer for that. There’s also the contention that the right has been misrepresented on these platforms and that they’re trying to quiet conservative voices. The question is: Will he seek to intervene in how they’re governed, even though it’s in his best interest to let them be?
And the companies will keep their heads in the sand. Don’t expect them to be brave on immigration or anything else. They’re not showing up at a rally in a MAGA hat, that’s for sure, but they certainly are not going to be doing anything to oppose him. Why should they? It’s been great for them.
—Kara Swisher

The Death of Global Climate Efforts

Let’s start with a conservative estimate. Trump’s deregulatory environmental rampage completely stalls — rolling back no more protections against small-particulate pollutants or toxic carcinogens and nuking no more policies like the Clean Power Plan or parts of the Clean Water Act, but merely locking in the sadistic legacy of his first term — there will be as many as 80,000 additional American deaths over the course of the next decade. That’s roughly ten times as many as on D-Day, more than 20 times as many as on September 11, and almost 40 times the number of Japanese citizens who have died in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. One million more Americans, The Journal of the American Medical Association reports, will suffer from respiratory illness.
Most presidents spend second terms trying to leave a lasting mark on foreign policy, and it is abroad where Trump’s environmental cruelty is likely to be felt most intensely. This is not just about the 2016 Paris accords, which technically Trump can only pull out of on November 5, the day after he’s reelected. In the meantime, he’s already fatally undermined them, along with like-minded sadists Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil — a trio of world leaders who may come to be seen much more clearly, in a second term for Trump, as a climate axis of evil. In the latest round of post-Paris climate negotiations, the three countries spiked nearly every possibility of meaningful progress. If you add to the axis Vladimir Putin and his petrostate and Xi Jinping and his have-it-both-ways approach (building renewable farms alongside new coal fleets), the loose alliance of climate inaction accounts for more than half of all global emissions. That’s a very powerful veto.
It may sound glib and vacuously patriotic to say that the world needs American leadership, but the path of the last few years suggests, on climate at least, it is also distressingly true. That’s not because action within the U.S. is so important — the country is the second-biggest emitter, but responsible for only about 15 percent of the global total. It’s because, without American support, prospects for any coordinated international program seem distressingly dim. In Trump’s first term, the U.S. has dithered and, in part as a result, the rest of the world has, too — breaking emissions records in 2017, 2018, and 2019. This is not just because of Trump — or Morrison and Bolsonaro, Putin and Xi. It’s because even many self-styled global leaders on climate (Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron) have merely paid lip service to climate action (while approving new oil pipelines and failing to pass carbon taxes, for instance). It is not just “ecofascists” peddling delay anymore, but climate hypocrites.
These leaders don’t look or talk like Trump, but they share a concerning, nationalistic climate logic: that leaders should emphasize the material benefits to their people first, with the understanding that, at least for the time being, calculations about climate policy made by nations individually may turn them away from the path that would benefit the world as a whole. If the next years are presided over by Trump, they will likely spell the further breakdown of the international alliances on which any truly global solution to this global problem would, theoretically, depend. Which means they may also break the hope, sustained now through decades of frustration, that global cooperation must be the path forward, and initiate instead a terrifying new go-it-alone era of climate suffering and disaster. Policymakers the world over may start to deemphasize the project of reducing emissions and instead begin preparing nation-by-nation assessments of how to live with climate change and all its terrible brutality. And we may find ourselves, on the ground, asking less and less often what global actors are on the side of angels, and more often simply who is on our side.
—David Wallace-Wells

More Hunger

Trump doesn’t need Congress in order to cut benefits. As president, he controls federal agencies. Three proposed rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture may ultimately take food stamps away from 3.7 million people. And SNAP isn’t the only welfare program on the line. Through the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, the White House has already approved changes to state Medicaid programs that cost thousands of people their health care. That’s why West Virginia teacher Sam Yurick is disturbed by the prospect of Trump’s reelection. Many of Yurick’s students live in poverty and often miss school because of their living conditions. “When they do make it in, they have headaches from not eating or aren’t completely recovered,” he said. Trump boasts of his support in West Virginia, but if he gets four more years to slash welfare, Yurick’s students might get sicker. “The amount and quality of instruction will get eaten into more and more,” he said, “as we put more and more of our energies into making up for ways the world outside our classrooms has failed the kids we serve.”
—Sarah Jones

