In the last few months we’ve seen repeated, powerful confirmations of the Biden-Harris Presidency’s success and this only helps to validate Harris’s candidacy:
· Inflation fell last month and has been at the Fed’s target rate for the past 6 months.
· Crime and murder rates are way down.
· Gas prices are lower.
· The immigrant flow to the border is down.
· We’ve had the strongest economic recovery after Covid of any advanced economy in the world.
· The Wall Street Journal called the American economy the “envy of the world.”
· The job market is the best since the 1960s.
· The number of medically uninsured is the lowest in American history.
· The deficit is trillions less.
· The Dow broke 40,000 and all three indices hover in record territory.
· Domestic oil, gas and renewable production continue to be at all-time highs.
· America is more energy independent than it has been in decades.
· The Economist recently wrote about the unprecedented startup boom America is experiencing right now.
· The three big Biden-Harris investment bills dramatically accelerated the energy transition necessary to combat climate change and will be creating opportunities and jobs for our workers for decades to come.
· Together, President Biden and Vice President Harris reinvigorated the Western alliance and were an historic champion of democracy and freedom.
· President Biden helped successfully defeat the fascists in recent European and French elections.
Condensed from RUTH BEN-GHIAT, July 18, 2024
Assassination Attempts on Autocrats and Strongmen Result in the Following Behavior – Sound familiar?
Summarized from LUCID Ruth Ben-Ghiat, July 18, 2024
· Traumatizes them and increases their instincts of self-preservation
· Strengthens their political power by boosting their personality cults
· Testifies to their sense and their followers’ sense of their omnipotence
· Provides the rationale for persecuting their enemies
· Becomes less moderate and calls for vengeance after threats to their power or life.
· Plays up the assassination attempt for political and media impact
· Calls for “unity” as code for labeling criticism as dangerous and an incitement to further violence.
· Lends credibility to the victimhood personas they cultivate
· Prompts and justifies crackdowns or declarations of states of emergency that then become normalized
· Provides an excuse to do things they’ve wanted to do, like securing their hold on government and silencing the opposition
“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people.
“As Trump’s running mate, Vance will make it his mission to enact Trump’s Project 2025 agenda at the expense of American families. This is someone who supports banning abortion nationwide while criticizing exceptions for rape and incest survivors; railed against the Affordable Care Act , including its protections for millions with preexisting conditions; and has admitted he wouldn’t have certified the free and fair election in 2020.
“Billionaires and corporations are literally rooting for J.D. Vance: they know he and Trump will cut their taxes and send prices skyrocketing for everyone else.
“Over the next three and a half months, we will spend every single day making the case between the two starkly contrasting visions Americans will choose between at the ballot box this November: the Biden-Harris ticket who’s focused on uniting the country, creating opportunity for everyone, and lowering costs; or Trump-Vance – whose harmful agenda will take away Americans’ rights, hurt the middle class, and make life more expensive – all while benefiting the ultra-rich and greedy corporations.”
· Like Trump, J.D. Vance supports a nationwide ban on abortion – and he criticizes exceptions for rape and incest.
· Like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance supports an abortion ban nationwide.
· Vance opposes exceptions for rape and incest survivors, saying “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and calling those circumstances “inconvenient.”
· Vance thinks women should stay in “violent” marriages.
· J.D. Vance supports Trump’s agenda to cut Social Security and rip away Americans’ health care.
· Vance railed against the Affordable Care Act, which includes protections for millions of Americans with preexisting conditions.
· Vance called Social Security and Medicare “the biggest roadblocks to any kind of real fiscal sanity.”
· J.D. Vance denies the results of the 2020 election and makes excuses for political violence.
· J.D. Vance admitted he would not have certified the 2020 election results, and echoes Donald Trump’s baseless lies refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election.
· Vance has repeatedly attempted to whitewash the political violence that occurred on January 6.
· Vance has a reputation as one of the most far-right extremists in Washington, endorsing a January 6 rally member for Congress and calling Marjorie Taylor Greene, who traffics in antisemitism and division, “a friend.”
For the first time in eight years, the Republican Party has a platform. It’s not written in Sharpie, but it might as well be. It’s all in caps, like they’re shouting at us. The content and the form are high-schoolish. It reads as though someone who lacks substance tried to write bumper stickers or poster slogans that sound good but are empty—no one, Republican or Democrat, is going to “seal” the border or “stop” inflation. It’s that emptiness, ending with “Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success,” that captures the hollow spirit of this new Republican platform. It’s not that platforms are ever highly substantive, but this one hits new lows.
Perhaps what’s absent is as telling as what’s in there: no mention of abortion or marriage equality, two issues where the well-known GOP position is at odds with public sentiment. Trump recently bragged about undoing Roe and abortion rights, and now he tries to back away from that signature accomplishment.
The platform is what they’ll show people. But Project 2025 is the substance of what the new administration will look like. It includes a national abortion ban—forget about states’ rights. It includes policies that would increase taxes for middle class Americans, weaken workers’ right to overtime pay, and raise the retirement age for Social Security. It’s those unpopular parts of Project 2025 that are absent from or contradicted by the Republican platform, the part they show the public. But Project 2025 is squarely Trump’s, written by his people. Eighty-one percent of them held formal roles connected to the Trump presidency.
The coming election is the perfect storm for anyone interested in sinking democracy. On the one hand, there is the Republican Party, now completely and firmly in thrall to a would-be dictator who serves his own self-interest and doesn’t care about the people who make up his “base,” and for whom he pretends to be fighting for. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME, THEY’RE AFTER YOU…I’M JUST STANDING IN THE WAY!” Trump rants in bold on his website.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party is still in something of a meltdown, not entirely without reason, after Joe Biden stumbled through his debate performance, leading to a fierce conversation about whether he’s capable of leading the country for the next four years. That’s a conversation that might have been better had it happened at the outset of the campaign season before Biden locked up the delegates necessary for the nomination. But that did not happen. So now, here we are, with democracy hanging in the balance.
