Category: Mental Health

In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better

MSNBC – Maddow Blog

In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better

Steve Benen – November 11, 2024

Then-President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the Oval Office in 2020.

One of the forgotten stories of Donald Trump’s first term came around this time five years ago, when the then-president tried to arrange for a G7 summit to be held at one of his struggling businesses. Even by his standards, it was quite brazen.

Trump, in no uncertain terms, told some of the world’s most powerful leaders that if they wished to participate in an international gathering, they would have to spend quite a bit of money at one of the venues he owns that was short on customers. The Republican had already earned a reputation for welcoming money from foreign governments, but this represented an escalation: Trump was insisting upon money from foreign governments.

To be sure, he ultimately backed off, but the effort was part of an ugly pattern. As The American Prospect’s David Dayen recently explained in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s entire term in office was marked by profit-taking schemes and uses of public funds for personal benefit.”

Unfortunately, we can keep going down the same road: Trump also issued corrupt pardons to those who engaged in corruption. Members of his Cabinet faced so many corruption allegations that it was difficult to keep track of them all. For all intents and purposes, the result was effectively the first modern pro-corruption administration.

It’s nevertheless a safe bet that his second term in the White House will be considerably worse.

Indeed, less than a week after Election Day, there’s already some unsettling evidence coming to the fore. The New York Times reported, for example, that the president-elect “has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office.”

Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act. While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, noted that Trump’s transition team was supposed to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration by Sept. 1. That didn’t happen.

Why does that matter? Because, while that would’ve released millions of dollars in funding to cover transition costs, it also, as the Times’ report noted, would impose a $5,000 cap on donations to the transition team and require the public disclosure of all its donors.

“By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly,” the article added. “Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.”

Those looking to bribe the president-elect, in other words, wouldn’t have to place orders for overpriced wristwatches.

But wait, there’s more. The New York Times also reported on Howard Lutnick, the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, whose influential new role is raising eyebrows.

As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise. But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.

Given Lutnick’s vast business interests, the Times added, it’s unclear how he might “keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics.”

Looking ahead, there’s little reason for optimism. Indeed, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently highlighted a broader context, noting that if Trump moves forward with plans to purge much of the federal workforce, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, Americans might soon see a dynamic in which independent officials “muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency.”

I suspect that if a pollster were to ask Americans whether they’re comfortable with government corruption, the vast majority would say no. And yet, we’re about to experience a brutal elections-have-consequences moment when it comes to the corrupting of the executive branch of the federal government.

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What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024

A group of people outdoors watching something out of frame.
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times

On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.

The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”

What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.

The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.

But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.

And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?

Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?

I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.

I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.

Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.

A Cold, Hard Look Into Our Trumpian Future

The New Republic

A Cold, Hard Look Into Our Trumpian Future

Jason Linkins – November 9, 2024

Let’s begin with the simplest and most obvious observation: A majority of Americans prefer what Donald Trump has been selling over Kamala Harris. It’s hard to stomach, because this election offered a pretty clear choice between a cheerful and humane future and a rapturously brutish one. But the latter won out. More Americans wanted the 1939 German-American Bund–style hate rally at Madison Square Garden than the big-tent party with high ideals about the American constitutional order. And we can no longer reassure ourselves, as we did in 2016, that Trump voters didn’t precisely know what they were getting or that much of what he promised to do was not to be taken seriously. We know what he’s about now, and a majority of voters clearly want it.

The country is set to change in stark ways, as Project 2025 jumps from the pages of a far-right dream journal into our lives. There will be big rollbacks in the civil rights many of us have come to enjoy, causing disproportionate pain to women and members of the LGBTQ community. I feel terribly for all the people who voted to protect reproductive freedoms in their states because the effort may be all for naught. As we have relentlessly explained on TNR’s pages, Trump’s Department of Justice can create a national abortion ban by enforcing the Comstock Act, thus bypassing the legislative process and the will of voters entirely. Wherever reproductive rights have managed to secure a haven in a state constitution, those rights will be fought over in inhospitable venues, like the Supreme Court.

