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Former President Donald Trump gave a long and deranged speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend. We need to stop treating support for Trump as if it’s just another political choice and instead work to isolate his renewed threat to our democracy and our national security.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Cover story: The new anarchy Special ed shouldn’t be separate. Pregnancy shouldn’t work like this.

A Test of Character

Donald Trump went to CPAC and gave a speech that was, even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory. Amusing as it is to listen to President von Munchausen and his many “sir” stories, Trump is the former commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces and the current front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. He is as  dangerous as ever to our democracy and to our national security.

But I also want to turn attention from Trump’s evident emotional issues to consider a more unsettling question: How, in 2023, after all we know about this man and his attacks on our government and our Constitution, do we engage the people who heard that speech and support Donald Trump’s candidacy? How do we turn the discussion away from partisanship and toward good citizenship—and to the protection of our constitutional order?

In the past, reporters have approached such questions gingerly, poking their head into coffee shops, asking for comments at rallies, and claiming to overhear conversations at gas stations, all in the service of trying to understand Trump voters. (Only The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper has ever managed to get anywhere in such interviews, and the answers he elicits are often terrifyingly dumb.) These respectful conversations with Trump voters have produced almost nothing useful beyond failed theories about “economic anxiety” and other rationalizations that capture little about why Trump voters continue to support a posse of authoritarian goons.

In 2016, Trump supporters could lean on a slew of hopeful arguments: Trump is just acting; he’ll hire professional staff; the “good” Republicans will keep him in line; the job will sober him up. All of these would be disproved over time. (It didn’t help that the alternative at the time was Hillary Clinton, for whom I voted but whose campaign was a tough sell to many people.) But by 2020, Trump, along with his enablers at Fox and other right-wing outlets, had created a kind of impermeable anti-reality field around the GOP base. This shell of pure denial defeated almost any argument about anything.

Media, flummoxed by having a sociopathic narcissist in the Oval Office, treated Trump like a normal political leader, and soon we all—even me—became accustomed to the fact that the president of the United States routinely sounded like the guy at the end of the bar who makes you decide to take your drink over to a table or a booth. When Joe Biden won, I hoped that this strange fever gripping so many Americans would finally pass. But the fever did not break, not even after January 6, 2021, and the many hearings that showed Trump’s responsibility for the events of that black day.

And now Trump has kicked off his attempt to regain office with a litany of lunacy. His speech at CPAC has been recounted by my Atlantic colleagues; John Hendrickson notes Trump’s return to the classics of grievance, and McKay Coppins describes how Trump has managed to become part of the typically boring CPAC kitsch.

But we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s gibbering for harmless political glossolalia. As Charlie Sykes said this morning, CPAC is “a serious threat masquerading as a cultic circus cum clown car,” and revealed “what a Trump 2.0 would look like.” This is a former president whose pitch included “I am your retribution.” Retribution for what, exactly, was left unsaid, but revenge for being turned out of office is likely high on the list. The Trumpian millennium turned into a tawdry four years of grubby incompetence and an ignominious loss. If Trump wins again, there will be a flurry of pardons, the same cast of miscreants will return to Pennsylvania Avenue, and, this time, they won’t even pretend to care about the Constitution or the rule of law.

Imagine an administration where we’ll all be nostalgic for the high-mindedness of Bill Barr.

Trump also reminded us that he is an existential menace to our national security. He reveled in a story he first told last spring—almost certainly a fiction—about how he informed a meeting of NATO leaders that he would let the Russians roll over them if they weren’t paid up. (Trump still thinks NATO is a protection racket.) He then fantasized about how easily a Russian attack could destroy NATO’s headquarters.

We’ve all cataloged this kind of Trumpian weirdness many times, and I still feel pity for the fact-checkers who try to keep up with him. But I wonder if there is any point. By now it should be clear that the people listening to Trump don’t care about facts, or even about policy or politics. They enjoy the show, and they want it back on TV for another four years. And this is a problem not with Trump but with the voters.

