Daily Archives: May 14, 2020

But don't assume that we'll be getting a look at the President's tax returns before heading to the polls on November 3. Chances are we still won't.

1) The Supreme Court could push the decision back down to the lower courts to sort out. And there were indications during Tuesday's oral arguments that we might be headed in that direction.

Later, in his year-end letter on the state of the judiciary, Roberts counseled his fellow judges to "celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability," and to "reflect on our duty to judge without fear of favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity and dispatch."

Issuing a definitive ruling on the tax returns of the President of the United States five-ish months before the 2020 election isn't the sort of thing that will knock down the growing perception that the court is too political.

"Chief Justice John Roberts signaled from the start that he is looking for a path that avoids absolute rules and could bridge, to some extent in these polarized times, the dueling sides.

"But even as he appeared ready to reject the hard-line Trump positions in both cases, if he opts for what the Justice Department raises as middle ground, the chief justice would ultimately make it difficult to enforce the subpoenas against Trump."

In short: The possibility exists that the court issues a ruling in late June or early July that forces the White House to comply with the House's subpoena of Trump's financial records. But there are several ways that the justices could get out of offering such a decision in the midst of a presidential campaign -- and it seems likely they will do just that.

Continued here:

Don't hold your breath on seeing Donald Trump's taxes before the election - CNN

THE SEPARATION of powers, the founders bulwark against tyranny, is not what it might seem. As James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers No. 47, the idea is not to keep the legislative, executive and judicial departments absolutely separate and distinct. Rather, Madison wrote, each must exercise a measure of control or agency over its fellow branches. Negotiating the overlapping portions of the Venn diagram has often fallen to the judiciary, as it did on May 12th, when the Supreme Court took up two challenges to President Donald Trumps quest to keep his taxes and other financial records secret.

Mr Trump is the first president since Richard Nixon to refuse to share at least some tax information with the American people. But in April 2019, with the Democrats back in control of the House of Representatives, three congressional committees subpoenaed years of papers from Mr Trumps banks and his accounting firm. A few months later Cyrus Vance, Manhattans district attorney, sought similar records for a grand-jury investigation into Mr Trumps alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult film star and a Playboy model before the election in 2016. Lower courts rejected Mr Trumps pleas to block the subpoenas, leaving the nine justices with the final say.

The first pair of cases, argued by telephone (the court is not meeting in person during the pandemic), concerned House subpoenas to Capital One and Deutsche Bank, two of Mr Trumps lenders, and Mazars USA, his accountant. The Oversight Committee had demanded documents to help it consider revising government ethics laws. The Intelligence and Financial Services Committees said they wanted to investigate money-laundering and foreign interference in the 2016 election.

Patrick Strawbridge, Mr Trumps lawyer, described the House efforts as a dragnet. He seemed to raise the eyebrows of Chief Justice John Roberts, though, when he cast doubt on all congressional oversight of presidents. Quite frankly, Mr Strawbridge said, the House has limited powers to regulate the presidency itself. Jeff Wall, supporting Mr Trump from the Department of Justice, added that the subpoenas were designed to undermine the president and the House had not even come close to explaining why it needs the documents.

The Houses lawyer, Douglas Letter, seemed to have precedent on his side. In 1927 the court observed that the power to secure needed informationhas long been treated as an attribute of the power to legislate. And in 1974 it unanimously ordered Nixon to comply with a subpoena for his White House tapes. But when pressed to identify a limit on Congresss subpoena power, Mr Letter faltered. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the courts most skilful questioners, backed him into a Socratic corner. There is really no protection, he asked, preventing the harassment of a president, because subpoenas require only a conceivable legislative purpose, and you cant think of a single example of a subpoena that wouldnt meet that test?

Justice Elena Kagan sought to elicit more persuasive responses from Mr Letter and vividly depicted Mr Trumps request as placing a ten-ton weight on the scales between the president and Congress. Yet even Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the liberal wing, worried that the House subpoenas might be unduly burdensome. He was bothered, he said, by the prospect of a red-baiting future Senator McCarthy haranguing a future Franklin Roosevelt.

