Vox Sentences: Donald Trump’s authoritarian soap opera continues

Donald Trump is a threat to democracy; Vladimir Putin says Russia's withdrawing from Syria (is it, tho?); and the rise of the far right in Germany.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

This is getting legit scary

Brian Blanco/Getty Images

• When last we left our antihero Donald, he was eroding democratic norms by encouraging his supporters to beat up protesters. Let's see how that's going.

• Badly, it turns out! On Friday, a Trump rally in Chicago — which hundreds of protesters had attended — was abruptly canceled, leading to hours of standoffs between supporters and protesters and the occasional scuffle (though not widespread violence).

  [CBS News / Sopan Deb]

• Trump claimed he'd canceled the rally because police had warned him of "threats." In fact, police said the abrupt cancellation probably made the situation more dangerous. This article from Politico Magazine is far and away the best account of what happened.

  [Politico Magazine / Keith O'Brien]

• Trump's protesters are definitely getting more organized and aggressive — often foolishly so. One protester in Dayton on Saturday tried to storm the stage. (Trump said he was ISIS-affiliated. He was not.)

  [The Daily Beast / Asawin Suebsaeng]

• And on Sunday, Trump offered to put his money where his mouth is: He said he'd told his campaign to look into paying the legal fees of the man who sucker-punched a protester on Wednesday.

  [Los Angeles Times / Michael Finnegan and Noah Bierman]

• This is unprecedentedly bad. Even Trump's Republican rivals John Kasich and Marco Rubio are having trouble saying they'd still vote for Trump if he's the nominee.

  [Vox / Michelle Hackman]

• Of course, if anything it helps him with voters. A poll of Florida voters found twice as many were more likely to vote for Trump after the Chicago incident as were less likely (though most didn't care).

  [Monmouth University]

• This does not make Trump's acceptance of violence remotely okay. It is corrosive to a democratic society. Period.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Did Putin get what he wanted in Syria?

Sasha Mordovets/Getty

• Russian President Vladimir Putin made a sudden announcement today: Russia will (Putin says) start withdrawing its "main" ground troops from Syria, six months after they went in.

  [Reuters / Denis Dyomkin and Suleiman al-Khalidi]

• Take this announcement with a grain of salt. According to Putin, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine, either. (And there are definitely Russian troops in Ukraine.)

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• The US government doesn't believe Putin plans to withdraw troops for several months. They think the announcement is a way to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down or sue for peace, since without Russia his government wouldn't be doing so well.

  [LA Times / Patrick J. McDonnell , Mansur Mirovalev, and Nabih Bulos]

• The timing of Putin's announcement bolsters this theory: It comes on the day that Syrian peace talks restart, after a surprisingly successful ceasefire.

  [CNN / Holly Yan]

• But Putin got what he wanted in Syria. For one thing, his army's involvement shifted momentum in the war toward Assad — proving that Russia is a major player and forcing its inclusion in peace talks.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• And many argue that the continued flow of refugees out of Syria toward Europe is a desired outcome for Putin as well — to force European powers to push for a quicker end to the war, even if it strengthens Russia or Assad.

  [CNBC / Sam Jones]

Rise of the German Trumpists

Carsten Koall/Getty Images

• Speaking of Europe: The far-right German party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), made serious gains in three local elections over the weekend.

  [NYT / Alison Smale]

• The AfD was founded in 2013 as an anti–European Union party. But, unsurprisingly, it's hit its stride after 2015 as a hard-line anti-refugee party.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The AfD's leader has called for refugees to be shot by border guards if they attempt to enter Germany, a statement that, Trumpistically, was expected to damage the party politically but instead helped it in the polls.

  [Der Spiegel]

• The rise of the far right is at this point a pan-European issue: This map by Der Spiegel shows that anti-immigration parties are gaining representation in parliaments (and often a role in governing coalitions) across the continent.

  [Der Spiegel]

• But it has special repercussions in Germany — including legal ones. Germany is understandably wary of far-right nationalist populism, and some argue that the AfD's existence might violate the nation's constitution.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Despite the rightward reaction, it's worth noting that a majority of voters in the German elections supported parties that agree with Chancellor Angela Merkel's expansive pro-refugee policy.

  [The Altantic / Krishnadev Calamur]

• And Merkel has declared that her government isn't changing course despite the indications that she's spurring a political backlash.

  [The Guardian / Philip Oltermann]

MISCELLANEOUS

This is a compelling, well-researched argument that the VA scandal of 2014 was greatly exaggerated and that the VA system still provides better health care than the private sector. [Washington Monthly / Alicia Mundy]

• 19th-century seed catalogs sometimes featured illustrations of "vegetable people."

  [FT / Susan Fraser]

• The debate over highway sign fonts is truly the defining public policy issue of our time.

  [Wired / Margaret Rhodes]

• Beverly Hills is starting to name and shame its biggest water wasters, including Amy Poehler and David Geffen, the latter of whom used 27,000 gallons of water a day last summer.

  [LA Times / Matt Stevens]

• Counter-level support for Donald Trump is well correlated with white high school dropouts' share of the population.

  [NYT / Neil Irwin and Josh Katz]

VERBATIM

"It is difficult for people who are not African-American to understand what it has been to have someone in the White House that you know understands you." [C.T. Vivian to NYT / Yamiche Alcindor]

• "Jackson’s supporters slammed Adams as effete and elitist. In an assault that puts Trump’s insults to shame, they claimed, falsely, that as minister to Russia, Adams procured an American virgin for the Czar. They were, in effect, calling the president a pimp."

  [Politico Magazine / Andrew Saunders]

• "Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them."

  [Quanta / Erica Klarreich]

• "The state of Texas will inject poison into Marvin’s veins, and he will die. And they didn’t even tell his family how to retrieve his body so they could bury it."

  [The Marshall Project / Burke Butler]

• "Tammy Blair, the chairwoman of the Republican Party in nearby Cherokee County, said there were differing definitions of extreme, adding that she was sympathetic to the movement to have Texas secede from the United States."

  [NYT / Manny Fernandez]

WATCH THIS

Why the Wingdings font exists [YouTube / Phil Edwards and Sarah Turbin]

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