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Tag: second Trump term

  • The GOP Has Crossed an Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy

    The GOP Has Crossed an Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy

    The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point.

    Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush.

    But even so, during Trump’s four years in office, a substantial remnant of traditionally internationalist Republicans in Congress and in the key national-security positions of his own administration resisted his efforts to unravel America’s traditional alliances.

    Now though, evidence is rapidly accumulating on multiple fronts that the internal GOP resistance is crumbling to Trump’s determination to steer America away from its traditional role as a global leader.

    In Congress, that shift was evident in last week’s widespread Senate and House Republican opposition to continued aid for Ukraine. The same movement is occurring among Republican voters, as a new Chicago Council on Global Affairs study demonstrates.

    The study used the council’s annual national surveys of American attitudes about foreign affairs to examine the evolution of thinking within the GOP on key international issues. It divided Republicans into two roughly equal groups: those who said they held a very favorable view of Trump and the slightly larger group that viewed him either only somewhat favorably or unfavorably.

    The analysis found that skepticism of international engagement—and in particular resistance to supporting Ukraine in its grueling war against Russia—is growing across the GOP. But it also found that the Republicans most sympathetic to Trump have moved most sharply away from support for an engaged American role. Now a clear majority of those Trump-favorable Republicans reject an active American role in world affairs, the study found.

    “Trumpism is the dominant tendency in Republican foreign policy and it’s isolationist, it’s unilateralist, it’s amoral,” Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush, told me a few months ago.

    That dynamic has big implications for a second Trump term. The growing tendency of Republican voters and elected officials alike to embrace Trump’s nationalist vision means that a reelected Trump would face much less internal opposition than he did in his first term if he moves to actually extract America from NATO, reduce the presence of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia, coddle Russian President Vladimir Putin, or impose sweeping tariffs on imports.

    During Trump’s first term, “the party was not yet prepared to abandon internationalism and therefore opposed him,” Ivo Daalder, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Council, told me. “On Russia sanctions, on NATO, on other issues, he had people in the government who undermined him consistently. That won’t happen in a second term. In a second term, his views are clear: He will only appoint people who agree with them, and he has cowed the entire Republican Party.”

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    The erosion of GOP resistance to Trump’s approach has been dramatically underscored in just the past few days. Most Senate Republicans last week voted against the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. After that bill passed the Senate anyway, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that he would not bring it to a vote. All of this unfolded as an array of GOP leaders defended Trump for his remarks at a rally in South Carolina last weekend when he again expressed disdain for NATO and said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to members of the alliance who don’t spend enough on their own defense.

    Many of the 22 GOP Republicans who voted for the aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were veteran senators whose views about America’s international role were shaped under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or George W. Bush, long before Trump and his “America First” movement loomed so large in conservative politics. It was telling that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate while Reagan was president in 1984, was the aid package’s most ardent GOP supporter.

    By contrast, many of the 26 Republican senators who voted no were newer members, elected since Trump became the party’s leading man. Republican Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, one of Trump’s most ardent acolytes, delivered an impassioned speech, in which he portrayed the aid to Ukraine as the latest in a long series of catastrophic missteps by the internationalist forces in both parties that included the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

    Soon after the bill passed, first-term Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri noted a stark generational contrast in the vote. “Nearly every Republican Senator under the age of 55 voted NO on this America Last bill,” Schmitt posted on social media. “15 out of 17 elected since 2018 voted NO[.] Things are changing just not fast enough.”

    Just as revealing of the changing current in the party was the vote against the package by two GOP senators considered pillars of the party’s internationalist wing: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida. Both also unequivocally defended Trump against criticism over his remarks at the South Carolina rally. That seemed to encourage Putin to attack NATO countries that have not met the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense.

    To many observers, the retreat on Ukraine from Rubio and Graham suggests that even many GOP officials who don’t share Trump’s neo-isolationist views have concluded that they must accommodate his perspective to survive in a party firmly under his thumb. “Lindsey Graham is a poster child for the hold that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party,” Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state under President Joe Biden, told me.

    Republican elected officials still demonstrate flickers of resistance to Trump’s vision. In December, the Senate and the Republican-controlled House quietly included in the massive defense-authorization legislation a provision requiring any president to obtain congressional approval before withdrawing from NATO. The problem with that legislation is that a reelected Trump can undermine NATO without formally leaving it, said Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.