When rulings arrive this summer, Mr Trump may win a majority in Trump v Mazarskeeping his finances out of the newspapers, for now. But he seems likely to lose Trump v Vance, the clash over the New York subpoena (if so, only the grand jury would be privy to Mr Trumps records while he remains in office). In Vance, Jay Sekulow, Mr Trumps lawyer, offered a royalist vision of the presidency shielded by absolute immunity from criminal investigation. But he struggled to explain how, in 1997, the court could unanimously order Bill Clinton to appear for depositions in a sexual-harassment suit, whereas a grand jury probing Mr Trumps alleged payoffs to paramours was constitutionally barred from peeking at the presidents papers.

Noel Francisco, the solicitor-general, defended Mr Trump on somewhat less outlandish grounds. Carey Dunne, ably representing Mr Vance, argued that the investigation was well within the scope of legal process permitted by this court since 1807. If the justices side with Mr Trump, Mr Dunne warned, presidents may wind up unchecked and above the law.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "On the money"

Read more:

The Supreme Court will not agree on the president's taxes - The Economist

American Comeback, the Trump campaign titled a new ad out this week. THIS NOVEMBER, the ad proclaimed, making clear the comeback he is referring to is not just the countrys struggle with the coronavirus pandemic but the restoration of his own political fortune, THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY IS WRITTEN.

That Trumpin the throes of the worst public health crisis in more than a century and the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depressionis writing rosy history long before it has actually happened might seem audacious. It borders on the fanciful when considering the slew of numbersthe steadily mounting death toll, near-record unemployment and a majority of Americans dissatisfied with his handling of the crisisthat sketch a future trending in the opposite direction. But this is a page from a playbook Trump has used many times before.

At key points in Trumps long and public lifefrom his nadir in the 1990s to The Apprentice more than a decade later to his embattled campaign a decade after that and finally to his tumultuous presidencyTrump has used the idea of the comeback as a critical weapon in his arsenal of self-invention. A believer in a binary worldview that was a core teaching of his flinty fatherthere are winners and losers, and he always must be the former, not the latterTrump has used comeback as a fortifying piece of rhetoric that masks periods of failure, delaying a reckoning until theres something to brag about. Others might wait for actual evidence that a comeback has occurred, but Trump repeatedly has advertised his comebacks months and even years in advance. He has used it to bend in his favor unflattering media narrativesto tweak perception, to alter realityto conjure power, positivity and a sense of propulsion, especially at junctures when hes running low on all three.

The world that he lives in and projects, there are just two roles in it, Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. Youre a winner or a loser. And if theres a moment that youre not quite a winner, youre almost a winner. Youre practically a winner. Its a cloak that contains winning as a part of it.

Its his way of saying, I had a setback, and now Im coming backbut he never says he had a setback, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me.

He also uses it as a starting off point to build momentum, added Marcus, who worked for Trump from 1994 to 2000. It was a word that he pushed off on.

Comeback, said Sam Solovey, a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice, who prepped for the show by reading every Trump book and biography, is the placeholder until victory is at hand.

It helped him get to the White House. And now, forced by circumstance to abandon his victory lap messaging of Keep America Great, Trump is reaching for it again as he tries his hardest to stay there.

Its just as critical to 2020 as it was in 2016, if not more so, former Trump aide Jason Miller told me. If hes the outsider, if hes the insurgent, he wins reelection. If hes viewed as the insider, the one whos the power holder in a tumultuous time, then winning becomes much tougher.

My name is Donald Trump, he said in the intro of the first show of the first season of The Apprentice, launching into a quick series of words and pictures associated with success. For Trump, the reality television show on NBC, which debuted in 2004, was a chance to cement his comeback taleand to do it in the way that he wanted, sandwiching what he took to calling his glitch or his blip basically between brackets of unfettered triumph. But it wasnt always easy, he explained. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back. And I won.

In the first half of the 90s, Trump constantly skirted financial ruin, facing for years the possible permanent tarnishing of the image he had cultivated in the 70s and 80s as an infallible deal-doer. Donald was broke, Stephen Bollenbach, the CFO Trumps lenders made him hire, would say. He was worse than broke. He was losing money every day. Even so, Trump talked about his comeback, not when his struggles began to wane but practically from their start.

