Category Intellectual Dishonesty

The truth shall set you free – Episode 2

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Maybe this really isn’t very complicated at all.  Maybe, a growing number of Americans don’t trust the mainstream news media because they don’t like what they see and hear and read, and they don’t understand what journalism is supposed to do.  I first encountered this phenomenon as a journalist way back at the beginning, by which I mean about 1980.

As a kid I somehow understood that the “news” I read in the newspaper and heard and saw on radio and television was intended to inform and educate me about what was happening in the world, not to promote any certain politicians or favored views of the world.  And that’s not to say that news didn’t (or doesn’t) cast some politicians and views of the world favorably, if you consider the ones who were not in the news in the first place for accusations of law-breaking and dirty dealing.  Watergate happened when I was in high school – both the crimes and the reporting that uncovered the crimes – and Woodward-and-Bernstein were making “investigative journalist” a career goal for more and more college students, although that’s not specifically what attracted me…I was looking for an alternative after I decided, as someone who really didn’t enjoy college, that it would take too long to go to law school.  Later I realized I made a mistake turning my nose up at “college” the way I did.  Later I also came to realize that all good journalism involves “investigating” and the term of art was more a promotional pitch than an accurate description of a exclusive branch of the practice.

After having worked for a year on the college newspaper as a reporter and editor (followed by life-affirming experiences as a lunch-rush sandwich maker in a fast food restaurant and then overnight cashier in a self-serve gas station), I got a part-time job in the news department at a local country music radio station.  They needed someone else to cover school board meetings since their reporter was the daughter of the school board president, and someone to write and anchor short on-the-hour newscasts on weekend afternoons and evenings.   That’s what had me on the air reading the first UPI bulletin about the assault on Congressman Leo Ryan and his traveling party at Port Kaituma in Guyana before the news the next day of the massacre at Jonestown.  Before long I was covering city hall and a municipal election while still a student, then going full-time after graduation.  Nine months later I took a job at another station in town (for more money) as a reporter and anchor, lucky to have a terrific friend and mentor there (Olin Murrell, the late musician you may have heard of) who kept my focus on a clear and fair presentation of the stories that made up the daily news.

Olin also hosted the live evening call-in talk show on that station, and late in 1980 he gave me a chance to try it out: be the ringmaster who conducted interviews and managed an open discussion of any topic, able to articulate my opinion and be devil’s advocate with callers as they expressed their opinions, so as to generate a discussion and hold the attention of an audience.  A few years ago I characterized my outlook at that time as “left of center but not crazy; I had more than one caller who complimented me for being funny and so reasonable…for a liberal.”

It was those conversations with a caller named Irene that were the first direct exposure I can remember to the accusation that the news media is liberal and biased against conservatives.  It seemed to be drawn from a false belief that no person who believed in the Conservative cause and ideals – think Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority – would ever express an opinion contrary to that company line.  It was as if, first, they did not believe that any reporter was capable of quarantining the influence of their personal beliefs when reporting the facts of a story, and second, that any facts reported that did not gild Reagan’s lily must be wrong or have been intentionally distorted to make him look bad.  And this was long before the rise of “alternative facts” or “fake news” and today’s growing mainstream distrust of mainstream reporting.  Where does that come from?

In a thoughtful piece in Slate this month, Ben Mathis-Lilley lays out the case that an economic impact on legacy media from online sources that do not prioritize fair and responsible reporting has made it “increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting.”

That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.

Where that mostly leaves the participants in media (defined broadly) is trying to hustle up a career by selling a strong perspective on the world—by having a dramatic and emotionally satisfying explanation for everything that’s happening everywhere. Its marker of success is being able to headline your own podcast or subscription-driven Substack newsletter, and it runs on opinion “takes,” which cost relatively little to produce, but have to compete for space and eyeballs on Google results, X and Bluesky, and Apple News. And in many cases, the more a take reinforces readers’ existing beliefs, the better it does. It’s a truism and a Paul Simon lyric for a reason: All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest.

So, if even the media outlets which are not ideologically bent one way or another are pushed to publish quick, emotional opinions about the news – rather than to report and present “the news” itself – in order to remain profitable and stay in business, it shouldn’t be surprising that more and more Americans have come to believe, through their own experience, that there is a lot of opinion included in mainstream “news.”

