Click on photos to enlarge and read.
 September 12, 2024 |
 |
By Eliza Barclay
Climate Editor, Opinion |
It may be a subtle point in a wild election cycle, but in fact, the contributing writer Robinson Meyer argued in a guest essay published Wednesday, Trump bears significant responsibility for China’s ascension in hybrid and electric vehicles (as well as other industries including solar, wind and battery production) and for G.M. and Ford’s struggles to keep up. “America has fallen behind China in large part because Trump killed our climate policies,” Meyer writes.
And it’s not just automakers that are lagging China. We are now facing, as Meyer puts it, “chronic trade and security concerns” because we don’t yet have a viable battery industry to support our military in future crises. The way America can create that industry is first by developing a viable electric vehicle sector. Harris seems to understand that, but Trump appears poised to weaken or suspend all of the policies and subsidies that are currently helping American-made electric vehicles along. “With him once again in the Oval Office, America would be at risk of falling even further behind,” Meyer writes.
The above is from the timeline of Mark Hagland:
This is one of the pieces I posted on Facebook and asked you to read, but those not subscribed could not read it. The other was too long to take a screenshot of. Sorry.
Many of you may get her daily letters, but just in case, this is another one I feel it is so important for everyone to see.
|
By rights, tonight’s post should be a picture, but Trump’s behavior today merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years. Please feel free to ignore—as I often say, I am trying to leave notes for a graduate student in 150 years, and you can consider this one for her if you want a break from the recent onslaught of news. 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. — Notes: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-migrants-bloody-story-border-control-deportation-1950386 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/06/trump-press-conference-nyc-legal-cases-00177765 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrant-crossings-plunge-near-level-lift-biden-border-crackdown/ X: atrupar/status/1832509585195757752 harris_wins/status/1832504561602351540 |
A Letter from Heather Cox Richardson.
One of the things that came to light on Wednesday, in the paperwork the Justice Department unveiled to explain its seizure of 32 internet domains being used by Russian agents in foreign malign influence campaigns, was that the six right-wing U.S. influencers mentioned in the indictments of the Russian operatives are only the tip of the iceberg.
Since at least 2022, three Russian companies working with the Kremlin have been trying to change foreign politics in a campaign they called “Doppelganger,” covertly spreading Russian government propaganda. “[F]irst and foremost,” notes from a meeting with Russian officials about targeting Germany read, “we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain, and NATO.” Through fake social media profiles, their operatives posed as Americans or other non-Russians, seeding public conversations with Russian propaganda.
In August 2023 they launched the “Good Old USA Project” to target swing-state residents, online gamers, American Jews, and “US citizens of Hispanic descent” to reelect Donald Trump. ”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” one of the propagandists wrote. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Using targeted ads on Facebook, they could see how their material was landing and use bots and trolls to push their narrative in comment sections.
“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the propagandists told their staff. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”
According to the documents, one of the three companies, Social Design Agency (SDA), monitors and collects information about media organizations and social media influencers. It collected a list of 1,900 “anti-influencers,” whose accounts posted material SDA workers thought operated against Russian interests. About 26% of those accounts were based in the U.S.
SDA also identified as pro-Russian influencers more than 2,800 people in 81 countries operating on various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram. Those influencers included “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” About 21% of those influencers were in the U.S.
YouTube took down the Tenet Media Channels associated with the Justice Department’s indictments, and last night, Tenet Media abruptly shut down. In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last noted that the Tenet influencers maintain they were dupes, although they must have been aware that their paychecks were crazy high for the numbers of viewers they had. He asks if, knowing now that their gains are ill-gotten, they are going to give them to charity.
Earlier this week, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his X show, where Cooper not only suggested that the death of more than six million Jews was an accidental result of poor planning, but also argued that British prime minister Winston Churchill, who stood firm against the expansion of fascist Germany in World War II, was the true villain of the war.
Cooper’s argument puts him squarely on the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who insist that democracy undermines society. During the recent summer Olympics, Cooper posted on social media an image of Hitler in Paris alongside another of drag queens representing Greek gods at the Olympic opening ceremonies, an image some on the right thought made fun of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. “This may be putting it too crudely for some,” Cooper wrote, “but the picture [of Hitler in Paris] was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
The idea that Churchill, not Hitler, is the villain of World War II means denying the fact of the Holocaust and defending the Nazis. It lands Carlson and Cooper in the same camp as those autocrats journalist Anne Applebaum notes are “making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.” Elon Musk promoted the interview, saying it was “very interesting,” and “worth watching,” before the backlash made him delete his post. The video has been viewed nearly 30 million times.
