Month: July 2024

You can listen to Episode 13 on Apple or Spotify.

It’s the second episode with a guest and it’s a good one. Bill Hangley Jr. is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and musician who recently did a guest post here at the Pond: The Case of Kamala. He joined us to discuss the controversy over President Biden dropping out and also to promote his amazing new song: For My Father, Who Loves the Law. He really writes great songs, and I love his voice.

After Brendan and I discuss the serious weirdness of the Republican National Convention for a bit, Bill joins us to talk about a wide range of topics all related to the upcoming presidential election. It’s probably the most interesting conversation we’ve had yet on the Pondcast. Bill’s a really insightful and original thinker and helps us think through where we go from here.

We’d also like to announce that we set up a Patreon page for the pondcast, and ask that you become a member, paying or otherwise. We definitely need some financial support to be able to produce a regular podcast, and I think it’s important that we’re able to add our voices to the discussion in these crazy times and this most consequential election cycle. We have an interview with a member of the Pennsylvania legislature lined up and are hoping to have guests much more frequently going forward.

If you like and subscribe to the pondcast, that will also help us add listeners, which is important to making the project viable.

Imagine for a second that you are here living in the United States without legal permission. What’s the number one thing that can fuck up your world? Obviously, it’s interaction with legal authorities who will demand to see your documentation. Are you more or less likely than a U.S. citizen to exceed the speed limit? Are you more or less likely to shoplift? Are you more or less likely to do a snatch and grab robbery on the street. To truth is, you want to keep your head down and avoid attention. That’s why it’s no surprise that studies show that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, including violent felonies, than legal immigrants or citizens. They have too much to lose. An arrest could lead to deportation not only for themselves but for other members of their family.

But that’s not what Donald Trump says. During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he claimed:

“The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country — they are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia and the Middle East — they’re coming from everywhere, and this administration does nothing to stop them. They are coming from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and terrorists at levels never seen before.”

The New York Times reports that “June had the lowest monthly total for illegal crossings since January 2021,” and fact-checkers find no evidence “to support that other countries are sending their murderers, drug dealers and other criminals to the U.S.” He’s just lying.

But notice something else. He’s complaining about immigrants coming from every continent except Europe and Antartica, where only penguins and researchers live. His fans waved “Mass Deportations Now!” signs at the convention, but they weren’t concerned about either Belgians or penguins. They’re convinced that there’s a conspiracy to replace white people with non-white people, and they want non-white people tossed out of the country by the millions. This very much includes Indians from the subcontinent. And that’s why there is so much anger from the right that J.D. Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate.

The problem is Vance’s wife and kids.

The wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Usha Chilukuri Vance, and the couple’s children have become the targets of backlash for their Indian ancestry.

Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in San Diego, as well as RNC speaker Harmeet Dhillon — who is Sikh and Indian – are facing anti-Asian hate from far-right figures online.

Posts appear to have spiked this week following Vance’s nomination criticizing Vance for marrying someone who is non-white, expressing concerns about an influx of Indian immigrants as a result and the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy have garnered hundreds of thousands of views according to individual post engagement figures.

It’s similar to criticism made of Kamala Harris who also has Indian ancestry. This reminds me of the cognitive dissonance I have understanding how Stephen Miller, a Jew who grew up in Santa Monica, California, became Trump’s point man for mass deportation programs. J.D. Vance has joined a fascist movement that considers intermarriage between whites and non-whites as part of a sinister plot to destroy the white race. They want his wife and kids deported, and they consider him part of the problem. How can he sleep at night? How can he face his wife and kids and say he’s doing what’s best for them and people like them?

I have no earthly clue how to answer that question. Being vice-president of the United States is certainly an alluring prospect, but it shouldn’t be attractive under these circumstances.

There are a lot of reasons to question Vance’s character, but this is right at the top of the list.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s home in New York’s Hudson Valley. I’m painting from my photo from a recent visit, seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now started the lawn and tree to the left. Further, I have added details to the tree to the rear and foreground bush.
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The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Here’s a fun bit of trivia. Johnny Carson was the king of late night television for three decades beginning in 1962. He interviewed several guests a night, five nights a week. But he never interviewed a politician until 1988. And, no, the first wasn’t one of the presidential candidates from that year, Michael Dukakis or George H.W. Bush. The first politician to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was a little known governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton who had just absolutely bombed during a 33-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. He’d actually been booed by a bored audience that cheered when he finally declared “In conclusion…” It was a humiliating failure on the biggest stage, and Clinton’s handlers knew he needed a quick redemption if he wanted to maintain his national political ambitions.