We are living squarely at the intersection of law and politics, and it is not a comfortable place to be. The Lincoln Project is out with a new ad, an effort to demonstrate as though it’s a news report what it would mean to have Donald Trump back in office, organized under the principles of Project 2025 and backed by a Supreme Court that has decreed none of his official acts are crimes. It’s four minutes long, but it’s a must watch.
Here’s how it ends: “Ask yourself, what did you believe was impossible just eight years ago? … He’s counting on you to believe it won’t happen.” That’s an evergreen statement when it comes to Trump; whether it’s Project 2025 or anything else about his hoped-for second term in office, he is quite literally counting on Americans to believe it won’t happen.
I know many of you will hear proof of this in your conversations with people who intend to vote for him. They won’t read Project 2025; they may not know what it is. They won’t read a lengthy analysis, maybe not even a short one. It comes down to conversations with trusted friends. So please take one or two key points that resonate with you from everything we’ve been reading and discussing and be prepared to make them at the right moment in those conversations. It might be the contradiction between the Republican Party’s platform and Project 2025. That implies a level of deceit that might make people question and dig deeper to take a look for themselves. It could be the promise that there will be no changes to Social Security on the one hand, while proposing to weaken it on the other.
It seems likely at this point that Joe Biden will be the Democrat’s nominee. He says he’s staying in the race, and he has the votes. He also has, as University of Virginia political science Professor Larry Sabato puts it, the “high ground,” in the sense that he can’t be forced to leave the race. He has said he won’t.
I know the whole situation angers some of the people in the big tent that is the Democratic Party. The Democrats have never been a party that marches in lockstep. That is something that Republicans do. Its absence is both a strength and a weakness of the Democratic Party, but I suspect something that draws many Democrats is the lack of a mandatory dogma.
Nonetheless, we live in a moment where we must find a way to keep the Republic. We are in the moment Benjamin Franklin envisioned more than 200 years ago, when, asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention had created, he responded, “a Republic, if you can keep it.” Just like America on the cusp of the Civil War, we are going to have to find a way to steer back towards democracy.
Because we know what Trump will do.
I prefer a political party that permits dissent and debate—the proverbial big tent—over one where disagreement with the dear leader leads to marginalization and forced expulsion. I prefer a country where the First Amendment and a whole host of other rights many will take for granted until it’s too late stay in place. Also, and this is putting it mildly, I’d prefer to see Joe Biden appointing new judges and justices rather than Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court—including three members Trump appointed and two who, by virtue of conflicts of interest due to work undertaken and/or views expressed by their wives, would have recused had they been judges on any other federal court—has now anointed him with near total immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts he undertakes. The opinion in Trump v. U.S. sweeps so broadly when describing potential official acts that he can claim protection for virtually anything he does. Any effort to hold him accountable would be tied up in court for years.
Next Monday Republicans will gather in Milwaukee. They will vote on their platform and, presumably, Donald Trump will emerge as their nominee to be president. It will be a dark moment in our country’s history.
We live in the time of the perfect storm. In less than four months, we’ll be deciding the future of the United States. Whatever your tolerance is for the news and for staying engaged in this moment, try to engage in civil discourse wherever you find the opportunity to do so. Just like those of us who write postcards to voters in other states know that they influence people’s decisions about whether to vote, our conversations—the casual ones in grocery stores, in places of worship, or over coffee or a beer, can have a strong impact too. And it’s the part we can do ahead of November, which is to say we must do it.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
To make clear our commitment, we offer to the American people the 2024 GOP Platform to Make America Great Again! It is a forward-looking Agenda that begins with the following twenty promises that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican Majorities in the House and Senate.
Thousands of American patriots fought and died to free the colonies from a king who ruled with absolute power. Today [July 2, 2024], the Supreme Court overthrew the American Revolution and anointed the US president as a modern-day king. Their betrayal of the American revolutionaries, Founders, and Framers is all the worse because they did so to promote the most corrupt, dangerous, depraved person to disgrace the office of the presidency.
Trump v. United States will be overruled. The decision is so bad it will not stand....
It may take a few years or decades to overturn Trump v. US, but the American people are the ultimate power under the Constitution….We are going to win. The only thing that has changed is the timeline to ultimate victory.…
The opinion in Trump v. US
There is a torrent of excellent writing and commentary about the opinion. Given that fact, I will follow the maxim that “Less is more” and attempt to explain the decision and its consequences in a bare bones fashion and direct readers to other commentary for further details.
What happened?
From 1789 to the present, everyone rightly believed that US presidents were subject to criminal prosecution on the same basis as all other citizens.
Today, the Supreme Court invented a rule (found nowhere in the Constitution) granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution as follows:
· Core presidential functions are absolutely immune (“conclusive and preclusive”), for example, when granting pardons.
· Official acts are presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for a president’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility—which is almost anything tangentially related to the president’s enumerated powers
· Evidentiary rules. The Court also imposed two evidentiary rules on prosecutors seeking to navigate the above two rules:
o A prosecutor may not use official acts as evidence in a prosecution of unofficial acts.
o A prosecutor may not examine a president’s motives in
attempting to distinguish between official and unofficial acts.
· What does this mean for presidential power?
· The opinion went much further than Trump had requested. For example,
o A president can accept bribes in exchange for pardons. He would be immune from prosecution because issuing pardons is a core presidential function.
o A president can issue a self-pardon. Under the opinion, the president is immune from prosecution for any exercise of the pardon power.
o A president can pressure the Attorney General to corruptly target the president's political enemies. Presidential discussions with the Department of Justice are core functions and conclusively immune.
o A president can pressure the Vice President to corruptly miscount the Electoral Ballots. The corrupt pressure on the VP is presumptively immune, and the prosecutor cannot examine the president’s motives in trying to prove he was acting in an unofficial capacity.
Of course, a president is subject to impeachment for actions immune from prosecution. But given Trump's iron-fisted control over the skulk of cowards banded together under the GOP banner, impeachment is no constraint on a future Trump presidency.
The examples above are frightening. But they should also be motivating. Democrats and persuadable Independents should be motivated to turn out in massive numbers to prevent a second Trump term.
What does the opinion mean for Jack Smith’s prosecution?
Judge Chutkan must hold an evidentiary hearing to determine which acts are official and unofficial and what evidence must be excluded from proof.
As a practical matter, there will be a public hearing that fully ventilates the prosecution’s case to make those substantive and evidentiary determinations.
Although that hearing will not be a trial, it will be a first-order approximation of a trial. It is possible that it may take place before the election. See Andrew Weissmann, op-ed in NYTimes, How to Get Voters the Facts They Need Without a Trump Jan. 6 Trial (This article is accessible to all.)
The evidentiary hearing will be a positive step forward. But a trial of Trump is years in the future. And it will not occur if Trump is reelected. In that sense, nothing has changed. The courts are not going to save us. The only way to hold Trump accountable is to defeat him at the ballot box. That has been true since February 13, 2021, when the Senate refused to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.
Worth reading
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent:
Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.
The historical evidence that exists on Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution cuts decisively against it. For instance, Alexander Hamilton wrote that former presidents would be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” The Federalist No. 69.
The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune. Immune.
Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
________________________________________
President Biden’s statement after the ruling
This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. That each of us is equal before the law. That no one is above the law. Not even the President of the United States.
Today's decision by the Supreme Court removes virtually all limits on what the president can do.
It's a dangerous precedent.
I know I will respect the limits of the presidential powers, but any president -- including Donald Trump -- will now be free to ignore the law.
I concur with Justice Sotomayor's dissent today. She said: "In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law… with fear for our democracy, I dissent."
________________________________________
NYTimes Editorial, The Supreme Court Gives a Free Pass to Trump and Future Presidents (This article is accessible to all.)
Prior to this decision, there was no grant of criminal immunity to presidents; though the authors of the Constitution gave a form of that privilege to members of Congress, they declined to do so for the chief executive. For a conservative majority that pretends to rely on historical precedent, the newly created standard is remarkable for its lack of basis in the Constitution, law or any precedent of the court. It was made up out of thin air.
The product of the majority’s invention runs counter to the entire notion of a government based on the rule of law.
Ian Millhiser, Vox
See The Supreme Court’s Trump immunity decision is a blueprint for dictatorship - Vox.
________________________________________
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
See John Roberts and the Supreme Court just made the president a King. (slate.com)
________________________________________
Concluding Thoughts
Some moments in life bring clarity. Clarity is good but can be painful. Still, it is better to understand the worst so that we can make necessary adjustments rather than labor under misperceptions.
Today, we learned that the Supreme Court is no longer operating as a good-faith player in a constitutional democracy. It wrote an opinion that immunized Trump’s insurrection and attempted coup to the fullest extent of the law.
The Supreme Court is lawless. It is not an ally to democracy. Indeed, the Supreme Court is the single biggest threat to democracy we face.
Now that we are clear on that fact, we can set aside any delusions that the Supreme Court will act as a guardian of democracy or liberty, ever. Not during the election. Not after the election. Never.
That clarity tells us that it is up to us. It always has been. But the Trump v. Anderson decision should be a rallying call for every American. No more half-measures. No more close elections. No more staying home because we are not excited about the candidates.
We either value our democracy enough to save it, or we do not. We will either do the necessary work or we will not.
I know most readers of the newsletter are already giving 110%. We need to motivate friends, neighbors, colleagues, and complete strangers to begin acting the same way. Biden must win by 15 million votes so that the Supreme Court will back away from any attempt to help Trump steal a close election.
So, we know the worst. And we still have every reason to believe we are going to win. Indeed, we have more reason to believe we will win after we explain the Trump v. Anderson opinion to potential voters who are not paying attention.
We cannot let this important development pass without comment: The Supreme Court told Joe Biden today that he is a king. He replied, “No, I am not a king. Each of us is equal before the law.”
As we approach Independence Day, we are reminded that the signers of the Declaration of Independence understood that they put their lives, fortunes, and families at risk by declaring that
"The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."
Overthrowing a king gave birth to our nation. The Supreme Court has just reimposed a king on the American people. It is time for a second revolution—this time to bring a rogue Court back to the guiding principles of the Constitution. That revolution begins with massive voter turnout in 2024, allowing us to expand the Court and send the reactionary majority back to the fringe minority status it deserves.
© 2024 Robert B. Hubbell
With the benefit of twenty-four hours’ reflection, nervous Democrats and excitable media have invented endless grounds for converting a resounding victory for the rule of law into a new source of anxiety and confusion. Legal experts are analyzing prospects on appeal and political strategists are arguing over how vigorously President Biden should lean into the convictions as a campaign issue.
Here's my advice: Don’t overthink it.
The verdicts were a singular outcome for justice, the rule of law, and the democratic political process. Accept that gift and move forward.
Should Democrats use Trump's criminal convictions for partisan advantage? Of course!
What is the maximal strategy? We will have a clear answer to that question in several decades—after historians have ventilated the results of the 2024 election with the luxury of hindsight.
For us, the verdict changes nothing about strategy and everything about outlook.
We needed a win. We got the only win that bestowed blazing moral clarity. Good. But the election still comes down to turnout. And turnout depends on relational politics: Person-to-person, door-to-door, phone calls, texts, post cards, house parties, yard signs, letters to the editor, showing up, and speaking out. That was true before the verdicts and is true after.
But we should feel some wind beneath our wings. We should have more spring in our step and more confidence in our approach to undecided voters. Twelve people were put to the test and saw through the lies. Every single one of them. Even the juror who said his major source of news was Truth Social.
If twelve randomly selected citizens can discern the truth “beyond a reasonable doubt” despite the obfuscation and lies of defense counsel, so can tens of millions of persuadable Americans. And in the political arena, we need not convince twelve out of twelve persuadable voters. If we can persuade more than half, Biden will by a landslide.
We should pause for a moment to reflect on how fortunate we are that the verdict was conviction on all counts. The range of possible outcomes were as follows:
1. Guilty on all counts
2. Guilty on some but not all counts
3. Hung jury with 1 or 2 holdout jurors
4. Hung jury with 3 or more holdout jurors
5. Acquittal on some counts
6. Acquittal on all counts
Outcomes 2 through 6 would have resulted in varying degrees of victory dances in the end zone and claims of exoneration by Trump. Only the first outcome—guilty on all counts—communicates with clarity that “Donald Trump is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and stands for all time as a convicted felon for interfering in the 2016 election.”
