Trump’s first week shows America's 'on track to a dark place': conservative

During the U.S. presidential race of 2024, The Bulwark — a conservative website with a strong Never Trump focus — repeatedly warned that if Republican nominee Donald Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, his second term would be even more dangerous than his first.

Trump narrowly defeated Harris, returning to the White House on Monday, January 20. In a column published a week later, on January 27, The Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last examines the first week of Trump's second presidency — and his takeaway is that as bad as it was, the worst is probably yet to come.

"The argument I'm going to walk you through is that President Trump keeps inching closer to violence and his decision to remove protection from former government employees who are being targeted by Iran is a message about his intentions," Last explains. "How bad could it get? Well, people forget that once upon a time, it was unthinkable that Vladimir Putin would kill a political rival. Which brings us to worst-case scenarios and failures of imagination."

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Last continues, "If you were to go back ten years — or even ten weeks — and describe what we're seeing today, people would have said you were crazy. That it could never happen."

In Russia, Last notes, President Vladimir Putin turned out to be even worse than his critics thought. And the lesson for the U.S. during Trump's second presidency, the Bulwark columnist warns, is that the unthinkable can happen.

"Vladimir Putin is gangster, but he is also the law," Last argues. "Putinism is what happens when you put a gangster in charge of a state. Yet the great and good American people decided to put a convicted felon who consorts with gangsters in charge of their state. And they did this after their Supreme Court invented a writ of criminal immunity for him. What did they think was going to happen?"

During his first week back in the White House, Last laments, Trump pardoned at least 1500 of the January 6, 2021 rioters and removed security protection for former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo despite the death threats they received from Iran's Islamist government.

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"When I say today, on January 27, that Trump's gangster government is going to end badly —maybe even very badly — it sounds crazy and hysterical," Last emphasizes. "But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you 12 weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, 'I guess that's possible, but you're talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.' Yes, Putinism would definitely be a worst-case scenario. But we are living the worst-case scenario right now."

Last continues, "Maybe in the future, something will slide us down the scale to one of the lower-variant scenarios. That would be nice. I hope it happens. But right now, we are on track to a dark place."

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Jonathan V. Last's full column for The Bulwark is available at this link.