Clinton friend and television producer and director Harry Thomason contacted Carson’s producer Freddie de Cordova about whether Clinton could appear on The Tonight Show. Initially he was told that Carson had a policy against having politicians on as guests, but that changed when Thomason promised that Clinton would play the saxophone. The appearance was a huge success, and four years later Clinton accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Here’s another piece of trivia. Until President Joe Biden came along, Bill Clinton held the record among presidents for longest spoken State of the Union addresses at 7,426 words. By comparison, Obama averaged 6,824 and Trump averaged 5,690. Biden’s average stands at an astonishing 8,333. Prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four-term presidency, the State of the Union had been delivered in writing since the time of Thomas Jefferson. George Washington (2,080 words) and John Adams (1,790 words) had been models of brevity.

Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention were 3,000 words. That’s in the range of many of FDR’s State of the Union speeches, but shorter than the average for any president. But Trump didn’t stick to the script. His performance wound up being over 12,000 words long and didn’t end until after midnight on the east coast. At an interminable 92 minutes, it broke the record for longest acceptance speech in history by 18 minutes. But this shouldn’t have been a complete surprise since the second and third longest acceptance speeches in history are Trump’s from 2016 and 2020.

The response inside the hall was less than rapturous. Jonathan Chait described the speech as “incendiary yet dull” and the audience as “shockingly sedate.” It remains to be seen how the country perceived it.

The last hour, at least, was a rehashing of material he uses at MAGA rallies which made it easy to fact check since most of the claims have been previously debunked. Nothing he said was rated better than “half true” and he received a “pants on fire” for claiming the Democrats used COVID to steal the 2020 election. My perception from following along on X/Twitter is that media members long ago stopped watching Trump’s rally speeches, so they seemed shocked at his rambling performance and insane stories. But the only real surprise is that he gave a MAGA rally speech instead of something tailored to a bigger and less unhinged target audience.

I’ve seen several people argue over the last year that the cable news blackout of MAGA rallies was actually helping Trump this time around because people weren’t seeing how much he’s declined mentally since 2020. Anyone who watched his acceptance speech on Thursday night should have noticed, however, so my guess is that Trump badly hurt himself.

If Jonathan Alter’s response is an indication, a lot of Democrats got a new jolt of hope out of the fiasco. Democrats need hope, so thank you to Trump, I guess.

 

At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday, attendees were waving Donald Trump campaign-themed signs that read “Mass Deportations Now!” That’s an indication that the GOP believes this a popular policy, and it’s backed up by the campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who issued a statement reading: “A majority of Americans want mass deportations for illegal immigrants. … On Day One back in the White House, President Trump will begin the largest criminal deportation operation of illegal immigrants and restore the rule of law.”

During the June 29 presidential debate, Trump claimed there are 18 million people in need of deportation, although the recent government numbers estimate there’s only 11 million undocumented people in the country. Whatever the precise number, there’s a lot. Somewhere around 80 percent of them have been living here for more than a decade.

I think pretty much everyone wishes that we didn’t have people entering the country illegally or living here in an undocumented status. In an ideal world, we’d have a perfectly rational and efficient immigration system that provided an exact match of legal immigrants to labor needs, and people wouldn’t flood our borders seeking a better life but would come in an organized and manageable trickle that causes no political backlash.

That’s not the real world, though. So, let’s think about this. If 80 percent of 11 million undocumented people have been living here for a decade or more, what have they been doing during that time? The young ones have been going to school, and the vast majority of the rest have been working, many at multiple jobs. We’re talking about more than 10 million jobs carried out by 7 or 8 million people.

How many of these jobs are costing citizens job opportunities? Or, to put it another way, how many jobs would be left unfilled if tomorrow those 7 or 8 million people were magically deported? If I were in charge of immigration policy, I’d want some answers on that question, because I don’t want to create a bunch of economic disruption without a plan for how to correct it.

