Donald Trump Sees The Threat Of Violence As A Skeleton Key To Unchecked Power

He wants swing voters to feel at ease with his angry agenda, but promises of restraint mean nothing if he looses an unaccountable mob on the country.

(Photo by PETER FOLEY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

For my sins, I didn’t just read the new Time magazine cover story based on Eric Cortellessa’s lengthy interviews with Donald Trump. I also read the transcript of the interviews, and its dozens of links, which underline Trump’s lies. Click through and you’ll arrive at this fact-check page, which is a lengthy read in its own right.

There’s more to cover in that body of work than I can condense into a single newsletter. The New York Times assigned multiple reporters just to summarize it and log the reaction to it within the political class.

I thought Cortellessa distilled the material well in his nut graf, which was screen-capped widely on the political internet.

But the transcript reveals something that the feature story doesn’t quite capture: