GIFT ARTICLE from the New York Time
By Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Nicholas Nehamas
Reporting from Kalamazoo, Mich.
Oct. 26, 2024 Michelle Obama issued an impassioned plea to American voters on Saturday — and, in particular, American men — anchored in a searing and intimate depiction of women’s bodies and reproductive health, and what she described as the life-or-death stakes of returning former President Donald J. Trump to power.
In her first appearance on the campaign trail during this election, Mrs. Obama, long reluctant to engage in the political arena, described the far-reaching consequences of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, in the concrete terms of personal tragedy.
“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Mrs. Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”
And while she acknowledged the anger that many Americans feel about the “slow pace of change” in the country, she warned: “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”
Mrs. Obama’s words — at a rally in Michigan where she introduced Vice President Kamala Harris — amounted to an extraordinary centering of women’s bodies and their private experiences in an American presidential election. She discussed menstrual cramps and hot flashes, describing the shame and uncertainty girls and women feel about their bodies. She told women they should demand to be treated as more than “baby-making vessels.”
And she castigated the media and many voters for holding Ms. Harris to a higher standard than her opponent, for “choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence, while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”
The crowd roared in approval.
But it was her remarks on women’s health that most captivated the audience. Mrs. Obama told her audience that Mr. Trump would further damage women’s health care, while Ms. Harris has vowed to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law.
Those protections, Mrs. Obama said, went far beyond the right to an abortion, extending to the private and vital relationships women and girls have with their doctors.
Mrs. Obama’s message was, in part, a counterpoint to the argument her husband, former President Barack Obama, made to Black men earlier this month, when he sternly suggested that sexism might be preventing them from voting for a woman. Perhaps, Mrs. Obama seemed to say, men could instead be persuaded to vote for the women in their lives.
“I am asking you all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” she said.
With the election 10 days away, Ms. Harris is facing an electorate deeply divided by gender. A majority of women support her. A majority of men are backing Mr. Trump. Her joint appearance with Mrs. Obama in Michigan seemed designed both to energize her female supporters and jolt men into understanding what she believes is at risk.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, October 27
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
—
Notes:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=armytalks
War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945, at https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
October 21, 2024
Condensed from HEATHER COX RICHARDSON OCT 22
On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. …
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki ….warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution. By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others. {Note: all of these actions are proposed in Project 2025]
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson….was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany…..In 1931, Thompson [had] interviewed Hitler ….She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.”
She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment…..
She wrote in a 1937 column [for the New York Herald Tribune]: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will…. when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter that …. the reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said. “My offense [that got her expelled] was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
October 16, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Two Fox News Channel interviews bracketed today: one this morning with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in front of an audience of hand-picked Republican women in Georgia, the other by Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris with host Bret Baier. Together, the two were a performance of dominance.
FNC billed Trump’s so-called town hall as a chance for female voters, a demographic that is swinging heavily to Harris, to ask Trump about issues they care about. But Hadas Gold and Liam Reilly of CNN reported that FNC had packed the audience with Trump supporters. The first question came from the president of the Fulton County Republican Women, though she was not identified as such. FNC then edited the broadcast to cut out remarks in which the attendees expressed support for Trump.
It seems unlikely that Trump attracted any new voters by speaking to an audience of loyalists audibly cheering him on.
After Trump refused to debate her again, Harris voluntarily moved into his right-wing territory, agreeing to an interview with FNC host Bret Baier. In that interview, Baier reframed right-wing talking points as questions, essentially giving Trump a second shot at a debate. Baier kept talking over the vice president’s attempts to answer—even putting out a hand to interrupt her—in a stark contrast to FNC’s deference to Trump. Harris asked him to let her reply, and then answered his questions, sometimes testily, usually turning them into opportunities to contrast her own candidacy and record with Trump’s.
Control of the interview changed abruptly when Harris called out Trump for referring to the “enemy within” and talking about using the American military against those he considers enemies. Baier used that opportunity to show a clip of Trump saying he wasn’t threatening anyone, but the clip was edited to remove his threats against “sick,” “evil,” “dangerous” “Marxists and communists and fascists” including Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) and “the Pelosis”—presumably former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her husband, who was attacked by a man with a hammer in 2022 by a man who wanted to force Nancy Pelosi to renounce the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Harris had had enough propaganda.
“Bret, I'm sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That's not what you just showed…. You and I both know that he’s talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States in the United States of America should be… able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America.”
Simply by going on the right-wing network, Harris was demonstrating dominance. Then, by answering as thoroughly as she did, she undercut the right-wing narrative that she is stupid and inarticulate. By calling out the FNC for deliberately misleading its viewers, she took command. Baier, rather than Harris, was the one doing the post-interview spinning.
Writer Peter Wehner, who worked for presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, wrote: “Bret Baier has rarely looked as bad (or tendentious) as he did in his interview with Kamala Harris. On the flip side, this was one of her best interviews. She dominated Bret. All in all it was quite a bad day for MAGA world's most important media outlet.”
In between the two FNC events were two others that also told a story, this one about how the Republican Party’s descent into MAGA is creating a new political coalition to defend American principles.
Trump held a town hall with undecided Latino voters moderated by Mexican journalist Enrique Acevedo for Univision. Members of the audience asked excellent questions: how would he bring down household costs, who would take the jobs left behind by undocumented workers if Trump deported them and how much would that drive up food costs, why Trump took so long to stop the January 6 rioters, if he had caused deaths during the pandemic by misleading Americans, and if he agrees with his wife, Melania, about protecting abortion rights.
But Trump did not answer the questions, instead regurgitating his usual talking points. He promised to produce more oil and gas, called undocumented immigrants criminals, repeated the lie about Haitian migrants eating pets, and, after notably referring to the January 6 rioters as “we” and law enforcement officers as “the others,” called January 6 “a day of love.” The audience did not appear convinced.
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris joined more than 100 Republicans in Pennsylvania, near the spot where George Washington and more than 2,000 Continental soldiers crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to surprise a garrison of British soldiers at Trenton, New Jersey, where they won a strategic victory.
Harris noted that those gathered were also near Philadelphia, where in 1787 delegates from across the country gathered to write and sign the U.S. Constitution.
“That work was not easy. The founders often disagreed. Often quite passionately. But in the end, the Constitution of the United States laid out the foundations of our democracy, including the rule of law, that there would be checks and balances, that we would have free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power. And these principles and traditions have sustained our nation for over two centuries, sustained because generations of Americans, from all backgrounds, from all beliefs, have cherished them, upheld them, and defended them.
“And now, the baton is in our hands,” she said. [A]t stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our founders and generations of Americans before us have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution of the United States…its very self.”
Harris welcomed the Republicans in the crowd, saying that everyone there shared a core belief: “That we must put country before party.” The crowd chanted, “USA, USA, USA.”
Harris noted that many of the Republicans on stage had taken the same oath to the Constitution that she had. “We here know the Constitution is not a relic from our past, but determines whether we are a country where the people can speak freely, and even criticize the president, without fear of being thrown in jail, or targeted by the military. Where the people can worship as they choose without the government interfering. Where you can vote without fear that your vote will be thrown away. All this and more depends on whether or not our leaders honor their oath to the Constitution.”
Trump, she pointed out, tried to overturn the will of the people expressed in a free and fair election, has vowed to use the military to go after any American who doesn’t support him, and has called for the “termination” of the Constitution. “It is clear,” she said, “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is seeking unchecked power.” Trump, she said, “must never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States.”
“And to those who are watching,” she said, “if you share that view, no matter your party, no matter who you voted for last time: There is a place for you in this campaign. The coalition we have built has room for everyone who is ready to turn the page on the chaos and instability of Donald Trump.”
“I pledge to you to be a President for all Americans. And I take that pledge seriously.”
She reiterated her promise to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and to establish a Council on Bipartisan Solutions to strengthen the middle class, secure the border, defend our freedoms, and maintain the nation’s leadership in the world. She noted that the country needs a healthy two-party system, and described how the Senate Intelligence Committee left partisanship at the door. It “was “country over party in action,” when she sat on the committee, she said, “[s]o I know it can be done.”
“[O]ur campaign is not a fight against something,” she said. “It is a fight for something. It is a fight for the fundamental principles upon which we were founded, It is a fight for a new generation of leadership that is optimistic about what we can achieve together—Republicans, Democrats, and independents who want to move past the politics of division and blame and get things done on behalf of the American people.
“[W]e are all here together this beautiful afternoon because we love our country…and we know the deep privilege and pride that comes with being an American and the duty that comes along with it…. Imperfect though we may be, America is still that ‘shining city upon a hill’ that inspires people around the world. And I do believe it is one of the highest forms of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country.”
“So, to people from across Pennsylvania, and across our nation, let us together stand up for the rule of law, for our democratic ideals, and for the Constitution of the United States. And in twenty days, we have the power to chart a New Way Forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.”
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
October 6, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.
Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.
Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”
They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.
Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.
But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.
Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States... encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,... [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”
But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.
In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.
Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.
Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.
Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.
Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.
In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.
Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.
Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.
They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.
But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.
Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.
—
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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DUELING VISIONS OF THE ECONOMY--ONE OF THEM "UNSERIOUS"
September 26, 2024, ROBERT B. HUBBELL
On Wednesday, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump promoted their competing visions of the economy under their prospective administrations. Their visions could not be more different.
Kamala Harris offered a principled vision focused on helping the middle class and small businesses. She pledged to protect Medicare and Social Security, lower prescription drug prices, spur the construction of new homes, cut red tape for businesses, and increase worker employment opportunities by removing the artificial barrier of a college degree for skills-based jobs. She proposed to pay for her proposals by restoring the corporate tax rate to its pre-2017 level and increasing the tax rate on families earning more than $400,000 per year.
After Kamala Harris’s speech, her campaign released a series of bullet points that highlighted many of her proposals. I include them below to help her supporters educate others who may (mistakenly) claim that VP Harris has not articulated specific economic policies
In her speech, Kamala Harris made the following proposals:
• Support domestic manufacturing in strategic industries through new America Forward tax credits (including small businesses)
• Double the number of registered apprenticeships in America and help promote meaningful pathways to jobs that don’t require 4-year degrees
• Stand up to countries like China when they threaten American workers by engaging in unfair trade practices
• Crack down on counterfeit and unsafe goods from China to protect American small businesses and consumers
• Invest in R&D for critical industries to ensure the United States maintains its lead
• Support American-made products by enforcing Buy America requirements
• Incentivize domestic processing of critical minerals for manufacturing
• Protect affordable health care premiums (that were lowered by an average of $800 a year for millions of Americans)
• Cap the cost of insulin at $35 for all Americans
• Cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 a year for all Americans
• Lower prescription drug costs by accelerating Medicare price negotiations
• Relieve medical debt for millions of Americans
• Call on Congress to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food
• Invest in building resilient food supply chains
• Give small businesses, grocers, and growers the support they need, revitalizing a competitive marketplace to lower prices for consumers
….In contrast to the specifics proposed by Kamala Harris, the unifying theme of Trump's economic vision is deporting ten million immigrants, which Trump promotes as a cure-all for home prices, energy costs, and the price of groceries
Trump proposes to cut taxes for the wealthiest taxpayers while imposing a national sales tax on all Americans in the form of punitive tariffs.
Trump spreads fairy dust on top of his incoherent economic vision by promising to cap interest rates on credit cards and to give free IVF treatments any American who asks for such.
Trump has also proposed to eliminate tax on Social Security—a plan that will benefit many wealthy Americans who do not need the tax cut and will not help lower income Americans who pay no tax. As with most of Trump's proposals, they are stealth tax cuts for the wealthy.
But at the core of Trump's effort to be reelected by promising free ponies to everyone is his proposal to extend his existing tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. When all of Trump's tax-giveaways are combined, they will cost a whopping $9.7 trillion dollars. See American Prospect, Trump’s Tax Cut-A-Rama Total So Far: $9.75 Trillion.
And his plan to pay for that whopping number is a national sales tax that will result in trade wars and cause a recession. Trump’s promised tariffs could spark trade war, inflation, expert warns.
