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Is there anything typically German about you? Donald Trump was asked in January, during an interview with European journalists about his immigrant forebears. He answered, I like things done in an orderly manner. And, certainly, the Germans, thats something that theyre rather well known for. As often with Trumps comments, it was hard to distinguish historical insensitivity from personal obliviousnessgiven the complete disorder of his Administrationand heedless stereotyping. (He added, in reference to his mother, who was born in Scotland, The Scottish are known for watching their pennies.... I deal in big pennies.) When Trump talks about Europe, it tends to be as a land of his own imagining: a once terrific place brought low by NATO deadbeats and so wrecked by immigration-related disasters that no one wants to visit anymore; its discontent a harbinger of his success and proof of his perspicacity. Last week, however, the real Europe fell out of step with Trump.

On Wednesday, the Dutch held an election in which the center-right Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, was pitted against Geert Wilders, a right-wing extremistwhose oddly constructed blond pompadour is the least baneful of his resemblances to Trump.Wilders had called for shutting mosques, banning the Koran, closing the Netherlands borders to Muslims, and levying a tax on women who wear head scarves in public.Owing to the fragmented state of Dutch politicstwenty-eight parties were on the ballothe had a shot at gaining a plurality, an outcome that would have given momentum to others on Europes far right, including Marine Le Pen, who will face French voters in the Presidential election next month, as well as the German extremists who will challenge Chancellor Angela Merkel in the fall.

The fear was that, after a near-miss in Austria, three months ago, the Continent was emulating Trump and reverting to its basest image of itself and of others. In fact, Europes current populist-nationalist movements predate Trumps ascendance, and, at times, it isnt clear who is nurturing whom. Wilders, for example, was a featured speaker at a 2010 rally in New York, protesting the construction of a mosque near the World Trade Center site, and he has since written for Breitbart News. Representative Steve King, the Iowa Republican, was praising Wilders when he remarked, earlier this month, that Western civilization could not be saved by somebody elses babies.

Two days before the Dutch election, in a televised debate, Wilders railed against the liars and the givers-away who dont allow the Netherlands to be the Netherlands anymore. Rutte agreed that immigration was an issue, but charged that Wilderss proposals were fake, and added, Thats the difference between tweeting from your couch and governing the country. That line, which dominated the next days headlines, was one that Hillary Clinton might have used; in Ruttes case, it seems to have worked. With a record eighty-two-per-cent voter turnout, his party won thirty-three seats out of a hundred and fifty, leaving Wilders in second place, with twenty. Many young, first-time voters supported the GreenLeft Party, which won fourteen seatsup from just four in the previous electionunder the leadership of Jesse Klaver, who is thirty years old and exhorted crowds to stand by their principles.

The celebrations were tempered, though, by the way that Rutte had pandered to the right. One of his campaign ads told immigrants, Be normal or get out, and he warned that, with Wilders, the wrong kind of populism would take hold, begging the question of what the right kind might be.This is a temptation that many European politicians share with the leaders of the G.O.P.: how Trump-like are they willing to appear in the interest of winning over voters? In the event, Ruttes party did worse in this election than it did in the last one, and it will probably rely on insurgent pro-Europe leftist parties to form a coalition. Franois Fillon, Frances center-right Presidential candidate, tried a tactic similar to Ruttes, only to be derailed by a classically French corruption scandal involving, among other things, expensive suits. If the polls hold, Emmanuel Macron, who is essentially running as an independent, will be the mainstream alternative to Le Pen in a runoff, in May. At a moment of partisan upheaval and realignment, the future is not likely to belong to those who do little more than triangulate.

