What to Expect When You’re Electing
It can be overwhelming to keep constant track of all the badness in the news (trust me, I know), so let’s just consider the past 24 hours or so. America’s European allies are sending troops to Greenland to defend against the administration’s relentless threats to take it over. Trump again blamed Zelensky, not Putin, for delays in getting a peace deal done. Trump, who led an insurrection and then pardoned its participants, is now threatening to invoke the insurrection act in response to Minneapolis protests, which erupted in response to the murder of an innocent person whom the administration has relentlessly blamed for her own death. After invading Venezuela without Congressional approval (or even advance knowledge), the administration has begun selling Venezuelan oil, with some of the proceeds being held in a bank located in Qatar. The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist, an act that has drawn only silence from the newspaper’s owner. Four more Democratic lawmakers said on Wednesday that they were being investigated for their participation in a video urging military service members to resist illegal orders. And in an interview with Reuters, Trump again tossed out a familiar refrain about the midterms: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” This list, while exhausting, is hardly exhaustive. It’s also not surprising. Antagonizing allies abroad and using the corrupted levers of government to punish perceived enemies at home is the Trump Doctrine. And beyond that, it’s just about exactly what we expected when Trump was elected. “Both ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis and Trump’s threatened seizure of Greenland are part of the same story: An increasingly unpopular regime is rapidly radicalizing and testing how far it can go down the road toward autocracy.” NYT (Gift Article): The Resistance Libs Were Right. I’d say these predictions came from a lot more people than the resistance liberals. I know this because I’ve been linking to stories predicting just these outcomes for years. Of course, being right about Trump (which amounted to little more than merely repeating what he and his wrecking crew said they planned to do) offers little solace. The big question now is how decent Americans, and their leaders, will respond. My take is that anyone who wants to be the next president should grab a bullhorn and head to Minneapolis. Pro democracy Americans are desperate for strong leadership. I’m not ready to predict they’ll get it.
