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When former President Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last month, his win was taken by many as both a hard-fought campaign victory and the conclusion of a long-standing inevitability. Although much of today's GOP exists as a de facto extension of the MAGA movement, Trump's dominating primary performance cannot be attributed to his personal sway over the conservative zeitgeist alone. For months the former president and his campaign team have worked behind the scenes to ensure the mechanics of this election cycle work in his favor. Some of these maneuvers have taken place publicly, such as Trump's installment of loyalists to run the Republican National Committee. Other instances have been less dramatic but equally impactful, as Trump alters both the spirit of the American electoral system and its operational structure as well.

In the past, Trump's political agenda had been "frequently stymied by infighting and incompetence" thanks, in part, to having "populated his campaigns with huge egos," Vanity Fair said. The 2024 contrast is stark, with a drama-free campaign best represented by senior advisor Chris LaCivita and his "Talmudic understanding of primary rules." LaCivita has spent much of the past year pushing for "state Republican parties to change their processes to favor Trump." Perhaps nowhere was that effort more impactful than in California, where the campaign orchestrated a change to the primary rules so that a "candidate who wins more than 50% of the statewide vote on March 5" receives the state's entire delegate count, rather than a proportional amount, Politico said. Ultimately, the maneuver was a potential "death knell for Trump's competition" like Ron DeSantis, who had been planning his California campaign to pick off delegates from the total batch under the old rules.

Recently Trump and his allies attempted a similar operation in Nebraska, which metes out electoral college votes based on district wins, rather than the winner-take-all system used by the vast majority of the country. In many past elections, "Republicans take two and Democrats take one of the state's votes, though the third is tightly contested," The Hill explained. After Republican Gov. Jim Pillen endorsed a bill to change his state's electoral college process, Trump publicly threw his support behind the measure, calling it "right for Nebraska" while urging supporters to lobby on its behalf.

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"When you realize you can't win with the current rules, you go back to the drawing board to change the rules so you can win?" Democrat State Sen. Jen Day of Nebraska asked during last week's debate. The measure was ultimately defeated, but by lending his weight to the issue, Trump and his allies "underscore[d] just how narrow the race for 270 electoral votes could be in November," CNN said.

While the average American voter likely doesn't follow the picayune ins and outs of every state's primary voting rules, the Trump campaign has not been shy about manipulating the system in its favor. After several states "adoptedTrump-friendly rulesin 2020 to ward off competition for the then-president," in 2023 the former president's team began actively "advocating for modifications in half a dozen additional states," Reuters said, highlighting the "scale of the effort." For much of the 12 months prior to the 2024 primaries, Trump and his allies were "changing all these party rules, getting their people in place, changing the battlefield," one GOP strategist told Vanity Fair.

Trump is hardly alone in his effort to shape the existing political system to his liking. President Joe Biden's efforts with Democrats to change the primary schedule so South Carolina a state widely seen as being to his political advantage would vote first helped fend off a challenge from Minnesota Rep. Dean Philips. It also "helped set up an advantage for Trump" by cutting into then-chief rival Nikki Haley's base since "any registered voter can participate in either party's primary. But voters can only choose one primary," Politico said.

Working the electoral system to benefit incumbents may well be a bipartisan pursuit. For someone like Trump, who has built his political capital on claims of being the victim of a "rigged election," however, it might be the deciding factor in a path back to power.

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Trump campaign changes election rules to try to win in 2024 - The Week

The captivity of the pro-life movement to the character of Donald Trump is a crucial aspect of contemporary abortion politics. But maybe not quite in the way suggested by Trumps decision this week to publicly distance himself from his pro-life supporters by refusing to endorse national restrictions on late-term abortions.

That refusal was a sign of the anti-abortion movements political weakness but not necessarily a major blow to its cause. The contemplated legislation was unlikely to pass the Senate no matter what stance Trump took, and positioning the G.O.P. as a defender of state-based regulation usefully focuses abortion opponents on their most important challenge: defending the abortion restrictions that are already on the books in conservative states, and finding ways to win over the voters who have turned against the pro-life side in every post-Dobbs referendum with Arizona looming as the next battleground now that its Supreme Court has upheld an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions.

The problem for pro-lifers is that these efforts at persuasion have become markedly less effective over a timeline that overlaps closely with Trumps takeover of the Republican Party. The captivity of abortion opponents, in this sense, isnt about the specific policy stances that Trump might choose and that they might then have to reluctantly accept. Its about the ways in which a Trumpist form of conservatism seems inherently to make Americans more pro-choice.

