Make It Stop

The political news cycle simply won't stop buffeting us with unprecedented events and news.

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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There’s so much happening right now. The news cycle is seemingly on steroids. Here is my quick rundown on what’s happened in the last 72 hours — and what it means.

1. It feels like an eternity ago, but on Thursday evening, President Biden gave an “exceedingly impressive performance at his first solo press conference in months” and then topped that on Friday with a “‘fiery,’ ‘rousing’ and "defiant" campaign appearance in Detroit, Michigan which included chants of “don’t quit” from the partisan audience. Those back-to-back events undermined the argument that Biden is incapable of carrying out his responsibilities as president and significantly decreased the likelihood that Biden would dumped from the presidential ticket.

   Then, former President Donald Trump was shot on Saturday evening.

   

   Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

   That seismic event took all the momentum out of the “drop Biden” movement and likely put this discussion to bed. Democrats are playing with fire in having a presidential nominee who will be under enormous scrutiny for the next four months and risks becoming a distraction from Trump’s lawless and narcissistic mishegas. But here we are.

2. Oh yeah, Trump was shot on Saturday. Let me say at the outset that political violence, in any form, is abhorrent. I’m glad that President Trump survived this assassination attempt, and so should every American. Moreover, this was neither staged nor a false flag operation. Please keep such arguments out of the comments.

3. Several Republican elected officials have sought to blame Joe Biden — and Democratic rhetoric about the threat Trump represents to democracy — for the shooting.

   

   

   

4. As I noted on Twitter, there is political hypocrisy - and then there are members of a party whose presidential nominee incited a mob to attack the Capitol and directly threatened the life of his Vice President, attacking Democrats for using overheated political rhetoric. No political figure in my lifetime has more lustily embraced political violence and empowered political extremists than Donald Trump - and it’s not remotely close. As my MSNBC colleague Steve Benen pointed out a few days ago,

   “It was literally last week when Trump described the Biden administration as a “fascist government,” as his campaign operation issued a fundraising appeal asserting as fact that President Joe Biden is “a threat to democracy.”

   Two weeks earlier, the former president wrote on his social media platform, “JOE BIDEN IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, AND A THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL AND EXISTENCE OF OUR COUNTRY ITSELF!!!” The hysterical missive dovetailed with months of rhetoric in which Trump has told voters the United States would likely cease to exist if he loses.

5. Moreover, Donald Trump IS a threat to democracy. In 2020, he not only refused to acknowledge that he’d lost the presidential election, but he actively tried to overturn it, including inciting a mob to attack the Capitol and stop the election certification. I’m not always comfortable with accusations of fascism lodged at Trump, but this is a man who said he’d be a dictator on “only” day one of his presidency, who traffics in authoritarian rhetoric and has called for the rounding up and mass deportation of up to 20 million undocumented immigrants. Democrats have a duty and an obligation to tell this to the American people because it’s true. What they can’t do is call for political violence — and they haven’t. That would be the province of Republicans.

6. The threat to American democracy was magnified this morning when Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case against Donald Trump.