Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
US Election
You have probably heard the news. New Yorkers of all ages have become gleeful, merciless killers.
On the streets. In the subways. In the parks. Even in their own homes. The massacres here continue, with no end in sight.
But it’s not what you think.
The tens of thousands of nameless dead are in fact Spotted Lanternflies, nickel-sized insects with kimono-like layers of spotted gray, black, and fiery-red wings. “A sexy cicada,” as my colleague Riley Callanan aptly describes them.
And the trouble with the Lanternflies around here is simple: they’re out-of-towners.
Native to Asia, they’re believed to have hitched a ride to the US on a shipping container about a decade ago. The population exploded across the Northeast, along with concerns about their impact on forests and farms.The Lanternflies, it turns out, secrete a gooey honeydew that foments deadly fungi.
Experts began warning of billions of dollars in damage. And so local governments urged us all to kill them on sight.
People listened.
Today, if you point out a lanternfly on any New York sidewalk, stoop, shirtsleeve, subway platform, or slide, people will spring into action: stomping, swatting, crushing, squashing. The bloodlust for this tiny creature is immense. As one popular science magazine put it, we must “destroy this useless garbage insect ... without mercy.”
Even the youth have been conditioned to kill. My 8-year-old son told me yesterday a girl in his class has declared herself head of “The Lanternfly Committee.” Her primary responsibility in this role is to scream that there are lanternflies around whenever there are lanternflies around. And when there are lanternflies around, all committee members (and present non-members) must stomp them into oblivion.
I will say this – it can be cathartic to stomp the shit out of lanternflies. Boss chewed you out at the office? Stomp a lantern fly. Mets blew a lead in the ninth? Die, lanternfly. Fed up with your kids asking you about lanternflies? Stomp more lanternflies.
No one is sure if all this killing is really controlling the lanternfly population, but so what? We aren’t just venting – we’re doing our part for society. This violence is virtuous. The killing must go on. And it will.
In that sense, I think there’s actually a little of the lanternfly in our politics more broadly these days. Call it the Lanternfly Law of Politics. It says: our opponents are no longer simply people we happen to disagree with, they are a threat that must be wiped out before they can do more harm.
You see this kind of thinking everywhere these days. Depending on what your views are, you might see liberals, or conservatives, or Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris, or the media, or the tech companies, or the police, or the federal government itself as a menace steadily devouring the foliage of our society.
As a result, in response, our political culture is becoming more extreme, more violent. People on the left will point to January 6th or the broader increase in threats of rightwing terrorism in recent years. People on the right will point to the not one but two plots to kill Donald Trump that occurred this summer.
We should all point to this as evidence that we are in a bad place.
Perhaps nowhere is the Lanternfly Law more obvious, or more dangerous, than in the language used to describe immigrants. When Donald Trump describes his political opponents as “vermin”, or immigrants as parasites who are “poisoning the bloodstream” of our country, he is tapping into a rich, vile history of demonizing foreigners as invasive species.
It’s powerful, of course, because it works. True vermin and invasive species are, by definition, threatening to our organisms, our communities, our ecosystems. So that kind of language taps deep into our lizard brains and provokes a primal emotional response.
But we aren’t … lizards, we are human beings. And immigrants or people you disagree with politically aren’t vermin, they are … also human beings.
We can argue about sensible rules for immigration, abortion, speech, guns, Lanternflies, whatever. But giving ourselves permission to dehumanize our neighbors and rivals like this is always dangerous.
The Lanternfly Law is, in the end, the root of all demagoguery: it’s a kind of political conjuring trick that gives people license to express their basest impulses under the cloak of civic virtue or community protection. You aren’t behaving like an ideologue, a loon, or a psychopath, the Law of the Lanternfly says, you are defending society as you know it.
So the next time a Lanternfly scuttles by or settles down, by all means stomp it to death if that makes you feel good.
But when it comes to the way we speak and think about our politics and society more broadly, be careful before you go chasing those sexy cicadas.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023.