Europe may also be taking note of the backlash in this country to Trumps xenophobic policies. On the same day that Wilders was defeated, a judge in Hawaii issued a temporary restraining order halting Trumps latest travel ban, on the ground that its legal language was simply a cover for discriminating against Muslims. Still, European anti-Trump sentiment possesses, as yet, a certain ideological incoherence. Last week, after Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, called for a new referendum on Scottish independence she took to Twitter to boast about the numerical superiority of her electoral mandate to that of Theresa May, the British Prime Minister. In response, Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, tweeted, Someones gone the full Donald Trump. It is May, though, who is leading Britain out of Europea process advanced by Parliament last week. More than a million Britons signed a petition berating her for inviting Trump for a state visit, which would entail the national mortification of seeing him presented to the Queen. (Sean Spicers accusation, during a White House press briefing, that British spies had helped President Obama wiretap Trump didnt help matters.) But such gestures mean little in the absence of a clear European voice speaking out against what Trump stands for.

The closest the Continent has to that is Angela Merkel, who arrived in Washington last Friday. During the campaign, Trump said that Merkel, with her humane approach to refugees, was ruining her country, and that the German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman. At a joint press conference, when a reporter asked Merkel what she thought of Trumps style she politely made a broader point: People are different, people have different abilities, have different characteristics, traits of character, have different origins, have found their way to politics along different pathwayswell, that is diversity, which is good. As she finished speaking, she turned and nodded at Trump, with a smile, trying, perhaps, to discern just what about him might be typically American.

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The Dutch Donald Trump Loses - The New Yorker

New York Times

Chuck Berry, Donald Trump, Interest Rates: Your Weekend Briefing New York Times The budget outline President Trump proposed last week calls for large increases in defense and Homeland Security spending and sharp reductions for many domestic programs. Here is our breakdown of who wins and who loses. Mr. Trump is seeking billions ... Assessing Donald Trump's budget proposalAl Jazeera America Donald Trump's Voldemort BudgetThe New Yorker Donald Trump's presidency is wandering off courseNewsday The White House all 2,129 news articles »

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Chuck Berry, Donald Trump, Interest Rates: Your Weekend Briefing - New York Times

CAN WE BREATHE a sigh of relief after federal judges blocked President Donald Trumps discriminatory executive orders? For a moment we can, but we are just a terrorism attack away from the White House gaining a new pretext for its wrathful crackdown against Muslims and immigrants.

Among the alterations in American politics since Trumps inauguration, this may be the most frightening one: a terror attack on U.S. soil will be used by the White House as an excuse for implementing an extra-legal agenda that could only be pushed through in a time of crisis. What the courts will not allow today, what protesters will hit the streets to defend tomorrow, what even the pliant Congress would have a hard time backing the White House is almost certainly counting on all of this changing in the wake of a domestic terrorist attack.

This macabre turn, in which terrorism becomes an opportunity rather than a curse, has ample precedents that tell us one thing: be prepared.

It wasnt long ago that 9/11 was used as a pretext for invading Iraq. Although it was almost immediately clear that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told President George W. Bush on the evening of September 11, Part of our response maybe should be attacking Iraq. Its an opportunity. Just a few years earlier, Rumsfeld, along with Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, had signed a now-infamous letter calling for the removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The with-us-or-against-us atmosphere after 9/11 enabled them to carry out the task.

It has happened overseas, too. Vladimir Putins rise to power in Russia was accelerated by a series of mysterious bombings against apartment buildings across the country, and the bombings were so essential to consolidating Putins rule that he was suspected of organizing them. There was also, most famously, the Reichstag fire in 1933, in which the German Parliament burned to the ground, leading Adolf Hitler, the new chancellor, to warn that there will be no mercy now. Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.

The Trump administration has already begun laying the groundwork for extreme initiatives if or more likely when a terror attack occurs on U.S. soil and is tied to ISIS, al Qaeda or another Muslim group, according to civil liberties lawyers and activists. Under the guise of protecting national security, a blitz of presidential actions could target not just immigrants and Muslims but other minority groups as well as the media and the judiciary. These initiatives will be more dire and much more severe than Trumps first executive order in late January against the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, according to Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

While the bad news is stark expect the worst from Trump when an attack happens on U.S. soil the better news is that people are already organizing to prevent the worst from happening. There is, it turns out, quite a bit that can be done to prepare for the nearly inevitable moment when the Trump administration tries to take advantage of the tragedy of a man or a woman using a bomb, a gun, a knife or a truck to kill Americans in the name of an Islamic terror group.