What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit. (Which, to be clear, is a take I usually agree with. There’s lots of bullshit out there!) At the same time, groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. (Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime.) It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.

For a detailed explanation of how the rise of online “news” has threatened the existence of mainstream reporting, check out Phillip Longman’s “How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism” in the first quarter’s Washington Monthly.  It has a thorough background of how digital players have stripped mainstream journalism of its income and contributed to the growth of opinion journalism; I found it very educational with both scary and hopeful aspects:

[With politicians of both parties] repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press.

An extension of the attitude I first heard from Irene some 45 years ago is evident in our next president, who has a long record of attacking as corrupt and/or unfair any source of information that does not praise him.  That combative attitude is present in Republicans at lower levels of government, too, many of whom (I’m talking about you, Ken Paxton) have taken to refusing to even engage with the “hostile media”…and then pander to their supporters by later attacking those outlets over stories in which they didn’t get a chance to defend themselves!

I think most people want a reliable source for news that is not biased for or against certain politicians or any particular view of how the world should be.  Like the folks in a rural southeastern Colorado county who volunteered to pay more to keep their weekly newspaper from shutting down, from losing their only source of what was happening where they live.  If journalism can find a way to better provide that, affordably, we can still have the educated populace that is critical to our survival as a free people…as Ronald Reagan himself said it, in 1981: “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, as Jefferson cautioned, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.”

The truth shall set you free

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

One nice thing about Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race for president and to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the job – and then her enthusiasm for the task as she began to gather more support among Democrats nationwide, plus the wall to wall coverage of those efforts – has been the brief respite we’ve enjoyed from hearing TFG’s constant attacks and whining complaints about…well, everything.  Even The New York Times has noticed, and immediately sought to give the Republican nominee something of a make-good by doing a story about the fact that he wasn’t getting stories done about him.

It’s an unfamiliar experience for Mr. Trump, who has monopolized America’s televisions, newspapers and smartphones for more than 12 months through indictments, primary victories, 34 felony convictions, an assassination attempt and a Republican National Convention at which he was celebrated as a quasi-religious figure.

In the three days since President Biden announced he was quitting the 2024 race, Mr. Trump has entered foreign territory. He has been largely crowded out from “earned media,” or organic news coverage that spreads rapidly among voters and costs campaigns nothing to produce. And his message has been, for the moment, scrambled as Democrats have replaced an old, frail white man with a younger Black woman who is campaigning energetically and giving new life to the Democratic base.

(snip)

The Trump team was not unprepared. They had planned for the possibility of Mr. Biden’s dropping out, produced anti-Harris videos and tested her vulnerabilities in private polls. But they were still somewhat surprised when Mr. Biden actually did it. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers thought he seemed too stubborn — “too Irish,” one aide said — to buckle to the pressure to quit a race against a man he viscerally hated and believed he was best positioned to defeat.

And they were caught off guard by the speed and ruthless efficiency of the replacement. They figured that if he did quit, Democrats would have to stumble through at least a few weeks of turmoil as ambitious Democrats jostled for their shot at the national stage.

(snip)

Mr. Trump was furious about the switch. He complained it was unfair that Democrats were forcing him to start over with a new opponent after he had spent all that time and money fighting Mr. Biden.

Boo-hoo.  What are you, five years old?  “They’re not being fair to me, they’re not being nice.”  Try to act like an adult instead of an entitled narcissist who doesn’t want to play the game unless it’s rigged…who keeps telling the same disproved lies over and over because you’ve got nothing else to say.

Which reminds me, I have a suggestion for anyone who finds themselves trying to argue some point or other with a Trump-ish opponent primed with the standard firehose of falsehoods: don’t think you have to fully refute every single specious argument they make.  You can take the trouble to point out the error, but they aren’t going to accept your argument – they will respond with another lie.  Trump does this all the time.  Instead, use forensic judo on them: respond to their torrent of lies with truths: fill the air with the good facts and let the leaden falsehoods from the MAGA mouths thud to the floor.

