"Having escaped prison and death, President Trump has returned to power seeking vindication and vengeance — and done more in his first 100 days to change the trajectory of the country than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt."

That's the subheadline at the NYT article "After the Arrests and Bullets, Trump Takes on Second Term With a New Fervor" by Peter Baker in the NYT. Free-access link (because it's the last-day of the month and I over-hoarded by 10 free links and must use them or lose them).

In the opening chapter of this new term, Mr. Trump has acted like a man on a mission, moving with almost messianic fervor to transform America from top to bottom and exact retribution against enemies at the same time. He appears intent on demolishing the old order no matter the collateral damage, putting his personal imprint not just on government and foreign affairs but on almost every aspect of national life, including business, culture, sports, academia, the legal world and the media. 

"It feels worth noting that in this moment, Zelensky decides to call the vice President JD, not Vice President Vance."

Observes Peter Baker in this morning's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — "The Fallout From Zelensky and Trump’s Oval Office Meltdown" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

We hear the recording of Zelensky, with new focus on the dismissive "JD": "What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What? What you, what you, what do you mean?"

Baker continues: "Perhaps history will not note this as an important moment. I noted it."

Yes, the re-listen affected me.

Trump and Vance get remarkably intense with Zelensky.

ADDED: The scene is described by Peter Baker for the NYT: "Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance castigated Mr. Zelensky for not being grateful enough for U.S. support in its war with Russia and sought to strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictate. With voices raised and tempers flaring, Mr. Trump threatened to abandon Ukraine altogether if Mr. Zelensky did not go along. Talking over the Ukrainian leader, Mr. Vance told Mr. Zelensky that it was 'disrespectful' for him to come to the Oval Office and make his case in front of the American news media and demanded that he thank Mr. Trump for his leadership. Mr. Trump jumped in and told the Ukrainian leader, 'You’re not really in a good position right now” and that “you’re gambling with World War III.' 'You’re either going make a deal or we’re out,” Mr. Trump added. “And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out and I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.' The exchange in front of television cameras was one of the most dramatic moments ever to play out in public in the Oval Office...."

AND: "This is gonna be great television — I'll tell you that."

The NYT purports to show us "how" Biden did something we don't even know that he did.

This is an embarrassing headline: "How Biden Changed His Mind on Pardoning Hunter: ‘Time to End All of This’/The threat of a retribution-focused Trump administration and his son’s looming sentencings prompted the president to abandon a promise not to get involved in Hunter Biden’s legal problems."

They — the authors are Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush — cannot know the interior of the President's mind. He may have changed what he was saying about his thoughts, but I presume that he was lying all along, for political purposes, when he said he wouldn't pardon Hunter, and I presume that he always intended to pardon him.

The phrase "How Biden Changed His Mind" is misdirection — sleight of hand. If we fall for it, we unwittingly form a belief that Biden did change his mind. He and his supporters weren't lying to us throughout the campaign season. He was weighing all the factors and the factors changed after the election. He painfully reweighed and his consistent and honorable decision-making process yielded a new result. Let Rogers and Rush detail the factors and burnish our respect for the venerable statesman.

No, no, absolutely not. Now, and only now, am I reading past the headline. So let's see:

A dark sky had fallen over Nantucket, Mass., on Saturday evening when President Biden left church alongside his family after his final Thanksgiving as president.

It was a dark and stormy night. We begin with a weather report.  

Inside a borrowed vacation compound earlier in the week, with its views of the Nantucket Harbor, Mr. Biden had met with his wife, Jill Biden, and his son Hunter Biden to discuss a decision that had tormented him for months....

Who, if anyone, is the source of this knowledge of Biden's months-long mental torment? 

Support for pardoning Hunter Biden had been building for months within the family...

Who? Jill? Hunter? Who's talking to the NYT? How is building support observed? Was this support in the mind of Jill? Was it voiced to the President? 

... but external forces had more recently weighed on Mr. Biden, who watched warily as President-elect Donald J. Trump picked loyalists for his administration who promised to bring political and legal retribution to Mr. Trump’s enemies.

