DONALD TRUMP

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Via Fernando Oliver

Daily Mail, UK -  Donald Trump's favorability saw a six-point surge after winning the 2024 election. With a 54 percent favorability in the first post-election Emerson College poll, the president-elect prepares to come into office with an 18 percent higher rating than current President Joe Biden...Before the election on November 5, polling showed Trump at 48 percent favorability. 

Robert B Hubbell - Garland failed to bring Trump to justice in four years after a coup and insurrection that were not only televised but announced beforehand in speeches, tweets, and cable news appearances. Garland dithered until the testimony of 26-year-old Cassidy Hutchinson embarrassed him into appointing special counsel Jack Smith. But by then, it was too late. Garland allowed Trump to run out the clock.\

Also at fault is the DOJ’s decades-old policy declaring that it may not investigate or indict a sitting president. That dubious policy granted the president protections not found in the Constitution. The DOJ compounded that original sin by expanding its policy to declare that it may not continue an existing prosecution against a non-president if that person is subsequently elected president. In its newest policy, the DOJ is affording protection nowhere found in the Constitution, and that is inimical to the nation’s founding principle that all persons are equal under the law.

The DOJ’s internal policy memo was the first step in converting the presidency into a dictatorship. The Supreme Court relied on the DOJ memo (in part) in fabricating presidential immunities nowhere found in the Constitution and whose existence would have shocked and scandalized the Framers.  

Timothy Noah, New Republic - The pithiest summary of Donald Trump’s last presidency was by the comedian John Mulaney. He compared it to a horse being set loose in a hospital. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next,” Mulaney said, “least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before!”

The prevailing theory about Trump’s second term is that the horse now knows its way around the hospital. I have my doubts. Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year. He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.

In saying this, I don’t dispute that Trump’s instincts are dangerously authoritarian. Nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless—quite the opposite, in fact. Trump’s last presidency did serious damage. He redistributed income upward to the rich; he separated children from their parents at the border; he secured an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court; and he reduced the proportion of the population covered by health insurance just as a deadly pandemic arrived to kill 40 percent more people than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

But as the latter two examples demonstrate, not all these ghastly outcomes were deliberate, and indeed Trump’s mismanagement of Covid probably cost him reelection. In memoirs, participants in Trump’s first term don’t describe Trump as an evil mastermind. They describe him as vain, foolish, petty, mercurial, and easy prey for con artists and crackpots of every stripe. The result was bedlam. He was a horse loose in a hospital.