Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney (meaning lead federal prosecutor in a particular jurisdiction), condemned in recent days a campaign approach prominently taken by Donald Trump of starkly maligning the United States as a whole and casting himself as the savior.
“Trump’s disinformation game uses the same tropes as the authoritarians who came before him. Portray a country “in decline,” blame people cast as “other,” and argue desperate times require desperate measures that only he can bring. These ideas belong on the scrap heap of history,” McQuade said on X, the site formerly called Twitter.
Trump’s antagonism towards not just the Biden administration or elected Democrats but the social and political directions taken by the entire country is absolutely incessant.
“Our country is going bad. And it’s going to be changed on November 5, and if it’s not changed we’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said in a recent interview highlighted by Newsweek. The caption on a specific Trump post that McQuade was referencing is also fairly direct. “OUR ONCE GREAT COUNTRY IS GOING DOWN THE DRAIN. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE! VOTE FOR DONALD J. TRUMP…WE ARE GOING TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” said the remarks on Truth Social, Trump’s alternative social media site. This campaign rhetoric from Trump is consistent. He also sometimes singles out specific cities, like New York City and D.C., as supposedly emblematic of this imagined decline.
Another area where Trump is facing intense criticism is his claim of presidential immunity, meaning legal protections by way of merely serving as president at all that supposedly should stop a key case against him. Amid the criminal case, which accuses Trump of a series of attempted election interference schemes, Trump’s arguments have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Observers decry Trump’s vision for the presidency as dictatorial, mirroring a range of foreign figures for whom Trump has expressed evident admiration.