There’s one obvious problem. We might argue that we could change our immigration laws in a way that allows legal immigrants to replace those who have been deported, but the people waving those Mass Deportations Now! signs at the Republican convention don’t want to allow the millions of legal immigrants that would be required. Their primary problem with undocumented Americans is that they’re mostly Latino. And the pool of likely legal replacements would not be white Europeans. They’d mostly be people of color, too.

What this means is that there’s no political will to convert our present system in a way that meets our labor needs. If your goal is to prevent non-white immigration, whether legal or illegal, then we have no realistic options for crafting a politically possible policy that is economically functional.

This is why we settle on more unpopular but realistic policies like giving people who’ve been living and working here for a decade or more a pathway to citizenship. Whenever I’ve seen polling on this, I’ve been surprised at how much political support it has. A poll in 2022 found 70 percent support for a pathway to citizenship. A poll from 2024 found 52 percent support for a pathway and 68 percent support for the Dreamer (children of undocumented immigrants) category.

I know a lot depends on how pollsters frame their questions, but it doesn’t seem like a mass deportation program is likely to have majority support. And I believe the idea of mass deportations has more appeal in the abstract than it would if put into practice. This is partly because people wouldn’t actually like the resulting economic disruption, but it’s also because they wouldn’t like seeing families ripped apart and herded into cattle cars or detention camps. The optics of involuntarily moving ten or more million people out of the country would be disturbing. And then there’s the staggering cost of such a program and the fact that it would probably take at least two decades to carry out even if it miraculously got the necessarily funding.

What Trump probably can achieve is deporting more people, quicker, and with less due process. But even that might not even reduce the level of undocumented people because the flow of entrants is controlled as much by external factors, like the political and economic conditions in Central and South America, as it is by American policy.

I guess what I’m saying is that Trump’s mass deportation policy is set up to be a broken promise. It’s a magical solution rather than a real one. The threat is real though because he will try to implement wasteful, economically disruptive and inhumane immigration policies. It’s just that they won’t deliver on ridding the country of millions of Latinos or prevent the entry of millions more. They won’t lead to a more rational and efficient system, because that’s not the goal.

But I’m also saying that I don’t think waving Mass Deportations Now! signs at the convention is politically smart. I think it takes one of the GOP’s best assets, which is widespread unhappiness with the level of undocumented people in the country, and it casts it in way that’s ugly and that people don’t support. I think if they were waving Comprehensive Immigration Reform Now! signs, that would be tremendously effective. That’s because they’d be promising to fix a problem people want fixed without sounding mean and cruel.

Congress was set to make a deal on a comprehensive immigration package and Trump intervened to stop it because he wants it as a campaign issue. Wouldn’t it make sense to campaign on it then, instead of pushing cattle cars and detention camps? It seems like he’s only talking to his own base where too often cruelty is the point. I think it’s a political miscalculation. I hope I’m right.

Hello, hello! It’s that time again. I’ve really been in a retro mood, so here’s an accoustic song from Jethro Tull’s Stormwatch LP:

A good 45 years have passed since this song was recorded, and it still sounds remarkable today.

The bar is open and the jukebox is ready.

Cheers!

I have to thank Peter Navarro. Without him, I wouldn’t know that prison consultant is an occupation and career path. Navarro’s prison consultant is a man named Sam Mangel whose job is “to help prepare well-heeled convicts and their families for time behind bars.” Navarro, of course, is the “first former White House official ever jailed for contempt of Congress.” His offense was refusing to appear before the special committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt.

Navarro just completed his four month sentence:

The federal correctional facility where Navarro has lived since March is one of the oldest prison camps in the country, housing fewer than 200 inmates in its aging infrastructure, with a large Puerto Rican population…

…Navarro, who is in his 70s, worked as a law library clerk during his time in the prison camp, his prison consultant Sam Mangel told CNN.

“Everybody has to work,” Mangel said. “It gave him a chance to write.”

Mangel said Navarro was liked and respected by his fellow inmates while in the prison.

“When I went to visit him, guys were coming up to him, high-fiving him,” Mangel said.