Trump’s signature policy proposal is a mass deportation scheme that will target legal citizens for “remigration” alongside the undocumented. The regulatory state will be transformed into something that serves corporations instead of the public. The civil service, as I have mentioned before, will be reconfigured into something that, at best, may look like the “spoils system” of yesteryear; more likely it will exist to dole out punishments to Trump’s political opponents. Imagine a world in which blue states don’t receive disaster relief; where Democrats don’t get their Social Security checks.

Part of Trump’s second-term agenda includes a plan to crush left-liberal organizing. The movement to end the war in Gaza, which was highly effective in shifting public opinion on Israel’s ongoing military assault, will feel this hammer blow first. Trump has been lately dogged by generals who opposed his fascist inclinations; his future generals will be much less reluctant. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will retire and be replaced by younger versions of themselves. Probably worst of all, the timeline on permanent climate catastrophe has moved up—it’s not unfair to say that we may soon arrive at a point of no return (though my strong suspicion is that we have reached it already).

At the moment, I can’t exactly figure out what kind of Democratic Party emerges from the wreckage of this election. Harris ran a distinctly centrist style of politics, for which influential members of the punditocracy and the party’s most entrenched elites had long agitated. This approach flopped, badly. This brand of politics makes complete sense on paper to a lot of people who now need to contend with the fact that the voters that Democrats need the most to win presidential elections are rejecting it in substantial numbers.

But these failures are not the biggest problem Democrats face. The real crisis is that all the roads ahead are fraught with peril. The country has clearly tacked to the right in substantial ways. It’s going to make sense to a lot of Democrats to keep chasing the electorate in that direction. But a party that, in 2024, was only really defending a narrow portfolio of traditionally Democratic principles ceases to be the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense if they abandon those few battlements which they’ve retained the courage to defend. Tacking right might be a path to power, but we should dispense with the delusion that a Democratic Party choosing this path would continue to be a liberal party. Rather, it would come to reside in the same ideological province of the pre-Trump Republican Party—and remember, that’s a movement that Trumpism dispatched far more rapidly and soundly than the Democrats.

At the same time, organizing the party around a bolder, leftward direction is difficult to fathom. A more leftist set of domestic policy prescriptions requires its proponents to run the sort of piping-hot, high-spending economy that Biden attempted—and probably to a greater extent than Biden was willing to go. The failure of Bidenomics to impress the very voters it strove so mightily to help will make politicians extremely skittish about taking that approach again anytime soon. But even if Democrats were brave enough to let it rip, bolder policies also require a functioning administrative state to administer them. Right now, the Supreme Court is not committed to the administrative state’s survival and is more likely to keep dismantling it. So a Democratic Party that shifts in this direction is destined to make a ton of near-term promises that it can’t fulfill and risk making voters more cynical about government, which helps strongmen like Trump stay in power.

All that said, Trump might very well run up against the problem of unfulfillable promises a lot sooner than the Democrats. Trumpism has always been a slow march into the thickets of its own policy paradoxes, and this will only grow more pronounced as all the reins and fetters that impeded Trump’s first-term ambitions come off in the second. Here, the laws of gravity snap back with a vengeance. Trump cannot deport millions of people without sending the economy into a doom spiral. He can’t create a more efficient government by asking a noodlehead failure like Elon Musk to manage it. He can’t put a quack like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health without people getting a lot sicker. You can’t make America great again while destroying the regulatory regime that keeps a staggering range of everyday harms at bay: coal ash spills and E. coli and shoddy building construction and, lest we forget, pandemics. And, no, you can’t arrest climate change by pretending it’s not happening.

The problem, of course, is that the rug-pull always arrives too late for the conned to prevent. While we are waiting for these bills to come due, however, Trump will probably manage to keep two of his promises: He will duck accountability for the malfeasances for which he’s already facing judgment in various legal fora (and likely extend this privilege to a grip of bad actors, beginning with the January 6 rioters), and he will hurt the people he deems to be his enemy. Those supporters who are inclined to dole out punishments of their own will feel a freer hand to do so. This is going to be an immediately more dangerous country to reside in for lots of Americans.

