“The litany of grievances, the sense that Trump has been forever persecuted by the government, the unfounded implication that the FBI was “planting information” at his house — all of it screams victimization, that Trump is the target of a vast and shadowy conspiracy pulling the FBI’s strings.
The fact that a Truth Social user had just been radicalized by such talk — posting violent threats on the site before attempting an armed breach of an FBI building — isn’t deterring Trump at all. He is, as the political scientist Julia Azari puts it, a nationalist who has no concept of a nation; a narcissist who abuses the language of patriotism without any commitment to the underlying idea that he has some responsibility to preserve order and cohesion in the polity. In fact, he does the opposite — sowing division and stoking violent distrust if it helps him.
Perhaps Trump’s talk wouldn’t be so dangerous if the rest of the GOP would work to tamp it down. Yet it’s become excruciatingly clear in the wake of his emergence as the GOP’s standard-bearer that Republicans are not taking Trump’s transgressions and troubles as opportunities to dump him, but rather to dig in, right by his side, in similarly radical terms.”
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“As it escalates, there is every chance that Trump’s supporters will become more radicalized.”
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“The Department of Homeland Security has thought since at least 2020 that white nationalists are now the greatest terrorist threat to the American homeland. The odds of a greater increase in far-right terrorism, especially from disgruntled Trump supporters who have been taught to see the Biden administration as part of a tyrannical “Regime,” are rising — and will continue to rise as the broader conservative movement keeps using the virulent anti-government language of the fringe right.
The United States is at a troubling crossroads. If investigators in jurisdictions around the country drop their inquiries into Trump, they are tacitly conceding that he can break any laws without consequence prior to a near-certain 2024 presidential run — an incredibly dangerous precedent. If they continue their work, they risk stoking further unrest and civil conflict, pushing an already polarized country toward an even more dangerous form of division.
Trump and his enablers have taken the country to a very dark place. And we have every reason to believe things will get darker before the dawn.”
“When the Trump administration implemented tariffs on Chinese chemical companies in 2018, administration officials said tariffs would make American chemical companies more competitive. But industry groups told regulators last week that it’s had the opposite effect.
At a Thursday hearing on the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs against China, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry group representing over 190 U.S. chemical companies, informed the International Trade Commission that imports of Chinese chemical products have instead grown continuously since the tariffs took effect in June 2018. Over $35 billion worth of chemicals were imported from China in 2021, and Chinese companies now make up a larger share of U.S. chemical imports than they did when former President Donald Trump took office in 2017.
Per the ACC, the Trump administration failed to account for American manufacturers’ reliance on intermediate products exclusively produced in China. “China is the primary source of many valuable inputs to U.S. chemical manufacturing processes, and for which few or no alternatives exist,” an ACC representative said. “It would take years, and billions of dollars, to build manufacturing capabilities for these inputs in the United States or other countries.”
Dyes stand out as some of the most notable examples of vital Chinese imports impacted by chemical tariffs. For U.S. manufacturers to produce Red 57, a red pigment commonly found in many cosmetic products, they must import 3-hydroxy-2-naphthoic acid, also known as BONA, from China. BONA is exclusively produced in China, forcing American manufacturers to bear the higher costs associated with importing these critical Chinese-made inputs for their final products.”
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“Despite the attention given to the industry by the federal government in recent years, chemical companies are warning that tariffs are hurting their ability to invest new capital in their supply chains and innovate on issues like climate change. They also worry that it will slow job growth and hinder the Biden administration’s broader efforts toward restoring resilience in the supply chain while only contributing to higher costs for consumers.
“[T]ariffs are clearly not working for the chemicals and plastics sector,” the ACC said in their testimony. “[They] are making the United States a less attractive place for jobs, innovation, and plant expansion.””
“The documents indicate the warrant was issued to investigate potential violations of the Espionage Act. That act states, among other things, that an official entrusted with sensitive or classified information who allows it to be taken away from its secure location through “gross negligence” or who knows it’s been removed from safety and doesn’t tell federal officials can be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years. They also suggest an inquiry into possible improper removal or destruction of federal records, and obstruction of a federal investigation.
The receipt suggests 11 sets of documents were recovered, including items related to French President Emmanuel Macron, handwritten notes, photos, and top-secret materials.”
“Biden administration officials are now working to undo some of the harmful legal policies put in place by Trump-era attorneys general—less visible than controversial measures like the border wall and family separation, but nonetheless damaging to due process and punitive toward the people who seek asylum on American soil. Last June, Attorney General Merrick Garland scrapped rules that made it difficult for victims of domestic violence or gang violence, as well as family members of threatened individuals, to qualify for asylum.”
“Since the 2020 election, millions of Republican voters have accepted former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the presidential election was stolen from him. And now, here in 2022, many Republican politicians have capitalized on this lie and have won elections of their own.
This election cycle, FiveThirtyEight is tracking the views of every Republican candidate for Senate, House, governor, attorney general and secretary of state on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. And now that we’re halfway through the primary season, we can say definitively that at least 120 election deniers have won their party’s nomination and will be on the ballot in the fall.”