Pollsters and pundits frequently say that the economy is the most important issue in the 2024 election. If that is true (and I do not believe it is), then the competing visions offered by the candidates on Wednesday should remove any doubt that Kamala Harris is the only rational choice for president in 2024.
© 2024 Robert B. Hubbell
On Thursday, September 19, the day after the Federal Reserve began to lower interest rates two and a half years after it began to raise them to get inflation under control, President Joe Biden spoke to the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., a nonprofit, nonpartisan forum where leaders from around the world can speak to larger questions about the global economy.
Biden noted the interest rate cut and identified it as an important signal from the Federal Reserve to the nation that inflation, which at its post-pandemic peak was 9.1%, has come down close to the Fed’s target rate of 2%. He described it as “a declaration of progress…a signal we’ve entered a new phase of our economy and our recovery.”
But Biden told the audience he was “not here to take a victory lap.” Instead, he wanted to “speak about…how far we’ve come, how we got here, and, most importantly, the foundation that I believe [we’ve] built for a more prosperous and equitable future in America.” He wanted, he said, to make the country realize how much progress we’ve made, because if we don’t, the negative economic mindset he attributes to the pandemic will “dominate our economic outlook,” and we will miss “the immense opportunities in front of us right now.”
Biden reminded the audience that when he and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021, having “inherited the worst pandemic in a century and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” they found “there was no real plan in place—no plan to deal with the pandemic, no plan to get the economy back on its feet. Nothing—virtually nothing.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted the U.S. wouldn’t see a full economic recovery until at least 2025.
But, Biden said, he “came into office determined not only to deliver immediate economic relief for the American people but to transform the way our economy works over the long term; to write a new economic playbook,” investing in ordinary Americans and promoting fair competition.
Immediately, Biden and the Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan—without a single Republican vote—to launch “one of the most sophisticated logistical operations in American history” to get coronavirus vaccines into every person in America. Without addressing the pandemic, there could be no economic recovery, he said. The American Rescue Plan also “delivered immediate economic relief for those who needed it the most,” preventing “a wave of evictions, bankruptcies, and delinquencies and defaults” like those that had followed economic crises in the past and had “weakened the recovery and left working families permanently further behind,” a process Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called “economic scarring.”
The economic crash had tanked local and state tax revenues, so the administration funded state and local governments to keep teachers and first responders working, small businesses open, and more housing being built. It expanded the Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty in half. The American Rescue Plan included the Butch Lewis Act, which protected the pensions of millions of union workers and retirees.
During the pandemic, factories shut down, and supply chains—from shipping to port operations to trucking networks—were tangled. The reopening of the global economy sent inflation skyrocketing, and then Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine sent food and oil prices even higher.
Biden reminded the members of the Economic Club of the massive cargo ships stuck outside the Port of Los Angeles before the 2021 holidays, and the shortage of baby formula, and explained that his administration brought together business and labor to repair supply chains and “unclog our ports, trucking networks, and shipping lines.” (Although Biden didn’t note it, Republicans in 2021 suggested that the “reckless spending” of the American Rescue Plan meant that Christmas would be “ruined,” but the administration worked to smooth out the tangles and by July 2024 the Port of Los Angeles saw record-breaking volume passing through it, up 37% from July 2023.) Biden also released oil reserves to stabilize global markets and increased energy production to record highs. Together, these measures began to ease inflation.
Nonetheless, Biden said, critics claimed that the economic supports of the American Rescue Plan would make people leave the labor market—remember “The Great Resignation”?—and that it would take significant unemployment to lower prices. But rather than backing off, Biden and Harris seized the moment to invest in the United States. They wrestled the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law through Congress to rebuild roads, bridges, ports, airports, trains, and buses; to remove lead pipes from schools and homes; and to provide affordable high-speed internet access to every American.
The administration insisted that U.S. contracts must use U.S. workers and U.S. products. With the CHIPS and Science Act, it brought back semiconductor chip manufacturing to the U.S., and private companies from around the world are investing tens of billions of dollars in new chip factories in the U.S. that are already employing construction workers and will soon employ factory workers. Factory construction is at a record high now, and the Biden-Harris administration created more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs.
Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act that will help cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 and is creating hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs. That law also permits Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, saving taxpayers an estimated $160 billion over the next decade.
With inflation under control and a record 16 million jobs created, the administration’s policies proved, Biden said, that it’s possible to bring down inflation while also safeguarding jobs and wages for American workers and promoting economic growth. A record nineteen million people have applied to start new businesses. More Americans have health insurance than ever before. The racial wealth gap is the smallest in 20 years. And rather than creating a recession, these measures kept economic growth above 3% last year. The stock market is at record highs.
Biden contrasted his economic policies, based in the idea that the economy grows from the middle out and the bottom up, with those of former president Trump, whose policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations are based in the idea that the economy grows best when markets drive it and that concentrating wealth at the top of society permits individuals to invest more efficiently than the government can. Biden noted that, in contrast to his own approach, Trump’s policies killed manufacturing jobs and saw very little factory construction, while creating the largest budget deficit in American history.
Biden listed these comparisons to make the point that, as he said, “[f]or the past 40 years, too many leaders have sworn by an economic theory that has not worked very well at all: trickle-down economics. Cut taxes for the very wealthy…and hope the benefits trickle down. Well, guess what? Not a whole lot trickled down to my dad’s kitchen table. It’s clear, especially under my predecessor, that trickle-down economics failed. And he’s promised it again—trickle-down economics—but it will fail again.” He noted, as former president Bill Clinton pointed out at the Democratic National Convention, that since 1989 the U.S. has created about 51 million jobs, and 50 million of them have come under Democratic presidents.
“I’m a capitalist,” Biden said, “[b]ut I believe capitalism is the greatest force to grow the economy for everybody.” He called for more affordable housing, affordable childcare, and lower healthcare costs, noting that those policies will increase economic growth. He called for higher taxes on the very wealthy to pay for those pro-growth policies and to cut the deficit.
And then Biden brought the economic discussion back to his argument before the State Department in 2021, just after he took office. He told the audience at the Economic Club that we have such a dynamic system, and foreign companies are willing to invest here, because of the stability provided in the U.S. by the rule of law. Indeed, it is the rule of law that protects investments and capital, as evidenced by the fact that autocrats stash their money not in their own countries or other dictatorships, but in liberal democracies where investments cannot be taken away or legal protections changed on a dictator’s whim.
After listing the extraordinary economic successes of the past three and a half years, Biden told the audience: “American business, our economic dynamism can’t succeed…without a stability and security that makes us the envy of the world.”
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Heather Cox Richardson, September 10, 2024
Former president Trump has always approached debates as professional wrestling events in which the key is not to explain policies or answer questions, but rather to demonstrate dominance over his opponent. In 2016 the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, had a hard time countering this strategy effectively because of the many expectations of what was appropriate behavior for a female presidential candidate.
In 2020 and then again in the June 2024 “debate,” Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s stutter made it difficult to counter Trump’s scattershot attacks.
The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people.
She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television.
The Harris campaign began the day trolling Trump with a new campaign ad featuring the pieces of former president Barack Obama’s speech at the August Democratic National Convention that concerned Trump. “Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire”—the ad cuts to a photo of Trump in a golf cart—“who has not stopped whining about his problems.” Then a clip of Trump shows him complaining about Harris’s crowds, before Obama notes Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” complete with Obama’s hand motion suggesting Trump’s sizes were small. “It just goes on, and on, and on,” Obama says, before the ad shows empty seats and people yawning at Trump’s rallies.
“America’s ready for a new chapter,” Obama says to the overflow crowd cheering at Chicago’s United Center during the Democratic National Convention. “We are ready for a President Kamala Harris!” At the end, even Harris’s standard statement, “I’m Kamala Harris and I approved this message,” sounds like a challenge. This morning, the Harris campaign began running the ad on the Fox News Channel.
At the same time, they began running Philadelphia-themed ads across the city on billboards, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and on food trucks and taxi cabs, sidewalk art, and digital projections making fun of Trump’s fascination with crowd sizes. They showed, for example, a full-sized Philadelphia pretzel labeled “Harris” alongside a piece of one that looked like an upside down U labeled “Trump.”
