It is going to get worse. That is the unfortunate truth following a week in which many institutions of our republic seemed to buckle under relentless assault from Donald Trump and his allies. The president reportedly directed a subordinate law-enforcement officer to break the law, and offered him a pardon if he faced legal consequences for doing so. He has stepped up his tampering with the Federal Reserve and floated laughably unqualified candidates who will politicize the central bank. His Treasury Secretary openly defied Congress on releasing the president's tax returns, which appears to be a black-and-white violation of federal law with a penalty of five years in prison.

His press secretary added to the shameless absurdity of it all by suggesting members of Congress weren't smart enough to see his tax returns, as if the president could successfully navigate TurboTax, or she would be anywhere near the White House if her father hadn't been a governor and the president weren't a truthless grifter who struggles to attract actual talent. His attorney general continues to prevent the release of the Mueller Report using tactics that bear striking similarities to his activities in his previous AG stint in the '80s. Like with the tax returns, we're supposed to believe these people are working overtime to prevent the public from seeing documents that prove the president is COMPLETELY EXONERATED!

This is just bullshit. All of it.

But perhaps worst of all, the president has embarked on a series of increasingly brazen attacks on Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, one of several freshman Democrats—who always seem to be women of color—that the right has targeted relentlessly. The latest blowup is over a speech Omar gave highlighting the erosion of Muslim Americans' civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. Omar suggested these threats to all Muslims' rights came after "some people did something," a line which Republicans like Dan Crenshaw—thanks again, SNL—seized on and trumpeted out of context to suggest Omar was downplaying the attacks themselves. Never mind that, as Omar pointed out, President George W. Bush spoke in very similar language just days after the attack. This was an opportunity, and conservatives took it.

The New York Post produced a disgusting cover using the deaths of 3,000 people as a political cudgel. Republicans from all over took their shots. But as expected, the most egregious behavior came from the President of the United States.

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WE WILL NEVER FORGET! pic.twitter.com/VxrGFRFeJM — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2019

This is such insane propaganda that Chris Wallace of Fox News was only comfortable playing five seconds of it before he asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about it.

WALLACE: Why is the president comfortable putting out horrible images like that? Does he worry at all about inciting violence against Muslims in general or Ilhan Omar in specific?"

SANDERS: Certainly nothing could be further from the truth. The president is not trying to incite violence against anybody.

And here was what she said on ABC's This Week.

SANDERS: Certainly the president is wishing no ill will and certainly not violence towards anyone.

This is just bullshit. All of it. There is no mistaking the president's intent when he intersperses footage of a Muslim woman with footage of an attack perpetrated by Muslim terrorists. He is trying to tie her to to the event, to make her indistinct from the perpetrators of mass murder. He does not need to say it outright—the blurring of lines will be enough. He has done this continually with followers of Islam, lying about how thousands of Muslims were "cheering" the 9/11 attacks from rooftops in New Jersey and calling for a ban on Muslim immigration. “I think Islam hates us,” he said on CNN in 2016.

Omar with Rashida Tlaib (L), who also faced a bad-faith right-wing smear after she called the president a "motherfucker." Tom Williams Getty Images

Like with Hispanic immigrants, Trump has sought to paint Muslims as The Other in America—an enemy who has invaded this country and sought to subvert the American way of life. In this vision, of course, the United States is a country for white Christian people. A horrifying explanation for this behavior is that it is what the president genuinely believes. A possibly more disgusting one is that it is a way to play politics. According to a report from The New York Times' Maggie Haberman, it at least has filaments of the latter.

Privately, Mr. Trump’s advisers describe Ms. Omar as his ideal foil. Her remarks about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, combined with her role in a progressive contingent of freshman House Democrats who have sparked intraparty battles, have been treated as a gift by Republicans.

Trump aides and allies say they are pleased that some of the Democratic hopefuls for the 2020 presidential nomination are defending her against the president’s attacks, claiming they think it will be damaging for them in the general election.

Ms. Omar “is the perfect embodiment of the sharp contrast President Trump wants to paint for 2020,” said Sam Nunberg, a 2016 campaign aide to Mr. Trump. He added that Mr. Trump is tethering Ms. Omar to more visible Democrats, like her closest ally in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whom Republicans have sought to make a boogeyman.

“This contrast gives the president a chance to expand his support closer to 50 percent,” Mr. Nunberg insisted.

He is endangering the life of a member of Congress because he thinks it's good politics. And make no mistake: he is endangering Omar's life. These freshman congresswomen of color face an outsize number of death threats at the baseline, but when the leader of the movement targets them, the incidents spike. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said as much after a College Republicans group referred to her as a "domestic terrorist" in a mailing:

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This puts me in danger every time.



Almost every time this uncalled for rhetoric gets blasted by conserv. grps, we get a spike in death threats to refer to Capitol Police.



Multiple ppl have been arrested trying to harm me, Ilhan, & others.@GOP, what’s it going to take to stop? https://t.co/vpous77RbT — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 10, 2019

And Omar said the same in this case:

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We are all Americans. This is endangering lives. It has to stop. pic.twitter.com/gwB2kDUIRp — Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) April 15, 2019

This is not some political game. A New York man was arrested this month after a staffer in Omar's office received a call from him in which he said, "Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she's a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull." When authorities arrived at his house, he told them "he is a patriot, that he loves President Donald Trump," and that, "If our forefathers were still alive, they'd put a bullet in her head."

The New York Post published this cover last week in the wake of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s remarks, sparking a boycott of the newspaper among some store owners in New York City. New York Post

In February, a Coast Guard officer was discovered to be a white nationalist with designs on becoming, according to law enforcement, a "domestic terrorist" who "intended to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country." He'd stockpiled 15 guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and he had a kill list featuring Omar, a number of prominent Democrats, and media personalities he considered the president's enemies. A Florida Trump supporter pled guilty this month to mailing 16 pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and news organizations including CNN—which the president has specifically targeted with increasing vitriol. Meanwhile, hate crimes are on the rise.

Most of the president's supporters would never consider turning to violence against his political opponents and members of the media who are trying to hold him accountable. They might hate these people and rail against them, but they would not go down this road. Unfortunately, however, there are people on the outer fringes who just might. The president surely knows that his rhetoric could lead to violence—he watched as one of his supporters, worked up into a frenzy at a rally in El Paso, attacked a BBC reporter. But he does it anyway, just as he continued to with Omar today:

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Before Nancy, who has lost all control of Congress and is getting nothing done, decides to defend her leader, Rep. Omar, she should look at the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and ungrateful U.S. HATE statements Omar has made. She is out of control, except for her control of Nancy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 15, 2019

Here, Trump seems almost determined to confirm the Times' reporting. He is ham-handedly trying to paint Omar as the leader of the Democratic Party, shortly after painting her as an apologist for Islamist terrorism.

It is the strategy of a man completely unconcerned with the truth, or with safeguarding the public safety of American citizens. It is a tactic for someone who sees no value in the democratic process or in the idea of a political commonwealth based on ideas, not blood and soil. It's the behavior of someone who struggles to demonstrate empathy for others—the type who would, when interviewed on 9/11 shortly after the Twin Towers fell, took the opportunity to declare his building was now the tallest in Lower Manhattan. (It wasn't.) It is an approach favored by someone who views anything as acceptable if it helps him get what he wants or will remove an obstacle in the way. As the risk rises that he could face legal jeopardy once he leaves office, we are about to find out just what that means.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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