If you’re a supporter of Kamala Harris, deny the false attack on her and proudly reply with her true position on the issue.  No candidate for office, ever, has had a position on each issue that satisfies all potential voters.  On some things, we just disagree; that’s OK.  She is not running for God, and she doesn’t have to agree with you on every single topic to be a good president.  She starts with one insurmountable advantage: her election as president keeps Trump out of office and stymies efforts to implement the Project 2025 goals that the criminal Trump denies knowing anything about.  Which is, of course, another Trump lie.  (Add that to the more than 30,000 documented lies he told while he was president, or the 30 more “false claims” he managed to squeeze in during less than 90 minutes on stage in last month’s debate.)

If you feel you must knock down the stupid argument, here is a new, handy, fact-check sheet with to-the-point refutations for the usual false claims about job creation, inflation, tax cuts, government debt, tariffs, Ukraine, immigration, crime, and who is the worst president of all time.  (I think you know where that one is going.)

This is not your Founding Fathers’ America

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

When we feel our treatment by our rulers has become so intolerable, so unjust – so inhumane – that we must declare our independence among the peoples and nations of the world, it just makes sense that we should explain to the rest of the world why we are doing it.  Here goes.

–Pat’s paraphrase of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence

The Founding Fathers then laid out the Declaration of Independence of the 13 “united States of America” which included the self-evident truths of the “unalienable” rights that they believed are the birthright of all humans.  Point by point, they laid out their grievances against George III and insisted they had made every good faith effort to resolve differences peacefully.  They explained that they had appealed to the goodness and mercy of “our British brethren” to end the mistreatment from which they suffered, but found them unresponsive.  And in light of those facts, they declared to the world that they and their fellow Americans were going into business for themselves.  The war that had begun the previous year was concluded by treaty in 1783; by 1787 a new Constitution of the United States was approved on behalf of the people of the new nation “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”.

That legal framework set out principles to guide our development and our lives, including the principle that no man is above the law.  That idea had a pretty run there, right up until last Monday when the Supreme Court of the United States decided that presidents and former presidents of this great country were effectively kings or queens.  And despots, if they choose to be.

Immunity from prosecution.  The Justice Department has a policy that no sitting president can be prosecuted while in office, but there was no law that said that, and nothing explicit in the Constitution says a former president is immune from prosecution for officials acts taken while in office.  The high-minded concept was that a president was a person given certain powers to exercise – temporarily – on behalf of his country and in its best interests, and who would then return to his life as a regular citizen.  Would President Gerald Ford have granted Richard Nixon a pardon after his resignation over Watergate crimes if anyone had thought that the former president was immune from prosecution?  No one before has ever had the temerity to claim he had immunity from prosecution…or quite frankly, the need for immunity…before you know who.

A man made famous as much for his over-use and abuse of the legal system as for his dubious business skills that necessitated all the suing and threats of suing had nothing to lose and everything to gain (and no shame) by making an unsupported legal claim that had the desired effect of delaying his trial on felony charges of trying to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election.  The trial court judge hearing this case rejected the claim of immunity, so did a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals.  The Supreme Court…well, the Supremes (1) surprised many when they agreed to hear the case at all, causing a delay until (2) they heard oral arguments April 24 and then (3) “deliberated” the rest of April, all of May and all of June – more than nine weeks – before issuing the ruling.  Guess it takes a while to create a whole new right not found in the Constitution, especially when you had said yourself, under oath, that such a right did not exist:

https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1808191057236000975
https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1807835389865951253
https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1807855254006124944

Hmmm…same folks who said Roe v. Wade was settled precedent. Interesting…

The idea proposed by Trump lawyers in oral arguments was that immunity is needed to protect former presidents from being corruptly prosecuted by their successors; whether or not that is true, there was no such right in the Constitution until this court created it with this ruling.  When was the last time you saw a former president pursued in the legal system by a previous president?  (If you said Biden is doing it to Trump right now, that is the wrong answer; he’s not.)  You haven’t seen it before: not even the lawless Trump went after Barack Obama or his other predecessors!  The assertion that this is a real and dangerous prospect is based on nothing in law or custom or history; it is a projection from Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder wherein he knows what he wants to do to Joe Biden and to every other perceived enemy, and his fevered brain assumes that’s how everyone else operates, too.

Not only did the court create a right that wasn’t there (don’t you just hate those activist judges that Republicans have been warning us about?) but, as argued by Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center for Justice, “The Court has created an elaborate system of ambiguous rules that will not only ratchet up the complexity of the case against Trump but also erode the checks on presidential illegality. It is both a roadblock to prosecution and an encouragement to more insurrection.”