MAGA Budgets

When you look at the budget cuts he’s proposing for 2021, they’re going to disproportionately impact the black community and low-income people and the most vulnerable. His white-supremacy agenda is reflected in his new budget proposal, his birther attitude toward African-Americans especially. So do his cuts in foreign aid, for example, and on the development front. Those accounts specifically are there to provide development assistance to what he calls the “s—hole countries.” Those are countries where you have majority people of color. It’s almost Make America White Again in terms of his budget cuts. I worry that people of color, African-Americans, the most vulnerable, will unfortunately be forced to pay the price for his outlandish policies.
—Representative Barbara Lee

Silly Television

No one wants to watch excruciating, serious dramas when everything seems terrible. The TV we talk about the most in 2020 already reflects a shift from the bleak prestige projects of the Obama era toward trashy, middlebrow escapism like YouThe Witcherand 90 Day Fiancé, or the middlebrow-in-prestige-drag tentpole The Morning Show on Apple TV+. Or they’re shows like Evil or Dickinson, which package niche weirdness inside fluffy-looking, silly exteriors. Even a show like Succession — with pitch-black terrifying nihilism at its center — is palatable because it’s so magnetically fun. Already, only a few hyper­serious shows a year crest into mainstream awareness (When They See UsChernobyl). In a second term of Trump, there’ll be even less cultural bandwidth for dire self-reflection. We’ll see more social-experiment reality shows in which people do ridiculous things for love, more shows with bards and elves, and somehow even more superheroes. As the world swings toward catastrophe, TV will be doing its best to be a countervailing force, desperately swinging the pendulum back toward light, undemanding delights.
—Kathryn VanArendonk

A Democratic Party in Revolt

Analyses suggest Trump could lose the popular vote by as many as 5 million, or potentially even more, and still win the Electoral College. (The Electoral College doesn’t care that you almost won Texas; it only cares that you lost Wisconsin.) Just to think about this for a second, if Trump wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, that would mean that, since Bush’s very contested, strange Electoral College win in 2000, fully half of presidential elections will have gone to the loser of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College, and, in each case, to a Republican. If this happens, if a younger, more urban, more diverse majority keeps growing but finds itself locked out of political power, there will be a backlash on the left against the legitimacy of a system that it feels, correctly, does not represent it and does not give it a fair shake. The scary thing is not just that the electoral geography is not reflecting the popular vote but that the party that is winning despite losing the popular vote realizes its only path to sustaining power is disenfranchisement. And that party begins passing more rules — from voter-ID laws to gerrymandering efforts to things like Citizens United — that build the power it fears it would lose and make it harder for the emergent popular-vote majority to express itself.
—Ezra Klein

A More Vulnerable Electoral College

Recognizing that getting approval of a constitutional amendment to switch to the popular vote would be an extremely difficult and lengthy process, the National Popular Vote Initiative, begun in 2006, aims to circumvent the Electoral College by getting enough states to collectively carry the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency to agree to cast them all for the national-popular-vote winner. What once looked quixotic is beginning to seem possible and may only become more so. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, with a total of 196 electoral votes, have already joined the initiative, and another Trump win despite a loss in the popular vote could give it the momentum to get over the hump.
“Every year,” says National Popular Vote chair John Koza, “we add a state or two, and that’s what we plan to keep doing from now until it becomes law.” If not 2021, then 2023, after a likely strong second-midterm backlash against a Trump presidency, could be the year: All it would take is for Texas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Minnesota to sign on.
—Ed Kilgore

Nuclear Brinkmanship

Trump seems poised to allow the last of the deals limiting U.S. and Russian arsenals, the New START Treaty, to expire in 2021. Meanwhile, his defense team is eager to build several types of new nuclear weapons on top of the estimated 6,185 we already have (second only to Russia’s total). The just unveiled federal budget would bring spending for maintaining and developing nuclear warheads 50 percent above its level when Trump took office. Trump has spoken eagerly about resuming nuclear testing, which the U.S. has not done since George H.W. Bush, though we are still contending with the health and environmental consequences. That might well open a rush of other nations following suit.
North Korea, meanwhile, is very likely to achieve a missile that can reliably deliver a nuclear warhead to the East Coast during a second Trump term — even as it grows its arsenal. It increasingly looks as if a second Trump term would also see Iran restart its program full speed. Those two events, plus Trump’s threats to withdraw U.S. nuclear deterrence from our allies, has voices in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — among others — saying their countries should get their own weapons. Those who believe a world with more nuclear powers is more stable would get a chance to see their theory play out. So would the rest of us.
—Heather Hurlburt