Carlson told Lauren Irwin of The Hill that the Biden administration is made up of “warmonger freaks” who have “used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history.” Carlson is on a 16-day speaking tour, on which he will interview Trump allies, including Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump today continued his effort to undermine the democratic American legal system in a “news conference” of more than 45 minutes, in which he took no questions. Although Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts, decided today to delay sentencing until November 26 to avoid any appearance that the court was trying to affect the 2024 election, Trump nonetheless launched an attack on the U.S. legal system and suggested the lawsuits against him were election interference.
He spoke after he and his legal team were in court today to try to overturn a jury’s conclusion that he had sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, a decision that brought his judgments in the two cases she brought to around $90 million. He began with an attack on what he said was a new “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, and promised he had not “spoken to anybody from Russia in years.”
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded what amounted to close to an hour of attacks on the American Justice Department and the laws of the country, and also on American women (he not only attacked Carroll, he brought up others of the roughly two dozen women who have accused him of sexual assault). He attempted to retry the Carroll case in the media, refuting the evidence the jury considered and suggesting that the photo of him and Carroll together was generated by AI, although it was published in 2019.
Attacking women was an interesting decision in light of the fact that he will need the votes of suburban women if he is to make up the ground he has lost to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
For her part, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) appears to see this moment for what it is. Although a staunch Republican herself, she is urging conservative women to admit they’ve had enough. Referring to both Trump and Vance in a conversation sponsored by the Texas Tribune, she said: “This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs.” She assured listeners, quite accurately, that Trump “is not a conservative.” “Women around this country…we’ve had enough.” “These are not people that we can entrust with power again.”
Her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, agreed that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” and announced today that he will be voting for Harris. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said. Eighty-eight business leaders also endorsed Harris today, including James Murdoch, an heir to the Murdoch family media empire. Citing Harris’s “policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment,” they said in a public letter, “the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy” is by electing Harris president.
Meanwhile, at his event with Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel yesterday, Trump embraced the key element of Project 2025 that calls for a dictatorial leader to take over the U.S. That document maintains that “personnel is policy” and that the way to achieve all that the Christian nationalists want is to fire the nonpartisan civil servants currently in place and put their own people into office. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025, but last night he said the way to run the government is to “get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success, and I know now the people, and I know them better than anybody would know them.”
One of those people appears to be X owner Elon Musk, whom Trump has promised to put at the head of an “efficiency” commission to audit the U.S. government.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that the arguments against democracy and in favor of a few people dominating the rest were always the same. In his era, it was enslavers saying some people were better than others. But, he said, those were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
In our era, Indiana Jones said it best in The Last Crusade: “Nazis. I hate these guys.”
—
Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366261/dl
https://www.wired.com/story/project-good-old-usa-russia-2024-election/
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4866301-tucker-carlson-interview-holocaust-revisionist/
https://newrepublic.com/post/185686/donald-trump-tenet-media-russia-scheme
Heather Cox Richardson:
Last night the Boston Globe published a leaked email from a top volunteer with the Trump campaign, former Massachusetts Republican Party vice chair Tom Mountain, telling volunteers that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back” from that important swing state. He urged volunteers to turn their attention instead to Pennsylvania. After the story dropped, the Trump campaign cut ties with Mountain.
Stephen Collinson of CNN and Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post reported today that Trump’s team has given up on trying to get Trump to talk about the economy and other issues voters care about. The former president has decided to spend the rest of the campaign attacking Vice President Harris to destroy her popularity and drive voters away from her, rather than trying to attract them to himself. The Washington Postreporters noted that likely voters view Trump unfavorably and his team has concluded that while he can’t improve his own standing, he can damage hers.
Collinson dubbed Trump’s plans a “feral political offensive.”
It is not clear that this will work. As Collinson notes, Harris has refused to get dragged into the gutter with Trump, and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who studies focus groups, notes that voters appear to want to put the nastiness of the past several years behind them. Still, the media-tracking company AdImpact reported that between August 23 and August 29, 57% of the total television spending for political ads was on Republican attacks on Harris.
Trump also continues to demand that Republicans support his attempt to suppress voting. Having failed to pass any of the necessary appropriations bills before going on August recess, Congress will be in a rush when it comes back into session next week. It needs to fund the government before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 in order to prevent a partial shutdown. Last Thursday, Trump told right-wing podcast host Monica Crowley that he would “shut down the government in a heartbeat” unless the government funding package includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—which would give credence to the idea that noncitizens are voting in national elections despite the fact it is already illegal—and a bill restricting legal immigration.
Zeeshan Aleem of MSNBC today took public notice of Trump’s “deteriorating ability to clearly communicate.” His speeches “seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day,” Aleem wrote. “Those speeches are making it hard, if not impossible, for people listening to them to understand what he wants to do with his power in office, and they’re reportedly turning off voters.” A reporter for The Guardian pointed out that attendees at Trump’s rallies are leaving as he rambles for nearly two hours, and complaining that he is “babbling.”
For his part, Trump says his wandering speech is deliberate. He calls it “the weave.” I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Aleem notes that this less-focused, less-capable Trump would be exceptionally dangerous in office a second time. And yet, he was dangerous enough the first time. Today Adam Klasfeld and Ryan Goodman of Just Security released a study showing at least twelve times that Trump used the power of the presidency to retaliate against his political enemies. They note that there is no evidence that President Joe Biden or anyone else at the Biden White House ever took similar actions.
John McCain’s son Jimmy today announced that he has switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat and will work to elect Vice President Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in 2024. The younger McCain enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and is now an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment of the Arizona Army National Guard. He said he is speaking out because Trump’s conduct at Arlington National Cemetery was a “violation.”
Last Friday, just before the long weekend, Trump announced that he would vote against a Florida ballot measure that would essentially enshrine in the Florida state constitution the abortion rights formerly protected by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. When Trump had bowed to popular support for abortion rights and expressed uneasiness at the state’s current six-week ban—a cutoff reached before most women know they’re pregnant—antiabortion activists launched fierce attacks on him. So, on Friday, Trump switched his position and announced he would vote against restoring access to abortion in Florida.
That announcement has given wings to the Democrats’ messaging about Republicans’ determination to end abortion rights. It did not help the Republicans that more videos have been unearthed in which Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said that “a childless elite” is ruling the country. He went on to excoriate this elite for what he claimed was their pride that they didn’t have children and that they had abortions, and said “they look down on people who invest their time and their future in their children. And that is a dangerous place to live as a country.” Even a right-wing Newsmax interviewer suggested that he was “painting this group with perhaps a broad brush?”
On October 1, in Louisiana, a law will go into effect that reclassified the drug misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance. Misoprostol can be used for abortion. It is also used for routine reproductive care and during medical emergencies to treat postpartum hemorrhage. It is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medications, a list containing those medications that are the most effective and safe to meet a health care system’s most important needs. After antiabortion activists targeted the drug, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a law reclassifying it as a controlled dangerous substance. The reclassification means that the drug will no longer be easily available on obstetric hemorrhage carts.
“Take it off the carts?” one doctor said to Lorena O’Neil of the Louisiana Illuminator. “That’s death. That’s a matter of life or death.”
The Harris campaign said: “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the reason Louisiana women who are suffering from miscarriages or bleeding out after birth can no longer receive the critical care they would have received before Trump overturned Roe. Because of Trump, doctors are scrambling to find solutions to save their patients and are left at the whims of politicians who think they know better. Trump is proud of what he’s done. He brags about it. And if he wins, he will threaten to bring the crisis he created for Louisiana women to all 50 states.”
Vice President Harris’s campaign started its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour today in Palm Beach, Florida, where it drove past the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago club. The bus will make at least 50 stops across the country.
Pollster Tom Bonier today continued his examination of new registrants to vote. This time his focus was North Carolina. The pattern he has found across the country continues: “surges in registration are being driven by women.” In North Carolina, he writes, the number of registrants was almost 50% higher during the week of July 21 than in the same week in 2020, and the gender gap was +12 women, compared to +6 women in 2020. The new registrants were +6 Democratic, and 43% were younger than 30.
For RDP the prompt is Agency
Please read this!!!
