Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump's dangerous rhetoric

[Brexiter]

We begin today’s roundup with analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN on Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric:

As he contemplates a 2024 campaign and rallies for 2022 candidates, ex-President Donald Trump is conducting a new symphony of political malice and facing little pushback from his party despite the insurrection’s example of where the politics of malevolence can lead.

The foreboding atmosphere five weeks before the midterm elections shows the country remains in the grip of the rancor that stained the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another less than two years ago. [...]

One of the ex-President’s top boosters, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, also played into Trump’s politics of fear at his weekend rally in Michigan, claiming that Democrats wanted Republicans dead.

The Washington Post editorial board writes about increasing threats of violence against members of Congress, especially those of color:

According to the Times, in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, following a campaign marked by his virulent discourse, the number of threats recorded by the Capitol Police against members of Congress increased more than tenfold, to 9,625 in 2021; the first quarter of 2022 saw 1,820 cases opened. Members of Congress from both parties have been targeted, but the Times’s review showed that more than a third of the threats were made by Republican or pro-Trump individuals against Democrats or Republicans seen as disloyal to Mr. Trump. Nearly a quarter were made by Democrats targeting Republicans, while party affiliations could not be determined in the other cases. Particularly vulnerable are lawmakers of color.

Over at the Council on Foreign Relations, Jacob Ware dives into the escalating violence and threats of violence in American democracy:

Secondly, electoral violence damages the trust of U.S. allies and the United States’ ability to promote liberal democracy abroad. The events of January 6 were part of a broader, global democratic trend in which electoral violence is appearing more frequently, and leaves Washington less able to lead calls for change. In fact, over the past several years, the United States has been an exporter of extremism, sparking trends that now plague its European and other Western allies. Recent global analysis has focused on America’s abdication of its “leader of the free world” role, and warns that a vacuum has been left for other powers to fill. As one analyst lamented, “The United States remains indispensable because it is the world’s greatest military power—but not because other nations look to it for guidance.”

On the topic of the midterms, Peter Slevin at The New Yorker dives into how attacks on reproductive choice are motivating voters:

Prominent Michigan Democrats are moving reproductive rights to the center of their campaigns, testing the potency of an issue that has put Republican candidates on the defensive for the first time in years. A string of elections, most notably in Kansas, have shown significant increases in turnout among pro-choice voters. A Pew Research Center study released in August found that seventy-one per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents consider abortion very important, up from forty-six per cent in March, before the Court issued its Dobbs ruling. With only forty-one per cent of Republicans saying the same, some G.O.P. candidates appear to be sensing electoral danger in absolutist positions. Tom Barrett, who hopes to unseat Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, in central Michigan, changed the wording on his Web site from “protect life from conception” to “consistent pro-life state legislator.” In a debate last week, he refused to specify whether he’d oppose abortion in cases of rape or incest when pressed by Slotkin and the moderator.

Meanwhile, a must-read at The Atlantic from J. Michael Luttig on the right’s “independent legislature theory,” which is another attempt to dismantle government as we know it:

The Supreme Court will decide before next summer the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.

In Moore v. Harper, the Court will finally resolve whether there is a doctrine of constitutional interpretation known as the “independent state legislature.” If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.

Tim Alberta writes about the threat of bad losers to our democracy:

The Republicans who have made election denying the centerpiece of their campaign must lose, and lose badly. They will cry fraud and demand recounts and refuse to concede. They will throw tantrums sufficient to draw attention to their margins of defeat. At that point, Thomas says, maybe a critical mass of GOP voters—the very people who supported these candidates in the first place—will finally realize that they’ve been duped. Maybe they will abandon the lies and choose a different path before it is too late.

But based on the number of candidates who sold a lie to earn their spot on the November ballot, in Michigan and beyond, I fear it may already be.

On a final note, don’t miss this profile of Michael Fanone, who almost lost his life in the January 6th attack: