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“The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself.”

Jonathan Swift, it’s worth noting that he was not an optimist about “truth.”

By the time a lie is refuted, he wrote, “it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'“

“Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe,” he wrote in 1710, “I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth; that truth will at last prevail.

A recent Washington Post tally found that nearly 300 Republicans running for congressional and state offices are election deniers. That means, as a FiveThirtyEight analysis found, 60 percent of Americans will have at least one election denier on their ballot next week.

In a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 63 percent of Republicans say they worry “the election results could be manipulated.”

From the New York Times: When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.

The big mistake people have made is in assuming this could blow up only in an extensive struggle in 2024 and perhaps involving Donald Trump. What seems entirely unanticipated, yet is extremely predictable, is that smaller skirmishes could break out all over the country this year.

Democrats have got themselves in a situation where the head of their party holds the most popular position on guns and crime—and yet they’re getting crushed on the issue because they’ve let GOP campaign ads, the right wing media ecosystem, and assorted progressive big city prosecutors shape the narrative on the issue rather than doing so themselves.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee.

If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries.

Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

There was extraordinary national unity after the 2001 terrorist attacks. But George W. Bush’s strategists argued that Republicans should “go to the country” on the issue of terrorism and “focus on war” in the elections of 2002 and 2004, making the case that Democrats endangered Americans’ security. On the campaign trail, Dick Cheney warned that if people made “the wrong choice” and voted Democratic, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” As Bush said Democrats were “not interested in the security of the American people,” Cheney claimed electing Republicans was “vital” for “defending our homeland.”

In that same year, Republicans close to the administration ran an infamous ad juxtaposing an image of Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), a triple amputee from his service in Vietnam, with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein

Two years later, a group with ties to Bush did similarly to Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, with flimsy accusations that he lied about his Vietnam service and betrayed comrades.

Cheney was also the primary force for distorting intelligence about Iraq to make the case for war. He falsely claimed in 2001 that it was “pretty well confirmed” that the 9/11 mastermind met with Iraqi intelligence. He falsely called evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda “overwhelming” and said Hussein had “long-established ties with al-Qaeda.” He falsely called Iraq “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault … on 9/11.”

Those contagions — using disinformation and patriotism as political weapons — spread through the Republican Party and consumed it utterly with Trump’s triumph. Too late, Liz Cheney bravely stood against both, and is on the verge of political exile

All our Greek tragedy needs now is the catharsis: a glimmer of self-awareness from Dick Cheney about his role in causing this.

in hindsight, the real Romney radicalization is far more clear. You could see the seeds planted during the 2012 Republican primary. On January 19, two days before South Carolina primary voters cast their ballot, Newt Gingrich had a moment during the GOP primary debate.

Surely, heavily evangelical voters in a key Republican stronghold would be concerned about Gingrich’s scandals? No, they were far angrier at media outlets than they were at any Republican hypocrisy.

Gingrich went on to win the South Carolina primary in a “landslide” powered by evangelicals. It was the only time in primary history that South Carolina voters failed to vote for the eventual GOP nominee. But South Carolina voters weren’t out of step; rather they were ahead of their time. They forecast the Republican break with character in favor of a man who would “fight.”

To understand the emotional and psychological aftermath of Romney’s loss, one has to look at the cultural break between the GOP establishment—which commissioned an “autopsy” of the party in 2012 that called for greater efforts at inclusion—and a grassroots base that was convinced that it had been hoodwinked by party leaders into supporting the “safe” candidate.

And so the Republican establishment and the Republican base moved apart, with one side completely convinced that Romney lost because he was perhaps, if anything, too harsh (especially when it came to immigration) and the other convinced that he lost because he was too soft.

When Trump won, the base had its proof of concept. Fighting worked, and not even Trump’s loss—along with the loss of the House and the Senate in four short years—has truly disrupted that conclusion. And why would it? Many millions still don’t believe he lost.

The Mitt Romney martyr theory thus suffers from a fatal defect. It presumes that large numbers of Republicans weren’t radicalized before Romney’s rough treatment. In truth, they already hated Democrats and the media, and when Romney lost, their message to the Republican establishment in 2016 was just as clear as it was in South Carolina in 2012. No more nice guys. The “character” that mattered was a commitment to punching the left right in the mouth.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.

The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed President Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.

Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

On its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”

As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.

After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency

Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.

But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.

A decade or two ago, while many foreigners did not especially like the British, they respected us as sensible, decent people who made our society work. Today, that sentiment has vanished, swept away by Johnson and Liz Truss, his own unworthy nominee to succeed himself.

At the end of Act 2 of Henry IV Part 2, jesting Falstaff pleads with Prince Hal not to “banish plump Jack”. The prince coldly answered: “I do. I will.” When the crown was placed upon Henry’s brow, the comedy of the fat charlatan was indeed played out, the scoundrel banished.

The Conservative Party, and the British people, have been very foolish to humour their own Falstaff through these past sorry years. If they cannot banish plump Boris now, they sacrifice all hope of regaining the respect for Britain which has been sacrificed to his cavorting.

From Papua New Guinea to Palau, the countries of the region have jurisdiction over an area of ocean three times as large as the continental United States, stretching from just south of Hawaii to exclusive economic zones butting up against Australia, Japan and the Philippines.

Chinese fishing fleets already dominate the seas between the area’s roughly 30,000 islands, seizing huge hauls of tuna while occasionally sharing intelligence on the movements of the U.S. Navy. If China can add ports, airports and outposts for satellite communications — all of which are edging closer to reality in some Pacific Island nations — it could help in intercepting communications, blocking shipping lanes and engaging in space combat.

Mr. Wang signed several new agreements, including a security deal that gives China the power to send security forces to quell unrest or protect Chinese investments, and possibly to build a port for commercial and military use.

Chinese officials deny that’s the plan. But the deal — along with others in the Solomons and Kiribati whose details have not been disclosed — has been made possible because of something else that’s visible and much-discussed in the Pacific: a longstanding lack of American urgency, innovation and resources.

American officials point out that the United States does have big military bases in Guam, along with close ties to countries like the Marshall Islands. And in February, Antony J. Blinken became the first secretary of state in 36 years to visit Fiji, where he announced that the United States would reopen an embassy in the Solomon Islands and engage more on issues like illegal fishing and climate change.

The Yanks, it is often said, used to be more productive. Many of the airports and hospitals still in use across the Pacific were built by the United States and its allies during World War II.

“The United States doesn’t have a significant presence in the Pacific at all,” said Anna Powles, a senior lecturer in security studies at Massey University in New Zealand. “I’m always shocked that in Washington they think they have a significant presence when they just don’t.”

“There’s a lot of talk,” said Sandra Tarte, the head of the government and international affairs department at the University of the South Pacific in Suva. “And not much real substance.”

Mr. Blinken said last week that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.” He promised that the United States would “shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system.”

The start-up embassy in the Solomons also looks less impressive on closer inspection. Replacing an embassy that closed in the 1990s during America’s post-Cold War withdrawal, the outpost will begin in leased office space with two U.S. staff members and five local hires.

The American Embassy, by contrast, sits on a hillside far from downtown Suva in a heavily fortified compound. It covers five nations (Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu), doesn’t have a full-time ambassador — President Biden nominated someone only last week — and is known for being understaffed.

Joseph Veramu, a former U.N. consultant who runs Integrity Fiji, which focuses on values like transparency, said in an interview in Suva that he had invited U.S. embassy officials to events five or six times in recent years. Only once did someone come — without saying much, and refusing to allow photos.

But what they do want, and what China seems better at providing right now, is consistent engagement and capacity building.

While the United States has shown off Coast Guard vessels it is using to police illegal fishing, China is planning to build maritime transportation hubs and high-tech law enforcement centers where Chinese officers can provide expertise and equipment.

“China has always maintained that big and small countries are all equals,” Mr. Xi, the Chinese leader, said in a written message to Pacific foreign ministers on Monday. “No matter how international circumstances fluctuate, China will always be a good friend.”

Clearly, China intends to keep emphasizing that friendship means building stuff and offering promises of prosperity, while expecting news censorship, resource access and security opportunities in exchange.