In an interview with right-wing host Mark Levin on the Fox News Channel last night, Trump complained about the new grand jury indictment of him for trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it,” he asked.
In fact, no one has a right to interfere with a presidential election. Several federal laws prohibit such interference. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added: “This is the banality of evil right here—Trump asserting he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost. And, he will do it again. We must vote against him in overwhelming numbers.”
Former president Trump is approaching the election of 2024 the way southern white supremacists approached elections from 1876 to 1964. He has made it very clear he is not trying to win the votes of a majority of Americans. He and his loyalists are trying to intimidate his opponents to keep them from voting while egging on his supporters to commit violence. They are bringing the tactics of the reactionary southern Democrats after the Civil War forward to the present day in an attempt to impose the same sort of minority rule on the nation as a whole.
Trump has made it clear he is not trying to win the popular vote. When his primary challenger Nikki Haley dropped out of the race in March, Trump’s team made no effort to win over her voters; it was President Joe Biden’s reelection team that reached out to them.
A few days later, when Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and his loyalist Michael Whatley took over the Republican National Committee, they killed the plans of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to open 40 satellite campaign offices across ten battleground states. As The Dispatch noted, that meant very little ground game: doors knocked on, phone calls made, or volunteers organized. The new leadership of the RNC also fired 40 out of 60 employees whose job was field organizing.
Trump was clear what he was doing: rather than worrying about attracting voters, he intended to play out the game of the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election.
Since the 2020 election, at least 28 states have passed laws making it harder to vote in 2024. Whatley was a chief proponent of the Big Lie that justified those laws, and Trump put him in place, saying he wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts. The campaign has focused on lawsuits to make it harder to vote and to put their own loyalists into positions where they might be able to affect the certification of the 2024 vote. As Peter Nicholas reported at NBC News yesterday, Republicans have filed dozens of lawsuits that seemed designed not only to game the system, but also to convince supporters that the election is rigged against Trump.
That lie was the argument Florida governor Ron DeSantis made to justify creating an election police unit in 2022 to stop what he claimed was illegal voting, although election fraud is vanishingly rare. The unit conducted raids—mostly in the early morning—primarily against Black Americans shortly before the 2022 election. Most of the cases were later dropped, or those charged agreed to a plea deal without jail time.
The raids did, though, depress voting. In its 2023 annual report, the Office of Election Crime and Security wrote: “Enforcing Florida election law has the primary effect of punishing violators, but enforcement also and equally as important acts as a deterrent for those who may consider voting illegally or committing other election related crimes.”
Now MAGA Republicans have joined Trump in arguing that Democrats are trying to get noncitizen immigrants to vote for their candidates, although a federal law in place since 1996 makes it clear that it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress. It does not appear to matter to Republicans that there is no evidence that noncitizens try to vote. As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in May: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.”
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton also created an “Election Integrity Unit” in the wake of the 2020 election, and on August 21, 2024, after Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo repeated a baseless rumor about noncitizens registering to vote, Paxton launched what he called an undercover investigation that, just days later, launched raids against Latino activists. “It is evident through his pattern of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting,” Latino leaders say.
This pattern echoes the Reconstruction Era intimidation of Black voters and their white Republican allies, and it does so with the same justification: the idea that business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure, and civil rights policies are “socialism.” Those policies had nothing to do with the actual principles of socialism, which call for the government to control the means of production. This “socialism” echoed the argument of southern white supremacists who used it to attack Black voting in 1871 after the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified the year before, made it unconstitutional to stop someone from voting on the basis of race.
As newly enfranchised formerly enslaved men who owned little property—because enslavers took what they produced—and white Republicans voted for lawmakers who would rebuild the South, white supremacist Democrats maintained that the roads, schools, and hospitals a healthy society needed could be paid for only with tax dollars. Since white men owned most of the property, such improvements were, they said, a redistribution of wealth.
In the nineteenth century, that argument led first to voter suppression and then to the argument that anyone who did not vote to keep the white supremacists in power was a danger to society. Good Americans must keep such dangerous people out of any proximity to power. In that light, outright violence to maintain the rule of the minority was a demonstration of civic virtue.
