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  • The Return of the John Birch Society

    The Return of the John Birch Society

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    Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.

    Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.

    He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose onetime membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.

    Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be

    In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, as one report put it.

    Though CPAC has long catered more to the activist base of the Republican Party than to its establishment, the event has marched steadily closer to the fringes in the years since Donald Trump’s election, the barrier to entry for speakers and organizations being little more than a sufficient appreciation of the 45th president. But even Smart seemed a touch surprised by the ease of it all in 2023; when he applied on behalf of the John Birch Society for a booth at CPAC, and when, after the fuss and hand-wringing of 11 years earlier, the application was approved.

    Read: The martyr at CPAC

    “It was a very basic process,” he recalled with a shrug. (CPAC organizers did not respond to a request for comment about the John Birch Society’s presence at the conference.)

    It was half past noon yesterday, day two of the 2024 gathering, and Smart, a soft-spoken, genial man wearing a trim blazer and slacks, was standing before the red-white-and-blue curtained backdrop of the John Birch Society booth. He occasionally paused our conversation to direct curious passersby to the literature spread across a nearby table—brochures outlining the history of the organization (“How are we unique?”); copies of its latest “Freedom Index,” or congressional scorecard; issues of The New American, the group’s in-house journal, including a “TRUMP WORLD” collector’s edition featuring such articles as “Trumping the Deep State” and “The Deplorables.” It was the contemporary output of an organization with an older and more controversial heritage than probably any other group featured this year at CPAC. And yet what was most striking about the John Birch Society of 2024 was how utterly unremarkable it appeared among the various booths lining this hotel conference center.

    The John Birch Society, once the scourge of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, relegated to the outermost edges of the movement, now fits neatly into the mainstream of the American right. David Giordano, another field coordinator for the organization who was attending CPAC, credited Trump for hastening the shift, challenging the global elite in ways that past Republican presidents had only ever talked about doing. “What were the things they said about him? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’—that got my attention,” Giordano told me, smiling. “What’d they say about the John Birch Society? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic.’ That’s when you know you’re over the target.” Longtime members and officers of the organization exuded the polite but unmistakable air of I told you so at the conference. “A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, my grandmother or my dad was a member. We used to think he was crazy, but now, not so much,’” Smart said, beaming. “Because we’ve been warning people about a lot of this stuff for decades, obviously.”

    The John Birch Society, so named for a U.S. Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists toward the end of World War II, was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who made his fortune by way of Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Welch persuaded a handful of the country’s wealthiest anti–New Deal businessmen to join him in a mission to extinguish the “international communist conspiracy” he believed had penetrated the U.S. government and was set to consume every facet of American life. President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles—all of them, Welch insisted, were dedicated agents of the U.S.S.R.

    For Welch, the Warren Court was incontrovertible evidence of the Soviet mandate in motion, given its decision outlawing prayer in public schools and, crucially, its ushering of America into a racially desegregated future. Donations flooded in as the John Birch Society took aim at the civil-rights movement, the United Nations, local public libraries and school boards, and the diabolical plot apparently enshrouding all of them. As the organization grew in prominence, a number of conservative leaders, including National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., agonized over how to contain Welch’s influence without alienating the electrified legion of Americans—many of them subscribers to Buckley’s magazine—whom Welch had brought into the movement. In the early 1960s, Buckley would publish a series of editorials critical of Welch and his worldview, urging conservatives to unite in rejection of his “false counsels.” By the mid-’70s, the organization’s formal ranks and funding had significantly dwindled.

    Matthew Dallek: How far-right movements die

    Yet the Bircher worldview never really went away. On the margins of the right, it continued to find purchase in new candidates and new personalities who adapted it to meet new moments. The society’s anti-communist crusade translated into alarm over a post–Cold War plot by the global elite to construct a “new world order” defined by porous borders and centralized, socialist rule; the birther conspiracy theories of the Tea Party era fit well within the Bircher tradition. And then, in 2016, the John Birch Society saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House.

    Giordano was at first skeptical of Trump’s candidacy. But then he watched as President Trump in short succession scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—dramatic blows, in Giordano’s view, to plans for the new world order. Giordano counts COVID—the lockdowns, the vaccines—as the wake-up event for many Americans, himself and others in the John Birch Society included. “I’ve been a member since 1994. And I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if this new world order will come in my lifetime,’” he recalled. And then came 2020. “They said, ‘Go home and flatten the curve.’ And I said, ‘This is the new world order. It’s here.’” He refused to take a vaccine or ever wear a face covering in public, recalling to me the time he successfully wore down a sales associate at Designer Shoe Warehouse who’d asked him to abide by the store policy on masks.

    The John Birch Society, Giordano claimed, has been in a “growing phase” in the years since. “I’m constantly signing people up—I’ve got a new chapter in Ocean County; we had no chapters in Delaware, and now I’ve got a new chapter right in Wilmington.” Oddly enough, it’s a Trump victory in November that he fears could reverse the tide. “If Trump wins—which I personally hope—our membership will drop,” he predicted. “‘Oh,’ they’ll all say, ‘he’s gonna save us.’ And I explain to people, we’re the watchers on the Wall. The Founders said, ‘Here’s a constitution; this is forever; you got to fight every day to keep it.’”

    Giordano’s claims of growth dovetail with the recent uptick in references to the John Birch Society by right-wing celebrities. Last May, in conversation with the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich on his War Room podcast, Steve Bannon mocked left-wing efforts to deploy the “Bircher” label as a smear. “They say, ‘Oh! Moms for Liberty is just the modern version of the John Birch Society,’” Bannon said, laughing, before turning back to Descovich: “You’re doing something right, girl.” A few months before that, Nick Fuentes, a far-right vlogger and white supremacist who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, heralded the John Birch Society as a “prelude to the Groypers”—the army of neo-Nazi activists and online influencers Fuentes counts as followers.

