Trump’s Time Promises
Clearing My Tabs #66: Here are nine or so things that I’ve found interesting while browsing around the internet.
Here’s what I’ve found interesting: Trump once again describes how far he will go, Columbia University student journalists provide a comprehensive report on what they’ve experienced with the campus protests, many Americans who recently purchased guns are open to the idea of political violence, the dangers of Constitutional Sheriffs, a new book reminds us about the forgotten history of Hitler’s establishment enablers, I break Godwin’s Law, Trump is no moderate on abortion, Voyager 1 is back, Brittney Griner tells the story of her Russian detention, and essential Monty Python political analysis.
#1
How Far Trump Would Go (Eric Cortellessa, Time)
What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump remains the same guy, with the same goals and grievances. But in person, if anything, he appears more assertive and confident. “When I first got to Washington, I knew very few people,” he says. “I had to rely on people.” Now he is in charge. The arranged marriage with the timorous Republican Party stalwarts is over; the old guard is vanquished, and the people who remain are his people. Trump would enter a second term backed by a slew of policy shops staffed by loyalists who have drawn up detailed plans in service of his agenda, which would concentrate the powers of the state in the hands of a man whose appetite for power appears all but insatiable. “I don’t think it’s a big mystery what his agenda would be,” says his close adviser Kellyanne Conway. “But I think people will be surprised at the alacrity with which he will take action.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
We are fortunate that the former president and his top advisors are so open about his potential second-term plans. Trump takes ownership of some of Project 2025’s most alarming ideas in these interviews. Kellyanne Conway’s statement at the end of the excerpt above is as much a threat as a promise. No one can argue that what could happen starting on January 20, 2025, is a surprise. Go back and reread what Trump intends to do. These promises should be significant news. These are the stakes. However, the conversation about what Trump said has already died out just a few days after Time published this article. Why aren’t these promises worthy of the coverage reporters gave to Hillary Clinton’s emails or President Joe Biden’s age? Democrats need to warn voters of Trump’s intentions at every possible opportunity. That is the only way these promises will get the attention of reporters—and voters.
#2
Our Campus. Our Crisis. Inside the encampments and crackdowns that shook American politics. A report by the staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator. (Isabella Ramírez, Amira McKee, Rebecca Massel, Emily Forgash, Noah Bernstein, Sabrina Ticer-Wurr, Apurva Chakravarthy, Esha Karam, Shea Vance, Sarah Huddleston, and Maya Stahl, New York Magazine in collaboration with the Columbia Daily Spectator)
The encampment and the takeover of Hamilton represented a dramatic escalation of months of activism on campus. Since the October 7 attack on Israel and its subsequent war in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, the school has been the site of intense protests and counterprotests with bitter debates on campus over antisemitism and Islamophobia, genocide, and free speech. Overseeing it all was a new president, Minouche Shafik, whose inauguration had come just three days before 10/7 and who had scarcely begun to acquaint herself with the Columbia community when the campus was thrown into crisis. With national political figures and billionaires agitating for the removal of other Ivy League presidents, Shafik was charged with resolving standoffs among groups with vastly divergent interests: deep-pocketed donors used to getting their way, faculty with the security of tenure, and students who believe Columbia is betraying its legacy as an engine for progress. As the encampment impasse played out, it became clearer than ever that people were living in two different Columbias. As pro-Palestinian protesters built a community of hope and solidarity around their support for Gaza, many pro-Israel students reported feeling unwelcome and organized their own counterprotests on and around campus. Some of the latter group packed their bags and left, while many of the former were hauled off to jail and suspended.
The staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the nearly 150-year-old undergraduate newspaper, has been covering every minute of this story. Recently, New York Magazine asked us to create this report, leveraging our intimate knowledge of the university and its people to tell the story from the inside. Our reporters, writers, editors, and photographers polled more than 700 Columbians to better understand what happened, took more than 100 portraits of members of the community, and compiled this oral history of the two weeks that forever changed our university.—Isabella Ramírez, editor-in-chief, Columbia Daily Spectator
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I am glad New York magazine’s leadership gave Columbia’s student journalists the cover story of its latest issue. They have compiled a nuanced and comprehensive report about the student protests and the NYPD’s Columbia administration-approved crackdown. The situation is more complicated than it may initially seem—especially given how Columbia (and other colleges and universities) sell their history of activism to prospective students. The Columbia journalists explain how the protests developed, how students reacted, and how the Columbia administration responded. We get to hear from all aspects of the Columbia community. I believe the Columbia administration failed its students throughout the crisis. They failed to protect their students from anti-semitic and Islamaphobic attacks. Then they compounded the error with their decision to send in the NYPD (who responded, per usual, with excessive force and by spreading lies). This story is an outstanding example of the first rough draft of history that great journalism can create.
#3
Many Americans who recently bought guns open to political violence, survey finds (Ed Pilkington, The Guardian)
Large numbers of Americans who have bought guns over the past four years or who regularly carry their loaded weapons in public are willing to engage in political violence, even to the extent of shooting a perceived opponent, a new mega-survey has found.
The study of almost 13,000 Americans, drawn from across the US and weighted for demographics, provides alarming evidence of the openness of certain types of gun owners to the idea – and possibly the practice – of violence as a political act.
The risk of violent behavior rose dramatically, the researchers found, with certain subsets of gun owners.
...
About 42% of owners of assault-type rifles said political violence could be justified, rising to 44% of recent gun purchasers, and a staggering 56% of those who always or nearly always carry loaded guns in public.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I am not surprised, yet I am shocked by these poll results. How have we reached the point where this many of our fellow Americans believe they can justify resorting to political violence? This dynamic is exacerbated by former President Donald Trump and his supporters’ ongoing efforts to deny the result of the 2020 election and raise questions in advance of the 2024 election. What do we think a significant number of Trump’s supporters hear when they see someone like Senator Tim Scott refuse to say he will accept the outcome of this year’s election? How will these gun owners react to Trump’s calls for a “bloodbath?” How many more election workers are going to face dangerous situations or worse at a time when 45 percent of them already fear for their safety? The supporters of one of the presidential candidates are being primed to take by force what they may not get at the ballot box. That should worry anyone who would like to see our nation’s democratic experiment continue past its upcoming 250th birthday.
#4
A sheriff, a felon and a conspiracy theorist walk into a hotel. They’re there for the same conference. (Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News)
A conference for a far-right sheriffs group this week drew a parade of felons, disgraced politicians, election deniers, conspiracy theorists and, in the end, a few sheriffs.
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA, met in Las Vegas’ Ahern Luxury Boutique Hotel conference center to publicly counter reports of extremism within the group and set a course for the coming election — one that involves sheriffs’ investigating what they claim, despite a lack of evidence, is rampant voter fraud.
The group sees sheriffs as the highest authority in the U.S., more powerful than the federal government, and it wants these county officers to form posses to patrol polling places, seize voting machines and investigate the Democrats and foreign nations behind what they claim is a criminal effort to rig the vote by flooding the country with immigrants who vote illegally.
Critics of the group — including voting rights advocates and extremism researchers — fear the CSPOA’s new focus will amount to interference and legitimize disinformation about U.S. elections.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
This Constitutional Sheriff fantasy is a ticking explosive on our democracy, and Donald Trump is preparing to engage it. Imagine for a moment the chaos that sheriffs will create when their posses are turning voters away from polling sites, and then they seize voting machines. History demonstrates how aspiring authoritarians can take advantage of the uncertainty such chaos creates. Plus, Trump and Stephen Miller are warning us of their intention to weaponize Constitutional Sheriffs as part of their mass immigrant deportation plan, as this article by America’s Voice’s Gabe Ortiz explains. Do you think these rogue law enforcement officers will be careful to ensure they are targeting only undocumented people? Do you believe our Constitutional protections are going to be their priority?
#5
The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)
So the historian Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” (Knopf), an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one. Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I decided to read Takeover after seeing this book review, and Ryback does an excellent job of taking us back to Germany during the pivotal months that led to Hitler’s takeover. It isn’t a comfortable read because we know how the story ends. I gasped and shouted out loud several times at the German establishment politicians as they made the errors in judgment that gave the Nazis the ability to take over the state. They thought they could influence Hitler. They thought the institutions would constrain him. They thought the laws would protect them. As the famous aphorism (likely misattributed to Mark Twain) notes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I believe history right now is screaming its warning rhymes at us. Loudly. But will we listen?