Extraordinary Stress

In the past four years, I saw people in my clinical practice experiencing a level of anxiety specific to the political climate that we really hadn’t seen before. It’s why I started writing about “Trump anxiety disorder.” The American Psychological Association does a “Stress in America” survey, and the 2019 one had 62 percent of American adults citing the current political climate as a source of stress, which has gone up since Trump took office. It’s not unlike a child living in a home that’s chaotic; we don’t have faith in the leaders we have historically put trust in, and that’s creating a lot of trauma. If Trump does get reelected, we’ll see a spike in this feeling of fear like we haven’t seen before. People will have to come to terms with the prospect of another four years of trying to keep up the fight. We can feel anxious for only so long, because anxiety is exhausting, and eventually that fatigue could transform into depression and leave us feeling really helpless. All of that could lead to more civil unrest or unhealthy behaviors such as drinking and emotional eating — people trying to deal with the stress in any way they can.
—Dr. Jennifer Panning

Red-State Entertainment

Photo: Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow. Source Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images (Senate and Trump body); Drew Angerer/Getty Images (Trump head)
Expect more fumbling studio attempts to reach a red-state demographic. The trouble is that no one on either side of the political spectrum seems able to agree on what a conservative movie looks like. Consider the box-office failure of Richard Jewellwhich looked from afar like a surefire appeal to the resentful quadrant: a movie in which cackling media hordes descend upon and destroy the life of an innocent white man, made by a seeming stalwart like Clint Eastwood. It has proved easier to stir up right-wing outrage against a release, as demonstrated by the baffling furor that bumped the thriller The Hunt, sneering liberal villains and all, from the schedule last year. Look for studios to steer into tried-and-true territory, investing more in faith-based films like Breakthrough (the reason Chrissy Metz sang that song at the Oscars) and rah-rah war movies (because who could get mad at 1917?). But also be ready for more ex–Trump staffers to be anointed with normalization by way of reality-competition shows, along with the second coming of Mel Gibson, who has basically been welcomed back into the fold with his already-in-the-works follow-up to The Passion of the Christ.
—Alison Willmore

Escalating Trade Wars

Trump will get more out of the box on economic policy, and 2021 will be his big chance to take the fight to China. This year’s “Phase One” trade agreement was a pause in hostilities to avoid preelection economic damage, but after he has won, he’ll be free to impose more tariffs and further impede global trade without fear of immediate electoral consequences from the economic drag those actions will cause.
If Trump cranks up the trade war, he will need more help from the Federal Reserve, cutting interest rates to offset the economic damage it causes. So you can expect Trump to replace Fed chairman Jay Powell — whom he has called naïve and a “bonehead” who is “like a golfer who can’t putt” and whom he “maybe” regrets appointing to the job in the first place — with a more loyal leader who is more likely to cut interest rates when Trump wants them cut.
In Trump’s second term, maybe a financial crisis or an energy crisis or a geopolitical crisis will drag down the U.S. economy. Or maybe fundamentals will shift so that his favorite economic tools don’t work anymore — maybe big deficits will slow the economy or low interest rates will push up inflation. But if I had to guess, I’d say economic performance in Trump’s second term would probably be similar to the first. The pattern since Trump’s election is his pursuit of output-boosting policy in two key areas: fiscal (cutting taxes while growing spending) and monetary (pushing for lower interest rates). Expansionary policy in these areas can cover up a lot of sins, such as an expanded trade war.
—Josh Barro

And Escalating Self-Dealings

Amonth after Trump’s inauguration, his sons Don Jr. and Eric laid out an ambitious plan for the future of their father’s real-estate and branding empire. In a front-page article in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of the two posed authoritatively at a shiny boardroom table, they touted developments under way in Vancouver and Dubai and a new domestic hotel chain called Scion, which Eric said would be focused on “trendy” cities like Austin.
The Scion chain never went anywhere after its first reported location attracted resistance-led street protests. A second expansion plan, for a heartland-based budget chain called American Idea, also imploded, and the Trumps’ partner in the project was charged last year with stealing luggage from an airport baggage turnstile. Many of the family’s overseas partners have been revealed to have unsavory pasts, and Trump’s own behavior as president has turned his brand toxic.
But Trump’s reelection could serve as an adrenaline shot to his moribund company. “I think Trump unleashed in a second term,” says Andrea Bernstein, author of a book about the Trump family business, American Oligarchs“means he continues to find ways to get people to pay him, and that becomes turbocharged.” Bernstein points out that, so far, the financial bright spot in the Trump Organization’s portfolio has been the place that most baldly trades in influence: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (With an uncertain election on the horizon, the company is reportedly trying to cash in by selling the hotel for as much as $500 million.) Trump has also sought to capitalize by selling access to his private club in Mar-a-Lago — which doubled the joining fee to $200,000 after he was elected — and only fierce criticism from key Republicans kept him from staging the next G7 summit at his ailing golf resort in Doral, Florida. Look for that brand of audacity to be deployed more creatively after 2020.
The most obvious direction for the Trump Organization to expand would be overseas. In a raucous press conference before he was inaugurated, Trump promised he would do “no new foreign deals,” but the pledge was purely voluntary. For now, it may be that the Trump family has discovered a more lucrative line of business. Hundreds of millions of dollars in donations flow through political campaigns, creating an immense opportunity for consultants and fund-raisers — not to mention hoteliers and caterers. “The business of Trump in the next year is the business of getting Trump reelected,” Bernstein says. “It is an incredible money machine.”
—Andrew Rice

A Generation of Judges

In just three years, Trump has already filled 51 vacancies on U.S. Courts of Appeals, the “circuits” that provide much of the guidance federal trial judges utilize. His appointees now represent more than one-fourth of appeals-court judges, and he has succeeded in “flipping” three of the 13 circuits from Democratic-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. This administration has installed 135 district-court judges and is on pace to significantly exceed Obama’s 268 in much less time — if Trump is reelected and Republicans hold on to the Senate (which they are likely to do in most “Trump wins” scenarios).
Trump’s judicial counterrevolution could happen most decisively in the Supreme Court. He quickly exploited two openings on SCOTUS, and, in a second Trump term, the odds of court liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who will turn 87 this year and was recently treated for pancreatic cancer) and Stephen Breyer (who will be 82 this summer) hanging on until the next Democratic administration will go down significantly. One more flip of a liberal seat on the Court could produce a landmark conservative era in constitutional law, almost certainly including the reversal or significant modification of Roe v. Wade and other key precedents, not to mention a decisive new era of sympathy for corporations, reactionary state governments, nativists, vote suppressors, and foes of civil liberties. Names reportedly on Trump’s short list include Kavanaugh runner-up and Seventh Circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of hard-core cultural conservatives; Sixth Circuit judge Joan Larsen, who is viewed as hostile to LGBTQ rights; another Sixth Circuit judge, Amul Thapar, a Kentuckian who is close to Mitch McConnell; and Tenth Circuit judge Allison Eid, a former Clarence Thomas clerk. The relatively diverse nature of this group reflects the feeling that three white men in a row might be a bit much.
—Ed Kilgore

A Crisis of Faith

“The fact is, no President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!,” Donald Trump tweeted last year. A dubious claim, but it could come true — just not in the way he thinks. His alliance with white born-again Christians helped make him president. It may also help end American Evangelicalism as we know it.
Trump is unpopular with America’s youngest adults in a moment when Evangelical Christianity is desperate for young members. Last May, Christianity Today — the same publication whose editor called for Trump’s impeachment and inspired that defensive presidential tweet — reported that merely half of all children raised Southern Baptist stay Southern Baptist as adults. The politically conservative, mostly white denomination isn’t winning enough souls to make up its losses, either. Overall membership in the Southern Baptist Convention hit a 30-year low in 2018.
Southern Baptists aren’t the only Protestants with shrinking churches; liberal traditions are losing young members too. But the values held by young adults are at odds with those behind the political goals of white Evangelicalism. According to one Associated Press poll, young adults are more likely than members of any other age group to say they disapprove of Trump. For white Evangelicals, Trump may prove a Moloch, an idol who devours the young in exchange for his favors.
—Sarah Jones

The Wall, Abandoned

By the time he exits the office, the president has said he wants a 1,000-mile structure along the border, an ambitious goal considering that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has only completed 100 miles in the past three years — around 90 miles of which serve as replacement for run-down barriers already in the ground. Though Trump has permanently altered legal immigration to the U.S. through his travel ban and nativist policies like restricting immigrant access to safety-net programs, a finished wall along the 1,954-mile southern border will not be an enduring piece of the administration’s legacy for a simple reason: It will not get done. According to construction-cost estimator Ed Zarenski, it’s just unfeasible to build such a substantial structure in such harsh, remote territory. At his low-end estimate of $22 billion, it would take 10,000 workers 11 years to build 1,000 miles of steel-slat barrier. “But you might not be able to get concrete trucks to deliver to such faraway sites,” he explains, “meaning the contractors would have to build plants along the way. That is unlikely to happen.” Another practical concern: “Where do these men stay overnight? That cost isn’t built into any estimates, and there aren’t hotels along this 1,000-mile corridor for people to stay in.” These infrastructural problems don’t address the apparent quality of the barrier. Despite Trump’s claim that “this wall is not something that can be really knocked down,” in January a strong gust of wind toppled newly settled panels in Southern California. “I can’t believe that an engineer designed what photos show them using for foundations on that wall,” Zarenski says. “They’ve taken a lot of liberties in how things are getting built to get it done as cheaply as they can.” The current taxpayer cost for the wall sits at $18.4 billion.
—Matt Stieb