    “You destroy NATO not by walking out but by just not doing anything,” Daalder told me. “If you go around saying ‘If you get attacked, we’ll send [only] a mine sweeper,’ Congress can’t do anything. Congress can declare war, but it can’t force the commander in chief to go to war.”

    Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador and his last remaining rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has stoutly defended the traditional Reaganite view that America must provide global leadership to resist authoritarianism. She has denounced Trump’s comments on NATO, and she criticized him Friday for his repeated remarks over the years praising Putin following the reports that Alexei Navalny, the Russian leader’s chief domestic opponent, had died in prison. On Saturday, in a social-media post, she blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and pointedly challenged Trump to say whether he agreed.

    Yet Haley has struggled to attract more than about one-third of the GOP electorate against Trump. Her foreign-policy agenda isn’t the principal reason for that ceiling. But Trump’s dominance in the race is evidence that, for most GOP voters, his praise for Putin and hostility to NATO are not disqualifying.

    The Chicago Council study released helps explain why. Just since 2017, the share of Republicans most favorable toward Trump who say the U.S. should play an active role in global affairs has fallen in the council’s polling from about 70 percent to 40 percent. Likewise, only 40 percent of Trump Republicans support continued military aid to Ukraine, the study found. Only about that many of the Trump Republicans, the Council found, would support sending U.S. troops to fulfill the NATO treaty obligation to defend the Baltic countries if they were invaded by Russia.

    Read: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’

    By contrast, among the part of the GOP less favorable to Trump, majorities still support an active U.S. role in global affairs, sending troops to the Baltics if Russia invades, and continued military and economic aid to Ukraine. The “less-Trump” side of the GOP was also much less likely to agree that the U.S. should reduce its commitment to NATO or withdraw entirely.

    Conversely, Trump Republicans were much more likely to say that they want the United States to be the dominant world leader, while two-thirds of the non-Trump Republicans wanted the U.S. to share leadership with other countries, the traditional internationalist view.

    “Rather than the Biden administration’s heavily alliance-focused approach to U.S. foreign policy,” the report concludes, “Trump Republicans seem to prefer a United States role that is more independent, less cooperative, and more inclined to use military force to deal with the threats they see as the most pressing, such as China, Iran, and migration across the United States-Mexico border.”

    The Chicago Council study found that the most significant demographic difference between these two groups was that the portion of the GOP more supportive of robust U.S. engagement with the world was much more likely to hold a four-year college degree. That suggests these foreign-policy concerns could join cultural disputes such as abortion and book bans as some of the issues Democrats use to try to pry away ordinarily Republican-leaning white-collar voters from Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.

    Jeremy Rosner, a Democratic political consultant who worked on public outreach for the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, told me it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s specific views on NATO or maintaining the U.S. alliances with Japan or South Korea will become a decisive issue for many voters. More likely, Rosner said, is that Trump’s growingly militant language about NATO and other foreign-policy issues will reinforce voter concerns that a second Trump term would trigger too much chaos and disorder on many fronts.

    “People don’t like crazy in foreign policy, and there’s a point at which the willingness to stand up to conventional wisdom or international pressure crosses the line from charmingly bold to frighteningly wacko,” Rosner told me. “To the extent he’s espousing things in the international realm that are way over the line, it will add to that mosaic picture [among voters] that he’s beyond the pale.”

    Perhaps aware of that risk, many Republican elected officials supporting Trump have gone to great lengths to downplay the implications of his remarks criticizing NATO or praising Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Rubio, for instance, insisted last week that he had “zero concern” that Trump would try to withdraw from NATO, because he did not do so as president.

    Those assurances contrast with the repeated warnings from former national-security officials in both parties that Trump, having worn down the resistance in his party, is likely to do exactly what he says if reelected, at great risk to global stability. “He doesn’t understand the importance of the [NATO] alliance and how it’s critical to our security as well,” Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN last week. “I think it’s realistic that [if] he gets back in office, one of the first things he’ll do is cut off assistance to Ukraine if it isn’t already cut off, and then begin trying to withdraw troops and ultimately withdraw from NATO.”