All Donald knew was that he was still a story, Wayne Barrett wrote in his seminal biography. In the spring of 91, according to Barretts reporting, Trump announced to a consultant that he was determined to return to the cover of Time. He said he would be the comeback of the century.

In 1992, he redoubled his efforts, earning honeyed headlines on the cover of New York magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post. He refused to reflect on the past, skated through the present and relentlessly spun toward the future. Im not going to look back and say it was tough and blame myself, he told the Sunday Times of London. I could be even bigger than ever.

Gossip columnists marveled at Trumps ability to shape the nature of the story. I mean, Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News told the Boston Globe in 1994, its not like hes the president.

Business bigwigs, meanwhile, marveled at it because it wasnt true. I think his recovery is an illusion, a real estate executive who did frequent business with Trump said to the reporter from the Globe. Its like the emperor has no clothes. I guess if you keep repeating it long enough people begin to believe it.

And he did. And they did.

And it worked.

In 1995, not quite five months after Trump successfully started selling stock in his failing casinos in New Jersey and his resurgence was looking legitimately less and less like a mirage, some of New Yorks business and government leaders honored Trump at a luncheon in Manhattan for what they dubbed the comeback of the decade. The lieutenant governor called him the comeback kid. Bill Fugazy, a limo company tycoon and onetime Roy Cohn crony, gave Trump a glass-encased boomerang. You throw it, he said, and it always comes back.

In 1996, in articles about Trump, the Daily News and the New York Times used comeback in headlines. By this time, thanks to the casino deal plus at-long-last development on a plot of land he was involved with on the Upper West Side, those headlines were no longer wrong. I think it says, Trump said, what Ive been doing over the years has been right. (Sound familiar?)

And in 1997, out came The Art of the Comeback, the sequel of sorts to The Art of the Deal. It never occurred to me to give up, to admit defeat, Trump (really Kate Bohner) wrote. He simply skips over the losing part. It is the unspoken chapter in the ongoing narrative, said Solovey, the first-season Apprentice contestant. He left out the Art of Losing.

Hence the intro to the show in 04. That same year, too, on multiple occasions, he made the claim that the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as having made the greatest personal financial comeback of all time. Its true. It did, in 1999 and 2000, a Guinness World Records spokesperson told me, before the Records Management Team decided the concept of a comeback was not standardizable across the globe. To use it the way he wanted to use it, he didnt need it to be.

He kept comeback as a cudgel, of course, when he turned toward politics.

In 2015, a little more than a month before he came down the escalator and officially entered the fray as a presidential contender, he gave a speech to the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. Our country is not going to have a comeback, he said, with any politician.

The rest of 2015 and into 2016, for most of the campaign, he didnt use the word that muchuntil he needed it, in October, when polls pointed to him losing to Hillary Clinton and perhaps by a lot. I know how to make a comeback, he said in a speech October 3 in Loveland, Colorado, referring to his experience in the 90s. I dont even think of it as a comeback, he said that same day in a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. It was just, like, you know, we had tough periods, good periods, tough periods. We just knew that things were going to be just fine.

Americas comeback begins on November 8, he said in a speech in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on October 15, a week after the uncovering of his lewd comments on the Access Hollywood tape, when many figured his candidacy surely was doomed.

Hes never stopped using the word as president. But it started to tick up at the turn of the year. He was always going to run in 2020 by talking about a comeback.

But he wanted to run on one he was saying had just occurredand that he had engineered. Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback, he said in his State of the Union address the first week of February. Were in the midst of the great American comeback, he said repeatedly that month and into early March.

At that point, though, the dire reality of the coronavirus and its consequences began to become clear. It was no longer a credible pitch. The Trump campaign this year was going to be about KAGKeep America Greatbut now its another round of MAGA. Make America Great Again. Again. Trump not only has not shied away from using the word comeback but has doubled down, simply shifting from trumpeting one to forecasting anotherto trying, as is his wont as a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale, to speak it into existence, never, ever losing, always either winning or on the way.

Theres going to be a comeback very, very quickly, as soon as this is solved, he said in a coronavirus briefing on March 18. And it will be solved. We will win. And there will be a comeback.

Were going to have a very quick comeback, he said on Fox News on March 24.

Well be the comeback kids, he said in the briefing on April 15. All of us. All of us.

He has very few moves, Marcus, the former Trump publicist, told me, and one of those moves is the comeback move.

More:

Donald Trumps Lifelong Obsession with Comebacks - POLITICO

Trump could not possibly have been surprised, either, when CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang asked a pointed question about why Trump was trying to frame the testing as some sort of global competition. Instead of giving a coherent answer, the president told her twice she should direct her question to China, which many have interpreted as a shot at Jiangs ethnicity. In the exchange that ensued, Trump labeled her question nasty twicehis typical putdown for a question he doesnt likeand then, after calling on CNNs Kaitlan Collins and then uncalling on her, he abruptly shut the presser down by saying, OK, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much, and marched away from the podium.

And this wasnt even the weirdest part of the presser! When a reporter asked about his recent Obamagate tweets and wanted to know exactly what crime he was accusing his predecessor of, Trump avoided answering, shooting back at the reporter, You know what the crime is, the crime is very obvious to everybody. And its not the only crime Trump is bird-dogging. Recent Trumps tweets have reprised his old and completely baseless accusation that MSNBCs Scarborough was culpable in the death, 19 years ago, of a staffer. (For what its worth, Senate Republicans seem to want no part of Trumps Obamagate-mongering, according to POLITICO.)

Embracing mania engaging in pageantry fight-picking conspiracy theorizing throwing a public tizzy. While none of these batty Trump behaviors are new, their current intensity invites us to ask once more why he still goes on like this.

Above all, as Rob Long put it in the May Commentary, Trump likes to be watched. The camera is always your friend, is his guiding principle, Long writes. The more you let people seeeven the nasty stuffthe safer you are. The greater his antics, the greater his exposure, the greater the commentary, and the larger the feedback loop. See, Im writing about him and youre reading about him. Almost 3 years into his presidency, hes learned that theres little political blowback from his followers for whatever lunacy the camera records. In fact, as weve seen from his rallies, the more he lies and blusters, the more they like it.

For the same reason, Trump loves it when we yell back at him about his Obamagate B.S. or his charges against Scarborough or his snit-fits. Making him the subject of our conversations is almost as good to Trump as making him the video cameras focal point. All those op-ed commentaries denouncing him? Obviously, hed like it better if the commentariat praised him, but if theyre going to criticize him, hes content to annotate the insults and censures and repurpose them as offensive weapons. Remember what he did when Hillary Clinton called some of his supporters deplorables? He turned it into a badge of honor.

Trump has long loved stirring the pot with charges of conspiracy. This week the perpetrators of conspiracy are China, Obama, Scarborough and the ravings of QAnon. During the campaign, it was the alleged criminal hijinks of Hillary Clinton and his attacks on the question of Barack Obamas citizenship. Baseless charges like these are the perfect refuge of a rhetorical arsonist like Trump, who scorches the earth with controversy and confusion so nobody knows where to find the truth.

Conspiracy is a self-sealing narrativeit can never be disproven, says Jennifer Mercieca, the author of the forthcoming Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. The logics of conspiracy cover up the lack of proof (they are hiding the proof) or disconfirming proof (they cant be trusted to tell the truth). He who wields conspiracy is very powerful because he can point suspicion in any direction he likes.

Has Trump really turned up the heat or have we just been sitting in his saucepan so long it just feels that way? My intuition tells me that both his supporters and critics have grown numb to his previous rhetorical excesses and need for him to cross new boundaries, violate new taboos, and break fresh panes of glass in order remain engaged. Then theres the matter of his Trumps recent dip in the polls, reportedly putting him in a foul mood. He knows he cant charm his way back to better numbers, so hes trying furiously to stay in the public eye by displaying more ferocity. And dont forget the Biden problem. Sleepy Joe, as Trump often taunts him, has been hiding like a possum in his basement where Trump cant get to him, and thats got to frustrate him.