I don’t know if the aging mostly Puerto Rican inmates of this Connecticut prison camp were truly high-fiving Navarro or not. The truth is that I don’t have any experience with prisons. I’ve never been in one and I’ve never visited one. My personal experience with involuntary detention is restricted to drug rehabilitation centers. And one thing I’ve taken away from all my visits with rehab patients and my one voluntary stint in a rehab myself, is that they warn you before release not to return to the same “people, places, and things.” Here’s a typical rehab advisement:

When you’re reading information pertaining to addiction, it doesn’t take long before you encounter the phrase “people, places, and things.” But why are these so important, and what do they have to do with addiction and recovery? The people, places, and things you experience every day play a vital role in encouraging or discouraging substance use, no matter the stage of addiction or recovery. If you want to remain substance-free, you must make some changes to the people, places, and things with which you normally engage.

The phrase “people, places, and things” refers to triggers. Triggers are the problematic cues that lead to a craving, which is a strong—often overwhelming—desire to obtain and use your substance of abuse.

This means who shouldn’t leave rehab and go hang out with the same people or go to the same places where you used drugs or alcohol, and you should be wary of things you associate with using, whether it’s listening to certain music, partying on payday, holidays and weekends or it’s simple boredom and anxiety.

If your circle of friends is made up of hard partiers, they’re not only going to trigger you to party, they’ll most likely encourage it. If you try to hang around them without partying, they might treat you like a turd in the punch bowl.  No one wants to be a party-pooper.

And the same thing is true of criminals. You don’t want to come of prison and immediately go hang out with your criminal gang. You might get a strong—often overwhelming—desire to commit new criminal offenses. And, even if you don’t, they’re going to be plotting new violations of the law. Do you want them to suspect you of snitching? Are you going to report them to the police or become an accessory to their unlawful schemes.

In some cases, the terms of probation will include not associating with members of your old crowd, but that’s not the case for Peter Navarro. And that’s why he’s free to head from his prison camp straight to Milwaukee.

Navarro is expected to quickly travel to Milwaukee so he can appear at the Republican National Convention, where his former boss has been formally nominated as the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee.

He’s going to hang out with Donald Trump and the rest of his old coup-plotting criminal gang. That’s the same people. He’s going to attending a partisan political event. That’s the same place. And, the Associated Press reported several days ago that Navarro is expected to speak at the convention. The reason the January 6 committee subpoenaed Navarro in the first place is because of public statements he made about the 2020 election. So, speaking about the 2024 election is the same thing.

This is a recipe for rapid recidivism. We should expect Navarro to begin criming again, perhaps as soon as today. If he were smart, he’d go fishing in Montana or something and pay no attention to politics. But if Navarro were smart, he never would have wound up in a Connecticut prison camp in the first place.

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump will be investigated by the FBI, Congress and possibly an independent commission, so we will eventually have a full record and timeline. How satisfactory that record will be is another question. Hopefully we won’t be left with sketchy autopsies and dubious ballistics and grassy knolls. But there’s already plenty of fodder for conspiracy theorists. This is mainly because of the staggering fact that the shooter was able to get on the roof of that building at all. The latest jaw-dropping fact comes from a CNN report.

Snipers were stationed inside the building where a gunman climbed the roof and attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, a source familiar with the investigation tells CNN.

The source said the local sniper team hailed from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit.

The team, according to the source, was located on the second floor providing overwatch of the crowd at the rally.

This is almost comical. Let’s take an aerial  look at the scene. This picture is taken after the fact so all the people and cars are gone. But note the location of the parking lot. At the time of the shooting, it was chock full of cop cars and emergency vehicles. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has acknowledged that the parking lot and even the warehouse itself was a staging area for local law enforcement. He didn’t mention that a local sniper team was on the second floor.

Now, let’s look at a report from the Associated Press. This report raises more questions than it answers about the timeline, but it looks like the shooter was milling around the entrance to the event and arousing suspicion prior to moving over to the warehouse.

Several rallygoers reported to local officers that [would-be assassin Thomas] Crooks was acting suspiciously and pacing near the magnetometers, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the investigation.

There’s no mention of him having a long gun at that point. But elsewhere I have seen it noted that because it’s legal to openly carry an AR-15 in Pennsylvania, the Secret Service couldn’t preemptively fire on Crooks so long as he remained on the perimeter. I’ve also watched video taken of Crooks when he was on the roof, and you can see a police officer patrolling on foot.

