Trump's Purge
A reminder that brutality is the point
“You know, if you had one day, like, one real rough, nasty day…. One rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It will end immediately.”- Donald J. Trump, September 29, 2024, reminding us that the brutality is the point. Really.
Happy Tuesday. Amid hurricanes, floods, strikes, wars, and the rumors of wars, there are five weeks until Election Day.
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Trump’s hurricane of lies
We’ll get to Trump’s Purge in a moment, but let’s start with this: Adversity tests our spirit and our values, so it is not a surprise that a crisis like Hurricane Helene should bring out the worst elements of Trump’s character: his self-serving demagoguery and chronic need to deceive. “This is what he does,” writes Mona Charen in today’s Bulwark, “sow suspicion, engender resentment and hatred.”
While millions were still suffering the aftermath of the devasting storm, Trump showed up for a photo-op trailing a cloud of lies. He lied about Joe Biden calling the Georgia governor; lied about the allocation of resources; and posted juvenile conspiracy theories about his Democratic opponent.
Biden himself called BS.
He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying.
I’ve spoken to the governor [Brian Kemp]. I don’t understand why he keeps doing this.
The reason I get so angry isn’t because of what he says about me—I don’t care about that—but because of what he’s communicating to people in need. He’s suggesting we aren’t doing everything we can, but we are.
You’ve probably heard the Republican Governor of Georgia mention this; he’s been on the phone with me more than once. So, it’s just not true. And frankly, it’s irresponsible.
Why does Trump keep doing this? Because he’s Donald Trump.
Questions? Anyone?
By now the pattern is depressingly familiar. “Trump lies, repeats the lie and then, as the right-wing information bubble becomes more impregnable, the lie becomes fact for a portion of the population,” posted CNN anchor Jim Sciutto. “This is not new but it has become the norm for Trump. And there is less and less pushback from his party for either the lies, or personal insults, or threats, etc. It’s now a decade-long American story.”
But, actually, it does seem to be getting worse. “There is something qualitatively different about the new Trump lies,” writes S.V. Date. “Once upon a time, he would exaggerate, often wildly, but there was at least a grain of something at the core. Nowadays, he's just inventing complete fiction and claiming it's real.”
Date also points out that Trump was accusing the Biden Administration of doing exactly what did himself: Withholding storm aid from victims for political reasons. Because, with Trump, every accusation is a confession.
Trump’s accusations that Biden is intentionally withholding assistance from areas where residents are largely critical of him, however, do mirror his precise behavior as president when he withheld $20 billion in congressionally approved aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017 and threatened to withhold federal assistance to California to deal with wildfires.
And remember this? “99 percent of Hurricane Matthew aid requested by NC denied by Trump administration.”(wbtv.com) This also seems relevant:
Under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which Trump initially praised for detailing “exactly what our movement will do” if he returned to office but in recent months has disavowed as Democrats publicized its contents — federal programs helping individuals and businesses would be slashed. The massive proposal also would scrap the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as turn over forecasting, and presumably control, over a fleet of weather satellites paid for with many billions of tax dollars to private companies.
Also worth remembering: Just a few weeks ago, Trump said he was okay with climate change and rising sea levels because he thinks he’ll “have more oceanfront property”. And lest we forget, last month Trump urged congressional Republicans to shut down the federal government, if they didn’t get everything they wanted. How would that have worked out?
It’s the Brutality. Always.
The challenge of writing about Trump is separating what’s new from what’s old; and not becoming numbed to the repetition.
Trump’s Purge-like quote at the top of today’s newsletter didn’t make the front pages of most major newspapers because… well… they figured it was just Trump being Trump. His call for “one real rough, nasty day,” was just a variation of his usual fetish for police violence, and so not particularly novel and therefore not especially newsworthy.
And, indeed, we’ve seen this before. Which is precisely why attention needs to be paid, because time and again, what seems like an off-the-cuff remark or a bleat from the fringes morphs into a central message of his campaign.
Back in August, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic about a social media post by the Trump campaign that endorsed the racist “Replacement Theory.”
That was not a one-off, or a gaffe by an overzealously deplorable staffer. The dark warning: “Import the third world; Become the Third World,” has now become a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign and a staple of his increasingly bizarre rally speeches.
Just this weekend, in Wisconsin, he described the invasion migrants as “animals” who will “will walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat.” And he pledged: "I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. We're going to liberate our country."
Then came his call for a daylong spasm of violence. It wasn’t a joke; and it wasn’t an isolated call for more violence. Here’s a flashback to something I wrote more than a year and a half ago:
Trump has long cultivated cruelty as a political weapon. But he has not confined his cruelty to mere rhetoric.
For Trump, this is hardly a new theme. His enthusiasm for violence — including torture, extra-judicial murder and shooting both migrants and protesters — has been a consistent feature of his politics for years.
As [Adam] Serwer noted, Trump has long cultivated cruelty as a political weapon. But he has not confined his cruelty to mere rhetoric. Indeed, the “pro-life” former president makes no secret of his passion for actual violence — including the maiming, wounding, flesh-tearing, shooting and killing of human beings….
Speaking to supporters at Mar-a-Lago in November, Trump threatened that, as president, he would send the military into American cities, even if local officials objected, and repeatedly stressed his eagerness for executing drug dealers and human traffickers after quick, summary trials….
[He] recounted a conversation he claimed that he had with President Xi Jinping of China, when the Chinese strongman explained why his country had no drug problem: drug dealer trials that took two hours and ended in execution.