For most of my lifetime, public opinion on abortion was fairly stable, leaning pro-choice but with a strong pro-life minority and a lot of people in the middle expressing support for some restrictions but not others. But since the mid-2010s there has been a clear shift in favor of abortion rights: More Americans support abortion without restriction that at any point since Roe v. Wade was handed down.

You can tell various stories about these numbers that do not implicate Trump himself. For instance, America has become notably less Christian and less socially conservative, and maybe it stands to reason that as the country turned left on issues like same-sex marriage or marijuana legalization, it would swing left on abortion as well.

Or again, it was clear that Roe was threatened well before Dobbs was issued, so maybe it was the prospect of abortion being back in the political arena that focused the minds of abortion moderates and made them more solidly pro-choice.

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Opinion | How the Pro-Life Movements Deal With Trump Made America More Pro-Choice - The New York Times

Politics / February 16, 2024

His promise to abandon NATO members who fall short of military spending targets puts international stability at risk.

As I look from the West Coast this week, the world seems increasingly dangerous by the minute. And, no, Im not talking about mudslides in Los Angeles or windstorms in the High Sierra, though it is true that the weather has played its fair share of dirty tricks on California in February. Nor am I talking about the horrific mass shooting in Kansas City this weekthough the relentless litany of massacres in modern day America is surely one of the most dispiriting developments of recent times.

Rather, Im thinking about the perilous state of American democracy. Special counsel Hurs poison pen letter in which he declined to prosecute President Biden for his mishandling of classified documents but went out of his way to cast doubt on Bidens mental acuity and memory drastically increases the risk that Donald Trump could be reelected come November. Biden doesnt have much time to turn around the dismal polling numbers hes been facing for the past half yearand Hurs report makes that task vastly more difficult. Las Vegas oddsmakers now have Trump as the most likely winner of the presidential election. Meanwhile, far from moderating his worst impulses as the election nears, the GOP front-runners behavior is, if possible, getting even cruder and more erratic, soiling everyone and every institution he interacts with.

Trumps head-spinning statement last week that he would encourage Putins Russia to do whatever the hell they want with NATO members who dont devote at least 2 percent of their GDP to the military would have doomed any other presidential candidate at any other moment in US history. After all, primary season is usually pretty unforgiving. Howard Dean, for Christs sake, was finished after he let out too primal a scream following some welcome primary results. Bidens own efforts to win the 1988 nomination were derailed after he purloined a few phrases from the speeches of an overseas politician.

Trump being Trump, however, and the GOP base being what the GOP base currently is, the party has hardly unified in outrage at this assault on the international order, and this explicit invitation to piracy. Supposedly rational politicians such as Lindsay Grahamwho prides himself on his national security credentialsrushed to Trumps defense. Grahams rationale? Give me a breakI mean, its Trump. In other words, dont judge Trump by the rational political and moral standards one would judge every other human being by. Judge him by his own standalone code of conduct. Let Trump say and do what no other mere mortal could say and do. If thats not the Fhrerprinzip, then I dont know what is.

If Donald J. Trump were a peacenik, I might give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he got carried away by his own semiliterate bombast, that all he was really trying to do was to raise uncomfortable questions about the purpose and value of NATO 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After all, its perfectly healthy in a democracy to debate the value of old military alliances and the wisdom of a foreign policy based on the idea that your nation must for all time maintain a global military posture of a scope and scale virtually unprecedented in human historycertainly, many of the great left-wing parties of Western Europe have debated these very issues for three-quarters of a century, and much of the British Labour Party leadership under Michael Foot in the early 1980s opposed continued membership in NATO. If Trumps minions in Congress who are holding up billions of dollars of military assistance to Ukraine and Israel were doing so out of a genuine loathing of the military-industrial complex and of a defense lobby run amokif theyd all been up nights reading C. Wright Mills on the new power elite, and polishing up on Gandhian nonviolence philosophyif they had a genuine policy beef with, say, the brutalist youve got to destroy a village to save a village philosophy undergirding Israels morally calamitous actions in Gaza, Id again say that was a perfectly valid debate to bring out into the open.

But by no stretch of the imagination can Trump be thought of as a warrior for peacethis is the same man who asked his advisers why we have nuclear weapons if we arent going to use them, who wanted to shoot immigrants on sight at the southern border, and who plotted to send in the US military against domestic racial justice protesters. This is the same man who fantasized about military parades, complete with displays of the latest hardware, running through the heart of Washington, D.C. And this is the same man who declared that he wanted to have generals as loyal to him as Hitlers top brass were to the Fhrerand who has recently advocated executing the erstwhile chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for not being in lockstep with him in the weeks after the November 2020 election.