Biden also "watched" as Trump got elected, but that's not mentioned. It's not politically convenient to characterize Biden as waiting to see if his party might win, lying about the pardon in an effort to produce that win, and needing a new plan when the party lost. It needs to be about Trump's bad behavior, and son of a bitch, it was!... in this dark-and-stormy-night tale the NYT is telling. 

Mr. Biden had even invited Mr. Trump to the White House, listening without responding as the president-elect aired familiar grievances about the Justice Department — then surprised his host by sympathizing with the Biden family’s own troubles with the department, according to three people briefed on the conversation.

So Trump was sympathetic, and it's here, for the first time in the article, that we see a reference to sources. It's harder to portray Trump as a vengeful narcissist when 3 sources say he sympathized with Biden. It was sympathy, we're told, in the context of Trump's complaining that Biden's administration was using criminal prosecution against Trump. Maybe that inspired Biden to see how a pardon of Hunter could be portrayed not as a political favor to Hunter but as an end to political disfavor. It sounds crazy, but we're looking for "How Biden Changed His Mind."

But the article doesn't pursue that, perhaps because it had no evidence that the meeting with Trump jogged Biden's thoughts on the subject. Or do you think the fact that Biden was smiling widely is circumstantial evidence that a wonderful new idea had arisen?

The next thing in the article is this:

But it was Hunter Biden’s looming sentencings on federal gun and tax charges, scheduled for later this month, that gave Mr. Biden the final push....

The final push. So we were supposed to see the Trump meeting as a push? This is a long article, and it purports to tell us "How Biden Changed His Mind," but there was no elaboration of "how" in that bit about the meeting with Trump. Now, I'm wondering if Trump cleverly played Biden somehow? The Times had 3 sources about the conversation and we got one unenlightening sentence.

But there is much more to the article after that introduction. We're told the NYT spoke with "a half dozen people close to the president and his family," but not told who they are or anything about how they could have access to Biden's mind and why they should be trusted to tell the truth.

When the president returned to Washington late Saturday evening, he convened a call with several senior aides to tell them about his decision. “Time to end all of this,” Mr. Biden said, according to a person briefed on the call....

That's says nothing about how or when Biden decided to pardon Hunter, only about the timing of the action. 

Mr. Biden’s decision has tarnished a storied public legacy that began more than 50 years ago....

Here's a good place for elision. 

Hunter Biden’s decision to plead guilty on the tax charges — after a weeklong gun trial in Delaware in June that rehashed the family’s darkest days — had further embittered Mr. Biden....  [who] began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon. It appears that there was never serious consideration of anything short of a full pardon, such as a commutation of his sentence, they said.

Was there any serious consideration of restricting the full pardon to the gun and tax charges? The article doesn't mention the sweep of the pardon Biden gave, covering every possible federal crime in a 10-year period, such as the oft-alleged corrupt dealings with Ukraine and China!  

For his part, Hunter Biden was hardly shy about telling the people around him that he wanted — needed — a pardon, although it is unclear how often he had discussed the matter directly with his father before this past week....

You've got sources. What did he say? Did he threaten to do drugs again and yell about how it would all be dad's fault? Did he say he's writing a memoir that will destroy Joe's reputation forever? Did he threaten to offer his testimony to Trump officials about Joe's involvement in corrupt dealings with Ukraine and China? You're inviting your readers to visualize this scene. That's what I'm seeing.

And here's a hint that the corrupt dealings were part of the discussion:

While both father and son expressed anger over the yearslong effort by Republicans to link Hunter Biden’s questionable foreign business consulting to the president — the unproven “Biden crime family” narrative — they were almost equally contemptuous of the prosecutors who aggressively pursued both cases....

The door was cracked open for half a sentence, then quickly shut.

The statement that followed from Mr. Biden on Sunday offered a window into the mind-set of an aggrieved president who, in the end, could not separate his duty as a father from his half century of principled promises as a politician....

The most comforting possible narrative is chosen! That's the answer to how — how Biden "changed" his mind. He's just too devoted a father — to his duty as a father. Surely, you won't subtract very much from the value of his half century of principled promises as a politician!

I've read the whole thing now, and the NYT hasn't rebutted my presumption that Biden was lying all along, for political purposes, when he said he wouldn't pardon Hunter. And I need to know much more about the 10-year sweep of the pardon, covering all federal crimes, and how that connects to Joe Biden's own possible corruption. Don't just label that "unproven." Investigate it!

ADDED: I just listened to this morning's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, and it is much better. The guest is the NYT reporter Peter Baker. Excerpts:

I think obviously the only thing that's changed between June... and December when he gives this pardon, is the election. And you can look at it a couple of different ways. You could look at it in the way of him not being honest in the summer. That he really was in fact considering this, but didn't want to say before an election because it would be politically damaging. And only after the election does he admit that in fact he is going to use his extraordinary power for his son. Or — and this may be an and/or — you can also look at it as waking up to the reality of a Trump-run Justice Department in which this new president is promising retribution and specifically to go after Hunter Biden and a president who's on the way out thinking, I'm not going to let that happen. I'm not only going to pardon him for this tax and gun charges. I'm going to protect him from the next guy who's making very clear he's going to use the FBI for retribution....

[In his statement announcing the pardon, Biden] talks about the current prosecutions that his son has faced being unfair and selective. He doesn't say the other part... which is that he is guarding against politicization of the Justice Department by his successor. Right? He could have framed it that way, but he didn't. But the net effect of what he did by making it a 10-year sweeping pardon for any and everything that his son might have done does have that effect. And it does tell you what was probably going through his mind when he decided to issue the pardon.

What Peter Baker says was "probably going through his mind" is what I was saying Rogers and Thrush left out of their "How Biden Changed His Mind" article.

"President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized."

Thanks to the NYT for stating the obvious point obviously.

The article, by Peter Baker, is "In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints/President Biden complained about selective prosecution and political pressure in a system he has spent his public life defending."

The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics.... There is no evidence that Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases.... But Mr. Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the F.B.I. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Mr. Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.... 

Mr. Biden’s pardon will also give ammunition to Republicans who have contended that Hunter Biden was guilty of wrongdoing beyond the charges for which he was actually prosecuted.... The pardon Mr. Biden issued to his son specifically covers any offenses “which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024,” not just the tax and gun charges.... 

“There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” the president said. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

You can only cogently say "Enough is enough" about the things that lie within your own power.

"Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did."

"Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections. George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that."

Writes Peter Baker, in "The 'Landslide' That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory/The latest vote count shows that Donald J. Trump won the popular vote by one of the smallest margins since the 19th century. But Mr. Trump claims a 'powerful mandate'" (NYT).

Saying it's a landslide is the same thing as saying it's not a landslide: propaganda.

It's just a word.

"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."

"So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is, and I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left Democratic, foreign-policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer that she believes in the international rules-based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules, in effect, in terms of whether it be trade security or economics."

Said Peter Baker on "Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (transcript and audio at that link)(I've tweaked some punctuation, etc.).

How are we to understand Harris as anything other than a continuation of Biden? That's what Peter Baker is doing.

And here's how he contrasts Trump:

How to argue that Trump is responsible for attracting assassins without catching hell for blaming the victim.

That's what the elite media commentators are working hard to figure out, I think, scanning the many headlines this morning. I tired of reading the commentary before even beginning, and I am also tired of the columns reacting to it.

So I'll choose one piece, on the chance that it might go a bit deeper. It's by Peter Baker in the NYT and the title suggests some sobriety and moderation: "Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence/The latest apparent assassination attempt against the former president indicates how much the American political landscape has been shaped by anger stirred by him and against him."

Excerpt:

At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him. He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed....

Mr. Trump’s critics have at times employed the language of violence as well, though not as extensively and repeatedly at the highest levels. The former president’s allies distributed a video compilation online of various Trump opponents saying they would like to punch him in the face or the like. Some of the more extreme voices on social media in the past day have mocked or minimized the close call at the Florida golf course. Mr. Trump’s allies often decry what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome, the notion that his critics despise him so much they have lost their minds.

Anger, of course, has long been the animating force of Mr. Trump’s time in politics — both the anger he stirs among supporters against his rivals and the anger that he generates among opponents who come to loathe him....

"The candidate who will win the election is the candidate seen as the most able to bring about change, say strategists on both sides."

