Seconds into talking about their new movie, Jane Schoenbrun cannot help but bring up Freddy Got Fingered. Back in 2001, the comedian Tom Green’s sole directorial effort—a work of avant-garde grossness meant to capitalize on his unlikely fame as an MTV talk-show host—was so universally despised that it essentially killed his career. “As a child of irony-poisoned internet culture, it’s a personal favorite,” Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, told me. They joked that Green’s mindset while making the film must have been “My stock is really good right now, so I’m going to spend it all.”
Right now Schoenbrun’s stock is also really good. I Saw the TV Glow, their second feature, is being released by A24—a big step up from their micro-budgeted debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. “It’s like I’m aware of what the sellout options are, and then I’m also aware of what the Tom Green–suicide-mission options are—and I feel like I’m constantly trying to do both at the same time,” they said.
I predict there will be no Golden Raspberry trophies (Green won five for Freddy Got Fingered) in Schoenbrun’s future. I Saw the TV Glow is a major work—a frightening and complex exploration of childhood nostalgia, adult regret, and the ways our identity is shaped by pop culture. But it retains all of the creepy specificity that made Schoenbrun’s debut so electrifying, with uncommon human tenderness bumping right up against mutated, half-formed monstrousness. Scale has not smoothed out Schoenbrun’s idiosyncratic wrinkles—and whatever the future holds for them, “selling out” does not seem to be part of it. “Mattel asked me for a meeting at Sundance, and I was like, ‘I value my life and dignity,’” Schoenbrun said with a laugh, remarking on the toy giant’s post-Barbie expansion into cinema, which includes planned movies based on toys such as Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels. (“I don’t think they’d make my Candy Land,” they added, referring to the popular board game, which is actually owned by Hasbro. “My Candy Land has a lot of milky, creamy fluids.”)
In an era when every buzzy indie director could be a meeting or two away from making a superhero movie, this disdain for modern Hollywood blockbusters is refreshing. Though Schoenbrun’s style can be challenging, their films feel alive and contemporary; We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, for instance, taps into the disquieting world of online “creepypasta” communities and manages to viscerally capture the experience of late-night YouTube browsing. It’s no wonder a company such as Mattel might be intrigued; for all the distancing strangeness of Schoenbrun’s films, they’re current in the exact way that would perk up an executive’s ears.
I Saw the TV Glow is perhaps a little more accessible and straightforward—a tale about Owen (played by Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), disaffected teens who bond over their obsession with a ’90s genre TV show called The Pink Opaque. Slowly, their reality begins to blur as villains and metaphysical concepts from the program seep into the real world. The dreamy narrative was directly influenced by Schoenbrun’s own experiences. World’s Fair, which is about a character seeking to transform her body through a strange online game, was written before Schoenbrun came out as trans. I Saw the TV Glow was written during their early months on hormones, and is powered by those specific, unsettled feelings.
Spencer Pazer / Courtesy of A24
“By the time I made [I Saw the TV Glow] … I was in love for the first time in my real body,” Schoenbrun said. “That’s the thing about transition … and I mean this quite literally: I wrote [the movie] as a child, I made it as a teenager, and I’m releasing it as not-quite-a-grown-up.” Schoenbrun is in their late 30s, but transition often means going through a second coming-of-age, and they joked that their current mental age is around 24: “I’m trying to figure out how to be an adult.”
In the film, Owen has a tenuous grasp of his own identity—a sense that’s further stirred up by The Pink Opaque. But I Saw the TV Glow is not the kind of perfunctory narrative of self-actualization that Schoenbrun might get pitched in a studio meeting. “Owen’s arc in the movie is one of deterioration, [to] a point where maybe he can start to become a thing that he briefly noticed in childhood but then lost for half of his life,” Schoenbrun said. Owen’s narrative isn’t digestible or triumphant, and his investment in The Pink Opaque is more disturbing than empowering. Though Schoenbrun knows they’re considered part of what they called “the LGBTQ umbrella,” they still don’t want to forget that trans people often face an unwelcoming reality in America. “I’m very cautious of assimilation,” they said, acknowledging the tensions that artists must navigate in the industry.
