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One prediction about the 2024 political season has already come true. The election year, to the delight of Donald Trumps superfans and the dread of just about everyone else, is all about the former President: his trials, his feuds, his insufferable family. We learned this week that he wants his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become the co-chair of the Republican National Committeeshe loyally promises to spend every single penny of the Partys funds to elect him if thats what it takesand that Jared Kushner really doesnt want to go back to the White House for a second Trump term. On Thursday, a judge in New York ruled that Trumps criminal trial for allegedly paying hush money to a former porn actress and then lying about it will go forward in March, and a decision is expected any minute in a civil fraud case that could cost Trumps business hundreds of millions of dollars. (The judge is CORRUPT, Trump insisted in a social-media post, repeating one of his favorite claims, but theres so much else Trump-related going on, Im not sure anyone noticed.) In Washington, the federal special counsel Jack Smith pleaded with the Supreme Court to act swiftly to get the other cases against Trump moving, too: The public interest in a prompt trial is at its zenith where, as here, a former President is charged with conspiring to subvert the electoral process so that he could remain in office. The Nation has a compelling interest in seeing the charges brought to trial.

Legal cliffhangers aside, Trump has demonstrated his remarkable continued ability to hijack the national conversation, warping and distorting not only Americas politics but also its foreign policy to suit his toxic personal mixture of dictator worship, blustery nationalism, and deep-seated skepticism about U.S. engagement in the world. Over the weekend, he delivered an anti-NATO rant at a campaign rally that sparked days of news coverage and outraged responses from his opponents. I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want, he said, of Russiaall but inviting Vladimir Putin to attack European countries that did not, in Trumps view, spend enough on their defense budgets. You gotta pay! The Secretary-General of NATO weighed in; so did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who warned solemnly that U.S. credibility is at stake. Leaders from Poland and the Baltic states were officially alarmed; veterans of Trumps White House, including his former national-security adviser John Bolton and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, cautioned, as they have many times before, that NATO is not likely to survive a second term of their former boss. In blistering remarks at the White House, on Tuesday, President Biden denounced Trump using some of his strongest language yet about his predecessor, whose threat to allies, he said, was dumb, shameful, dangerous, and un-American.

After days of this backlash, Trump appeared at another campaign rally on Wednesday night, where he, naturally, doubled down. He repeated his dubious account of having warned a fellow NATO leader about the consequences of not meeting the alliances commitment to spend two per cent of annual G.D.P. on defense. Look, if theyre not going to pay, were not going to protect. O.K.? he said.

As a matter of politics, none of it makes much sense. NATO is popular; support for Ukraine in its fight with Russia remains high even as Republicans have questioned how much aid to send. Americans loathe Putin, even after years of Trumps suck-uppery and the recent awkward attempt at reputation laundering by Tucker Carlson. In terms of timing, Trumps tirade could not have been worse, handing the gift of a major gaffe to Biden, at a time when the President is facing unwelcome questions about his age and mental fitness, thanks to the special counsel Robert Hurs report calling him a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. And yet the lesson of the Trump years is that the conventional metrics of politics dont apply to his actionshe is out to prove mastery over his party, not consistency in policy. He has shown once again that where he goes they will follow. When I went back and listened to his NATO remarks, the thing that struck me was the audiences response: they clapped and cheered.

The larger backlash to Trump was not just about his words, as ignorant and dangerous as they were, but about the actual effect they are already having on Republicans in Congress, many of whom have gone from being staunch supporters of Ukraine in its existential fight against Russian invasion to refusing to send any more assistance because of Trumps loud public opposition. (See: Graham, Lindsey.) When the Senate this week finally passed a bill requested by Biden months ago that would send nearly sixty billion dollars to Ukraine along with billions more for Israel and Taiwan, only twenty-two Senate Republicans voted for it. On the other side of the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump acolyte who owes his job to the ex-Presidents backing, all but refused to bring the legislation to a vote, then adjourned the House for a two-week recess.

In interviews after the Senate passage, the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, was strikingly open about the reason for his struggle to get even half of his fellow G.O.P. senators to go along with the bill: Trump. Its a political reaction led, obviously, by the likely nominee for President having a view and expressing a view on this, he told CNNs Manu Raju. Thats why we are where we are. He told The Hill that this weeks vote recalled the Senates 1941 vote to approve the Lend-Lease Act, which sent assistance to countries fighting Nazi Germanyand that, then as now, a majority of his partys members had voted with the wrong side. In the early days of the Second World War, the problem was the Ohio senator Robert Taft, who was the leader of the Republicans considerable isolationist wing; today, its Trump.McConnell said that, with the ex-President actively making calls and lobbying senators to vote down the bill, the twenty-two Republican votes he managed to secure seemed like a landslide. Yeesh.

McConnell, whose own leadership has come under fire from a loud and growing minority of his increasingly Trumpified caucus, has famously not spoken with Trump since the violent aftermath of the 2020 election. And yet he and the dwindling remains of the Party establishment who refuse to get on board with Trumps 2024 campaign repeatedly failed to act decisively against Trump when it might have matteredby voting to convict him in the Senate impeachment trial that followed his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat, or, more recently, by pushing through assistance to Ukraine months ago rather than agreeing to hold the aid hostage to far-right demands for a border deal that Trump was never going to agree to in an election year anyway.

McConnells willingness to complain publicly about Trump now, alas, is the tellnot a sign of an incipient battle for the soul of the Party but of a fight that has already been lost. This is also the explanation for the increasingly loud criticisms being lobbed at Trump by his one remaining opponent in the Republican primaries, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whose longshot campaign faces a death blow next week in her home states primary, where polls currently give Trump around two-thirds of the Republican vote. With little to lose, Haley has begun bashing away at Trump with a lacerating intensity that was missing from her earlier efforts. On Tuesday, she told NBCs Today show that he was diminished and unhinged. That same day, she released a new ad showing Trump shaking Putins hand and smiling. The ad warns about the consequences of electing Trump to a second term: from more record-breaking debt to a Russian victory that will bring more war. With Trump, its just more chaos, the spot concludes.

A year ago, it might have appeared unthinkable that so many Republicans would abandon Ukraine just because Trump urged them to do so; a year from now, there is the not-implausible chance that when a relected President Trump demands that they make concessions to Putin, or pull back from commitments to our treaty allies in Europe, they will follow him in that, too. Consider yourself warned.

See more here:
Trump's Threat to NATO Is the Scariest Kind of Gaffe: It's Real - The New Yorker

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