So he keeps harping on China as the responsible party for the 80,000-plus coronavirus deaths in the United States. While offering absolutely no proof for the charge, Trump obscures his own neglect of the pandemic and misdirects culpability to a foreign country. These techniques might not work on you, but that doesnt bother Trump. His hardcore supporters are the target of the tweets, speeches, pressers and conspiracy theories. The more he does to make himself look persecuted and reviled by the elites and the press, the more heroic he appears to his base.

As the presidential campaign progresses, look for more of the same from Trump, with an emphasis on Biden, of course. His goal is a permanent schism in American society, a cold civil war, with lots of finger-pointing and yelling and demagoguery. Even if he loses in November, his audience will endure, and hell do whatever he needs to make sure we never take our eyes off of him.

******

Ill be writing more about Jennifer Merciecas Demagogue for President when its published in early summer. (Highly recommended.) Send book recommendations to [emailprotected]. My email alerts blame my Twitter feed for losing China. My RSS feed is a prisoner of rational argument.

Continued here:

Opinion | Why Trump Is Peddling Extra-Strength Conspiracy Theories - POLITICO

Donald Trump listens during a roundtable meeting with energy sector CEOs on April 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

The staggering responsibilities of the executive office do not appear to have aged President Donald Trump much. Unlike past presidents who have grown visibly wearier on the job, Trump seems to have not aged much over his four years in office. Even in the face of a historic pandemic that has, at the time of this writing, killed over 80,000 people in his country, the president has projected an unflappable vanity. Questioned about the rising death toll at an April press conference, Trump boasted, You cant mourn it any stronger than were mourning it.

Most people no longer seem to be sharing this ghoulishly upbeat attitude. Recent polls show that Trumps support has declined over the past few months, as a wave of suffering from the pandemic ripples across the United States. The administration is widely seen as having botched the response to the coronavirus. And the president himself has compounded the sense of chaos with his incoherent and disturbing messaging during the crisis. Trump has been saying insane things for years, of course, but with tens of thousands of Americans killed by disease and tens of millions more out of work and facing an uncertain future, the joke finally appears to be wearing thin.

Every day seems to be a pivotal turning point for American society lately, but its hard not to look ahead to one autumn day in particular as a momentous occasion that will shape this countrys future: Election Day. There is not much reason to believe that the United States will have recovered by the time of the vote. Under normal circumstances, after such a disaster, the incumbent losing office would be all but assured. But Trump also happens to be facing off against a Democratic Party that is bitterly divided and with good reason. The Democratic split can be attributed both to structural differences as well as those of personality, divisions that have been pored over ad nauseam and need not be relitigated here.

What should be considered is that, one way or another, this election will really be a matter of life and death for millions of people. This is particularly the case for the poor and people in developing countries whose voices are not heard in the electoral process, even though its outcome affects them. The question of whether Trump would be worse on balance than any Democratic candidate is worth sincerely asking. But, when you analyze both Trumps record in office and future trajectory, it hardly seems debatable. In addition to its hideous response to the coronavirus pandemic the suffering of which is falling overwhelmingly on the working poor and minorities the Trump administration is willfully laying the groundwork for global suffering on a scale that will be unprecedented.

Trump ran on a platform that made vaguely populist gestures at times. But in office, he has served as a human ventilator keeping the terminally ill ideologies of neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy alive both in their most rapacious forms. If the forces that latched onto him get another four-year extension, we could pass beyond a point where we have much less left to rescue. There are several fronts on which a second Trump term would guarantee escalated suffering for innocent people, including health care, xenophobia, immigration policy, income inequality, and the courts. For purposes of illustration however, let me focus on two issues that I follow closely, and which progressives have historically expressed concern about: climate change and war.

Every expert has warned that major cuts in emissions need to take place within the next decade in order to avert calamity. An administration interested in even the minimalist goal of keeping civilization functioning in the medium term should feel compelled to register a response. Yet the Trump administration has made it a point of pride to do the opposite of what is necessary as aggressively as possible. Many of its environmental policies seem to have little apparent logic beyond killing endangered species and ramping up CO2 emissions to trigger the libs. The direst warnings from scientists seem incapable of shaking the administration off its current course. And this problem is time-sensitive: Within roughly a decade on our present course, we will have likely passed a point beyond which catastrophic harm is unavoidable.