Police officers react to the explosions near marathon runner Bill Iffrig at the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon.

Photo: John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

The first thing to understand is that attacks by foreign-born terrorists are rare. From 1975 through 2015, a total of 3,024 Americans were killed in such attacks, with most of those occurring on 9/11, according to a recent Cato Institute report. In other words, the annual odds of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist are 1 in 3,609,709. Each of these deaths is a tragedy, of course, but they represent a fraction of the preventable fatalities from any number of causes, including spouse-on-spouse violence, traffic accidents, and even toddlers with unsecured guns.

Trumps eagerness to exploit only a particular type of terror attack by Muslims was reflected in his selective reaction to two incidents in his first month in office. In late January, he remained silent when a white Christian shot dead six Muslims in a Canadian mosque. A few days later, an Egyptian with a machete attacked French soldiers at the Louvre while shouting Allahu Akhbar. Nobody was killed, not even the attacker one soldier was slightly injured before the Egyptian was shot four times. Yet within hours, Trump tweeted, A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.

His disingenuity exposes a glaring fallacy in his executive orders. The handful of Muslim-majority countries named in the orders represent a negligible threat for domestic terrorism. The few attacks in America that have involved Muslims, including 9/11, drew largely on people from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt but those countries were not included in either order from the Oval Office. A ruling by Judge Theodore Chuang that blocked the second order noted strong indications that the national security purpose is not the primary purpose of the travel ban.

The unique dynamic is that the White House has made clear its wish to impose an array of extreme and unconstitutional policies that are nearly impossible to carry out in ordinary times. Trump has previously said, for instance, that he wants to ban all Muslim immigration a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our countrys representatives can figure out what is going on, as he famously stated during the presidential campaign. His top adviser, Steve Bannon, has even complained about the proportion of legal immigrants already in America which he described as 20 percent of the population, though its actually just over 13 percent. Isnt the beating heart of this problem, the real beating heart of it, of what we gotta get sorted here, not illegal immigration? Bannon asked on a radio show in 2016. Weve looked the other way on this legal immigration thats kinda overwhelmed the country.

In a way, the White House is like a pistol cocked to go off at the first touch. Warren, the head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, described the presidents early use of anti-Muslim executive orders as a precursor, a mirror into what were going to be looking at after a significant terror attack. Warren added, I think the Trump administration will move by executive fiat for everything. It will create whats essentially a constitutional crisis in the country.

But Trump is not the pre-ordained winner of the crisis he will initiate.

Protesters walk during the Womens March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017 in Washington.

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Michael Walzer, apolitical theorist who has been around long enough to have chronicled, in real time, the social movements of the 1960s, wrote in an essay earlier this month that there are two types of necessary politics against Trump. Resistance is defensive politics, but we also need a politics of offense a politics aimed at winning elections and, as we used to say, seizing power, Walzer wrote. He pointed to a particularly hopeful development that others have also noted after Trumps inauguration: local organizing against the federal government.

The womens march the day after the inauguration was a nearly immediate example. In cities across the country, large crowds turned out to protest the new president and his far-right agenda. The sanctuary city movement has also taken root, with local leaders vowing to oppose federal orders that are unconstitutional or immoral, especially ones that involve undocumented immigrants. And key legal challenges to Trumps executive orders have come from attorneys general in a variety of states who have vowed to continue their war of legal writs.

Warren describes the popular reaction to a post-terrorism crackdown as an X factor. In the wake of the presidents first executive order, which led to Muslims being turned away at Americas borders, airports across the country were besieged by spontaneous protests that involved thousands of people and a small army of lawyers to help immigrants and refugees who were detained by customs authorities. Boots on the ground will be crucial after the next attack, argues Ben Wizner, a prominent ACLU lawyer who earlier this month tweeted, If/when there is an attack, well need millions in the streets with a message of courage and resilience.

