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      Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

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      I just finished reading Tim Alberta’s masterly new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s a powerful and emotionally resonant account of the transformation in evangelical politics that has brought us to the current moment: A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.One of the troubling aspects of the Trump era for me, as a churchgoing evangelical, has been watching the evolution of his support among white evangelicals. During the 2016 primaries, I took some solace in the fact that Trump’s support seemed to decline the more a voter went to church. According to the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study, he received majority support from white evangelicals who seldom or never attended church, but he received barely over a third of the votes of white evangelicals who attended weekly.As we headed into the general election, a self-justifying narrative emerged. Countless churchgoing evangelicals told friends and neighbors that Trump had been their last choice among Republicans but that they had to vote for him against Hillary Clinton as the only pro-life option remaining.Soon enough, however, the churchgoing dynamic flipped. I noticed the change among people I knew before I saw it in the data. After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.Then the data started to confirm my observations. In 2018, Paul Djupe, a Denison University professor, and Ryan Burge, a statistician and associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, reported that Republican approval for Trump was positively correlated with church attendance: The more often people went to church, the more likely they were to strongly approve of Trump. By 2020, white evangelicals who attended church monthly or more were more likely to support Trump than evangelical voters who attended rarely or not at all.I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”Alberta captures this rage well in his book. He tells a gut-wrenching anecdote about receiving a nasty note in 2019 at the funeral of his father, a pastor. After Alberta spoke at the service, he was handed the note from a member of the congregation condemning him as part of an “evil plot” to “undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States” and demanding that he seek absolution by investigating the “deep state.” This would be a strange message to direct at a journalist under any circumstance. But to do so at his father’s funeral is grotesque.Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity. It’s the sense of shared purpose and community that makes any form of fundamentalism truly potent. There is an undeniable allure to the idea that you’re joining a community that has achieved an understanding of life’s mysteries or discovered a path to resolving injustice. As angry as fundamentalists may feel, at the same time, there is true joy among comrades in the foxhole — at least as long as they remain comrades.I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.When you recognize the psychology of fundamentalism, fundamentalist Christian enthusiasm for Trump makes considerably more sense. His fundamentalist supporters are certain that he is fulfilling a divine purpose. They are ferocious in their response to opponents, especially those Christians they believe to be weak or squishes. And they experience great joy in their motivated, activist solidarity.But the keys to fundamentalist success are also the source of its ultimate failure. Certainty, ferocity and solidarity can combine to create powerful social and political movements. They can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity.We’ve seen this phenomenon in both secular and religious spaces across the political spectrum. A small number of extremely confident and aggressive people can turn an organization upside down. Political activists who possess fundamentalist intensity can push through resistance — at least until their inherent intolerance creates sufficient backlash to trigger real opposition.That’s how fundamentalism fails. Certainty, which gives so much purpose, ultimately struggles in the face of complex realities. Ferocity, which allows fundamentalists to bully and intimidate opponents, also limits the ability to win converts. And solidarity, which creates community, can become stifling, as it encourages conformity and punishes those who raise good-faith questions.Why do so many fundamentalists love Trump? Because in his certainty, ferocity and demands of loyalty, he’s a far more culturally familiar figure than a person of restraint and rectitude such as the departing senator Mitt Romney, who has the piety of a true believer but does not possess the ferocity of the fundamentalist. Thus Romney was culturally out of step with the millions of Christians who wanted, in the words of Jeffress, “the meanest, toughest son of a gun” they could find.That’s why Trumpism, too, is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s engineered to destroy, not to build. The very characteristics that give it life also plant the seeds of its destruction. And so as we watch the continued marriage between Trumpism and fundamentalism dominate the right, the proper question isn’t whether fundamentalism will permanently remake American culture in its own image. Rather, it’s how much damage it will do before it collapses under the weight of its own rage and sin. More

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      The Electoral College Is ‘the Exploding Cigar of American Politics’

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      Hey, it’s election season! Think about it: A year from now, we should know who the next president is going to be and …Stop beating your head against the wall. Before we start obsessing over the candidates, let’s spend just a few minutes mulling the big picture. Really big. Today, we’re going to moan about the Electoral College.Yes! That … system we have for actually choosing a president. The one that makes who got the most votes more or less irrelevant. “The exploding cigar of American politics,” as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice called it over the phone.Whoever gets the most electoral votes wins the White House. And the electoral votes are equal to the number of representatives and senators each state has in Washington. Right now that means — as I never tire of saying — around 193,000 people in Wyoming get the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.It’s possible the system was quietly hatched as a canny plot by the plantation-owning Southerners to cut back on the power of the cities. Or it’s possible the founders just had a lot on their minds and threw the system together at the last minute. At the time, Waldman noted, everybody was mainly concerned with making sure George Washington was the first president.Confession: I was hoping to blame the whole Electoral College