Schoenbrun is working outside the kinds of traditional structures that define so much of Hollywood storytelling; at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the external influences that come knocking with any bigger production. So how does someone like Schoenbrun make something particularly radical on the scale demanded by mainstream moviemaking? “The narrative of the sellout looms,” Schoenbrun said. “Having to be in some way a shill for a system is expected of any level of artist.”
That balancing act feeds into the story within the film, where a show airing on network TV (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and many other cult shows from the ’90s) is parsed for secret, perhaps unintended messages by its most devoted fans. I Saw the TV Glow adds further layers of wink-wink self-awareness. It features a Buffy actor (Amber Benson) in a small role, as well as the Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst—an early-aughts musical star and an avatar of that era’s gendered toxicity—as Owen’s disdainful father, Frank. “I’m always thinking about the era of popular culture that … I was first exposed to—that post-Tarantino Scream era,” Schoenbrun said. “Even Buffy is incredibly self-referential; it’s genre that’s aware of itself as genre.”
“I don’t want to say that TV Glow is watered down or speaking in a commercial vernacular that I’m uncomfortable with,” Schoenbrun continued. “But I definitely was like, I’m making this teen-angst thing; I’m looking at the Donnie Darkos of the world for reference.” At the turn of the millennium, Donnie Darko managed to be an instant cult hit, arriving as a small studio release in an era of Hollywood bombast. Still, for a moment, as they calibrated the tone of their movie, they wondered if they were pushing too far into the territory of a show such as Stranger Things, which is almost excessively reverential of the 1980s. To Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow embodies a sort of “identity crisis”; it uses the narrative language of more commercial film and TV shows while striving to avoid formulaic conclusions.
Though I Saw the TV Glow was inspired by Schoenbrun’s life, they believe it’ll speak to viewers in unpredictable ways. And for all their suspicion of Hollywood’s more corporate side, Schoenbrun can’t help but fantasize about new ways to mess with audiences’ expectations. “I said no to the Mattel meeting, but then I was like, ‘Wait, actually, if you give me Barbie 2, I’ll consider it,’” they said. They brought up the end of Greta Gerwig’s film, where the title character, having transformed from doll to human, makes her first appointment at the gynecologist’s: “That is a deeply trans place to be; let’s talk about what that looks like. Mattel, I’m open to it.”
The videos began appearing on Telegram in November. One showed a pair of white mercenaries raising a black flag emblazoned with a white skull over a mud-brick fort in the Malian-desert outpost of Kidal. In another, a bearded white soldier moved through the town on a motorcycle, weaving among locals who chanted, “Mali! Mali!”
The troops belonged to the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary outfit founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin a decade ago and best known for its role in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now reportedly under the control of a Russian military-intelligence unit, Wagner troops are showing up in impoverished countries within and just south of the Sahel region of Central Africa.
Most of Wagner’s clients in the Sahel are former French colonies, and all have been struggling for years against Islamist terrorists and other insurgent groups. For a decade, the French, with some support from the United Nations and the United States, took the lead in battling jihadists in the Sahel. But one by one, the military juntas that run these countries have booted out the French and the multilateral peacekeepers and hired Wagner, or, as its Sahel branch has renamed itself, Africa Corps.
Some of the Russian fighters got their start protecting commercial vessels from Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and battling the Islamic State in Syria a decade ago. Now they are tools in a great geopolitical realignment: Onetime client states of Western liberal democracies have repudiated their former colonizers and embraced Wagner, giving Russia political leverage across Africa—as well as new sources of wealth, including gold mines, as it pursues its war in Ukraine.
White mercenaries have propped up—or brought down—beleaguered African regimes in the past, but Wagner is different. It has direct ties to a national government with expansive geopolitical ambitions. And as Wagner grows its presence in Africa, it is forcing imperiled governments to make a Faustian bargain: The regimes get help in putting down the insurgencies that threaten their existence, but in return, they’re compelled to surrender a measure of their sovereignty and resources to a foreign army that heeds no laws except its own.