It is long past time to admit that support for Trump, after all that we now know, is a moral failing. As I wrote in a recent book, there is such a thing as being a bad citizen in a democracy, and we should cease the pretend arguments about policy—remember, the 2020 GOP convention didn’t even bother with a platform. Instead, anyone who cares about the health of American democracy, of any party or political belief, should say clearly that to applaud Trump’s fantasies and threats at CPAC is to show an utter lack of civic character. (I might say that it is no better than applauding David Duke, but why invoke the former KKK leader when Trump has already had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who he seems to think is a swell guy?)

The man who bellowed and sweated his way through almost two hours of authoritarian madness is still the same man who instigated an attack on our Capitol (and on his own vice president), the man who would hand our allies to Russia if they’re behind on the vig, the man who thinks a free press is his enemy, the man who tried to wave away a pandemic as thousands and thousands of Americans died.

Stigma and judgment have a place in politics. There was a time when we forced people out of public life for offenses far less than Donald Trump’s violent and seditious corruption. We were a better country for it, and returning to that better time starts with media outlets holding elected Republicans to account for Trump’s statements—but also with each of us refusing to accept rationalizations and equivocation from even our friends and family. I said in 2016 that the Trump campaign was a test of character, and that millions of us were failing it. The stakes are even clearer and steeper now; we cannot fail this test again.

Related:

The martyr at CPAC Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be.

Today’s News

The Biden administration is reportedly considering a mass-vaccination campaign for poultry as an outbreak of bird flu continues to kill millions of chickens. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced yesterday that he would not be seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. A stampede at a GloRilla concert in Rochester, New York, on Sunday night killed one person and injured nine more. Two of the injured are in critical condition.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up more reader responses about organized religion.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Teresa Kopec / Getty

A Bird’s-Eye View

By Elaine Godfrey

Have you ever looked at a duck? I mean really looked at one.

If you have, then you’ve probably noticed how a duck somehow manages to appear graceful and goofy at the same time, with her rounded head nestled perfectly into her body and her rubbery feet flapping beneath the water. Sometimes she’ll twist her elegant neck around to peck and pull at her wings, preening—which actually involves gathering oil from glands near her tail and combing it through her feathers to keep them waterproof.

This is important work for a duck. And it can be nice to watch, pondering how else she occupies her time and letting your mind wander back to childhood memories of Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck and Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings. I indulged in this for a while this week during a tour of the National Zoo’s Bird House, in Northwest Washington, D.C. After six years of renovation, the exhibit will finally reopen on March 13.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Some folks on social media recently pointed me to a documentary on Amazon Prime titled The Sound of 007. I am a sucker for all things James Bond (and I have been known to have some controversial views on casting the role), but I especially love the music. The brassy horns and electric guitars, the cheesy lyrics, the overwrought performances—all of it makes me wish I were playing baccarat in London or Hong Kong in 1967 while smoking and saying things like “banco.”

There’s a lot in the special about John Barry, the king of 007 scores, and especially about the origins of Monty Norman’s instantly recognizable theme. (Weird factoid: It was originally meant for a musical that Norman was writing based on a V. S. Naipaul novel set among the East Indian community of Trinidad, and so it had a kind of bouncy, sitar-influenced sound. Barry jazzed it up.) The documentary includes many interviews and archival clips, and some of the stories behind these songs are amazing: Dame Shirley Bassey had to take off her bustier to hit the notes in “Goldfinger,” and Tom Jones says he nearly passed out trying to finish off “Thunderball.” There’s also some honest talk about the not-great themes: Dame Shirley detested “Moonraker,” and no one much liked “All Time High,” from Octopussy. The producer Harry Saltzman apparently tried to veto one of the true classics, “Diamonds Are Forever,” because it was too risqué. (No, really.) I admit I yawned a bit at the later contributions from Sam Smith and Billie Eilish, but The Sound of 007 is an engrossing musical tour through the Bond movies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Well-placed Republican insiders are mobilizing to block Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination.

For instance, Trump is conspicuously excluded from the roster of potential 2024 candidates whom the Club for Growth has invited to speak this weekend at a retreat the conservative group is hosting for its biggest donors in Palm Beach, Florida—Trump’s backyard. Likewise, the sprawling network of donors associated with the Koch brothers declared last month that it would work in the 2024 GOP primaries to elect a nominee who “will turn the page on the past several years,” an unmistakable reference to moving beyond Trump. And though they’re still a minority, a steady stream of prominent Republican strategists, donors, and elected officials are openly predicting that the party will lose in 2024 if it nominates Trump again.

[David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame]

If all of this sounds like an echo of the 2016 Republican primary race, that’s because it is. Both the Club for Growth and the Koch network opposed Trump’s nomination then too. Big donors almost entirely shunned him, hardly any elected officials endorsed him until after he had already secured the nomination, and party leaders such as Senator Lindsey Graham warned that “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

None of this stopped Trump from winning the nomination, and, except for the relatively small band of Never Trump conservative activists, all of that internal Republican opposition evaporated after he won the White House.

Whether this institutional opposition to Trump will prove more effective and durable now is an open question. Republicans resistant to Trump are cautiously optimistic that this time will be different. That’s partly because of signs that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might unify the party’s anti-Trump forces more effectively than any of his rivals did in 2016. But it’s also because those who oppose Trump are mobilizing earlier than they did in the 2016 race.

“The thing about 2015 is that Trump had the initiative; he surprised everyone,” says the conservative strategist Bill Kristol, who became one of Trump’s leading GOP critics. “The establishment was always on the back foot trying to react to him, and the candidates were diffuse, so there was never a coming together. Here, at least in theory, you have big institutions mobilizing against him early, and they are ready from the beginning.”

Yet even with those undeniable shifts in the landscape, many Republicans remain dubious that opposition from party leaders and big donors will have much impact on Trump’s fate in 2024.

Almost everyone in the GOP agrees that Trump faces political challenges now that he didn’t then—in particular, more widespread concerns among Republican voters about whether he can win a general election. But some believe that, if anything, more overt opposition to Trump from the party elite will help him convince his die-hard supporters that he alone is fighting for them. “Trump is such a unique political figure that, in some ways, you could argue that having all these institutional forces mobilize against him makes him stronger,” Craig Robinson, the former political director for the Republican Party in Iowa, told me.

Trump’s camp is ready to make those sort of arguments against the groups and party leaders that oppose him. Hogan Gidley, Trump’s former White House deputy press secretary, says it is “naive” to assume that the party establishment could really unite behind a single alternative, as many of Trump’s critics hope. But, he adds, “if in fact there is a coalescing this time,” Trump and his allies are prepared to argue that it represents a continuation of “a concerted effort by the establishment to try to take down someone they couldn’t control.”

Given how quickly top Republicans bent the knee to Trump after he was elected, it may be hard to remember that in 2016, he was more distant from his party’s leadership than any candidate who had won either side’s presidential nomination since the Democratic outsiders George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The McGovern and Carter victories were the direct products of the rule changes that Democrats instituted after their bitter nomination fight in 1968 to shift power for selecting the presidential nominee from party bosses, elected officials, and other insiders at their quadrennial national convention to voters through primaries and caucuses. Republicans quickly followed suit.

Over time, though, political scientists began to perceive a striking pattern in which the new system took on more characteristics of the old one. Although the reformed rules ostensibly empowered voters to select the nominees during the marathon of primaries and caucuses, in fact, the winners were usually those around whom party insiders coalesced during what became known as “the invisible primary.” That phrase referred to the rolling courtship of donors, other elected officials, and party interest groups that the contenders slogged through for a year or more before the first voters cast a ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The “invisible primary” didn’t always have a clear winner, but when it did, that candidate almost always won the nomination—as demonstrated by the Democrats Walter Mondale in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1992, Al Gore in 2000, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and by the Republicans George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012. The race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 probably stood as the premier example of a contest in which the invisible primary ended in a standoff.

The pattern of primary voters eventually choosing the candidate who had first secured the most support from elected officials, interest groups, and donors became so reliable that the political scientist Marty Cohen and his three colleagues could flatly declare, per the title of their 2008 book, The Party Decides. “The reformers of the 1970s tried to wrest the presidential nomination away from insiders and to bestow it on rank-and-file partisans,” they wrote, “but the people who are regularly active in party politics have regained much of the control that was lost.”

Trump’s march to the 2016 GOP nomination represents the most explicit recent exception to the “party decides” theory. Trump amassed almost none of the assets that usually boost nominees. During the 2016 primaries, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio all outraised him. Those rivals also won far more endorsements than Trump did; only Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and three governors endorsed Trump at any point in the primaries. And to describe Trump’s ground-level political organizations in the early states as skeletal would be to overstate the meat on their bones.

Trump in 2016 overcame these limitations with forceful and flamboyant performances at Republican debates, arena-size rallies in the key states, and, above all, a wave of unprecedented national-media coverage in which he appealed to white voters’ anxieties over racial and cultural change more openly than any national candidate in either party had since George Wallace. “Trump was able to run a national media campaign to win the nomination, and that is something that we just didn’t expect to be a successful path,” Cohen, a political scientist at James Madison University, told me this week.

Cohen, like many others, believes that one principal reason Trump survived such widespread resistance from party leaders is that those opposed to him never united behind a single alternative, splintering instead among Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and former Ohio Governor John Kasich. “I think that when the party is able to coalesce on an acceptable candidate, they still have a pretty good chance at getting them nominated,” Cohen said. “The question that’s pressing is how difficult is it now to solidify around one particular candidate?”

That exact question is looming again for the Republicans skeptical of Trump. Many in the party believe the ceiling on Trump’s potential support is lower now than it was in the 2016 primaries—particularly among college-educated Republican voters, who mostly voted against him even then. But Trump’s solid hold on about one-third of GOP voters could still allow him to win if no one consolidates the remainder of the party.

To many of Trump’s GOP skeptics, the biggest difference from 2016 is the possibility that DeSantis might unify the party’s anti-Trump forces more thoroughly than anyone did then. “I think you are going to see a lot of folks coalesce around DeSantis this summer after he runs around the track and does his formal announcement,” predicts the GOP strategist Scott Reed, who served as Dole’s campaign manager in 1996.

DeSantis is certainly generating enormous interest: A retreat he convened in Florida last weekend drew a procession of elected officials, conservative activists, and donors. And all of the Republican strategists I spoke with in recent days expect donors to be much more conscious than they were in 2016 of concentrating their dollars on a few candidates to reduce the chances that Trump can again divide and conquer a large and unwieldy field. DeSantis will likely be lavishly funded, but that calculation could make it difficult for many others contemplating the race to raise enough money to truly compete.

However, many of those strategists also remain unconvinced that the party’s Trump skeptics will move en masse to the DeSantis side until they see more evidence that he can handle the rigors of a national campaign—and of running against Trump. Mike Murphy, a GOP strategist who helped direct the super PAC supporting Jeb Bush in 2016, told me that though “the donor mentality is going to be a lot different … it’s not going to be binary: ‘We’re all going to be for DeSantis, and nobody else can raise any money.’”

[Read: The coming Republican amnesia]

In fact, several GOP strategists I spoke with predicted that with DeSantis and Trump both defining themselves primarily as pugnacious culture warriors, there might be room in the top tier for a third candidate who offers a less polarizing and more optimistic message. And one name came up repeatedly as a possibility for that role: South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the chamber. “I think he could come here and do very well,” Robinson, the former Iowa GOP political director, said.

What’s clear already is that, for groups, donors, and candidates alike, opposing Trump won’t be for the fainthearted. Without identifying specific targets, Gidley, for instance, says Trump’s allies are prepared to argue that big donors organizing against him are doing so to protect business interests in China. “That’s going to be a massive point that was not talked about in 2016 that will most assuredly be exposed in 2024,” says Gidley, now an official at the America First Policy Institute, which was founded by former Trump aides.

Even against such threats, the conditions seem to be in place for the GOP institutions skeptical of Trump to move back toward the “party decides” model in 2024. Jennifer Horn, the former Republican state party chair in New Hampshire and a leading Trump critic, told me that it’s likely the institutional resistance to him this time “will be stronger and more organized” than it was in 2016. Doubts about Trump’s electability, she added, could resonate with more GOP primary voters than opponents’ 2016 arguments against his morality or fealty to conservative principles did. “His biggest vulnerability in a primary is whether or not he can win a general election,” she said.

But Horn cautions that such internal resistance could melt away again after a few primaries if it looks like Trump is on track to win the nomination. “If we get into the primaries and Trump is winning, it will all go to the side, just as in 2016,” Horn predicted. “We saw the degree to which the party and the donors and everyone else completely sold their soul and became all Trump, all the time. If he becomes the guy again, he’s going to be everybody’s guy.”

The way conservatives tell it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a hive of anti-Trump villainy, filled with agents looking for any excuse to hound the former president with investigative witch hunts. But the thing to understand about Donald Trump’s legal troubles is that they exist not because federal agents are out to get him, but despite the fact that the FBI is full of Trump supporters who would really like to leave him alone.

This morning, The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators clashed with federal prosecutors over the decision to search the former president’s residence, where highly classified documents were found despite Trump’s insistence that he had none.

“Some of those field agents wanted to shutter the criminal investigation altogether in early June,” the Post reported, adding that FBI agents were “simply afraid” and “worried taking aggressive steps investigating Trump could blemish or even end their careers.” The FBI did not exhibit this worry in 2016, when it publicly announced that it was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified documents, an announcement that, even with all the other mistakes her campaign made, likely cost Clinton the election. That decision was made in part because then-Director James Comey feared that pro-Trump FBI agents would leak the details if he did not announce them publicly. The federal investigation into the Trump campaign, by contrast, was properly kept confidential until after the election. As one agent told the reporter Spencer Ackerman in 2016, “The FBI is Trumpland.”

[Adam Serwer: If it were anyone else, they’d be prosecuted]

President Joe Biden is also under investigation for his mishandling of classified documents, but for now the two situations are distinguished by Biden’s attorneys discovering and voluntarily handing those documents over, as opposed to lying about having them and then insisting that they were his to keep. Neither man, however, should be above prosecution if the circumstances call for it.

A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.

Michael Fanone, a former Metropolitan Police officer who was injured by the mob that attempted to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf on January 6, became disillusioned by the lack of support he received from fellow officers. “What it is is Trumpism,” Fanone told Politico in 2022. “And it’s a loyalty to Donald Trump because he says things like, ‘We love our law enforcement officers.’ And, you know, there’s a lot of police officers at the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement agencies that participated in the defense of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, that still do not accept the reality of what January 6th was.”

Steven D’Antuono, one of the former top FBI officials described in the Post story as reluctant to carry out the search, also said a few days after January 6 that there had been “no indication” of potential violence that day. A moderately active news consumer would have understood that the risk of violence was real; perhaps the only people unaware of that potential worked at the FBI or as regular columnists for elite publications.

[Quinta Jurecic: The classified-files scandal is the most Trumpy scandal of all]

I am not alleging any malignant intent here. But the partisan lean of law-enforcement officers has consequences, producing ideological blind spots and an institutional bias in favor of conservative individuals. They are also more sensitive to criticism from the right, not only because it comes from powerful people, but because it is always more painful to be attacked by people you perceive as being on your side. The stakes here are not simply political; as the debacle of January 6 showed, such blind spots affect the bureau’s ability to fulfill its duties.

In theory, proper, vigorous oversight by Congress might check this kind of bias, among other benefits. But having recently lost one presidential election to FBI intervention, the Democratic Party appears reluctant to engage in such oversight, and the Republican Party is only interested in confirming the conspiratorial explanations of its base for why the benevolent Mr. Trump continues to come under investigative scrutiny. This has merely reinforced to both the bureau’s leadership and its rank and file that the only political danger they need to heed comes from the right, further exacerbating the underlying ideological dynamic.

The irony of all Trump’s legal problems, however, is that the FBI desperately wants to leave him alone—if only he would let them.