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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Heather  Cox Richardson, September 10, 2024

Former president Trump has always approached debates as professional wrestling events in which the key is not to explain policies or answer questions, but rather to demonstrate dominance over his opponent. In 2016 the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, had a hard time countering this strategy effectively because of the many expectations of what was appropriate behavior for a female presidential candidate. 

In 2020 and then again in the June 2024 “debate,” Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s stutter made it difficult to counter Trump’s scattershot attacks.

The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people. 

She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television. 

The Harris campaign began the day trolling Trump with a new campaign ad featuring the pieces of former president Barack Obama’s speech at the August Democratic National Convention that concerned Trump. “Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire”—the ad cuts to a photo of Trump in a golf cart—“who has not stopped whining about his problems.” Then a clip of Trump shows him complaining about Harris’s crowds, before Obama notes Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” complete with Obama’s hand motion suggesting Trump’s sizes were small. “It just goes on, and on, and on,” Obama says, before the ad shows empty seats and people yawning at Trump’s rallies.

“America’s ready for a new chapter,” Obama says to the overflow crowd cheering at Chicago’s United Center during the Democratic National Convention. “We are ready for a President Kamala Harris!” At the end, even Harris’s standard statement, “I’m Kamala Harris and I approved this message,” sounds like a challenge. This morning, the Harris campaign began running the ad on the Fox News Channel. 

At the same time, they began running Philadelphia-themed ads across the city on billboards, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and on food trucks and taxi cabs, sidewalk art, and digital projections making fun of Trump’s fascination with crowd sizes. They showed, for example, a full-sized Philadelphia pretzel labeled “Harris” alongside a piece of one that looked like an upside down U labeled “Trump.”

The taunting might have been behind Trump’s demand for loyalty from Republican lawmakers this afternoon, telling them to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his way on the inclusion of a voter suppression measure in the bill to fund the government. The right has often relied on threats of government shutdowns to try to get their way, but such shutdowns are never popular, and even moderate Republicans are leery of launching one just before an election.

Nonetheless, Trump tried to lock them into such a shutdown, reiterating in a post this afternoon the lie that undocumented immigrants are voting in presidential elections. “If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN—CLOSE IT DOWN.” 

Throughout the day, the Harris campaign placed posts on social media showing Harris looking crisp and presidential and Trump looking old and unkempt. And then, for ten minutes in the hour before the debate, the Harris campaign held a drone show over the Philadelphia Museum of Art showing campaign slogans and then turning the words “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT” into “MADAM PRESIDENT.” 

Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that Trump’s advisors were concerned ahead of the debate about whether they would get “happy Trump” or “angry Trump,” worrying that a frustrated Trump would engage in the vicious personal attacks that turn voters off. They expressed relief that having the microphones muted when it was not a candidate’s turn to speak would prevent Harris from irritating him with fact checks and snark of her own. Conservative lawyer George Conway noted that it was “[i]nteresting how one campaign is extremely concerned about the emotional stability of its candidate, and how the other is not.”

Harris’s attacks on Trump, including her campaign’s subtle digs at his masculinity, appeared to have accomplished what they set out to. When the two came out on stage, he went straight to his podium, while she strode across the stage, moved into his space, held out her hand, introduced herself and wished him well: “Kamala Harris. Have a good debate.” He muttered in response, “Nice to see you.” Then she took her own spot at the podium. When the debate opened, it was clear that Harris was the dominant figure and that her opponent was “angry Trump.” He would not look at her during the debate.

In her first answer, Harris tried to set out both her own story as a child of the middle class and how she intended to build an opportunity economy for others, lowering food and housing costs and opening the way for more small businesses. It was a lot, quickly, and she looked a little nervous.

Then Trump spoke and it was clear he was going off the rails. His first comment was to suggest Harris was lying, and then to insist that his proposed tariffs will solve everything, although he has the way tariffs work entirely backward: they are paid by the consumer, not by foreign countries. As he followed with a long list of his rally lies, Harris started to smile. 

From then on, he continued to produce rally stories full of wild exaggerations and attack Harris with lies in what CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called “a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former president Trump.” "No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency,” Dale said. “A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true. This wasn't little exaggerations, political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality." As Harris spoke directly to the American people, growing stronger and stronger, Trump got wilder and angrier and told more and more crazy stories. 

And then, about ten minutes into the debate, Harris baited him. She invited the American people to go to one of his rallies, where “he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, he will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer.’ And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” 

Trump lost it. He defended his rallies, said Harris couldn’t get anyone to attend hers and has to bus in attendees (in reality, her rallies are packed and he is the one who reportedly hires attendees), and then, in his fury, repeated the lie about immigrants eating pets. When a moderator fact-checked that story, he fought back, saying he heard it on television.

And from then on, Harris kept baiting him while explaining her own policies directly to the camera, and he took the bait every single time. He ran down every rabbit hole and appeared unable to finish a thought. Notably, he refused to say he would not sign a national abortion ban and admitted that after nine years of promising one, he had no health care plan (he has, he said, “concepts of a plan,” and if they pan out, he’ll let us know in the “not too distant future”). 

He threatened World War III and repeated that the U.S. is “a failing nation.” He told a long story about threatening “Abdul,” the leader of the Taliban; in fact, the leader of the Taliban since 2016 is Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. In response to Harris’s statement that foreign leaders thought he was a disgrace, Trump answered that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who destroyed his country’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship, says he’s a good leader. New York Times columnist David French wrote: “It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life.”

The debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC, asked solid questions and corrected the most egregious of Trump’s lies. But as he continued to interrupt and yell at Harris, they increasingly gave him leeway to do so. This meant he spoke more often and for more time than Harris; MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reported that he spoke 39 times for a total of 41.9 minutes, to her 23 times for a total of 37.1 minutes. But the extra time did him no favors.

By the end of the evening, Harris had delivered a clear message about her hopes to move the country forward beyond years of using race to divide people who have far more in common than they have differences. She promised to develop an economy that will build small businesses and support a growing middle class, while protecting rights, including the right to make reproductive decisions without the intrusion of the state. And she showed the nation that Trump can be baited, that he lies freely and incoherently, and—perhaps crucially—that he is no longer the dominant politician in America. 

Immediately after the debate, the Harris campaign continued their demonstration of dominance. Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon released a statement recapping Harris’s strength and Trump’s angry incoherence. She concluded: “Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”

Then things got even worse for Trump. 

Music phenomenon Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, telling her 283 million Instagram followers that she felt she had to because of Trump’s earlier reposting of an AI image of her seeming to endorse him. That, she said, “brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.” 

After explaining why she was supporting Harris and Walz and urging her fans to do their own research, Swift signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 

Steven Beschloss August 29, 2024

Arlington National Cemetery is a sacred space, the final resting place for about 400,000 veterans and their families dating back to the Revolutionary War and Civil War, a somber, deeply moving expression of the sacrifices that so many Americans have made for their country. It’s why I found it so appalling that Donald Trump visited there on Monday, since it was obvious that he was exploiting this sacred place as a photo op to attack the withdrawal from Afghanistan, nothing more than a publicity stunt for his failing campaign. As I put it in yesterday’s essay, “The Downward Spiral of a Weak Man,” “The issue here is that this man who despises dead soldiers felt it necessary to pretend to care.”

But then we learned yesterday from reporting by NPR that the reality is even worse—that while several military families who lost their sons during the Afghanistan withdrawal invited him there, Trump and his staff engaged in an altercation with an Arlington employee and violated federal law that disallows photography and filming by anyone other than authorized cemetery staff members in an area called Section 60. This 14-acre area is primarily reserved for fallen veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now totaling some 900 soldiers killed in those conflicts.

A handout given to visitors titled “Rules Governing Conduct” specifically prohibits “political campaign or election-related activities within the cemeteries.” But that didn’t stop Trump’s political operatives from shooting campaign video and setting up photos with their malignant candidate standing over a gravestone, grinning and flashing a “thumbs up.”