thing on Thomas Jefferson, who’s possibly my least favorite founding father. You know — states’ rights and Sally Hemings. Not to mention a letter he once wrote to his daughter, reminding her to wear a bonnet when she went outside because any hint of the sun on her face would “make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.” But Jefferson was someplace in France while all this Electoral College stuff was going on, so I’m afraid it’s not his fault.Anyway, no matter how it originally came together, we’ve now put the loser of the popular vote in office five times. Three of those elections were more than a century ago. One involved the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who won in 1876 even though the electoral vote was virtually tied and Samuel Tilden easily won the popular vote. But the Republicans made a deal with Southern Democrats to throw the election Hayes’s way in return for a withdrawal of federal troops from the South, which meant an end to Reconstruction and another century of disenfranchisement for Black voters in the South.Really, every time I get ticked off about the way things are going in our country, I keep reminding myself that Samuel Tilden had it worse. Not to mention the Black voters, of course.Here’s the real, immediate worry: Our current century is not even a quarter over and we’ve already had the wrong person in the White House twice. George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 — many of you will remember the manic counting and recounting in Florida, which was the tipping point state. (Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, in part thanks to Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot. If you happen to see Robert Kennedy Jr. anytime soon, remind him of what hopeless third-party contenders can do to screw up an election.)And then Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump decisively in the popular vote — by about 2.8 million votes, coming out ahead by 30 percentage points in California and 22.5 percentage points in New York. But none of that mattered when Trump managed to eke out wins by 0.7-point margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, not to mention his 0.3-point victory in Michigan.By the way, does anybody remember what Clinton did when she got this horrible news? Expressed her dismay, then obeyed the rules and conceded. Try to imagine how Trump would behave under similar circumstances.OK, don’t. Spare yourselves.Sure, every vote counts. But it’s hard not to notice that every vote seems to count a whole lot more if you happen to be registered in someplace like Michigan, where the margin between the two parties is pretty narrow. After her loss, Clinton did wonder how much difference it might have made if she’d taken “a few more trips to Saginaw.”On the other side of the equation, Wyoming is the most Republican state, with nearly 60 percent of residents identifying with the G.O.P. and just about a quarter saying they’re Democrats. Nobody is holding their breath to see which way Wyoming goes on election night.But if you’re feeling wounded, Wyoming, remember that presidential-election-wise, every citizen of Wyoming is worth almost four times as much as a Californian.We are not even going to stop to discuss representation in the U.S. Senate, but gee whiz, Wyoming. You could at least show a little gratitude.Nothing is going to happen to fix the Electoral College. Can you imagine trying to get a change in the Constitution that enormous? It was a long haul just to pass an amendment to prohibit members of Congress from raising their own pay between elections.But we do at least deserve a chance to groan about it once in a while.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Trump Represents a ‘Trifecta of Danger’

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      Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captures the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”Klaas argues that the presidential contest now pitsA 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to poweragainst “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”“One of those two candidates,” Klaas notes, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”Klaas asks:What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?The media, Klaas argues, has adopted a policy in covering Trump of: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he calls the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”This approach, according to Klaas,has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.Looking over the eight-and-a-half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there were no warning signs.Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called “A Duty to Warn” was held at the Yale School of Medicine.The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.In a review of that book, “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mindset:“I think he’s crazy,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” to succeed as president.The warnings that Donald Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.I asked some of those who first warned about the dangers Trump poses what their views are now.Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence, and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.Glass continued:If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.In March, he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration shoplifters will be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont N.H. on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible, they’ll do anything whether legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”Trump, the Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’ ” and then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency, but that never went into effect.Schedule F, the reporters wrote,would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”Miller wrote that he haslong thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity; failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table and Trump seems rather high on those traits along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration,” adding “this behavior is also consistent with psychopathy which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal, and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama, or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to the book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which I mentioned earlier:Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation, and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls, and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”In 2020, Pew Research reported that “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe.” Pew found:Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three-in-four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.A recent editorial in The Economist, carried the headline: “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concludes:would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.Klaas, who opened this column, concludes that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that dominates over all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Wants Us to Know He Will Stop at Nothing in 2025