This has, unfortunately, been the cauldron in which recent Democratic electoral successes have been conjured: The collapsed reality and widespread destruction wrought from GOP misrule provokes a backlash that drives up enough public support for a change. This is how we got Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House. This is also the widening gyre in which we’re now trapped: Republican failures, and the intense period of crisis management that follows, have made it harder for Democrats to build anything of their own that’s truly enduring, which in turn gives them little to run on. I’m left with the strong impression that the only thing most people know about Democrats is that they didn’t want Trump to be president.

As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted on election night, “Incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic.” Perhaps this outcome was predetermined. But it wasn’t our fate to end up with, as Marshall described, “Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways” as the alternative. That a cruel president is returning to office on the promise of doubling down on the cruelty speaks to something really unpleasant about ourselves. There was a notion, once, that Obama’s election indicated that the United States was closer than ever to becoming the nation we were always destined to be. With Trump’s reelection, we should reckon with the dreadful possibility that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie is correct when he says, “Most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.”

The problem(s) with Trump claiming an ‘unprecedented’ mandate

MSNBC – Maddow Blog

The problem(s) with Trump claiming an ‘unprecedented’ mandate

The closer one looks at his claim to “an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” the worse the president-elect’s argument appears.

By Steve Benen  – November 8, 2024

The idea behind an electoral mandate is pretty straightforward: Presidential candidates present voters with a series of ideas they want to pursue in office, and if they win, they claim that they have the nation’s support for that agenda. To stand in their way, the argument goes, is to reject the will of the American electorate.

With this in mind, Donald Trump said in the run-up to Election Day 2024 that he wanted a mandate, and as the results came in, the Republican claimed to have one. NBC News reported early Wednesday morning:

Trump, claiming victory, said America gave him an ‘unprecedented mandate.’ … ‘America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate. Wow, that’s great.’

Let’s note at the outset that Republicans’ interest in presidential candidates and electoral mandates is, at best, selective.

In 2008, Barack Obama won roughly 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. Were GOP officials on Capitol Hill willing to grudgingly concede that the Democrat had earned a mandate? No, they were not. Four years later, when Obama became only the sixth president in American history to top 51% of the popular vote twice, did Republicans acknowledge the then-president’s mandate? Again, no.

In 2020, when Joe Biden won the popular vote by a fairly wide margin and ended up with the strongest support of any presidential challenger since FDR, did his opponents on the right respectfully recognize his mandate? Take a wild guess.

If you’re thinking that, under GOP rules, only GOP presidents’ mandates matter, you’re not alone.

But let’s put recent history aside and consider the core question of whether Trump has a legitimate claim to a popular mandate — because there’s ample room for skepticism.0 seconds of 12 minutes, 7 secondsVolume 90% 

First, the president-elect might have a stronger case to make if he’d presented voters with a detailed governing blueprint, but he did not. Trump peddled some vague, bumper sticker–style talking points, but the post-policy president became a post-policy candidate, indifferent to the substance of governing. It’s difficult, in other words, to credibly claim a mandate for a set of proposals that, for the most part, didn’t exist in a meaningful way.

Second, Trump’s policy priorities (to the extent that they existed) weren’t especially popular. It’s fair to say the GOP candidate prevailed despite his ideas, not because of them.

Third, the idea that Trump’s mandate is “unprecedented” is demonstrably silly. Did he win? Yes. Did he win by historically enormous margins? Not even close. He might eke out a narrow popular-vote win, but plenty of other presidents fared far better. What’s more, he’ll probably finish with 312 electoral votes, which will rank 41st on the presidential history list.

Just so we’re all clear, my point is not to argue that Trump’s win is somehow illegitimate. He won fair and square, as Democratic leaders have been quick to acknowledge. I believe the electorate made a horrible mistake, but that doesn’t change the legitimacy of the outcome.

But if the president-elect and his allies are going to argue that his win was such a historic landslide that policymakers have no choice but to yield to his will because he’s the true voice of the nation — that is not an argument worth taking seriously.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The exact thing that helped Trump win could become a big problem for his presidency

CNN

The exact thing that helped Trump win could become a big problem for his presidency

Analysis by Matt Egan – November 7, 2024

Donald Trump rode a powerful wave of discontent over the cost of living back to the White House.

