Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.
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In December 2022, Donald Trump said something that, in a healthy political culture, would have spelled his doom. He wrote, "A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!"
That is not the language of populism; that is aspiring despotism.
And how many Republicans announced after this that they could no longer in good conscience support Trump? I counted one. Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton said the post was "disqualifying" and that all GOP candidates should issue "Shermanesque" statements to that effect.
As with so many landings along the steep staircase of Republican decline, things would have been different if there had been pushback; if leading Republican officeholders and opinion shapers had stood on their hind legs and said, "Hey, I liked Trump fine until now but this is a deal breaker for me." But there was barely a bleat from the party; it was thoroughly demoralized in all senses of the word.
Today, the Constitution terminator leads in most of the polls, and bigwigs from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, are telling themselves and others that a second Trump term might actually be OK.
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase reassured his audience in Davos (where else?) that Trump did many good things while in office and that whatever the outcome of the November election, "My company will survive and thrive."
Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and hedge fund manager John Paulson hosted a fundraiser for Trump, reports Bloomberg News. Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz endorsed Trump, as did Robert Bigelow, a Ron DeSantis backer who has made his peace with the certain GOP nominee.
Lenin is supposed to have said that when it came time to hang them, the "capitalists will sell us the rope." These capitalists are deluding themselves if they imagine that another Trump term in office will be good for them. Yes, Trump is a "businessman," but more in the style of Tony Soprano than Andrew Carnegie.
Trump is promising an all-out trade war — 10% tariffs on all products, a 60% tariff on goods from China, and a 100% duty on imported cars. Think he hasn't the power? In his first term, he cited "national security" to impose tariffs on Canada (Canada!) and got away with it. The inflationary effect of his new, larger tariffs would be off the charts.
Similarly, Trump has issued broad hints that he will tamper with the independence of the Federal Reserve, which could spell much worse inflation than we've yet experienced.
In any case, what these Trump backers seem not to appreciate is that their riches are only possible because the United States is a stable, democratic country. If we cease to be stable — and perceived as such by investors around the world — our national debt would become a crushing burden. If we reelect a lying, despot-loving, quadruple-indicted, ignorant cretin, the United States will be a lot less appealing to overseas investors. And when we cease to be a safe haven for foreigners' nest eggs, we will have to raise interest rates to attract capital, which will increase the burden of our existing debt. How would Wall Street like them apples?
Honestly, these economic arguments ought to be third- and fourth-order considerations for any American — including billionaires. Economic stability is important, but the gravest threat is to our liberty.
We are staring down the possibility of putting someone back in power who has demonstrated that he is willing to use informal violence to achieve his anti-democratic ends. He attempted a coup with a mob of enraged zealots. How tragically foolish must you be to give him the power to wield formal, state-sanctioned violence? Think the president hasn't the power? Read the Insurrection Act.
The reason Trump was unable to order that border crossers be shot in the legs, or that the IRS conduct audits of his foes, or any of the myriad other crimes, outrages or stupidities the former president contemplated was that his own hires talked him out of things or slow-walked them until Trump's goldfish attention turned elsewhere.
In a second term, those officials would be gone. As his former chief of staff John Kelly put it, "The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don't put guys like me ... in those jobs. The lesson he learned was to find sycophants."
The foreign policy implications of electing Trump are just as frightening. He disrupted key American alliances in NATO and East Asia in his first term, but would destroy them in a second term. Without the U.S. security guarantee, nations around the globe would rush to acquire their own nuclear stockpiles. Trump would reward Putin's aggression by abandoning Ukraine, which would whet Putin's appetite for the Baltics, Xi's appetite for Taiwan, and God only knows what other aggressors' plans.
Those are the stakes. It is tragic and shameful that so many fail to see it.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
The fur was flying in a contentious hearing Thursday night as the House Oversight and Investigations Committee passed a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. Democrats, with some help from GOP Chair James Comer, exposed the purely political motives behind this attack on Merrick and President Joe Biden over the White House’s refusal to turn over audio and video recordings from Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
The White House claimed executive privilege on the Hur recordings, with counsel Ed Siskel saying in a letter to Congress that the GOP lawmakers had no legitimate legislative purpose and that their intent in getting the recording was obvious—“to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
Comer proved exactly that Thursday just before the hearing, sending out a fundraising appeal—using his Oversight Committee title—declaring that “Biden and his advisors are terrified that I will release the recordings, forcing the media and Democrats to answer for the dismal decline of Biden’s mental state.”
The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, blasted Comer in his opening statement. “I thought you were serious about the legal enterprise here and not just another political huckster calling hearings to make a buck.”
Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida provided a must-see “spirited reading” of Comer’s fundraising pitch, after pointing out that the hearing had been delayed so that GOP members could make a pilgrimage to Manhattan to attend Donald Trump’s hush money trial. He noted that the pitch came from “the desk of the Oversight Chairman,” adding “I’m not sure you can do that, but I’m not an ethics expert.”
It was downhill from Republicans after that, largely thanks to the antics of—who else—Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who threw the process into chaos with a personal attack on Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, jibing “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
The ensuing fight lasted nearly an hour, with Comer struggling to regain order, and culminated in a vote on whether to allow Greene to continue to participate. It ended in a party-line 22-20 vote, with one exception: Greene’s arch nemesis Rep. Lauren Boebert voted with Democrats to muffle Greene.
To get a sense of how surreal the whole mess was, there’s this: “I just want to apologize to the American people,” Boebert said. “When things get as heated as they have, unfortunately, it’s an embarrassment on our body as a whole.”
The whole debacle, one Democrat suggested, was fueled by the booze certain members consumed before the hearing—and an audience of lawmakers drinking during it. One panel member claimed “we have some members in the room who are drinking inside the hearing room, who are not members of this hearing.”
The crass politics of Comer, the Greene chaos, the partying—it’s all a reflection on just how low the GOP has sunk. It’s also making Speaker Mike Johnson’s job that much harder. Because the hardliners are going to push him to hold a vote on the contempt resolution, and some of the more moderate—and vulnerable—Republicans don’t want to go anywhere near it.
Republican Rep. David Joyce of Illinois is one of them, telling Politico that Congress has “important” work to do “but going after the attorney general isn’t one of them.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.