Don Jr. 2024

If social media seems particularly vitriolic, deceptive, and stupid in 2020, wait until 2024. The top executives at platforms like Facebook and Twitter have already demonstrated a willingness to bend backward to satisfy baseless Republican accusations of suppression; just as the news media found itself bullied into false equivalencies by charges of bias at the end of the 20th century, social media will feel obligated to give conservatives more leeway in what they post. One particular beneficiary of this will be Donald Trump Jr., who already has an Instagram account with 2.4 million followers and a Twitter account with 4.4 million followers — both larger than any current Democratic presidential candidate besides Bernie Sanders — to which he posts unbelievably popular jokes, memes, and complaints. Newly empowered by his father’s victory in 2020, Don Jr.’s online presence will only get louder.
But Don Jr. isn’t just shitposting on Instagram. He’s building a political base for himself. President Trump will not run for a third term in 2024, less for any particular legal reasons (by then, his party would have an inescapable Supreme Court majority), than because he’ll be turning 78 and will be exhausted from another four years of security briefings and Cabinet meetings that take him away from his true vocation: watching and tweeting about cable news programs. What reason would he have to continue in a job he hates, especially if he could garner nearly all the benefits of the presidency — the graft, the platform, the attention — by handing the job off to someone tied closely to him? Like, say, his son?
Don Jr., among his father’s most energetic and devoted surrogates, is already highly popular in the Republican Party. He has openly speculated about running for governor of New York, but more recently he’s said to be considering a run in a more Trump-friendly state in the Mountain West. (Some allies have reportedly pushed Don Jr. for chairmanship of the RNC.) An Axios–Survey Monkey poll from December found that 29 percent of Republicans already would consider voting for Donald Trump Jr. in the 2024 election. That’s nearly double the support for his more polished sister, Ivanka, and behind only Vice-President Pence. Assuming enough of Trumpism’s senior-citizen base is still alive, Don Jr. could sail to the presidency or at least face off in a fiery run against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump Senior, meanwhile, could keep tweeting about politics to his heart’s content.
—Max Read