The US Secret Service is probingElon Musk’s social media post from last Sunday questioning why no one has attempted to assassinate President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. Musk deleted the post after some resistance and issued another claiming it was a joke — but the Secret Service isn’t known for its sense of humor.
The agency told Bloomberg it was withholding records in response to a FOIA request because releasing them “could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.” Don’t rush to conclusions, though: The Secret Service routinely investigates even jokes or artistic expression on the off chance it could be a threat. Rap star Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, was interviewed in 2017 over song lyrics, for example, and “Last Week Tonight” senior writer Dan O’Brien was subpoenaed over a comedic article about how to kidnap the president’s daughter in 2009.
Musk has a history of making jokes many people don’t find very funny, and this isn’t even the first time it’s landed him in trouble with the feds. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued him in 2018 for claiming he had secured funding to make Tesla a private company at $420 a share, forcing him to claim this very obvious and immature weed joke was in fact a serious offer in federal court. We’re watching whether he learns to keep jokes to the group chat from here on out.
Indian Army soldiers participate in a mock drill exercise during the Army Day parade in New Delhi, India, January 15, 2016. India celebrated the 68th anniversary of the formation of its national army with soldiers from various regiments, and artillery on display on Friday.
11: For more than a year now, European countries have been buying Indian weapons and sending them to Ukraine for use against Russian invaders, according to 11 Indian and European defense officials interviewed in a Reuters exclusive. The juiciest bit? New Delhi – which has otherwise maintained good ties with Moscow – has refused Russia’s repeated requests to stop this from happening.
2: The Colombian government suspended peace talks with the Marxist rebels of the National Liberation Army, known by its Spanish acronym ELN, after an attack by the group killed two soldiers. Calling off talks with the ELN – which sat out the historic 2016 peace deal between the government and the larger FARC group – is another blow to leftist President Gustavo Petro’s promise of reaching “total peace” in the country. In July he was forced to scrap negotiations with another large faction of holdout militants.
47: With less than two months until Election Day, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are in a dead heat, tied at 47% apiece in a new national poll. In Pennsylvania, a key swing state, polls gave Harris an advantage of between one and four points. The margin of error in the state polls was just under 4 points.
80,000: People in the flood-battered northeastern Nigerian state of Borno are reeling at the price of canoe rides, with operators charging as much as 80,000 naira (about $50) for a short journey. To put that in perspective, that single ride would cost more than the local monthly minimum wage. Borno has suffered severe floods, and a related prison break, since a dam burst amid unusually heavy rains in Central and Eastern Africa.Early this month, the US Department of Justice announced the indictment of two RT employees, charging that the Russian state broadcaster had broken the Foreign Agents Registration Act and engaged in a “conspiracy to commit money laundering” by covertly funding a right-wing media outlet to spread Russian disinformation abroad.
The Justice Department said RT employees were bound up in a “$10 million scheme to create and distribute content to US audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinkenwarned that Kremlin-backed media outlets like RT have effectively behaved as an arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus, threatening not only the US but countries worldwide.
The Justice Department didn’t name the outlet suspected of being a conservative front for Russian propaganda, but details in the indictment suggest it was Tenet Media. The Tennessee-based company was founded by a Canadian, Lauren Chen, and her husband, and they hired another right-wing Canadian influencer, Lauren Southern. In other words, the unsealed indictment suggested that Canadian media personalities may have unwittingly been part of alleged Russian influence operations.
So the US and Canada have two foreign interference problems. The first is that foreign states, particularly Russia, are interested in sowing discord and shaping political discourse and election outcomes abroad to further their own strategic goals. The second is that both Washington and Ottawa seem intent on playing right into their hands.
Peddling propaganda at a price?
Tinatin Japaridze, an expert in Eurasian politics and security for Eurasia Group, says one of Russia’s “key goals” is to disrupt political discourse and undermine democratic practices in any states it views as a strategic threat.
“They will use any opportunities they can through hybrid means, including clever manipulation of public opinion by spreading disinformation and propaganda and exploiting existing and new vulnerabilities, to try to show discord and distrust of institutions,” she says.
