What Wouldn’t Trump Do?
Plus: Two cheers for ‘God Bless the USA.’
Boy, did last night’s women’s Elite 8 games deliver: Caitlin Clark’s Iowa over Angel Reese’s LSU in an explosive grudge match of last year’s title bout, Paige Bueckers’ dynastic UConn over JuJu Watkins’ upstart USC a few hours later. Both games were tied at the half. Iowa and UConn’s Final Four matchup will be just the second collegiate showdown between Clark and Bueckers, whose trajectories diverged after they entered college in 2020 as two of the nation’s highest-rated guards: Bueckers spent years hobbled by injuries as Clark rewrote the record books. But it was Bueckers and UConn who came out on top in that first contest, knocking Iowa out in the 2021 Sweet 16.
Likely awaiting the victor in the title game: The terminators of South Carolina, who have lost exactly one game in the last two years—to Iowa in last year’s Final Four. If you’re not watching women’s college basketball yet, what do you even own a TV for? Happy Tuesday.
‘Start the Steal’
A.B. Stoddard clangs a warning bell up at The Bulwark this morning:
There is a plan afoot to overturn the results of the November election, and for both parties it is fast becoming a major concern. The scheme is being hatched by Republicans on behalf of Donald Trump, who seeks to steal the election if Joe Biden defeats him again. The Biden campaign and an army of lawyers are working to thwart it.
Trump can win on November 5, and polls show he likely would if the election were held today. But if Biden defeats him, the man who would trample the country for his ego can be expected to use even more extreme means than he did last time to flip the result—because he’s trying to stay out of jail.
Trump will declare victory on election night before all the votes are counted, as he did in 2020—and as we know he had planned before election night.
What happens next, depending on how many complicit Republicans aid Trump and his lieutenants in battleground states, could take the nation to dangerous new territory.
Trump, no longer the incumbent president, wouldn’t have as many arrows in his stolen-election quiver this time around. But some experts warn there’s still one major vulnerability in the election-certification process: What if GOP-led legislatures in contested states were to simply order electors to cast their electoral ballots for Trump?
“There are plenty of mechanisms to ensure that the election selects the right slate of electors—recounts, contest proceedings and so on,” Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman write in their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election. “But there are no protections against a state legislature simply ordering whichever electors are appointed to vote for the candidate that the legislature, and not the people of the state, choose.”
In an interview with The Bulwark, Lessig said that an unintended consequence of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) enacted in 2022 was to shrink the window in which an attempted election subversion could be blocked. Under the new law, no errors in the electoral vote can be corrected after electors vote on December 17, 2024. If corrupt electors vote for someone other than their states’ popular vote winner, Congress will certify that result on January 6, 2025.
Old habits die hard, and there can still be a temptation to roll one’s eyes at this sort of how-far-could-he-go speculative thinkpiecery of what’s to come for Trump. But the lesson of the former president’s abortive attempt to stay in office in 2020 is that you can throw any analysis that boils down to “well, come on, he wouldn’t do that” right out the window. It turns out there’s exactly three things that limit how far Trump will go to take and hold power: The concrete limits of the letter of the law, the political limits of where the Republican Party does and doesn’t control the levers of power, and the few places where scraps of backbone remain among Republican lawmakers and office-holders to withstand Trump’s heavy-handed pressure tactics.
That combination proved just barely enough in 2020, but the GOP has had four years since to purge itself of the sort of state and local officials who’d have the temerity to put country over party in time of crisis. And Trump is more motivated than ever to put the squeeze on.
—Andrew Egger
Two Cheers for ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’
OK, I’ll admit it: I kind of like “God Bless the U.S.A.”
My good friend Matt Labash begs to differ: “I’d rather eat a roomful of sugar cubes than endure that saccharine musical overdose yet again.”
Yes, Matt has more discriminating taste in popular music than I do. Still, a little saccharine never hurt anyone.
Now, I’m biased. For me, the song triggers associations with my days in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, when the song was played at all those Reagan and Bush rallies. Nostalgia is a powerful force. Liking “God Bless the U.S.A.” is, I think, a relatively harmless manifestation of it.
But the music is kind of catchy, isn’t it? And the lyrics aren’t objectionable:
If tomorrow all the things were gone
I worked for all my life
And I had to start again
With just my children and my wife
I’d thank my lucky stars
To be living here today
’Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can’t take that away
And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free
And I won’t forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me…
The song’s about freedom. Freedom, we’re told, is what it means to be an American.
It’s not Trumpist. It’s not about being a bigoted nativist or a crude nationalist. The song is Reaganite.
And it’s not about hating half of your fellow Americans. To the contrary:
From the lakes of Minnesota
To the hills of Tennessee
Across the plains of Texas
From sea to shining sea
From Detroit down to Houston
And New York to L.A.
There's pride in every American heart…
Detroit! New York! L.A.! It turns out Lee Greenwood is really a pro-blue state RINO.
Now, it’s unfortunately true that Greenwood has been a Donald Trump sympathizer in recent years, and that he’s now joined with him to make money off pairing the song with the Bible.
