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2025-06-10 20:46:29

@nprofile…6kn7
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Trump’s trade war won’t just cripple domestic markets—it will slow global GDP growth to its lowest point in 17 years. The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report found that “international discord” surrounding trade has “upended many of the policy certainties that helped shrink extreme poverty and expand prosperity after the end of World War II.”The report did not name President Trump explicitly, but made it clear that his unprecedented tariffs—a 10 percent tax on imports from the entire world—were the direct cause of the drop in global and domestic economic growth. “The rise in trade barriers, heightened uncertainty, and the spike in financial market volatility are set to weigh on private consumption, international trade, and investment,” the report stated. “As a result, U.S. growth is expected to decelerate sharply in 2025, to 1.4 percent.” Additionally, Global output is expected to slip by 0.5 percent. The report’s future outlook is also not encouraging. “In 2026-27, a tepid recovery is expected, leaving global output materially below January projections, the report said. “The outlook largely hinges on the evolution of trade policy globally. Growth could turn out to be lower if trade restrictions escalate or if policy uncertainty persists, which could also result in a build-up of financial stress … On the upside, uncertainty and trade barriers could diminish if major economies reach lasting agreements that address trade tensions.” It’s clear that these hits to GDP will impede the growth of the domestic and the international working class, as Trump struggles to make a single trade deal while kneecapping the U.S’s diplomatic legitimacy in the process. “The world economy today is once more running into turbulence,” World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill wrote. “Without a swift course correction, the harm to living standards could be deep.”President Trump has yet to comment on the World Bank’s report.
https://newrepublic.com/post/196378/world-bank-trump-trade-war-economy-recession

2025-06-04 19:22:46

@nprofile…pyzj
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Trump said he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone for over an hour on Wednesday, just to confirm that Putin will continue to carry out attacks on Ukraine. “I just finished speaking, by telephone, with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour and 15 minutes. We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.” The president is referring to Ukraine’s successful drone attacks on multiple Russian airfields over the weekend, which destroyed 40 Russian aircraft. Trump then provided an update on Iran nuclear deal talks. “We also discussed Iran, and the fact that time is running out on Iran’s decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly! I stated to President Putin that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and, on this, I believe that we were in agreement,” Trump said, using much harsher language than he did in the first half of his post.“President Putin suggested that he will participate in the discussions with Iran and that he could, perhaps, be helpful in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion. It is my opinion that Iran has been slowwalking their decision on this very important matter, and we will need a definitive answer in a very short period of time!”Trump is displaying much more trust and deference towards Putin here than he was just days ago, when he wrote that the Russian president was “playing with fire” by continuing to attack Ukraine. The president continues to waffle in his support of Putin, oscillating between praise and rebuke all while getting nowhere closer to actually ending the war in Ukraine.
https://newrepublic.com/post/196125/trump-putin-russia-retaliate-ukraine-attacks

2025-06-02 21:39:27

@nprofile…pyzj
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The Pentagon’s new press secretary is a chronically online 26-year-old white nationalist who believes in the “great replacement” theory, thinks Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy is an “entitled midget,” and pushed an antisemitic conspiracy theory about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched after being falsely accused of murder in 1915. Kingsley Wilson, who has served as deputy press secretary since January, is the daughter of right-wing talking head and former Trump adviser Steve Cortes and previously worked for Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russel Vought. She will now act as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s primary mouthpiece at the Pentagon, a department that has not had regular press briefings for some time now. “The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs is announcing that Kingsley Wilson will serve as Press Secretary for the Department of Defense,” senior Defense Department adviser Sean Parnell wrote on X last week. “Kingsley’s leadership has been integral to the DOD’s success & we look forward to her continued service to President Trump!”Wilson’s personal X page is a treasure trove of ultraright-wing content. “Minneapolis became Mogadishu in 10 years time,” she said over a video of Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar at a rally in her district. “The Great Replacement isn’t a conspiracy theory … it’s reality.” She has posted about the great replacement therory—a racist conspiracy theory that alleges there is a coordinated plot to decrease America’s white population through immigration, in some iterations at the behest of Jewish leaders—incessantly for the past three years. She said, “I hate this entitled midget,” in response to Zelenskiy receiving military aid from the U.S last year, and lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin for having “encyclopedic knowledge of his people’s history,” which she called “beyond impressive … especially when contrasted with the low-IQ lunatics working at the U.S. State Department.”“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a Black man for his crime,” she wrote on X. “The ADL turned off the comments because they want to gaslight you.” The ADL stated that they were “deeply disturbed” by Wilson’s comments. While troubling, this is a predictable pick, as Trump has lined his highest ranks with fringe MAGA loyalists with often openly racist politics, like State Department official Darren Beattie and National Counterterrorism Center head Joe Kent. They, like Wilson, are anti-neocons who subscribe to the same far-right, deep-MAGA views as figures like Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, rather than the more conventional conservatism of the GOP.
https://newrepublic.com/post/196011/pete-hegseth-press-secretary-kingsley-wilson-extremism

2025-05-29 23:40:14

@nprofile…pyzj
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Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine activist detained by the Trump administration and threatened with deportation, thinks that government officials coordinated with anti-Palestinian groups and organizations to target him.Zeteo News reports that Khalil and his legal team from the Center of Constitutional Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act request with several government agencies to “document and expose the reported collaboration between federal officials and private, anti-Palestinian organizations who have identified, doxxed, and reported him and others for purposes of securing the deportation of student activists advocating on behalf of Palestinian human rights.”In their request, Khalil’s lawyers say that his arrest, as well as that of other pro-Palestine activists, shows patterns that indicate the government is working with outside groups who are working together to target such activists. These groups, which include the pro-Israel academic blacklist Canary Mission and far-right Betar USA, publicly take credit every time one of these arrests are announced.As early as January, Betar, a Revisionist Zionist organization that has been labeled “extremist” by the Anti Defamation League was recommending foreign students and teachers to the Trump administration for deportation because they protested against Israel. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at what he thought was a U.S. citizenship interview, was also on Betar’s list.According to Zeteo, the FOIA request cites several examples of Betar and other organizations creating profiles for Khalil and attacking him on social media. Activists from these organizations, such as Betar head Ross Glick, reportedly met with Senator John Fetterman and the office of Senator Ted Cruz to discuss deportation efforts.Fetterman denied working with Betar, telling Zeteo that “I do not support private organizations coming up with deportation lists, and in any event, I would never participate or assist in that.” The State Department, on the other hand, didn’t deny working with such organizations.“Given our commitment to and responsibility for national security, the Department uses all available tools to receive and review concerning information when considering visa revocations about possible ineligibilities,” a department spokesperson told Zeteo.If the Trump administration is taking deportation recommendations from extremist, anti–free speech organizations like Betar and Canary Mission, it is violating the First Amendment to the Constitution in its immigration policies. But Trump and his associates have already shown the public that they don’t care about such freedoms for the people they oppose, let alone the law.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195882/trump-administration-taking-deportation-orders-extremists

2025-05-28 23:06:57

@nprofile…pyzj
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A Harvard University scientist detained by immigration authorities for over three months was granted bail by a federal judge Wednesday in a rebuke to the Trump administration. U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss ruled that Kseniia Petrova’s detention and the revocation of her J-1 visa for failing to declare frog embryos at Boston’s Logan Airport in February should not have happened, and raised serious legal concerns. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions,” Reiss said in her ruling, adding that the samples Petrova brought into the U.S. were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.”“Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” Reiss added, which the Trump administration has said it plans to do. Petrova has said that she fears returning to the country due to her protests against the war in Ukraine.Over three months ago, Petrova arrived back in the U.S. from a vacation in France with frog embryo samples, which she agreed to bring from a laboratory affiliated with her own at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School. When her bags were inspected at the airport, a customs official immediately canceled her visa and began deportation proceedings. “[W]hat happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” Reiss said. If she did not take action in Petrova’s case, Reiss said that “there will be no determination” if Petrova’s constitutional rights were violated. Petrova was recruited from Russia in 2023 to work at Harvard’s Kirschner Lab, studying the earliest stages of cell development as part of the lab’s work to find ways to repair cell damage that leads to diseases such as cancer. She has admitted to failing to declare the embryo samples, and her lawyer says that this would normally be punished with a minor fine. Petrova still may not be released, as she also faces felony charges in Massachusetts for allegedly smuggling the embryos into the U.S., and is currently in federal custody in Louisiana. For now, though, Reiss’s ruling is another rebuke to an administration that is trying to fast-track mass deportations of immigrants while ignoring the law.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195830/judge-government-acting-illegally-harvard-russian-scientist-case