While Tenet produced videos that predominantly addressed US political and cultural topics, it also made more than 50 videos on Canadian politics. Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlancsays the Canadian government is taking the matter seriously and is partnered with Washington to address Russian propaganda operations.
The FBI is still investigating in the US; if convicted, the suspects named in the US indictment face up to five years in prison for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and up to 20 years for conspiracy to commit money laundering.
RT has been banned in both the US and Canada under sanctions imposed in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the Justice Department’s indictment was unsealed, YouTube removed Tenet Media from its platform. On Monday, Meta banned RT from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
Heads Russia wins, tails the US and Canada lose
If Russia wanted to sow discord in American and Canadian politics, they may be getting unwitting assistance from partisans who are ready to capitalize on the latest revelations of foreign interference in their domestic politics.
On Sunday, Liberal Member of Parliament Ken Hardieposted on X about the Conservative Party leader, writing that “the Russians favour [sic] Pierre Poilievre … and Mr. P votes against help for Ukraine. What to make of this, eh?”
Two days later, Hardie followed up with a similar attack, saying, “As you know, Mr. Poilievre has refused to get the security clearance he needs to see sensitive info on foreign interference. Might he find the chapters on Russia and India too personally upsetting? Time for the enquiry [sic] to open those pages.”
A week earlier, Liberal MP Mark Gerretsenboosted a report about the 50+ Russia-linked videos while taunting the Conservative Party and its leader Pierre Poilievre about a 2023 vote in the House of Commons. “But, please, tell us more about the opposition to Ukraine being premised on the preamble of the free trade agreement.”
Last, Canada’s Conservatives voted against a Ukraine free trade deal. At the time, Poilievre said the party supported free trade with the country but nonsensically alleged the bill would impose a carbon tax on it. The move was almost certainly more about Poilievre attacking the carbon tax for domestic political reasons than to appease Russia.
A Russia-backed site did indeed feature videos that attacked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and supported Poilievre and his party, but there is no evidence linking the Conservatives or Poilievre to the production of the content or to Russia. In February, Poilievre said he and his party would stand with Ukraine and criticized Vladimir Putin for his “tyranny.”
Stateside, foreign interference by Russia and Iran has become a political weapon for Democrats and Republicans alike. For example, the Trump campaign used the alleged Iran hack of its materials to point out that its nominee was a target because he is such a strong anti-Iran leader.
Trump’s routine praise for Putin and the Kremlin’s apparent preference for him in recent elections — and in the 2024 race, for that matter — has helped fuel perceptions that he’s in cahoots with the Kremlin – and Democrats haven’t been shy about suggesting as much. But there’s no direct evidence of this. His campaign might’ve welcomed Russian interference in 2016, but that is not the same as coordinating or colluding with Moscow.
In other words, partisans are capitalizing on Russian propaganda efforts for their own political gain – the implications be damned. Stephen Miller, a top aide to former President Trump, for instance, dismissed the Russia news altogether, using it as an opportunity to attack the Justice Department itself and Vice President Kamala Harris. He suggested it was all a Democratic ploy to “interfere in and suppress the Election in favor of the Democrats.”
What can we do about foreign interference?
For nearly a decade, there have been warnings about Russia’s attempts to disrupt Western politics by using existing political cleavages and opening up new ones to divide, distract, and undermine the health – or what’s left of it – of democratic institutions in the US and elsewhere.
The strategy seems to be working. Toxic partisan polarization is thriving in the US, and it’s moving north. Distrust in political institutions – and elections – is acute in the US, and it’s gradually creeping into Canada.
Japaridze says Russia’s strategy is effective, and its efforts are unlikely to abate, while some of the Western discourse may play a role in fueling the problem, which is already difficult to tackle since it can be difficult to identify the origins of disinformation.
Moreover, the growing tendency for some to label information they don’t like as Russian disinformation isn’t helping, Japaridze argues. “But, of course, the fact that the Kremlin has deeply penetrated Western politics and society over the years is undeniable.”
“If something looks suspicious, we immediately call it Russian,” she says. “And that has numbed the public, even when Moscow is undoubtedly behind the malicious act.”
She advocates for a broader strategy that deals with the content of political discourse and not just its origins while also addressing institutional problems and eroding institutional trust in Western democracies.
“The entity behind the campaign is important to identify for the purposes of naming and shaming,” says Japaridze, “but the end result – the ultimate damage – remains the same, and our resilience to disinformation continues to be weak.”
Addressing that content means shoring up the strength of democratic institutions, many of which are currently in bad shape.
Russia doesn’t even have to create vulnerabilities. “They're able to identify them and deepen them so that they’re indirectly influencing the conversations without always needing to be directly involved in the mechanisms behind them,” Japaridze says.
The work now falls to US and Canadian political, media, and civil society leaders to counter foreign interference without playing into the hands of adversaries – a task which has proven, to date, far more difficult and elusive than perhaps ever before, which is surely a delight to Russia.
Hard numbers: Teamsters make their choice, US drug deaths plummet, Google wins big fine appeal, Brazil’s drought reaches records, Australia sees a “Ghost”
FILE PHOTO: Teamsters union members march in the annual Labor Day Parade in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., September 2, 2024.
58: In a stunning break with decades of tradition, the Teamsters, one of the largest unions in the US, declined to endorse a presidential candidate. The organization has historically leaned left, and it endorsed the Democrat in the last four cycles. But after internal polling revealed that 58% of its members now support Donald Trump, the union bosses announced Wednesday that they wouldn't side with either candidate. Shortly after, however, the West Coast Teamsters announced that they were endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, signaling a possible rift among the membership.
10: Some rare positive news from the frontlines of America’s war with addiction, as new public health data show that US overdose deaths fell 10% nationwide between April 2023 and April 2024. In some states, such as Ohio, the drop was triple that. The findings suggest that the acute wave of overdose deaths that began during the pandemic is ending. Experts aren’t sure what caused the drop, but they point to expanded treatment for drug addiction and overdoses, the gradual end of pandemic-era economic dislocation and isolation, and efforts to crush the supply of illicit narcotics. Still, more than 100,000 people a year die of drug overdoses in the US.
1.5 billion: Google notched a victory in its ongoing tussles with Brussels, as the tech giant won an appeal against a €1.5 billion (nearly US$1.7b) EU fine for violating European competition laws. The EU’s general court found that while the company had unfairly blocked rival online advertisers for a decade until 2016, the fine was too large. The news gives Google some relief after getting hit with a fine nearly twice as big last week in a separate EU antitrust case concerning online shopping services.
4.25 The Solimões river, a main tributary of the Amazon, has fallen to 4.25 meters below its historic September average, the lowest level ever recorded. This is the second consecutive year of severe droughts and scorching heat across Brazil and South America more broadly. A recent analysis showed there have been more than 345,000 wildfires on the continent this year, a record. Experts say underlying climate change dynamics are exacerbating the dry conditions produced by this year’s El Niño weather phenomenon.
5: In a first-of-its-kind case in Australia, authorities have arrested and charged a man with five crimes related to running an online messaging app used by organized criminals to traffick drugs and plot killings. Police say they were able to crack the app, called Ghost, in an operation that led to the arrests of as many as 50 people who allegedly used it for nefarious purposes. They also face charges.Trump balancing a burning world on his finger.
What if Donald Trump wins in November?
With less than 50 days to go until the US election and the former president now having near-even odds of taking back the White House, governments around the world are scrambling to work out what a second Trump term could mean for US foreign policy.
One thing’s certain: For better and worse, Trump is still the same charismatic, narcissistic, impulsive, transactional leader he was four years ago (albeit a little slower). But even though Trump the person hasn’t changed since 2020, the world around him has become dramatically more dangerous.
Some will point out that as president from 2017-2021, Trump was able to score some notable foreign-policy successes, including a revitalized North American free trade agreement, the Abraham Accords, fairer cost-sharing among NATO members, and new and stronger security alliances in Asia. It’s also true that this happened amid a generally benign and peaceful international environment, at least before the COVID-19 pandemic started near the end of his term.
Two major regional wars, intensifying great-power competition with China, serious instability threatened by emboldened rogue actors like Russia and Iran, a sluggish global economy strained by structural supply chain shifts and 20-year-high interest rates, and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence will place entirely new demands on Trump’s leadership.
The more challenging and volatile geopolitical context means the stakes are much higher than they were in 2017 when Trump first took office. Combined with the former president’s immutable traits, this suggests that a second Trump term would likely deliver significantly more extreme foreign policy outcomes than his first term, the current Biden administration, and a Kamala Harris presidency.
On China, a second Trump presidency would take a harder line toward the rivalry, after the Biden administration finally managed to halt the three-year slide in relations. This would begin with the return of Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s hawkish trade czar, and a push for much higher tariffs on Chinese imports. (Trump would also rekindle old tensions with US allies like Japan and South Korea in his zeal to extract better trade terms from them, too, driving at least some into China’s arms – or encouraging them to hedge more.)
The success of Trump’s confrontational approach would depend almost entirely on how Beijing responds. President Xi Jinping might decide his strategy of engagement and conflict management has run its course and the US can never be a reliable partner. He would accordingly retaliate symmetrically wherever possible and asymmetrically where not, leaning further into economic decoupling and taking advantage of Trump’s disdain for allies to drive a wedge between them and America. By reducing US-China interdependence and therefore the cost of going to war, this Cold War scenario would also increase the risk of direct military confrontation – be that over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or whatever else.
But there’s an alternative: Xi could decide that China’s worsening long-term economic prospects demand a more conciliatory response to Trump’s escalation and instead present him with a “grand bargain” that he could sell at home as a win. That is, after all, what Trump cares most about: not Taiwanese sovereignty, not treaty allies, not the rules-based order, not US global leadership (all of which Xi believes Trump is less committed than Biden/Harris to defending), but claiming credit for reducing the bilateral trade deficit. Whatever happens, a second Trump term would create both bigger risks and bigger opportunities in relations with China than a Harris presidency.
In the Middle East, Trump could play a stabilizing role. The Abraham Accords, probably the biggest foreign policy achievement of his first term, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries, sparking hope for a more stable and prosperous region. (They also exposed the indifference that Arab governments feel toward the Palestinians, whose plight was largely decoupled from the agreements.) While Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the crushing Israeli response to them have put this hope – and the prospect that even Saudi Arabia might cut a breakthrough deal with Israel – on hold, Trump’s transactional nature and strong relationships with deep-pocketed Gulf leaders could revive this possibility (if a lame duck Biden doesn’t get there first…).
The flipside is that Trump’s lack of inhibition about using military force against Iran – remember his administration’s targeted assassination of Iranian defense chief Qasem Soleimani? – could also create wildcard risks, most notably inadvertent escalation from autonomous Iranian proxies or a desperate or emboldened Israeli government. But as the last several months have shown, Tehran itself has no interest in a dangerous direct war with either the US or Israel that it can’t win, particularly when a loss would destabilize the economy, jeopardize recently normalized relations with the Gulf Arabs, and precipitate a crisis at home. So even here, Trump’s risky approach is more likely than not to result in de-escalation and regional stability.
Trump has famously claimed that if elected, he will end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours by unilaterally forcing Presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to accept an immediate cease-fire on terms favorable to Russia. In the likely event that Zelensky, who he strongly dislikes, rejected his terms, he would cut off US military aid as leverage. But, to avoid appearing weak, he would ramp up aid to Ukraine if it was Putin who refused to negotiate.
While Trump’s deal would freeze Russian control over the presently occupied Ukrainian land, the fact remains that Kyiv doesn’t have the manpower to win it all back. It can, however, still end up in a stronger geopolitical position than it was before the invasion. NATO accession would be off the table under Trump, but if he was prepared to sign onto hard security guarantees for Kyiv as part of a breakthrough agreement, the onus would then be on the Europeans to fast-track EU integration and fund Ukraine’s reconstruction. The war would stabilize, and Ukraine would get about as good an outcome as it plausibly could. Absent security commitments or a cease-fire, though, Russia would continue to attempt to take more Ukrainian territory, while a desperate Ukraine would continue its drone and asymmetric warfare to retake its land.