"A New York Times/Siena College poll found 61 percent of likely voters said they want major change from Biden. Democrats argue Harris inhabits an ethos of change simply by being a younger, fresher candidate, and her potential to become the first woman president. They hope Trump will look stale on the stage next to her."

Writes Amber Phillips, in "What Harris, Trump need to do to win Tuesday’s presidential debate" (WaPo).

Look for other efforts to diminish Trump by referring to his age. I'm also seeing this, from Peter Baker at the NYT: "As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity/With President Biden no longer in the race, former President Donald J. Trump would be the oldest person ever to serve in the Oval Office. But his rambling, sometimes incoherent public statements have stirred concern among voters."

My question about Harris as the change candidate: She just seized all the delegates Biden won in the primaries to get the nomination, which symbolized that she was the proper substitute for him. Doesn't that require her to run on his record and vow to stay the course and tell us not to change horses in midstream? I think the answer is "yes," and that explains the new focus on age. She is Biden II, the younger Biden.

But people want change, supposedly. It's a "change election." The idea seems to be to convince the people that the change from Biden is just someone younger (and, if you must, also a different color and gender).

"That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss."

Said the NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker on yesterday's episode of "The Daily." Context:

[Biden is] saying, in essence, you can't have this debate anymore because this debate, it undermines my chances exactly, and therefore I want you to shut up. This question is over. Knock it off move on. And I think he's daring them. He's daring his doubters and naysayers to come after him or to shut up. You want to take me on? Take me on. Right? That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss. So all eyes right now are on Congressional Democrats to see where they fall this week. Do the floodgates open and they end up abandoning him in large numbers or do they decide to give up on that notion?

First, the "old saying" is in fact a famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." I wrote about it back in 2019:

"Is there an ‘L.B.J. Moment’ in store? Don’t count on it."

Asks Peter Baker (at the NYT).

Back in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation — and many of his own advisers — by adding a secret 90-second bombshell finale to an Oval Office address on Vietnam that he was pulling out of the presidential campaign. With war raging, he said, he should not “devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.”

No one should expect President Biden to emulate Johnson during his State of the Union on Thursday night, no matter how much some Democrats and commentators have floated the idea.... 

The SOTU is still over an hour away, but please put your SOTU comments on this post.

"[T]here are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful... overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity."

"This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Said Martin Luther King Jr., in the late 1960s, in a speech title "The Other America."

John Edwards also had a "Two Americas" speech when he was a presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008.

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Two Americas" this morning to escape from reading — in the NYT — "The Looming Contest Between Two Presidents and Two Americas/The general election matchup that seems likely between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump is about fundamentally disparate visions of the nation."

I don't know how much of this sort of thing we can stand:

Should a politician hold a campaign rally in a church?

Here's "Charities, Churches and Politics" at the IRS website.

I'm not going to give a tax law lecture. I just want to say politicians using churches usually attempt to be somewhat subtle. Is this some kind of joke:

Here's the article, "Biden Tries to Rally Disaffected Black Voters in Fiery Condemnation of Trump."

President Biden sought to rally disaffected Black supporters on Monday with a fiery condemnation of former President Donald J. Trump, linking his predecessor’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election to the nation’s history of white supremacy in what he called “the old ghost in new garments.”

Ghost?! If Trump used the idea of a ghost to scare black people, he'd be accused of trading on the old racist trope. 

"They thought it was over, that they could put it in the rearview mirror. All that Hunter Biden had to do was show up in a courtroom, answer a few questions..."

"... sign some paperwork and that would be it. Not that the Republicans would let it go, but any real danger would be past. Except that it did not work out that way. The criminal investigation that President Biden’s advisers believed was all but done has instead been given new life with the collapse of the plea agreement and the appointment of a special counsel who now might bring the president’s son to trial. What had been a painful but relatively contained political scandal that animated mainly partisans on the right could now extend for months just as the president is gearing up for his re-election campaign. This time, the questions about Hunter Biden’s conduct may be harder for the White House to dismiss as politically motivated. They may even break out of the conservative echo chamber to the general public... It may be that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s decision to designate Mr. Weiss a special counsel with more independence to run the inquiry means that there is still more potential legal peril stemming from Hunter Biden’s business dealings with foreign firms. Yet it may amount to less than meets the eye in the long run...."