The pressing question in this part of the world is: What does friendship mean to America?

They had a duty to speak up sooner. And they failed in that duty.

These efforts allowed both Trump’s supporters and his critics to comfort themselves with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, was trying to limit the damage to the country. His fans could say, “He’s just inexperienced but he has good people around him,” while the opponents could say, “He’s an execrable moron but reasonable people are in charge, and they’ll save us from the worst.”

But the price for this quiet custodianship (a form of opposition to Trump described in detail by Miles Taylor, now known as the author of the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times) is that the American people never really knew how much danger they were facing, at home and abroad, at any given moment.

Governments are more than just large organizations. They are a far more delicate web of norms and habits, and liberal democracies especially are built on informal agreements rather than black-letter law. Yes, we have tons of laws and administrative bumf that complicate our lives, but when it comes to the nature of our democracy, the Constitution manages to do it all in fewer than  5,000 words. Our basic rights as citizens take less than a page. The rest relies on us.

in the end, they have faith in the system. They see Trump as only one man, and the system as a bulwark of laws and regulations, people and committees, institutions and practices that will somehow kick in and prevent a catastrophe.

Esper, Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and many, many other people who crawled through the Shawshank sewer pipe that was the four years of the Trump administration needed to speak up the minute they were out. Instead, they teased their book bombshells or played coy games of slap and tickle on cable outlets.

And so when you know that the president is unhinged, when you know the country is in danger, when you know that plots are being hatched to subvert the Constitution, you have a duty to speak. This duty supersedes confidentiality, partisanship, or personal loyalty.

Think of all the people from whom we don’t have a full account of this mess, who did not speak up even as Trump was running for reelection or inciting an insurrection: Mattis, Tillerson, John Kelly, Robert O’Brien, H. R. McMaster, and many others.

These are experienced political figures who know that the public needs to be grabbed by the lapels and made to listen to a compelling story. The too-late book excerpts, along with all the throat clearing, the circumlocutions, the carefully phrased “but I’d still support the nominee” escape hatches don’t cut it.

I was in a vulnerable position as a government employee, and from the first time I spoke up, people tried to get me fired from the Naval War College. Even with tenure, I could have been dismissed if I was found to violate the Hatch Act, the law prohibiting on-the-job politicking by federal employees.

I called my family together nearly six years ago and said that I could lose my job if I kept writing about Trump. All of them told me to keep writing, and we’d deal with whatever comes.

for more than five years, the demands to fire me came so often, as one administrator later told me, that after a while they didn’t even bother to inform me about them anymore.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be burdened with knowing the president was mentally unstable, that he wanted to fire missiles at Mexico, that he was planning to exit NATO, that he wanted to shoot unarmed protesters, that he wanted to invalidate a national election. That is a level of responsibility beyond anything I have ever experienced. This was Night of Camp David stuff, and I’m not sure what I’d have done.

But I’m reasonably certain I wouldn’t have kept it to myself until my agent told me I had a deal.

Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, he writes.

“He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Mr. Barr writes. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.”

Mr. Barr also denounces the inquiry by the F.B.I. and then the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into links between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016. He writes that “the matter that really required investigation” was “how did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the F.B.I. leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?”

On the scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, in which Mr. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine as leverage to try to get Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Barr was scathing.

He calls it “another mess — this one self-inflicted and the result of abject stupidity,” a “harebrained gambit” and “idiotic beyond belief.” But while Mr. Barr describes the conversation Mr. Trump had with Ukraine’s president on the topic as “unseemly and injudicious,” he maintains that it did not rise to a “criminal offense.”

His book expands on that theme, going through specific “fact-free claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump has put forward and explaining why the Justice Department found them baseless. He lists several reasons, for example, that claims about purportedly hacked Dominion voting machines were “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.”“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.”

Mr. Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.” Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold.

Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author.

Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform. It’s hard to imagine that without “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Mr. Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Mr. Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.

As Mr. Vance noted in a Time magazine interview in 2016, Mr. Trump’s greatest failure as a political leader is that “he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.” That’s turning out to be true of Mr. Vance, too.

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Vance wrote that Mr. Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.”