“Attorney General Bill Barr..said former President Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen from him indicated he was “detached from reality.” Ironically, that seemingly damning assessment of Trump’s state of mind might be his best defense against a possible criminal prosecution.
The Jan. 6 Committee has spent a great deal of time during its first two hearings trying to prove that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election fair and square. On Monday, they effectively used the testimony of Trump’s former staff and lawyers to hammer home that Trump was repeatedly told the vote totals went against him, that allegations of election fraud were bogus and that he continued to spread them to his followers anyway.”
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“as several former Trump insiders testified, the former president clung to implausible conspiracy theories advanced by a handful of legal advisers such as Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Sidney Powell.”
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“prosecutors would have to overcome the likely defense that Trump sincerely believed the election had been stolen because he had been told so by people he believed were knowledgeable. Defendants usually don’t go to prison for following legal advice. While Eastman, Giuliani and Powell were conspiracy theorists whose claims were thrown out of multiple courts, they also were lawyers with, at one time, good credentials. Trump’s defense team would argue that he trusted them and relied on their advice. Poor judgment might disqualify someone for public office, but it is not, in and of itself, a crime.”
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” That would also be a defense to another potential charge — that Trump obstructed an official proceeding, which requires proof that Trump had corrupt intent. A federal judge recently found that it was “more likely than not” that Trump had corrupt intent, relying on the fact that Pence and others told Trump that Eastman’s plan to set aside valid slates of electors and send the process back to the states was illegal. But in the context of a federal jury trial, Trump would only need to convince one juror that there was reasonable doubt that he believed a plan proposed to him by a prominent lawyer (who had once been a former Supreme Court clerk) was lawful.”
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“Garland has been dealt a difficult hand. Many who view the committee hearings will assume that the mountain of evidence amassed by the committee would be more than sufficient to convict Trump. But Garland and his team must know that such a case would be a coin flip at best, and federal prosecutors don’t win over 95 percent of their cases by rolling the dice. They charge defendants when they know they have the goods, and based on what we’ve seen so far, they don’t have an airtight case against Trump.”
“Amid the many extraordinary revelations at the January 6 committee’s first primetime hearing Thursday, one stood out for its sheer depravity: that during the assault, when rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” in the halls of the Capitol, President Donald Trump suggested that the mob really ought to execute his vice president.
“Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he said, per a committee source. “[Mike Pence] deserves it.”
Endorsing violence is hardly new for Trump; it’s something he’s done repeatedly, often in an allegedly joking tone. But the reported comment from January 6 is qualitatively worse given the context: coming both amid an actual violent attack he helped stoke and one he did little to halt. The committee found that the president took no steps to defend the Capitol building, failing to call in the National Guard, or even speak to his secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.
While he was de facto permitting the mob’s rampage, he was privately cheering the most violent stated objective of people he acknowledged as “our supporters.””
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“when a leader whips up a mob to attack democracy with the goal of maintaining his grip on power in defiance of democratic order, then privately refuses to stop them while endorsing the murderous aims of people he claims as his own supporters, it’s hard to see him as anything but a leader of a violent anti-democratic movement with important parallels to interwar fascism.
This doesn’t prove that fascism is, in all respects, a perfect analogy for the Trump presidency. Yet when it comes to analyzing January 6, both Trump’s behavior and the broader GOP response to the event, [the] hearing proved that the analogy can be not only apt but illuminating.”
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“Events like the 1922 March on Rome or 1923 Beer Hall Putsch help us understand the way in which attempts to forcefully seize power — even failed ones like the Putsch — can play a role in the rise of radical far-right movements. They help us understand the clarifying and organizing power of violence, the way in which banding together to hurt others can help solidify dangerous political tendencies.
And it helps us understand the potential for violence to recur, especially given the mainstream Republican Party’s continued whitewashing of January 6.
One of the defining elements of the interwar fascist ascendancy is the complicity of conservative elites — their belief that they could manipulate fascist movements for their own ends, empowering these movements while remaining in the driver’s seat. This is precisely how the mainstream Republican Party has approached Trump, even after a violent attempt to seize power exposed just how far he’s willing to go to hold power.”
“Barr, along with other administration officials, described playing “whack-a-mole” with Trump’s false claims of fraud.
Every time one false claim was dispelled, they said, the former president would bring up another. Aides repeatedly intervened to tell Trump that he had lost the election, and described taking each claim seriously, investigating it until they had the facts and reporting back to Trump. Former acting Attorney General Richard Donoghue described one meeting during which Trump seemed to accept the gathered evidence, but for each conspiracy theory aides were able to explain away, he had another he’d latch onto.
Barr described one popular conspiracy theory around the 2020 election, that it had been rigged by voting machine malfeasance, as “idiotic.” Other Justice Department officials testified that they repeatedly insisted to Trump that other conspiracy theories around the election were simply “not true,” including viral claims of ballot box stuffing in Georgia promoted by Giuliani or Trump’s false claims of “big massive dumps” of illegal votes.
Essentially, the committee suggested, Trump knew or should have known that his lies about the election were, as Barr put it, “bullshit.” But he repeated them anyway, which helped lead to the violence on January 6.”