Attention to the Unseen

John F Harris and Daniel Lippman write: Nearly everyone remembers the old cliché: If you can’t trust someone to get the little things right, how can you ever count on them to do the big things? President Donald Trump had better hope that bromide, invoked everywhere from youth sports teams to sales-force training sessions, doesn’t apply to him. As his presidency lurches toward a climactic judgment on Nov. 3, the little things lately have rarely gone more pervasively or embarrassingly…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Early in the pandemic, as thousands of American troops began NATO maneuvers in Germany, Attila Hildmann did a quick YouTube search to see what it was all about. He quickly came across videos posted by German followers of QAnon. In their telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government — something they applauded. “The Q movement said these are troops that…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: For Republicans, fearful of a possible electoral disaster just weeks away, it has become safe at last to diss Donald Trump — or at least to distance themselves from him in unmistakably purposeful ways. A barrage of barbed comments in recent days shows how markedly the calculus of fear has shifted in the GOP. For much of the past four years, Republican politicians were scared above all about incurring the wrath of the president and his supporters with…

Read More Read More

A search warrant and a list of seized property from an FBI raid related to the alleged kidnapping plot. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images By Amy Cooter, Vanderbilt University Details are still emerging about the men arrested on federal and state charges related to an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Federal prosecutions can take months and even years, so it will be quite some time before a full analysis of this situation becomes possible. But as a…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump needed money. His “self-funded” presidential campaign was short on funds, and he was struggling to win over leery Republican donors. His golf courses and the hotel he would soon open in the Old Post Office in Washington were eating away at what cash he had left on hand, his tax records show. And in early 2016, Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still doing business with him, unexpectedly turned down his request…

Read More Read More

Fred Kaplan writes: The most striking thing about the six domestic terrorists arrested on Thursday for conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan isn’t that they actually took steps to carry out their plot—though that is unusual and frightening (most groups of this ilk talk big but do little). More, it’s what the gang reveals about the steep rise in American militia activity this year. Some of these groups—including this one, which, had it succeeded, would have been the season’s…

Read More Read More