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      Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what Donald Trump would do if given a second chance in the White House. And it is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole to say that it looks an awful lot like a set of proposals meant to give the former president the power and unchecked authority of a strongman.Trump would purge the federal government of as many civil servants as possible. In their place, he would install an army of political and ideological loyalists whose fealty to Trump’s interests would stand far and above their commitment to either the rule of law or the Constitution.With the help of these unscrupulous allies, Trump plans to turn the Department of Justice against his political opponents, prosecuting his critics and rivals. He would use the military to crush protests under the Insurrection Act — which he hoped to do during the summer of 2020 — and turn the power of the federal government against his perceived enemies. “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” Trump said in a recent interview on the Spanish-language network Univision.As the former president wrote in a disturbing and authoritarian-minded Veterans Day message to supporters (itself echoing a speech he delivered that same to day to supporters in New Hampshire): “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”Trump has other plans as well. As several of my Times colleagues reported last week, he hopes to institute a program of mass detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants. His aides have already drawn up plans for new detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, where anyone suspected of illegal entry would be held until authorities have settled the person’s immigration status. Given the former president’s rhetoric attacking political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups like the homeless — Trump has said that the government should “remove” homeless Americans and put them in tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” — there’s little doubt that some American citizens would find themselves in these large and sprawling camps.Included in this effort to rid the United States of as many immigrants as possible is a proposal to target people here legally — like green-card holders or people on student visas — who harbor supposedly “jihadist sympathies” or espouse views deemed anti-American. Trump also intends to circumvent the 14th Amendment so that he can end birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants.In the past, Trump has gestured at seeking a third term in office after serving a second four-year term in the White House. “We are going to win four more years,” Trump said during his 2020 campaign. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.” This too would violate the Constitution, but then, in a world in which Trump gets his way on his authoritarian agenda, the Constitution — and the rule of law — would already be a dead letter.It might be tempting to dismiss the former president’s rhetoric and plans as either jokes or the ravings of a lunatic who may eventually find himself in jail. But to borrow an overused phrase, it is important to take the words of both presidents and presidential candidates seriously as well as literally.They may fail — in fact, they often do — but presidents try to keep their campaign promises and act on their campaign plans. In a rebuke to those who urged us not to take him literally in 2016, we saw Trump attempt to do what he said he would do during his first term in office. He said he would “build a wall,” and he tried to build a wall. He said he would try to keep Muslims out of the country, and he tried to keep Muslims out of the country. He said he would do as much as he could to restrict immigration from Mexico, and he did as much as he could, and then some, to restrict immigration from Mexico.He even suggested, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, that he would reject an election defeat. Four years later, he lost his bid for re-election. We know what happened next.In addition to Trump’s words, which we should treat as a reliable guide to his actions, desires and preoccupations, we have his allies, who are as open in their contempt for democracy as Trump is. Ensconced at institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, Trump’s political and ideological allies have made no secret of their desire to install a reactionary Caesar at the head of the American state. As Damon Linker noted in his essay on these figures for the Opinion section, they exist to give “Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.”Americans are obsessed with hidden meanings and secret revelations. This is why many of us are taken with the tell-all memoirs of political operatives or historical materials like the Nixon tapes. We often pay the most attention to those things that have been hidden from view. But the mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen.And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Johnson Said in 2015 Trump Was Unfit and Could Be ‘Dangerous’ as President

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      Speaker Mike Johnson, then a Republican state lawmaker, posted on social media that Donald J. Trump lacked the character and morality to be president and could be vindictive.Years before he played a lead role in trying to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office after the 2020 election or defended him in two separate Senate impeachment trials, Speaker Mike Johnson bluntly asserted that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could be a danger as president.“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also questioned what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely disrespecting him? I am only halfway kidding about this. I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”The comments came at a time when many Republicans who would later become loyalists of Mr. Trump were disparaging him and declaring him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Only later did they fall in line and serve as the first-line defenders of his most extreme words and actions.But Mr. Johnson’s anti-Trump screed has, until now, flown under the radar, in a large part because Mr. Johnson himself did, too, before his unlikely election as speaker last month put him second in line to the presidency.These days, Mr. Johnson only praises Mr. Trump and defends him against what he dismisses as politically motivated indictments and criminal charges. Mr. Trump has lauded Mr. Johnson as someone who has acted as a loyal soldier since the beginning of his political rise.In a lengthy statement to The New York Times on Monday night, Mr. Johnson said his comments were made before he personally knew Mr. Trump, and attributed them to the fact that “his style was very different than mine.”He continued: “During his 2016 campaign, President Trump quickly won me and millions of my fellow Republicans over. When I got to know him personally shortly after we both arrived in Washington in 2017, I grew to appreciate the person that he is and the qualities about him that made him the extraordinary president that he was.”Mr. Johnson, who campaigned for Mr. Trump in 2020 and has endorsed his 2024 bid, added: “Since we met, we have always had a very good and friendly relationship. The president and I enjoy working together, and I look forward to doing so again when he returns to the White House.”A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the posts.In 2015, Mr. Johnson, who would announce his first run for Congress the next year, wrote that he was horrified as he watched Mr. Trump’s debate performance with his wife and children.“What bothered me most was watching the face of my exceptional 10 yr old son, Jack, at one point when he looked over at me with a sort of confused disappointment, as the leader of all polls boasted about calling a woman a ‘fat pig.’”In one of the most famous exchanges from that debate, Megyn Kelly, a moderator and then a Fox News host, asked Mr. Trump about his history of referring to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Mr. Trump responded. He added that the country’s problem was political correctness, something he didn’t have time for.Mr. Johnson was horrified.“Can you imagine the noble, selfless characters of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln or Reagan carrying on like Trump did last night?” wrote Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian. He noted that voters needed to demand a “much higher level of virtue and decency” than what he had just witnessed.During the Trump administration, Mr. Johnson enjoyed a friendly relationship with the president. In 2020, he accompanied him, along with other House Republicans, to the college football national championship game between Louisiana State University and Clemson.After the election that year, he played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results. On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called him to discuss legal challenges to the election results.In recent years, Mr. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, has used a podcast he hosted with his wife to defend Mr. Trump against four different indictments and the criminal charges against him.“I think every single one of these bogus prosecutions is overtly weaponized political prosecutions of Donald Trump,” Mr. Johnson said on one episode.On another, Mr. Johnson proclaimed, “No one did it better in the White House than President Trump.” In last month’s speaker’s race, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Johnson, noting that he was someone who had “supported me, in both mind and spirit, from the very beginning of our GREAT 2016 Victory.”Mr. Johnson is far from alone in having expressed deep concerns about Mr. Trump, only to go on to later embrace him and his agenda.In 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called Mr. Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” as well as a “kook,” “crazy” and a man who was “unfit for office.” He went on to serve as Mr. Trump’s most loyal defender in the Senate.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the second-to-last man left standing in the 2016 Republican primary race, called Mr. Trump a “pathological liar” who was “utterly amoral,” a “serial philanderer” and a “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Mr. Cruz has explained his decision to become a loyal defender of Mr. Trump as something that was a “responsibility” to his constituents.Mick Mulvaney, the former Republican congressman who went on to serve as the president’s acting chief of staff, in 2016 called his future boss a “terrible human being” who had made “disgusting and indefensible” comments about women.Unlike the other lawmakers who fell in line, however, Mr. Johnson has pitched himself as someone of deep religious convictions, whose worldview is driven by his faith. 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      Jill Stein Announces Third-Party Bid for President

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      Ms. Stein will seek the Green Party nomination, a spokesman said. Her last two campaigns with the party were unsuccessful.Jill Stein, who ran unsuccessfully for president on the Green Party ticket in 2012 and 2016, will run again in 2024, she announced on Thursday — adding yet another name to the field even as the two major parties appear almost certain to nominate the same two candidates who ran in 2020.“Democrats have betrayed their promises for working people, youth and the climate again and again, while Republicans don’t even make such promises in the first place,” she said in a video announcing her candidacy, and accused both parties of being “a danger to our democracy.”A spokesman for Ms. Stein’s campaign, LeBeau Kpadenou, confirmed that she intended to again seek the Green Party’s nomination.That institutional backing would spare her some of the challenges in gaining ballot access that will be faced by two prominent independent candidates in the race: the progressive activist and professor Cornel West and the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who left the Democratic primary last month.The group of third-party candidates could significantly complicate what looks likely to be a rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Some of Mr. Biden’s allies, worried that third-party candidates could siphon support from him in swing states and make a Trump victory more likely, have been working aggressively to undermine those campaigns.In 2016, Ms. Stein drew some 1.4 million votes, and some Democrats blamed her for pulling support from Hillary Clinton in critical states. Her 2012 bid, on the other hand, drew only about 470,000 votes and not much attention because ultimately the race between President Barack Obama and the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, was not particularly close.Like Mr. West, Ms. Stein will be running to Mr. Biden’s left. In her announcement video, she called for an “economic bill of rights” that would include a guaranteed right to employment, health care, housing, food and education. The video interspersed images of demonstrations for action on climate change, abortion rights, transgender rights and more as she talked.She wrote in an accompanying post on X: “The political insiders always smear outsiders like us & try to shame voters who want better choices. So forget the politicians & pundits who tell you to ignore your struggle and keep voting for those who caused it.” More

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      Love Can Win Trump the Nomination. It Will Take Hate to Win Back the White House.

