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.
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© 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
September 7, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Trump’s behavior today {Saturday Sept 7} merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years. …Yesterday, Trump ranted at the press, furious that the American legal system had resulted in two jury decisions that he had defamed and sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. He was so angry that, with his lawyers standing awkwardly behind him, he told reporters: “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”
Today, Trump held a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, a small city in the center of the state, where he addressed about 7,000 people. A number of us who have been watching him closely have been saying for a while that when voters actually saw him in this campaign, they would be shocked at how he has deteriorated, and that seems to be true: his meandering and self-indulgent speeches have had attendees leaving early, some of them bewildered. In today’s speech, Trump slurred a number of words, referring to Elon Musk as “Leon,” for example, and forgetting the name of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who was on his short list for a vice-presidential pick.
But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.
Trump told the audience that when he took office in 2017, military officers told him the U.S. had given all the military’s ammunition away to allies. Then he went on a rant against our allies, saying that they’re only our allies when they need something and that they would never come to our aid if we needed them. This echoes the talking points put out by Russian operatives and flies in the face of the fact that the one time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked the mutual defense pact in that agreement was after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in support of the U.S.
He embraced Project 2025’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education and send education back to the states so that right-wing figures like Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson can run it. He reiterated the MAGA claim that mothers are executing their babies after birth—this is completely bonkers—and again echoed Russian talking points when he said these executions are happening—they are not—but “nobody talks about it.” He went on: “We did a great thing when we got Roe v. Wade out of the federal government.”
He reiterated the complete fantasy that schools are performing gender-affirming surgery on children. “Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump’s suggestion that schools are performing surgery on students is bananas. This is simply not a thing that happens.
And then he went full-blown apocalyptic, attacking immigrants and claiming that crime, which in reality has dropped dramatically since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office after a spike during his own term, has made the U.S. uninhabitable. He said that “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” "Migrants and crime are here in our country at levels never thought possible before…. You're not safe even sitting here, to be honest with you. I'm the only one that's going to get it done. Everybody is saying that." He urged people to protest “because you’re being overrun by criminals.”
He assured attendees that "If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids." He reiterated his plan to get rid of migrants. “And you know,” he said, “getting them out will be a bloody story.”
He went on to try to rev up supporters in words very similar to those he used on January 6th, 2021, but focused on this election. “Every citizen who’s sick and tired of the parasitic political class in Washington that sucks our country of its blood and treasure, November fifth will be your liberation day. November fifth, this year, will be the most important day in the history of our country because we’re not going to have a country anymore if we don’t win.”
He promised: “I will prevent World War III, and I am the only one that can do it. I will prevent World War III. And if I don’t win this election,... Israel is doomed…. Israel will be gone…. I’d better win.”
"I better win or you're gonna have problems like we've never had. We may have no country left. This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This may be our last election…. It’ll all be over, and you gotta remember…. Trump is always right. I hate to be right. I’m always right.”
Trump's hellscape is only in his mind: crime is sharply down in the U.S. since he left office, migrant crossings have plunged, and the economy is the strongest in the world.
Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Is it the Justice Department indictments that showed Russia is working to get him reelected? Is it the rising popularity of Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Is it fury at the new grand jury’s indicting him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in power? Is it fear of Tuesday’s debate with Harris? Is it a declining ability to grapple with reality?
Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide.
© 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.
August 19, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
The Democratic National Committee today released a platform that lays out the history of the last four years and explains how and why the Biden-Harris administration has oriented the United States government toward ordinary Americans. It is in many ways a snapshot of the United States of America in this moment. At the most basic level, it shows how rapidly the political world is changing. Approved on July 16, five days before President Joe Biden announced he would not accept the nomination, it refers to Biden, and not to Vice President Kamala Harris, as the party’s nominee.
At a grander scale, though, the platform suggests the country is entering a new political alignment. In its length and scope it recalls the 1980 Republican platform that launched the Reagan Revolution and the modern Republican Party. Unlike that platform, which laid out what the Republicans hoped to accomplish if voters put them into power, today’s Democratic platform recounts almost four years of work on which to base the Democrats’ future plans.
As the Republican Party that coalesced under Reagan has crumbled into a Christian nationalist authoritarianism, the Democrats have come together into a pro-democracy coalition. That coalition includes Republicans eager to stop Trump and his allies. They have signed on to elect Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in order to preserve democracy, but are clear they are not embracing the Democratic Party’s policies. The Harris-Walz campaign has welcomed them.
The Republicans’ platform is heavy on slogans—many of which are in all caps—saying things like “We will defeat Inflation, tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve fiscal sanity, restore price stability, and quickly bring down prices,” without any suggestion of how they will bring about such sweeping changes. In contrast, the Democrats laid out their policies today in a detailed 90-page platform that places the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration in a larger framework of protecting American democracy.
The platform lists the landmark legislation the Democrats have passed since 2021 and explains how they designed those measures to address both economic inequality and the historic racial and gender discrimination that has held back women as well as racial and gender minorities. The central theme of the platform is fairness: some version of that word appears in the document 58 times. The nation’s government, and the globe, have been skewed toward a few rich people. The Democratic platform says that they should pay their fair share and that those Americans who have been held back by systemic discrimination should have a fair shot at success.
“Our nation is at an inflection point,” the platform’s preamble reads. “What kind of America will we be? A land of more freedom, or less freedom? More rights or fewer? An economy rigged for the rich and powerful, or where everyone has a fair shot at getting ahead?”
Taking office in the midst of a crisis, “Democrats proved once again that democracy can deliver, and made tremendous progress turning the country around,” but Trump will destroy those victories, focusing “not on opportunity and optimism, but on revenge and retribution…. He and his extreme MAGA allies are ripping away our bedrock personal freedoms, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love. They’re rigging our economy for their rich friends and big corporations, pushing more trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful…. They are eroding our democracy with lies and threats, have refused to denounce political violence, and are making it harder to vote. And given the chance, they’ll keep stacking our courts, locking in their extreme agenda for decades.”
“History has shown that nothing about democracy is guaranteed,” the platform reads. “Every generation has to protect it, preserve it, choose it. We must stand together to choose what we want America to be.”
The Democratic platform was the backdrop today for the opening of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. Today’s theme was “For the People,” and today's speakers hit that goal, aiming directly at voters by telling two compelling stories of America. While the evening was designed to honor President Joe Biden, it did that not so much by focusing on his administration’s achievements—although they were there—as by emphasizing how his qualities, his initiatives, and his faith in America have restored the nation’s better qualities, setting it on a positive path.
Speakers told a wide range of stories about the many kindnesses of Biden, Harris, and Walz. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) teared up when she recounted Harris’s kindness to her as a new lawmaker. Golden State Warriors and U.S. national basketball team coach Steve Kerr noted that Harris and Walz have spent their careers “serving other people.” Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan talked of how as Walz does the work for Minnesota, he brings along a "bottomless bag of snacks -- Nutter Butters, cheese curds, and Diet Dew."
Speakers talked about how the Democrats are getting things done: Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH) said that "J.D. and Trump like to talk about states like Ohio, but Kamala and Joe actually get stuff done for us."
United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) emphasized the support of Biden, Harris, and Walz for unions and other working Americans, noting that they come from a middle-class background themselves.
And they talked about what patriotism means. Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) said: "My mom taught me to love this country. She taught me that real American patriotism is not about screaming and yelling, ‘America first.’ Real American patriotism is loving your country so much that you want to help the people in your country. THAT is American patriotism."
Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) brought the crowd to its feet when he offered the Democrats’ underlying moral doctrine: “I need my neighbor's children to be okay so that my children will be okay,” he said. “I need all of my neighbor’s children to be okay, poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia, I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine, I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay. Because we are all God’s children. And so, let’s stand together. Let’s work together. Let’s organize together. Let’s pray together. Let’s stand together. Let’s heal the land.”
In contrast to this forward-looking community vision, the speakers made clear—often with memorable humor—that the future Trump offers is as dark as his own vows of retribution and revenge. They spoke of how he cares only about himself and how Trump has vowed to be a dictator.
Several people mentioned Project 2025, which South Carolina representative James Clyburn called “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Flanagan told the crowd that her brother was the second person in Tennessee to die of Covid; Garcia said his mother and stepfather both died of it. The DNC showed a video of Trump downplaying the disease.
Individuals affected by the abortion bans enacted after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion care told their heart wrenching stories.
And they talked about Trump’s crimes. Representative Crockett asked voters which of the two candidates they would hire. “Kamala Harris has a résumé,” she said. “Donald Trump has a rap sheet.”
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence is the first vice president in more than 200 years “not to support the president he served with in a general election.” “Someone should’ve told Donald Trump that the president’s job under Article 2 of the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not that the vice president is executed…. J.D. Vance, do you understand why there was a sudden job opening for running mate on the [Republican] ticket? They tried to kill your predecessor!”
Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA) told the crowd: “We deserve a president…who shatters the boundaries of what’s possible, not the boundaries of what’s legal.”
The Democrats tonight wove the past into their story of the future, creating a new history in which the present moment is part of a longer trajectory. Civil rights leader Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who worked alongside the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., received a standing ovation tonight. And when former secretary of state Hillary Clinton took the stage, the crowd roared.
“Something is happening in America,” she said. “You can feel it. Something we’ve worked for and dreamed of for a long time.” She recalled the history of women’s suffrage in the United States, noting that her mother was born before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and she remembered the pathbreaking leadership of New York representative Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and Representative Geraldine Ferraro, also of New York, who ran for vice president in 1984. Then she spoke of her own nomination for president in 2016: “Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. And afterwards we refused to give up on America. Millions marched, many ran for office. We kept our eyes on the future.”
“Well, my friends,” she said, “the future is here!” She urged everyone to “keep going…. Kamala has the character, experience, and vision to lead us forward.”
When Biden took the stage at the end of the night, he was greeted with a long standing-ovation and chants of “We love Joe!” He reiterated the deep importance of family and thanked his own before recounting the accomplishments of his administration in rebuilding the damaged country that he inherited in January 2021. And then he turned to democracy.
“The vote each of us casts this year will determine whether democracy and freedom will prevail. It’s that simple. It’s that serious,” he said. “And the power is literally in your hands. History is in your hands…. America’s future is in your hands.”
“Nowhere else in the world could a kid with a stutter and modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, grow up to sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. That’s because America is and always has been a nation of possibilities. And we must never lose that.”
“Each of us has a part in the American story. For me and my family there’s a song that means a lot to us that captures the best of who we are as a nation. The song is called ‘American Anthem.’ There’s one verse that stands out:
“‘The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day.
What shall our legacy be?
What will our children say?
Let me know in my heart when my days are through
America, America, I gave my best to you.’
“For 50 years…I have given my heart and soul to our nation. And I have been blessed a million times in return with the support of the American people…. I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you…. I can honestly say I’m more optimistic about the future than I was when I was elected as a 29-year-old United States senator.
“We just need to remember who we are.
“We’re the United States of America.
“And there is NOTHING we cannot do when we do it together.”
© 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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
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
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
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