Prigozhin’s soldiers first showed up in Africa in 2017. They trained troops for the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was overthrown two years later. In Libya, they backed the rebel commander Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army is struggling for power and territory against the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. The Central African Republic, an impoverished former French colony just south of the Sahel, invited about 1,000 Wagner fighters to help stanch a rebellion in 2018. Within three years, they had taken back a good deal of territory and stopped a rebel advance on the capital. In the process, Wagner troops seized a Canadian-owned gold mine, Ndassima. The U.S. Treasury Department valued the gold deposits there at more than $1 billion, and John Lechner, the author of the forthcoming Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries in the New Era of Private Warfare, says the mine is ramping up operations and could soon generate “about $100 million a year” for the mercenaries.
Then came Mali. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a jihadist group operating in the Sahara and the Sahel, had allied with a faction of Tuareg separatists and taken over two-thirds of the country in April 2012. French troops set about dislodging the militants in January 2013, driving the jihadists from Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, and other northern population centers into the surrounding desert and killing hundreds in a week-long battle that February. For the next decade, a French counterinsurgency force based in Chad precision-bombed al-Qaeda encampments deep in the Sahara.
But the French could never fully eradicate the jihadists. Many Islamist fighters fled to villages in the south. The French focused on aerial bombardments in the north, leaving poorly trained Malian troops to raid villages and take hundreds of casualties. The Malians resented this division of labor, and the ground operation made little progress.
Meanwhile, the Tuareg separatists, most of them secular insurgents, had moved back into Kidal with the tacit acceptance of the French. They sometimes assisted the French with intelligence to target the jihadists, and the Malians believed that the French were therefore protecting them. Kamissa Camara, Mali’s foreign minister from 2018 to 2020, told me that the dispute was one reason, by 2020, “the relationship between the French and the government was at an all-time low.”
Mali’s democratically elected government was toppled by a coup in August 2020, and old allegiances fell by the wayside. Few members of the junta that came to power had studied in France or identified with Mali’s former colonizer. Several, including a minister of defense and an important legislator, had attended military-training school in Russia. They paid attention when Wagner, flush with success in the Central African Republic, made its initial approach.
Andy Spyra / laif / Redux
“Wagner said, ‘There is a military solution to the return of Kidal and the north, and we’ll help you get there,’” Lechner told me. “They were going to go after both the terrorists and Tuareg separatists. That was their major selling point.”
For years, Kidal had served as a sanctuary for both rebel groups. The Malian army had withdrawn in 2014, leaving the insurgents to carry out uprisings and atrocities—among them the kidnapping and murder of two French radio journalists by jihadists, and the execution of six civil servants by Tuareg separatists during an attack on the regional governor’s headquarters. I flew into Kidal on a UN plane a decade ago and was allowed to stay for just 24 hours. I couldn’t leave the UN compound without an escort of two armored personnel carriers full of Togolese peacekeepers.
Early last November, a joint force of Wagner mercenaries and Malian troops approached Kidal from an army base about 60 miles to the south. They deployed armed drones, fought various ragtag rebel units on the outskirts of the town, and then stormed Kidal as the rebels retreated into the desert. Hundreds of jubilant people greeted the Russians. But others were wary.
“The army is moving through the town with white soldiers—we don’t know who they are,” an elderly resident told the Agènce France Presse as Wagner seized the old French fort in mid-November. “People are afraid of them, so there’s nothing left in the town except people like me, who can’t afford to leave.”
The Russians had won the Malian government over not only with the prospect of retaking Kidal but also with the promise of delivering the weapons and other equipment that Mali needed to fight its wars. For instance, Mali wanted to purchase a Spanish-made Airbus to transport troops to bases in jihadist-dominated areas. The Spanish couldn’t sell the Airbus without installing a U.S.-manufactured military transponder, used to relay communications. But the Biden administration, citing the Leahy Law, which prohibits direct military assistance to coup states, blocked the transponder deal and “essentially killed the entire sale,” Peter Pham, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Sahel and now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me. Another obstacle to the transponder sale, according to Corinne Dufka, who covered the Sahel for Human Rights Watch from 2012 to 2022, was the presence of a small number of child soldiers in a progovernment militia. She called the U.S. decision in that regard a victory for “human-rights-based moral diplomacy over realpolitik.” But it was also a tipping point for the Malian government as it decided to embrace the Russians.