To be fair to Trump, past presidents had environmental policies that also brought us to this point. Its reasonable to ask, then, whether his approach is meaningfully worse. But, according to climate experts who have tracked this subject for years, it is. Trumps environmental positions go beyond even those of the conservative establishment and corporate America. They align instead with the most extreme fringe of right-wing activists and libertarians opposed to any type of regulatory action to stave off climate disaster.

In 2012, the Obama administration was doing better on climate policy than a Republican administration would have done. But even Mitt Romney was not completely terrible on climate. He wouldve enacted some policies, he wasnt totally retrograde or an outright denialist, said Kert Davies, the founder and director of Climate Investigations Center. When Trump ditched the Paris accords, many major corporations came out and said that this is a bad idea because they had already begun planning for a reduced-carbon future. It tells you a lot about how fringe the president is on this issue that hes not even in line with corporate America.

Over the past few years, in part because of the alarm over the Trump administrations policies, a powerful grassroots movement has grown to force the issue on climate change. It is having an impact. Whereas in previous elections, it was a struggle for activists to get a single question about the issue addressed, climate policy was one of the major topics of discussion during the last set of Democratic primary debates.

The current likely Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, has made weaker commitments on this subject so far than some of his challengers and been justly criticized for his shortcomings by activists. But there is significant reason to believe that he or any Democratic president would do more than Trump on climate and also be susceptible to pressure to improve their stance in office. On this issue, even marginal improvements happen to matter a lot. Even with great effort, we are likely pass the red line that scientists have set: 2 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels. But keeping emissions at a point that takes us up to 2.5 degrees, 3 degrees, or even more warming would make a difference and accelerate the severity of our catastrophe. Its not hyperbole to say that every marginal increase in emissions means death and misery for millions of the most vulnerable around the world. The absolute intransigence of the Trump administration on climate is particularly galling since there is a lot that could easily be done with a little bit of political will.

Damaged military vehicles in the aftermath of U.S. military air strikes at a militarized zone in the Jurf al-Sakhar in Iraq on March 13, 2020.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

There is an ocean of difference between what a Trump presidency and a Biden presidency would do on climate policy, Davies said. In one youd do zero, even continue moving backwards, while on the other wed at least be moving forward again. Even if people dont think Bidens policies are up to Bernies Bidens progressive rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ended his presidential campaign in April theres a much higher bar now.

Davies added, People have woken up on this issue in a way that could not have been foreseen years ago. It is likely that climate policy will be a significant node of the Democratic platform in November, and that itll be something beyond getting back into the Paris accords. The dialogue has moved way past that.

The Democratic Partys legacy on war is an ugly one. President Barack Obama was responsible for putting in place a drone warfare program that frequently killed innocent people around the world. After he left office, the terrifying executive powers over life and death that Obama created were then handed over to a man who was perhaps the least morally or temperamentally fit to wield them. While Trump occasionally expressed skepticism of U.S. militarism during his first presidential campaign, in practice he has governed with callous brutality, behaving like the ugliest imperialist possible.

Under Trump, strikes in Somalia have ramped up eight times over what they were under Obama. In all battlefields, he has loosened rules of engagement to allow the greater killing of civilians in American wars. Thousands have died in needlessly brutal operations in Iraq and Syria as a result of slackened targeting standards. As commander-in-chief, Trump has gone out of his way to encourage war crimes and even celebrate those who commit them. Harming innocent civilians is one issue, at least, where he has been keeping his campaign promise.

Trumps foreign policy doesnt get any better when you zoom out from the actual business of killing people. His administration has given an unprecedented blank check for unilateral Israeli land grabs in the Palestinian territories, setting the stage for institutionalized oppression unseen in the past seven decades of conflict. Trump has revoked arms control treaties that form part of the hidden infrastructure preventing the outbreak of nuclear wars. His retrograde approach to these agreements is setting the stage for the renewal of a Cold War-style arms race. Even a relatively small decision to remove restrictions on land mines will likely kill and maim innocents pointlessly for years to come.

