No Violence. No Demagoguery. No Kings.
We condemn Saturday’s violence. And we condemn attempts to exploit it.
Trump hasn’t given the order to resume bombing yet, but the ceasefire with Iran seems to be dying a death of a thousand cuts. Hezbollah announced today, per the New York Times, that it will not “relinquish its weapons,” and Israel and the group continue to trade attacks despite the reported terms of the U.S.–Iran ceasefire.
Some quick bookkeeping: Sam and Will Sommer will be going live on YouTube and Substack at 10 a.m. EDT for MAGA Mondays—albeit a bleaker one than usual in the wake of Saturday’s attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Happy Monday.
How Trump Intends to Exploit the Moment
by William Kristol
I should begin with the obvious: I condemn Saturday night’s act of violence at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and I am grateful that no one, including President Trump, was killed.
Last Wednesday, after the vote here in Virginia on redistricting, I wrote that I was proud to be part of “a movement that does what it has to do—peacefully and legally and democratically—in defense of fair elections and liberal democracy.” I repeat: “peacefully and legally and democratically.”
We should be proud to be part of a civic and political movement that unequivocally rejects violence. Which this pro-democracy movement does. To take one example, the No Kings homepage states that “A core principle behind all No Kings events is commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”
So when MAGA propagandists try to tar eight million Americans who peacefully and lawfully exercised their right of assembly last month at No Kings protests, using a report that shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen may have attended one of those protests, we should dismiss the smear with scorn.
We should also be proud to be part of a movement that doesn’t make light of violent attacks on political opponents, as President Trump and his supporters did after the 2022 assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. We should be proud to be part of a movement that doesn’t celebrate the death of public servants, as President Trump did a month ago: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”
And we should be proud to be part of a movement that will not be cowed by attempts at intimidation. The pro-democracy movement will resist efforts by this administration and its MAGA minions to use Saturday night as an excuse to criminalize political dissent, silence legitimate criticism, and curtail our civil liberties.
Such efforts got underway within hours of the shooting at the Washington Hilton.
On Sunday morning, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, “I don’t think this should be lost on anyone . . . that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump—in that same week we learn that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate.”
I’d say in response that I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that this is mere demagoguery in defense of the baseless indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in defense of using Congress’s investigative powers, as Jordan intends to do, to abet DOJ. Of course Jordan doesn’t quite say that there is any connection between the shooter and the SPLC. But he implies one that should not “be lost on anyone.” This is pretty classic McCarthyism—or, for that matter, Trumpism.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) tried to use Saturday night’s incident as an excuse not just to get new funding for the Department of Homeland Security but to increase the power of the Senate Republican majority: “At a moment of national danger, if Democrats refuse to fund DHS, I would say this would be the time to nuke the filibuster for good.”
In fact, Democrats are refusing to provide new funds not for the whole of DHS but merely for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, neither of which has anything to do with Saturday’s shooting, but which have a lot to do with the administration intimidating opponents. But Trump wants more money for those agencies, and he wants to get rid of the filibuster. This fake “moment of national emergency” is the excuse.
And Speaker Mike Johnson intends to try once again this week to move legislation in the House reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any real civil liberties safeguards.1 Expect to see him and his lieutenants use this “moment of national danger” to try to overcome opposition to the bill, even though there’s no connection between Section 702 and the events of Saturday night.
More broadly, we should expect a sustained effort in the days and weeks to come to intimidate and silence critics of the Trump administration in the same vein as the notorious National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There will be attempts to justify further investigation, chilling, and criminalizing of speech as part of a crackdown on “domestic terrorism.” According to NSPM-7, one of the “common threads animating this violent conduct” is “anti-Christianity.” So President Trump has already called Cole Tomas Allen “anti-Christian”—though as it happens he was active in a Christian group at college, and spends considerable time in his manifesto trying to justify his actions by appealing to scripture.
But the Trump administration will use any excuse to further batter American democracy, and so there will be plenty of demagoguery directed at us this week.
The pro-democracy movement shouldn’t, and won’t, yield to any of this. The Trump administration’s agenda is as noxious as ever, and it remains right for us to oppose it as vigorously as ever. The defense of civil liberties and the rule of law is as important today as it was before Saturday night. The true moment of national danger we face is Trumpism, and there is no reason to hesitate or waver in opposition to it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
White Supremacy on the Right… On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL and THOMAS JOSCELYN went live to discuss white supremacy in the online Right and why they’re obsessed with attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Can Iran Take More Pain Than Us? On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN review an extended buffet of jackassery before turning to the current state of affairs in Iran.