That disgusting collection of images visibly includes the gravestone of another soldier, Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, a Green Beret who had three children and committed suicide after eight tours of combat duty. “We hope,” said his sister in a statement after the shameful incident, “that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”

These legal and moral violations would be bad enough, but we also learned that Trump’s staffers verbally abused and pushed aside an Arlington employee who unsuccessfully tried to stop them. That employee filed a report about what happened, the details of which haven’t been made public.

Yet a further reminder of Trump’s toxic contamination is that this employee chose to not file charges due to fear of retaliation from Trump supporters. Given the pattern of abuse in so many other instances, this is more than understandable. This decision followed Trump’s campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, insisting in a statement that the employee who tried to bar them from entering Section 60 was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and later attacked the cemetery staffer’s fear about pressing charges. “That is ridiculous,” he said in a statement yesterday, “and sounds like someone who has Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

I’m sure Cheung didn’t miss the ugly vitriol coming from the candidate’s running mate yesterday, who attacked Vice President Kamala Harris as “disgraceful” for criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery, even though she never made any comment. The despicable conclusion from J.D. Vance during a campaign stop: “She can—she can go to hell.”

I felt it necessary to follow up on this nauseating, infuriating episode because it encapsulates why we should do whatever we can to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—to make clear how done we are with a sociopath who exploits a hallowed place like Arlington, cares not one whit if he’s breaking laws, creates conflict and misery for his own personal benefit, then exacerbates the abuse when the actions are questioned. This whole episode makes the need to end this dark chapter in our nation’s history even more obvious.

For the first time in eight years, the Republican Party has a platform. It’s not written in Sharpie, but it might as well be. It’s all in caps, like they’re shouting at us. The content and the form are high-schoolish. It reads as though someone who lacks substance tried to write bumper stickers or poster slogans that sound good but are empty—no one, Republican or Democrat, is going to “seal” the border or “stop” inflation. It’s that emptiness, ending with “Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success,” that captures the hollow spirit of this new Republican platform. It’s not that platforms are ever highly substantive, but this one hits new lows.

Perhaps what’s absent is as telling as what’s in there: no mention of abortion or marriage equality, two issues where the well-known GOP position is at odds with public sentiment. Trump recently bragged about undoing Roe and abortion rights, and now he tries to back away from that signature accomplishment.

The platform is what they’ll show people. But Project 2025 is the substance of what the new administration will look like. It includes a national abortion ban—forget about states’ rights. It includes policies that would increase taxes for middle class Americans, weaken workers’ right to overtime pay, and raise the retirement age for Social Security. It’s those unpopular parts of Project 2025 that are absent from or contradicted by the Republican platform, the part they show the public. But Project 2025 is squarely Trump’s, written by his people. Eighty-one percent of them held formal roles connected to the Trump presidency.

The coming election is the perfect storm for anyone interested in sinking democracy. On the one hand, there is the Republican Party, now completely and firmly in thrall to a would-be dictator who serves his own self-interest and doesn’t care about the people who make up his “base,” and for whom he pretends to be fighting for. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME, THEY’RE AFTER YOU…I’M JUST STANDING IN THE WAY!” Trump rants in bold on his website.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is still in something of a meltdown, not entirely without reason, after Joe Biden stumbled through his debate performance, leading to a fierce conversation about whether he’s capable of leading the country for the next four years. That’s a conversation that might have been better had it happened at the outset of the campaign season before Biden locked up the delegates necessary for the nomination. But that did not happen. So now, here we are, with democracy hanging in the balance.

We are living squarely at the intersection of law and politics, and it is not a comfortable place to be. The Lincoln Project is out with a new ad, an effort to demonstrate as though it’s a news report what it would mean to have Donald Trump back in office, organized under the principles of Project 2025 and backed by a Supreme Court that has decreed none of his official acts are crimes. It’s four minutes long, but it’s a must watch.

