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By David Remnick

As Trump takes office, there is every reason to be on guard against a President whose attachment to constitutional norms seems episodic at best.

How do you fight an enemy whos just kidding?

A rogue group of conservative thinkers tries to build a governing ideology around a President-elect who disdains ideology.

Inside a stunned White House, the President considers his legacy and Americas future.

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trumps world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness.

West Virginia used to vote solidly Democratic. Now it belongs to Trump. What happened?

His campaign tells us a lot about what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be.

Our reporters and fact-checkers have been working on a series of reported essays about the scale and depth of Donald Trumps lies.

How the patrician couple came to have an outsized influence on a populist Presidential campaign.

Obama used the power of the pen to make policy. What would Trump do?

The Art of the Deal made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that mythand regrets it.

To call the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits.

At the candidates rallies, a new understanding of America emerges.

As Republicans struggle over whether to resist the candidate or to capitulate, they also face the Partys biggest ideological crisis in fifty years.

Melania Trump is the exception to her husbands nativist politics.

By stoking paranoia about immigration, he has found a following among far-right extremists.

How has this coddled scion of a New York real-estate baron emerged as a populist hero?

Why a celebrity proto-fascist with no impulse control is winning over the white working class.

Insiders loathe them; voters love them. Who will decide the future of the G.O.P.?

After writing a book about Benito Mussolini last year, an N.Y.U. professor began noticing the similarities between her books subject and Trump.

An exceptional nation would have better reflexes than this, would recognize the communicable nature of fear more quickly, would rally its immune defense more efficiently.

Trump clearly believes he can win the state, and he told his supporters that he was also going to win the election.

Donald Trump behaves exactly how you would expect an American fascist to act.

Despite his frequent lies, polls show that Americans view Trump as more honest than Hillary Clinton.

Clinton supporters point to James Comey, the media, and sexism to explain the latest poll numbers. Theyre onto something, but theyre missing the bigger story.

Republicans have long used Presidential debates to show their support for the government program. Add this to the list of norms that Trump has broken.

In 2012, Corey Robins The Reactionary Mind recognized the philosophical affinities that would lead to the Republican embrace of Donald Trump in 2016.

At the opening of his new D.C. hotel, Trump professed an optimism that has been absent on the campaign trail.

If Trump believed that he still had a realistic shot at winning, Wednesday nights debate was his opportunity to act Presidential. He didnt.

Trump doesn't need to be a puppet of Putin to be a dangerous President. It is enough that he seeks to emulate his authoritarianism.

At a rally in western Colorado, the candidate prepares his followers to give up without giving in.

But it would be a mistake to think of Hillary Clintons strong performance as a blowout.

If news cycles were driven by issues of import, rather than what's new, Trump University would never leave the headlines.

If Trump was just cynically catering to the nativist right during the primaries, by now he would have integrated some mainstream Republican thinking into his position on immigration.

The truth, of course, is that the old Trump can read the polls, and he knows hes headed for a heavy and ignominious defeat.

If Trump continues to stonewall, its clear that hes doing so because thats his choice, not his legal obligation.

Trumps implication that gun owners might attack Hillary Clinton if she is elected President was irresponsible in more than just the obvious ways.

The attraction is mutual, but history shows whos really using whom.

At his wedding to Melania, Trumps high status in the tabloids and on TV was clearly respected by everyone.

Trump badly but predictably underestimated the parents of a Muslim Army captain who died serving the United States in Iraq.

Trumps latest disruption of American politics at the highest level has stunned academics. But will the country care?

One of Trumps most trusted sources for news trades heavily on wild conspiracy theories. Does he actually believe any of them?

After the tragedy in Florida, it feels indecent to acknowledge Trumps commentsbut their sheer ugliness reflects his empty character and the campaign to come.

It was once possible to laugh at Donald Trumps obsessions without worrying that he might actually impose them on the country.

Donald Trumps statements say more about his disregard for the rule of law than they do about Hillary Clinton or her e-mail server.

But will it be the candidates undoing?

The candidate says he plans to make a strong showing among Midwestern voters, but the numbers dont add up.

Donald Trumps harangues about the media, and reports of a third-party challenge from a political neophyte, made for a bizarre twenty-four hours.

His statements on the function of the judiciary reveal ignorance about how the Supreme Court works and a total absence of legal philosophy.

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over.

It will be debated for years, but any convincing explanation must acknowledge his talents as a demagogue and pugilist.

Cruz spent most of his time in Indiana arguing that Trump and Hillary Clinton were indistinguishable. The results point to the political, and the logical, weaknesses of this argument.

Thanks to some good old-fashioned reporting, we now have an idea of how little cash Trump has given away.