The undeniable force of the 34-count guilty conviction leaves Republicans only one option: Attack the justice system, the judge, and the jury. As bad as that feels, it is not a winning strategy for GOP candidates in purple districts and swing states that hinge on independent voters.
The insane response by Republican congressional leaders has been unnerving. But it contains the seeds of the GOP’s destruction. The ugly threats of retaliation are red meat to the base but not a winning strategy for Americans who want a governable country run by a Congress focused on something other than revenge.
Moreover, while we should be outraged and concerned by the comments of GOP congressional leaders, we should not ascribe superpowers to Republicans they do not have. Railing about subpoenas to Judge Merchan and his daughter is one thing. Obtaining an enforceable subpoena is another. And finding evidence of a crime is yet another stretch—as the hapless House Oversight Committee learned in its Hunter Biden investigation and presidential impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden.
Likewise, we should also maintain perspective about media reports about Trump supporters calling for violence. A careful reading of such reports indicates that they are based on single-person interviews on the street or reviews of social media sites that contain “dozens” of such threats. While one threat is too many, a couple of dozen threats on fringe websites must be measured against the hundreds of millions of Americans who use social media on a daily basis. Compare the Reuters’ headline, Trump supporters call for riots and violent retribution after verdict, with the factual basis for the story, “dozens of violent online posts . . . on three Trump-aligned websites.”
To be clear, I am not criticizing those observers and commentators who are thinking through Democratic strategy or appellate prospects. Indeed, I cite some of them below. Thinking through strategy and prospects are necessary exercises and should be performed post haste.
But you should not allow yourself to become consumed or overwhelmed by complex calculations best solved in n-dimensional anti-de Sitter space. Read the articles if they help you navigate this historical moment. Don’t fret about them if they interfere with your ability to shape history by taking action now.
I recommend the following articles for those interested and up to the task of taking a deeper dive.
See two articles by Lucian K. Truscott IV, Trump guilty verdict changes everything, and If you thought my take on the likely effects of the Trump verdict was a little too rosy . . . .
See also Martin London, Marty’s Blog, RIGGING.
See also Vox, The best — and worst — criticisms of Trump’s conviction.
There are a handful of non-frivolous grounds for challenging some of Judge Merchan’s legal rulings. But the criticisms of those rulings mostly come from federal practitioners who are attempting to import federal jurisprudence onto New York’s interpretation of its own law. Whatever the outcome of the appeals process, it will conclude long after the 2024 election.
Until the final judgment is issued after appeals are exhausted—sometime in 2026 or 2027—Donald Trump is a convicted felon. That is a good result, for now. Let’s focus on ensuring that Biden is reelected.
Today felt as if there was a collective inward breath as people tried to figure out what yesterday’s jury verdict means for the upcoming 2024 election. The jury decided that former president Trump created fraudulent business records in order to illegally influence the 2016 election. As of yesterday, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States of America is a convicted felon.
Since the verdict, Trump and his supporters have worked very hard to spin the conviction as a good thing for his campaign, but those arguments sound like a desperate attempt to shape a narrative that is spinning out of their control. Newspapers all over the country bore the word “GUILTY” in their headlines today.
At stake for Trump is the Republican presidential nomination. Getting it would pave his way to the presidency, which offers him financial gain and the ability to short-circuit the federal prosecutions that observers say are even tighter cases than the state case in which a jury quickly and unanimously found him guilty yesterday. Not getting it leaves Trump and the MAGA supporters who helped him try to steal the 2020 presidential election at the mercy of the American justice system.
After last night’s verdict, Trump went to the cameras and tried to establish that the nomination remains his, asserting that voters would vindicate him on November 5. But this morning, as he followed up last night’s comments, he did himself no favors. He billed the event as a “press conference,” but delivered what Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times described as “a rambling and misleading speech,” so full of grievance and unhinged that the networks except the Fox News Channel cut away from it as he attacked trial witnesses, called Judge Merchan “the devil,” and falsely accused President Joe Biden of pushing his prosecution. He took no questions from the press.
Today the Trump campaign told reporters it raised $34.8 million from small-dollar donors in the hours after the guilty verdict, but observers pointed out there was no reason to believe those numbers based on statements from Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Stephen Miller shouted on the Fox News Channel that every Republican secretary of state, state attorney general, donor, member of Congress must use their power “RIGHT NOW” to “beat these Communists!”
The attempt of MAGA lawmakers to shape events in their favor seemed just as panicked. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) posted on social media that “New York is a liberal sh*t hole,” and Jim Jordan (R-OH) today asked Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Trump, to testify before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about “politically motivated prosecutions of…President Donald Trump.” Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY) noted that Trump is a private citizen and Congress has no jurisdiction over the case, but that Jordan is using his congressional authority illegally to defend Trump.
MAGA senators were even more strident. Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah melted down on X last night over the verdict, and today he led nine other Republican senators in a revolt against the federal government. Lee, J. D. Vance of Ohio, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin issued a public letter saying they would no longer pass legislation, fund the government, or vote to confirm the administration’s appointees because, they said, “[t]he White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways. As a Senate Republican conference,” they said, although there were only 10 of them, “we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.”
It was an odd statement seemingly designed to use disinformation to convince voters to stick with them. Ten senators said they would not do the federal jobs they were elected to do because private citizen Trump was convicted in a state court by a jury of 12 people in New York, a jury that Trump’s lawyers had agreed to. The senators attacked the rule of law and the operation of the federal government in a demonstration of support for Trump. A number of the senators involved were key players in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Awkwardly, considering the day’s news, a video from 2016 circulated today in which Trump insisted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who he falsely insisted had committed crimes even as he was the one actually committing them, “shouldn’t be allowed to run.” If she were to win, Trump then said, “it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and, ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put it correctly: this is not an “outpouring of rage and anger,” so much as “an overwhelming effort to match and muffle the earthquake of what happened yesterday afternoon with enough noise and choreography to keep everyone in Trump’s campaign and on the margins of it in line and on his side.”