Here’s how it ends: “Ask yourself, what did you believe was impossible just eight years ago? … He’s counting on you to believe it won’t happen.” That’s an evergreen statement when it comes to Trump; whether it’s Project 2025 or anything else about his hoped-for second term in office, he is quite literally counting on Americans to believe it won’t happen.

I know many of you will hear proof of this in your conversations with people who intend to vote for him. They won’t read Project 2025; they may not know what it is. They won’t read a lengthy analysis, maybe not even a short one. It comes down to conversations with trusted friends. So please take one or two key points that resonate with you from everything we’ve been reading and discussing and be prepared to make them at the right moment in those conversations. It might be the contradiction between the Republican Party’s platform and Project 2025. That implies a level of deceit that might make people question and dig deeper to take a look for themselves. It could be the promise that there will be no changes to Social Security on the one hand, while proposing to weaken it on the other.

It seems likely at this point that Joe Biden will be the Democrat’s nominee. He says he’s staying in the race, and he has the votes. He also has, as University of Virginia political science Professor Larry Sabato puts it, the “high ground,” in the sense that he can’t be forced to leave the race. He has said he won’t.

I know the whole situation angers some of the people in the big tent that is the Democratic Party. The Democrats have never been a party that marches in lockstep. That is something that Republicans do. Its absence is both a strength and a weakness of the Democratic Party, but I suspect something that draws many Democrats is the lack of a mandatory dogma.

Nonetheless, we live in a moment where we must find a way to keep the Republic. We are in the moment Benjamin Franklin envisioned more than 200 years ago, when, asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention had created, he responded, “a Republic, if you can keep it.” Just like America on the cusp of the Civil War, we are going to have to find a way to steer back towards democracy.

Because we know what Trump will do.

I prefer a political party that permits dissent and debate—the proverbial big tent—over one where disagreement with the dear leader leads to marginalization and forced expulsion. I prefer a country where the First Amendment and a whole host of other rights many will take for granted until it’s too late stay in place. Also, and this is putting it mildly, I’d prefer to see Joe Biden appointing new judges and justices rather than Donald Trump.

The Supreme Court—including three members Trump appointed and two who, by virtue of conflicts of interest due to work undertaken and/or views expressed by their wives, would have recused had they been judges on any other federal court—has now anointed him with near total immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts he undertakes. The opinion in Trump v. U.S. sweeps so broadly when describing potential official acts that he can claim protection for virtually anything he does. Any effort to hold him accountable would be tied up in court for years.

Next Monday Republicans will gather in Milwaukee. They will vote on their platform and, presumably, Donald Trump will emerge as their nominee to be president. It will be a dark moment in our country’s history.

We live in the time of the perfect storm. In less than four months, we’ll be deciding the future of the United States. Whatever your tolerance is for the news and for staying engaged in this moment, try to engage in civil discourse wherever you find the opportunity to do so. Just like those of us who write postcards to voters in other states know that they influence people’s decisions about whether to vote, our conversations—the casual ones in grocery stores, in places of worship, or over coffee or a beer, can have a strong impact too. And it’s the part we can do ahead of November, which is to say we must do it.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Today felt as if there was a collective inward breath as people tried to figure out what yesterday’s jury verdict means for the upcoming 2024 election. The jury  decided that former president Trump created fraudulent business records in  order to illegally influence the 2016 election. As of yesterday, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States of America is a convicted felon. 

Since the verdict, Trump and his supporters have worked very hard to spin the   conviction as a good thing for his campaign, but those arguments sound like a desperate attempt to shape a narrative that is spinning out of their control. Newspapers all over the country bore the word “GUILTY” in their headlines today.

At stake for Trump is the Republican presidential nomination. Getting it would pave his way to the presidency, which offers him financial gain and the ability to short-circuit the federal prosecutions that observers say are even tighter cases than the state case in which a jury quickly and unanimously found him guilty yesterday. Not getting it leaves Trump and the MAGA supporters who  helped him try to steal the 2020 presidential election at the mercy of the  American justice system.  