    Some national Republicans, moreover, no longer try to maintain even a nominal distance from the organization. Joining the John Birch Society for its return to CPAC in 2023 were lawmakers including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ronny Jackson of Texas, both of whom sat for livestreamed interviews with The New American as throngs of conference-goers listened from the sidelines. At this year’s conference, a woman helping staff the booth urged me to check out the magazine’s January issue, the cover of which featured a close-up portrait of Andy Biggs; the Arizona congressman—former chair of the House Freedom Caucus—had sat for an exclusive interview on “many of the issues facing our country,” including President Joe Biden’s “corruption,” as the magazine put it, “immigration, and China.”

    From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?

    It’s unclear just how large the John Birch Society is today—even Smart told me, “They keep those numbers close”—but to measure its influence by membership is to miss the point. Naturally, as the principles and positions of the John Birch Society have insinuated themselves into the mainstream on the right, the Birchers’ own claim to those ideas has weakened. The organization’s rogue crusades of the past are now so familiar and universal that the original fingerprints are no longer visible.

    Consider fluoride. At the height of the group’s relevance in the ’60s, the John Birch Society railed against fluoridated drinking water as a communist conspiracy to poison Americans en masse, a go-to data point for the National Review set and others invested in the political exile of the Birchers. As soon as I stepped off the escalator at the convention center outside Washington, D.C., that hosted CPAC, though, I came upon cocktail tables scattered with brochures listing “Fun Facts on Fluoride,” among them that “Fluoride was used by Hitler and Stalin” and that “it will kill you.”

    There was no stated affiliation with the John Birch Society, and no person around to discuss the pamphlets. And perhaps that was telling; far from the niche boogeyman of one conservative organization, the perils of fluoride had become part of the generic paraphernalia of the movement. (The “Myth vs Facts” section of the John Birch Society website, I should note, currently states that “while the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”)

    Plenty have noted the John Birch Society’s echoes in the GOP’s oft-invoked specter of the “deep state,” the conspiracism that immediately hijacked the memory of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July 2016. Yet to attend CPAC today is to see those instincts taken to their most troublingly banal ends. Lifestyle and wellness products are hawked as solutions that the medical establishment never wanted you to find; a payment-processing company warns, with a massive image of a human-silhouette target riddled with bullet holes, “Your business is a target.”

    For the John Birch Society, returning to CPAC has meant slipping seamlessly back in among groups and personalities that for years have been operating within its legacy, whether they knew it or not. The organization has been “eclipsed by many different groups and offshoots, so they’re not controversial in the same way that, say, Richard Spencer was a few years ago,” Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, told me.

    Why was the John Birch Society invited back to CPAC? The better question, in Dallek’s view: “Why wouldn’t it be?”

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    Elaina Plott Calabro

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  • MTG Releases New Tell-All Book – Bill Tope, Humor Times

    MTG Releases New Tell-All Book – Bill Tope, Humor Times

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    MTG shovels the dirt on friends and foes alike in new tell-all book.

    Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R), representing Georgia’s 6th Congressional district since 2021, has come out with a tell-all book, a memoir of her years of political enlightenment which she states began in 2015, with the escalator ride taken in Trump Tower by future President Donald J. Trump.

    tell-all book, Marjorie Taylor Greene
    MTG counts how many actual facts are in her new tell-all book. Photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.

    In the book, titled I’d Drink His Bathwater: My Loyalty to The Donald, Greene recounts the highlights of her career so far. For example, she promulgates many controversial political (conspiracy) theories, including that the 9/11 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York was a so-called inside job, perpetrated by elements of the “deep state.” Greene states the actual perpetrators were not Saudi radicals, but in fact Jews and seminal figures of the nascent Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

    Another theory put forth by Greene is that the spate of destructive wildfires which ravaged the Pacific Northwest some five years ago was the work of space lasers manipulated by Rothschild family “bad Jews.” Said Greene: “They’re always up to shit.”

    Still another conspiracy theory she sets forth in detail is that rogue Democrats, also enmeshed in the deep state, operated a cannibalistic child-sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. “They wasn’t just puttin’ pepperonis on them pies,” claimed Greene in a post on Twitter. Hillary Clinton, stated Greene, “was the bitch behind this disgraceful episode.”

    Greene, who divorced her husband of more than 30 years in 2022, has been linked romantically in the tabloids with former President Donald J. Trump. When Trump was temporarily incarcerated in Fulton County, Georgia last year, to have his mug shot and fingerprints taken, Greene allegedly had a conjugal visit with the ex-president. Trump reportedly said that if such interludes continued to occur, then he’d “be happy to spend more time in the clink.”

    MTG’s political career has been a mixed bag. Although she was stripped of her committee assignments during her first term, due to imprudent public remarks and posts on social platforms, Greene. a fast friend of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has in her second term gained membership on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Committee on Homeland Security where, she wrote, she has “consistently raised hell.” She has personally introduced bills to impeach some 40 members of the Biden administration, including all the cabinet members.

    On Jan. 20, 2021, Greene introduced a bill of impeachment against newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden. It was his first day on the job. And she has said that she would move to vacate the Speaker’s chair if new Speaker Mike Johnson managed to pass legislation which would afford military aid to Ukraine, which is involved in an on-going war with Russia.

    “That there’s a territorial dispute,” cried Greene on the House floor, gnashing her teeth. “We got no business helping out them Ukraine Nazis,” she recounted, quoting herself. Greene went on to write that, when Donald Trump is reelected, then “he’ll nuke them sons’o’bitches!”

    Green concludes her tell-all book by looking to the future, a future with Donald J. Trump at America’s helm. “Trump has already had a big effect on my life,” she wrote. Emulating the 45th president, she has taken up golf. She said her low score matches her record at the dead lift — 325.

    “I would,” she quipped on the last page of the memoir, quoting the book’s title, “drink Trump’s bath water.”

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    Bill Tope

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  • Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies

    Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies

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    When Donald Trump first took office, he put a premium on what he called “central casting” hires—people with impressive résumés who matched his image of an ideal administration official. Yes, he brought along his share of Steve Bannons and Michael Flynns. But there was also James Mattis, the decorated four-star general who took over the Defense Department, and Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs chief operating officer who was appointed head of the National Economic Council, and Rex Tillerson, who left one of the world’s most profitable international conglomerates to become secretary of state.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

    Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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    Trump seemed positively giddy that all of these important people were suddenly willing to work for him. And although his populist supporters lamented the presence of so many swamp creatures in his administration, establishment Washington expressed pleasant surprise at the picks. A consensus had formed that what the incoming administration needed most was “adults in the room.” To save the country from ruin, the thinking went, reasonable Republicans had a patriotic duty to work for Trump if asked. Many of them did.

    From the December 2019 issue: James Mattis on the enemy within

    Don’t expect it to happen again. The available supply of serious, qualified people willing to serve in a Trump administration has dwindled since 2017. After all, the so-called adults didn’t fare so well in their respective rooms. Some quit in frustration or disgrace; others were publicly fired by the president. Several have spent their post–White House lives fielding congressional subpoenas and getting indicted. And after seeing one Trump term up close, vanishingly few of them are interested in a sequel: This past summer, NBC News reported that just four of Trump’s 44 Cabinet secretaries had endorsed his current bid.

    Even if mainstream Republicans did want to work for him again, Trump is unlikely to want them. He’s made little secret of the fact that he felt burned by many in his first Cabinet. This time around, according to people in Trump’s orbit, he would prioritize obedience over credentials. “I think there’s going to be a very concerted, calculated effort to ensure that the people he puts in his next administration—they don’t have to share his worldview exactly, but they have to implement it,” Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesperson, told me.

    What would this look like in practice? Predicting presidential appointments nearly a year before the election is a fool’s errand, especially with a candidate as mercurial as this one. And, whether for reasons of low public opinion or ongoing legal jeopardy, some of Trump’s likely picks might struggle to get confirmed (expect a series of contentious hearings). But the names currently circulating in MAGA world offer a glimpse at the kind of people Trump could gravitate toward.

    One Trump-world figure with a record of deference to the boss is Stephen Miller. As a speechwriter and policy adviser, Miller managed to endure while so many of his colleagues flamed out in part because he was satisfied with being a staffer instead of a star. He was also fully aligned with the president on his signature issue: immigration. Inside the White House, Miller championed some of the administration’s most draconian measures, including the Muslim travel ban and the family-separation policy. In a second Trump term, some expect Miller to get a job that will give him significant influence over immigration policy—perhaps head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or even secretary of homeland security. Given Miller’s villainous reputation in Democratic circles, however, he might have a hard time getting confirmed by the Senate. If that happens, some think White House chief of staff might be a good consolation prize.

    From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy

    For secretary of state, one likely candidate is Richard Grenell. Before Trump appointed him ambassador to Germany in 2018, Grenell was best-known as a right-wing foreign-policy pundit and an inexhaustible Twitter troll. He brought his signature bellicosity to Berlin, hectoring journalists and government officials on Twitter, and telling a Breitbart London reporter early in his tenure that he planned to use his position to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe.” (He had to walk back the comment after some in Germany interpreted it as a call for far-right regime change.)

    Grenell’s undiplomatic approach to diplomacy exasperated German officials and thrilled Trump, who reportedly described him as an ambassador who “gets it.” Grenell has spent recent years performing his loyalty as a Trump ally and, according to one source, privately building his case for the secretary-of-state role.

    One job that Trump will be especially focused on getting right is attorney general. He believes that both of the men who held this position during his term—Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr—were guilty of grievous betrayal. Since then, Trump has been charged with 91 felony counts across four separate criminal cases—evidence, he claims, of a historic “political persecution.” (He has pleaded not guilty in all cases.) Trump has pledged to use the Justice Department to visit revenge on his persecutors if he returns to the White House.

    “The notion of the so-called independence of the Department of Justice needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history,” says Paul Dans, who served in the Office of Personnel Management under Trump and now leads an effort by the Heritage Foundation to recruit conservative appointees for the next Republican administration. To that end, Trump allies have floated a range of loyalists for attorney general, including Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Josh Hawley; former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Jeffrey Clark, formerly one of Trump’s assistant attorneys general, who was indicted in Georgia on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election (the charges are still pending).

    Vivek Ramaswamy—the fast-talking entrepreneur running in the Republican presidential primary as of this writing—is also expected to get a top post in the administration. Ramaswamy has praised Trump on the campaign trail and positioned himself as the natural heir to the former president. Trump has responded to the flattery in kind, publicly praising his opponent as a “very, very, very intelligent person.” Some have even speculated that Ramaswamy could be Trump’s pick for vice president.