I think Crooks succeeded in getting shots off because he was so brazen that it defied belief. At some point, he grabbed his rifle and walked right through a phalanx of cops  and up onto a building that was serving as their staging area. He crawled right on top of a sniper team and got in position. And this did not go unnoticed at all. Witnesses alerted the cops and a local cop actually scaled the roof and came under fire and had to retreat.

It’s astonishing that no one stopped him on the ground, but who would suspect someone would risk detection in the staging area and choose to shoot from on top of the sniper team? It must have seemed like the most secured area of the fairgrounds and its environs.

It never would have worked if Crooks had the slightest concern for being arrested or killed. So, all I can really say in defense of the security for the event is that it’s hard to stop suicide attacks because deterrence has no impact.

Still, his success in getting on that roof and getting shots off is so against the odds, that it’s inevitable that people will wonder if he had help. Did someone usher him through the parking lot? Was the gun hidden ahead of time?

I suspect that these questions won’t have the same lasting power as the grassy knoll of JFK fame, simply because Trump survived. If he had died, I have no doubt that this story, no matter how true it may be, is so implausible that it would never be accepted by a large swath of the public.

I do think one thing we should take from this is that it should not be legal to openly carry semiautomatic rifles in public. I also think that if we can have drug-free school zones, we can have AR-15-free zones around the perimeters of political rallies.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20 year-old would-be assassin of Donald Trump, was a member of the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, “a premier shooting facility” in the hills south of Pittsburgh. He was a math and science prize-winning 2022 graduate of affluent, suburban Bethel Park High School. Two months ago, he graduated from the Community College of Allegheny County with an associate degree in engineering science.

His parents are reported to be professional counselors of some sort. The father is a libertarian and the mother a Democrat, but Crooks was registered as a Republican. According to the account of a former classmate reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Crooks was “definitely a conservative” during his high school years who “no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side” during a history class mock debate.

He was employed in the kitchen of a nursing home and had a remarkably light social media footprint that doesn’t indicate any particular ideological fervor. At the time of the shooting, he was wearing a t-shirt from the popular YouTube channel, Demolition Ranch. Newsweek reports, “The channel, hosted by Matt Carriker, boasts millions of subscribers and features videos that explore the capabilities of various firearms and explosive devices.”

As far as I know, he left no note or explanation for his actions. FBI special agent in charge, Kevin Rojek, said there is “no indication of any mental health issues” and that Crooks was not on law enforcement’s radar. If there’s any indication of discontent with Trump, it’s a one-time January 20, 2021 donation Crooks made to the Progressive Turnout Project for fifteen dollars. The date is significant because it was Inauguration Day for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and came exactly two weeks after Trump’s violent attempted coup.

So, what does that leave us with as Americans?

Some are pointing to the fact that Crooks was a registered Republican with conservative views to absolve the left of any responsibility for the shooting. Others are arguing that the left’s warnings about a potential second term are so overwrought and alarmist that it provides a rationale for murder that must have influenced Crooks. Concern that the assassination attempt will fuel further violence is widespread, as are calls for everyone to tone down the rhetoric. President Biden was explicit on this point in his Sunday night address to the nation from the Oval Office:

“We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” Mr. Biden said. “The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do that.”

He added that “politics must never be a literal battlefield, God forbid, a killing field.”

I very much want to follow President Biden’s advice to cool down the political rhetoric, but there are limits to what I can manage. I don’t consider anything I’ve ever written about Trump to be irresponsible or hyperbole and I have no plan on pulling my punches now.

So, to begin, I have to emphasize that there no evidence that the rhetoric of the left had any influence on Crooks at all. If he was a Republican who was jolted by Trump’s actions on January 6 into abandoning his party, he’s not alone in that. When we look at former Republican Never Trumpers like Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt and Stuart Stevens, we don’t argue that they were dupes of left-wing propaganda. They oppose Trump for many of the same reasons that Democrats oppose him, but not because Democrats oppose him. And their rhetoric about the threat Trump poses to the nation is just as heated as you’ll find from any partisan Democrat.

Having said that, I won’t lie to you. Behind the scenes on the left, I’ve encountered some disappointment that the assassination was unsuccessful. I know this from my own personal interactions. People might not like me acknowledging this, but it’s one of the most important elements of the situation the country now faces. And to explain why this is the case without endorsing it, I can point you to a piece I wrote on July 2nd, called We Are Absolved From All Allegiance to the Supreme Court.