#6
Guess Who’s Coming to Elon’s Dinner (Theodore Schleifer, Puck)
On a brisk Friday evening earlier this month, David Sacks and Elon Musk convened a dozen or so of America’s most powerful business leaders for dinner at Sacks’ $23 million, 11,000-square-foot home in the Hollywood Hills. The dinner party, according to people familiar with the intimate gathering, comprised a veritable living room Milken conference: Michael Milken himself was there, in fact, as were billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel. A few government types, including Steven Mnuchin, scored invites. There were also some less politically active titans of industry, such as Uber co-founder and former C.E.O. Travis Kalanick. But all were there as members of a burgeoning anti-Biden brain trust, united by a shared sense of grievance.
The get-together, which hasn’t been previously reported, is the latest evidence of Musk’s growing power beyond Silicon Valley, as he’s evolved from political hobbyist to media owner and conservative icon. As I wrote last week, Musk has told associates that he’s interested in formalizing his running political commentary on Twitter/X into an official endorsement of some sort—either a statement against President Biden, or even something supporting Donald Trump. He has been encouraged to go deeper into politics this cycle by his friends Joe Lonsdale, the venture capitalist, and Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and Trump emissary.
The Most Feared and Least Known Political Operative in America (Michael Kruse, Politico Magazine)
[Susie] Wiles is not just one of Trump’s senior advisers. She’s his most important adviser. She’s his de facto campaign manager. She has been in essence his chief of staff for the last more than three years. She’s one of the reasons Trump is the GOP’s presumptive nominee and Ron DeSantis is not. She’s one of the reasons Trump’s current operation has been getting credit for being more professional than its fractious, seat-of-the-pants antecedents. And she’s a leading reason Trump has every chance to get elected again — even after his loss of 2020, the insurrection of 2021, his party’s defeats in the midterms of 2022, the criminal indictments of 2023 and the trial (or trials) of 2024. The former president is potentially a future president. And that’s because of him. But it’s also because of her. Trump, of course, is Trump — he can be irritable, he can be impulsive — and this campaign is facing unprecedented stressors and snags. It’s a long six-plus months till Election Day. For now, though, nobody around him is so influential, and nobody around him has been so influential for so long.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
He can help them make more money. They think they can influence him. They think the institutions will constrain him. They think the laws will protect them. Yeah, history sure can rhyme.
#7
Trump Gives Up the Game (Jessica Valenti, Abortion Every Day)
In an interview with TIME magazine, Donald Trump admits that if reelected, he’d let anti-abortion activists do whatever they want. I wish that was hyperbole.
Trump, who has been trying to position himself as the ‘reasonable’ Republican on abortion rights, can’t help but give up the game the second a reporter gives him a few minutes to talk. He tells Eric Cortellessa that he’d support states tracking women’s pregnancies and arresting abortion patients, and he refused to commit to vetoing a federal abortion ban.
How many different times can Trump make clear that he’s an extremist misogynist before people finally take his word for it?
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yes, Trump said that states should track pregnant people. Let that sink in for a second. That’s where we are heading. Trump and his advisors have been clear about the various ways they will seek to implement a national abortion ban. He won’t even need to sign a bill into law (although, despite his protestations, he clearly would). As president, Trump can use the Food and Drug Administration to remove abortion medication from the market. He can order the Department of Justice to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act. His Supreme Court appointees could decide that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause requires fetuses to have the same protections as people. There are reasons so many Trump supporters try to keep us from taking him literally. But a candidate’s statements and promises should still matter.
#8
How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away (Stephen Clark, Ars Technica)
In November, Voyager 1 suddenly stopped transmitting its usual stream of data containing information about the spacecraft’s health and measurements from its scientific instruments. Instead, the spacecraft’s datastream was entirely unintelligible. Because the telemetry was unreadable, experts on the ground could not easily tell what went wrong. They hypothesized the source of the problem might be in the memory bank of the FDS.
