The Week Ahead

More Hitler-speak from Trump, a bruising battle over the border and immigration, and binders full of Russians

Graphic courtesy of CNN

I’m following three stories, one of which (Russian election interference intelligence binders) I will write about more extensively in The Big Picture. My piece on “Binders Full of Russians” comes out Tuesday, and I encourage you to sign up for The Big Picture newsletter, where I write or edit one big thought piece a week. You’ll receive my deeper dive into this scandal—one which might carry serious federal criminal consequences for people like Mark Meadows, especially if what his top aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, recounts is true. You can join that Substack as a reader for free! Or if you want to show you appreciation and help support my team, you can also join as a paid supporter. Here’s the link to join if you haven’t already. The Big Picture offers a great “wide view” complement to my daily pieces here!

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Okay, done with my plug. On to the Week Ahead—and I apologize in advance that my reports today are a bit difficult on the psyche…

Trump re-channels Hitler, praises dictators

It’s no longer possible to ignore the parallels, nor pretend it was just a one-time thing. In a speech before his MAGA faithful in New Hampshire, Trump doubled down on his fascist and inflammatory language of earlier speeches.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said. “They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia.”

Trump’s name-calling and targeting of China during the pandemic led to an unprecedented jump in attacks upon AAPI citizens and residents, and his demonization and scapegoating of immigrants is likely to produce the same horrific violence against perceived “outsiders.” The more he says these words, the more emboldened his supporters will become.

As historian Michael Beschloss noted, Hitler used this same racist argument. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” the Nazi leader said. As I’ve written about before, Trump’s use of Hitler’s language is no accident. His former chief of staff John Kelly and his late ex-wife Ivana have all spoken about Trump’s admiration for and even study of Hitler’s methods and words.

Trump also quoted Putin in support of his false claim that the four criminal prosecutions against him are politically motivated. “It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin as saying.

He also praised Kim Jong Un of North Korea and the far-right, illiberal leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who has attacked civil liberties and sided with Putin often. Trump called him a “highly respected” leader who “can save the Western World.” And he referred to the January 6 violent offender defendants as “hostages” instead of prisoners.

The Biden campaign forcefully condemned the speech. “Tonight Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement.

Trump’s inflammatory speech was a top story on major newspapers and television cable news, indicating that the press is covering the issue. It remains to be seen if they will go the necessary step further and ask other GOP leaders if they stand by the idea of immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, and whether they condemn Trump’s earlier reference to them as “vermin.” We should insist that they do.

Speaking of immigration…

Trump’s speeches against immigrants comes at a time when Biden is vulnerable on the question of border security and migration, not just from the right, but from within his own party, too. Republicans have insisted that any aid package for Ukraine and Israel contain draconian new border policies that would effectively reinstate Trumpian policies that Biden eliminated or pared back after taking office.

A record number of migrants, escaping gang violence, climate change-induced disasters, and crushing poverty, have fled northward. Republicans have turned the crisis into a political weapon, bussing and flying migrants to Democratic enclaves and urban centers to score political points. But even within the Democratic party, according to the New York Times, urban leaders have begun to plead for assistance and a change in policy to help ease the burden.

While polls are showing Americans shifting to the right and in favor of harsher measures, progressive leaders warn that Biden must stick to party principles and obey international law when it comes to asylum seekers and migrants’ rights. They fear a capitulation by Biden in order to pass Ukrainian aid, now that congressional Republicans have threatened to withhold aid unless they get their way on border security.

The migrant crisis is a wedge that splits the Democratic Party, and Republicans know it. As Secretary Buttigieg once wisely pointed out, it is an issue where the problem is more useful to Republicans than the solution. Without comprehensive immigration reform, which is blocked by the GOP, Democrats can lean only into greater compassion for migrants. But in the eyes of an increasingly alarmed electorate, this makes the Democrats seem “weak” and leaves them open to charges of encouraging even more migration.

But if Democratic leadership and the White House take a harder stance, this risks alienating and losing the support of key constituencies, including progressives, minority civil rights groups, and the youth vote. These groups understandably want to help as many people as much as possible in any way they can, and they demand compassionate migrant policies be in place to help them do their work.

The White House ultimately may have no choice but to accede to Republican demands, or risk losing the war in Ukraine. It is absolutely shameful that the GOP would hold our ally hostage in order to force inhumane policies at the border, but the GOP has shown it is willing to go to extremes, including blowing up the entire U.S. economy, unless it gets its way. The Democrats were able to call their bluff on that threat, but on the border the political calculus, speaking realistically, weighs against such a move.

The GOP forcing Biden’s hand on immigration does help shift the blame to Republicans for any move rightward on border security. But that would be small comfort for the desperate families at the border who would be most impacted by these harsh policy changes.

Binders full of Russians

Per my intro, I will write more about this story on Tuesday. But the larger contours are this: CNN reported on Friday that a binder containing highly classified intelligence relating to Russian election interference in the 2016 U.S. election is missing. In fact, it’s been missing since Trump left office, and that’s a huge problem. Inside the binder are some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the U.S. and its allies, including all-important sources and methods of intelligence gathering on Russia. The compromise of that information has put lives of agents and sources at grave risk.

Trump sought to declassify the binder in the waning days of his term as president, leading to a mad rush to redact, copy and distribute the information, then an equally frenzied attempt to regather all the copies because they still continued top secret information. Ultimately, the original copy of the binder—one of the most valuable documents in the world—was purportedly kept by Mark Meadows in a safe as his staff members sought to redact information. (This itself is simply insane to contemplate; none of these people should have been looking at any of this.)

Then the binder went missing. Tellingly, Meadows’s top aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, recalls that Meadows took that top secret binder with him when they departed the White House for the last time. Meadows’s attorney, in a very carefully worded statement, denies that Meadows mishandled classified information.

I’ll have much more to say on Tuesday, but those who are now more familiar with the laws around mishandling our nation’s secrets will probably spot the immediate issue for Meadows here. If what Hutchinson claims is true, and Meadows personally took the binder, or gave it to Trump, or even burned or destroyed it, as he has been known to do with other documents, that would open him up to serious criminal liability.

And as I’ll explain on Tuesday, the whole business about this particular set of documents sheds significant light upon what Trump may have been up to when it came to all the other classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago that are now the subject of the federal criminal case in Florida.

Look for my piece on Tuesday, and don’t forget to subscribe! Here’s the link again: https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/subscribe

Have a great Sunday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Jay