Still, there is more behind the MAGA support for Trump than fearful political messaging. Trump has been hailed as a savior by his supporters because he promises to smash through the laws and norms of American democracy to put them into power. There, they can assert their will over the rest of us, achieving the social and religious control they cannot achieve through democratic means because they cannot win the popular vote in a free and fair election. With Trump’s conviction within the legal system, his supporters are more determined than ever to destroy the rules that block them from imposing their will on the rest of us.
Today the Federalist Society, which is now aligned with Victor Orbán’s Hungary, flew an upside-down U.S. flag as a signal of national distress. Their actions were in keeping with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statement that Trump is being persecuted “for political reasons” and that the cases show “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”
Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported today on a spike in violent rhetoric on social media targeting New York judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s Manhattan election interference trial, and District Attorney Bragg. Users of a fringe internet message board also shared what they claimed were the addresses of jurors. “Dox the Jurors. Dox them now,” one user wrote. Another wrote, “1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to [W]ashington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution.”
This attack on our democracy was the central message of a crucially important story from yesterday that got buried under the news of Trump’s conviction. In The New Republic, Ken Silverstein reported on a private WhatsApp group started last December by military contractor Erik Prince—founder of Blackwater and brother of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos—and including about 650 wealthy and well-connected “right-wing government officials, intelligence operatives, arms traffickers, and journalists,” including Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who served as Trump’s secretary of the interior. Called “Off Leash,” the group discussed, as Silverstein wrote, “the shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists,” collapsing Gaza into a “fiery hell pit,” wiping out Iran, how Africa was a “sh*thole of a continent,” and ways to dominate the globe. Mostly, though, they discussed the danger of letting everyone vote. “There is only one path forward,” Zinke wrote. “Elect Trump.” Another member answered, “It’s Trump or Revolution.” “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” wrote another.
And yet the frantic MAGA spin on the verdict reveals that there is another way to interpret it. Americans who had lost faith that the justice system could ever hold a powerful man accountable as Trump’s lawyers managed to put off his many indictments see the verdict as a welcome sign that the system still works.
“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Biden said today. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself. It was a state case, not a federal case. And it was heard by a jury of 12 citizens, 12 Americans, 12 people like you. Like millions of Americans who served on juries, this jury is chosen the same way every jury in America is chosen. It was a process that Donald Trump's attorney was part of. The jury heard five weeks of evidence…. After careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict. They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts. Now he’ll be given the opportunity as he should to appeal that decision just like everyone else has that opportunity. That's how the American system of justice works. And it's reckless, it's dangerous, and it's irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don't like the verdict. Our justice system has endured for nearly 250 years and it literally is the cornerstone of America….The justice system should be respected, and we should never allow anyone to tear it down. It’s as simple as that. That's America. That's who we are. And that's who we will always be, God willing.”
Today the publisher of Dinesh D’Souza’s book and film 2000 Mules, which alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election, said it was pulling both the book and film from distribution and issued an apology to a Georgia man who sued for defamation after 2000 Mules accused him of voting illegally.
MAGA Republicans confidently predicted yesterday that the stock market would crash if the jury found Trump guilty. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 600 points.
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
How did America reach this point where about half our country thinks up is down, black is white, and Republicans are best trusted with our money and national security?
The fifteen or twenty percent of Americans who follow actual news reporting are dumbfounded:
· Only about half of Americans know that Trump set up and wanted the end of Roe v Wade while one-in-five think President Biden is responsible for it,
· More trust Republicans with the economy than Democrats and 46% say Trump can fix the economy compared to 32% for Biden,
· Only a third of Americans know that Republicans appointed the majority on the Supreme Court,
· 46% of Americans say a second Biden presidency will weaken American democracy,
· More than half (55%) of Americans believe the economy is shrinking and we’re in a recession (when it’s growing faster than under any president since FDR and has been for three-plus years),
· When President Biden came into office in 2021, almost two-thirds of Americans approved of his handling the economy and foreign affairs; today that number is fewer than a third,
· Almost half (49%) think the stock market is down for the year when in fact the S&P 500 was up 24% last year and is up more than 12% this year,
· About three-quarters (72%) are sure that inflation is up right now, when the rate has fallen from 9.1% to a current low of 3.4%, far better than the lowest inflation number Reagan had at 4.1% in his entire 8 years in office,
· While unemployment is lower than it’s been in over 50 years, half of Americans (49%) say “unemployment is at a 50-year high,”
· Only 34% of Americans can name the three branches of government while 69% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump,
· As violent weather tears apart America, only 23% of Republicans consider climate change a major threat to our nation’s well-being,
· Today, 58% of Americans say the economy is getting worse daily because of mismanagement by Biden and Democrats in Congress,
· Almost half of Americans (44%) think Social Security will be gone by the time they retire,
· Fully 44% of Americans say the media and politicians are “making too much” of the January 6th assault on our capitol.
How did America reach this point where about half our country thinks up is down, black is white, and Republicans are best trusted with our money and national security?
The first imperative for any dictatorial regime is to seize control of the press. Hitler not only shut down all the opposition press and turned all of Germany’s newspapers into propaganda outlets, but ordered Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will played in every theater in Germany before every movie. The first thing his soldiers did upon occupying every country he conquered was to seize the offices of the local newspapers and radio stations.
Orbán destroyed the free press in Hungary by changing that nation’s libel and defamation laws in the same way Trump is today advocating, setting up libel lawsuits against virtually every press outlet that had ever criticized him and bankrupting them and their owners and editors with lawsuits. His oligarch buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar.
Putin did the same in Russia, and Modi is pursuing a similar effort in India.
Here in America, though, the rightwing billionaires who overwhelmingly own our media didn’t need the heavy hand of libel laws to seize control of this nation’s news and information channels (although Trump promises to do so anyway).
Zuckerberg built Facebook by buying out and shutting down or taking over his competitors in defiance of anti-trust laws that haven’t been used (until recently) since Reagan’s famous 1983 order to stop their enforcement.
Musk brought in cash from Saudi Arabia to help finance his purchase of Twitter, turning it into a rightwing cesspool that has become one of America’s premier sources of misinformation tilted toward Trump and hard-right Republicans.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and the wealthy owner of The New York Times, some argue, is pushing that paper to hammer Biden’s age because the president won’t do a sit-down interview with him.
From the 1930s, media monopoly laws prevented the consolidation of TV and radio stations and newspapers into a few rich hands. That ended when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which discarded those ownership restrictions: within a decade virtually all of America’s media (in terms of reach) was in the hands of fewer than a dozen corporations.
A few years ago, I met with the billionaire owner of 900 or so radio stations, many of them carrying rightwing talk radio. We were in the offices of a US Senator, who pointed out to the billionaire that my show was regularly beating Rush Limbaugh in the ratings and asked the media mogul if he’d ever considered balancing his programming with some progressive shows, which make just as much money for their stations as do conservative hosts.
The billionaire laughed at the senator and said, simply, “I’ll never put anybody on the air who wants to raise my taxes.”
Ever since Reagan’s deregulation of the financial sector legalized the private equity scam, these predatory companies have bought up, sucked dry, and driven into bankruptcy more than half of America’s small local newspapers.
It’s the same strategy they used to drain hundreds of billions from Red Lobster, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus, Toys “R” Us, Sears, 24 Hour Fitness, Aeropostale, American Apparel, Brookstone, Charlotte Russe, Claire’s, David’s Bridal, Clear Channel, Deadspin, Fairway, Gymboree, Hertz, KB Toys, Linens ’n Things, Mervyn’s, Mattress Firm, Musicland, Nine West, Payless ShoeSource, RadioShack, Shopko, Sports Authority, Rockport, True Religion, and Wickes Furniture (among hundreds of others).
The fact that information is the lifeblood of democracy and news media is the only industry explicitly named and protected by the Constitution is as irrelevant to these parasites as it is to Supreme Court justices Alito and Thomas, who the billionaire owners of such firms regularly spiff with luxury vacations and other gifts.
Political and economic commentators seem baffled. Last week, Steve Rattner did a long-form charts-and-graphs presentation for Joe Scarborough’s show demonstrating how the economy, by almost every measure, is better than any time since World War II but — bafflingly — Americans are convinced it’s in the tank and getting worse. He didn’t once, however, mention the role played by the media.
When large numbers of the people of any nation believe things that are objectively untrue, it’s a huge warning sign that something is awry with that nation’s media.
Almost half of Americans get all or most of their news from social media, which is dominated by two rightwing billionaires and the Chinese Communist Party, all of them apparently fans of Trump and his dreamed-of autocracy.
The rest of us get our news from radio, TV, cable, and other online sources, again dominated by billionaire interests who put keeping their tax rates low above threats to our democratic system of government.
Back in the 1980s, when the media told the truth about Reagan’s massive tax cuts, deregulation, gutting public education, and selling off public lands for pennies on the dollar, rightwing strategists began a unified chant about “liberal media bias.” Other than being unhappy about news outlets telling the truth, the one twig they could hang onto was the fact that most journalists were college graduates and colleges were then considered bastions of liberalism.
Rush Limbaugh debuted in 1988, claiming his show was a necessary antidote to liberal media bias even though it was the “liberal media” that made him famous and promoted his show to the top of the ratings. By the end of the ’80s the “liberal media” had become the GOP’s go-to meme under almost all circumstances.
At the 1992 Republican nominating convention, everybody from Barbara Bush to Marilyn Quayle was trashing the so-called leftwing media. GOP Chairman Rich Bond told The Washington Post that this was, in fact, a coordinated effort to influence coverage by intimidating reporters and their editors: "But there is some strategy to it. I’m a coach of kids’ basketball and Little League teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs’ — meaning the media. Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”
It’s high time for Democrats and advocates for democracy to begin working the refs, and pushing for legislation to outlaw media monopolies, eliminate Section 230 liability limitations on social media, and end the destruction of local news by private equity.
If we don’t, America will continue to look more and more like Hungary or Russia and it could soon be too late to do anything about it.
Excerpted from May 28, 2024, ©HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
“In remarks at Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Memorial Day, President Joe Biden honored “the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who’ve given their lives for this nation. Each one…a link in the chain of honor stretching back to our founding days. Each one bound by common commitment—not to a place, not to a person, not to a President, but to an idea unlike any idea in human history: the idea of the United States of America.”
“[F]reedom has never been guaranteed,” Biden said. “Every generation has to earn it; fight for it; defend it in battle between autocracy and democracy, between the greed of a few and the rights of many…. And just as our fallen heroes have kept the ultimate faith with our country and our democracy, we must keep faith with them,” he said.
His speech at Arlington echoed the message he delivered to this year’s graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he urged the graduates to hold fast to their oaths. “On your very first day at West Point, you raised your right hands and took an oath—not to a political party, not to a president, but to the Constitution of the United States of America—against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said to applause. Soldiers “have given their lives for that Constitution. They have fought to defend the freedoms that it protects: the right to vote, the right to worship, the right to raise your voice in protest. They have saved and sacrificed to ensure, as President Lincoln said, a ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.’”
“[N]othing is guaranteed about our democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it, to choose it,” he said. “Now, it’s your turn.” Biden spent more than an hour saluting and shaking the hand of each graduate.
In contrast, Trump ushered in Memorial Day with a post on his social media company, saying: “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.”
He then continued to attack E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, before turning to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the civil case of Trump and the Trump Organization falsifying documents, and Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the current criminal case in New York.
The message behind this extraordinary post was twofold: Trump can think of nothing but himself…and he appears to be terrified.
"This weekend, on Saturday, May 11, Paul Kiel of ProPublica and Russ Buettner of the New York Times teamed up to deliver a deep investigation into what Trump was talking about when he insisted that he must break tradition and refuse to release his tax returns when he ran for office in 2016 and 2020, citing an audit.
The New York Times had already reported that one of the reasons the Internal Revenue Service was auditing Trump’s taxes was that, beginning in 2010, he began to claim a $72.9 million tax refund because of huge losses from his failing casinos.