 
So begins the top story at the NYT right now, "For President Biden, a Political Liability That May Not Go Away Soon/The collapse of a plea deal and the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden mean the president could face political fallout for months to come," by Peter Baker.

Why are doubts something to "chip away" at? Why wouldn't you explore doubt?

I'm trying to read "New Insights Into Trump’s State of Mind on Jan. 6 Chip Away at Doubts" by Peter Baker in the NYT.

I'm thinking about how reasonable doubt is the standard for judging criminal guilt.

I'm thinking about how George W. Bush used to be condemned for being incurious. 

Why wouldn't you look into doubt? Why wouldn't you see doubt as inviting exploration and contemplation? Why would you think in terms of destroying doubt — like it's some cloddish block of stone and you've got a chisel and mallet? 

Baker writes:

"Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan Is Testing That. The chaotic endgame of the American withdrawal has undercut some of the most fundamental premises of President Biden’s presidency."

That's the lengthy headline for a "news analysis" piece by Peter Baker in the NYT.  

Had you been under the impression that the Biden presidency was premised on empathy and competence? I'd never gotten that impression, and I did a search of my blog archive for "Biden" and "empathy," and everything that came up was about the press shielding Biden from scrutiny, saying he's got empathy and (of course) Trump does not. I haven't done a search, but I'll hypothesize that running on competence worked the same way. The press touted Biden as a remedy for the disease they'd been scaring us about for years — Trump. 

And so Biden wasn't tested. He was promoted. Did we ever believe in his "competence and empathy"? Are anybody's "fundamental premises" getting undermined? That headline — however much it questions Biden — engages in the same unexamined touting of Biden that got him elected in the first place. He never demonstrated competence and empathy! People just hoped he had it, because they thought Trump didn't have it, and the press encouraged them to indulge in those beliefs and hopes. 

I'm questioning assumptions contained in the headline. The article itself is questioning Biden's competence and empathy, which I think ought to have been done when he was running for office. From the article:

At points, the president has evinced little sense of the human toll as the Taliban swept back to power. Asked about pictures of fleeing Afghans packed into planes and some even falling to their death after trying to sneak aboard, Mr. Biden interrupted. “That was four days ago, five days ago,” he said, when in fact it was two days earlier and hardly made less horrific by the passage of a couple of sunsets.... 

Biden — or his handlers — knew he'd be asked about that, and he said something that was not only bluntly callous but wrong in the way that is most easily proved wrong — numerically. 

Meanwhile, American citizens are called upon to care deeply about things that happened over a hundred years ago and to work diligently on their psyche if they think it would be best to look optimistically toward the future and not dwell on the distant past. 

"[T]he Biden White House frequently demands that interviews with administration officials be conducted on grounds known colloquially as 'background with quote approval'..."

"[T]he information from an interview can be used in the story, but in order for the person’s name to be attached to a quote, the reporter must transcribe the quotes they want and then send them to the communications team to approve, veto or edit them.... At its best, quote approval allows sources to speak more candidly about their work. At its worst, it gives public officials a way to obfuscate or screen their own admissions and words. The Biden White House isn’t the first to employ the practice. Many reporters say it’s reminiscent of the tightly controlled Obama White House. The Trump White House used it, too. But reporters say Trump’s team did so less frequently than Biden’s team — which also used the tactic during the campaign — and a number of current White House reporters have become increasingly frustrated by what they see as its abuse.... 

From "Reporters fume at White House 'quote approval' rules" (Politico).  

The article quotes NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker, explaining that the practice originated with reporters: “What started out as an effort by reporters to get more transparency, to get people on the record more, to use fewer blind quotes, then got taken by the White House, each successive White House, as a way of taking control of your story. So instead of transparency, suddenly, the White House realized: ‘Hey, this quote approval thing is a cool thing. We can now control what is in their stories by refusing to allow them use anything without our approval. And it's a pernicious, insidious, awful practice that reporters should resist.”

NYT creates a video montage to demonstrate that Trump talks like George Wallace.