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      A few weeks ago, I was talking to a local pastor here in Tennessee, and he started the conversation by asking a question I hear all the time: “Can anybody beat Trump?” He was desperate for someone else, anyone else, to claim the Republican nomination. He ticked through the names — DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Pence (he was still in the race then) — and they were all better. Why can’t they gain traction? “It’s not a binary choice anymore,” he said. “It’s not Trump or Biden.”“But,” he quickly added, “if it is Trump or Biden, then I’m voting Trump. It’s just who I am.”It’s just who I am. I thought of that conversation when I saw last weekend’s headlines. Donald Trump is now leading President Biden in five swing states, and if the race goes the way the poll suggests, Trump could win the presidency with more than 300 electoral votes. At the same time, we know from previous Times/Siena College polling that the hard-core MAGA base is 37 percent of the Republican Party. Another 37 percent can be persuaded to oppose Trump, while 25 percent are completely opposed to his nomination.How is it possible that a person whose true base is only 37 percent of his party, who faces four separate criminal indictments and who already lost once to Biden might sit in the electoral driver’s seat?I’ve written quite a bit on the enduring bond between Trump and his base. There’s the strange combination of rage and joy that marks the MAGA community. They’re somehow both furious about the direction of the country and having the time of their lives supporting Trump. There’s also the power of prophecy. Millions of Christians are influenced by claims that Trump is divinely ordained to save the United States. But the MAGA millions aren’t enough to put him back in the White House.To understand his general election prospects, we have to go beyond Trump’s MAGA core. He needs millions more votes — including from my pastor friend, a man who’s desperate to see Trump leave American politics.Trump’s viability in the Republican Party depends on the loyalty of his base, but his viability in the general election depends on a dark combination of negative partisanship and civic ignorance. “Negative partisanship” is the term political scientists use to describe partisan loyalty that exists not because a voter loves his party or its ideas but because he loathes the opposing party and the people in it. And why do voters loathe the opposition so darn much? That’s where civic ignorance plays its diabolical role. Partisan Americans are wrong about each other in a particularly dangerous way: Each side thinks the other is more extreme than it really is.This hostility is what permits Trump to convert his primary plurality into a potential electoral majority. This hostility both predated Trump and powered his election. In previous American political generations, nominating a person perceived to be an extremist or a crank was the kiss of electoral death. You wouldn’t merely expect to lose. You would expect to lose in a landslide.When Republicans nominated far-right Barry Goldwater in 1964, for example, he won six states and lost the popular vote by 23 points. Eight years later, when Democrats nominated far-left George McGovern, they won one state and also lost the popular vote by 23 points. There was enough partisan mobility in the electorate to decisively reject two different candidates, from opposing edges of the political spectrum.But now? It is unthinkable for many millions of partisans — or even for those independents who lean right or left and maybe secretly don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re truly partisan — to either vote third party or cross the aisle and vote for a candidate of the opposing party. They simply hate the other side too much. The result is that virtually any Republican or Democratic nominee begins the race with both a high floor and a low ceiling and no one has much margin for error. Every nominee is going to be fragile, and every national presidential race is going to be close. The margin in the last two races has been agonizingly slim. A few thousand votes cast differently in key swing states, and Hillary Clinton wins, or Joe Biden loses.To understand the power of negative partisanship, it’s important to understand the sheer scale of the mutual partisan hatred. Dating back to June 2014 — a full year before Trump came down that escalator — the Pew Research Center reported an extraordinary increase in polarization. Between 1994 and 2014, the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who expressed “very unfavorable” views of their opponents more than doubled, to 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans. Overall, 82 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats had either unfavorable or very unfavorable views of their political opponents.During the Trump era, this mutual contempt and loathing only grew. A June 2019 report by More in Common found that 86 percent of Republicans believed Democrats were brainwashed, 84 percent believed Democrats were hateful and 71 percent believed Democrats were racist. Democrats also expressed withering disgust for Republicans: 88 percent believed Republicans were brainwashed, 87 percent believed Republicans