Voters, fed up with high prices on everything from groceries to car insurance, have ousted Democrats from power in Washington.

Trump reminded voters often that inflation wasn’t a problem when he was calling the shots. And he has promised to attack high prices by shaking things up.

But if he’s not careful, Trump could have an inflation problem of his own.

Some of the very same campaign promises that appealed to voters – mass deportations and sky-high tariffs – would be inflationary if enacted, perhaps very inflationary.

Not only that, but the bond market is already getting nervous about Trump’s plans to add trillions to the national debt. Bond yields have climbed sharply, a situation that will make it more expensive to get a mortgage or home equity loan and finance the purchase of a car.

“The lesson of this election shouldn’t go unnoticed by Republicans – inflation doesn’t sit well with voters, and they won’t forget,” Ryan Sweet, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, told CNN.

Of course, it’s far too early to know which of Trump’s campaign promises will become a reality. For now, Wall Street seems largely unfazed by the inflation warnings.

Investors appear to be betting that Trump won’t actually go forward with plans to impose tariffs on all $3 trillion of US imports, or that he won’t be able to deport millions of undocumented workers. And they may be right.

After all, there’s a long history of presidential candidates softening their approach once the votes are done being counted and the business of governing begins.

America’s affordability crisis

Voters made clear Tuesday their frustrations with the state of the economy.

Two-thirds (67%) of voters described the US economy as not good or poor, according to CNN exit polls.

Despite historically low unemployment, just 32% rated the economy as excellent or good.

And this proved to be pivotal in the outcome.

Among those who described the economy as not good or poor, 69% voted for Trump. Likewise, 40% of Latino voters indicated the economy was the No. 1 issue. Trump decisively carried Latino voters who picked the economy as the No. 1 issue.

The findings illustrate just how angry voters are about the cost of living.

Yes, the rate of inflation is down sharply. It peaked at a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 when gas prices spiked above $5 a gallon.

But no, prices are not down.

“Though economists focus on the rate of price changes, consumers focus on the level of prices,” Sweet said. “The American consumer generally has a short memory, except for when it comes to prices. Many can tell you the price of gasoline, milk and bread down to the penny today versus four years ago.”

Prices vs. paychecks

And all too often, Americans are spending much more than they were when President Joe Biden took office.

Each month, the typical US household must spend $1,120 more than in January 2021 just to buy the same goods and services, according to Moody’s Analytics.

Paychecks are up by about the same amount ($1,192 more per month, on average) but that means many people must spend all their pay hikes just to get by. They’re treading water, not getting ahead.

And keep in mind, these are averages. For many others, wages have not kept up with inflation.

As CNN’s Phil Mattingly noted, Trump flipped multiple counties in Pennsylvania where wages have failed to keep up with prices.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to not just get the rate of inflation down but to make prices plunge by deporting millions of undocumented people and unleashing fossil fuel production. In August, Trump said he would to get prices to “come down fast.”

However, broad-based price declines are not only improbable, they could bring about a doom loop that’s hard to escape because it feeds on itself.

“The price level for many consumer goods and services aren’t going to plunge,” Sweet said. “The level of prices for many things is permanently higher.”

Tariffs and deportations could lift prices

Not only that, but elements of the Trump agenda could spike prices – if they were enacted. Trump has held up tariffs as a magical fix to almost any problem, describing these taxes on imports as “the greatest thing ever invented.” He’s threatened to impose unthinkably high tariffs on friend and foe alike.

Trump’s promises to impose massive tariffs, deport millions of undocumented workers and potentially influence the Federal Reserve would weaken growth, boost inflation and lower employment, according to a recent working paper released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Inflation would climb to at least 6% by 2026, and by 2028, consumer prices would be 20% higher, the researchers found.

Trump has insisted that his trade agenda will not be inflationary, noting that price increases were modest during his administration even as he lobbed massive tariffs on China.

Still, Trump’s calls for across-the-board tariffs have alarmed mainstream economists. They point to study after study that shows Americans bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on China.

Trump’s tariff proposals would cost the typical US household over $2,600 a year, according to a separate analysis from the Peterson Institute.