Check it out:



The main thing seems to be the phrase "law and order." It would help the anti-Trump cause quite a bit if people would believe the phrase "law and order" signals white supremacy. It's easy to do the counter-spin however: It is racist to hear "law and order" as white supremacy.

Accompanying that video montage is this article — "A Half-Century After Wallace, Trump Echoes the Politics of Division/George Wallace’s speeches and interviews from his 1968 campaign feature language and appeals that sound familiar again as the 'law and order' president sends federal forces into the streets" by Peter Baker:

The president rails about the “anarchists and agitators” and accuses “the radical left” of running rampant through the streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.”...

Like Mr. Trump, Wallace denounced “anarchists” in the streets, condemned liberals for trying to squelch the free speech of those they disagreed with and ran against the elites of Washington and the mainstream media....

Like the pugnacious Mr. Trump, Wallace enjoyed a fight. Indeed, he relished taking on protesters who showed up at his events. “You know what you are?” he called out to one. “You’re a little punk, that’s all you are. You haven’t got any guts.”

MEANWHILE: At the New Yorker, they're talking about Joe McCarthy because — don't you know?! — Trump is like Joe McCarthy. The article, by Louis Menand, is "Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods/McCarthy never sent a single 'subversive' to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures." Excerpt:

Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy.... He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was.... To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong.... He was... a conspiracy-monger.... What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy.... McCarthy lied all the time.... He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

Trump is like McCarthy, who loved chaos, and Trump is like George Wallace, who loved law and order. Oh, that Trump — he's everything you need him to be.

"As the book nears publication and details spill out, many congressional Democrats quickly assailed Mr. Bolton for not telling his story during the impeachment proceedings and instead saving it for his $2 million book."

"Mr. Bolton explains his position in the epilogue, saying he wanted to wait to see if a judge would order one of his deputies to testify over White House objections. Once the House impeached Mr. Trump over the Ukraine matter, Mr. Bolton volunteered to testify in the Senate trial that followed if subpoenaed. But Senate Republicans voted to block new testimony by him and any other witnesses even after The New York Times reported that his forthcoming book would confirm the quid pro quo. Some of those Republican senators said that even if Mr. Bolton was correct, it would not be enough in their minds to make Mr. Trump the first president in American history convicted and removed from office. Mr. Bolton blames House Democrats for being in a rush rather than waiting for the court system to rule on whether witnesses like him should testify, and he faults them for narrowing their inquiry to just the Ukraine matter rather than building a broader case with more examples of misconduct by the president. 'Had a Senate majority agreed to call witnesses and had I testified, I am convinced, given the environment then existing because of the House’s impeachment malpractice, that it would have made no significant difference in the Senate outcome,' he writes."
From "Five Takeaways From John Bolton’s Memoir 'The Room Where It Happened' describes Mr. Bolton’s 17 turbulent months at President Trump’s side through a multitude of crises and foreign policy challenges" by Peter Baker (NYT).

ADDED:

Wacko John Bolton’s “exceedingly tedious”(New York Times) book is made up of lies & fake stories. Said all good about me, in print, until the day I fired him. A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020

"President Trump’s legal team will call on the Senate on Monday to 'swiftly reject' the impeachment charges and acquit him..."

"... maintaining that he committed no impeachable offense and has been the victim of an illegitimate partisan effort to take him down.... Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to dismiss the largely party-line impeachment by the House as a 'brazenly political act' following a 'rigged process' that should be repudiated by the Senate, according to a person working with his legal team, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the submission of the trial brief.... The brief does not deny that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to announce investigations into Democrats, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but argues that the president has the right to conduct relations with other countries as he sees fit and that he had valid reasons to raise those issues with Ukraine to fight corruption. The lawyers plan to dismiss the notion that doing so was an abuse of power, as outlined in the first article of impeachment, calling that a 'novel theory' and a 'newly invented' offense that would allow Congress to second-guess presidents for legitimate policy decisions. They will argue that the second article, accusing him of obstructing Congress by blocking testimony and refusing to turn over documents during the House impeachment inquiry, would violate separation of powers by invalidating a president’s right to confidential deliberations...."

Write Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman in the NYT this morning.