After last night’s verdict, Trump went to the cameras and tried to establish that the nomination remains his, asserting that voters would vindicate him on November 5. But this morning, as he followed up last night’s comments, he did himself no favors. He billed the event as a “press conference,” but delivered what Michael Grynbaum of the New   York Times described as “a rambling and misleading speech,” so full of grievance and unhinged that the networks except the Fox News Channel  cut away from it as he attacked trial witnesses, called Judge Merchan “the devil,” and falsely accused President Joe Biden of pushing his prosecution. He took no questions from the press.

Today the Trump campaign told reporters it raised $34.8 million from small-dollar donors in the hours after the guilty verdict, but observers pointed out there was no reason to believe those numbers based on statements from Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Stephen Miller shouted on the Fox News  Channel that every Republican secretary of state, state attorney general, donor, member of Congress must use their power “RIGHT NOW” to “beat these   Communists!” 

The attempt of MAGA lawmakers to shape events in their favor seemed just as  panicked. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) posted on social media that “New   York is a liberal sh*t hole,” and Jim Jordan (R-OH) today asked Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Trump, to testify before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the   Federal Government about “politically motivated prosecutions of…President  Donald Trump.” Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY) noted that Trump is a private citizen and Congress has no jurisdiction over the case, but that Jordan is using his congressional authority illegally to defend Trump. 

MAGA  senators were even more strident. Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah melted down on X last night over the verdict, and today he led nine other Republican senators in a revolt against the federal government. Lee, J. D. Vance of Ohio, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin issued a  public letter saying they would no longer pass legislation, fund the government, or vote to confirm the administration’s appointees because, they said, “[t]he White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways. As a Senate   Republican conference,” they said, although there were only 10 of them, “we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.” 

It was an odd statement seemingly designed to use disinformation to convince voters to stick with them. Ten senators said they would not do the federal jobs they were elected to do because private citizen Trump was convicted in a state court by a jury of 12 people in New York, a jury that Trump’s lawyers had agreed to. The senators attacked the rule of law and the operation of the federal government in a demonstration of support for Trump. A number of the senators involved were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020   presidential election. 

Awkwardly,  considering the day’s news, a video from 2016 circulated today in which Trump insisted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who he falsely insisted had committed crimes even as he was the one actually committing them, “shouldn’t be allowed to run.” If she were to win, Trump then said, “it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and, ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put it correctly: this is not an “outpouring of rage and  anger,” so much as “an overwhelming effort to match and muffle the earthquake of what happened yesterday afternoon with enough noise and choreography to keep everyone in Trump’s campaign and on the margins of it in line and on his side.”

Still, there is more behind the MAGA support for Trump than fearful political messaging. Trump has been hailed as a savior by his supporters because he promises to smash through the laws and norms of American democracy to put them into power. There, they can assert their will over the rest of us, achieving the social and religious control they cannot achieve through democratic means because they cannot win the popular vote in a free and fair election. With Trump’s conviction within the legal system, his supporters are   more determined than ever to destroy the rules that block them from imposing their will on the rest of us. 

Today the Federalist Society, which is now aligned with Victor Orbán’s Hungary, flew an upside-down U.S. flag as a signal of national distress. Their actions were in keeping with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statement that Trump is being persecuted “for political reasons” and that the cases show “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”

Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported today on a spike in violent rhetoric on social  media targeting New York judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s Manhattan  election interference trial, and District Attorney Bragg. Users of a fringe  internet message board also shared what they claimed were the addresses of jurors. “Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote. Another wrote, “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to [W]ashington and hang everyone. That’s   the only solution.”