    A return to power for Trump would likely end the dominance of the internationalist wing that has held the upper hand in the GOP since Dwight Eisenhower. The bigger question is whether a second Trump term would also mean the effective end for the American-led system of alliances and international institutions that has underpinned the global order since World War II.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • What Will Happen to the American Psyche If Trump Is Reelected?

    What Will Happen to the American Psyche If Trump Is Reelected?

    There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we’d had a man in the White House who governed by tweet. I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds. I forgot, even, that we’d had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated (this being a central irony, that our nation’s top executive had zero executive function) that the generals around him had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the Constitution.

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    I forgot, in short, that I’d spent nearly five years scanning the veldt for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin, just as Erica Jong believed that her concentration and vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea.

    Say what you want about Joe Biden: He’s allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he’s there.

    Adam Serwer: An incompetent authoritarian is still a catastrophe

    But now here we are, faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration. We’ve already seen the cruelty and chaos that having a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office entails. What will happen to the American psyche if he wins again? What will happen if we have to live in fight-or-flight mode for four more years, and possibly far beyond?

    Our bodies are not designed to handle chronic stress. Neuroscientists have a term for the tipping-point moment when we capitulate to it—allostatic overload—and the result is almost always sickness in one form or another, whether it’s a mood disorder, substance abuse, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or ulcers. “Increase your blood pressure for a few minutes to evade a lion—a good thing,” Robert Sapolsky, one of the country’s most esteemed researchers of stress, emailed me when I asked him about Trump’s effect on our bodies. But “increase your blood pressure every time you’re in the vicinity of the alpha male—you begin to get cardiovascular disease.” Excess levels of the stress hormone cortisol for extended periods is terrible for the human body; it hurts the immune system in ways that, among other things, can lead to worse outcomes for COVID and other diseases. (One 2019 study, published in JAMA Network Open, reported that Trump’s election to the White House correlated with a spike in premature births among Latina women.)

    Another major component of our allostatic overload, notes Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span, would be “technostress,” in this case brought on by the obsessive checking of—and interruptions from, and passing around of—news, which Trump made with destructive rapidity. Human brains are not designed to handle such a helter-skelter onslaught; effective multitasking, according to Mark, is in fact a complete myth (there’s always a cost to our productivity). Yet we are once again facing a news cycle that will shove our attention—as well as our output, our nerves, our sanity—through a Cuisinart.

    Read: ‘This is fine,’ the meme that defined a decade

    One might reasonably ask how many Americans will truly care about the constant churn of chaos, given how many of us still walk around in a fug of political apathy. Quite a few, apparently. The American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey, conducted by the Harris Poll, found that 68 percent of Americans reported that the 2020 election was a significant source of strain. Kevin B. Smith, a political-science professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, found that about 40 percent of American adults identified politics as “a significant source of stress in their lives,” based on YouGov surveys he commissioned in 2017 and 2020. Even more remarkably, Smith found that about 5 percent reported having had suicidal thoughts because of our politics.

    Richard A. Friedman, a clinical psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, wonders if a second Trump term would be like a second, paralyzing blow in boxing, translating into “learned helplessness on a population-level scale,” in which a substantial proportion of us curdle into listlessness and despair. Such an epidemic would be terrible, especially for the young; we’d have a generation of nihilists on our hands, with all future efforts to #Resist potentially melting under the waffle iron of its own hashtag.

    Which is what a would-be totalitarian wants—a republic of the indifferent.

    Ironically, were Trump to win, an important group of his supporters would bear a particular psychological burden of their own, and that’s our elected GOP officials. I’ve written before that Trump’s presidency sometimes seemed like an extended Milgram experiment, with Republican politicians subjected to more and more horrifying requests. During round two, they’d be asked to do far worse, and live in even greater terror of his base—and even greater terror of him, as he tells them, in the manner of all malignant narcissists, that they’d be nothing without him. And he wouldn’t be wholly wrong.

    The Trump base, however, will be intoxicated. We should brace ourselves for a second uncorking of what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”: The Proud Boys will be prouder; the Alex Jones conspiracists will let their false-flag freakishness fly; the “Great Replacement” theorists will become more savage in their rhetoric about Black, Hispanic, and Jewish people. (The Trump administration coincided with a measurable increase in hate crimes, incited in no small part by the man himself.)