Speaking of NATO, a second Trump term would weaken the transatlantic alliance. Despite increased defense spending across the continent (largely to the credit of Trump’s first-term threats), most European countries won’t be willing or able to meet Trump’s demands for more burden-sharing across the alliance. Whatever he may say, Trump is unlikely to unilaterally withdraw the US from NATO. But he may pull back troop deployments from member countries he believes are “ripping off” the US (whether on defense costs or bilateral trade) to get them to pay up.
American allies in Europe and enemies in the Kremlin will each have cause to doubt the Trump administration’s Article 5 commitment to defend NATO members under attack. A leaderless, divided, and fiscally challenged Europe will be unable to act on French President Emmanuel Macron’s call to bolster its “strategic autonomy,” shore up its collective defenses, and fill the US-shaped hole. Frontline NATO states closest to Russia’s borders – Poland, the Baltics, and the Nordics – are right to worry for their national security under a second Trump presidency.
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un would be happy to welcome back Trump, the only US president willing to bargain with him … while Trump remains intrigued by the enduring prospect of a deal he believes no other US president can get: North Korean denuclearization. That’d be bad news, of course, for South Korea and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who would have little say in what Trump offers Kim in exchange. Last time around, he canceled joint military exercises, questioned the US troop presence in South Korea, and undermined Seoul’s deterrent … without coordinating with Seoul in advance. Diplomacy would not only alienate the conservative Yoon administration, but also it may not be as attractive to Pyongyang now that North Korea is receiving support from Russia, Iran, and China as a member of the “axis of rogues.”
Finally, a second Trump administration would also attempt to cut deals with Mexico on both border security and trade yet again. Trump’s abrasive rhetoric and the scheduled review of the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal in 2026 might get relations with incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum off to a contentious start, but both sides know the US has all the negotiating leverage. Ultimately, there are more than enough vested interests in both countries to find mutually beneficial compromises here, setting Trump up for easy breakthroughs.
In short, Trump’s return at a time of heightened geopolitical turbulence would be more likely to precipitate both catastrophic breakdowns and improbable breakthroughs. Do you feel lucky?
Former President Donald Trump seen golfing in Doral, Florida, on Oct. 27, 2022.
President Donald Trump is already blaming Democrats for the apparent assassination attempt on him at his West Palm Beach golf course on Sunday. The incident came roughly two months after a gunman attempted to kill Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” Trump said Monday. The Secret Service on Monday said the suspect did not fire any shots and never had the former president in his line of sight. But they admitted that they did not search the perimeter of the golf course before Trump began his game and that the almost-assassin may have been hiding at the course for nearly 12 hours waiting for his target.
Trump — who has routinely employed violent rhetoric — has also pointed the finger at Dems over the attempt on his life in July.
Meanwhile, Trump supporter Elon Musk on Sunday questioned in a since-deleted post why “no one is even trying to assassinate” President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. Russia also didn’t wait long to chime in, with the Kremlin on Monday effectively blaming the incident on US support for Ukraine. The suspect has reportedly exhibited a strong sense of solidarity with Ukraine amid its war with Russia. Trump has expressed opposition to continued US aid to Kyiv, and investigators are reportedly looking into whether this motivated the suspect.
July’s shooting, which was caught on video and witnessed firsthand by a large group of people, temporarily boosted Trump’s poll numbers. And much like after the first attempt, Trump’s campaign is already referencing Sunday’s incident in fundraising emails. But this attempt doesn’t seem to be getting as much online traction as the previous one, says Noah Daponte-Smith, a US analyst for Eurasia Group.
“Given that the previous attempt, which came within millimeters of succeeding, had a negligible impact on the polls, I'd expect the impact of this attempt to be similarly minimal,” adds Daponte-Smith. The biggest impact could be a result of Trump's own rhetoric, Daponte-Smith says, as the former president continues to lean into the notion that Democrats are putting him in danger.