According to Pham, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov invited a Malian delegation to Moscow, and “they got transponders and everything else.” France began withdrawing its troops from Mali in February 2022; the last soldier was gone by August. The UN peacekeeping force, whose primary mission was to safeguard the French army, was booted out in December 2023.
Today, just about the only trace of the French presence in Mali is the colonial architecture in riverside towns such as Ségou, once the site of the Festival on the Niger, an annual three-day concert held on a river barge that was canceled in 2015 and has never resumed. Ségou, friends told me, is now a favored R & R spot for Russian paramilitaries, who strut through the streets and gather in bars after carrying out incursions on jihadist-held villages and bush encampments.
For the time being, most Malians appear to welcome the estimated 1,500 to 2,000 Wagner fighters spread across their country. An American friend who has lived in Bamako for decades told me that thanks to the Russians, “we’ve been able to regain our territory and our dignity.” The mercenaries had done “horrible things,” but “war is ugly, and France and the UN were useless. Everybody in Bamako is happy about the situation.”
Lechner recalled a similar response in the Central African Republic. “I went by road through the CAR after the 2021 counteroffensive and listened to people saying that they were really happy with the stability,” he told me. “If you go from not being able to travel to the next village without being robbed and killed to being able to move freely, that’s great.”
But this stability comes at a price. “The Russian counterinsurgency doctrine is brutal,” Lechner added. “The logic is, ‘We create so much pain that it stifles any support for the insurgents, and it ends the conflict.’” According to a U.S. investigator I spoke with, on more than one occasion, the mercenaries entered villages in the Central African Republic and executed 15 to 20 members of the Fulani ethnic group “because two principal armed groups were Fulani.”
Wagner has been even more savage in Mali. One of its first documented atrocities occurred in Moura, near Mopti, over five days in March 2022. According to Dufka, who investigated the case for Human Rights Watch, Wagner soldiers along with the Malian army raided a market and, after a brief firefight, “picked up, tortured, and killed 300 people”—all of them men from the dominant Peul ethnic group, one of the country’s poorest. It was unclear, Dufka said, whether the men were directly involved with the Islamists or whether they’d been rounded up and executed solely because they belonged to an ethnic group that has served as a major source of recruitment. The UN later put the death toll at more than 500.
Wagner “has been effective, if you don’t mind [the fact that they’re] shooting down everyone in sight,” Pham said. “They don’t make the distinctions that Western armies make between combatants and civilians.” According to the U.S. State Department, Wagner soldiers have destroyed villages and murdered civilians in the CAR, “participated in the unlawful execution of people in Mali, raided artisanal gold mines in Sudan, and undermined democratic institutions in every country where they have worked.”
Three weeks after Wagner’s victory in Kidal last November, I received a WhatsApp message from Azima Ag Ali, a guide and translator in Timbuktu, 600 miles across the desert. I had worked with Ag Ali, a member of the ethnic Tuareg minority, for years, most recently in 2013, after the city’s traumatic eight-month occupation by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Wagner had set up a base in Timbuktu in 2022 to facilitate its war against the jihadists. But when the mercenaries got to town, Ag Ali told me, they also began pursuing Tuaregs suspected of separatist sympathies, carrying out acts of “extortion and murder” against them. Tuareg separatists have been quiet in recent years, holding Kidal but otherwise doing little to provoke the Malian government and military. But their very presence in the country was considered an affront to the military regime. Masked Russian fighters, Ag Ali told me, had just raided a health center in a village called Hassan Dina, 30 miles north of Timbuktu, and decapitated the director. In Timbuktu, they were seizing mobile phones of Tuareg males on the streets and searching their messages for signs of pro-separatist sentiment. If they find anything suspicious, Ag Ali wrote to me, “you will be taken to their base at the airport, and your fate will be uncertain.” Most of his family had fled to a refugee camp in Mauritania, “and I am thinking of joining them,” he wrote. He asked me to send him a few hundred dollars to help him escape. I had no way to verify Ag Ali’s claim about Hassan Dina, but Dufka, who has visited the region frequently, told me that his account of this attack and of the arrests and intimidation of Tuareg men in Timbuktu sounded plausible. A Human Rights Watch report published in March 2024 documented summary executions by Wagner in villages throughout northern and central Mali, including three villages near Timbuktu.