    From the January/February 2024 issue: The Proud Boys love a winner

    But at this point, even an electoral defeat for Trump might not significantly diminish the toll that politics is taking on the collective American psyche. “In such a polarized society, everyone is always living with a lot of hate and fear and suspicion,” Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist at MIT who thinks a good deal about tribalism, told me. The winner of the presidential election “may change who bears the burden every four or eight years, but not the burden itself.”

    Of course, fractured attention, heightened anxiety, and moral cynicism may come to seem like picayune problems if Trump wins and some 250 years of constitutional norms and rules unravel before our eyes, or we’re in a nuclear war with China, or the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is frog-marched off to court for treason.

    “You get Trump once, it’s a misfortune,” Masha Gessen, the author of Surviving Autocracy, told me. “You get him twice, it’s normal. It’s what this country is.”

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Psychic Toll.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

    Jennifer Senior

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  • A Warning

    A Warning

    Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”

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    I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?

    That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

    I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.

    Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”

    “For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”

    Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”

    David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged

    There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.

    And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

    The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.

    This editor’s note appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Warning.”

    Jeffrey Goldberg

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  • The Danger Ahead

    The Danger Ahead

    For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

    When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?

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    In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.

    By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury.

    A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.

    From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.

    A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?

    The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency. If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up.

    After Trump was elected in 2016, he was quickly surrounded by prominent and influential people who recognized that he was a lawless menace. They found ways to restrain a man they regarded as, to quote the reported words of Trump’s first secretary of state, “a fucking moron” and, to quote his second chief of staff, “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” whose “dishonesty is just astounding.” But there would be no Rex Tillerson in a second Trump term; no John Kelly; no Jeff Sessions, who as attorney general recused himself from the investigation into the president’s connections to Russia, leading to the appointment of an independent special counsel.

    Since 2021, Trump-skeptical Republicans have been pushed out of politics. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger forfeited their seats in the House for defending election integrity. Representative Tom Emmer withdrew his bid for House speaker over the same offense. The Republican Senate caucus is less hospitable to Trump-style authoritarianism—but notice that the younger and newer Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance) tend to support Trump’s schemes, while his opponents in the Senate belong to the outgoing generation. Trump’s leading rivals for the 2024 nomination seldom dare criticize his abuse of power.

    Most of the people who would staff a second Trump term would be servile tools who have absorbed the brutal realities of contemporary Republicanism: defend democracy; forfeit your career. Already, an array of technically competent opportunists has assembled itself—from within right-wing think tanks and elsewhere—and has begun to plan out exactly how to dismantle the institutional safeguards against Trump’s corrupt and vengeful impulses. Trump’s likely second-term advisers have made clear that they would share his agenda of legal impunity and the use of law enforcement against his perceived opponents—not only the Biden family, but Trump’s own former attorney general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    If Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its investments in the Trump family.

    First-term Trump told aides that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. Second-term Trump would choose aides who would not talk him out of it. Other partners, too, would have to adjust to the authoritarianism and corruption of a second Trump term. Liberals in Israel and India would find themselves isolated as the U.S. turned toward reaction and authoritarianism at home; East Asian democracies would have to adjust to Trump protectionism and trade wars; Mexico’s antidemocratic Morena party would have scope to snuff out free institutions provided that it suppressed migration flows to the United States.

    Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.

    If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.

    In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.

    The outvoted would happily justify the twist of events in their favor. “We are a republic, not a democracy,” many said in 2016. Since that time, the outvoted have become more outspoken against democracy. As Senator Mike Lee tweeted a month before the 2020 election: “Democracy isn’t the objective.”

    So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.

    And what might follow that? In 2020, Trump’s advisers speculated about the possibility of using the Army to crush protests against Trump’s plans to overturn that year’s election. Now those in Trump’s circle are apparently thinking further ahead. Some reportedly want to prepare in advance to use the Insurrection Act to convert the military into a tool of Trump’s authoritarian project. It’s an astonishing possibility. But Trump is thinking about it, so everybody else must—including the senior command of the U.S. military.

    If a president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer be free. There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.