But perhaps the single most aggressive policy Trump is still playing out is his approach toward Iran. After tearing up the Obama-era nuclear agreement, which, whatever its shortcomings, was the most significant step to extricating the U.S. from its endless wars in the region, Trump brought the two countries within inches of war this January after illegally assassinating an Iranian general in Iraq. Even more shockingly, the president has maintained crushing sanctions on that country during the Covid-19 pandemic over the pleas of Iranian human rights activists, Democratic senators, and former high-ranking world officials. A leaked Pentagon document reported in April said that these sanctions had crippled the Iranian health care systems ability to respond to the disease, a development that has made even some hawkish anti-Iran figures queasy.

The presidents Iran policy has already resulted in the deaths of innocent people. In a second term, worse is almost assured. On this issue alone, there is a staggering difference with even the most flawed Democratic position on this issue. Anyone looking to express moral outrage over the suffering of civilians due to U.S. foreign policy need look no further than Iran today.

The risk of war with Iran is an issue where there is a huge partisan split, said Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of the forthcoming book Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Trump has had many years to pivot from maximum pressure to dialogue and he has not done that with Iran, he has not selected advisers that would allow him to do that. The Democrats, on the other hand, started out as the party that supported the nuclear deal and are likely to try to return to it once in office.

Trump has periodically given hints that he favors some type of economic-nationalist retrenchment of American resources away from foreign conflicts. His thoughts on this issue have never been systematized in any clear way. But his rhetoric has sometimes given those who hope for such a policy enough material to project an image onto him as an isolationist, despite daily accumulating evidence to the contrary. It has taken the Covid-19 pandemic and his response blaming it almost entirely on China instead of using it to make the case for domestic retrenchment to put the final lie to this claim.

If Trump were an isolationist, if he were in favor of Fortress America, he would be focused right now on building defenses in America against future pandemics, said Wertheim. That is not what we are seeing.

The Democratic Party has also been historically invested in the dubious goal of U.S. global primacy. Unlike in the GOP, however, there seems to be a meaningful constituency growing against the hawkishness of previous decades, at least on some important issues. The nuclear deal negotiated by the Democrats in particular was the most significant step taken to extricate the U.S. from the cycle of endless war in the Middle East. In general, though deeply flawed and deserving harsh criticism, the Democratic Party consensus is still less hawkish than Trumps, who has served as an empty cipher for the most unhinged extremists in Washington, D.C.

Retrenchment in some fashion is the direction the U.S. should be heading, and the public debate reflects that, said Wertheim, who is a critic of the so-called blob foreign policy consensus in both parties. No one in the Democratic primaries was trying to sound more hawkish on foreign policy; it was all a contest to say who was going to end endless wars. Regardless of what happens, this is how the debate is being framed now.

The most damning indictment of the status quo that preceded Trump is that it ultimately gave rise to his presidency. The proposition of simply returning back to those days and calling it a job well done is untenable. But when it comes to the question of a second Trump term, if there is a lesson we can take from history, including recent history, its that even when things are bad, they can still become much, much worse without getting better again. The accelerationist dream of tearing things down so that something better just might be built in its place is a folly that sacrifices the weakest among us for uncertain gains. Unless you have great personal wealth and are benefiting from Trumps eye-watering tax cuts on the rich, there will not be any safe haven from what a second term will mean.

Electoral politics are not the sum total of political engagement, of course. Mutual aid and local democracy can flourish without getting involved in the dispiriting business of national elections. For anyone who cares about large structural issues like climate change and foreign policy, however, its worth considering how a second Trump term would preclude even a long-term future that is progressive in any sense. From a strategic perspective is also political capital in appearing to be on the right side of history at a pivotal moment. If Trump does overcome the pandemic to win the election and, as would be likely, takes the world further down the path of ruin, amid the pain that ensues it would be good for progressives to look like they had done everything in their power to stop him.

One of my favorite books is the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweigs 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday. In that book, written shortly before his death at the height of World War II, Zweig decried how the world that he had grown up in had suddenly been shattered by politics, as if it were a hollow clay pot breaking into a thousand pieces. Our world is no less fragile. People can reasonably disagree over the perennial question of what is to be done. But, at the very least, as this pandemic is emphasizing, we should never let the delicacy of the things we take for granted slip from mind.

More here:

No One Is Worse Than Donald Trump on Climate and War - The Intercept