The taunting might have been behind Trump’s demand for loyalty from Republican lawmakers this afternoon, telling them to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his way on the inclusion of a voter suppression measure in the bill to fund the government. The right has often relied on threats of government shutdowns to try to get their way, but such shutdowns are never popular, and even moderate Republicans are leery of launching one just before an election.
Nonetheless, Trump tried to lock them into such a shutdown, reiterating in a post this afternoon the lie that undocumented immigrants are voting in presidential elections. “If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN—CLOSE IT DOWN.”
Throughout the day, the Harris campaign placed posts on social media showing Harris looking crisp and presidential and Trump looking old and unkempt. And then, for ten minutes in the hour before the debate, the Harris campaign held a drone show over the Philadelphia Museum of Art showing campaign slogans and then turning the words “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT” into “MADAM PRESIDENT.”
Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported today that Trump’s advisors were concerned ahead of the debate about whether they would get “happy Trump” or “angry Trump,” worrying that a frustrated Trump would engage in the vicious personal attacks that turn voters off. They expressed relief that having the microphones muted when it was not a candidate’s turn to speak would prevent Harris from irritating him with fact checks and snark of her own. Conservative lawyer George Conway noted that it was “[i]nteresting how one campaign is extremely concerned about the emotional stability of its candidate, and how the other is not.”
Harris’s attacks on Trump, including her campaign’s subtle digs at his masculinity, appeared to have accomplished what they set out to. When the two came out on stage, he went straight to his podium, while she strode across the stage, moved into his space, held out her hand, introduced herself and wished him well: “Kamala Harris. Have a good debate.” He muttered in response, “Nice to see you.” Then she took her own spot at the podium. When the debate opened, it was clear that Harris was the dominant figure and that her opponent was “angry Trump.” He would not look at her during the debate.
In her first answer, Harris tried to set out both her own story as a child of the middle class and how she intended to build an opportunity economy for others, lowering food and housing costs and opening the way for more small businesses. It was a lot, quickly, and she looked a little nervous.
Then Trump spoke and it was clear he was going off the rails. His first comment was to suggest Harris was lying, and then to insist that his proposed tariffs will solve everything, although he has the way tariffs work entirely backward: they are paid by the consumer, not by foreign countries. As he followed with a long list of his rally lies, Harris started to smile.
From then on, he continued to produce rally stories full of wild exaggerations and attack Harris with lies in what CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called “a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former president Trump.” "No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency,” Dale said. “A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true. This wasn't little exaggerations, political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality." As Harris spoke directly to the American people, growing stronger and stronger, Trump got wilder and angrier and told more and more crazy stories.
And then, about ten minutes into the debate, Harris baited him. She invited the American people to go to one of his rallies, where “he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, he will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer.’ And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Trump lost it. He defended his rallies, said Harris couldn’t get anyone to attend hers and has to bus in attendees (in reality, her rallies are packed and he is the one who reportedly hires attendees), and then, in his fury, repeated the lie about immigrants eating pets. When a moderator fact-checked that story, he fought back, saying he heard it on television.
And from then on, Harris kept baiting him while explaining her own policies directly to the camera, and he took the bait every single time. He ran down every rabbit hole and appeared unable to finish a thought. Notably, he refused to say he would not sign a national abortion ban and admitted that after nine years of promising one, he had no health care plan (he has, he said, “concepts of a plan,” and if they pan out, he’ll let us know in the “not too distant future”).
He threatened World War III and repeated that the U.S. is “a failing nation.” He told a long story about threatening “Abdul,” the leader of the Taliban; in fact, the leader of the Taliban since 2016 is Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. In response to Harris’s statement that foreign leaders thought he was a disgrace, Trump answered that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who destroyed his country’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship, says he’s a good leader. New York Times columnist David French wrote: “It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life.”
The debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC, asked solid questions and corrected the most egregious of Trump’s lies. But as he continued to interrupt and yell at Harris, they increasingly gave him leeway to do so. This meant he spoke more often and for more time than Harris; MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle reported that he spoke 39 times for a total of 41.9 minutes, to her 23 times for a total of 37.1 minutes. But the extra time did him no favors.
By the end of the evening, Harris had delivered a clear message about her hopes to move the country forward beyond years of using race to divide people who have far more in common than they have differences. She promised to develop an economy that will build small businesses and support a growing middle class, while protecting rights, including the right to make reproductive decisions without the intrusion of the state. And she showed the nation that Trump can be baited, that he lies freely and incoherently, and—perhaps crucially—that he is no longer the dominant politician in America.
Immediately after the debate, the Harris campaign continued their demonstration of dominance. Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon released a statement recapping Harris’s strength and Trump’s angry incoherence. She concluded: “Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”
Then things got even worse for Trump.
Music phenomenon Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, telling her 283 million Instagram followers that she felt she had to because of Trump’s earlier reposting of an AI image of her seeming to endorse him. That, she said, “brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
After explaining why she was supporting Harris and Walz and urging her fans to do their own research, Swift signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Steven Beschloss August 29, 2024
Arlington National Cemetery is a sacred space, the final resting place for about 400,000 veterans and their families dating back to the Revolutionary War and Civil War, a somber, deeply moving expression of the sacrifices that so many Americans have made for their country. It’s why I found it so appalling that Donald Trump visited there on Monday, since it was obvious that he was exploiting this sacred place as a photo op to attack the withdrawal from Afghanistan, nothing more than a publicity stunt for his failing campaign. As I put it in yesterday’s essay, “The Downward Spiral of a Weak Man,” “The issue here is that this man who despises dead soldiers felt it necessary to pretend to care.”
But then we learned yesterday from reporting by NPR that the reality is even worse—that while several military families who lost their sons during the Afghanistan withdrawal invited him there, Trump and his staff engaged in an altercation with an Arlington employee and violated federal law that disallows photography and filming by anyone other than authorized cemetery staff members in an area called Section 60. This 14-acre area is primarily reserved for fallen veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now totaling some 900 soldiers killed in those conflicts.
A handout given to visitors titled “Rules Governing Conduct” specifically prohibits “political campaign or election-related activities within the cemeteries.” But that didn’t stop Trump’s political operatives from shooting campaign video and setting up photos with their malignant candidate standing over a gravestone, grinning and flashing a “thumbs up.”
That disgusting collection of images visibly includes the gravestone of another soldier, Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, a Green Beret who had three children and committed suicide after eight tours of combat duty. “We hope,” said his sister in a statement after the shameful incident, “that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”
These legal and moral violations would be bad enough, but we also learned that Trump’s staffers verbally abused and pushed aside an Arlington employee who unsuccessfully tried to stop them. That employee filed a report about what happened, the details of which haven’t been made public.
Yet a further reminder of Trump’s toxic contamination is that this employee chose to not file charges due to fear of retaliation from Trump supporters. Given the pattern of abuse in so many other instances, this is more than understandable. This decision followed Trump’s campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, insisting in a statement that the employee who tried to bar them from entering Section 60 was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and later attacked the cemetery staffer’s fear about pressing charges. “That is ridiculous,” he said in a statement yesterday, “and sounds like someone who has Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
I’m sure Cheung didn’t miss the ugly vitriol coming from the candidate’s running mate yesterday, who attacked Vice President Kamala Harris as “disgraceful” for criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery, even though she never made any comment. The despicable conclusion from J.D. Vance during a campaign stop: “She can—she can go to hell.”
I felt it necessary to follow up on this nauseating, infuriating episode because it encapsulates why we should do whatever we can to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—to make clear how done we are with a sociopath who exploits a hallowed place like Arlington, cares not one whit if he’s breaking laws, creates conflict and misery for his own personal benefit, then exacerbates the abuse when the actions are questioned. This whole episode makes the need to end this dark chapter in our nation’s history even more obvious.
July 22, 2024
The Inflation Reduction Act & Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act & CHIPS & Science Act created jobs and benefits in Republican-led states
The conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal reports that inflation would be worse under another Trump term.