    That grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on. Stopping Trump would not represent progress on any of those agenda items. But stopping Trump would preserve the possibility of progress, by keeping alive the constitutional-democratic structure of the United States.

    A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not expunged. The schemes and plots of a second Trump term may be defeated too. Yet every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.

    As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. The leaders of his own party in Congress feared and hated him. The GOP’s deepest-pocketed donors have worked for three years to nominate somebody, anybody, else. Yet even so, Trump’s co-partisans are converging upon him. They are convincing themselves that something can justify forgiving Trump’s first attempted coup and enabling a second: taxes, border control, stupid comments by “woke” college students.

    For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.

    When Benjamin Franklin famously said of the then-new Constitution, “A republic, if you can keep it,” he was not suggesting that the republic might be misplaced absentmindedly. He foresaw that ambitious, ruthless characters would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal characters might assist them. Americans have faced Franklin’s challenge since 2016, in a story that has so far had some villains, many heroes—and just enough good luck to tip the balance. It would be dangerous to continue to count on luck to do the job.

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Revenge Presidency.”

    David Frum

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  • Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies

    Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies

    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.

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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.”

    McKay Coppins

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  • The Courtroom Is a Very Unhappy Place for Donald Trump

    The Courtroom Is a Very Unhappy Place for Donald Trump

    No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence.

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    The upcoming trials of Trump—in Manhattan; Atlanta; South Florida; and Washington, D.C.—will not be the first time he encounters this dynamic. His claims of 2020 election fraud floundered before judges, resulting in a series of almost unmitigated losses. In one ruling that censured and fined a team of Trump-aligned lawyers who had pursued spurious fraud allegations, a federal judge in Michigan made the point bluntly. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” she wrote, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.”

    But only now is Trump himself appearing as a criminal defendant, stripped of the authority and protections of the presidency, before judges with the power to impose a prison sentence. The very first paragraph of the Georgia indictment marks this shift in power. Contrary to everything that Trump has tried so desperately to prove, the indictment asserts that “Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020”—and then actively sought to subvert it.

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

    Although Trump loves to file lawsuits against those who have supposedly wronged him, the courtroom has never been his home turf. Records from depositions over the years show him to be sullen and impatient while under oath, like a middle schooler stuck in detention. Timothy L. O’Brien, a journalist whom Trump unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2006, recalled in Bloomberg that his lawyers forced Trump to acknowledge that he had lied over the years about a range of topics. Trump has seemed similarly ill at ease during his arraignments. When the magistrate judge presiding over his arraignment in the January 6 case asked whether he understood that the conditions of his release required that he commit no more crimes, he assented almost in a whisper.

    All of this has been a cause for celebration among Trump’s opponents—because the charges against him are warranted and arguably overdue, but also for a different reason. The next year of American politics will be a twin drama unlike anything the nation has seen before, played out in the courtroom and on the campaign trail, often at the same time. Among Democrats, the potential interplay of these storylines has produced a profound hope: Judicial power, they anticipate, may scuttle Trump’s chances of retaking the presidency, and finally solve the political problem of Donald Trump once and for all.

    It has become conventional wisdom that nothing can hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. But his legal jeopardy could, in fact, have political consequences. At least some proportion of Republicans and independents are already paying attention to Trump’s courtroom travails, and reassessing their prior beliefs. A recent report by the political-science collaborative Bright Line Watch found that, following the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents indictment in June, the number of voters in each group who believed that Trump had committed a crime in his handling of classified information jumped by 10 percentage points or more (to 25 and 46 percent, respectively).

    And despite Trump’s effort to frame January 6 as an expression of mass discontent by the American people, the insurrection has never been popular: Extremist candidates who ran on a platform of election denial in the 2022 midterms performed remarkably poorly in swing states. Ongoing criminal proceedings that remind Americans again and again of Trump’s culpability for the insurrection—among his other alleged crimes—seem unlikely to boost his popularity with persuadable voters. If he appears diminished or uncertain in court, even the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful might conceivably wane.

    Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 committee

    Above all of this looms the possibility of a conviction before Election Day, which has no doubt inspired many Democratic fantasies. If Trump is found guilty of any of the crimes of which he now stands accused, a recent poll shows, almost half of Republicans say they would not cast their vote for him.

    But that outcome is only one possibility, and it does not appear to be the most likely.