2025-05-28 23:05:34

@nprofile…6kn7
https://images.newrepublic.com/6abd6b30293b58c1d5d1c515a6d435161cfd7ae5.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
A Harvard University scientist detained by immigration authorities for over three months was granted bail by a federal judge Wednesday in a rebuke to the Trump administration. U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss ruled that Kseniia Petrova’s detention and the revocation of her J-1 visa for failing to declare frog embryos at Boston’s Logan Airport in February should not have happened, and raised serious legal concerns. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions,” Reiss said in her ruling, adding that the samples Petrova brought into the U.S. were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.”“Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” Reiss added, which the Trump administration has said it plans to do. Petrova has said that she fears returning to the country due to her protests against the war in Ukraine.Over three months ago, Petrova arrived back in the U.S. from a vacation in France with frog embryo samples, which she agreed to bring from a laboratory affiliated with her own at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School. When her bags were inspected at the airport, a customs official immediately canceled her visa and began deportation proceedings. “[W]hat happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” Reiss said. If she did not take action in Petrova’s case, Reiss said that “there will be no determination” if Petrova’s constitutional rights were violated. Petrova was recruited from Russia in 2023 to work at Harvard’s Kirschner Lab, studying the earliest stages of cell development as part of the lab’s work to find ways to repair cell damage that leads to diseases such as cancer. She has admitted to failing to declare the embryo samples, and her lawyer says that this would normally be punished with a minor fine. Petrova still may not be released, as she also faces felony charges in Massachusetts for allegedly smuggling the embryos into the U.S., and is currently in federal custody in Louisiana. For now, though, Reiss’s ruling is another rebuke to an administration that is trying to fast-track mass deportations of immigrants while ignoring the law.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195830/judge-government-acting-illegally-harvard-russian-scientist-case

2025-05-27 21:26:18

@nprofile…6kn7
https://images.newrepublic.com/39257f574277f66e1b78e8242934e95dabcb8073.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending Covid-19 vaccines to young children and pregnant women—even though the agency’s own research recommends doing so.The lifesaving jab was removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule Tuesday at the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.“Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another Covid shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children,” Kennedy said in a video statement, promising that the move would advance the Trump agenda to “Make America Healthy Again.”But exactly how Kennedy came to the conclusion that avoiding the booster would be healthier for those groups is unclear, especially when the CDC lists pregnancy as a condition that increases the risk of experiencing “at least one severe Covid-19 outcome” based on its own research.Young children are also at a higher risk of developing serious illness. Babies 6 months old and younger face the same health risks as adults who are between the ages of 65 and 74, American Academy of Pediatrics vaccine expert Sean O’Leary told The New York Times last week.But vaccination during pregnancy can actually offset that risk, granting children temporary immunity to some illnesses, such as Covid-19, before they’re even born thanks to the transfer of protective antibodies. “These antibodies can help protect your baby from those diseases during the first few months of life,” according to the CDC. But after six months of life, they wear off—a detail that alarms medical experts about Kennedy’s new strategy, as removing the vaccine from the vaccine schedule will make it harder for parents and pregnant women to get the shot as insurance companies stop paying for them.Whatever the rationale for stripping the vaccine, it was made without the input of the CDC’s usual advisers: Its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is not scheduled to meet until the end of June. What is clear though is that Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—has made it his mission to attack vaccine access in his time atop HHS. Kennedy’s contagious beliefs are spreading in spite of the science. Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The jabs are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox, a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195747/robert-f-kennedy-jr-covid-vaccine-rules-fda

2025-05-27 21:26:18

@nprofile…6kn7
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t want government scientists to publish their work in the world’s leading medical journals. In the Ultimate Human podcast on Tuesday, the secretary of health and human services accused the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet of being “corrupt” and in the pocket of major pharmaceutical companies. “Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop [National Institutes of Health] scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” Kennedy said. The NIH is the world’s largest funder of health research. Last week, the HHS released a report saying that overprescribed medications were the source of increased chronic diseases in children, blaming the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear preventing doctors and scientists from studying these diseases’ root causes. And earlier this month, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to medical journals around the country, accusing them of partisanship. “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications … are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” wrote Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, in a letter to the medical journal CHEST. According to NPR, the letters did not cite any evidence to back up Martin’s claims. The head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, said in an interview earlier this month that he supports academic freedom, meaning that “I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.”On the surface, that would seem to run counter to Kennedy’s proposed ban, but Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary, who are both also vaccine skeptics, just so happen to have launched their own medical journal, Journal of the Academy of Public Health. The two are listed as “on leave” from the journal, which has raised concerns about promoting misinformation. “It looks like a well-put-together journal, it’s been nicely designed and so forth,” Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, told the journal Science. “But when you look at the papers that have been published and at the editorial board, you see that it’s really dominated [by] a small clique of contrarians around the COVID pandemic. There is certainly nothing like even representation of consensus viewpoints within infectious disease epidemiology.”For all of their talk about academic freedom and corruption, Kennedy, Bhattcharya, and Makary seem to be pushing their own views and stifling others. Their appointments also coincide with mass layoffs and staff purges at their respective agencies, leaving behind smaller staffs less likely to raise objections out of fear of losing their jobs.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195753/rfk-jr-threatens-ban-nih-scientists-medical-journals

2025-05-27 21:24:15

@nprofile…pyzj
https://images.newrepublic.com/a5f7add65989c5a8aed77bce8ba9f555ca6c0610.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t want government scientists to publish their work in the world’s leading medical journals. In the Ultimate Human podcast on Tuesday, the secretary of health and human services accused the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet of being “corrupt” and in the pocket of major pharmaceutical companies. “Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop [National Institutes of Health] scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” Kennedy said. The NIH is the world’s largest funder of health research. Last week, the HHS released a report saying that overprescribed medications were the source of increased chronic diseases in children, blaming the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear preventing doctors and scientists from studying these diseases’ root causes. And earlier this month, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to medical journals around the country, accusing them of partisanship. “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications … are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” wrote Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, in a letter to the medical journal CHEST. According to NPR, the letters did not cite any evidence to back up Martin’s claims. The head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, said in an interview earlier this month that he supports academic freedom, meaning that “I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.”On the surface, that would seem to run counter to Kennedy’s proposed ban, but Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary, who are both also vaccine skeptics, just so happen to have launched their own medical journal, Journal of the Academy of Public Health. The two are listed as “on leave” from the journal, which has raised concerns about promoting misinformation. “It looks like a well-put-together journal, it’s been nicely designed and so forth,” Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, told the journal Science. “But when you look at the papers that have been published and at the editorial board, you see that it’s really dominated [by] a small clique of contrarians around the COVID pandemic. There is certainly nothing like even representation of consensus viewpoints within infectious disease epidemiology.”For all of their talk about academic freedom and corruption, Kennedy, Bhattcharya, and Makary seem to be pushing their own views and stifling others. Their appointments also coincide with mass layoffs and staff purges at their respective agencies, leaving behind smaller staffs less likely to raise objections out of fear of losing their jobs.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195753/rfk-jr-threatens-ban-nih-scientists-medical-journals

2025-05-27 21:24:15

@nprofile…pyzj
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Donald Trump has a five-step plan to keep Republican control of the House of Representatives in 2026, as part of a desperate bid to stave off yet another impeachment inquiry, Axios reported Tuesday. There is no shortage of potential subjects for an impeachment inquiry. Trump has openly profited from his seat, and helped his allies get rich, too—whether by manipulating the market or by turning administration officials into salespeople. Not to mention, he claims to have accepted a massive gift from a foreign government, likely violating the U.S. Constitution. Suffice to say, Trump needs to keep the Democrats out of power. Trump “knows the stakes firsthand. He saw what can happen. It’s clear he doesn’t want that again,” Matt Gorman, a top official for House Republicans’ campaign arm in the 2018 midterms, told Axios.“Investigations, impeachment—he knows it’s all on the table with a Speaker [Hakeem] Jeffries.”In an effort to maintain a GOP-led House, the president will try to prevent lawmakers from leaving their seats, either to retire or to run for another office. Any defections could hurt the party’s chances of retaining the seats and cost millions of dollars—which could hurt them come the next general election. Earlier this month, Trump endorsed New York Representative Mike Lawler to keep his seat, despite the congressman’s ambitions to run for governor. Last week, during a contentious meeting with Republicans to secure the passage of the president’s “big beautiful bill,” Lawler had fought to restore state and local tax (SALT) deductions—in part, to boost his viability as a candidate statewide—but failed. Trump told him to forget the SALT, warning, “I know your district better than you do. If you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway.” The Trump team is already concerned over the defections of Michigan Representative John James, who has opted to run for governor, and Kentucky Representative Andy Barr, who is leaving his seat to run for Senate. In that same vein, an essential part of Trump’s plan involves shutting down primary challenges. If the president endorses vulnerable Republicans in the early stages of their races, it could potentially ward off challengers. Over the weekend, Trump made posts endorsing New York Representative Andrew Garbarino and Montana Representative Troy Downing. Although Downing handily defeated his Democratic challenger, he’d also had to defeat eight Republican challengers in the primary.The next two steps of Trump’s plan are to raise big and spend big. The president has proven to be the GOP’s most effective fundraiser, raising more than $35 million for the cowardly National Republican Congressional Committee at a dinner in April. More events like these are sure to fill the party’s coffers ahead of the midterm elections. Additionally, Trump’s political operation already has about half a million dollars ready to spend on future elections, and has launched a massive ad campaign backing the president’s tax plan, which will cost an estimated $5.3 trillion over the next decade. Finally, the president will get hands-on with his recruitment. Gorman explained that the president would act as a “closer,” bringing in candidates to run in swing districts.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195750/donald-trump-plans-house-republican-control

2025-05-27 21:24:15

@nprofile…pyzj
https://images.newrepublic.com/39257f574277f66e1b78e8242934e95dabcb8073.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending Covid-19 vaccines to young children and pregnant women—even though the agency’s own research recommends doing so.The lifesaving jab was removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule Tuesday at the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.“Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another Covid shot despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children,” Kennedy said in a video statement, promising that the move would advance the Trump agenda to “Make America Healthy Again.”But exactly how Kennedy came to the conclusion that avoiding the booster would be healthier for those groups is unclear, especially when the CDC lists pregnancy as a condition that increases the risk of experiencing “at least one severe Covid-19 outcome” based on its own research.Young children are also at a higher risk of developing serious illness. Babies 6 months old and younger face the same health risks as adults who are between the ages of 65 and 74, American Academy of Pediatrics vaccine expert Sean O’Leary told The New York Times last week.But vaccination during pregnancy can actually offset that risk, granting children temporary immunity to some illnesses, such as Covid-19, before they’re even born thanks to the transfer of protective antibodies. “These antibodies can help protect your baby from those diseases during the first few months of life,” according to the CDC. But after six months of life, they wear off—a detail that alarms medical experts about Kennedy’s new strategy, as removing the vaccine from the vaccine schedule will make it harder for parents and pregnant women to get the shot as insurance companies stop paying for them.Whatever the rationale for stripping the vaccine, it was made without the input of the CDC’s usual advisers: Its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is not scheduled to meet until the end of June. What is clear though is that Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—has made it his mission to attack vaccine access in his time atop HHS. Kennedy’s contagious beliefs are spreading in spite of the science. Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The jabs are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox, a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195747/robert-f-kennedy-jr-covid-vaccine-rules-fda

2025-05-21 13:48:39

@nprofile…pyzj
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Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s own intelligence agencies found that Venezuela does not control the Tren de Aragua gang, directly contradicting Trump’s justification for invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants. But instead of admitting their mistake, they decided to lie.“We need to do some rewriting … so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” said Joe Kent, Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff, according to leaked emails viewed by The New York Times. Kent, along with former acting National Intelligence Council head Michael Collins, largely rewrote the memo together. The original memo stated that “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” according to the Times.Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to detain and deport Venezuelan immigrants without basic due process.To support Trump’s use of the wartime powers act, Kent began to piece a story together in the hope that it’d make Trump’s actions look more reasonable.“Flooding our nation with ‘migrants’ and especially ‘migrants’ who are part of a violent criminal gang is the action of a hostile nation, even if the gov of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA’s operations,” Kent wrote in an email obtained by the Times. “Let’s just come out and say [Tren de Aragua] leaders are given sanctuary in Venezuela as their gang members commit horrendous crimes in America, then we can provide the context about our exact knowledge of relationship between TDA and the Venezuelan government,” he continued. Kent even went so far as to say that Tren de Aragua didn’t need logistical support from the Venezuelan government because former President Joe Biden had given it to them in his first term, another lie. This is clearly an administration that is making up justifications for their draconian policies as they go. Whether it’s habeas corpus or birthright citizenship, this administration will look Americans in the eye and lie over and over again until their version of events is taken as truth.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195544/gabbard-aide-ordered-secret-intel-change-protect-trump-deportations

2025-05-16 11:56:38

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To live under the rule of Donald Trump is to lurch from crisis to crisis—one day, a horrifying act of cruelty; the next, a brazen display of corruption. Without a doubt, this state of affairs demands a constant refrain of outrage and disgust from the opposition. Not a day should pass when Trump’s unlawful, authoritarian behavior is not laid bare for every American to see.But if we want to build a sustainable movement that can consistently win, it’s not enough to go negative. There has to be a compelling vision of the future laid alongside the wreckage of the Trumpian present. The Democratic Party is dealing with record-low approval ratings—not only because many Americans believe Democrats are failing to stand up to Trump, but also because they don’t have a clear sense of what they’re offering in return. Democrats can and should stoke outrage at GOP misdeeds. They also have to cement in the minds of voters that they can deliver something better—and possess the conviction necessary to fight like hell for it.That brings us to congestion pricing.Amid the horrors Trump has unleashed in his first few months back in office, New York has rolled out one of the most successful municipal policies in a generation—a model of what capable liberal governance can achieve if given a chance. If you haven’t heard about the success of New York’s congestion pricing policy, maybe it’s because you’re not directly benefiting from it. But it’s also because many of its so-called advocates have gone to some lengths to avoid mentioning it. This is odd behavior; they should be shouting from the rooftops.The idea behind congestion pricing is simple: charge a toll to drive into Lower Manhattan—the most transit-rich, congested, and pedestrian-packed part of the country—and invest the revenue in public transportation. The toll targets a small, disproportionately wealthy group of drivers, many of whom don’t even live in the city, and forces them to help fund the subway system that millions of people rely upon daily. It’s equitable, efficient, and good for the planet.The results have been transformative, improving almost every aspect of daily life in New York nearly immediately. In just a matter of months, traffic has thinned, crashes are down, noise complaints have dropped, and subway ridership is up. None of the doomsday scenarios—from runaway price increases to increased traffic in the outer boroughs—have come to pass. It is, without question, a true feat of policymaking.Naturally, Trump wants to kill it.Echoing right-wing talking points, Trump and other Republicans have falsely framed the toll as a tax on the working poor—a strange argument, given that the vast majority of working-class New Yorkers don’t even own cars and rely on the public transit system that congestion pricing is rescuing from insolvency. But don’t look toward the economic results if you want to discern the logic of the opposition. Congestion pricing has earned the ire of Republicans precisely because it demonstrates that government can, and should, improve people’s lives. That’s why the Trump administration, despite having much on its plate, has devoted attention to congestion pricing—and is using every tool it has to try and extort New York to turn off the cameras and end congestion pricing altogether.You’d think Democrats would jump at the chance to fight back. Here’s a policy that improves daily life for millions of New Yorkers, forces red-district suburbanites to help fund public goods in blue cities, and delivers real climate benefits. And Trump wants to take it away—instantly making the city louder, more dangerous, and pushing our transit system into crisis. It’s practically a campaign ad written for you.Instead, with few exceptions—including Governor Kathy Hochul—Democrats have done what they too often do: duck the fight. For the most part, to the extent congestion pricing has been defended at all, it’s been treated as a technocratic, financial, or legal prerogative, instead of the clear political victory it is—one that deserves a full-throated defense.And to make matters worse, some local Democrats have gone so far as to actively join the opposition. Christopher Marte, the City Council member representing Lower Manhattan—a place where car ownership is vanishingly rare, transit access is unparalleled, and congestion pricing’s benefits are most vividly felt—has even led protests opposing the policy altogether.Yes, we’re living through an urgent constitutional crisis, and there are many priorities far greater in scale than congestion pricing. But this fight is emblematic of a much larger failure: the Democratic Party’s allergy to defending its own governing vision—especially in places where it already holds power. And that meekness makes it harder to build the kind of broad, durable anti-Trump coalition we need.Because it’s not just congestion pricing. In deep-blue cities across the country—where there’s no Republican obstruction to blame—Democratic politicians are often doing far more to entrench the status quo than to fight for the transformative change so many Americans desperately desire. While you’ll often find very little progress on the things that most immediately affect people’s lives—housing costs, transit access, clean, livable neighborhoods—you will find an extensive record of elected Democrats organizing to stop housing construction, prioritizing cars over vibrant open spaces, and shelving infrastructure projects.As much as Democrats talk about affordability and climate and equity, they too often defer to Nimbys and hedge their language when it comes time to act, all while hoping no one notices. And when they do use their hard-won power to deliver on a big promise, they seem to be content ceding the ground to our opponents, afraid to defend policies that are achieving exactly what we set out to achieve. Congestion pricing may be the most recent example of this phenomenon, but those with longer memories will recall that in the wake of enacting the Affordable Care Act, national Democrats treated their own achievement with an alarming skittishness, as if it were policy poison. It’s comforting to think that the smaller battles—over a toll charged in Lower Manhattan or a proposed housing development down the block—are just that: small. But eventually, what at first can be dismissed as one-off concessions compound to form full-blown crises. Skyrocketing housing costs, broken transit infrastructure, noisy, congested neighborhoods—these predicaments didn’t appear out of nowhere. They are the direct result of local leaders who consistently cower under pressure, who are content paying lip service to progressive values but refuse to spend even a shred of political capital defending them. If Democrats won’t defend (or even act on) the very values they claim to hold dear, why should anyone trust them to lead on bigger fights, like defending democratic governance or rooting out corruption? When Republicans unstintingly defend their bad ideas, the reluctance of Democrats to stand behind their good ones sends voters a message about whose spines are the stiffer ones. There is no default victory for the progressive, pro-democracy agenda on the horizon. We either build and defend it—starting with tangible, local solutions that improve life on every block—or we’ll only have ourselves to blame.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195199/democrats-fighting-congestion-pricing-nyc

