Polls are a Snapchat of that Second, Is"The Country Gone to Hell or is in The Hell" On Someone’s Mind?
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| An illustration depicting the silhouettes of Donald Trump surfing on a crowd in a blue dumpster against an orange background. |
Credit...Ben Wiseman
Let me just say as an introduction and please check the facts: Highest Stock Markets in decades, the Economy the best since Covid, and Trump's past 4 yeaUnemployment is the lowest in decades and we are admired and respected (ask any NATO member and ask Putin if it's easy to mess with a friend of ours?)
This is Adam Gonzalez and I ask you to stay informed! Make sure you pass the correct info to any new voter. The new voters are very savvy but they did not live through COVID-19 in the say fashion as we did.
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff
of The Times for more than 25 years.
The New York Times
We tell children — or at least we used to — that actions have consequences. What goes around comes around. Watch your behavior. You’ll answer for it someday.
Donald Trump is the living, lying contradiction of that.
He answers for nothing. He’s accountable to no one.
You thought that changed with a Manhattan jury’s verdict five weeks ago? With “guilty” on all 34 counts? How adorable. That only bound most of his supporters even closer to him. Only amplified the theatrical ardor with which Republican politicians pledged their devotion. Only increased donations to his presidential campaign.
Oh, and his sentencing has now been delayed and the conviction itself thrown into doubt, thanks to a supremely reckless Supreme Court.
Immunity, thy name is Trump.
The House of Representatives impeached him twice, but a cabal of collaborators in the Senate chose tribalism over justice and made it all go away. They said that it was up to others to decide if he’d committed crimes, and up to others to punish him for those. It was up to them to get re-elected.
The voters repudiated Trump, but he simply pretended it hadn’t happened. He invented dark conspiracies and embroidered wild fantasies to turn defeat — by seven million votes, no less — into supposed victory. Into full-blown martyrdom. He cried “rigged,” he cried “stolen,” he stood by as a mob stormed the Capitol and stood mute as it chanted for his vice president to be hanged. For that ethical savagery, the members of his political party lined up dutifully behind him once again. David Koresh never knew loyalty like this.
Trump schemed to steal the election himself. Prosecutors rightly charged him for that. But he has lawyers upon lawyers. He has gall atop gall. He has Fox News, Newsmax, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon. He has that rogue Supreme Court stacked in his favor, thanks to his and Mitch McConnell’s brazen stacking of it. Its justices have kicked the can so far down the road that it has tumbled into a different galaxy, a different cosmos, one where there’s no moral gravity, where transgressions vanish and worries disappear with the abracadabra of executive privilege.
Trump’s unpopularity with most voters should be a much bigger obstacle for him and a much bigger opportunity for Democrats than it is. Time worked in his favor, as it has so often in the past. It stiffened his political rival’s gait. Weakened his political rival’s voice. President Biden can’t answer Trump’s outrages with optimal passion, ideal precision, or laser-guided disdain. He’s Trump’s better in decency, many times over. He’s Trump’s lesser in lung power, and in an age of invective, that matters.
Creditors are left in the lurch. Accomplices left holding the bag. (Here’s looking at you, Rudy Giuliani.) Spurned associates. Appeals and delays and delays and appeals. Attorney General Letitia James of New York won her fraud case against Trump, but it doesn’t seem to have hobbled him at all. It’s seldom even mentioned anymore. E. Jean Carroll won her sexual abuse and defamation case. He swaggered (and slandered) on.
Trump has made a career of evasion. No, he has made a legend of it. And while there’s a kind of smarts and a sort of skill in that, it owes more to luck than to brilliance. It owes the most to the perverse freedom that comes with a total lack of conscience — with the readiness to stoke people’s darkest fears and cruelest impulses, to shrug at the damage done, to bilk charities, to run a sham university, to tell little lies, to tell big ones, to place self-promotion and self-preservation so far above everything else that they’re not so much his guiding values as his only ones.
All of that has gone around. When exactly is it coming around?
Perhaps we owe children a new adage, as oversimplified as the ones with which I began but no less true: The shameless shall inherit the earth, while the blameless grapple with the mess they make of it.
The Long Trump Tease
The wait for Donald Trump’s announcement of a running mate will apparently continue into next week.
Let’s not pretend for a second that this is a normal process.
I don’t mean Trump’s hyping of the suspense, as if he’s engaged in some reality-show reveal. I mean this: Whoever is willing to be considered has made that decision despite Trump’s attempt after the 2020 election to get Mike Pence, his vice president the first time around, to ignore the will of American voters and violate the Constitution. Despite Trump’s reported equanimity with calls for Pence’s execution. That bespeaks not only a perilously high tolerance for risk but also a capacity for power at odds with responsibly wielding it. Which is to say that the reputed finalists for the Republican vice presidential nomination complement Trump beautifully.
But the argument for many of them ends there. J.D. Vance? His singular mix of contemptuousness and smarm should be patented — and then promptly outlawed. Doug Burgum? Proof that plutocrats can be as dull as the rest of us. Tim Scott? An unctuous blur. Tom Cotton? He scares small children and many forest animals.
Keep an eye on Marco Rubio. Sure, he’d have to resign his Senate seat and establish a primary residence somewhere other than Florida to join the ticket, but that’s nothing compared to stepping into Pence’s old cement shoes. And while it took Rubio a while, he has now traveled — now completed — the modern Republican arc from being appalled by Trump to being in thrall to him.
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| Fireworks |
Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times
In The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser reflected on a micro-tussle toward the end of last Thursday night’s presidential debate: “Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?” (Thanks to Mike Greenwald of Melville, N.Y., for nominating this.)
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