On Tue 2/2 hosted a really compelling discussion about Trump, authoritarianism, the current moment with @ruthbenghiat. Watch if you can - always learn so much from her.
Consider also buying her book "Strongmen" - it is timely, important.
Also hosted a great discussion in December with @RepRubenGallego about the many years of work which went into turning Arizona blue, and the continuing drift of the heavily Mexican-American parts of the US from the GOP.
Join us on Feb 16th for a discussion with @glennkirschner2 about the second Impeachment trial of Donal Trump and the need to rethink how we approach electoral crimes by a sitting President.
Glenn is really terrific - looking forward to this one.
Here’s what the good people of Georgia are waking up to this morning - local extremist groups, some aligned w MTG, talking on the record about a sustained insurgency against the US.
Read what MTG wrote YESTERDAY, below. She repeats the new MAGA blood libel - that Democrats are an existential threat to the nation, which is why she/other patriots are justified in using violence to stop them. (2/x).
Trump wove all these narratives together, he brought everyone together around the idea Dems/radical left existential threat, he/patriots were going to Save America by keeping them/removing them from power.
1/So I learned this weekend that my 80 year old aunt, who is healthy but has a bad leg so she can't wait on line for hours or walk long distances, still hasn't been able to get vaccinated in her country in NY State north of NYC. No slots.
2/I looked at our population tables, and even though the Trump Administration said we would have 40m people vaccinated by the end of December, we still have not vaccinated the 22m or so over 75. My aunt is 80 - so even higher risk.
3/The original Trump sin was not building a national testing and tracing regime for the eventually vaccination rollout to be built on top of. We could have learned from building that initial system, and been ready for the incredibly tough task of rapidly vaccinating everyone.
Over the coming years we are going to learn much more about the major dark episodes of the Trump era, and it’s going to be really bad for Trump, McConnell and the rest of the GOP. washingtonpost.com/world/europe/u…
Let me offer a few first cuts of what we will come to understand:
1- Trump only won in 2016 due to Russia's help, and that leverage was used by Putin to pressure Trump into a kind of strategic partnership (Helsinki), which included aligning US foreign policy w/Russia's aims.
2 - That among the things Trump did for Putin was the entire wild, reckless Ukraine affair, which both attacked a 2020 Democrat cut in Clinton's muscular foreign policy cloth and denigrated Zelensky and his project.
The language MTG uses in this video TODAY is descended from Trump's July 4th speech, and is itself a call for violence. If her colleague is a "radical left terrorist" then extreme measures can be used to silence her.
It is disheartening Trump is using "Save America" as his calling card.
"Save America March" was the name of the event on Jan 6th, and as Trump said on July 4th the process of "Saving America" is one which requires violence.
"Save America" is now a call for political violence.
As we contemplate Trump, from Russia's intervention on his behalf in 2016 to his recent months long assault on our democratic system, I share this IC assessment from Jan 2017. It was all there, then (1/x):
"Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity (2/x)
."...and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election (3/x)