    Americans who oppose Trump—and, more to the point, who wish he would disappear as a political force—have repeatedly sought saviors in legal institutions. The early Trump years saw the lionization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a white knight and (bewilderingly) a sex symbol. Later, public affection turned toward the unassuming civil servants who testified against Trump during his first impeachment, projecting an old-school devotion to the truth that contrasted with Trump’s gleeful cynicism. Today, Mueller’s successors—particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia prosecution—are the subjects of their own adoring memes and merchandise. One coffee mug available for purchase features Smith’s face and the text Somebody’s Gonna Get Jacked Up!

    Perhaps this time will be different. With Trump out of office, Smith hasn’t been limited, as Mueller was, by the Justice Department’s internal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting chief executive. Willis, a state prosecutor, operates outside the federal government’s constraints. And neither Bill Barr nor Republican senators can stand between Trump and a jury.

    The indictments against Trump have unfolded in ascending order of moral and political importance. In April, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced charges for Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money scheme that began in advance of the 2016 election. In June came Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida, over the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Two months later, the special counsel unveiled charges against Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Willis’s indictment in Georgia quickly followed, employing the state’s racketeering statute to allege a widespread scheme to subvert the vote in favor of Trump. (He has pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and, as of this writing, was awaiting arraignment in Georgia. The Trump campaign released a statement calling the latest indictment “bogus.”)

    But each case has its own set of complexities. The New York one is weighed down by a puzzling backstory—of charges considered, not pursued, and finally taken up after all—that leaves Bragg’s office open to accusations of a politically motivated prosecution. The indictment in Florida seems relatively open-and-shut as a factual matter, but difficult to prosecute because it involves classified documents not meant to be widely shared, along with a jury pool that is relatively sympathetic to Trump and a judge who has already contorted the law in Trump’s favor. In the January 6 case, based in Washington, D.C., the sheer singularity of the insurrection means that the legal theories marshaled by the special counsel’s office are untested. The sweeping scope of the Georgia indictment—which involves 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts—may lead to practical headaches and delays as the case proceeds.

    Trump’s army of lawyers will be ready to kick up dust and frustrate each prosecution. As of July, a political-action committee affiliated with Trump had spent about $40 million on legal fees to defend him and his allies. The strategy is clear: delay. Trump has promised to file a motion to move the January 6 proceedings out of Washington, worked regularly to stretch out ordinary deadlines in that case, and tried (unsuccessfully) to move the New York case from state to federal court. The longer Trump can draw out the proceedings, the more likely he is to make it through the Republican primaries and the general election without being dragged down by a conviction. At that point, a victorious Trump could simply wait until his inauguration, then demand that the Justice Department scrap the federal cases against him. Even if a conviction happens before Americans go to the polls, Trump is almost certain to appeal, hoping to strand any verdict in purgatory as voters decide whom to support.

    Currently, the court schedule is set to coincide with the 2024 Republican primaries. The Manhattan trial, for now, is scheduled to begin in March. In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Aileen Cannon has set a May trial date—though the proceedings will likely be pushed back. In the January 6 case, Smith has asked for a lightning-fast trial date just after New Year’s; in Georgia, Willis has requested a trial date in early March. But still, what little time is left before next November is rapidly slipping away. In all likelihood, voters will have to decide how to cast their ballot before the trials conclude.

    The pileup of four trials in multiple jurisdictions would be chaotic even if the defendant were not a skillful demagogue running for president. There’s no formal process through which judges and prosecutors can coordinate parallel trials, and that confusion could lead to scheduling mishaps and dueling prosecutorial strategies that risk undercutting one another. For instance, if a witness is granted immunity to testify against Trump in one case, then charged by a different prosecutor in another, their testimony in the first case might be used against them in the second, and so they might be reluctant to talk.

    In each of the jurisdictions, defendants are generally required to sit in court during trial, though judges might make exceptions. This entirely ordinary restriction will, to some, look politically motivated if Trump is not allowed to skip out for campaign rallies, though conversely, Trump’s absence might not sit well with jurors who themselves may wish to be elsewhere. All in all, it may be hard to shake the appearance of a traveling legal circus.

