Fraud Alert Regarding The Atlantic

How to Build an Autocracy

David Frum

The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.

It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

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Donald Trump Declares a Vision of Religious Nationalism

Emma Green

At the annual prayer breakfast in Washington, the president focused on the violent, ideological threats to America.

When Donald Trump looks out on the world, he sees a landscape of potential threats to the United States and its values. “Freedom of religion is a sacred right, but also a right under threat all around us,” the president said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. “The world is under serious, serious threat in so many different ways,” he went on, “but we’re going to straighten it out. That’s what I do. I fix things.”

He laid out a vision of what it means to end these threats to United States: Stop terrorism. End the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians. Defend the country’s borders from those who “would exploit that generosity to undermine the values we hold so dear.” Religious Americans also feel threatened within the U.S., he said: “That is why I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment,” a provision of the tax code that prohibits religious leaders and institutions endorsing or opposing political candidates, “and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” Repealing the Johnson Amendment would theoretically allow houses of worship and religious leaders to openly advocate for political candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status, while also allowing them to funnel religious donations into explicitly political efforts.

Red State, Blue City

David A. Graham

The United States is coming to resemble two countries, one rural and one urban. What happens when they go to war?

The United States now has its most metropolitan president in recent memory: a Queens-bred, skyscraper-building, apartment-dwelling Manhattanite. Yet it was rural America that carried Donald Trump to victory; the president got trounced in cities. Republican reliance on suburbs and the countryside isn’t new, of course, but in the presidential election, the gulf between urban and nonurban voters was wider than it had been in nearly a century. Hillary Clinton won 88 of the country’s 100 biggest counties, but still went down to defeat.

American cities seem to be cleaving from the rest of the country, and the temptation for liberals is to try to embrace that trend. With Republicans controlling the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most statehouses, Democrats are turning to local ordinances as their best hope on issues ranging from gun control to the minimum wage to transgender rights. Even before Inauguration Day, big-city mayors laid plans to nudge the new administration leftward, especially on immigration—and, should that fail, to join together in resisting its policies.

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters

Olga Khazan

Multiple studies suggest social conservatives are more attuned to threats—even when they are not real.

One of the few comforts liberals had in the aftermath of the election was the anecdotal reporting that fake-news purveyors found it easier to get conservatives to believe their baloney.

As one such fake-news entrepreneur, responsible for articles with headlines like, “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide,” told NPR: "We’ve tried to do [fake news with] liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

No doubt this served as a signal, to some, that if fake news works better on Trump supporters, it must be because liberals are smarter than conservatives. “I can safely binge-drink the next four years away,” some liberals might have thought, “since I have all these extra brain cells to burn.”

(Peter Frederick Rothermel / Library of Congress / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)

The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion

Olga Khazan

Conservatives are more likely to support issues like immigration and Obamacare if the message is “morally reframed” to suit their values.

Ever since Donald Trump handed down his executive order temporarily halting all immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations for three months and barring refugees from Syria indefinitely, the social-media outpouring from liberals has focused, understandably, on how unfair the policy is to Muslims.

Yes, this is a refugee family in handcuffs, in America, for being muslim. That little girl? Handcuffed.

History will judge us very harshly. pic.twitter.com/KIR50K64ZO
— Amir (@amiraminiMD) January 31, 2017

Those who didn’t decry the injustice of it all instead highlighted how important it is to protect refugees from harm (myself included.) They point out that Anne Frank’s family tried in vain to secure asylum in the U.S. in the 1940s. “Anne Frank today is a Syrian girl,” The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote.

Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

David A. Graham

Marking Black History Month, the president made some strange observations about Douglass and Martin Luther King, but mostly talked about himself.

Does Donald Trump actually know who Frederick Douglass was? The president mentioned the great abolitionist, former slave, and suffrage campaigner during a Black History Month event Wednesday morning, but there’s little to indicate that Trump knows anything about his subject, based on the rambling, vacuous commentary he offered:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.” Within moments, he was off-topic, talking about some of his favorite subjects: CNN, himself, and his feud with CNN.

President Donald Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast — Carlos Barria / Reuters

A Publicity Stunt at the National Prayer Breakfast?

Jeremy Venook

In his speech at the annual event, the president went on a digression promoting The Apprentice, a show he co-produces.

The National Prayer Breakfast, held annually in Washington, D.C., is typically a scandal-free part of the president’s schedule. Since 1953, every commander-in-chief, usually alongside members of Congress, Cabinet officials, and a wide variety of prominent guests, has taken one morning a year to address the gathering, which the Christian organization The Fellowship hosts as an annual acknowledgement of the role of faith in American public life. The most notable story to arise out of the event in recent years was when Ben Carson, in a speech at the 2013 event, railed against “moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility” under the Obama administration, a moment that many say jump-started his eventual run for president in 2016.

How Conservatives Can Save America

Conor Friedersdorf

If properly understood and marshaled, they “can be a liberal democracy's strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements.”

Conservatives can save America in 2017.

That’s my takeaway from a passage that I haven’t stopped thinking about since Donald Trump’s election. It appears in a 2005 book about the forces that tear countries apart.

It’s impossible to read without thinking of the United States right now.

Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton University, studied places like the former Yugoslavia that descended into bloody civil war, as well as citizens of successful democracies in Europe and North America, and identified the conditions and political predispositions that make civil strife most likely. She found that across eras and countries, some humans, who she calls “libertarians,” strongly prefer individual freedom and diversity, while others, who she calls “authoritarians,” possess a perhaps innate discomfort with difference that causes them to prefer sameness and unity, even if coercive measures are needed to enforce it.

A Clarifying Moment in American History

Eliot A. Cohen

There should be nothing surprising about what Donald Trump has done in his first week—but he has underestimated the resilience of Americans and their institutions.

I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.

Donald Trump's Blunder Down Under

Conor Friedersdorf

Citizens of an unusually close ally now regard the president as a volatile, vainglorious, untrustworthy bully after he needlessly disrespected their leader in a phone call.

Dishonor and distraction. That is what Donald Trump brought the United States Wednesday when news broke that he inexplicably lashed out at the prime minister of Australia in a phone call, tried to renege on an agreement between the two nations, and bragged as ever about himself. To add insult to insolence, he then took to Twitter to complain.

The Washington Post first reported on the self-indulgent outburst:

President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it. At one point, Trump informed Turnbull that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day — including Russian President Vladimir Putin — and that “this was the worst call by far.”

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.