Trump’s Presidency Isn’t a Dark Comedy — It’s an Absurd Tragedy


Photo: Chris Graythen/Getty Images
The idea that Donald J. Trump is a president best defined by his weakness has always carried a kind of knowing, world-weary authority. It’s basically the Washington Republican response when you’re freaking out about Trump’s incessant power grabs. Calm down, they tell us; he’s not really effective; he’s a shiny object to keep non-college-educated whites in the GOP’s grip; we’re still having elections; he’s only behaving like presidents before Watergate; the economy is fine; he’s more in touch with America than the rest of you. And so on.
And I should say I really, really want to believe Republicans when they say this. I’d love to adopt a more laconic and nuanced attitude in these nerve-racking times, and I’m worried about my blood pressure. I’m not hostile to every part of the Trump policy agenda, and I can happily accept some mitigating factors in Trump’s defense: Some rogue courts that have denied legitimate presidential authority (especially in immigration matters) only to be rebuffed in the end by SCOTUS; worrying errors in the FISA process early on  (Carter Page, ahem); bureaucratic resistance rooted in ideology and partisanship; the shift of the mainstream media into a woke cul-de-sac; and the fever-swamp Maddowism that tried to re-up the Cold War to shore up the reputation of Hillary Clinton. These are points worth taking.
I also admire the sangfroid of some non-hysterics. In an age of high emotionality, the calm-down chorus has managed to summon up an air of coolness, detachment, moderation. To take one of the more persuasive advocates of this basic position: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He argued a while back that the best way to see the Trump administration was more as LBJ than Mussolini. This week, he described the Trump era as a “black comedy” — something unmistakably dark but ultimately unserious. On February 1, Ross made the broader case that Trump is “a reckless and distracted figure, a serial squanderer of opportunities, who barely won the presidency and whose coalition is united only in partisan solidarity and fear of liberalism. He may not be removable by the impeachment process, but is not a king; he is a widely hated, legislatively constrained president facing a difficult re-election … A failed impeachment doesn’t give him new powers or new popularity.”
And that’s where I get off the calm-down bus. The way Trump has been operating since he was acquitted by the Senate suggests to me that he is quite obviously seeking and practicing new powers, as he has been since he was sworn in; and that he has been rewarded, chillingly, with new popularity despite or because of it. He has brazenly pardoned a whole slew of his political allies and personal friends, initiated a purge of anyone in government who exposed malfeasance, fired an acting director of National Intelligence because an underling warned of Russian interference in the 2020 election, and kept suggesting to a judge that if she returned a harsh sentence for one of his goons, Roger Stone, he would almost certainly commute it or pardon Stone entirely. (Since Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s moderate sentence on Thursday, Trump has refused to take a pardon off the table.)
And to make sure we fully understand and witness what he’s doing, he has also declared himself as “I guess, the chief law enforcement officer” of the United States, and made a series of very public assertions that he can do anything he wants in the criminal-justice sphere. For all this, he is at 49 percent high in the Gallup poll, at a yearslong peak of 44.2 percent in the FiveThirtyEight poll of polls and 46 percent in RealClearPolitics’ average.
Yes, presidents before Trump did bad things we would today deplore (like spying on domestic political opponents). Yes, they committed impeachable offenses which did not lead to exposure, let alone removal from office. Yes, some flouted the rule of law. And, yes, we have tightened standards of executive accountability since Watergate. But no president, however malign, has ever declared that he has an absolute right to commit abuse of power — while he was doing it. Even when Nixon said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” it was way after his departure from the White House, and prompted gasps. What Trump is doing is openly mocking constitutional constraints on the presidency even as he abuses his office — and has prompted only indifference among Republicans and exhaustion among Democrats.
Look at the precedents that have already been set: A president can now ignore Congress’ power of the purse, by redirecting funds from Congress’ priorities to his own (as in the wall); he can invent a “national emergency” out of nothing and exercise powers that are, at their worst, dictatorial (as Trump did to fund his wall); he can broadly refuse to cooperate with any legitimate congressional inquiries — and defy all congressional subpoenas (as he did with impeachment); he can, reportedly, order illegal acts and promise his subordinates he will subsequently pardon them if they are discovered; he can dangle pardons, obstruct justice, and intimidate witnesses with impunity; he can slander judges and accuse the FBI and CIA of being part of a seditious “deep state.”