This  attack on our democracy was the central message of a crucially important  story from yesterday that got buried under the news of Trump’s conviction. In The New Republic,  Ken Silverstein reported on a private WhatsApp group started last December by military contractor Erik Prince—founder of Blackwater and brother of Trump’s   secretary of education, Betsy DeVos—and including about 650 wealthy and well-connected “right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives,  arms traffickers, and journalists,” including Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who served as Trump’s secretary of the interior. Called  “Off Leash,” the group discussed, as Silverstein wrote, “the shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists,” collapsing Gaza into a “fiery hell pit,” wiping out Iran, how Africa was a “sh*thole of   a continent,” and ways to dominate the globe. Mostly, though, they discussed  the danger of letting everyone vote. “There is only one path forward,” Zinke  wrote. “Elect Trump.” Another member answered, “It’s Trump or Revolution.”  “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” wrote another. 

And yet the frantic MAGA spin on the verdict reveals that there is another way to interpret it. Americans who had lost faith that the justice system could ever hold a powerful man accountable as Trump’s lawyers managed to put off his many indictments see the verdict as a welcome sign that the system still works. 

“The  American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Biden said  today. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself. It was a  state case, not a federal case. And it was heard by a jury of 12 citizens, 12  Americans, 12 people like you. Like millions of Americans who served on  juries, this jury is chosen the same way every jury in America is chosen. It  was a process that Donald Trump's attorney was part of. The jury heard five  weeks of evidence…. After careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous   verdict. They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts. Now he’ll be  given the opportunity as he should to appeal that decision just like everyone  else has that opportunity. That's how the American system of justice works.  And it's reckless, it's dangerous, and it's irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don't like the verdict. Our justice system  has endured for nearly 250 years and it literally is the cornerstone of  America….The justice system should be respected, and we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that. That's America. That's who we  are. And that's who we will always be, God willing.”

Today the publisher of Dinesh D’Souza’s book and film 2000 Mules, which alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election, said it was pulling both the book and film from distribution and issued an apology to a Georgia man who sued for defamation after 2000 Mules  accused him of voting illegally.  

MAGA Republicans confidently predicted yesterday that the stock market would crash if the jury found Trump guilty. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained  almost 600 points.

© 2024 Heather Cox   Richardson
 

Excerpted from May 28, 2024, ©HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

“In remarks at Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Memorial Day, President Joe Biden honored “the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who’ve given their lives for this nation. Each one…a link in the chain of honor stretching back to our founding days. Each one bound by common commitment—not to a place, not to a person, not to a President, but to an idea unlike any idea in human history: the idea of the United States of America.”

“[F]reedom has never been guaranteed,” Biden said. “Every generation has to earn it; fight for it; defend it in battle between autocracy and democracy, between the greed of a few and the rights of many…. And just as our fallen heroes have kept the ultimate faith with our country and our democracy, we must keep faith with them,” he said. 

His speech at Arlington echoed the message he delivered to this year’s graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he urged the graduates to hold fast to their oaths. “On your very first day at West Point, you raised your right hands and took an oath—not to a political party, not to a president, but to the Constitution of the United States of America—against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said to applause. Soldiers “have given their lives for that Constitution. They have fought to defend the freedoms that it protects: the right to vote, the right to worship, the right to raise your voice in protest. They have saved and sacrificed to ensure, as President Lincoln said, a ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.’”

“[N]othing is guaranteed about our democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it, to choose it,” he said. “Now, it’s your turn.” Biden spent more than an hour saluting and shaking the hand of each graduate. 

In contrast, Trump ushered in Memorial Day with a post on his social media company, saying: “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.” 

He then continued to attack E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, before turning to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the civil case of Trump and the Trump Organization falsifying documents, and Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the current criminal case in New York. 

The message behind this extraordinary post was twofold: Trump can think of nothing but himself…and he appears to be terrified. 

This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term.

"Based  on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too  nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again. "

A summary of what Cortellessa and Cox-Richardson wrote follows: 

TRUMP PLANS TO:

1) Establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.” 

2) Use the military to round up, place in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. 

3) Permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. 

4) Shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). 

5) Bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of  attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,

6) End the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. 

7) Not aid European or Asian allies that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. 

8) Gut the U.S. civil service, 

9) Deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, 

10) Close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, 

11) Staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.