were hateful and 89 percent believed Republicans were racist.There is an interesting additional wrinkle to the More in Common report. Yes, it found that the two sides hated each other, but it also discovered that both sides were wrong about their political opponents. Both Democrats and Republicans believed their opponents were more politically extreme than they really were. The findings are startling: “Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents … hold views they consider ‘extreme’ ” than is actually the case.The media compounds the problem. More in Common found that consuming news media (with the exception of broadcast news on ABC, NBC and CBS) actually increased the perception gap. As a practical matter, this means that parties are almost always defined by their ideological extremes and each party uses the existence of those extremes to generate fear and increase turnout. Even if a party does try to moderate to appeal to the middle, partisan media still highlights the radicals that remain, and the perception gap persists. The fear persists.We can start to see why Trump is viable beyond his base. When you ask right-leaning voters to abandon Trump, you’re asking them to empower a political party they view as brainwashed, hateful and racist. You’re asking them to empower a political party they view as extreme. That’s the source of Trump’s strength in a general election. He’s surfing on top of a huge wave of fear and animosity, a wave he did not create but one that he’s making bigger through his malignant, destructive influence.That’s not to say that we face a political stalemate. After all, we’ve seen MAGA candidates perform poorly in multiple swing state elections, but many of those elections — even against plainly incompetent or corrupt candidates — have been extraordinarily close. Trump’s loss in 2020 was extraordinarily close. In a narrowly divided country, it becomes difficult for one party to deliver the kind of decisive blows that Republicans suffered in 1964 or Democrats suffered in 1972.When the Trump Republican Party is forced to take three steps back, it often consoles itself with two steps forward. It lost the House in 2018, but it gained seats in the Senate. It lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, but it gained seats in the House. It lost ground in the Senate in 2022, but it did (barely) win back control of the House. There weren’t many bright spots for Republicans in the 2023 elections, either, but there weren’t many races, and MAGA will still believe that Biden is weak even if other Democrats have proved stronger than expected.Already Trump and his allies are blaming electoral setbacks on the Republican establishment. The radio host Mark Levin claimed that the Republican nominee for governor in Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, lost to the Democrat, Andy Beshear, because Cameron is a “Mitch McConnell protégé.” Trump echoed the same theme, declaring on Truth Social that Cameron “couldn’t alleviate the stench of Mitch McConnell.” MAGA’s solution to electoral setbacks is always the same: more MAGA.There are two potential paths past this Republican dynamic. One is slow, difficult and dangerous. That’s the path of the Democratic Party defeating Trump and other MAGA candidates, race by race, year by year, with the full knowledge that the margin of victory can be razor thin and that there’s always the risk of a close loss that brings catastrophic consequences for our Republic. One negative news cycle — like Anthony Weiner’s laptop surfacing in the closing days of the 2016 election — can be the difference between victory and defeat.The other path — the better path — requires the Republican Party to reform itself, to reject Trump now. A two-party nation needs two healthy parties. Any republic that depends on one party defeating the other to preserve democracy and the rule of law is a republic that teeters on the edge of destruction. A Nikki Haley nomination, for example, might make Biden’s defeat more likely, but farsighted Democrats should welcome a potential return to normalcy in the Republican Party. It would mean that politics will perhaps return to a world of manageable differences, rather than a series of existential threats to democracy itself.As of now, however, internal Republican reform is a pipe dream. Ron DeSantis is falling, and while Haley is rising, she hasn’t even hit 10 percent support in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump leads by a staggering spread of 43.7 points. Perhaps a criminal conviction could reverse Trump’s primary momentum, but after watching Trump’s Republican approval rating survive every single scandal of his presidency and political career, the idea that anything will shake his Republican support is far more of a hope than an expectation.Until that unlikely moment, we’re stuck with the current dynamic. Love for Trump fuels his support in the Republican primary contest. Hatred of Democrats makes him viable in the general election. American animosity gave Trump the White House once, and as long as that animosity remains, it threatens to give him the White House once again. More

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      Supreme Court Wary of Trademark for ‘Trump Too Small’

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      In earlier cases, the justices struck down provisions of the trademark law on First Amendment grounds. But the one at issue here seemed likely to survive.The Supreme Court, which has in recent years struck down parts of the trademark law that prohibited registration of immoral, scandalous and disparaging marks, did not appear ready on Wednesday to do the same thing in a case concerning a California lawyer’s attempt to trademark the phrase “Trump too small.”The provision at issue in the case forbids the registration of trademarks “identifying a particular living individual except by his written consent.”There seemed to be consensus among the justices that the provision was different from the ones the court had rejected in 2017 and 2019. Some said that it did not discriminate based on viewpoint, which the First Amendment generally does not allow the government to do. Others added that there is a long history of allowing people to control the use of their names in commercial settings.Some justices pressed a more fundamental objection. Noting that the lawyer, Steve Elster, could use the phrase on merchandise without trademarking it, they wondered whether the First Amendment applied at all.“The question is, is this an infringement on speech?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “And the answer is no.”The contested phrase drew on a taunt from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Rubio said Donald J. Trump had “small hands,” adding, “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”Mr. Elster, in his trademark application, said that he wanted to convey the message that “some features of President Trump and his policies are diminutive.” He sought to use the phrase on the front of T-shirts with a list of Mr. Trump’s positions on the back. For instance: “Small on civil rights.”A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the First Amendment required the trademark office to allow the registration.“As a result of the president’s status as a public official, and because Elster’s mark communicates his disagreement with and criticism of the then-president’s approach to governance, the government has no interest in disadvantaging Elster’s speech,” Judge Timothy B. Dyk wrote for the court.The Biden administration appealed the Federal Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court.Malcolm L. Stewart, a deputy solicitor general who was presenting his 100th Supreme Court argument, said that granting Mr. Elster a trademark would allow him to forbid others from using it, diminishing the amount of the political speech the First Amendment is meant to protect.Chief Justice John G. Roberts echoed the point. “Particularly in an area of political expression,” he said, “that really cuts off a lot of expression other people might regard as important infringement on their First Amendment rights.”Justice Elena Kagan asked Jonathan E. Taylor, a lawyer for Mr. Elster, to identify a precedent in which the court had struck down a law conferring a government benefit like trademark registration that did not involve viewpoint discrimination.He replied, “I can’t point you to a case that’s precisely on all fours.”Justice Kagan responded that she could cite many decisions supporting the opposite proposition, naming a half-dozen.Commentary on the size of Mr. Trump’s hands has a long history. In the 1980s, the satirical magazine Spy needled Mr. Trump, then a New York City real estate developer, with the recurring epithet “short-fingered vulgarian.”In 2016, during a presidential debate, Mr. Trump addressed Mr. Rubio’s critique.“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Mr. Trump said, raising them. “And, he referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”If the Supreme Court upholds the provision challenged in the new case, it will be the end of a trend.In 2017, a unanimous eight-justice court struck down a different provision, one forbidding marks that disparage people, living or dead, along with “institutions, beliefs or national symbols.”The decision, Matal v. Tam, concerned an Asian American dance-rock band called the Slants. The court split 4 to 4 in much of its reasoning, but all the justices agreed that the provision at issue in that case violated the Constitution because it took sides based on speakers’ viewpoints.In 2019, the court rejected a provision barring the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks.That case concerned a line of clothing sold under the brand name FUCT. When the case was argued, Mr. Stewart told the justices that the term was “the equivalent of the past participle form of the paradigmatic profane word in our culture.”Justice Kagan, writing for a six-justice majority, did not dispute that. But she said the law was unconstitutional because it “disfavors certain ideas.”If the justices were divided in the new case, Vidal v. Elster, No. 22-704, it was over the rationale for ruling to uphold the law before them, not on the outcome.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., for instance, asked Mr. Stewart for a theory that would allow him to vote for the government without rejecting a position he had staked out in an earlier case.The justice added that the task was not pressing. “I mean,” he said, “you don’t need my vote to win your case.” More