2025-05-16 11:56:38

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 16 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The scandal around President Trump’s $400 million luxury jet just won’t go away. The Atlantic reports that Trump is privately telling his advisers it’s “humiliating” for a president to fly around in an outdated jet, and he’s even mused about keeping the jet after he leaves the White House. All that makes this whole story worse on multiple levels. Meanwhile, MAGA figures are increasingly breaking with Trump on this. And even some congressional Republicans are tentatively criticizing Trump for it as well, which is a true rarity. All this got us thinking that this story is actually a lot more serious and consequential than it first appears. Today we’re talking about all this with Russell Berman, a staff writer at The Atlantic who co-wrote that report. Russell, thanks for coming on.Russell Berman: Great to be with you.Sargent: So you and Jonathan Lemire report that Trump has told aides and advisers that it’s “humiliating” for the American president to fly in an outdated plane, and that foreign leaders will laugh at him if he shows up in such a plane. One outside adviser tells you guys that he’s mused about keeping the jet after his presidency. Russell, it sounds like Trump is privately angry over this whole thing. Why should he fly in an antique plane? Maybe he doesn’t understand why it’s a scandal? What does your reporting indicate along these lines about his mood and mindset on all this?Berman: Yeah, the sources that talked to my colleague, Jonathan Lemire, certainly indicate that he would be—he is angry. And he’s been publicly angry. When a reporter asked him about this, he said it was “stupid” to ask about the idea. To him, the idea that you would essentially look a gift plane in the mouth and not accept this $400 million gift from a foreign government is absurd. And to everybody else, the idea that you would accept this gift from a foreign government is absurd. He’s also firing off, as he often does, his Truth Social posts in the middle of the night, which indicates that he’s angry about this. And part of it is that, as you indicated, this is a rare issue where Republicans on Capitol Hill have dared to criticize or question the president. And they think that this could be—to borrow another idiom—not a Trojan horse but a Trojan plane.Sargent: You mentioned Republicans starting to speak out. Senator Roger Wicker said this would be “like the United States moving into the Qatari embassy.” And Senator Ted Cruz said, “I have concerns,” adding that it poses significant espionage and surveillance problems. Can you talk at a little bit more length about why it’s such a major security issue?Berman: Right. Well, again, the question is: Why would the government of Qatar do this out of the generosity of its heart? Or does it want something? And even if it’s just about whether it wants something from the U.S., that’s a big enough concern. But what if there’s some subterfuge going on? This is the most important airplane in the U.S. and certainly in the world—arguably in the world. And so I think the concerns that Republicans have raised ... Rather than talk about corruption, which is what first comes to everybody’s mind—that President Trump likes to do his corruption out in the open—Republicans have pointed to that to suggest that it’s not corruption to be taking a gift, which could be considered an emolument in violation of the Constitution. So instead of talking about this as a potentially corrupt act, they have talked about it in terms of the security concerns. And so it’s, I think, safer political ground for them to talk about the security concerns than to say out now that the president of our own party is accepting a bribe essentially.Sargent: That is fascinating. The Republican criticism also points to something else I want to bring up. Democrats are saying they want the whole transaction scrutinized by Congress, with Chuck Schumer saying he’ll place a hold on Trump nominees until that happens. Republicans aren’t going to let that happen—congressional scrutiny—are they? But that seems to be a problem for them because it’s so glaringly corrupt that it’s hard to make disappear. And the story will continue if and when Trump continues to go through with it and the challenges associated with it get aired out a little more. So how do Republicans handle that as it drags out? How can they hold off the congressional scrutiny while also appearing concerned about it and all that? Berman: Right. Well, the challenge for them is that this appears to be the epitome of the need of why you would have an oversight branch, or the legislative branch conduct oversight over the executive branch. And of course, when there’s been a Democratic president, Republicans are all too eager to invoke the solemn responsibility that the legislative branch has to conduct oversight. We saw that obviously with Hunter Biden. We saw that before with Hillary Clinton—and really with the Clintons—and Bill Clinton and on down the line. And yes, while Republicans have been critical or questioning of this, they’ve stopped far short of saying that they’re actually going to investigate it or conduct oversight or do anything to try to stop it.And it was amusing to see Speaker Mike Johnson at his weekly press conference. One, he tried to draw this distinction between what he characterized, I think very questionably, as the secretive dealings of what the Republicans call the “Biden crime family” with what Trump does, which is more transparent in that he does it out in the open—and therefore, because you don’t have the secrecy attached to it, it might seem to the average voter OK. So Johnson said, “Whatever Trump is doing is out in the open, they’re not trying to conceal anything.”Then he also said, I have a big enough job to do as the speaker of the House. But of course, your job as speaker of the House is partially to conduct oversight over the executive branch, whether or not the executive branch is run by a member of your own party. And he made little effort to disguise the fact that Republican or Republican-controlled Congress is really unlikely to investigate a Republican president no matter what the issue is. So when a reporter put this to him directly, he said, “Congress has an oversight responsibility, but I think, so far as I know the ethics are all being followed.” And of course, that is not the standard that he would follow if Joe Biden were president—or Kamala Harris or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. They wouldn’t say, Well, so far as I know, they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. They would say, We’re going to look into it and we’re going to see if they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. But they don’t seem to have any intention of doing that, at least right now. If pressure is brought to bear—by Democrats potentially but more notably by Republicans—then perhaps that would change.Sargent: Sure looks as if Republicans are going to have a tough time holding this off because, as you point out, the argument is so preposterous. The idea that the fact that he’s doing it out in the open somehow absolves him of corruption seems pretty weak because (a) we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes in his discussions between him and Qatar and (b) it’s becoming an argument against scrutinizing the whole thing even more deeply, which would reveal more. That just doesn’t make any sense on its face, does it?Berman: No, but honestly that’s been his secret sauce: taking advantage of especially the media’s preference for reporting what happens behind closed doors as if it is worse than what happens out in the open. And whether intentionally or not, he’s recognized that—and therefore he just names what is usually unmentionable in the past. He says the quiet thing out loud as they say. And by doing so, it seems—at least to his Republican allies—that, well, if he’s talking about it and if he’s public about it, then there can’t be anything wrong with it. But that’s not how it works, right? It doesn’t matter whether ... If you announce that you are robbing a bank, it doesn’t make it any less illegal than if you go into the bank without announcing it beforehand.Sargent: And this is clearly unconstitutional on its face. It’s a violation of the emoluments clause. And by the way, Congress is the body who the president’s supposed to go to in a situation like this to begin with. That’s what the emoluments clause says. It says you can’t take a gift like this unless it’s approved by Congress. Berman: Right, but we saw in his first term that there was very little accountability for when he did this—arguably less egregious, but still highly questionable ways [like] the use of his hotel, the promotion of his businesses, basically directing anybody who had interests before the U.S. government to stay at his various properties and hold golf tournaments there and all the rest. And that’s only, of course, the tip of the iceberg. The fact that there was little accountability—certainly when Republicans controlled Congress and then even when Democrats controlled Congress and they impeached him twice over different issues and he was not convicted—then, of course ... As we’ve seen across a range of areas, he has acted with impunity in his second term, knowing that he is unlikely to be stopped.Sargent: Well, I want to talk about MAGA opposition to this, which is really striking in a bit of a different way. You quote MAGA influencer Laura Loomer calling this “a stain on the administration” and another media influencer, Mark Levin, agreeing with her. Josh Hawley, who’s a bit more in the MAGA mold than some other Republicans says, “It would be better if Air Force One were a big, beautiful jet made in the United States of America.” There is a deep tension here because this whole scandal clashes so obviously with Trump slogans like “America first” and “drain the swamp,” doesn’t it? Berman: No, that’s right. And this has put Republicans in a very familiar, awkward position of defending moves that they would clearly denounce were they made by Democratic presidents. So I think it’s been interesting because you have seen more questioning and criticism by the people that you mentioned. Some of these people are the people that defend him down the line, no matter what he does.Now, of course, they are, as I indicated earlier, stopping well short of vowing to do anything about it—but the mere fact that they are not singing from the same page as the White House on this is certainly noteworthy and could be an indication that ... Again, Trump is always in search of that line. Is there a line with him where he can’t cross? To quote the president from his first campaign where he said, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, is there anything that he could do that would prompt Republicans in Congress to stand up to him? And they aren’t quite standing up to him yet on this, but they are certainly closer to standing up to him than they have been on many other issues.Sargent: Do you think this goes anywhere? What happens now? Does Trump eventually end up dropping this? Is there a component of MAGA that doesn’t want him to drop it? How does this all play out?Berman: The challenge with Trump is that we’ll probably be talking about something else that is arguably outrageous next week—that Democrats will have to respond to, that Republicans will be questioned about. Maybe the focus next week is on whether the Republicans can pass this “big, beautiful bill” that Trump wants. Maybe it will be something else. And so the challenge with any of these Trump so-called scandals is that there are so many and nobody remembers them. We might hear about this again in a few months when the paperwork is being filed or submitted—if there is any paperwork to be submitted about this. So that’s the big question: whether we’re still talking about this in another week or two.Sargent: Well, this is the thing. It seems like this story is inevitably going to be talked about again later, because there will be more shoes to drop. He’s going to have to say at some point that he actually is going through with this; we don’t know for sure whether he will. Then there will be a focus on, as you mentioned earlier, the security implications and the costs and the logistical problems associated with it. That brings this all back up again, doesn’t it? It’s not an easy story to make disappear.Berman: Right, because if the president gets his way, eventually this airplane will be used as Air Force One. I think, again, using the past as a guide, it is easy to see the president quietly dropping this, right? And again, us not hearing much about it because he has been persuaded by his advisers that this would all be just way too complicated and not worth the fight. And maybe he will move on to some other interest. It’s similar to [him] saying that the U.S. is going to take over Gaza and make it into some luxury resort. And everybody is like, What? Really? And with what troops? It seems like he still wants to do that—but again, this is also the kind of thing that maybe doesn’t go anywhere. So maybe this doesn’t go anywhere, and we don’t hear about it again.Sargent: Just to wrap this up, you guys cited a great quote from a former Air Force colonel. I want to read it, “Those of us who served in the military couldn’t accept a cup of coffee and a donut at a contractor’s site because of the appearance of impropriety. Now Trump is taking a 747 airplane from the government of Qatar for his personal use. Grift and corruption run amok.” That really captures it. There’s something about this story that, for a lot of people, neatly encapsulates Trump’s deep contempt for the very idea of public service and the obligations that come with it. Can you talk a little bit about that? You encountered that in your reporting, and you talked to others who have served the country before and felt the same way. What did you discover?Berman: Right. As you said, this has always been the issue with Trump. When you’re talking about corruption or alleged corruption, it’s that what he is doing is on such a grand scale. And the laws and the rules that are actually on the book for public servants, for federal employees, for congressional staffers about accepting gifts or even taking free food at an event are so tight. They are so restrictive. There’s this huge gap between what your person making $80 or $100 or whatever thousand dollars working for the government is allowed to do and what the president of the U.S. appears to be getting away with.And that’s where the danger is for him, because a lot of these people are nominally in his base. If you’re talking about members of the military, for example, or really, people in the federal government, right? We talk a lot about federal employees and how they are scattered throughout the country. They are not all Democrats and they are not all progressive. Many of them are Trump supporters or would-be Trump supporters. That’s where you see this huge disconnect. And yet, because there’s so much else out there, it doesn’t seem at the end of the day to always stick to him. And that’s how he essentially can get away with it.Sargent: There’s something so simple about this that really captures self-dealing, and self-dealing is something people really, really hate. This is not a hard story to grasp; it captures that perfectly. Russell Berman, thanks for talking to us, man. It was great to talk to you.Berman: Thanks for having me.Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195342/transcript-trump-rages-qatar-jet-fiasco-gop-criticism-worsens