    One source close to Ramaswamy told me that a Trump adviser had recently asked him what job the candidate might want in a future administration. After thinking about it, the source suggested ambassador to the United Nations, reasoning that he’s a “good talker.” The Trump adviser said he’d keep it in mind, though it’s worth noting that Ramaswamy’s lack of support for Ukraine and his suggestion that Russia be allowed to keep some of the territory it has seized could lead to confirmation trouble.

    Beyond the high-profile posts, the Trump team may have more jobs to fill in 2025 than a typical administration does. Dans and his colleagues at Heritage are laying the groundwork for a radical politicization of the federal civilian workforce. If they get their way, the next Republican president will sign an executive order eliminating civil-service protections for up to 50,000 federal workers, effectively making the people in these roles political appointees. Rank-and-file budget wonks, lawyers, and administrators working in dozens of agencies would be reclassified as Schedule F employees, and the president would be able to fire them at will, with or without cause. These fired civil servants’ former posts could be left empty—or filled with Trump loyalists. To that end, Heritage has begun to put together a roster of thousands of pre-vetted potential recruits. “What we’re really talking about is a major renovation to government,” Dans told me.

    Trump actually signed an executive order along these lines in the final months of his presidency, but it was reversed by his successor. On the campaign trail, Trump has vowed to reinstate it with the goal of creating a more compliant federal workforce for himself. “Either the deep state destroys America,” he has declared, “or we destroy the deep state.”

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies.”

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    McKay Coppins

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  • ‘Nothing Is Going to Stop Donald Trump’

    ‘Nothing Is Going to Stop Donald Trump’

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    “Anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” former President Donald Trump asked last night. “He was a nice fellow. But that’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

    The leader of the Republican Party—and quite likely the 2024 GOP nominee—was on an extended rant about mental institutions, prisons, and, to use his phrase, “empty insane asylums.” Speaking to thousands of die-hard supporters at a rally in South Florida, Trump lamented that, under President Joe Biden, the United States has become “the dumping ground of the world.” That he had casually praised one of the most infamous psychopathic serial killers in cinema history was but an aside, brushed over and forgotten.

    This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.—a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to return.

    His candidacy is rife with a foreboding sense of inevitability. Trump senses it; we all do. Those 91 charges across four separate indictments? Mere inconveniences. Palm trees swayed as the 45th president peered out at the masses from atop a giant stage erected near the end zone of Ted Hendricks Stadium in Hialeah. He ceremoniously accepted an endorsement from Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary. He basked in stadium-size adulation and yet still seemed sort of pissed off. He wants the whole thing to be over already. Eleven miles away, in downtown Miami, Trump’s remaining rivals were fighting for relevance at the November GOP primary debate. “I was watching these guys, and they’re not watchable,” Trump said. His son Donald Jr. referred to the neighboring event as “the dog-catcher debate.”

    Read: Trump’s rivals pass up their chance

    Though not a single vote has been cast in this election, Trump’s 44-point lead and refusal to participate in debates has made a mockery of the primary. And though many try to be, no other Republican is quite like Trump. No other candidate has legions of fans who will bake in the Florida sun for hours before gates open. No one else can draw enough people to even hold a rally this size, let alone spawn a traveling rally-adjacent road show, with a pop-up midway of vendors hawking T-shirts and buttons and ball caps and doormats and Christmas ornaments. Voters don’t fan themselves with cardboard cutouts of Chris Christie’s head.

    Multiple merchandise vendors told me that the shirts featuring Trump’s mug shot have become their best sellers. Some other tees bore slogans: Ultra MAGA, Ultra MAGA and Proud, CANCEL ME, Trump Rallies Matter, 4 Time Indictment Champ, Super Duper Ultra MAGA, Fuck Biden. “Thank you and have a MAGA day!” one vendor called out with glee. As attendees poured into the stadium, some of the pre-rally songs were a little too on the nose: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Jailhouse Rock.” Kids darted up and down the aisles between the white folding chairs, popping out to the snack bar for ice cream and popcorn. The comedian Roseanne Barr, who a few years ago was forced out of her eponymous show’s reboot after posting a racist tweet, took the stage early and thanked the MAGA faithful for welcoming her in. “You saved my life,” she said. Feet rumbled on the metal bleachers. People danced and embraced. In the hours before the night’s headliner, this felt less like a political event and more like a revival.

    I saw the GOP operative Roger Stone and his small entourage saunter past the food trucks to modest applause. Onstage, Trump complimented Stone’s political acumen. (Stone, who is sort of the Forrest Gump of modern American politics, has played a role in seemingly every major scandal from Watergate to January 6, not to mention the Brooks Brothers riot that helped deliver Florida to George W. Bush in the 2000 election.)

    That afternoon, seeking air-conditioning at a nearby Wendy’s, I met Kurt Jantz, who told me he’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies. Jantz had driven down to Hialeah from his home in Tampa. His pickup truck is massive, raised, and wrapped in Trump iconography. (He has an image of Trump as Rambo with a bald eagle perched on one shoulder, surrounded by a tank, a helicopter, the Statue of Liberty, and the White House, plus a background of exploding fireworks. That’s only one side of the truck.) Jantz has found a niche as a pro-MAGA rapper—he performs under the name Forgiato Blow. Tattoos cover much of his body, including a 1776 on the left side of his face. He rolled up his basketball shorts to show me Trump’s face tattooed on his right thigh. “Trump’s a boss. Trump’s a businessman. Trump has the cars. Trump has the females. Trump’s getting the money. He’s a damn near walking rapper to the life of a rapper, right? I want a Mar-a-Lago.” Jantz said he’s met and spoken with Trump “numerous times,” as recently as a couple of months ago at a GOP fundraiser. Trump, he said, was aware of the work Jantz was doing to spread the president’s message, not only through his music. “I mean, that truck itself could change a lot of people’s ways,” he said.

    Though people travel great distances to experience Trump in the flesh—I spoke with one supporter who had come down from Michigan—many attendees at last night’s event were local. Dalia Julia Gomez, 61, has lived in Hialeah for decades. She told me she fled Cuba in 1993 and supports Trump because she believes he loves “the American tradition.” Hialeah is more than 90 percent Hispanic and overwhelmingly Republican. Onstage last night, Trump warned that “Democrats are turning the United States into Communist Cuba.” People booed. Some hooted. He quickly followed up, seemingly unsure of what to say next: “And you know, because we have a lot of great Cubans here!”

    Trump won Florida in 2016 and 2020. His closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has just been endorsed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, but has otherwise been struggling to connect with voters for months. Trump has already secured many key Florida endorsements, including from Senator Rick Scott. (Senator Marco Rubio has yet to endorse.)

    Read: Inside Ivanka Trump’s dreamworld

    The night was heavy on psychological projection. “We are here tonight to declare that Crooked Joe Biden’s banana republic ends on November 5, 2024,” Trump said. Later, he vowed to “start by exposing every last crime committed by Crooked Joe Biden. Because now that he indicted me, we’re allowed to look at him. But he did real bad things,” Trump said. “We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist, and reverse enforcement of the law on day one.”

    He seemed to tiptoe around the idea of January 6, though he did not mention the day, specifically. Instead, he said: “We inherit the legacy of generations of American patriots who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to defend our country and defend our freedom.” Earlier in the day, I spoke with Todd Gerhart, who was selling Trump-shaped bottles of honey, with a portion of the profits going to January 6 defendants (Give the “Donald” a Squeeze: $20). Gerhart lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and is among the vendors who follow the Trump show around the country. He told me that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, is a fan of his product, as is General Michael Flynn. He introduced me to a woman from Tennessee named Sarah McAbee, whose husband, Ronald, was convicted on five felony charges related to January 6 and is currently awaiting sentencing. She told me she’s able to speak with him by phone once a day. Yesterday she informed him she was going to the Trump rally. “It’s a one-day-at-a-time sort of thing,” she said.

    About 100 yards away, people were lining up to meet Donald Trump Jr., who was scheduled to sign copies of his father’s photography book, Our Journey Together. Junior smiled and scribbled as his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, snapped selfies with fans. Walking around yesterday afternoon, I heard a rumor: Not only had Trump already picked his next vice president, but there was no one it could conceivably be besides his loyal namesake, Don Jr.

    A little while later, I saw Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, milling about. I asked him about this rumor explicitly. He gave me an inquisitive look. “President Trump’s not ready to announce his VP pick yet,” he said. “Can you even have someone from the same family? I know you can’t have two people from the same state. So that rules it out right there.”

    Family remains a confounding part of the Trump story. His daughter Ivanka spent the day in Manhattan testifying in the case that could demolish what’s left of the family’s real-estate empire. Trump himself had taken the witness stand on Monday. The occasion seemed to still be weighing on him, and at the rally, yielded a microscopic moment of familial self-reflection. “Can you believe—my father and mother are looking down: ‘Son, how did that happen?’” (For this he did an impression of a parental voice.) He quickly pivoted. “‘We’re so proud of you, son,’” he said (in the voice again). It didn’t make much sense. He rambled his way to the end of the thought. “But every time I’m indicted, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you,” Trump told the crowd. “Thanks a lot, everybody.”

    During my conversation with Miller, I asked him if the campaign had discussed the logistics—or practicalities—of Trump getting convicted and having to theoretically run the country from prison. “There’s nothing that the deep state can throw at us that we’re not going to be ready for,” he said. “We have a plane, we have a social-media following of over 100 million people. We have the greatest candidate that’s ever lived. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”

    What about something like a house arrest at Mar-a-Lago?

    “Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”

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    John Hendrickson

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  • The Open Plot to Dismantle the Federal Government

    The Open Plot to Dismantle the Federal Government

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    Of the many targets Donald Trump has attacked over the years, few engender less public sympathy than the career workforce of the federal government—the faceless mass of civil servants that the former president and his allies deride as the “deep state.”

    Federal employees have long been an easy mark for politicians of both parties, who occasionally hail their nonpartisan public service but far more frequently blame “Washington bureaucrats” for stifling your business, auditing your taxes, and taking too long to renew your passport. Denigrating the government’s performance is a tradition as old as the republic, but Trump assigned these shortcomings a sinister new motive, accusing the civilian workforce of thwarting his agenda before he even took office.

    As he runs again for a second term, Trump is vowing to “dismantle the deep state” and ensure that the government he would inherit aligns with his vision for the country. Unlike during his 2016 campaign, however, Trump and his supporters on the right—including several former high-ranking members of his administration—have developed detailed proposals for executing this plan. Immediately upon his inauguration in January 2025, they would seek to convert thousands of career employees into appointees fireable at will by the president. They would assert full White House control over agencies, including the Department of Justice, that for decades have operated as either fully or partially independent government departments.

    Trump’s nearest rivals for the Republican nomination have matched and even exceeded his zeal for gutting the federal government. The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to fire as much as 75 percent of the workforce. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promised a New Hampshire crowd last month, “We’re going to start slitting throats on day one.”

    William J. Burns: Trump’s bureaucratic arson

    These plans, as well as the vicious rhetoric directed toward federal employees, have alarmed a cadre of former government officials from both parties who have made it their mission to promote and protect the nonpartisan civil service. They proudly endorse the idea that the government should be composed largely of experienced, nonpolitical employees.

    “We’re defenders not of the deep state but of the effective state,” says Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening government and the federal workforce. Trump’s drive to eviscerate this permanent bureaucracy, Stier and other advocates fear, will bring about a return to the early American spoils-and-patronage system, wherein jobs were won through loyalty to a party or president rather than merit, and which the century-old laws that created the modern civil service successfully rooted out.

    “I can’t overstate my level of concern about the damage this would do to the institution of the federal government,” Robert Shea, a former senior budget official in the George W. Bush administration, told me. “You would have things formerly considered illegal or unconstitutional popping up all across the government like whack-a-mole. And the ability to fight them would be inhibited.”

    The Biden administration last week proposed new rules aimed at preventing future attempts to purge the federal workforce, which numbers around 2.2 million people. Even if the regulations are finalized, however, they could be undone by the next president. So defenders of the civil service have been looking elsewhere, trying to mobilize support in Congress and among the broader public. But their effort has not gained much traction, and legislation to protect career employees, roughly 85 percent of whom live outside the Washington, D.C., area, has stalled on Capitol Hill. “I don’t know how much attention the public pays to this type of thing,” laments Jacqueline Simon, the director of public policy for the American Federation of Government Employees.

    To Stier, that is precisely the problem. A Clinton-administration veteran who has run the partnership for more than 20 years, he has emerged as perhaps the nation’s most vocal cheerleader of the federal workforce. The partnership bestows awards on top-performing civil servants every year at an Oscars-style gala called the Sammies, and it advises presidential campaigns of both parties—including Trump’s—on the Herculean task of staffing a new administration every four years.

    Stier tries to keep his organization rigidly nonpartisan, but he views the proposals from Trump and his conservative allies as a unique threat. “I have never seen anything remotely close to an effort to convert a very large segment of the federal workforce and return to the patronage system,” he told me. “And that’s effectively what you have here.”

    Stier compared right-wing proposals to overhaul the civil service to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to weaken the judiciary in Israel. Tens of thousands of Israeli citizens protested in the streets, virtually shutting down the country and forcing Netanyahu to back off. “We have a similar order of threat to our democracy,” Stier said, “and yet not the same level of engagement and involvement as you do there.”

    Perhaps the most striking aspect of the right-wing push to dismantle the federal civil service is how open its conservative leaders are about their designs. They are not cloaking their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient. They are stating unequivocally that federal employees must give their loyalty to the president, and that he or she should be able to remove anyone insufficiently devoted to the cause. The fundamental structure of the executive branch, and the independence with which many of its agencies have operated for decades, these conservatives argue, represents a misreading of the Constitution and a usurping of the president’s power.

    “We’re at the 100-year mark with the notion of a technocratic state of dispassionate experts,” Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, told me. “The results are in: It’s an utter failure.”

    Dans is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a $22 million effort to recruit an army of conservative appointees and lay the foundation for what the project hopes will be the next Republican administration. He uses terms like “smash” and “wrecking ball” to describe what conservatives have in mind for the federal government, comparing their effort to the 1984 Apple commercial in which a runner takes down an Orwellian bureaucracy by chucking a sledgehammer at a movie screen.

    The project has released a 920-page playbook detailing a conservative policy agenda, including its vision for an executive branch that functions fully under the command of the president. “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch,” writes Russ Vought, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, in one section. The president must use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” Vought now runs the Center for Renewing America, another organization serving as an incubator for policies that Trump’s allies want to implement if the former president—or another conservative Republican—regains the White House.

    At the top of Vought and Dans’s must-do list for the next president: reissuing an executive order that Trump signed during his final months in office—and which President Joe Biden promptly reversed—that would allow the government to remove civil-service protections from as many as 50,000 federal jobs. The move would create a new class of employees known as Schedule F whom the president could fire at will. It would essentially supersize the number of political appointees in senior positions in the government, currently about 4,000.

    To Trump’s critics, the Heritage project is an effort to provide intellectual cover for the authoritarian tendencies that he exhibited as president—and which some of his primary competitors, including DeSantis and Ramaswamy, have mimicked.

    Vought, however, says the changes are needed to ensure that the government adheres to the results of presidential elections. The federal bureaucracy “is largely unresponsive to the president,” who, he argues, better represents the will of the people. As their prime example of the civil service supposedly run amok, Vought and Dans cite the career of Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who had been lionized by presidents of both parties before becoming a conservative bogeyman under Trump during the coronavirus pandemic. In our interview, Vought compared Fauci to Robert Moses, the notorious New York City parks commissioner who for decades during the 20th century used his unelected positions to exert as much influence as mayors and governors.

    John Gans: If you fear the deep state, history explains why

    “You’ve got to be able to ensure that those actors are no longer empowered,” Vought said, “unless they truly are going to serve the policy agenda of the president that gets elected by the American people.” Fauci’s status as a career civil servant rather than a political appointee made him difficult—although not impossible—to remove. Trump’s Schedule F would have made it easier.

    As OMB director, Vought chafed at the civil service’s opposition to Trump’s decision to bypass Congress and begin building his promised southern border wall by repurposing money appropriated to the Department of Defense. Vought said OMB officials told him the border plan was illegal even after his office’s general counsel had signed off on the idea. “You’re always up against a paradigm shift where people don’t want you to have an opportunity to make policy changes outside of a very clear, confined, very unrisky lane,” Vought said.