I wonder if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, (R-KY) would want Trump to stop the repairs on the Brent Spence Bridge just because the money came from the Biden-Harris administration. After all, Senator McConnell attended the ground-breaking with President Biden.
I wonder if the Americans in Republican-led states who have seen most of the benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to Business Insider, as well as from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (JA), and the CHIPS and Science Act would want their new jobs taken away, their energy savings eliminated and/or the repairs stopped on their bridges and roads either – or businesses in those states would want to lose their tax breaks or new projects or revenue – just because the funding came from Biden-Harris initiatives.
Business Insider put it succinctly: “Not a single Republican voted to support the historic IRA when it was passed in August. “It, therefore, comes as a surprise to learn that red states are reaping the benefits of Democrats’ climate law much more than the Democrats themselves, with red states claiming more IRA funds and installing more wind and solar power than Democratic-leaning states in 2022.”
Then there’s what is now dubbed “the Battery Belt” in Southern states for the expansion of battery manufacturing there. “It’s somewhat ironic that whereas Southern states led by Republicans did not vote for climate spending, they are embracing clean energy dollars a lot more than their blue counterparts,” Business Insider explained. “Billions of dollars of new clean energy investment has been announced for solar, electric vehicle and battery manufacturing in Georgia and other southern states since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August, leading to this swathe of states being nicknamed the ‘battery belt.’”
Would Republican-led Oklahoma give up the $1 billion investment by Italian energy company Enel for a solar cell and panel manufacturing facility that’s creating about1,000 jobs? Republican-led Tennessee secured a “$200 million award under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to boost battery materials processing and manufacturing” too. Ohio and Arizona are benefiting big-time from semiconductor manufacturing expanding in their areas, creating thousands of jobs while protecting the U.S. supply chain.
Project 2025 misrepresents the economy and inflation under President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Project 2025 says Biden-Harris regulations and policies “depress the economy,” and that the U.S. economy is in terrible shape. Yet the U.S. economy is literally the strongest in the world based on data from the International Monetary Fund and the only one to recover fully and thrive after covid.
In reality, the Biden-Harris administration created 15.7 million new jobs.
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
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
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....
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.
___________________
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....
© 2024 Robert B. Hubbell
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 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.
Good afternoon. Good afternoon ,everyone, good afternoon. Thank you all. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. So let me say, and I love you back, and I love you back. So let me say my heart is full today. My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country and full of resolve. The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright, as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.
To my beloved Doug and our family, I love you so very much. To President Biden and Dr. Biden, thank you for your faith and support. To Governor Walz and the Walz family, I know your service to our nation will continue. And to my extraordinary team, to the volunteers who gave so much of themselves, to the poll workers and the local election officials, I thank you. I thank you all.
Look, I am so proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it — and the way we ran it. Over the 107 days of this campaign, we have been intentional about building community and building coalitions, bringing people together from every walk of life and background, united by love of country, with enthusiasm and joy in our fight for America’s future.
And we did it with the knowledge that we all have so much more in common than what separates us now. I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it, but we must accept the results of this election. Earlier today, I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.
A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God. My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.
I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body and not have their government telling them what to do. We will never give up the fight to protect our schools and our streets from gun violence,
and America, we will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law, for equal justice, and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.
And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square, and we will also wage it in quieter ways, in how we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor, by always using our strength to lift people up to fight for the dignity that all people deserve. The fight for our freedom will take hard work. But like I always say, we like hard work, hard work is good work. Hard work can be joyful work. And the fight for our country is always worth it. It is always worth it.
To the young people who are watching, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be okay. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win. But here’s the thing, here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power, and don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.
You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.
This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together. Look, many of you know, I started out as a prosecutor, and throughout my career, I saw people at some of the worst times in their lives, people who had suffered great harm and great pain and yet found within themselves, the strength and the courage and the resolve to take the stand, to take a stand, to fight for justice, to fight for themselves, to fight for others. So let their courage be our inspiration. Let their determination be our charge.
And I’ll close with this, there’s an adage and historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages, the adage is, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.
And may that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America, I thank you all. May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. I thank you all.
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