The procedures the Court has crafted to go with [the new rule] are pitched in Trump’s favor. Whenever the case returns to Judge Tanya Chutkan’s trial court, Trump will be presumed immune by default; the burden will be on the prosecution to establish that he isn’t. The Court’s definition of “official acts” cuts extremely broadly, stretching to “the outer perimeter of [Trump’s] official responsibility.” (The Court refused to say exactly where that perimeter ends.) The prosecution must show that prosecuting Trump for those official acts “would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions” of the presidency (emphasis added). The prosecution won’t be able to claim an official act was “unofficial” because of the president’s motives for doing it. (emphasis added) And Trump can seek another round of appellate review if the trial court doesn’t rule him immune. Should the government clear these hurdles, it won’t be able to use the “testimony or private records of [Trump] or his advisors” about official acts to prove his guilt. (emphasis added)

The Court justifies all this new complexity as necessary to protect imaginary future presidents from imaginary future prosecutions. It does not, critically, justify it as a response to the acts of the real and credibly accused former president in the case before it. Just as members of the Court’s conservative supermajority consistently steered the conversation at oral argument away from Trump’s charges, they do not even try to grapple with the bigger implications of applying their new rule to the case in front of them or the consequences if their rule ultimately lets Trump skate. Instead, the Court bows out of the case with the tidy but myopic claim that it “cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies,” lest “transient results” threaten “the future of our Republic.”

The Court doesn’t engage with the ramifications of its opinion, because it can’t — at least not without exposing the fundamental bankruptcy of the whole edifice it has just built. The majority’s ruling cannot possibly be the rule for any functioning democracy. Trump has been charged with attempting to overthrow the election that threw him out of office. Any rule that would grant a president immunity for that crime would remove the principal check on presidential abuses of authority in our democratic system: the vote. And it would encourage other losing candidates to try the same in future elections. (emphasis added)  It is in this sense that the Court’s opinion is truly lawless. It does not merely invent constitutional rules that are antithetical to our founding commitments or enduring values. It threatens to free presidents from the constraints of law and democracy. And it paves the way for future presidents to try to make good on the most antidemocratic of all propositions: might makes right.

In reaching to resolve future imagined cases of presidential criminality while downplaying the actual criminality before it, the Court has imperiled accountability for Trump’s wrongs. It has done severe violence to our law. And it has left our democracy exposed.

Look at what Trump did while president – I mean, just the things we know he did – when there was no presumption of immunity from later prosecution; just what the hell do you think he’ll do next time if given the chance?   What about his calls for televised military tribunals of Liz Cheney and other enemies?  Immunity!  What about all the assaults on our system being planned by his supporters behind Project 2025?  Immunity!

And what about this threat from the president of the Heritage Foundation that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”?  Uh, do what we want and you won’t be hurt?  Really?

And this whole depressing development comes on the heels of a televised “debate” in which we saw one candidate for president lie his ass off for 90 minutes and the other look like an elderly deer caught in the headlights; Biden is now telling Democratic governors he’s fine but needs to stop working by 8 p.m.  I got the feeling this is going to get even weirder.

Fingers crossed, hoping for the best

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

A few thoughts while waiting for the New York jury to return a verdict in the business fraud/election interference trial of you know who:

I hate it every time a news report refers to Donald Trump’s “Hush Money Trial.”  Not only is it inaccurate and lazy, but it plays into his overheated claim that he’s being persecuted, that there was no crime committed.

  • It is NOT against the law to have sex with a porn actor.  Of the many things it may be (and you have your own list of the things that it is), “against the law” is not one of them.  I pray we don’t return to an age in this country where it is against the law for consenting adults to engage in some non-hurtful behaviors.
  • It is NOT against the law to pay hush money.  Blackmail is a crime, for the person committing it; it’s not illegal for you to pay money to keep someone from telling a secret about you.
  • It is NOT even a crime to use your private company’s funds to pay that hush money, provided your paper trail does not lie about the use of the money.  Your investors or directors probably won’t like it much and may take action against you, but it’s not business fraud.  (And if Trump is SOOO rich, as he claims, why didn’t he just write a check himself and not get the company money involved?  I know, hindsight is 20/20.)