    To Shea, a fellow Republican who also served as a senior OMB official, such pushback from career employees was a healthy and crucial part of the job. “It was incumbent on the career staff to keep me out of jail,” he said wryly.

    By the time Vought left his post, at the end of the Trump administration, he had developed plans to convert 90 percent of OMB’s 535 employees to at-will positions. Even the mere talk of Schedule F, he told me, had resulted in a cultural change at the department, as people “for the first time were understanding that there could be consequences for their resistance.”

    No conservative proposal has generated more controversy than the push to remove any separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, where federal prosecutors and agencies like the FBI have long made law-enforcement decisions independently of the president. Jeffrey Clark, the former assistant attorney general who along with Trump was indicted by a Georgia grand jury for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, published a paper online in May titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent” for the Center for Renewing America. Paired with Trump’s repeated calls to prosecute Biden and other Democrats, this argument raises the prospect that Trump, if elected again, could effectively order the Justice Department to jail anyone he wants, for no other reason than he has the power to do so as president.

    I asked Dans whether a president should be able to direct prosecutions against specific individuals. He initially deflected the question. “That’s happening right now,” he said, accusing Biden of ordering the charges that the Justice Department has brought in two separate cases against Trump—a claim for which there is no evidence.

    I changed the topic to Mike Pence. Trump has assailed his former vice president for refusing to help him overturn their defeat, but Pence has never been accused of criminal wrongdoing. Could Trump, as president, simply order the Department of Justice to prosecute him under this theory of presidential power? “Whether a president actually gets into identifying people who ought to be prosecuted, I don’t know if we ever get to that stage,” Dans said. He brought up a different example, arguing that a president could direct prosecutors to go after, say, Mexican drug cartels for their role in the opioid epidemic.

    I pressed him one more time on whether Trump could order the prosecution of someone like Pence. The answer wasn’t no.

    “I’m not in law school,” Dans replied. “We’re not going to hypotheticals.”

    The modern civil service dates back to a presidential assassination nearly 150 years ago. On July 2, 1881, an aspiring diplomat named Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield at a railroad station in Washington, D.C. Guiteau had become enraged after the new president, inaugurated just four months earlier, had refused to offer him a consulship in Europe as a reward for his help in getting Garfield elected. Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, signed what became known as the Pendleton Act of 1883, which mandated that federal jobs be awarded based on merit and forbade requirements that prospective hires make political contributions.

    Defenders of that system now worry that the escalating vilification of the federal workforce will lead to another outbreak of political violence, this time directed at civil servants. Trump has continued to decry the “deep state” with his customary bellicosity, but advocates were aghast after DeSantis took the rhetoric a step further with his promise to begin “slitting throats.” “They’re going to get somebody killed,” Simon, at the American Federation of Government Employees, told me, ridiculing DeSantis as “a weak little man trying to sound strong and scary.”

    Unions representing federal employees have been lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would prevent future administrations from implementing Schedule F and stripping career employees of their job protections.

    Jonathan Rauch: Trump’s second term would look like this

    The proposal has received scant Republican support, however. “If we had a floor vote on this today, I don’t know that I could get it passed in either the House or the Senate,” one of the proposal’s lead sponsors, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, told me. Kaine said he is trying to attach the bill to one of the must-pass spending bills that Congress will likely approve before the end of the year, but that appears to be a long shot.

    Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate subcommittee overseeing the federal workforce, has criticized the incendiary rhetoric directed toward government workers. But he told me he thinks Congress should debate proposals like Schedule F to determine whether some of the career workforce should be converted to at-will appointees. “There should be more political appointees. I don’t know exactly what that number is,” Lankford said. “It’s not tens of thousands.”

    With Congress unlikely to act, the Biden administration last week unveiled its new regulations aimed at thwarting the return of Schedule F. The proposed rule would “clarify and reinforce” existing protections for civil servants, forbidding changes that would take away a career employee’s status without their consent. It would also establish new procedures that the government would have to follow before converting career employees to at-will appointees. The regulations, Deputy OPM Director Robert Shriver told me, represent “what we think is the strongest action we can take under our existing authority.”

    The likely effect is that once finalized, the new regulations would slow—but not altogether stop—a future Republican administration from implementing Schedule F. “Can it be undone? Yes, it could be undone,” said Stier, who emphasized that legislation was a preferred route.

    Complicating the conservative push to dramatically increase the number of political appointments is the fact that administrations of both parties—and Trump’s in particular—have struggled to hire people to fill the approximately 4,000 appointed positions that already exist. Beyond the concerns about whether an administration should prioritize political loyalty over merit in hiring, former officials say the increase in turnover such a change would bring would simply be bad for the government and, as a result, the public. “We can’t change the leadership of an organization every three or six years and expect the organization to perform in an outstanding way,” says Robert McDonald, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble and a longtime Republican whom President Barack Obama nominated to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2014. “You’ve got to have continuity of leadership.”

    That doesn’t much concern Dans, who downplayed the importance of government experience in his recruitment drive for the next Republican administration. “I’m fully confident that the American people have the skills and have the ability to do these government jobs. It’s not rocket science,” he told me. (“Rocket science may be some of the simpler things they do,” Stier retorted.)

    The fight to defend the very existence of the civil service is particularly frustrating for Stier, who has spent the bulk of his career forging a bipartisan consensus in support of the federal workforce. He and the Partnership for Public Service have pushed the government to improve its performance, especially in areas visible to the public. They’ve advocated for changes that would grant presidents more power over appointments by making fewer positions subject to Senate confirmation. Another idea would increase accountability for civil servants by making them earn the protections of tenured service rather than receiving them automatically a year into their employment.