In that piece, I argued that the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the timely prosecution of Trump for January 6 and the classified documents case, and then to provide Trump with near-total immunity for all official acts he made in office or might make in a second term, had made Trump’s defeat in November essential to any peaceful resolution to our current divisions.

Why did I say this?

I said it because the left in this country is demanding justice for Trump’s crimes. It amounts to a faith in the system that it can manage something as serious as an attempted coup by a then-sitting president. How would you have expected the left to respond if Trump’s coup had been successful and Biden and Harris had never taken office? In that case, because the system failed, the laws could no longer be said to have the consent of the people and violence would have been inevitable.

But the system held and the transfer of power took place. And then the system went about protecting itself and us by holding the people who tried to carry out the coup responsible. Rioters were arrested, lawyers were disbarred and indicted and convicted, political operatives and fake electors were indicted and convicted. Fox News was held liable for hundreds of millions in damages. And Trump was arrested, not only for January 6 but for mishandling classified documents and committing business fraud. He was also held liable for sexual assault. For all these reasons, the left remained peaceful. The system was working.

On July 11, two days before the assassination attempt, Trump was supposed to be sentenced on 34 felony counts of filing false business records in New York to cover up an affair with Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But because the Supreme Court had ruled that evidence stemming from official acts while Trump was in office cannot be used in court against him, the sentencing hearing was put off until September 18, and it’s possible the whole case will be thrown out. It was also announced that the federal January 6 case against Trump will be delayed past the election. As I’m writing this, it has been reported that the federal documents case has been dismissed by Judge Eileen Cannon. This last blow, coming two days after the assassination attempt, could not have been a motive for Crooks, but it’s of a piece with the others. Collectively, they tell the people that the system has failed to protect itself or to protect them.

And, this is vitally important, because Trump has threatened revenge against the system and his political opponents. And, because the Supreme Court has given the office of the president the right to commit almost any crime with impunity so long as it can be tenuously connected to an “official act,” the expectation now is that people will have no legal protection from Trump if he is reelected.

Now I wouldn’t be being straight with you if I didn’t acknowledge a final factor leading to some acceptance of political violence among opponents of Donald Trump. And that’s that the Democrats’ candidate to oppose him, Joe Biden, is broadly thought not to be up to the task of winning. The two weeks leading up to the assassination attempt were dominated with news about efforts to replace him as the nominee. This had the effect of making a second Trump term look not only likely but inevitable.

And that would lead to total system failure. Not only would Trump not be held to account, but he’d have free rein to settle scores and destroy the institutions that ensure equal justice in this country, including free rein to commit and order criminal acts of retribution.

I began my July 2 piece by writing “Today, for the first time in a long time, I read the entire Declaration of Independence. It just felt like something I needed to do. Some people feel like fleeing the country, but I’d be ashamed to give up the fight.” That wasn’t written in some kind of vacuum. It was in response to what I was hearing from people I know on the left in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. The most common thing I heard was that it was time to leave the country. And the reason was the anticipated election of Trump and subsequent collapse of the system.

Is this hyperbole? Is it irresponsible to openly express what people are feeling? The most important part of the Declaration of Independence is the idea that governments are instituted to secure the people’s rights, and derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The people voted in 2020 for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They gave their consent for them to govern. Trump tried to ignore this and his actions led to violence, property destruction and death. There was no consent for that.

There was also no consent for a conservative judicial branch to protect Trump from accountability, allowing him to run for president again without first having his days in court to account for his actions. There was no consent for a conservative judicial branch to turn the presidency into a lawless dictatorship. And there will be no consent to the crimes of retribution that Trump carries out if he is reelected, nor will there be any meaningful legal recourse to restrain him.

The opposite of political consent is political violence. I can tell you right now, without endorsing it, that if Trump is reelected and behaves as anticipated in a lawless and spiteful manner, there will be violent resistance, and it will be violent precisely because the Supreme Court has taken away all non-peaceful ways of resisting. I predicted this would happen before the assassination attempt, and I have no idea what motivated Crooks, but I can say with certainty why his effort has some quiet support.