BUT, if you doctor your company’s books to falsify the record about why the money was spent – like, saying it was “legal fees” when it was really reimbursing an employee for fronting you the hush money to conceal a private matter – that IS a crime.  It is business fraud in New York, and that is the crime the Manhattan district attorney is prosecuting.  It became a major felony when, in this case, the fraud was committed to advance another crime: improperly interfering with the 2016 presidential election by covering up information that could harm Trump’s chances.  (Man, isn’t it hard to get your head around the idea that it was Trump and Republicans who actually were committing the election fraud, not the liberals and the illegals?)

Lately I’ve been running across many clever, funny, and to-the-point posts that take the varnish off of efforts to obscure what Trump has done, and what he promises to do if elected.  On ABC’s This Week George Stephanopoulos had a terrific summary as the current trial began.

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Last week Jennifer Rubin had a good roundup of Trump’s pratfall-filled week leading up to the trial’s closing arguments, including his not-unexpected cop-out when it came to fulfilling his repeated promise to testify in his own defense (something that I know no defense lawyer wants a client with a total lack of self-control and a well-documented history of serial lying to do).

Finally, Trump predictably chickened out of testifying. He repeatedly boasted he would testify, but like so many other attempts to look tough, this one fizzled into the ether. The episode underscored his cowardice and fragility. At some level, he likely knew that if he had taken the stand, he would have wound up either perjuring himself, digging his own legal grave or both.

What explains these serial debacles? This is who Trump is. He cozies up to neo-Nazis and white nationalists, so naturally he attracts aides with the mind-set to borrow material from fascists. He has contempt for women and tries to please his white Christian nationalist base at every turn; unsurprisingly, he has no idea where to stop and how far is too far. And he bullies his lawyers, insisting on making dumb arguments and calling witnesses he thinks are swell but who implode under examination. (And because he surrounds himself with disreputable charlatans and yes-men, one can hardly be surprised when they reveal their true character.)

For all Trump’s braggadocio, it may be that he just isn’t all that bright, cannot think strategically beyond the moment and lacks any common sense. Without aides or family members empowered to stop him from colossal missteps, he racks up the blunders. And perhaps like a good many bullies, he really does fear taking a punch.

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Trump’s family, which finally began to trickle in to the courthouse to act like they support him, joined in the family business – lying to our faces – when Eric Trump clearly and cleanly misstated the facts:

And beyond the current trial, the situation has become severe enough to get the historian and documentarian Ken Burns off the political sideline; he had this warning to America during a commencement speech at Brandeis University.

https://twitter.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1794455333764538763

Just a couple more..I can’t resist:

https://twitter.com/AnnieForTruth/status/1795772810520117719
https://twitter.com/TheReelRandom/status/1795769741593714898
https://twitter.com/JoJoFromJerz/status/1795848109752217919

No reservations on the crazy train

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

In the Unofficial Pat Ryan Register of All Things Known and Unknown, there is recent high concern that Donald Trump has dementia.  Or is just batshit crazy.  One or the other is used to explain some of demented and/or hallucinatory things he says at his rallies.  But such concerns aren’t new: in the 2016 campaign it even led to the development of an explanation of a candidate’s speech that you’d never expect to be considered positive: that one should take him seriously but not literally.

At a rally in Ohio earlierGJcwK0kaMAEBJeW this month, in a speech in which he referred to China and automaking, Trump said (amid a typical word salad) there would be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t win this November; sounds pretty ominous, and the Biden campaign claimed he was threatening actual violence.  But maybe he meant to convey that one result of him losing would be the continuation of Biden policies that would be devastating for the American auto industry.  In February, he told the Black Conservative Federation Gala that Black Americans like him better lately due to the many criminal and civil court cases against him: “I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them. Does that make sense?”  (No, not really)

One way or another, the listener has to do a lot of work to try to figure out what the speaker really means.  It’s the speaker’s fault if he doesn’t make his message clear enough for the audience to understand it.  (I mean the audience of the general population; his MAGA followers seem to process the dog whistle messages just fine.)