Similarly, with a few exceptionsthe libertarian-leaning Rand Paul arguably being a case in pointmost of the Republicans opposing military aid to Ukraine and Israel arent doing so out of any particular distaste either for militarism or for the specific alliances with Israel and Ukraine, but because Trump has essentially ordered them to stalemate government in order to embarrass Biden and the Democrats. More generally, to imagine the GOP as an anti-war, anti-violence, partydespite its fanatical embrace of a vision of the Second Amendment that arms the country to the teeth with high-velocity rifles, and despite high-profile Republicans such as Arizonas Kari Lake essentially threatening civil conflict if Trump is found guilty on his felony charges and sentenced to prisonis an absurdity.

Trump has repeatedly said that all he wants is peace. But advocates of peace dont publicly announce that they would welcome another countrys invasion of a neighbor. What Trump was doing in making such a statement had nothing to do with promoting global peace and everything to do with destabilizing international relations and openly converting NATO into a protection racket. One can imagine bad dialogue from a Mafia-themed B-movie. Pay up or my buddy over to your east will come in with some tanks and artillery and planes and, who knows, maybe even nuclear weapons, and fuck you up in a way that you and everyone else in your neighborhood wont soon forget.

The idea that a man like Trump, an amoral huckster seemingly gleeful at the prospect of small, vulnerable countries being chewed up and spat out like the husks of sunflower seeds by large, bullying powers, could once again be perched on the edge of the awesome power of the presidency, is beyond nightmarish. By the skin of our teeth, we survived Trump 1.0 with our democratic institutions still roughly intact. If Trump finds his way back to the White Housewith an assist from special counsel Hur and a flurry of own-goals from an aged, fragile, Bidenhes giving every indication that version 2.0 will be far, far worse. God only knows, the current international order is deeply flawed. But what Trumps advocating is a whole different ball game. In such a world, alliances become nothing but shakedowns, and Great Powers pick off smaller countries with impunity, cheered along by a gloating, preening, narcissistic US president too uncaring to realize the enormity of the damage he is unleashing with every inflammatory, thoughtless, and cruel statement that comes out of his mouth.

Sasha Abramsky, who writes regularly for The Nation, is the author of several books, including Inside Obamas Brain, The American Way of Poverty,The House of 20,000 Books, Jumping at Shadows, and, most recently, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the Worlds First Female Sports Superstar. Subscribe to The Abramsky Report, a weekly, subscription-based political column, here.

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Donald Trump Threatens to Start a Global Protection Racket - The Nation

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Trump's New York hush-money case will start March 25. It's the first of his criminal trials - The Associated Press

One prediction about the 2024 political season has already come true. The election year, to the delight of Donald Trumps superfans and the dread of just about everyone else, is all about the former President: his trials, his feuds, his insufferable family. We learned this week that he wants his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become the co-chair of the Republican National Committeeshe loyally promises to spend every single penny of the Partys funds to elect him if thats what it takesand that Jared Kushner really doesnt want to go back to the White House for a second Trump term. On Thursday, a judge in New York ruled that Trumps criminal trial for allegedly paying hush money to a former porn actress and then lying about it will go forward in March, and a decision is expected any minute in a civil fraud case that could cost Trumps business hundreds of millions of dollars. (The judge is CORRUPT, Trump insisted in a social-media post, repeating one of his favorite claims, but theres so much else Trump-related going on, Im not sure anyone noticed.) In Washington, the federal special counsel Jack Smith pleaded with the Supreme Court to act swiftly to get the other cases against Trump moving, too: The public interest in a prompt trial is at its zenith where, as here, a former President is charged with conspiring to subvert the electoral process so that he could remain in office. The Nation has a compelling interest in seeing the charges brought to trial.

Legal cliffhangers aside, Trump has demonstrated his remarkable continued ability to hijack the national conversation, warping and distorting not only Americas politics but also its foreign policy to suit his toxic personal mixture of dictator worship, blustery nationalism, and deep-seated skepticism about U.S. engagement in the world. Over the weekend, he delivered an anti-NATO rant at a campaign rally that sparked days of news coverage and outraged responses from his opponents. I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want, he said, of Russiaall but inviting Vladimir Putin to attack European countries that did not, in Trumps view, spend enough on their defense budgets. You gotta pay! The Secretary-General of NATO weighed in; so did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who warned solemnly that U.S. credibility is at stake. Leaders from Poland and the Baltic states were officially alarmed; veterans of Trumps White House, including his former national-security adviser John Bolton and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, cautioned, as they have many times before, that NATO is not likely to survive a second term of their former boss. In blistering remarks at the White House, on Tuesday, President Biden denounced Trump using some of his strongest language yet about his predecessor, whose threat to allies, he said, was dumb, shameful, dangerous, and un-American.