True to form, Trump and his supporters have made it clear they consider their ascendancy imperative to recover America from the carnage into which they allege President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have led it. And, if their opponents are truly as dangerous as they insist, those opponents must be capable of any of the actions MAGA Republicans falsely attribute to them.
Trump and his campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski have recently asserted the lie that Democrats kill newborn babies, for example, and Trump told the right-wing Moms for Liberty organization on Friday that schools are operating on children to transition them to a different sex. In a direct link to the ideas of the late nineteenth century that white supremacists used to justify taking power, Trump routinely calls Vice President Harris a communist.
Trump’s lies have become cartoonish as his attachment to reality has slipped, but behind them is a demonizing of his opponents that echoes the past argument that certain people must be kept from power and, possibly, purged from society.
Many of those arrested for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, told the court they believed they were defending American democracy from those who were destroying the country and had stolen the election. Trump has championed those arrested for trying to install him into the presidency, saying they are “patriots” who have been “treated unfairly” and “have shown incredible courage and sacrifice,” and has promised that if reelected, he will pardon the nearly 1,000 people found guilty of crimes related to that event.
A gala to celebrate and raise money for those attackers—the J6 Awards Gala—was scheduled to be held at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club this Thursday but has just been called off until after the election.
The celebration of violence is now deeply embedded in the MAGA movement with leaders like North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, who recently attacked an assortment of enemies and assured his audience: “Some folks need killing!” As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo wrote on August 27, this violent tendency has become for MAGA Republicans a fantasy about deploying the military against American citizens.
Yesterday, on the same day that Trump declared he had the right to interfere in a presidential election to put himself in power, the pro-Trump owner of X, Elon Musk, reposted to his nearly 200 million followers a statement suggesting that women and men who can’t physically defend themselves are inferior to “alpha men” and are not good participants in government because they lack the ability to think critically. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making,” the original post said. “Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”
Over the statement, Musk posted: “Interesting observation.”
—
Notes:
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11125
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/us/politics/trump-haley-gop-voters.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-may-2024
Donald Trump recently posted deepfakes online that appeared to show pop music superstar Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing him for president.
What are “deepfakes”?
To be clear, Taylor Swift has not endorsed Donald Trump.
And here’s what I told the national media:
“The deepfakes of Taylor Swift are yet another example of AI’s power to create misinformation that deceives and defrauds voters. The potential harms to our society that could result from such misinformation, including abuses of our elections, are wide-reaching and immensely damaging.”
In July of 2023, Public Citizen formally petitioned the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to require that political deepfakes be labeled as such. Frankly, it’s the least that the government agency tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our elections should do.
But — over a year since we asked the FEC to take this obvious step — we’re hearing that the agency may reject our petition and shirk its duty to prevent deepfakes from undermining the 2024 election.
To the Federal Election Commission:
Thanks for taking action.
For democracy,
– Lisa Gilbert, Co-President of Public Citizen
Image by SJ Objio on Unsplash
If you are considering voting for Trump in spite of all of his past illegal actions because he is “such a good businessman,” please read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” below and then subscribe to her free newsletter. Subscribe for free to Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
Two big stories today that together reveal a broader landscape.
The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released another blockbuster jobs report. The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. A widespread range of sectors added new jobs, including health care, government, leisure and hospitality, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period.
The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%. This is not a significant change, but it does break the 27-month streak of unemployment below that number.
The second big story is that Justice Clarence Thomas amended a financial filing from 2019, acknowledging that he should have reported two free vacations he accepted from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. While in the past he said he did not need to disclose such gifts, in today’s filing he claimed he had “inadvertently omitted” the trips on earlier reports. ProPublica broke the story of these and other gifts from Crow, including several more trips than Thomas has so far acknowledged.
Fix The Court, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to reform the federal courts, estimates that Thomas has accepted more than $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. As economic analyst Steven Rattner pointed out, that’s 5.6 times more than the other 16 justices on the court in those years combined.
These two news items illustrate a larger story about the United States in this moment.
The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office and that remained dominant until 2021, when Biden entered the White House. Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933.
Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices. That smart investment would dramatically expand the economy, supporters argued, and everyone would do better.
But supply-side economics never produced the results its supporters promised. What it did do was move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy. Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
In order to keep that system in place, Republicans worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to. With the rise of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the position of Senate majority leader in 2007, they weaponized the filibuster so any measure that went against their policies would need 60 votes in order to get through the Senate, and in 2010 they worked to take over state legislatures so that they could gerrymander state congressional districts so severely that Republicans would hold far more seats than they had earned from voters.