Slapping tariffs on apparel, toys, furniture, household appliances, footwear and travel goods alone would cost Americans at least $46 billion a year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group that represents retailers.

“We’re going to create the worst of both worlds: We’re going to have higher domestic prices for goods and some services…and we’re going to have no overall improvement to the jobs picture or the wage picture,” Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, told CNN’s Allison Morrow.

Even Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has been very supportive of the overall Trump agenda, recently told CNN he’s “not a big fan” of tariffs like what Trump has proposed.

“When Trump uses tariffs as a negotiating tool, I’m fine with that,” Moore said during a phone interview in late October. “But I don’t want to see us dramatically raise tariffs on imported goods. Tariffs are taxes. And my worry is, if you take it too far, you’re going to get into a tit-for-tat situation.”

And that raises one of the paramount economic questions of this next Trump era: Will he soften his economic proposals to avoid reigniting prices? Or will he triple-down on tariffs in a way that invites a return of inflation?

America will regret its decision to reelect Donald Trump

The Hill – Opinion

America will regret its decision to reelect Donald Trump

Max Burns, opinion contributor – November 6, 2024

A presidential campaign defined by personal hatreds, threats of political violence and two foiled assassination attempts ended on Tuesday in a mostly orderly election. No matter what the results ultimately show, Americans’ commitment to a fair and peaceful vote is a thumb in the eye to authoritarians both at home and abroad.

That’s about all the joy Democrats (and lovers of democracy) will find in yesterday’s election results. The fleeting optimism that washed over the party after Ann Selzer’s storied Iowa poll showed Kamala Harris unexpectedly leading Donald Trump by 3 points has crashed back to reality. In its place is the realization that democracy’s worst-case scenario is unfolding in real time.

Our democratic institutions are not ready for what comes next. Neither are the American people.

The Trump who will walk into the White House on Jan. 20 is a man steeped in unsettled vendettas, who came within a hair’s breadth of a string of federal felony convictions that he is now empowered to wipe away with a self-pardon — as if those offenses and so many others had never even happened. Trump will see his priorities as he has always seen them: party over country and self over all.

A man with 34 felony convictions can’t win the presidency in a nation where trust in institutions is high. It’s only in a culture where the justice system has long since lost its legitimacy that a man with such a thick criminal record as Trump glides by relatively unremarked. That one man can so effortlessly game American institutions to his own benefit says as much about the decrepit state of America’s institutions as it does about the moral decrepitude of the crook.

The nine years of the Trump era have taken a bat to our democracy, and Trump’s MAGA movement has exploited the nation’s systemic weakness at every turn. Political misinformation flooded social media networks owned by Trump’s key allies, or by Trump personally. Meanwhile, Trump and compliant Republican lawmakers torched public trust in the courts — first by appointing an ethically vacant Supreme Court, and later by urging his followers to hate and distrust not only the judges who tried him but the entire “rigged” justice system.

Trump is now set to return to the White House, and he’s made no secret of his lofty goals for a second term: gutting the civil service, destroying the independence of the Justice Department and seeking political and legal revenge on his lengthy list of personal enemies. Judging by yesterday’s election returns, a majority of Americans are eager to see Trump do exactly that.

The former and future president now inherits a nation deeply weakened by his own toxic brand of politics. Our divided and exhausted nation will now need to fend off the constant extralegal whims of a president who is also, thanks to the Supreme Court, functionally immune from prosecution for any act he undertakes. If Trump’s first term was any indication, we won’t need to wait long for our next constitutional crisis.

Believers in the rule of law are in for a rough four years, because though Trump contradicted himself countless times during this marathon campaign, he never wavered in his distaste for the rule of law or his admiration for strongman autocrats. Members of the press can expect Trump to at least try making good on his oft-repeated pledge to rewrite the nation’s press freedom and libel laws. The rest of us will be along for the bumpy and chaotic ride.

It matters that Trump won his office in a free and fair election. It matters that free people voluntarily chose to cloak Trump in power he will almost certainly abuse in far-reaching and destructive ways. Our country made the choice to walk down the dark path of Trump’s resentments and conspiracies. We will come to regret it.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

I’ve Covered Authoritarians Abroad. Now I Fear One at Home.

