Sure, Trump is unfit for office. But his agenda would also be a monumental disaster!

For just a moment, I'd like to back off the fact that Donald Trump is unfit for office, is a serial liar, has been found guilty of rape/fraud, and faces 91 criminal counts in 4 different indictments. Instead, let's take a moment to think about what he and his enablers say he will DO if elected president again. 

Foreign policy

Trump will turn Ukraine over to Putin and is likely to pull the U.S. out of NATO. He's also said that he would encourage Russia to invade any NATO country that doesn't pay up. That is nothing short of an invitation to World War III.

Revenge

Trump has promised that a second term would be all about retribution.

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations... 

To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.  

Immigration

At almost every campaign stop, Trump makes this promise: 

Trump calls for mass detention camps and rounding up millions of Latinos pic.twitter.com/I6Odws74v8

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 10, 2024

To understand what that means, let's take a look at what Ron Brownstein recently wrote.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

Blue state governors are likely to object to such a move and would have constitutional grounds to do so. At that point, Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, which would give him almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program.

Who would be targeted? Stephen Miller, the white nationalist that Trump would likely put in charge of such an operation, told Charlie Kirk that at minimum, they're talking 10 million people. Included in that number are people who have overstayed their visas and, according to Miller, people who were let in on visas but "whose views, attitudes, and beliefs make them ineligible to stay in the country." That aligns with what Trump said last October (emphasis mine).

“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel,” he continued, apparently ad-libbing, “if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right?”

Economy

To get some idea of what Trump's deportation operation would mean for our economy, let's take a look at what happened to Postville, Iowa in 2008 when one meatpacking plant was raided and about 400 undocumented immigrants were arrested. 

According to the Des Moines Register, not only were families torn apart, but a quarter of the town disappeared. Those left behind had to "pick up the pieces from an event that hit their town with the sledgehammer effect of a natural disaster." So just imagine that kind of thing happening in communities all over the U.S. - magnified exponentially.

Trump is also promising to escalate the U.S-China trade war he launched during his first term as president.

Trump’s trade war with China cost Americans an estimated $195 billion since 2018, according to the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. The economic battle also led to the loss of more than 245,000 U.S. jobs, according to the U.S.-China Business Council.

Finally, there will be more tax cuts, which ballooned the deficit during Trump's first term.

Climate change

Trump has promised to once again pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord and roll back as many of Biden's accomplishments as possible.

Trump could slow down the progress of the clean energy transition as president by redrawing the rules for the IRA’s generous tax credits.

He would, his allies say, also scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions; compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants; and symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, knowing it would fail.

Abortion

While Trump hasn't stated a position on a national abortion ban, he made one thing perfectly clear.

Trump: I’m the one that got rid of Roe V Wade pic.twitter.com/o24OhRNqV7

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 16, 2023

Guns

Trump promised the NRA that if he is elected, "no one will lay a finger on your firearms."

Health care

Even as the rest of his party abandoned the idea, Trump continues his promise to repeal Obamacare.

So there you have it. Even when we ignore the fact that this man is unfit for office, tried to foment an insurrection, and could end up in jail for the crimes he is alleged to have committed, a second term would be a monumental disaster for this country - on every major issue.

The latest right wing conspiracy theory: Trump/Russia was a CIA hoax and Putin actually favored Clinton

There have been a lot of big news stories lately, but a major focus has been on Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. 

• CNN reported that a 10-inch binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.
• Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin and is traveling around Russia telling us how everything is so much better there than it is here in the U.S.
• Donald Trump said that he would encourage Russia to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any NATO country that doesn’t pay enough.
• After the Senate passed the national security supplemental, including funding for Ukraine, Speaker Mike Johnson declared that it was "dead on arrival" in the House and sent representatives home for a couple of weeks.
• Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in prison - with the assumption being that Putin had the 47 year old murdered.
• Putin said that Russia would prefer to see Biden win a second term, describing him as "more experienced and predictable."