After days of this backlash, Trump appeared at another campaign rally on Wednesday night, where he, naturally, doubled down. He repeated his dubious account of having warned a fellow NATO leader about the consequences of not meeting the alliances commitment to spend two per cent of annual G.D.P. on defense. Look, if theyre not going to pay, were not going to protect. O.K.? he said.

As a matter of politics, none of it makes much sense. NATO is popular; support for Ukraine in its fight with Russia remains high even as Republicans have questioned how much aid to send. Americans loathe Putin, even after years of Trumps suck-uppery and the recent awkward attempt at reputation laundering by Tucker Carlson. In terms of timing, Trumps tirade could not have been worse, handing the gift of a major gaffe to Biden, at a time when the President is facing unwelcome questions about his age and mental fitness, thanks to the special counsel Robert Hurs report calling him a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. And yet the lesson of the Trump years is that the conventional metrics of politics dont apply to his actionshe is out to prove mastery over his party, not consistency in policy. He has shown once again that where he goes they will follow. When I went back and listened to his NATO remarks, the thing that struck me was the audiences response: they clapped and cheered.

The larger backlash to Trump was not just about his words, as ignorant and dangerous as they were, but about the actual effect they are already having on Republicans in Congress, many of whom have gone from being staunch supporters of Ukraine in its existential fight against Russian invasion to refusing to send any more assistance because of Trumps loud public opposition. (See: Graham, Lindsey.) When the Senate this week finally passed a bill requested by Biden months ago that would send nearly sixty billion dollars to Ukraine along with billions more for Israel and Taiwan, only twenty-two Senate Republicans voted for it. On the other side of the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump acolyte who owes his job to the ex-Presidents backing, all but refused to bring the legislation to a vote, then adjourned the House for a two-week recess.

In interviews after the Senate passage, the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, was strikingly open about the reason for his struggle to get even half of his fellow G.O.P. senators to go along with the bill: Trump. Its a political reaction led, obviously, by the likely nominee for President having a view and expressing a view on this, he told CNNs Manu Raju. Thats why we are where we are. He told The Hill that this weeks vote recalled the Senates 1941 vote to approve the Lend-Lease Act, which sent assistance to countries fighting Nazi Germanyand that, then as now, a majority of his partys members had voted with the wrong side. In the early days of the Second World War, the problem was the Ohio senator Robert Taft, who was the leader of the Republicans considerable isolationist wing; today, its Trump.McConnell said that, with the ex-President actively making calls and lobbying senators to vote down the bill, the twenty-two Republican votes he managed to secure seemed like a landslide. Yeesh.

McConnell, whose own leadership has come under fire from a loud and growing minority of his increasingly Trumpified caucus, has famously not spoken with Trump since the violent aftermath of the 2020 election. And yet he and the dwindling remains of the Party establishment who refuse to get on board with Trumps 2024 campaign repeatedly failed to act decisively against Trump when it might have matteredby voting to convict him in the Senate impeachment trial that followed his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat, or, more recently, by pushing through assistance to Ukraine months ago rather than agreeing to hold the aid hostage to far-right demands for a border deal that Trump was never going to agree to in an election year anyway.

McConnells willingness to complain publicly about Trump now, alas, is the tellnot a sign of an incipient battle for the soul of the Party but of a fight that has already been lost. This is also the explanation for the increasingly loud criticisms being lobbed at Trump by his one remaining opponent in the Republican primaries, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whose longshot campaign faces a death blow next week in her home states primary, where polls currently give Trump around two-thirds of the Republican vote. With little to lose, Haley has begun bashing away at Trump with a lacerating intensity that was missing from her earlier efforts. On Tuesday, she told NBCs Today show that he was diminished and unhinged. That same day, she released a new ad showing Trump shaking Putins hand and smiling. The ad warns about the consequences of electing Trump to a second term: from more record-breaking debt to a Russian victory that will bring more war. With Trump, its just more chaos, the spot concludes.

A year ago, it might have appeared unthinkable that so many Republicans would abandon Ukraine just because Trump urged them to do so; a year from now, there is the not-implausible chance that when a relected President Trump demands that they make concessions to Putin, or pull back from commitments to our treaty allies in Europe, they will follow him in that, too. Consider yourself warned.

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Trump's Threat to NATO Is the Scariest Kind of Gaffe: It's Real - The New Yorker