Last night was the annual White House Corespondents Association Dinner. Most of the jokes were at Trump’s expense. MC Colin Jost, for example, said “Can we just acknowledge how refreshing it is to see a president of the United States at an event that doesn’t begin with a bailiff saying ‘all rise!’” Biden had a couple of zingers to: “Trump’s so desperate he started reading those bibles he’s selling. Then he got to the first commandment: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ That’s when he put it down and said, ‘This book’s not for me.’” He also noted that “The 2024 election is in full swing and, yes, age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old… Age is the only thing we have in common, my vice president actually endorses me.” It got under Trump’s skin, who took on his favorite role of media critic for his captive audience:
This morning, in his Atlantic column, David Frum noted Barr’s peculiar announcement that he’s voting for trump, the man he recently declared “unfit” for the presidency. For Barr, as for millions of American voters, it’s a lesser of evils decision. Like Barr, Frum is a conservative Republican who used to work for George W. Bush and who thinks Trump is unfit for office, but so unfit that he would never consider voting for him. (He even voted for Hillary in 2016 and wrote two anti-Trump books while Trump was occupying the White House, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic and Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy.)
He wrote that Barr “isn’t thinking clearly. Even for a conservative Republican such as Barr who wants to maximize power for conservative Republicanism, Trump is a choice that makes sense only if you have no long-term imagination at all.”He then launched into an alternative history scenario that point of which was how much better it would have been— for Republicans— had Hillary’s popular vote translated into an electoral college win. Remember, Hillary beat Trump 65,853,514 (48.2%) to 62,984,828 (46.1%).
Back on the planet earth, he wrote that “If Trump wins in 2024, the country could plunge almost instantly into a political and constitutional crisis— especially if Democrats hold the Senate and win the House, but even if they don’t. A reelected Trump’s first priority will be to shut down all of the legal cases against him, including trials that have already begun. He’ll want to pardon himself if he has been convicted of any offenses. He’ll try to use presidential power to quash the half-billion dollars of civil judgments against him. Trump’s opponents will not passively submit to any of this. There will be upheaval, unrest, and very likely a third Trump impeachment trial.”
A reelected Trump’s second priority will be to sell out Ukraine and bust up NATO. Eighty years of U.S.-led alliance structure will collapse, and the whole system of world peace and security will unravel— with who knows what consequences.
A reelected Trump’s third priority will be to impose tariffs on China, triggering a global trade war. Consumer prices will rise, the stock market will tumble, and the world economy could slide into recession if not outright depression.
…Meanwhile, the path to Republican revival would open. Republicans could reasonably expect to score gains in the 2026 midterm elections. With Trump a three-time popular-vote loser, even his base would begin to perceive the failure of his corrupt and authoritarian leadership—and turn again to leaders whom Barr himself would much prefer to Trump or the Trump imitators who would proliferate if Trump somehow returns to power in 2025.
In Republican rhetoric, it is always five minutes to midnight. In 2011, future Speaker of the House Paul Ryan delivered a speech warning that the United States was fast approaching a “tipping point” that would “curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible.” That way of thinking can justify extreme actions. If the choice really is between constitutional democracy on the one hand, and free enterprise and national identity on the other, that’s indeed agonizing.
But as the history of the Trump years shows, that choice is as phony as Bill Barr’s pretense of integrity. A Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016 would have left both free enterprise and national identity perfectly intact, with no worse consequences for conservatives than a four-year delay of a big tax cut, and possibly the benefit of escape from their present predicament over abortion rights. A Biden reelection in 2024 will be annoying to conservatives in other ways. But compared with what Trump threatens?
Before choosing the “lesser of two evils,” Trump-skeptical Republicans must measure the choices accurately. Assessing clearly the recent past helps with that analysis. The Republican Party would today be healthier and more successful if it had lost the presidency in 2016. It will be healthier in 2032 if it loses in 2024.
A trio of NY Times writers tried sketching out what another Trump term would mean for the country. They began by reminding their readers that the deranged authoritarian actually said that “the ‘termination’ of the Constitution would have been justified to overturn the 2020 election, told followers ‘I’m your retribution’ and vowed to use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries— starting with President Biden and his family. Beneath these public threats is a series of plans by Trump and his allies that would upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law if he regains the White House.”
They concluded that “Forces that somewhat contained Trump’s autocratic tendencies in his first term— staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him— would all be weaker in a second term. [I think the word they were avoiding was ‘non-existent,’ not ‘weaker.’] As a result, his and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans would have a greater prospect of becoming reality. Perhaps the most important check on his presidency was internal administration resistance to some of his demands. The advisers who have stuck with him are determined that if he wins a new term, there will be no officials who intentionally stymie his agenda. A coalition of think tanks run by people aligned with rump has been compiling a database of thousands of ideologically vetted potential recruits to hand to a transition team if he wins the election. Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Trump’s desires by raising legal objections to his and his top advisers’ ideas. In a potential new term, Trump’s allies are planning to systematically install more aggressive and ideologically aligned legal gatekeepers who will be more likely to bless contentious actions.”