    Attacking the people responsible for holding him to account is one of Trump’s specialties. Throughout the course of their respective investigations, Trump has smeared Bragg (who is Black) as an “animal,” Willis (who is also Black) as “racist,” and Smith as “deranged.” Just days after the January 6 case was assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump was already complaining on his social-media site, Truth Social, that “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL” with Chutkan presiding (in the January 6 cases she has handled, she has evinced little sympathy for the rioters). Anything that goes wrong for Trump during the proceedings seems destined to be the subject of a late-night Truth Social post or a wrathful digression from the rally stage.

    However damning the cases against Trump, they will matter to voters only if they hear accurate accounts of them from a trusted news source. Following each of Trump’s indictments to date, Fox News has run segment after segment on his persecution. A New York Times /Siena College poll released in July, after the first two indictments, found that zero percent of Trump’s loyal MAGA base—about 37 percent of Republicans—believes he committed serious federal crimes.

    And beyond the MAGA core? A recent CBS News poll showed that 59 percent of Americans and 83 percent of self-described non-MAGA Republicans believe the investigations and indictments against Trump are, at least in part, attempts to stop him politically. Trump and his surrogates will take every opportunity to stoke that belief, and the effect of those efforts must be balanced against the hits Trump will take from being on trial. Recent poll numbers show Trump running very close to President Joe Biden even after multiple indictments—a fairly astonishing achievement for someone who is credibly accused of attempting a coup against the government that he’s now campaigning to lead.

    The law can do a great deal. But the justice system is only one institution of many, and it can’t be fully separated from the broader ecosystem of cultural and political pathologies that brought the country to this situation in the first place.

    After Robert Mueller chose not to press for an indictment of Trump on obstruction charges, because of Justice Department guidance on presidential immunity, the liberal and center-right commentariat soured on the special counsel, declaring him to have failed. If some Americans now expect Fani Willis or Jack Smith to disappear the problem of Donald Trump—and the authoritarian movement he leads—they will very likely be disappointed once again. Which wouldn’t matter so much if serial disappointment in legal institutions—he just keeps getting away with it—didn’t encourage despair, cynicism, and nihilism. These are exactly the sentiments that autocrats hope to engender. They would be particularly dangerous attitudes during a second Trump term, when public outrage will be needed to galvanize civil servants to resist abuses of power—and they must be resisted.

    Trump’s trials are perhaps best seen as one part of a much larger legal landscape. The Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 seem to have held extremist groups back from attempting other riots or acts of mass intimidation, even though Trump has called for protests as his indictments have rained down. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced criminal charges alleging that more than a dozen Republicans acted as “fake electors” in an effort to steal the 2020 election for Trump—and as a result, would-be accomplices in Trump’s further plots may be less inclined to risk their own freedom to help the candidate out. Likewise, some of those lawyers who worked to overturn the 2020 vote have now been indicted in Georgia and face potential disbarment—which could cause other attorneys to hold back from future schemes.

    Alan Z. Rozenshtein: The First Amendment is no defense for Trump’s alleged crimes

    This is a vision of accountability as deterrence, achieved piece by piece. Even if Trump wins a second term, these efforts will complicate his drive for absolute authority. And no matter the political fallout, the criminal prosecutions of Trump are themselves inherently valuable. When Trump’s opponents declare that “no one is above the law,” they’re asserting a bedrock principle of American society, and the very act of doing so helps keep that principle alive.

    None of this settles what may happen on Election Day, of course, or in the days that follow. But nor would a conviction. If a majority of voters in a handful of swing states decide they want to elect a president convicted of serious state and federal crimes, the courts can’t prevent them from doing so.

    Such a result would lead to perhaps the most exaggerated disjunction yet between American law and politics: the matter of what to do with a felonious chief executive. If federal charges are the problem, Trump seems certain to try to grant himself a pardon—a move that would raise constitutional questions left unsettled since Watergate. In the case of state-level conviction, though, President Trump would have no such power. Could it be that he might end up serving his second term from a Georgia prison?

    The question isn’t absurd, and yet there’s no obvious answer to how that would work in practice. The best way of dealing with such a problem is as maddeningly, impossibly straightforward as it always has been: Don’t elect this man in the first place.

    This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Trump on Trial.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

    Quinta Jurecic

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