Kiel and Buettner followed the convoluted web of Trump’s finances to find another issue with his tax history. They concluded that Trump’s Chicago skyscraper, his last major construction project, was “a vast money loser.” He claimed losses as high as $651 million on it in 2008. But then he appears to have moved ownership of the building in 2010 from one entity to a new one—the authors describe it as “like moving coins from one pocket to another”—and used that move to claim another $168 million in losses, thereby double-dipping.
The experts the authors consulted said that if he loses the audit battle, Trump could owe the IRS more than $100 million. University of Baltimore law professor Walter Schwidetzky, who is an expert on partnership taxation, told the authors: “I think he ripped off the tax system.”
This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term.
"Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again. "
A summary of what Cortellessa and Cox-Richardson wrote follows:
TRUMP PLANS TO:
1) Establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
2) Use the military to round up, place in camps, and deport more than 11 million people.
3) Permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans.
4) Shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden).
5) Bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,
6) End the U.S. system of an independent judiciary.
7) Not aid European or Asian allies that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense.
8) Gut the U.S. civil service,
9) Deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit,
10) Close the White House pandemic-preparedness office,
11) Staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
Reprinted by permission from Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson, February 17, 2024
Although few Americans paid much attention at the time, the events of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine would turn out to be a linchpin in how the United States ended up where it is a decade later. On that day ten years ago, after months of what started as peaceful protests, Ukrainians occupied government buildings and marched on parliament to remove Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office. After the escalating violence resulted in many civilian casualties, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, returned power to Ukraine’s constitution.
The ouster of Yanukovych meant that American political consultant Paul Manafort was out of a job. Manafort had worked with Yanukovych since 2004. In that year, the Russian-backed politician appeared to have won the presidency of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, while Russia’s president Vladimir Putin congratulated Yanukovych even before the results were officially announced.
The government voided the election and called for a do-over.
To rehabilitate his reputation, Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who was already working for a young Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska worried that Ukraine would break free of Russian influence and was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries and replacing the region’s communist leaders. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych finally won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In November 2013, Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union, refusing to sign a trade agreement and instead taking a $3 billion loan from Russia. Ukrainian students protested the decision, and the anger spread quickly. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.
Manafort, who had borrowed money from Deripaska and still owed him about $17 million, had lost his main source of income.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. These sanctions were intended to weaken Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
By 2016, Manafort’s longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone—they had both worked on Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign—was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Manafort began as an advisor to the Trump campaign in March 2016 and became the chairman in late June. hanks to journalist Jim Rutenberg, who pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs, we now know that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”
In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.
Now, ten years later, Putin has invaded Ukraine in an effort that when it began looked much like the one his operatives suggested to Manafort in 2016, Trump has said he would “encourage Russia to do whatever they hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t commit 2% of their gross domestic product to their militaries, and Trump MAGA Republicans are refusing to pass a measure to support Ukraine in its effort to throw off Russia’s invasion.
The day after the violence of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine, then–vice president Joe Biden called Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” and to urge him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint.”
Ten years later, Russia has been at war with Ukraine for nearly two years and has just regained control of the key town of Avdiivka because Ukrainian troops lack ammunition. President Joe Biden is warning MAGA Republicans that “[t]he failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”
“History is watching,” he said.
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
The war being fought on Ukraine’s soil is entering its third year and has exhausted the patience of some in the United States. They argue for Ukraine to accede to Vladimir Putin’s call for all Russian-speaking peoples to fold themselves in the warm embrace of “Mother Russia,” even if compelled by brute force. Acquiescing is a fools’ errand, as history teaches us. Putin’s aim to unite all Russian-speaking peoples under his “benevolent” charge is ridiculous and dangerous.
Unification is ridiculous: consider Spain deciding to annex Spanish-speaking Central and South America, parts of the western U.S. and the Caribbean, and the Philippines be annexed by Spain. Or the U.S., English-speaking Canada, Australia, and other former colonies being forced to form a reconstituted British Empire. Unification is dangerous because it leads to war: the Second World War was the costliest war – in treasure and lives – the world has yet seen.
Hitler began his campaign to expand German political and economic power in central Europe by declaring all ethnic Germans and the territory where they lived be incorporated into a “Greater Germany.” One by one, bits of territory were annexed and swelled the Reich. At first, the guarantors of European stability, Britain and France, feared a repeat of the First World War’s ruinous toll, if they tried to force a halt to this relentless expansion.
“Appeasement” (acceding to the demands of a hostile nation) as their answer to the challenge. Neither France nor Britain voiced opposition to the German army’s advance into Austria in March 1938. Nor did they vigorously protest Nazi propaganda, threats, and coercion in the April Austrian plebiscite that approved Austria’s annexation by Germany. Those governments, along with that of Fascist Italy, took an active role that September in handing over part of then-Czechoslovakia, the German-speaking Sudetenland, to the Reich. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed war was averted, declaring that this Munich Agreement achieved “peace in our time.”
The world soon learned that “peace” so purchased from a dictator is a mirage. Emboldened by such easy concessions, Hitler plunged his military forces into western Poland a year later, on September 1, 1939. Britain and France finally abandoned appeasement and declared war, beginning six years of conflict that cost scores of millions of lives and destroyed nations.
Putin’s intentions and actions repeat the Hitler pattern. Lebensraum living space) for ethnic Germans translates very nicely into yestestvennaya sreda (living space) for ethnic Russians. Provocations in Ukraine and other nations on Russia’s western border, followed by occupation, “annexation” of Crimea, and outright invasion of the rest of Ukraine perfectly parrots the Nazi 1930s playbook. Negotiation with Putin will prove as fruitless and dangerous as negotiation with Hitler.
There is but one lesson history is desperately trying to teach us: The cost of steadfastness in the face of assault is nothing as compared to the cost of appeasement.
WORTH READING: A FEW REPUBLICANS SHOWED A BACKBONE YESTERDAY ON AID TO UKRAINE AND ISRAEL, FOLLOWED BY BIDEN's AND TRUMP'S VIEWS ON NATIONAL POLICY AND PUTIN'S AND TRUMP'S COLLABORATION TO DESTROY DEMOCRACY.