“By the end of the day you’re executed,” he related to an enthusiastic audience.
Trump is himself so enthusiastic about the executions that he put his own gruesome (and probably ahistorical) twist on the story.
“I don’t know if anybody wants to know this or if it’s too graphic,” he said, “but the bullet is sent to their families. You know that, right? Sent to their families. It’s pretty tough stuff. No games. So they have no drug problem whatsoever.”…
Trump also praised the extra-judicial murders endorsed by former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whom he congratulated for doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem.” The State Department’s 2016 Human Rights Report estimated that police and vigilantes had killed more than 6,000 suspected drug dealers in the months since Duterte came to power.
Nor is his zeal for the death penalty relegated to other countries. As Rolling Stone reported this week, the Trump administration rushed to “execute every prisoner he could” in its last months in office.
As president, Trump not only wanted a border wall but frequently talked about having it electrified, with sharpened spikes on top, and had aides draw up cost estimates for moats filled with alligators and snakes. He publicly suggested that soldiers shoot immigrants who threw rocks, and, when told that would be illegal, “suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.” During his first campaign, he urged supporters to beat up hecklers and boasted that he could order the military to commit war crimes, including killing the families of suspected terrorists. “If you were president of United States, and the military declined to carry out an illegal order, what would you do?,” Fox News host Bret Baier asked him. “They won’t refuse,” he replied.
….Trump has encouraged police to stop worrying about physically injuring suspects during arrests. As unrest spiked after the police murder of George Floyd, Trump tweeted that he had told Minnesota’s governor that “the Military is with him all the way.”
“Any difficulty and we will assume control,” Trump wrote, “but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
And now, in his new campaign, he’s going to double down, daring his challengers to match his willingness to crush and kill opponents, protesters, or criminals.
Exit take: Trump’s promise to exact revenge won’t be hindered by mere laws - The Washington Post
Meanwhile, in Ohio: Some good news. And some bad news.
Really, this is a must-read from Politico’s Jonathan Martin about the conscience of Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine: “‘Just Not Right’: A GOP Governor Confronts Trump’s Lies .”
The governor was initially reluctant to let me see that story close up, to let me embed with him in Springfield. He didn’t want to expose or exacerbate tensions in the community.
Yet as Senator JD Vance (R-OH) continued to insist that his lie about eating pets was true and to falsely call the Haitians “illegal aliens,” DeWine grew “just more infuriated,” as he put it to me over dinner.
“Yeah, after a while, because it got cumulative, and then you keep thinking, ‘Well, they’re going to stop this,’” he said. “Well, they didn’t stop this, they just keep going.”
This is the good news, including some extraordinary details about the DeWines’s connections to Haiti.
Mike and Fran DeWine have been quietly helping underwrite a Catholic school in the one of the most destitute parts of Port-au-Prince for over two decades. It’s called the Becky DeWine School and it was named after the DeWines’ late daughter, who died in a 1993 car accident when she was 22. The name was bestowed by Father Tom Hagan, the Catholic priest who runs it and left the comfort of Princeton University to live in the slums of Cite Soleil.
The DeWines, who’ve been to Haiti over 20 times, first got to know Hagan in the 1990s, a few years after the couple’s first trip there as part of a Senate codel. Fran DeWine, whose passion is helping children, was moved by the country’s profound needs and especially those of newborns. Before long, the DeWines were helping to host an annual Ohio fundraiser for the school and Father Tom, as they call him.
But I regret to tell you, there is also some familiar bad news.
The governor insisted he was still supporting Trump and unfurled a realpolitik case for his endorsement.
“If you want to continue to be effective you have to do it from inside your own party,” said DeWine, who has an overwhelmingly Republican legislature. “My goal has always been to get things done. I’ve been I think successful at it. And I’ve got two years and three months and I want to continue to get stuff done.”
Has he talked to Trump or Vance about their comments? No.
Deep deep sigh.
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In other words, for all his goodwill and moral outrage about the lies, DeWine thinks it is more important to be in the room where it happens. He’s hardly alone. Here’s what I wrote about the gravitational pull of Relevance:
In-the-roomism is a deeply internalized ethos — or perhaps anti-ethos — that has shaped the Republican party’s serial compromises, capitulations, and sellouts.
In this mindset, speaking out or taking a stand is foolish, because it means you lose your place at the table and your leverage. (Just look at what happened to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger!) It’s the story that conservatives have been telling themselves for years now, and you can find it in virtually every corner of the right’s interlocking ecosystems.
Nota bene
As Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, I’m unfortunately well-suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be, even for those who are convinced he’s on their side.
Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America. Not to disregard individual accountability in the slightest, but it would be naive for us to ignore the fact that many of those closest to Trump have descended into catastrophic downward spirals.
If we let Trump back into the driver’s seat this fall, our country will be no exception.
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The NYT editorial board: “Kamala Harris is the Only Patriotic Choice for President.”
It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.
Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.
This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.
Your daily dogs
Monday morning Auggie.
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Eli was really into the movie “Secretariat” the other night.
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Pre-veep debate prep.
What are we to do when everything that Trump says that makes me despise him causes his ardent supporters to love him? What does this say about his supporters? What does this say about our country’s character? And people like Mike DeWine are just enablers.
DeWine used to seem like the kind of Republican that -- in a former life -- I might have voted for. Now, when I see his face, one word comes to mind: feckless.