2025-05-16 11:56:38

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House Republicans are pressing forward with a plan to cut billions of dollars from a critical nutrition program by forcing states to shoulder more of the cost, threatening benefits for roughly 42 million low-income Americans in red and blue states alike.The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, has traditionally been fully funded by the federal government and administered by states. But this week, the House Agriculture Committee approved along party lines a measure that would slash more than $290 billion from SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. These cuts would be achieved in part by pushing a portion of benefit costs onto states, as well as requiring individual states to shoulder more of the administrative expenses.Haley Kottler, campaign director at Kansas Appleseed, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, described the potential changes as “the most outlandish policy that I’ve seen on SNAP, maybe ever.” According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, requiring Kansas to pay for 25 percent of SNAP benefits would cost more than $100 million over six years.“If these go through, it absolutely will wreak havoc on the program overall,” said Kottler. “For one, we don’t have that in our state budget right now, and two, lawmakers in Kansas do not have the political will to put any more money forth for SNAP.”If the bill passes both chambers of Congress, beginning in 2028, states would be forced to pay between 5 percent and 25 percent of SNAP benefits based on payment error rates. In 2023, more than half of all states had an error rate of higher than 10 percent, meaning that they would shoulder a quarter of the cost of SNAP. Kansas, for example, had an error rate of more than 12 percent in 2023. Kottler said that she was disheartened but “not surprised” by the efforts to cut SNAP, as they echoed recent bills in her state’s legislature to expand work requirements and shave program costs. She was skeptical of House Republican assertions that states would understand the shift in cost and would be able to pick up the slack.“I’m a fifth-generation Kansan, and I’ve been working with our state legislature for six years now, and I’ve never heard them being interested in something like that,” said Kottler.Elaine Waxman, senior fellow in the Tax and Income Supports Division at the Urban Institute, noted that SNAP payment error rates increased amid the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic and that the state offices administering the program remain understaffed and underfunded. Historically, states and the federal government have split the cost of administering SNAP evenly. Under this bill, states would now be responsible for 75 percent of administrative costs, which would make it even more difficult for them to balance supervising the program and providing benefits themselves. The bill would also lower a “tolerance level” for SNAP error payments from $37 to $0, which would likely increase error rates across the board.“You’re [between] a rock and a hard place in that, OK, you have a higher error rate—in order to get your error rate down, or to implement other things that will reduce your costs, you need more administrative investment, probably. But where will that be coming from?” she said. “You had an atypical situation the last few years, and so you’re predicating the program on an atypical situation, but without diagnosing why things are the way they are, and what would be required to make them better.”As nearly every state has some form of balanced budget requirement, they may not have the leeway to expend greater funds on providing SNAP benefits. “What states cannot do, that the federal government can, is they cannot infinitely borrow to run an entitlement program,” said Lauren Bauer, associate director of the Hamilton Project. “Pushing things off onto states who do not have the capacities that the federal government does is a way to push responsibility onto people who don’t have every tool that they would need to to prevent the shrinking of these programs.”States would have limited options for finding the funds to cover increased SNAP costs that Republicans are proposing. One potential route states might take would be eliminating “broad-based categorical eligibility,” a policy that allows households to participate in the program if they qualify for certain other benefits. Eliminating this policy would increase bureaucratic red tape for families who would suddenly be dealing with a more complicated application process and potentially result in people losing their benefits. This, in turn, would affect access to other programs—for example, children would no longer be automatically enrolled in free school meals or immediately qualify for early childhood nutrition programs.“Should this cost shift go through, states would have to pull back on this SNAP expansion, and leave people who need the program without a recourse,” said Salaam Bhatti, SNAP director at the Food Research and Action Center. “It’s not just a ripple effect that these proposals have. It’s a shock wave.”SNAP can be considered an “automatic stabilizer” during times of economic hardship because it allows for the rapid enrollment of people who are newly eligible due to job loss or other financial struggles. During the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—which saw significant expansions in program benefits—SNAP was a key resource for Americans suddenly floundering in an unstable economic environment. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that every $1 spent on SNAP during a recession generates $1.50 in economic returns.“Let’s say that you’re in a place where a lot of people have lost their jobs because a recession is starting, but more people go onto SNAP to help buffer that income decline. And so what does that mean? Well, they can still go to the grocery store and buy food. So what does that mean? Well, it means that the grocery store doesn’t need to lay off one of their checkout people, or one of their shelf stockers,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University who studies policies addressing child poverty. “There’s a multiplier effect.”With economists warning of a potential recession on the horizon—with uncertainty surrounding tariff policy simultaneously heightening and lessening worries of an economic downturn—cuts to SNAP would mean losing that automatic stabilization. A recent report co-authored by Waxman estimated that, should the U.S. enter a recession, states subject to a 10 percent cost share would need to spend an additional $980 million in the first year of the economic downturn to cover increased benefit costs. The report also found that if states did not increase spending, but instead reduced benefit amounts, all SNAP participants would face an average reduction in benefits by $327. Given that these changes would be implemented beginning in fiscal year 2028—crucially, after the 2026 midterm elections that will be a referendum on Republican guardianship of Congress—it’s uncertain where the economy will be at that point.The potential changes to SNAP are not happening in a vacuum—the cuts are part of a massive package to slash federal spending and extend tax breaks that Republicans are currently trying to muscle through both chambers of Congress, through an arcane process known as “budget reconciliation.” The bill also includes cuts to Medicaid that could result in millions of low-income people losing their coverage at the same time that they see changes to SNAP benefits, even as losses in SNAP benefits are associated with poorer health outcomes.“Ironically, if you’re cutting SNAP, you may push that pressure over onto the Medicaid program … at the same time that you’re looking at cutting Medicaid,” said Waxman.While shifting more costs onto states would comprise roughly half of the $290 billion in proposed cuts to SNAP, tightening work requirements would slash an additional $92 billion in spending. Currently, able-bodied adults without children under age 54 can receive SNAP benefits for only three months over a three-year period unless they are able to prove that they are fulfilling a 20-hour-per-week work requirement or are disabled. The Republican plan would lift that cap to able-bodied adults without dependents up to age 64. It would also tighten work requirements for parents; instead of allowing parents with children under age 18 to be exempt from work requirements, those exemptions would only apply to parents with children under age 7. Research by Bauer has shown that SNAP work requirements do not meaningfully increase employment, and lead to a decrease in program participation.It’s uncertain whether the cuts to SNAP will pass as is, given that the reconciliation bill still needs to pass the House, and some senators have appeared skeptical about changes to federal benefit programs. Efforts to address some issues in the reconciliation bill that would normally be part of the farm bill—the massive legislation that oversees nutrition, agriculture, and conservation policy—may also run afoul of Senate rules. Still, even with changes to the bill on the horizon, the proposal to slash SNAP spending indicates where Republican priorities lie. Bauer argued that the intention of the cuts to SNAP did not fulfill the program’s purpose of assisting low-income Americans but that instead they were merely concerned with cutting the federal deficit.“This program right now is about reducing human suffering, getting people back on their feet, improving nutrition and food security outcomes, preventing hunger, stimulating local economies, helping rural economies, helping rural grocery stores, helping all grocery stores,” said Bauer. “All of the proposals that are in this bill are cost-cutting. That’s why they’re there.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/195323/house-republicans-cut-snap-benefits

