Trump Leans Into the Violence

Is our press corps up for this moment?

Headlines from our very weird times: Two months out from the election, Kamala Harris put up a slew of new policy positions on her website over the weekend.

This leaves reporters everywhere in a bit of a dilemma. What to focus fire on this week? Harris’s healthcare positioning? Or Donald Trump’s rants about sex-change operations at public schools and his threats to have Barack Obama and Liz Cheney face military tribunals? It’s a tough one! Happy Monday.

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Donald Trump takes the stage during a campaign rally in the 1st Summit Arena at the Cambria County War Memorial on August 30, 2024 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Take the Ranting Seriously

—Andrew Egger

Donald Trump’s rhetoric has only ever really been constrained by one thing: His lizard-brain sense of what he can get away with.

As the election draws near, he seems to believe he can get away with more than ever.

Trump’s policy promises are getting wilder and his flirtation with authoritarianism more brazen. At a rally in Wisconsin Saturday, he made a new pledge to slap a “100 percent tariff” on countries that adopt reserve currencies other than the dollar: “You leave the dollar and you’re not doing business with the United States because we are going to put a 100 percent tariff on your goods.”

“We’re gonna be a tariff nation,” he went on inanely. “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”

He keeps promising to elevate kooks. He says he’s tapped Elon Musk to run a “government efficiency” task force. He’s left open the door to a cabinet appointment for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vax crank whose endorsement he secured last month. In Wisconsin, he extolled his plan to end the federal Department of Education and “send it back to the states so that Ron Johnson can run it.”

His diagnoses of what ails the country remain utterly untethered from reality, as with his repeated false assertions that public schools are performing transgender surgeries on minors: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” he Saturday.

Most of all, though, he’s leaning into the violence. Trump, repeatedly and in open sight, is outlining two major initiatives involving large-scale, systematic arrests of groups of people.

His proposed mass deportations of millions of migrants, he warned Saturday, will be “a bloody story.” And he keeps pledging to redirect the Department of Justice against his own political enemies, calling for prominent Democrats to face “public military tribunals” and for members of the congressional committee who investigated January 6th to be indicted for treason. (For good measure, his promises to pardon January 6th rioters now explicitly include those who assaulted police during the insurrection attempt.)

On Saturday, Trump made clear that that enemies list won’t stop with national Democrats, promising “long term prison sentences” for anyone he deems to have cheated in the upcoming election in a baroque post to Truth Social:

CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.

It’s convenient, and maybe even a bit comforting, to just sidestep this as classic Trump overstatement and showmanship. But the record is very clear that his rhetoric has grown more ominous and his policies more draconian over time.

As a matter of policy, Trump is saying he intends to subjugate the Department of Justice to his own will more completely than any previous president has dreamed. Mentally, he is incapable of maintaining any category distinctions between “friends versus enemies” on the one hand and “patriots and criminals” on the other. Any ally, anybody useful, anybody willing to suck up or to just go along will be deemed a patriot, and any charge against them a witch hunt. Any enemy, anybody in the way, anybody who refuses to be an accomplice will be considered an enemy of America and a likely criminal to boot.

David Frum noted yesterday that Trump has reached a point where his rhetoric has become so unhinged that it actually plays to his favor:

The mainstream media cannot report every outrageous remark, or they would do nothing else. Even those shocking comments that do get reported tend to make just a blip. The next day, if not the next minute, Trump is telling another lie or vilifying another public servant or issuing another threat. Yesterday’s shocker is soon crushed beneath today’s, and then tomorrow’s, until it’s ancient history.

It’s exhausting and bewildering to follow it all. But tuning it out is a luxury only afforded to Americans so long as Trump remains out of power.

For the media, the next few months will be a testing point, too. Will they get bogged down in the minutiae of debates over what is the right level for a tax on unrealized capital gains? Or will they be clear-eyed about the threat?

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The Bulwark Does Dallas (and Austin)

—William Kristol

Andrew may be full of foreboding, but I write early Monday morning in a cheerful mood. Why? Am I not cognizant of that worrisome New York Times poll? Am I not aware that all is not well in our body politic? Am I not nervous about tomorrow night’s debate?

I am cognizant. I am aware. I am nervous. But I’m still cheered up.

Why, you ask? Well, I’m cheered by this past weekend. I was In Texas with Bulwark colleagues for an event at the Wyly Theater in Dallas Thursday night, and then for a Bulwark panel at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin Saturday.

Leave aside the panels themselves, which were (if I may say so) of high quality. It was the attendees who cheered me up. It really was heartening to see so many impressive Americans—and some like-minded foreigners!—engaged in a common cause.

There were college students and senior citizens, professors and artists, former pols and former Marines, business types and professional do-gooders. There were former Bush-Cheney White House staffers. And there were also dyed-in-the-wool liberals who couldn’t believe they were working in common cause with us former Republican types. As more than one person said to me: “Bill, I used to yell at the TV twenty years ago when you came on. Now we’re allied politically. I still can’t quite believe it.”

But we’re all believers in defending liberal democracy from the threats we face. And the conversations were intelligent, thoughtful, and lively. Spirits were high. And I genuinely left Texas more hopeful for the future. (Plus, we stopped en route from Dallas to Austin at one of those massive Buc-ee’s. I’d never been before. Wow. What a country!)

On the other hand: I am alarmed! The overall political world is not in as good shape as The Bulwark world.

Two months out, we have a dead-even election.

After everything—January 6th, the unmistakable signs of how much worse and more authoritarian a Trump second term would be, the continued self-radicalization of the MAGA movement to the point where in includes not merely vaccine deniers and election deniers but Holocaust deniers—after all this, Donald Trump has as much support as he ever did, and Trumpism is as strong as it ever was.

Yikes.

So The Bulwark is in good shape, but America—maybe not so much.

Still, I choose to take the health and vigor of The Bulwark as a leading indicator. I choose to believe The Bulwark is the future, the polls are the present, and that Trumpism will soon be relegated to the recent and unfortunate past.

At least that’s my line and I’m sticking to it.

Now I have to go back to worrying about tomorrow night’s debate. The question is which of two great statesmen will be vindicated. Will it be Otto von Bismarck, who said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”? Or John McCain, who loved to remark, “It’s always darkest . . . before it turns pitch black”?

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Quick Hits

WHAT THE ZUCK: New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi has a lengthy piece out on Donald Trump this morning that centers largely on how he manages to remain the center of gravity, despite his myriad scandals. One main thread is that he essentially wills things into existence. Take this quote she gets from Trump about the people who called him after he survived his near assassination attempt.

Mark Zuckerberg called up and said, “I’ve never supported a Republican before, but there’s no way I can vote for a Democrat in this election.” He’s a guy that, his parents, everybody was always Democrat. He said, “I will never vote for the people running against you after watching what you did.”

Nuzzi, naturally, asked Zuckerberg’s people if this was true. A Meta spokesman told her: “As Mark has said publicly, he’s not endorsing anybody in this race and has not communicated to anybody how he intends to vote.”

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CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME: Speaking of willing things into existence: Trump is on a real tear promoting memorabilia and different Trump-related products. The money he gets for this stuff isn’t going to his campaign. It’s going into his pockets. The Washington Post quotes Don Fox, former general counsel for the Office of Government Ethics: “There’s no precedent in history at all, and certainly not in modern history, for somebody who has monetized the office or running for office of president the way he has.”

If you’ve purchased some Trump shoes, hit us up. We wanna know, well, why.

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