There’s still a way out of this hellhole. Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was recently interviewed by Catherine Kim of Politico, and I think she made some important points. She said she wasn’t surprised that an attempt had been made on Trump’s life because “When polarizing figures (Trump) attempt to normalize political violence and make that a way in which they quiet moderates in their own party and opponents, they can’t stop where that violence will go.” But she also saw a path of hope, and it involves defeating Trump at the ballot box.

What we really need to happen in America has just happened in France and in Poland and even in Brazil — where Bolsonaro faced an assassination attempt — is for that broad swath of center left to center right to stand up and say, “We want a different kind of politician, and we want a different kind of political society.”

…What we need is accountability, not just for this political actor, but for anyone using political violence, such as the January 6 insurrectionists. You stop political violence through accountability, widespread condemnation from your own side and public revulsion.

…We’ve seen political violence reduce in our own country when political parties that tried to spread it, like the Know Nothing Party in the 1800s, fail or fall apart.

And so the best way to stop it is to vote out the political leaders who are trying to use incendiary rhetoric and normalize violence in our system.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but with Biden’s struggles and Trump’s sentencing delay, faith that this country will vote against Trump and he will face accountability hit a nadir in the days leading up to the assassination attempt and irrespective of the shooter’s motives, the despair felt as a result is fueling tacit support for desperate measures.

The effort to get Biden to withdraw as a candidate is part and parcel of the same sense of panic. But I think it’s possible that people will respond to the shooting not by rallying around Trump or by supporting more violence against him. Rather, we might say, as Ms. Kleinfeld suggests, “We want a different kind of politician” and vote against “the political leader who uses incendiary rhetoric to normalize violence in our system.”

That’s still my hope, because political violence is a sign of societal collapse, and I can’t see any way we won’t see more of it if Trump is victorious in November. Yes, things have gotten this toxic and it’s difficult to tone down the rhetoric because a lot of the rhetoric is all too on point. The stakes in this election are minor for the right. They lose, they get more of the same which looks pretty good compared to how other countries are faring. But the stakes for everyone else, and anyone who believes in the principles of representative non-monarchial government, could not be higher.

When it comes to our divisions, I do not blame the left’s rhetoric. I blame Donald Trump first, and the Supreme Court second. They want to govern without consent, and that has historically predictable outcomes. The tonic for violence is hope, and hope has almost left the building. That’s why calls to cool down the rhetoric will likely be unavailing, even if they are eminently responsible and appropriate.

It’s unequivocally wrong to commit or support political violence against Trump or anyone else. I condemn what Thomas Matthew Crooks did. That doesn’t mean Trump doesn’t need to be held accountable. And it certainly doesn’t mean he should be elected. This is especially true if you want to see this country bind up its wounds.

If it’s true that Israel has killed Mohammed Deif, perhaps we’ve reached a logical end point to the active phase of the Israel-Hamas War. The creator and leader of the al-Qassam Brigades, Deif is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention.” His 1990’s campaign of suicide bombings is believed responsible for the electoral defeat of Shimon Peres and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, which heralded the failure of the Oslo Accords. He’s been the number one target of Israel intelligence for decades and survived seven assassination attempts. But most importantly, he and Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar are considered the architects of the October 7 massacre that instigated the war.

Ideally, for Israel, both Deif and Sinwar will pay for the massacre with their lives, but maybe one out of two will be sufficient to agree to a ceasefire. If Deif’s death is confirmed, it will be an obvious point for Netanyahu’s government to declare a victory of sorts that can satisfy hardliners in his governing coalition that a pause in fighting is justified.

I have my doubts that this coalition will ever see the merits in a ceasefire. Netanyahu is barely clinging to power and still faces criminal prosecution and an accounting for the mistakes that led to October 7. An active state of war is his best insurance against a day of reckoning, and it also hurts Joe Biden’s reelection chances. Netanyahu would clearly prefer that Donald Trump win November’s election.

Still, there’s pressure to bring the surviving hostages home, and a ceasefire plan is on the table. On Friday, President Biden announced that the framework of a deal had been agreed to by Israel and Hamas, but predictably Netanyahu immediately reneged by “trying to hold up an agreement with demands for an enforcement mechanism that would prevent Hamas operatives from returning to northern Gaza.”

But that was before Deif’s death was reported. Just maybe, Netanyahu will see fit to agree now.