We don’t even know every result of 2022 yet, but the 2024 election has already begun. On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced that he would seek a second nonconsecutive term as president. While it’s too early to predict Trump’s chances of going all the way, the former president is the current favorite to win the Republican primary again. But nothing is assured.
First, Trump remains popular and influential among Republican voters. According to Civiqs, 80 percent of registered Republican voters have a favorable view of the former president, and only 11 percent have an unfavorable view. Admittedly, he is a little less popular than on Election Day 2020 when 91 percent viewed him favorably. But the decline has been gradual.
David Corn is a veteran reporter at Mother Jones Magazine who has watched the evolution of politics in Washington for decades. In a new book he argues the extremism that led to January 6th goes back at least 70 years to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his high profile hunt for alleged Communists inside the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. Corn outlines a series of deliberate choices by the Republican Party between the 1950s and today that he says nurtured and exploited fear and loathing, and capitalized on misinformation and political paranoia until it became a central tenet of the party. He joins Diane on On My Mind to discuss “American Psychosis.”
On Monday at about 10 a.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and technicians showed up at Donald Trump's Florida home to execute a search warrant to obtain any government-owned documents that might be in the possession of Trump but are required to be delivered to the Archives under the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.)
The act establishes that presidential records are the property of the U.S. government and not a president's private property. Put in place after Watergate to avoid the abuses of the Nixon administration, the law imposes strict penalties for failure to comply. "Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined" $2,000, up to three years in prison or "shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States."
The GW Program on Extremism has been tracking court cases from the January 6th Uprising where angry pro-Trump protestors overwhelmed the US Capitol Police, swarming the building, damaging property and leading to heart attacks and other injuries of government workers ill prepared for such a large angry crowd. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at this data and make a random dot-plot map of the indictments to see where the criminal cases were, and provide an interesting visual perspective on the wide-spread participants in the protest from across the nation.
To be clear, Donald John Trump is one of our nation's biggest jerks, and he got a lot of ordinary, often working-class people in trouble with the law over his asinine protest, over the election he lost, mainly due to his incompetent handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic that lead to hundreds of thousands of Americans dying and millions getting sick. Competence matters in our elected officials, especially our President, and I can't imagine Joe Biden would ever get such an angry mob of protestors amped up to the point where they destroyed property or cause personal or other injury. Protests are an important part of democracy, but they shouldn't result in protestors getting injured, arrested, prosecuted -- nor should they lead to property damage or injury and death to the government workers.
Youtube Ad from the Donald Trump Campaign: Do you support Trump?
The answer is absolutely not. The guy has proven himself to be a complete buffoon, really not worthy of the presidency. Some people grow into the job, including celebrities and the alike. But the president has proven that he is unable to grow into the job and he’s hardly a reliable conservative to boot. His response to COVID-19 has been a disaster, his stance on the international stage has made our country a laughing stock. We need somebody who listens to scientists and experts for guidance, not somebody who is more interested in ideology then practical solutions to our problems.
Something about this film scene comes straight out of Donald Trump - Take Back America propaganda film I posted earlier. The same kind of psychological trickery, fast flashing photos and films, dramatic music. I could see how it would excite a crowd.