    “We can do better,” Stier told me. “But doing better is not burning the house down.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Trump’s Mug Shot Gives His Haters Nothing

    Trump’s Mug Shot Gives His Haters Nothing

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    Listen to this article

    Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

    Donald Trump dropped in for a photo op in Georgia last night—not the usual kibbitz on the hustings for a former president, but a killer visual to end the week with: a mug shot.

    And just like that, Trump was restored to his accustomed place in the Republican dogpile: everywhere. It was hard to look away, even if you wanted to. Former presidents do not go and get fingerprinted and mug-shotted and perp-walked every day, even the one former president who takes his arraignments in gift packs of four.

    Clichés are always bad, and sometimes quite wrong, but the conceit that this would be a “split screen” week for the Republican campaign—eight GOP debaters on one screen, Trump’s co-defendants getting processed on the other—was spectacularly amiss from the start. One screen this week would blot out all of the rest.

    Read: Magical thinking in Milwaukee

    Yes, Wednesday’s debate yielded a few enduring images—including Chris Christie, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley all fixing simultaneous stink eyes upon Vivek Ramaswamy, as if they were about to stab him with their pens. But those moments unquestionably pale next to what emanated last night from Fulton County. Trump’s mug shot, probably the most anticipated in history, seems destined to also be the most analyzed and disseminated.

    You can assume that the subject, a figure of uncommon vanity, obsessed like hell over his bureaucratic close-up. How should he pose? For what aura should he strive? Tough guy, defiant, or wounded pup? Would makeup be allowed? Thumbs-ups or no?

    Trump had come and gone from the Fulton County Jail by about 8 p.m. on the East Coast. Roughly 95 percent of Americans—or at least a sampling of hyper-online individuals in my feed—furiously began refreshing social media to see if the image was out yet. There were a few fakeouts and some inspired memes. Trump’s recorded weight—215 pounds—became a topic for discussion. It was widely doubted.

    Finally, around 8:40 p.m, the mug shot landed. Trump’s hair and eyebrows were more feathered than usual, like he had brushed them out. Lips were pursed, eyes stern and severe, his brow zig-zagging like lightning. The former president looked like the Grinch—the Grinch Who Stole Georgia (or tried).

    David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture

    One thing that seemed clear from the other co-defendant processings this week is that the “deep state” wise guy who’s in charge of the booking shots at this notorious Atlanta jail is not much interested in customer service. The alleged lawbreakers have appeared, for the most part, shaken and disoriented. The lighting in the photos is awful; a harsh shine beats down over the side of each defendant’s forehead. The lawyer John Eastman seems confused; Mark Meadows, kind of sedated; a smiling Sidney Powell looks under-slept (and bonkers); Rudy Giuliani delivered the perfect “after” image to view alongside his Time “Person of the Year” cover from 2001.

    Trump’s photo offers a rough visage, formidable and extremely serious—which is what I assume he was going for. He made an effort here. It paid off. He gave his haters nothing in the ballpark of vulnerability. At 9:38 p.m., he tweeted out the image with a link to his campaign website and a message: “NEVER SURRENDER!”

    Each defendant’s photo, including Trump’s, is imprinted with a prominent Fulton County Sheriff’s Office badge in the top left corner. The logo carries a subtle but powerful message: Don’t even think about portraying this as anything but a dark, singular, and deeply unpleasant occasion. This is no place for joyriders or dilettantes or Instagram peacocks. You can post bail and leave, for now, but you don’t want to come back, trust us. Take a whiff and remember it.

    Quinta Jurecic: Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal

    No doubt, Trump will. He does not like places that are “not nice.” He is sensitive to germs and smells. “There have been ongoing problems with overcrowding in the [Fulton County] jail, along with violence, overflowing toilets and faulty air conditioning,” The Washington Post reported last week.

    But at least Trump was spared the spin room in Milwaukee.

    For the record, Ramaswamy dominated that particular halitosis hall after Wednesday night’s debate. He kept darting from one late-night interview to the next, big-man-on-the-stage that he was. “I gotta keep moving, gotta keep moving,” Ramaswamy announced as he glad-handed his way through the sweaty scene. At one point, he approached a CNN camera where host Dana Bash was preparing to interview North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. Ramaswamy tapped Bash on the shoulder, and Bash lit up, recognizing this sleeker vessel that had drifted into precious airspace. She seized her moment, as Ramaswamy had earlier, securing the peppy capitalist after an awkward back-and-forth with the governor.

    “I gotta keep moving,” Ramaswamy said again as someone tried to grab him away from Bash’s camera setup. This was his big night. Everyone was watching him, and he seemed determined to savor it all before midnight struck. Trump would be back and inescapable again soon enough.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • How Jason Aldean Explains Donald Trump (And Vice Versa)

    How Jason Aldean Explains Donald Trump (And Vice Versa)

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    The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.

    Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

    In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”

    Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia

    Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

    “Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”

    Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)

    Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.

    Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

    In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

    The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

    In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

    The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

    By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he’s denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”

    Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

    A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

    Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”

    That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

    Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation

    As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

    Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • What Comes After the Search Warrant?

    What Comes After the Search Warrant?

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    If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.

    So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?

    Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.

    Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.

    David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic

    It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.

    But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.

    It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.

    I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”

    Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”

    David Frum: Stuck with Trump

    This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.

    On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”

    As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.

    “They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”

    I asked her to elaborate.

    “The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”

    This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.

    What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

    “The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”

    “If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

    “If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

    Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law

    It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.

    Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

    “Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”

    And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

    It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.

    We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

    Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

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    Tim Alberta

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