2025-05-16 11:56:27

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Homer Simpson, despite his many flaws, wants to do right by his family and—with the possible exception of his do-gooder neighbor Ned Flanders—his community. In this sense, he has little in common with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a Christian nationalist bent on purging the U.S. military of women, LGBTQ people, and liberal voices. But Simpson and Hegseth do have one thing in common: They love their booze. For them, drinking is a kind of vocation—and a respite from the many problems they cause.
https://newrepublic.com/article/194639/homer-simpson-pete-hegseth-who-said-it-quiz

2025-05-16 11:56:27

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To live under the rule of Donald Trump is to lurch from crisis to crisis—one day, a horrifying act of cruelty; the next, a brazen display of corruption. Without a doubt, this state of affairs demands a constant refrain of outrage and disgust from the opposition. Not a day should pass when Trump’s unlawful, authoritarian behavior is not laid bare for every American to see.But if we want to build a sustainable movement that can consistently win, it’s not enough to go negative. There has to be a compelling vision of the future laid alongside the wreckage of the Trumpian present. The Democratic Party is dealing with record-low approval ratings—not only because many Americans believe Democrats are failing to stand up to Trump, but also because they don’t have a clear sense of what they’re offering in return. Democrats can and should stoke outrage at GOP misdeeds. They also have to cement in the minds of voters that they can deliver something better—and possess the conviction necessary to fight like hell for it.That brings us to congestion pricing.Amid the horrors Trump has unleashed in his first few months back in office, New York has rolled out one of the most successful municipal policies in a generation—a model of what capable liberal governance can achieve if given a chance. If you haven’t heard about the success of New York’s congestion pricing policy, maybe it’s because you’re not directly benefiting from it. But it’s also because many of its so-called advocates have gone to some lengths to avoid mentioning it. This is odd behavior; they should be shouting from the rooftops.The idea behind congestion pricing is simple: charge a toll to drive into Lower Manhattan—the most transit-rich, congested, and pedestrian-packed part of the country—and invest the revenue in public transportation. The toll targets a small, disproportionately wealthy group of drivers, many of whom don’t even live in the city, and forces them to help fund the subway system that millions of people rely upon daily. It’s equitable, efficient, and good for the planet.The results have been transformative, improving almost every aspect of daily life in New York nearly immediately. In just a matter of months, traffic has thinned, crashes are down, noise complaints have dropped, and subway ridership is up. None of the doomsday scenarios—from runaway price increases to increased traffic in the outer boroughs—have come to pass. It is, without question, a true feat of policymaking.Naturally, Trump wants to kill it.Echoing right-wing talking points, Trump and other Republicans have falsely framed the toll as a tax on the working poor—a strange argument, given that the vast majority of working-class New Yorkers don’t even own cars and rely on the public transit system that congestion pricing is rescuing from insolvency. But don’t look toward the economic results if you want to discern the logic of the opposition. Congestion pricing has earned the ire of Republicans precisely because it demonstrates that government can, and should, improve people’s lives. That’s why the Trump administration, despite having much on its plate, has devoted attention to congestion pricing—and is using every tool it has to try and extort New York to turn off the cameras and end congestion pricing altogether.You’d think Democrats would jump at the chance to fight back. Here’s a policy that improves daily life for millions of New Yorkers, forces red-district suburbanites to help fund public goods in blue cities, and delivers real climate benefits. And Trump wants to take it away—instantly making the city louder, more dangerous, and pushing our transit system into crisis. It’s practically a campaign ad written for you.Instead, with few exceptions—including Governor Kathy Hochul—Democrats have done what they too often do: duck the fight. For the most part, to the extent congestion pricing has been defended at all, it’s been treated as a technocratic, financial, or legal prerogative, instead of the clear political victory it is—one that deserves a full-throated defense.And to make matters worse, some local Democrats have gone so far as to actively join the opposition. Christopher Marte, the City Council member representing Lower Manhattan—a place where car ownership is vanishingly rare, transit access is unparalleled, and congestion pricing’s benefits are most vividly felt—has even led protests opposing the policy altogether.Yes, we’re living through an urgent constitutional crisis, and there are many priorities far greater in scale than congestion pricing. But this fight is emblematic of a much larger failure: the Democratic Party’s allergy to defending its own governing vision—especially in places where it already holds power. And that meekness makes it harder to build the kind of broad, durable anti-Trump coalition we need.Because it’s not just congestion pricing. In deep-blue cities across the country—where there’s no Republican obstruction to blame—Democratic politicians are often doing far more to entrench the status quo than to fight for the transformative change so many Americans desperately desire. While you’ll often find very little progress on the things that most immediately affect people’s lives—housing costs, transit access, clean, livable neighborhoods—you will find an extensive record of elected Democrats organizing to stop housing construction, prioritizing cars over vibrant open spaces, and shelving infrastructure projects.As much as Democrats talk about affordability and climate and equity, they too often defer to Nimbys and hedge their language when it comes time to act, all while hoping no one notices. And when they do use their hard-won power to deliver on a big promise, they seem to be content ceding the ground to our opponents, afraid to defend policies that are achieving exactly what we set out to achieve. Congestion pricing may be the most recent example of this phenomenon, but those with longer memories will recall that in the wake of enacting the Affordable Care Act, national Democrats treated their own achievement with an alarming skittishness, as if it were policy poison. It’s comforting to think that the smaller battles—over a toll charged in Lower Manhattan or a proposed housing development down the block—are just that: small. But eventually, what at first can be dismissed as one-off concessions compound to form full-blown crises. Skyrocketing housing costs, broken transit infrastructure, noisy, congested neighborhoods—these predicaments didn’t appear out of nowhere. They are the direct result of local leaders who consistently cower under pressure, who are content paying lip service to progressive values but refuse to spend even a shred of political capital defending them. If Democrats won’t defend (or even act on) the very values they claim to hold dear, why should anyone trust them to lead on bigger fights, like defending democratic governance or rooting out corruption? When Republicans unstintingly defend their bad ideas, the reluctance of Democrats to stand behind their good ones sends voters a message about whose spines are the stiffer ones. There is no default victory for the progressive, pro-democracy agenda on the horizon. We either build and defend it—starting with tangible, local solutions that improve life on every block—or we’ll only have ourselves to blame.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195199/democrats-fighting-congestion-pricing-nyc