Besides engaging in extrajudicial killings, the Russians have provided an illiberal, antidemocratic model for their African clients to follow. The Malian junta has tightened press censorship and largely sealed itself off from the outside world. Mali was once one of the easiest countries in Africa in which to operate as a foreign correspondent; even after an earlier military coup, in 2012, foreign reporters were generally free to enter the country without being questioned. But these days, I’ve been warned, foreign journalists are likely to be arrested at the airport, jailed, or immediately expelled. Dufka and other observers believe that Russian influence is largely responsible for the crackdown.
And yet, across the Sahel, Wagner’s successes in northern Mali have attracted more interest than its abuses. After refusing to deal with the mercenaries for several years, Burkina Faso, which faces a rising jihadist threat, signed a contract this year with the newly named Africa Corps. One hundred fighters are already in the country; another 200 are expected to arrive soon. Russia’s defense ministry is reportedly negotiating with Niger to send an Africa Corps contingent there. Niger’s military junta, which seized power in July 2023, ordered French forces to leave immediately (the last departed in December), expelled the French ambassador, and threatened to shut down a U.S. drone base near Agadez. The regime accused the Americans—who have nearly 1,000 troops in Niger—of violating the country’s sovereignty. In recent months, according to African political sources, Wagner has been talking with a rebel group in Chad about helping the insurgents dislodge the government led by President Mahamat Idriss Déby.
For Putin, Wagner’s expansion across Africa has provided an opportunity to stick it to his Western foes. “The Russians are good chess players,” Pham said, “and for an investment of next to nothing, they have dealt France a bitter blow and have gotten us distracted to no end.” But David Ottaway, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent and now a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., told me that Russia may come to regret its growing presence in the Sahel. The latest Western-Russian showdown, he said, smacks of the proxy wars that he covered in Ethiopia, Angola, and other Cold War battlegrounds. Those conflicts were destructive but in the end failed to bring either superpower a definitive advantage in the jockeying for geostrategic superiority. He says that beneath public expressions of dismay, U.S. officials may be watching the growing Russian entanglement with equanimity—or even a degree of satisfaction. “Good luck to the Russians,” he told me. “If they want to take on al-Qaeda in Africa, I suspect that’s fine with us.”
After a month-long silence, I asked my former translator, Azima Ag Ali, whether he had decided to flee Timbuktu. He was still there, he answered. The governor had begged the Russian mercenaries “to be more cooperative with the residents,” he texted me, and as a result, “the city is calmer now.” Some of those who had fled to Mauritania had even begun trickling back home. But the Russians still appeared to be operating with impunity in the remote villages of the Sahara, he wrote, and “people are afraid.”
Earlier this week, news leaked of the biggest change in federal drug policy in more than half a century. The Associated Press reported—and the Department of Justice later confirmed—that the Drug Enforcement Administration plans to recategorize marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. Since the 1970s, it’s been placed in Schedule I, a highly controlled group that includes drugs like heroin, with a high potential for abuse and no medical use. But cannabis will soon be moved to the much less restrictive Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine and Tylenol with codeine that have a moderate-to-low risk of addiction.
Currently, recreational cannabis is legal for adults over the age of 21 in 24 states, which are home to more than half of the U.S. population. According to a recent Harris poll, about 40 percent of Americans use cannabis, and a quarter do so on at least a weekly basis. And yet, researchers and physicians told me, scientific consensus on the drug’s precise effects—especially on the heart and lungs, mental health, and developing adolescent brains—is still lacking. Rescheduling marijuana will broaden access further still, which makes finding better answers to those questions even more crucial.
Conveniently, rescheduling marijuana is also likely to spur in-depth study, in part by expanding research opportunities that were previously limited or nonexistent. Easing restrictions will ultimately mean learning a lot more about the potential harms and benefits of a drug that for decades has been both popular and demonized.
Historically, the scope of cannabis research has been fairly limited. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, a major federal research funder, has a directive to study the harms of cannabis use rather than any potential benefits, says Amanda Reiman, the chief knowledge officer of New Frontier Data. (New Frontier is an analytics firm focused on the legal cannabis industry.) In 2018, research on the potential harms of cannabis use received more than double the funding that research on its medicinal or therapeutic use did in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. In 2020, a spokesperson for NIDA told Science that although the agency’s traditional focus was on marijuana addiction, it has started exploring the therapeutic potential of compounds in cannabis to treat addiction to other substances.
U.S. policy has also made marijuana research of any sort very difficult. Until recently, scientists had to obtain their supply from NIDA’s high-security Mississippi facility. (Six more sources were approved last year.) Researchers regularly complained that the marijuana was moldy, and far from the quality that regular consumers could purchase legally at their local dispensary, with less THC and CBD.
Most existing research on how cannabis affects our hearts, our brains, and our society at large is based on self-reported survey data, Peter Grinspoon, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and a medical-cannabis expert, told me. Such data are “notoriously inaccurate,” he said. But researchers have been forced to rely on these methods because cannabis is a Schedule I drug, so no studies that receive federal funding can simply give marijuana from state-approved dispensaries to people and record what happens.
As a result, the field lacks the number of high-quality studies necessary for researchers to agree on their implications, says Nick Cioe, an associate professor at Assumption University in Massachusetts who has studied the effects of marijuana on traumatic brain injuries. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of determining a given drug’s harms and benefits, but for weed, they’ve been nearly impossible. The FDA has approved a handful of cannabis-derived products to treat conditions such as seizures and chemotherapy-induced nausea, but that’s not the same as understanding the effects of recreational weed.
After marijuana is officially rescheduled, researchers will have a far easier time studying the drug’s effects. Researching any federally controlled substance is difficult, but obtaining the proper licenses for using Schedule III drugs in the lab is much less arduous than for Schedule I. Scientists will also have far more opportunities to obtain federal grant funding from all sorts of governmental bodies—the National Institutes of Health, the EPA, even the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—as policy makers rush to understand the implications of legalization.
Human trials won’t start the second that the DEA makes marijuana’s new status official. Researchers will have to wait for guidance from federal agencies like the FDA and the NIH, says R. Lorraine Collins, the director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. And given the limitations around Schedule III drugs, scientists still won’t be able to simply purchase the same cannabis that millions of Americans are consuming from their local dispensary.
Schedule III won’t “magically alleviate the bureaucratic headaches” associated with researching cannabis, Grinspoon said. But “it’s going to be a lot easier to say, ‘Let’s give this person cannabis and see what happens to their blood pressure.’”
Courtesy of Donald Trump, America continues its journey into the political twilight zone.
At an April 25 Supreme Court hearing, Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer was asked by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” To which Sauer responded, “It would depend on the hypothetical. We can see that could well be an official act.”
Sotomayor emphasized that this hypothetical act would be done for personal reasons, not in furtherance of an official responsibility, nor to protect the country from a terrorist. “Immunity says even if you did it for personal gain, we won’t hold you responsible,” she said. And that is precisely what Trump’s legal team is arguing for: immunity even for acts of personal gain, including assassinating a political opponent. (For good measure, Sauer argued that a president would have immunity if he ordered the military to stage a coup or sold military secrets to a foreign adversary.)
That is no surprise. In January, Sauer argued at an appeals-court hearing that a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and not face prosecution unless he were impeached and convicted first. (Trump lost the appeal unanimously.)