If you believe that last one, then Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag are in the midst of telling a tall tale that you will love. I'm not going to link to the articles they've published over the last three days because they're behind a paywall and I'm certainly not going to spend any money going after them. 

But these guys are basically saying that the entire Trump/Russia story was a hoax perpetrated by former Obama CIA Director John Brennan - who they accuse of doing two things:

1. Kicking off the whole "Russia hoax" by asking our allies ("Five Eyes" intelligence services) to spy on 26 Trump associates in early 2016.
2. Cooking the intelligence behind the January 2017 assessment of Russian activities to suggest that Putin aspired to help Trump when he really favored Hillary Clinton for the "continuity and stability" she would bring.

Here's Shellenberger on point #1:

Report: Deep state is scrambling to find a missing top-secret binder that shows how Obama's CIA set up the Russia hoax @shellenberger @mtaibbi pic.twitter.com/oBvKRrqkkp

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) February 14, 2024

And here he is on point #2: 

BOMBSHELL: a new report says Russia didn't want Trump to win in 2016, they wanted Hillary and the CIA knew it. Obama's CIA director, John Brennan, manufactured evidence for the Russia hoax, according to @shellenberger and @mtaibbi pic.twitter.com/u8aMMvqsTb

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) February 16, 2024

I'm not going to get into the weeds on all of the lies articulated in those two claims. But just to give you one example, in the second video Shellenberg says:

[The CIA] used the Steele memo, the infamous political document commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign, to cook the intelligence...for the early January 2017 intelligence community assessment claiming that the Russians favored Trump falsely. That relied on the Steele memo.

As a fact check on that one, let's actually go back and look at what Fox News reported in July 2020. There we learn that, in preparing the January 2017 report, it was Comey and the FBI who wanted the Steele dossier woven in, over objections from Brennan and the CIA. The compromise that they all agreed to was to avoid any use/reference to the dossier and simply attach it as an appendix. 

Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag didn't produce a single document to corroborate their claims. Instead, on several occasions they refer to their "multiple credible sources," but don't name them. They suggest that these sources are knowledgeable because of their involvement with the investigation done by the House Select Committee on Intelligence - the one that was initially chaired by Devin Nunes and staffed by Kash Patel. 

To assume that there is any credibility to these claims, all you have to do is take the word of people like that over the following:

• the Mueller Report
• the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report
• Trump's first CIA director, Mike Pompeo
• DOJ's Inspector General Michael Horowitz
• Trump's attorney general, Bill Barr
• Special Prosecutor John Durham 

The story these guys are trying to sell hasn't made it into the mainstream media. But it's not just showing up on Fox. It's also landed at places like The Federalist, the Washington Times, the Daily Wire, and RealClearPolitics. Apparently, Taibbi will be on Don Trump, Jr's. podcast tonight to talk about it. So of course, Jonathan Turley is also weighing in.

If this nonsense goes the way that other rightwing conspiracies have developed, it is very likely that we'll be hearing it from Republican politicians soon. So the question becomes, why now? I suspect it has something to do with all of those stories I listed at the beginning of this piece up above. So I'll be watching how it plays into all of the other lies Putin/Trump are trying to sell.

What Biden and Democrats learned from Obama

Last October, the Biden administration was in the process of preparing a supplemental funding request for aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Here's how Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson responded: 

What we've said is that if there is to be additional assistance to Ukraine, which most members of Congress believe is important, we have to also work in changing our own border policy.

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed that demand, stating that "Legislation that doesn’t include policy changes to secure our borders will not pass the Senate."

In response, the Biden administration released a supplemental funding request that included measures to secure the border. But Republicans rejected that one because they didn't think it "adequately" addressed the border issue.

In response, a bipartisan group of Senators worked on a compromise. This week, they released their bill, which basically embraced a lot of what Republicans have wanted. But once again, Republicans played the role of Lucy pulling the football just as Charlie Brown tried to kick it. Speaker Johnson immediately called it "dead on arrival."

We could stop the story there and have a typical pundit-style conversation about how Democrats continue to be naive in thinking they can negotiate with Republicans - because this is what always happens.

But the truth is that the story is still unfolding. Yesterday this happened in the Senate:

The Senate voted Thursday afternoon to proceed with a stripped-down bill that would provide aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, one day after Republicans in the chamber rejected a bipartisan border security and foreign aid bill.

The vote of 67-32 means the Senate can begin consideration of the $95 billion package, although the next steps are uncertain and it’s not yet clear it will have the votes for final passage in the chamber.

You might notice that what is under consideration in the Senate is what Biden initially proposed BEFORE Republicans had their temper tantrum about the border. So in a sense, we've gone full circle back to where this all started.

Commentators are right to suggest that Republicans in general - and Speaker Johnson in particular - blew this one big time. They had leverage (funding for Ukraine and Israel) to get most of what they wanted on border security. But to be successful, they'd have to compromise a bit and risk Trump's ire for taking the issue off the table. So they got nothing.

This whole scenario reminded me that during the Obama administration, Jonathan Chait coined a term for the president's approach to negotiations: "conciliatory rhetoric as ruthless strategy."

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Mark Schmitt captured it with this description of Obama's theory of change:

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict.

I'm not suggesting that Biden and Democrats knew all along how this would play out. But they certainly drew Republicans into a conversation about how to solve the "border crisis." In doing so, they demonstrated that all the opposition has is fear-mongering - and they're not willing to give that up by actually solving the problem. 

Republicans have used obstruction and lies to move the Overton Window rightward on immigration

It's been clear for a while now that, when it comes to the 2024 election, Republicans are determined to make immigration the one and only issue on the table. In doing so, many of their leaders are openly embracing the white nationalist's Great Replacement theory. Trump didn't just say that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, he also posted this:

Over the last few days, right wing billionaire Elon Musk has gone all-in on the Great Replacement theory.

Biden’s strategy is very simple:

1. Get as many illegals in the country as possible.

2. Legalize them to create a permanent majority – a one-party state.

That is why they are encouraging so much illegal immigration. Simple, yet effective. pic.twitter.com/B9M5ypUOQB

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2024

Last May, Speaker Mike Johnson said this about the so-called border crisis: "The Biden administration has done this intentionally...For what reason? Everybody asks me all the time. I think that ultimately they hope to turn all these illegals into voters for their side."

The truth is that, spewing white nationalist conspiracy theories about immigrants has become an everyday occurrence for Republicans.

As Josh Marshall pointed out, a decade ago those are the kinds of things you'd have to go to a site like Stormfront to see. Now they're part of everyday political discourse on the right. It's worth taking a moment to think about how we got here.

In 2012, Latinos voted for President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 71% to 27%. In response, the RNC performed an autopsy. Included in their report were statements like this:

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, must be to embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only...

By the year 2050 we’ll be a majority-minority country and in both 2008 and 2012 President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority groups...The RNC cannot and will not write off any demographic or community or region of this country.

That report was issued in mid-March 2013. By April, a bi-partisan group of Senators introduced comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, along with unprecedented resources for border security. By the end of June, it had passed the Senate by a vote of 68-32. But then-Speaker John Boehner, surrendering to his lunatic caucus, refused to vote on it in the House. They wanted border enforcement, but no pathway to citizenship.

Two years after the Senate passed bipartisan immigration reform, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president by claiming that immigrants are criminals and rapists. That launched a continuous series of lies, followed by horrific policies (ie, Muslim ban, family separation) once he was elected. The white nationalists in his administration even refused to support the DREAM Act for young people who came here as children.

What concerns me about this trajectory is that all of the obstruction and lies seem to have worked. Ten years ago the bipartisan bargain was to trade border security for a pathway to citizenship. But the current bipartisan Senate agreement doesn't even consider a pathway.

It gets even worse. Great Replacement theorists like Trump, Johnson, and Musk are now suggesting that offering a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants is part of the Democratic plot to destroy (white) America. 

It is impossible to ignore the fact that Republicans have been successful in using obstruction and lies to move the Overton Window to the right when it comes to immigration.