With Congress increasingly neutered, the power to make law shifted to the courts, which Republicans since the Reagan administration had been packing with appointees who adhered to their small-government principles.
Clarence Thomas was a key vote on the Supreme Court. But as ProPublica reported in December 2023, Thomas complained in 2000 to a Republican member of Congress about the low salaries of Supreme Court justices (equivalent to about $300,000 today) and suggested he might resign. The congressman and his friends were desperate to keep Thomas, with his staunchly Republican vote, on the court. In the years after 2000, friends and acquaintances provided Thomas with a steady stream of gifts that supplemented his income, and he stayed in his seat.
But what amounts to bribes has compromised the court. After the news broke that Thomas has now disclosed some of the trips Crow gave him, conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “It’s long past time for there to be a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes. What he has taken, and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time.” A bit less formally, over a chart of the monetary value of the gifts Thomas has accepted, Conway added: “I mean. This. Is. Just. Nuts.”
As the Republican system comes under increasing scrutiny, Biden’s renewal of traditional economic policies is showing those policies to be more successful than the Republicans’ system ever was. If Americans turn against the Republican formula of slashing taxes and deregulating business, those at the top of the economy stand to lose both wealth and control of the nation’s economic system.
Trump has promised more tax cuts and deregulation if he is reelected, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected that his plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025 will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. In April, at a meeting with 20 oil executives, Trump promised to cut regulations on the fossil fuel industry in exchange for $1 billion in donations, assuring them that the tax breaks he would give them once he was in office would pay for the donation many times over (indeed, an analysis quoted in The Guardian showed his proposed tax cuts would save them $110 billion). On May 23, he joined fossil fuel executives for a fundraiser in Houston.
In the same weeks, Biden’s policies have emphasized using the government to help ordinary people rather than to move wealth upward.
On May 31 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will make its experimental free electronic filing system permanent. It asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to sign on to the program and to help taxpayers use it. The program’s pilot this year was wildly successful, with more than 140,000 people filing that way. Private tax preparers, whose industry makes billions of dollars a year, oppose the new system.
The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding for this program and for beefing up the ability of the IRS to audit the wealthiest taxpayers. As Fatima Hussein wrote for the Associated Press, Republicans cut $1.4 billion from these funds last summer and will shift an additional $20 billion from the IRS to other programs over the next two years.
Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued five new reports showing that thanks in part to the administration’s outreach efforts about the Affordable Care Act, the rate of Black Americans without health insurance dropped from 20.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2022. The same rate among Latinos dropped from 32.7% to 18%. For Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, the rate of uninsured dropped from 16.6% to 6.2%. And for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate dropped from 32.4% to 19.9%. More than 45 million people in total are enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
President Biden noted the strength of today’s jobs report in a statement, adding: “I will keep fighting to lower costs for families like the ones I grew up with in Scranton.” Republicans “have a different vision,” he said, “one that puts billionaires and special interests first.” He promised: “I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.”
Subscribe for free to Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/07/may-jobs-unemployment/
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/jobs-report-may-06-07-24/index.html
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/07/jobs-report-may-2024-us-job-gains-totaled-272000-in-may.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-gift-disclosures-harlan-crow
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/trump-oil-industry-campaign
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/us/politics/trump-biden-affordable-care-act.html
X:
SteveRattner/status/1799058177373381097
SteveRattner/status/1798749555002941930
gtconway3d/status/1799122270037713027
gtconway3d/status/1799123230772568563
BidenHQ/status/1799098652297769271
A newsletter about the history behind today’s politics by Heather Cox Richardson Over 1,500,000 subscribers.
One No Trump
I must begin this sad narration
with these words of sad regret
for the state of our lost nation
that has lost that noble way
carefully planned in its gestation,
perfect in its founders’ minds,
but somehow skewed in maturation
by takeovers from the Trumpster set
led by an idiot’s vain oration!
The dVerse Poets Magic 9 prompt today was to write *a poem in 9 lines
*meter and line-length at discretion of poet
*rhyme, a b a c a d a b a, with c and d unrhymed
Go HERE to read other poems that followed the propt.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 