He can wage war unilaterally and instantly, without any congressional approval, while lying about the reason (what Iranian imminent attack?) and denying the consequences (the serious injuries that were inflicted on U.S. service members in Iraq); he can stack his Cabinet with many lackeys who never have to undergo Senate hearings — because they’re only ever “acting” Cabinet members; he can threaten media entities (like Amazon) with antitrust actions because of negative coverage; and he can leverage American military aid against Congress’ wishes in order to get a foreign government to smear his potential political opponents and describe it as a “perfect” presidential act. We also know that a president in this polarized deadlock will almost never be subject to a veto override — and that the judiciary is being packed with adherents to untrammeled executive power.
Are we supposed to believe these precedents will not be cited and deployed by every wannabe strongman president in the future? Are we supposed to regard these massive holes below the waterline of the ship of state as no big deal? And with these precedents in his first term, are we supposed to regard what could Trump get away with in a second term as a form of black comedy? I’m sorry but I don’t get the joke.
And look at the latest response to Trumpism among some Establishment Democrats: a multibillionaire autocrat who admires the Chinese system of government, effectively harassed an entire generation of brown and black Americans as mayor of New York City, and finagled a previously impermissible third term in that position! Yeah, let’s elect the guy who already fixed the system to extend his time in office! That’s a huge shift — and a big win for the elected monarchy Trump understands the presidency to be. We’ve had business-dictator wannabes before — think Ross Perot — but not an entire possible presidential race between two moneyed, outsider authoritarians. “Ripe for tyranny?” We’re begging for it.
We’ve also learned that the appeal of rank, tribal demagoguery has not waned. After all the shocks and scandals, and all the violations of key norms and practices, the cult of Trump is as strong as ever. One chilling fact: In New Hampshire, in the Republican primary, basically uncontested, almost 130,000 people showed up to vote for their president. At a similar point in their reelection bids, Bush and Obama only mustered about half that number in the state.
This is a cult. It’s sustained by constant fanatical rallies, buoyed by a campaign of deliberate falsehoods, and thriving in an alternate reality created by a media company’s propaganda. This is more dangerous than a monarchy, because it is based on charismatic authority, not tradition. And Trump’s demagogic and Twitter skills remain underrated by too many who can’t see the menace behind the circus. The economy, meanwhile, is strong — thanks in part to adding a trillion more dollars each year to the debt — and people at the bottom of the ladder are actually seeing real wage gains for the first time in a long while. It is therefore more likely than not that this president will be reelected.
If that happens, every authoritarian precedent being set now will be given deeper democratic legitimacy. Yes, this is exactly how republics die. As in Rome, the forms remain, but the essence has shifted — away from democratic discourse, separation of powers, compromise and coalition and toward cultish, one-man strongman presidencies, buoyed by the tribal loyalties of half the country.
And that, of course, is not the worst option. Competing cult leaders is bad enough; but our current president is also threatening the integrity of our elections by his indifference toward foreign influence, his refusal to commit to obeying an election result in advance, his grotesque past claims of voter fraud, and his toying with a third or fourth term. Last year, Trump tweeted a GIF that showed him winning elections in 2024, 2028, and on and on. And it was one thing to swallow all this gamesmanship and trolling from a rogue candidate in 2016 — but from a sitting president heading into an election year? And then we have a genuine potential nightmare: If the election is close, can we be sure that the president will accept the result, and act in the interests of the country, rather than himself?
With Trump, for the first time in the history of the presidency, the answer is no. If you have followed this man’s business career, or witnessed the last three and a half years, you will notice that Trump never concedes anything. So why do we assume he would concede an election? And who would make him? And when you examine the nature of the party he has now remade in his image, and observe its evolution in recent decades, you see that the GOP’s core belief seems to have become that the other party is inherently illegitimate, and must be crushed by any means to hand. Which means to say that the GOP is a party now dedicated to the maintenance of its own power before any other principle. That was the core meaning of Trump’s nomination. It means that we have no idea if we’ll see a normal transfer of power this fall if the president loses.
I’m sorry not sorry to be a Cassandra about this — and I sure hope I’m wrong. But confronted with this reality, it is staggering to me that anyone can say we should chill. The nature of Trump’s instinctual tyranny is that it never stops by itself. And, like any psychological disorder, it never rests. It has an energy all its own. Each new beachhead of power is simply a means to acquire more of it in an ever-more ambitious and dynamic form. This is not a comedy; it’s a tragedy we want to believe is a comedy. Because the alternative is too nightmarish. A Kierkegaard quote, of all things, popped on Twitter this week that seemed to capture the dynamic beautifully: “A fire broke out behind stage at a theater. The clown walked out to warn the public and they thought it was a joke and they applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s exactly how the world will end: to generous applause from wits who think it’s a joke.”
Haha, as the kids say. Haha. Now that’s a black comedy.


Trump pardons ruling class criminals

President Donald Trump issued 11 pardons or commutations of sentence on Tuesday, choosing to expunge the lawbreaking records of billionaire financier Michael Milken, the one-time “junk bond king,” and billionaire real estate magnate Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., former owner of the San Francisco 49ers professional football team.
He also pardoned former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, convicted of tax fraud and perjury, and commuted the 14-year jail term of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, impeached and then convicted on multiple corruption counts, including attempting to sell the Senate seat of Barack Obama after Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008. Blagojevich, a Democratic congressman before his election as governor, was released from prison immediately on Trump’s orders, and declared himself a “Trumpocrat” in the 2020 election.
Former Illinois Governer Rod Blagojevich arrives home in Chicago on February 19, 2020, after his release from prison [Credit: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast]
Trump’s actions in relation to Milken and De Bartolo are a clear demonstration of class justice, in which billionaires are effectively above the law. As one news report noted, there are only 600 billionaires in the United States, very few of them face trial and conviction, let alone jail time, and Trump has now pardoned three of them, including last year’s clemency for media mogul Conrad Black—author of a fawning pro-Trump volume—who served nearly two years in prison for fraud and embezzlement.
Milken was one of the most important actors in the financialization of the US economy, devising “junk bonds”—high-risk, high-return corporate securities that became a spearhead in the employer offensive against the working class throughout the 1980s and beyond. Hedge funds and private equity firms used junk bonds to finance leveraged buyouts of companies and proceed to loot pension funds, slash wages and benefits, and squeeze every penny of profit out of what frequently became empty shells.
In the process, Milken himself amassed a huge fortune, including a then unprecedented income of $550 million in 1987, while running a unit of Drexel Burnham Lambert, a second-tier Wall Street firm that rocketed to prominence in that decade. These operations were portrayed in such books as Den of Thieves and films like Wall Street, whose lead character, Gordon Gekko, was modeled after Milken’s partner-in-crime Ivan Boesky.
After pleading guilty to 10 counts of financial fraud in 1990, Milken served less than two years at a “Club Fed” luxury prison for the rich. He paid fines and restitution of $600 million, which barely made a dent in his multi-billion-dollar fortune. Trump’s pardon message paid tribute to Milken’s endowment of various medical charities and cancer research and hailed him as “one of America’s greatest financiers.”
De Bartolo was charged with paying a $400,000 bribe in $100 bills to Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, a Democrat, in return for state government approval of a riverboat gambling project in which he had invested. Edwards went to prison, while De Bartolo served no time but had to transfer ownership of the 49ers to his sister. His nephew now runs the franchise. The National Football League inducted De Bartolo into its Hall of Fame despite the criminal conviction.
Blagojevich and Kerik are lesser figures in terms of wealth, but gained national prominence in capitalist politics. Blagojevich was recorded in a wiretap soliciting bribes and campaign contributions from the Service Employees union and various wealthy individuals interested in his selection of a successor to Obama in the US Senate.
Kerik is a longtime crony of Rudy Giuliani, now Trump’s personal lawyer and political fixer. He was the driver and bodyguard for Giuliani during his campaign for mayor of New York City, and Giuliani eventually elevated him to police commissioner, where he was widely rumored to be receiving bribes from organized crime families.
Despite this atrocious reputation, Kerik was actually chosen by President George W. Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security, but had to withdraw after corruption allegations surfaced. In 2009 he pled guilty to charges of tax fraud and lying to investigators and spent three-and-a-half years in federal prison.
All four men had high-level sponsors lobbying Trump personally for clemency, including billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Tom Barrack, Ron Burkle, Nelson Peltz, Richard LeFrak and Rupert Murdoch for Milken, Giuliani and convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher for Kerik, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner for Blagojevich. The De Bartolo empire is based in northeast Ohio, giving Trump an electoral incentive for that pardon.
The remaining seven pardons and commutations include a Republican political operative, David Safavian, convicted in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal, a Cuban-American businesswoman from south Florida convicted in a massive Medicare fraud scheme, and two other corporate executives convicted on fraud and tax charges (one a significant Trump campaign donor).
Trump also pardoned three minority women convicted of nonviolent or white collar crimes, to serve as window dressing, but no minority men. As one account of the pardons and commutations noted, Trump has pardoned only one African American man in more than three years in office, and the beneficiary of that pardon had been dead for 72 years when it was issued: the late boxer Jack Johnson, whose conviction by an all-white jury took place more than a century ago.
The timing of the pardon and commutation decisions was significant from a number of standpoints. They had clearly been delayed until after Trump himself was acquitted in the Senate trial on impeachment charges brought by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, in order to avoid giving his political enemies additional ammunition.
And they come as part of a broader political offensive launched by Trump in the wake of impeachment, including firing or removing officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry or opposed his actions in delaying US military aid to Ukraine, the action that sparked his impeachment, and demanding that charges be quashed against his own associates arising from the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The pardons were issued only two days before Judge Amy Berman Jackson is to impose a sentence on Roger Stone, a longtime Trump crony, for lying to Congress and the FBI and witness intimidation in a case that stems from the investigation by Mueller into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
After federal prosecutors last week recommended a jail sentence of seven to nine years for Stone, Attorney General William Barr intervened and overturned the recommendation, proposing instead that the judge take a far more lenient approach.
All four prosecutors resigned from the case in protest of Barr’s action, and a petition calling for Barr’s resignation and opposing White House interference in the handling of federal criminal cases has been signed by more than 2,500 former federal prosecutors and other former officials of the Department of Justice.
Trump has attacked Judge Jackson on twitter several times in the past two weeks, leading the chief judge of the District of Columbia District Court, Beryl Howell, to issue a statement declaring that “Public criticism or pressure is not a factor” in judges’ rulings or sentencing decisions. The Federal Judges Association, an informal lobby of more than 1,000 jurists, scheduled an emergency meeting for Wednesday, although the meeting was called off at the last minute without explanation.
Judge Jackson is to sentence Stone today, but she seemed to bow to White House pressure by declaring in advance that she would not give effect to any sentence until the motion by Stone’s attorneys for a new trial had been adjudicated. In other words, Stone will not go to prison soon, if at all.
In the meantime, Trump’s pardons have sent a clear message that he is prepared to dole out similar treatment to Stone, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, and other Trump allies who have pled guilty to crimes like fraud and perjury.
In response to media attacks and even a mild critical remark from Attorney General Barr, who said Trump’s tweets were making his job more difficult, Trump has renewed his declarations that he is “the chief law enforcement officer of the country,” with unlimited power to intervene in the criminal justice system as he pleases.

In the wake of the impeachment debacle for the Democrats, Trump is asserting quasi-dictatorial powers, defying any effort to set limits on the power of the executive branch.

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