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

But there is at least one constant message in Trump speeches lately that doesn’t need much interpretation: his promise to free those convicted of crimes in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  Jonathan Chait sets the eerie scene in a great piece in New York Magazine:

At a recent rally in Ohio, Donald Trump stood at formal attention while an announcer instructed the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.” As Trump saluted, the speakers played a version of the national anthem sung by imprisoned insurrectionists. “They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that, and everybody knows that,” Trump said at the outset of his speech. “And we’re going to be working on that as soon as the first day we get into office. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots.”

Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign. The J6 version of the national anthem has been playing at rallies since March 2023, and Trump has been referring to jailed insurrectionists as “hostages” since November. But the prospect of pardoning them, which he has floated for two years, has in recent days been made his highest priority. Trump’s promise to “save the country,” which before encompassed his array of domestic and international policies, now refers principally to vindicating the militia that tried to illegally install him in power and that more and more has come to resemble a classic paramilitary group in the Trump imaginarium, licensed to carry out extrajudicial violence on his authority alone.

Bad enough that Trump is promising he will ignore/overturn court cases that sent hundreds of domestic terrorists to jail; Chait finds a scarier reason for Trump’s using this new message, one that potentially drives away independents who might vote for him: his desire for a second term in the White House that is unrestrained by conventional politics or judgement.

But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters. He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term. Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday. Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.

Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent. This is why Trump deposed Ronna McDaniel as head of the Republican National Committee in favor of election deniers Michael Whatley and Lara Trump. McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won. All her genuflections were not enough.

This is also why Trump is reportedly bringing back Paul Manafort, who served a prison sentence for bank and tax fraud, and witness tampering and obstruction of justice, and whose business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, was assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort’s skills are hardly irreplaceable. The point of bringing him back, other than the familiar mob logic of rewarding an underling who took his pinch like a man and refused to rat out the boss, is to signal that loyalty to Trump matters more than any other possible consideration. Normal politicians would distance themselves from staffers who committed crimes, especially crimes on their behalf. Trump regards this as the highest qualification.

(snip)

While Trump touts his first term as a historic success, he and his closest allies view it as largely a failure. Trump, in this view, was manipulated by staffers loyal to the traditional party into letting figures like Robert Mueller and Anthony Fauci undermine him. Mike Pence’s refusal to cooperate in Trump’s plot to steal the election was the ultimate betrayal. Trump’s project is to ensure that a second term faces no sabotage.

An effective Trumpist government has difficulty functioning under the rule of law. If Trump’s staffers and allies believe that carrying out his orders, some of them plainly illegal, will lead to prison or other punishment, they will again hesitate to follow them. That belief is one he has to stamp out, especially as he faces multiple criminal charges for his attempts to steal the election in 2020.

Chait’s conclusion is that Trump’s new focus is meant to shed his movement of all but the true believers; he doesn’t want to build a coalition of various interests and beliefs, he wants only those loyal to the boss, who will support and assist any grift the boss wants.

Among the true-believing Trumpists, there’s no confusion about what Trump’s relentless demands of cultlike submission are trying to accomplish. “The Judas Iscariots of the American Right need to understand that their betrayal comes at a cost,” rails a recent column in American Greatness, one of the new pseudointellectual organs that have sprung up in the Trump era to meet conservative audience demand for sycophantic content. “Excommunication is not enough. Their treachery deserves relentless psychic pain.” It adds that Mike Pence, the New York Times columnist David French, and others “should never be allowed back into respectable conservative company under any circumstances.”

Measured in traditional political terms, January 6 martyrdom may be a disadvantageous message for Trump. The stolen-election lie polls terribly with persuadable voters, and his fixation with it is one reason why Biden’s catastrophic approval ratings have resulted in only a small Trump lead. But by Trumpian logic, it is the perfect campaign theme. It forces his internal critics to swallow their last objection against him. It sends a message to his allies that they can act with impunity. By November, the J6 national anthem will be burned into our brains as deeply as any campaign jingle.

It doesn’t require high-levelGJiBgcnXcAAa-K4 interpretive skills to see the threat posed by a future President Trump in an administration without the likes of John Kelly or Mark Esper around.  They are among 40 of Trump’s 44 one-time Cabinet members who do not support him.  Think about that: of all the people Trump put in positions to lead the government – “the best people” – 10 out of every 11 of them now say no way do they want him in power again.  They haven’t all told us exactly what they saw on the inside of the Trump White House, but it’s enough for them to warn us not to repeat the mistake that was made in 2016.

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