AI Is About to Eat Your Job… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON speaks with ALANNA McCARGO to explore a surprisingly old idea that could fix a very modern problem: What if workers actually owned a piece of what they build?
Quick Hits
NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: After nearly two months of war in Iran, American and Iranian negotiators are seemingly locked in stalemate. Iran is treating the Trump administration’s bedrock demand—that it give up its store of enriched uranium and abandon efforts to enrich more—as a non-starter at least until the end of the war, but the White House says the war can’t end without Iranian nuclear concessions.
Over the weekend, Trump canceled a planned trip to Islamabad by his lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff,2 citing “too much time wasted on traveling” and “too much work.” “We have all the cards, they have none,” Trump insisted. “If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”
Iran is making plenty of calls—just not, it seems, to us. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spent Sunday meeting with officials in Oman, the AP reported, working to drum up regional support for a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that would permanently lock in Iran’s wartime practice of extracting tolls from ships trying to transit the waterway. And today, Araghchi is in Russia to conduct “necessary coordination” with Vladimir Putin’s government, which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the conflict so far.
Despite diplomatic progress grinding to an apparent halt, and despite the continued closure of the strait, Trump seems loath to end the ceasefire he unilaterally extended last week. Oil prices, which earlier this month sagged in anticipation of the conflict’s end, are now pushing back toward their wartime highs: Brent crude was trading above $107 a barrel this morning.
JUSTICE DROPS POWELL INVESTIGATION: Negotiations over Iran weren’t the only staredown that went poorly for the president this weekend. As we wrote this month, the president’s plans for the Federal Reserve have been held in a stranglehold by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who was refusing to confirm Trump’s new nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, until the president dropped his ridiculous, pretextual criminal investigation of the current chair, Jerome Powell. On Friday, Trump finally bowed to the reality that this investigation, which was intended to hasten Powell’s departure, was actually risking prolonging his tenure. The Justice Department, sock-puppet U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced, was closing up its Powell investigation.
In announcing this change, Pirro and Trump were forced to walk a fine line—communicating to Tillis that they were backing down while insisting to the MAGA base that they were sticking to their guns. In a Friday post, Pirro said she had referred the matter to the inspector general of the Federal Reserve. “I expect a comprehensive report in short order and am confident the outcome will assist in resolving, once and for all, the questions that led this office to issue subpoenas.” She added that “I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.”
But of course the facts have never warranted doing so, and the Federal Reserve’s inspector general does not report to Pirro or to the Justice Department. Nor is that office’s occupant, Michael Horowitz, a run-of-the-mill MAGA flunky: In fact, he has a longstanding reputation as a fair and by-the-book government watchdog.
The referral to Horowitz exists for one reason only: so that Trump can insist, as he did Saturday, that the investigation is “not dropped.” Tillis was happy to bank the win.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence, and it needed to end before I could support Kevin Warsh’s confirmation,” he wrote yesterday. “I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed. . . . With these assurances, I look forward to supporting Kevin Warsh’s confirmation.”
HORRIBLE PEOPLE ALERT: In the immediate aftermath of the attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Trump tried to strike a magnanimous tone toward the journalists with whom he’d just shared a highly unsettling experience. It didn’t last long.
In a Sunday evening interview with CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell, Trump remained even-keeled, even subdued—right until O’Donnell asked him about his reaction to the shooter’s calling him a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” Instantly, Trump’s whole demeanor changed. Here’s Politico:
“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”
O’Donnell interjected, “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”
But the president blew past her question, declaring, “I’m not a pedophile.”
Trump bristled at what he seemed to deem an insinuation about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was not mentioned by name in the manifesto or by O’Donnell. “You read that crap from some sick person,” the president said. “I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”
It’s reasonable to object to O’Donnell’s raising the profile of a would-be murderer’s manifesto by asking the president to weigh in on its accusations. But Trump’s instinctive shoot-the-messenger response was telling too: No wonder White House aides go out of their way to avoid bringing him bad news.
Cheap Shots
As ever, the president is spending his evenings focused on the most pressing matters at hand:
For a more detailed discussion of Section 702, its provisions and uses, and prospects for reform and extension, see this Lawfare article.
As ever: lol.
Trump gleefully celebrates violence done to his political enemies, domestic and foreign … cruelly denigrates members of the press simply for asking questions …constantly “tweets” hateful rhetoric and images and now has the audacity to wonder why people target him? Does he not know his “favorite book” warns about reaping what you sow?
Hey, Republicans, we've been in a "state of national emergency" since you refused to stand up to Trump after January 6, 2021.