How seriously should the US public take Donald Trump ? Is he just a blowhard who would never actually do the stuff he says ? Is it all "just Trump talk" and not to be really considered when US citizens go to the polls on Nov 5th.
This is around up of the most recent declarations.
Take the Ranting Seriously
—Andrew Egger
Donald Trump’s rhetoric has only ever really been constrained by one thing: His lizard-brain sense of what he can get away with.
As the election draws near, he seems to believe he can get away with more than ever.
Trump’s policy promises are getting wilder and his flirtation with authoritarianism more brazen. At a rally in Wisconsin Saturday, he made a new pledge to slap a “100 percent tariff” on countries that adopt reserve currencies other than the dollar: “You leave the dollar and you’re not doing business with the United States because we are going to put a 100 percent tariff on your goods.”
“We’re gonna be a tariff nation,” he went on inanely. “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
He keeps promising to elevate kooks. He says he’s
tapped Elon Musk to run a “government efficiency” task force. He’s
left open the door to a cabinet appointment for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vax crank whose endorsement he secured last month. In Wisconsin, he
extolled his plan to end the federal Department of Education and “send it back to the states so that Ron Johnson can run it.”
His diagnoses of what ails the country remain utterly untethered from reality, as with his
repeated false assertions that public schools are performing transgender surgeries on minors: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” he Saturday.
Most of all, though, he’s leaning into the violence. Trump, repeatedly and in open sight, is outlining two major initiatives involving large-scale, systematic arrests of groups of people.
His proposed mass deportations of millions of migrants, he warned Saturday, will be “a bloody story.” And he
keeps pledging to redirect the Department of Justice against his own political enemies, calling for prominent Democrats to face “public military tribunals” and for members of the congressional committee who investigated January 6th to be indicted for treason. (For good measure, his promises to pardon January 6th rioters
now explicitly include those who assaulted police during the insurrection attempt.)
On Saturday, Trump made clear that that enemies list won’t stop with national Democrats, promising “long term prison sentences” for anyone he deems to have cheated in the upcoming election in a
baroque post to Truth Social:
It’s convenient, and maybe even a bit comforting, to just sidestep this as classic Trump overstatement and showmanship. But the record is very clear that his rhetoric has grown more ominous and his policies more draconian over time.
As a matter of policy, Trump is saying he intends to subjugate the Department of Justice to his own will more completely than any previous president has dreamed. Mentally, he is incapable of maintaining any category distinctions between “friends versus enemies” on the one hand and “patriots and criminals” on the other. Any ally, anybody useful, anybody willing to suck up or to just go along will be deemed a patriot, and any charge against them a witch hunt. Any enemy, anybody in the way, anybody who refuses to be an accomplice will be considered an enemy of America and a likely criminal to boot.
David Frum
noted yesterday that Trump has reached a point where his rhetoric has become so unhinged that it actually plays to his favor:
It’s exhausting and bewildering to follow it all. But tuning it out is a luxury only afforded to Americans so long as Trump remains out of power.
For the media, the next few months will be a testing point, too. Will they get bogged down in the minutiae of debates over what is the right level for a tax on unrealized capital gains? Or will they be clear-eyed about the threat?
Is our press corps up for this moment?