“If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is for turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during the April 25 hearing.
This raises the question: Would Trump ever actually try such a thing? And if he did, would the Republican Party stand with him?
The answer to the first question is of course unknowable today, probably even to Trump, whose mental state seems more and more capricious and deranged. He is no Vladimir Putin, capable of coldly organizing hit jobs.
All the same, in his 2:24 p.m. tweet on January 6, 2021, Trump spurred on an already violent mob that sought to hang Vice President Mike Pence. (Immediately after his tweet, the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol violently surged forward.)
The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath that she recalls former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone saying to then–Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung.” And Meadows responded with something to the effect of, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
According to the January 6 committee’s report, several other White House aides also believed Trump’s tweet was an effort to inflame the mob. “It was essentially giving the green light to these people,” according to then–Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews.
Additionally, in a recent CNN interview, former Attorney General Bill Barr—who’d previously said that Trump has gone “off the rails,” is“manic and unreasonable,” and has demonstrated “erratic personal behavior”—admitted that Trump would “lose his temper” and talk about people who should be executed. “I doubt he would have actually carried it out,” Barr said with a nervous laugh. “But he would say that on other occasions?” the anchor Kaitlan Collins asked. “The president, I think people sometimes took him too literally,” Barr responded.
Perhaps Barr had the January 6 mob in mind.
So why would we assume that Trump—a man of sociopathic tendencies, who appears unable to even think in moral terms, who inflamed a violent mob to try to hang his vice president—would automatically recoil from having a political opponent assassinated if the opportunity presented itself?
In other words, although it may not be likely that Trump would order a political assassination—particularly if the Supreme Court rules that, as president, Trump would not have immunity—it is still possible. And that, in turn, raises another possibility, and maybe even a probability: Much of the Republican Party, including white evangelicals and fundamentalists, would line up in support of Trump even if he did order the assassination of a political opponent. If you don’t think so, you’re simply not familiar enough with the MAGA mind. You’re not listening closely enough to what Trump is saying to his supporters, and what they’re saying to one another.
It’s easy to anticipate just how their argument would unfold: first, deny that any amount of evidence could be amassed to prove that Trump tried to assassinate anyone; second, dismiss the allegations because they are being made by “haters” who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome; third, point the finger at the “Biden crime family,” whose corruptions far exceed what we see from Trump and his kin; and fourth, insist that even if the former president did order the assassination of a political opponent, it’s essential that Trump retain the presidency, because his absence would lead to dystopia. Unfortunately, for the sake of America, some people must perish. Or so Trump supporters would say.
Context is important here. MAGA world has stood with Trump—in fact, its support for him has deepened—through everything he has done, including encouraging the January 6 mob to kill his vice president and being found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming a woman. And those are just a fraction of his legal and moral transgressions. Yet Republicans have never been close to taking the exit ramp away from the former president. The closer we get to November’s election, the more emphatically they will defend him.
The identity of MAGA world has fused with Trump’s; to turn on him would be to turn on themselves. They won’t admit to themselves, and they certainly won’t admit to others, the sheer expanse of Trump’s degeneracy. To do so would be self-indicting; it would cause enormous cognitive dissonance. They made a Faustian bargain, and they’re not about to break it. They will follow him anywhere he goes.
Where Trump might go in a second term is of course a matter of speculation. But if his actions track at all with his last months in office, with his rhetoric since his defeat, and with the actions his lawyers are saying their client might be legally immune for committing, we are heading to an exceedingly dark and dangerous place. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.
Democrat says country is going off track after Trump compares Biden administration to Germany’s fascist secret police
Senior congressional Democrat James Clyburn has responded to remarks made by Donald Trump at a private event on Saturday in which he compared the Biden administration with the Gestapo secret police in fascist Germany, saying it was “incredible but it’s not surprising”.
The 83-year-old South Carolina Democrat added that Trump “is given to hyperbole on every subject that he ever approaches … The country got off track after that 1876 election and we are approaching the same kinds of elements today.”