There was a breakthrough last month when engineers sent up a novel command to “poke” Voyager 1’s FDS to send back a readout of its memory. This readout allowed engineers to pinpoint the location of the problem in the FDS memory. The FDS is responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth.
After a few weeks, NASA was ready to uplink a solution to get the FDS to resume packing engineering data.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
It turns out that my tribute to Voyager 1 was premature. Sometimes, I am so glad to be wrong. Remarkably, NASA scientists could diagnose the problem and upload a solution into Voyager 1’s memory despite it taking about 22.5 hours each way to send and receive messages from the spacecraft. I am so excited by these developments. And I look forward to seeing Voyager 1 again send back usable scientific data.
#9
‘I Will Never Forget Any of It’: Brittney Griner Is Ready to Talk (J Wortham, New York Times Magazine)
On the March afternoon when I met Brittney Griner in Phoenix, the wildflowers were in peak efflorescence, California poppies and violet cones of lupine exploding everywhere. Griner was in bloom too. She was practicing with some local ballers brought in by her W.N.B.A. team, the Mercury, to prepare its players for the start of the season in May. On the court, Griner was loose, confident, trading jokes with the other players between runs. She snatched a pass out of the air, drove it hard in the paint and pulled up to shoot, the ball kissing the net as it sailed through. Everyone, including Nate Tibbetts, the Mercury’s newly hired head coach, who dropped by to watch, erupted in cheers. Griner nodded to herself in quiet satisfaction, keeping her head down as she jogged back to run the play again.
Less than two years ago, Griner was starting her nine-year sentence in a penal colony in Russia, sewing uniforms for the Russian military and subsisting on spoiled food. She lived for glimpses of the sky, which she could see only through weathered rebar when the guards took prisoners outside. She had never been further from the sport that made her a household name. She could barely get through multiple rounds of horse, her lung capacity shot from smoking so many cigarettes. She rarely got to hear from her wife, Cherelle, or her family and friends, and she had no idea when — or if — she would be coming home.
When, after 10 months in Russia, she was finally released, she jumped back into playing, thinking the routine and familiarity would ground her back in herself and her life. But the transition was rocky.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Brittney Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, is being published this week, and she is now telling the story of her time in Russian prison. She explains how a mistake rushing to pack to make her flight led to her forgetting to remove the cannabis cartridges from her carry-on bag. Griner describes in detail the conditions of her detention and how she struggled after her release. Her story is an important one. I am glad she is now comfortable enough to share it.
Quick Pitches
American Autocracy Threat Tracker (Norman L. Eisen, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Siven Watt, Andrew Warren, Jacob Kovacs-Goodman and Francois Barrilleaux, Just Security)
This is a comprehensive and continually updated tracker of the promises and plans outlined by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.2024 AI Elections Tracker (Rest of World)
As two billion people in over 50 countries prepare to vote this year, Rest of World is tracking how artificial intelligence is being used to spread misinformation.The Town That Kept Its Nuclear Bunker a Secret for Three Decades (Emily Matchar, Smithsonian)
From 1958-1992, the residents of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, kept secret the knowledge that their town had a bunker designed to host all of the members of Congress in the event of a nuclear war.The Letter of Last Resort (Ned Donovan, Terra Nullius)
One of the first duties of every new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is to draft the Letter of Last Resort, a series of final instructions for the nation’s four nuclear submarines to follow if the governmental chain of command is destroyed in a nuclear attack. The options are as grim as you might expect in such a situation.Americans Throw Away Up to $68 Million in Coins a Year. Here Is Where It All Ends Up. (Oyin Adedoyin, Wall Street Journal)
It seems like there should be better solutions to this challenge.The Bluetooth Viking and the Scattered Bones of King Cnut (Brian Klaas, The Garden of Forking Paths)
I didn’t expect the name and logo of this key technology to be connected to Viking history and the English Civil War. But that’s what makes it so interesting.
The Closer
Seeing the responses to this tweet made me feel old. And then I learned that many of my trivia friends were not aware of this reference.
So here are three minutes of amusing political commentary from Monty Python to remedy to close this vital knowledge gap. Enjoy!
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“Authoritarians need the people who will promote the riot or launch the coup. But they also need the people who can use sophisticated legal language, people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do.” (Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy)
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