This inappropriate and even slightly sinister amalgamation of religion and politics should be called out and rejected.
But I’ll still maintain that the song itself is harmless. Indeed, like most American patriotic songs, it seems pretty sound. It’s pro-freedom, not pro-authoritarianism. Pro-forefathers, not pro-demagogues. Pro-sacrifice, not pro-greed. Pro-common identity, not pro-identity politics.
Greenwood may have gone Trumpy. But that’s no reason for liberals to let patriotism go Trumpy.
Once upon a time, liberals embraced patriotic songs. When Marian Anderson performed at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 85 years ago, having been barred from Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of the color of her skin, she chose to begin her program—which was otherwise classical music and spirituals—with “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”
And she changed the lyrics slightly.
Here’s the first stanza, as you all know:
My country, ’tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing:
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside
let freedom ring!
But Anderson changed the third line from “of thee I sing” to “to thee we sing.” She wanted, it seems, to make the song more directly patriotic—a hymn to the country, not merely about it. She also intended to make a statement about our common citizenship and our common heritage, in the face of prejudice and discrimination. And Anderson wanted to suggest, as she later said, that “the thing that made this moment possible for you and for me has been brought about by many people whom we will never know.”
Anderson’s appearance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 was a great American occasion. But it was also a great liberal occasion, a rebuke to bigotry and reaction, a liberal affirmation of America and the American idea. It was a liberal proclamation that the United States was, or could be, the “sweet land of liberty,” that America’s task was to “let freedom ring.”
The true alternative to Lee Greenwood’s embrace of Trumpism is surely Marian Anderson’s embrace, on that Easter Sunday, of a liberal patriotic vision of America.
In other words, the alternative to a mean and dishonorable nationalism is an elevated and generous patriotism. Today’s conservatism is no longer interested in such a patriotism. Liberals have a chance to embrace it.
They should do so. They can proudly belt out “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” They could even grin and bear it as they sing along to “God Bless the U.S.A.”
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
World Central Kitchen says 7 workers killed in Israeli strike in Gaza, halts aid: Washington Post
Mike Johnson hints vote on Ukraine aid is up next despite threat to speakership: The Guardian
Trump returns to campaign trail after posting $175 million bond: NBC News
McConnell: I’ll stay in the Senate and fight the GOP “isolationist movement”: Politico
Ruben Gallego, Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona, raises $7.5 million: New York Times
With abortion ballot question, a “path to relevance” for Democrats in Florida? New York Times
“It’s clearly strategic”: Why Trump kept attacking judges’ families: Politico
“The backlash is real”: Behind DEI’s rise and fall: Axios
Judge rejects Hunter Biden’s bid to dismiss tax charges: Politico
Quick Hits: Peace in the Process
What’s that? You want more Caitlin Clark content? Thought you’d never ask. This ESPN profile from earlier this month is incredible, joining two narratives, “one about a superstar standing on center stage surrounded by an ever-growing mania, and another about a young woman trying to find herself, trying to decide how and who she wanted to be, in the center of that madness”:
“I'm trying to learn about myself as a 21-year-old,” Clark said. “About how I react to situations, what I want in my life, what's good for me, what's bad for me.”
The back wall of the film room featured larger-than-life portraits of the Hawkeyes, with Caitlin dominating the center of the collage. She gets the absurdity. Most every person walking around on the planet is a watcher. A consumer of the lives and adventures of others. Caitlin was like that, standing in line as a little girl to meet a hero like Maya Moore. In her bathroom at home in Des Moines she kept a caricature she got at an amusement park that shows her wearing a UConn uniform. But during last year's NCAA tournament, when she averaged 31.8 points and 10.0 assists in leading Iowa to the championship game, she became one of the watched.
“... and I'm 21 years old!” she said, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders with a grin, as if to say: Buy the ticket, take the ride.
“I don't f---ing know . . . I’m trying to learn about myself.”
Read the whole thing. We would also note that Clark is now 22. Imagine how good Morning Shots would be if we got to hone each edition for months!
Cheap Shots
Correction, April 2, 2024: A previous version of this newsletter erroneously referred to the Lincoln Memorial as the “Lincoln Monument.”
"That combination proved just barely enough in 2020, but the GOP has had four years since to purge itself of the sort of state and local officials who’d have the temerity to put country over party in time of crisis."
Democrats have to win two wars at once. They have to win the election. And they have to win the war to establish the narrative that the election victory was legitimate. If Republican state legislators are living in a world where their base has gone all in on Trump's new Big Lie, they will sell out the country in a heartbeat. This is why what is happening in the Courts now is so important. There has to be severe consequences for those figures who promoted the current Big Lie. Republican officials need to be living in fear of the law.
The cringeworthy nature of that song, especially as the Iraq War turned into a quagmire in the late aughts, will be seared into my memory forever. I remember being in Iraq during the surge and then coming home and hearing bar patrons belt out that tune and wanting to vomit.