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist – November 2, 2024

Donald Trump, partially obscured, speaking into a mic.
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

With this presidential election seemingly a jump ball, what might American democracy and the world look like if Donald Trump is again elected president?

I think it’s hyperbole to suggest, as Hillary Clinton did, that a Trump election would be “the end of our country as we know it.” I don’t think that Trump could turn the United States into a dictatorship.

That said, in the course of four decades of covering the world, I’ve repeatedly seen charismatic leaders win democratic elections and then undermine those democracies. The populist left did that in Venezuela, Mexico and El Salvador, and the populist right did it in Hungary, India and Poland (Poland managed to claw its way back). In his lust for power, willingness to ignore democratic norms and eagerness to glorify himself and suppress opposition, Trump reminds me of those leaders.

“He is the most dangerous person to this country,” Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward.

It’s not that Trump would declare himself dictator for life, but he has already adopted the standard strongman approach of trying to weaponize the legal system to punish and intimidate critics. When he was president, he proposed prosecuting Clinton and did force a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State John Kerry.

“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in June.

It’s worth noting that his efforts to prosecute Clinton and Kerry didn’t succeed, and American democracy survived his first term largely unscathed. Democratic institutions are stronger in the United States than in Hungary or Venezuela, and our system is less vulnerable.

It’s also true that in his first term, Trump’s autocratic inclinations were frustrated by incompetence and by frantic efforts by his own aides to impede him. What would be different in a second term is that he is better prepared and seems ready to bring in like-minded aides who would empower his antidemocratic efforts.

I’ve seen in many other countries how threats and revenge can intimidate the business community and civil society into grudging acquiescence. When Trump was in office, his administration reportedly took steps to hurt Jeff Bezos and his corporate interests, possibly costing him a $10 billion military contract for cloud computing. That may explain Bezos’ decision to withhold an endorsement in the presidential election by The Washington Post, which he owns.

When I was The Times’s bureau chief in Beijing many years ago and wrote tough articles about China’s prime minister, the Chinese government responded by aggressively auditing my taxes. So it felt familiar to learn that Trump told aides to use the I.R.S. to audit the taxes of his critics or those who wouldn’t do his bidding, like James Comey and Andrew McCabe of the F.B.I.

Aides initially resisted, but Comey and McCabe were later selected — supposedly randomly — for audits. Trump said he knew nothing about this, but his denials also felt straight out of the Chinese playbook. Officials in China would tell reporters things that we all knew were false not to persuade anyone but to confuse the issue or to establish the party line for followers to echo.

The first time I met Trump as a politician, he made absurd claims and then denied ever making them — and I felt I was transported back into meetings with Chinese officials whose relationship with truth and reality was not just casual but largely coincidental.

The First Amendment is long established in the United States, and it will survive. But Trump can undermine the free press by bullying corporate owners. After all, about a year ago, he called for NBC’s corporate owners to be investigated for treason because of the network’s coverage, and he suggested recently that ABC News should be punished for the way it managed the presidential debate.

“They’re a news organization,” he said of ABC News. “They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license.” Later he called for CBS to lose its license as well and said that “60 Minutes” “should be taken off the air, frankly.” National news organizations don’t actually need licenses, but their local affiliate TV stations do.

Trump has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to reduce protections for news organizations. Two years ago he called for imprisoning journalists who don’t reveal sources in national security cases and added gleefully that the prospect of prison rape would make journalists ready to give up sources. (I believe journalists are made of sterner stuff, and I’ve seen that in the raw courage of reporters risking their lives in autocracies like Russia.)

Just as alarming is Trump’s suggestion that he would use the armed forces against U.S. citizens. In October he suggested that the National Guard or military be deployed in America against “the enemy from within,” including “radical left lunatics.”

That kind of language may encourage more political violence of the type we already saw on Jan. 6. Trump seemed to acknowledge the risk in his April Time magazine interview, when he was asked about the possibility of post-election violence. “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he said ominously. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

Spare a moment as well to contemplate what a Trump election might mean internationally.