A key story that got missed yesterday was that the Senate voted 64–19 to allow a bill that includes $95.34 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to advance a step forward. In terms of domestic politics, this appears to be an attempt by those who controlled the Republican Party before Trump to push back against Trump and the MAGA Republicans.
MAGA lawmakers had demanded border security measures be added to a national security supplemental bill that provided this international aid, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza, but to their apparent surprise, a bipartisan group of lawmakers actually hammered out that border piece. Trump immediately demanded an end to the bill and MAGA obliged on Wednesday, forcing the rest of the party to join them in killing the national security supplemental bill.
House Republicans then promptly tried to pass a measure that provided funding for Israel alone. At stake behind this fight is not only control of the Republican Party, but also the role of the U.S. in the world—and, for that matter, its standing. And much of that fight comes down to Ukraine’s attempt to resist Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Russian president Vladimir Putin is intent on dismantling the rules-based international order of norms and values developed after World War II. Under this system, international organizations such as the United Nations provide places to resolve international disputes, prevent territorial wars, and end no-holds-barred slaughter through a series of agreements, including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, deliberate targeting of civilian populations, and war crimes are his way of thumbing his nose at the established order and demanding a different one, in which men like him dominate the globe.
Trump’s ties to Russia are deep and well documented, including by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was dominated by Republicans when it concluded that Trump’s 2016 campaign team had worked with Russian operatives.
In November 2022, in the New York Times Magazine, Jim Rutenberg pulled together testimony given both to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs.
Rutenberg showed that in 2016, Russian operatives had presented to Trump advisor and later campaign manager Paul Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”
But they were concerned that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) might stand in their way. Formed in 1947 to stand against Soviet expansion and now standing against Russian aggression, NATO is a collective security alliance of 31 states that have agreed to consider an attack on any member to be an attack on all.
In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to put their finger on the scales to help Trump win the White House.
When he was in office, Trump did, in fact, try to weaken NATO—as well as other international organizations like the World Health Organization—and promised he would pull the U.S. out of NATO in a second term, effectively killing it. Rutenberg noted that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine looks a lot like an attempt to achieve the plan it suggested in 2016. But because there was a different president in the U.S., that invasion did not yield the results Putin expected.
President Joe Biden stepped into office more knowledgeable on foreign affairs than any president since Dwight Eisenhower, who took office in 1953. Biden recognized that democracy was on the ropes around the globe as authoritarian leaders set out to dismantle the rules-based international order. He also knew that the greatest strength of the U.S. is its alliances. In the months after he took office, Biden focused on shoring up NATO, with the result that when Russia invaded Ukraine again in February 2022, a NATO coalition held together to support Ukraine.
By 2024, far from falling apart, NATO was stronger than ever with the addition of Finland. Sweden, too, is expected to join shortly.
But far more than simply shore up the old system, the Biden administration has built on the stability of the rules-based order to make it more democratic, encouraging more peoples, nations, and groups to participate more fully in it. In September 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained to an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that the end of the Cold War made people think that the world would inevitably become more peaceful and stable as countries cooperated and emphasized democracy and human rights.
But now, Blinken said, that era is over. After decades of relative stability, authoritarian powers have risen to challenge the rules-based international order, throwing away the ideas of national sovereignty and human rights. As wealth becomes more and more concentrated, people are losing faith in that international order as well as in democracy itself. In a world increasingly under pressure from authoritarians who are trying to enrich themselves and stay in power, he said, the administration is trying to defend fair competition, international law, and human rights.
Historically, though, the U.S. drive to spread democracy has often failed to rise above the old system of colonialism, with the U.S. and other western countries dictating to less prosperous countries. The administration has tried to avoid this trap by advancing a new form of international cooperation that creates partnerships and alignments of interested countries to solve discrete issues. These interest-based alignments, which administration officials refer to as “diplomatic variable geometry,” promise to preserve U.S. global influence and perhaps an international rules-based order but will also mean alliances with nations whose own interests align with those of the U.S. only on certain issues.
In the past three years, the U.S. has created a new security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS, and held a historic, first-ever trilateral leaders’ summit at Camp David with Japan and the Republic of Korea. It has built new partnerships with nations in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as with Latin American and Caribbean countries, to address issues of immigration; two days ago the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee met for the fourth time in Mexico. This new system includes a wider range of voices at the table—backing the membership of the African Union in the Group of 20 (G20) economic forum, for example—advancing a form of cooperation in which every international problem is addressed by a group of partner nations that have a stake in the outcome.
At the same time, the U.S. recognizes that wealthier countries need to step up to help poorer countries develop their own economies rather than mine them for resources. Together with G7 partners, the U.S. has committed to deliver $600 billion in new investments to develop infrastructure across the globe—for example, creating a band of development across Africa.
Biden’s is a bold new approach to global affairs, based on national rights to self-determination and working finally to bring an end to colonialism.
The fight over U.S. aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the other countries with which we have made partnerships is not about saving money—most of the funds for Ukraine are actually spent in the U.S.—or about protecting the U.S. border, as MAGA Republicans demonstrated when they killed the border security bill. It is about whether the globe will move into the 21st century, with all its threats of climate change, disease, and migration, with ways for nations to cooperate, or whether we will be at the mercy of global authoritarians.
Trump’s 2024 campaign website calls for “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission,” and in a campaign speech in South Carolina today, he made it clear what that means. Trump has long misrepresented the financial obligations of NATO countries, and today he suggested that the U.S. would not protect other NATO countries that were “delinquent” if they were attacked by Russia. “In fact,” he said, “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin had a plan to save his Republican colleagues from the same fate suffered by anti-abortion GOP candidates since the Supreme Court took away the guaranteed right to an abortion: He proposed what he called a "compromise" on the politically volatile issue, a 15-week ban Youngkin said would isolate "extremist" Democrats and give Republicans full control in Virginia government.
It failed spectacularly, with Democrats keeping control of the state Senate and flipping the Virginia House of Delegates, according to projections by the Associated Press early Wednesday morning.
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