His Dadaist political exercises, designed to shock and command attention, have revealed the hypocrisies of the political class.

The insurgent candidates have run campaigns that seem tailored to the preferences of people who dont normally go to the polls.

Few Latinos are supporting Trump. But one pro-Trump voter, John Castillo, explains his position.

When political parties fail to stop alarming candidates.

Trumps rise isnt just about his political incorrectness and independence.

The message is that Trumps hate, his xenophobia and bigotry, its all a thousand per cent on purpose.

In a Profile written nearly two decades before his Presidential run, Trump was already contemplating how to present himself as a "doer and dealmaker."

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Donald Trump - The New Yorker

President Trump seems determined to exploit the publics mistrust of the media to the hilt, if only to distract his base from the disappointments that are sure to come.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / AP

When the leaders of the Bolshevik movementLenin, Stalin, and the restused the term vrag naroda, an enemy of the people, it was an ominous epithet that encompassed a range of wreckers and socially dangerous elements. Enemies included clergy, intellectuals, monarchists, Trotskyists, rootless cosmopolitans, and well-to-do farmers. To be branded an enemy of the people was to face nearly inevitable doom; such a fate was soon followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night, a prison cell, the Gulag, an icy ditcha variety of dismal ends. To be called an enemy of the people did not mean you had to hold oppositional thoughts or commit oppositional acts; it only meant that the dictator had included you in his grand scheme to insure the compliance of the population.

Robespierre, one of the architects of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, set out to horrify the opposition, and his instruments were the epithet, righteousness, and the blade. The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation, he said. It owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.

In 1917, the same year as the Bolshevik seizure of power, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published an essay in Pravda called Enemies of the People, in which he lionized the Jacobin Terror as instructive. His party, the Jacobins of the twentieth century, he wrote, should follow suit, if not with the guillotine, then with mass arrests of the financial magnates and bigwigs. Once in power, Lenin was far more brutal than the revolutionary French. He built the first outposts of the gulag archipelago. Stalin, Lenins energetic successor, expanded the system from western Russia to the Sea of Okhotsk, ten time zones to the east.

Now, Donald Trump, the elected President of the oldest democracy on earth, a real-estate brander and reality-T.V. star, has taken not to Pravda but to his own preferred instrument of autocratic pronouncementthe tweetto declare the media the enemy of the American People. Here is the declaration in full:

For months, cool, responsible heads have been counselling hot, impulsive heads to avoid overreacting to Trump. We must give him a chance. We must not in all our alarm compare him to all the tin-pot dictators and bloody authoritarians who have disgraced history. The Oval Officeits realities and traditionswill temper his rages. His aides, his son-in-law, and his daughter will soften his impulsivity. Besides, he doesnt really mean all he says. Even as Trump was signing one chilling executive order after anotherall with the cool counsel of Steve Bannon, late of Breitbartwe were assured that everything was fine. He was simply fulfilling the agenda of his campaign. Calm down. Dont react to every tweet. Dont take the bait.

Then came his press conference, last week, his first solo press conference in office, and it was epochal. Ostensibly an occasion to announce a replacement appointment to the Department of Labor after the first had to step aside, Trump instead took it upon himself to denounce repeatedly and at length the sinful, dishonest press and the very fake news it produces. It was unforgettable. With all his nastiness, his self-admiring interruptions and commands (Sit down! Sit down!) Trump resembled an over-sauced guy at a bar who was facing three likely options in the near term: a) take a swing at someone, b) get clocked by someone else, or c) pass out and wake up on a hard, alien cot.

But the venue was not a bar. It was the White House, and this was hardly a joke. What Trump resembled at the lectern was an old-fashioned autocrat wielding a very familiar rhetorical strategy.

Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, makes the point that autocrats from Chvez to Erdoan, Sisi to Mugabe, all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a more oppositional tone and role. And then that paves the way for the autocrats next move, Simon told me. Popular support for the media dwindles and the leader starts instituting restrictions. Its an old strategy. Simon pointed to Trumps lack of originality, recalling that both Nstor Kirchner, of Argentina, and Tabar Ramn Vzquez, of Uruguay, referred to the press as the unelected political opposition. And, as Simon has written, it was the late Hugo Chvez who first mastered Twitter as a way of bypassing the media and providing his supporters with alternative facts.

Trump, as indulgent parents say of an indolent child, is not a big reader. He may not hear every historical echo in his enemy of the American people tweet. What he does know, however, is that the American trust in the mediathat generalized term that stretches from the Times to NewsMaxis miserably low. He is determined to exploit that to the hilt, if only to distract his base from the disappointments that are sure to come. On Saturday evening, he held a rally in Melbourne, Florida, and doubled down on the familiar theme: putting himself in the same league as Lincoln and Jefferson, he told the crowd, Many of our greatest Presidents fought with the media and called them out. The agenda is always to divide. They have their own agenda, and their agenda is not your agenda, he said.

At the same time, there are distinct signs that Trump is losing ground among members of the conservative media who had initially cut him some slack, not least because they felt the liberal media had been besotted by Barack Obama. The attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, on the intentions of the intelligence agencies, and on the patriotism of the press have become too evident, too repulsive to be discounted as mere sideshow. Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman from Florida and the co-host of Morning Joe, tweeted a telling call to the right on Friday: Conservatives, feel free to speak up for the Constitution anytime the mood strikes. It is time.

Its true that Trump has not arrested any journalists. He has not shuttered any newspapers or television stations or Web sites. I went to work at The New Yorker on Friday and helped close a new issue that includes a deeply reported and tough-minded Letter from Washington, by Nicholas Schmidle, about the Michael Flynn affair, as well as a Comment by George Packer that notes that Trump, at his press conference, behaved like the unhinged leader of an unstable and barely democratic republic. Yes, there was a little trouble with a Xerox machine, but no one at the office counted it a threat to the First Amendment. In the meantime, the New York Times and the Washington Post are engaged in a ferociously competitive battle to cover this new Administration that has bolstered the forces of fact and truth; and no one has shut off their computers or phones, either. At CNN, Jeff Zucker, the network president, has gotten telephone calls of bitter complaint from Jared Kushner about the coverage of his father-in-law, but if the performance of Jake Tapper and others there is any indication, the attempt to intimidate CNN has not deflated any spirits. The journalists at Mother Jones, MSNBC, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, NPR, The National Review, the Marshall Project, ProPublica, and many other outlets are doing their work with determination and seriousness.

In Vladimir Putins Russia, as in every genuinely authoritarian state, there are no enemiesor, at least, none with the capacity to challenge power. Calling on all the repressive means available in such a statecompliant courts and legislatures; the elimination of political competition; comprehensive censorship of televisionsoaring popularity ratings are achieved. President Trump may wish for such means, just as he wishes for such popularity. For all the chaos and resulting gloom these past weeks, it has been heartening to see so many enemies of the American peopleprotesters, judges, journalists, citizens of all kinds, even some members of Congressdo their work despite Presidential denunciation, not necessarily as partisans of one party or another but as adherents to a Constitution.

Original post:
Donald Trump and the Enemies of the American People - The New Yorker

PolitiFact

Donald Trump savages media at Florida rally BBC News US President Donald Trump has launched another fierce attack on the media at a "campaign rally for America" event in the state of Florida. He told the crowd in Melbourne the media did not want "to report the truth" and had their own agenda. He also ... Fact-checking President Donald Trump's Florida rallyPolitiFact Donald Trump's Never-Ending CampaignDaily Beast President Trump Held a Re-Election Rally After Just a Month on the JobTIME Wall Street Journal (subscription) -CNN all 424 news articles »

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Donald Trump savages media at Florida rally - BBC News

PresidentDonald Trumpfalsely suggested at a Florida rally Saturday that Sweden had suffered a terror attack the previous night.

After announcing that the White House planned to renew its efforts to restrict immigration, Trump cited several European countries and cities that he said showed the dangers of admitting immigrants, particularly refugees.

You look at whats happening in Germany, you look at whats happening last night in Sweden, Trump told a large crowd of supporters in a hangar at the Orlando-Melbourne International Airport. Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden, he added. They took in large numbers. Theyre having problems like they never thought possible.

Trumps subsequent remarks made clear he was referring to European locales that had endured terrorist attacks in the past two years.

You look at whats happening in Brussels. You look at whats happening all over the world, he said. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris.

Observers on Twitter pointed out that no such attack took place on Friday night.

Others concluded that Trump had been referring to a segment on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, which explored an alleged rise in crime following Swedens admission of a large number of refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

Sweden, which has a population of around 9.5 million, has let in nearly200,000 refugeesin response to the wave of asylum seekers arriving in Europe that peaked during the summer of 2015. The generous policy, which has proved controversial, means the Scandinavian country has taken in more refugees per capita than any other European nation.

The people Swedenhas allowedto enter come mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, countries undergoing devastating conflicts.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The rest is here:
Donald Trump Appears To Make Up Sweden Terror Attack - Huffington Post

BBC News

Donald Trump: Americans assess the first month BBC News Donald Trump has been president for four weeks. We asked different groups of people living in America what that's meant to them. The Republican women learning to love Trump. Not a single one of these New Hampshire women voted for Mr Trump during ... and more »

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Donald Trump: Americans assess the first month - BBC News