If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Russian forces might now be in Kyiv, for Trump could never have mustered the international coalition and rounded up the assistance to keep Russia at bay (even if he had wanted to). Ukraine would probably have collapsed, Russia might have moved on to Moldova or Latvia, and NATO might well be an empty shell. Observing the fecklessness of the West, China would probably be more aggressive toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, so war might be more likely in Asia.

Trump presents himself as a strongman, but my sense from conversations with foreign officials and business leaders is that what he actually projects is weakness. He would damage the Atlantic alliance and threaten the network of countries that Joe Biden has knit together to restrain China, and he seems to discount the challenges from Moscow and Beijing.

Just last month, Trump described some of his American critics as “scum” and “a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Perhaps that’s why Russia is interfering in the U.S. election with the apparent aim of helping Trump.

Similarly, some Chinese people joke that Trump’s Chinese name is Chuan Jianguo, or Build-the-Country Trump — meaning that for all Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, his chaotic approach and disregard for allies make China stronger.

Trump has little interest in foreign wars, but he can be reckless and inclined to escalate; the upshot is that early in his presidency we came “much closer than anyone would know” to war with North Korea, in Trump’s own words to Woodward. His defense secretary, James Mattis, was so worried that he slept in gym clothes for a time and installed a flashing light in his bathroom to alert him to a crisis if he happened to be showering.

None of us knows how events will unfold, and Trump would not achieve all his aims. Two years ago, he urged the “termination” of the Constitution, and that won’t happen. When he was in office and a federal circuit court blocked one of his programs, he told an aide to “cancel” the court — it didn’t work then, and it won’t next year.

But could Trump make the United States less democratic and make the world far more dangerous? Absolutely. We would be gambling with our future.

Vote to End the Trump Era

The New York Times

Vote to End the Trump Era

The Editorial Board – Opinion – November 2, 2024

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

New York Times Editorial Board Rips Apart Donald Trump in Single Paragraph

Daily Beast

New York Times Editorial Board Rips Apart Donald Trump in Single Paragraph

Liam Archacki – November 2, 2024

Donald Trump.
Brian Snyder

The editorial board of The New York Times just eviscerated Donald Trump in a single paragraph.

The piece, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president during the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.

Rhetorically matter-of-fact, the piece succinctly lays out many of the reasons Trump’s critics think his second term would be disastrous for the country—the implicit point being that nobody really needs a lengthy review of all Trump’s actions; everyone already knows what he’s about.

Here it is in full, with its original hyperlinks to other Times’ coverage of Trump preserved: “You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.”

Last week, the Times’ editorial board published a longer and nearly as scathing article urging voters not to elect Trump.

“Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency,” the piece reads. “We have two words for American voters: Believe him.”

Many major publications have endorsed Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
Many major publications have endorsed Harris in the upcoming presidential election.

Another even lengthier editorial called Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, “the only patriotic choice for president,” citing Harris’ vow to unite the country and describing Trump as “morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest.”

Presidential endorsements from newspapers have been a point of debate in recent political discourse after The Washington Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The decision prompted multiple resignations from the Post’s editorial board, and significant criticism from throughout the journalism world.

The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also controversially ordered its editorial board not to endorse a presidential candidate.

Joining the Times’ in endorsing Harris are other major publications such as The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others. The New York Post endorsed Trump.

What I Truly Expect if an Unconstrained Trump Retakes Power

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist – November 1, 2024

Donald Trump, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, points his finger.
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking why, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, our bags aren’t packed. “It’s tempting to begin trolling my anti-Trump friends by asking if they are liquefying assets, getting passports in order, etc.?” Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, posted on X. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similarly snarky: “So fascism is here and you’re not doing what people did when fascism showed up, which is contemplating emigration in terror or joining armed resistance.”

These jabs seem meant to mock the dread many of us are living in. But despite their bad faith, they’ve lodged in my mind, especially during the late-night insomniac hours when I’m up panicking about what’s going to happen on Tuesday. They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.