Another X factor is the judiciary, which bears a larger share of responsibility than usual because both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party and have shied away from fulfilling their constitutional role as a check on the executive branch. So far, federal courts have stood up to the White House. Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, believes the judicial response to Trumps executive orders marks a notable break from the post 9/11 era, when courts generally did not support legal challenges to government policies on terrorism, torture, surveillance and drone warfare.

Im a real critic of how the courts handled national security, Greenberg said. I think they punted entirely. But if you look at the immigration ban and some of the pushback from the courts on ISIS prosecutions and how they are being handled, the courts have woken up from their I want to be asleep on national security stage. I think the courts may rise to the occasion.

Trump has provided confirmation, via Twitter, of the judicial branchs new spine and key role. After the courts shot down his first executive order, he lashed out in a series of tweets against federal Judge James Robart. The sharpest one, tweeted by Trump from his Mar A Lago estate, warned: Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!

The writer Mark Danner noted in a recent essay that the controversy over the first executive order may have served the desire of the president and his advisers to stage a fight with a major institutional force not yet recumbent before him: the judiciary. As Danner went on to explain, the presidents assertion of his unreviewable powers in the face of so-called judges was not just absurd or ignorant but a bit of bait, establishing the basis for blaming the judiciary for any terrorist attack that was to come. On this he tweeted indefatigably and repeatedly.

Another X factor is the media, which Trump has defined as a public enemy (though of course he means only the outlets that criticize him). Portions of the media, such as Breitbart, Infowars and probably Fox News, will likely support whatever crackdown the president proposes in the wake of a terrorist attack. Other parts of the media will hopefully do the work they are supposed to do. As Greenberg notes, the press will need to be on the ground and report information before it is misrepresented. That work can begin now, before an attack, with reporting that explains the rarity of Muslim-related terrorism in the United States and the constitutional as well as moral pitfalls of letting a demagogue turn tragedy to his own advantage.

Top photo: Russian Emergency Situations Ministry officers and firefighters try to save people as a massive explosion shattered a nine-story apartment building in Moscow in 1999.

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For Donald Trump, a Terror Attack Will Be an Opportunity Not a Curse - The Intercept

President Trump lashed out at Germany yesterday for owing vast sums of money to NATO and claimed the 28-member military alliance needs to pay the U.S. for protection less than a day after sitting down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a tweet posted yesterday morning, Trump asserted that despite what Americans may be hearing from the FAKE NEWS, his sit-down with Merkel was a great meeting before accusing the nation of owing vast sums of money to NATO. His two-part Twitter post ended with: The United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!

Only five of the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations 28 member countries meet the alliances defense spending goal: the U.S., the U.K., Greece, Poland and Estonia.

In 2014, NATO committed to having each nation spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024 a timeline set in the wake of Russias invasion of Crimea and one that Merkel reaffirmed this week in Washington, D.C. Germany currently spends 1.23 percent of its GDP on defense.

Former U.S. Ambassador for NATO Ivo Daalder was quick to point out that Trump isnt the first U.S. president to call on our European allies to up their defense spending.

The essential point is, yes, Europe needs to pay more. Daalder told the Herald, though he said theres no zero-sum ledger that shows Germany or any other nation owes the United States for its military might.

This entire idea that our defense spending somehow is for others, as opposed to for ourselves, is wrong, he said. We are spending on defense because we think its important to defend the things were defending, including Europe. Its not a favor we do.

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Donald Trump tells Angela Merkel to pay 'vast sums' owed to NATO - Boston Herald

New York Times

Donald Trump Jr. Is His Own Kind of Trump New York Times Donald Trump Jr. is the Trump who has not always seemed at ease with being a Trump. He grew up in the penthouse of Trump Tower but was happy to escape the gilded trappings of his Manhattan childhood to spend parts of the summers hunting and fishing ... and more »

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Donald Trump Jr. Is His Own Kind of Trump - New York Times