Many people I know who have the privilege to do so are in fact making contingency plans; friends whose family histories entitle them to European passports have secured them. But while I’m having lots of half-idle conversations about emigration, I’m not living my life as if either tyranny or exile is imminent, even though I believe, in keeping with assessments by prominent generals who’ve worked closely with Trump, that he’s a fascist.

Partly, I just feel frozen with horror. This awful liminal period is like waiting for the results of a biopsy, and it’s hard to reason clearly about the future until there’s a prognosis. Beyond that, a lesson of modern autocracy is that ordinary life, or at least a diminished version of it, can go on even as democratic hopes are slowly strangled.

My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.

If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past. This is what I envision when I think of MAGA fascism: people demonized as “vermin” being dragged off to camps, while dissent is violently crushed by the armed forces. I don’t know how anyone who has listened to Trump and those around him can dismiss this scenario as hysterical.

There will, I assume, be persecutions of Trump’s more high-profile enemies. We know that Trump, in his first term, harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ex-president and his allies have been clear about their intention to end the independence of the Justice Department. Mitt Romney is taking seriously the possibility that Trump will use the government to go after him, telling The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, “I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word.” Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and President Biden until he retired last year, told the journalist Bob Woodward that he fears Trump could have him recalled to duty and court-martialed for disloyalty. Anyone significant enough to threaten Trump could find themselves targeted.

And it won’t be only the powerful who need fear attacks by the MAGA state. Just look at those who’ve found themselves in the cross hairs of America First Legal, an organization headed by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, which The New York Times called “a policy harbinger for a second Trump term.” It has sued charities that help women pay for abortions, Maryland schools that “expose children to radical gender ideology,” and “woke” corporations — including the N.F.L. — trying to increase diversity. In a second Trump term, Miller and his allies will be able to deploy the power of agencies including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their foes.

Often, of course, they won’t have to; we’re already seeing troubling signs that some plutocrats are obeying in advance. The Washington Post’s decision to quash its editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris shocked so many of the paper’s readers because it seemed, despite the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ insistence to the contrary, like an act of corrupt capitulation.

As The Post itself has reported, Bezos’ companies have billions of dollars in government contracts at stake, and during the last Trump administration, the president went out of his way to punish the billionaire for Post coverage he didn’t like. In 2019, The Post reported, Marc Short, then Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told leaders of Bezos’ space exploration company, “You have a Washington Post problem.”

The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch. By the end of Trump’s first term, when the president was pressuring state officials to change vote totals, staffing the highest levels of government with thugs and lackeys, and, eventually, siccing a vigilante mob on the Capitol, we’d already gone farther on the path to authoritarianism than I’d once thought possible. The place we left off at in January 2021 will, in all likelihood, be the starting point for a Trump administration in 2025.

Johnny McEntee, who started as a Trump bag carrier, had by the end of Trump’s presidency become so powerful that some referred to him as the “deputy president.” As The Atlantic reported, he turned the Presidential Personnel Office, an agency in charge of hiring and firing political appointees, “into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”

Now a leader of Project 2025, McEntee will most likely have a major role in staffing a new Trump White House. He recently called — with the kidding-not-kidding sneer common to MAGA — for scrapping the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote.

Days out from the election, pointing out the potential nightmares ahead feels like screaming into a void. Trump’s deep contempt for liberal democracy is, as they say, baked in. When Milley called Trump “fascist to the core,” and when Gen. John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, said that he wanted to rule as a dictator, the political debate wasn’t about whether they were correct, but about whether their words would matter. (The consensus seemed to be no.) So those of us who recognize what Trump is lurch forward to Tuesday, a coin flip away from losing what we thought was our democratic birthright, trying and often failing to think through the aftermath of the unthinkable.

But even if the unthinkable happens, it won’t happen all at once. Hannah Arendt wrote, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” about how the dislocations of World War I created a mass of stateless people who lived “outside the pale of the law.” Seeing these people deprived of human rights, those secure in their citizenship did not generally worry about their own. “It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule,” wrote Arendt.

My kids keep asking anxiously what will happen if Trump wins. I tell them that their lives won’t change, that we’ll have to try to stand up for others who are more vulnerable, but that we ourselves will be fine. The last two words I only say in my head: “For now.”

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.