2025-05-16 11:56:27

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House Republicans are pressing forward with a plan to cut billions of dollars from a critical nutrition program by forcing states to shoulder more of the cost, threatening benefits for roughly 42 million low-income Americans in red and blue states alike.The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, has traditionally been fully funded by the federal government and administered by states. But this week, the House Agriculture Committee approved along party lines a measure that would slash more than $290 billion from SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. These cuts would be achieved in part by pushing a portion of benefit costs onto states, as well as requiring individual states to shoulder more of the administrative expenses.Haley Kottler, campaign director at Kansas Appleseed, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, described the potential changes as “the most outlandish policy that I’ve seen on SNAP, maybe ever.” According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, requiring Kansas to pay for 25 percent of SNAP benefits would cost more than $100 million over six years.“If these go through, it absolutely will wreak havoc on the program overall,” said Kottler. “For one, we don’t have that in our state budget right now, and two, lawmakers in Kansas do not have the political will to put any more money forth for SNAP.”If the bill passes both chambers of Congress, beginning in 2028, states would be forced to pay between 5 percent and 25 percent of SNAP benefits based on payment error rates. In 2023, more than half of all states had an error rate of higher than 10 percent, meaning that they would shoulder a quarter of the cost of SNAP. Kansas, for example, had an error rate of more than 12 percent in 2023. Kottler said that she was disheartened but “not surprised” by the efforts to cut SNAP, as they echoed recent bills in her state’s legislature to expand work requirements and shave program costs. She was skeptical of House Republican assertions that states would understand the shift in cost and would be able to pick up the slack.“I’m a fifth-generation Kansan, and I’ve been working with our state legislature for six years now, and I’ve never heard them being interested in something like that,” said Kottler.Elaine Waxman, senior fellow in the Tax and Income Supports Division at the Urban Institute, noted that SNAP payment error rates increased amid the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic and that the state offices administering the program remain understaffed and underfunded. Historically, states and the federal government have split the cost of administering SNAP evenly. Under this bill, states would now be responsible for 75 percent of administrative costs, which would make it even more difficult for them to balance supervising the program and providing benefits themselves. The bill would also lower a “tolerance level” for SNAP error payments from $37 to $0, which would likely increase error rates across the board.“You’re [between] a rock and a hard place in that, OK, you have a higher error rate—in order to get your error rate down, or to implement other things that will reduce your costs, you need more administrative investment, probably. But where will that be coming from?” she said. “You had an atypical situation the last few years, and so you’re predicating the program on an atypical situation, but without diagnosing why things are the way they are, and what would be required to make them better.”As nearly every state has some form of balanced budget requirement, they may not have the leeway to expend greater funds on providing SNAP benefits. “What states cannot do, that the federal government can, is they cannot infinitely borrow to run an entitlement program,” said Lauren Bauer, associate director of the Hamilton Project. “Pushing things off onto states who do not have the capacities that the federal government does is a way to push responsibility onto people who don’t have every tool that they would need to to prevent the shrinking of these programs.”States would have limited options for finding the funds to cover increased SNAP costs that Republicans are proposing. One potential route states might take would be eliminating “broad-based categorical eligibility,” a policy that allows households to participate in the program if they qualify for certain other benefits. Eliminating this policy would increase bureaucratic red tape for families who would suddenly be dealing with a more complicated application process and potentially result in people losing their benefits. This, in turn, would affect access to other programs—for example, children would no longer be automatically enrolled in free school meals or immediately qualify for early childhood nutrition programs.“Should this cost shift go through, states would have to pull back on this SNAP expansion, and leave people who need the program without a recourse,” said Salaam Bhatti, SNAP director at the Food Research and Action Center. “It’s not just a ripple effect that these proposals have. It’s a shock wave.”SNAP can be considered an “automatic stabilizer” during times of economic hardship because it allows for the rapid enrollment of people who are newly eligible due to job loss or other financial struggles. During the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—which saw significant expansions in program benefits—SNAP was a key resource for Americans suddenly floundering in an unstable economic environment. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that every $1 spent on SNAP during a recession generates $1.50 in economic returns.“Let’s say that you’re in a place where a lot of people have lost their jobs because a recession is starting, but more people go onto SNAP to help buffer that income decline. And so what does that mean? Well, they can still go to the grocery store and buy food. So what does that mean? Well, it means that the grocery store doesn’t need to lay off one of their checkout people, or one of their shelf stockers,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University who studies policies addressing child poverty. “There’s a multiplier effect.”With economists warning of a potential recession on the horizon—with uncertainty surrounding tariff policy simultaneously heightening and lessening worries of an economic downturn—cuts to SNAP would mean losing that automatic stabilization. A recent report co-authored by Waxman estimated that, should the U.S. enter a recession, states subject to a 10 percent cost share would need to spend an additional $980 million in the first year of the economic downturn to cover increased benefit costs. The report also found that if states did not increase spending, but instead reduced benefit amounts, all SNAP participants would face an average reduction in benefits by $327. Given that these changes would be implemented beginning in fiscal year 2028—crucially, after the 2026 midterm elections that will be a referendum on Republican guardianship of Congress—it’s uncertain where the economy will be at that point.The potential changes to SNAP are not happening in a vacuum—the cuts are part of a massive package to slash federal spending and extend tax breaks that Republicans are currently trying to muscle through both chambers of Congress, through an arcane process known as “budget reconciliation.” The bill also includes cuts to Medicaid that could result in millions of low-income people losing their coverage at the same time that they see changes to SNAP benefits, even as losses in SNAP benefits are associated with poorer health outcomes.“Ironically, if you’re cutting SNAP, you may push that pressure over onto the Medicaid program … at the same time that you’re looking at cutting Medicaid,” said Waxman.While shifting more costs onto states would comprise roughly half of the $290 billion in proposed cuts to SNAP, tightening work requirements would slash an additional $92 billion in spending. Currently, able-bodied adults without children under age 54 can receive SNAP benefits for only three months over a three-year period unless they are able to prove that they are fulfilling a 20-hour-per-week work requirement or are disabled. The Republican plan would lift that cap to able-bodied adults without dependents up to age 64. It would also tighten work requirements for parents; instead of allowing parents with children under age 18 to be exempt from work requirements, those exemptions would only apply to parents with children under age 7. Research by Bauer has shown that SNAP work requirements do not meaningfully increase employment, and lead to a decrease in program participation.It’s uncertain whether the cuts to SNAP will pass as is, given that the reconciliation bill still needs to pass the House, and some senators have appeared skeptical about changes to federal benefit programs. Efforts to address some issues in the reconciliation bill that would normally be part of the farm bill—the massive legislation that oversees nutrition, agriculture, and conservation policy—may also run afoul of Senate rules. Still, even with changes to the bill on the horizon, the proposal to slash SNAP spending indicates where Republican priorities lie. Bauer argued that the intention of the cuts to SNAP did not fulfill the program’s purpose of assisting low-income Americans but that instead they were merely concerned with cutting the federal deficit.“This program right now is about reducing human suffering, getting people back on their feet, improving nutrition and food security outcomes, preventing hunger, stimulating local economies, helping rural economies, helping rural grocery stores, helping all grocery stores,” said Bauer. “All of the proposals that are in this bill are cost-cutting. That’s why they’re there.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/195323/house-republicans-cut-snap-benefits

2025-05-16 11:56:27

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Imagine the news cycle that would have ensued if President Barack Obama had met with an ex-jihadist, whom the United States had labeled a terrorist, and praised him as a “tough guy.” What if President Joe Biden’s first planned tour abroad was to the Middle East, but he spurned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hobnob with autocrats (and shake hands with the aforementioned ex-jihadist)? What if he struck a hostage deal with Hamas and kept it secret from Israel? What if he lifted sanctions on Syria after it was taken over by rebels once aligned with Al Qaeda? “Can you imagine if a Democratic president had done that?” has been one of the defining clichés of the Trump era, whose 10-year anniversary is a month away. It is certainly true that Trump gets away with quite a lot that no one else could. Over the last few days, he has done everything listed in the paragraph above. But now, at least in some quarters on the left, the question is shifting to: Why didn’t a Democratic president do that?Watching Trump’s flurry of moves, Democratic foreign policy experts sounded almost jealous—and it’s hard to blame them. “He does all this, and it’s kind of silence, it’s met with a shrug,” Ned Price, who worked in Biden’s State Department, told Tommy Vietor on the former Obama staffer’s Pod Save the World podcast. “He has the ability to do things politically that previous presidents did not, because he has complete unquestioned authority over the Republican caucus.” On Syria, Ben Rhodes, a national security adviser under Obama, said lifting sanctions on Syria was “so clearly the right decision. I don’t know why Joe Biden didn’t do this.” Indeed. The full consequences of Trump’s trip to the Gulf are still not known, but the trip itself has thus far served as an indictment of much of his predecessor’s foreign policy. Yes, many of Biden’s most notable accomplishments came in that realm, such as strengthening global alliances and, foremost, aiding Ukraine. But in the Middle East, Biden and other Democrats were far too cautious. They were unwilling to risk controversy, at the expense of doing the right thing. And now Trump seems poised to accomplish things Biden should have done, like providing a badly needed lifeline to Syria and improving relations with Iran. OK, yes, it’s true: The deal Trump reportedly is close to striking with Iran—lifting all economic sanctions in exchange for an end to its nuclear weapons program—is essentially a recreation of Obama’s deal (though Trump certainly would never admit it). And yes, when Obama struck that deal it created a firestorm that, at least on the political right, still burns today. Meanwhile, Trump is also busy finding ways for oil-rich Gulf nations to enrich his family businesses, not to mention his determination to accept a $400 million jumbo jet from Qatar that he’s angling to turn into his personal plane after he leaves office—controversies that almost certainly won’t have the staying power that even Hunter Biden’s relatively minor Burisma scandal has had. Vets of past Democratic administrations are right to be frustrated.But when it comes to Israel, Biden has only himself to blame. Of all the black marks on his presidency, his steadfast backing of an Israeli prime minister who treated him with contempt as tens of thousands were killed in Israeli bombardments is the worst. Biden and his foreign policy team owe some responsibility for the horrific situation in Gaza now—and Trump’s current trip through the Middle East serves as a reminder that they could have done more. Not that Trump’s Israel policy has been better—far from it. He’s done nothing to push back as Israel pushes Gaza to the brink of starvation by cutting off all aid, done almost nothing to advance a ceasefire, and has repeatedly said he would like the U.S. to take over the territory and essentially turn it into a colony. (That Marco Rubio reportedly chastised Israel for the current humanitarian situation in Gaza on Thursday is a sign of how bad that humanitarian situation is, not a shift in administration policy.) But at least Trump has shown a willingness to sideline Netanyahu, who played Biden like a fiddle during his last two years as president. Imagine if Biden had given Netanyahu the cold shoulder, and more importantly withheld military aid, toward the goal of ending the slaughter of Gaza? It would have been the morally courageous thing to do, and for all we know, given how the November election turned out, it might have been the politically expedient thing to do too.What makes Democrats envious of Trump is that he simply doesn’t give a shit, which is a powerful attribute that can be used for good or ill. Even when Trump does the right things—as in Syria and Iran—it’s never entirely clear he’s doing them to promote peace or prosperity. His primary motivation in most of his dealings in the Gulf still, as ever, is promoting himself and his businesses, particularly a shady (even by his standard) cryptocurrency venture being hawked by his sons. But much of Biden’s foreign policy was too slow, too old-fashioned, too afraid of controversy. “I don’t like Trump’s motivations for lots of things he does,” Rhodes told Vietor. “But one thing you will say is he’s not tied to this constant fear of some bad-faith right-wing attacks or stupid Blob-type, ‘We don’t do this, we must leverage the sanctions for blah blah blah.’ No! Sometimes you just have to try something different.” Democrats have something to learn from Trump, after all—and these days they have nothing to lose, either.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195329/trump-middle-east-foreign-policy-biden-bad

2025-05-16 11:56:27

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 16 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The scandal around President Trump’s $400 million luxury jet just won’t go away. The Atlantic reports that Trump is privately telling his advisers it’s “humiliating” for a president to fly around in an outdated jet, and he’s even mused about keeping the jet after he leaves the White House. All that makes this whole story worse on multiple levels. Meanwhile, MAGA figures are increasingly breaking with Trump on this. And even some congressional Republicans are tentatively criticizing Trump for it as well, which is a true rarity. All this got us thinking that this story is actually a lot more serious and consequential than it first appears. Today we’re talking about all this with Russell Berman, a staff writer at The Atlantic who co-wrote that report. Russell, thanks for coming on.Russell Berman: Great to be with you.Sargent: So you and Jonathan Lemire report that Trump has told aides and advisers that it’s “humiliating” for the American president to fly in an outdated plane, and that foreign leaders will laugh at him if he shows up in such a plane. One outside adviser tells you guys that he’s mused about keeping the jet after his presidency. Russell, it sounds like Trump is privately angry over this whole thing. Why should he fly in an antique plane? Maybe he doesn’t understand why it’s a scandal? What does your reporting indicate along these lines about his mood and mindset on all this?Berman: Yeah, the sources that talked to my colleague, Jonathan Lemire, certainly indicate that he would be—he is angry. And he’s been publicly angry. When a reporter asked him about this, he said it was “stupid” to ask about the idea. To him, the idea that you would essentially look a gift plane in the mouth and not accept this $400 million gift from a foreign government is absurd. And to everybody else, the idea that you would accept this gift from a foreign government is absurd. He’s also firing off, as he often does, his Truth Social posts in the middle of the night, which indicates that he’s angry about this. And part of it is that, as you indicated, this is a rare issue where Republicans on Capitol Hill have dared to criticize or question the president. And they think that this could be—to borrow another idiom—not a Trojan horse but a Trojan plane.Sargent: You mentioned Republicans starting to speak out. Senator Roger Wicker said this would be “like the United States moving into the Qatari embassy.” And Senator Ted Cruz said, “I have concerns,” adding that it poses significant espionage and surveillance problems. Can you talk at a little bit more length about why it’s such a major security issue?Berman: Right. Well, again, the question is: Why would the government of Qatar do this out of the generosity of its heart? Or does it want something? And even if it’s just about whether it wants something from the U.S., that’s a big enough concern. But what if there’s some subterfuge going on? This is the most important airplane in the U.S. and certainly in the world—arguably in the world. And so I think the concerns that Republicans have raised ... Rather than talk about corruption, which is what first comes to everybody’s mind—that President Trump likes to do his corruption out in the open—Republicans have pointed to that to suggest that it’s not corruption to be taking a gift, which could be considered an emolument in violation of the Constitution. So instead of talking about this as a potentially corrupt act, they have talked about it in terms of the security concerns. And so it’s, I think, safer political ground for them to talk about the security concerns than to say out now that the president of our own party is accepting a bribe essentially.Sargent: That is fascinating. The Republican criticism also points to something else I want to bring up. Democrats are saying they want the whole transaction scrutinized by Congress, with Chuck Schumer saying he’ll place a hold on Trump nominees until that happens. Republicans aren’t going to let that happen—congressional scrutiny—are they? But that seems to be a problem for them because it’s so glaringly corrupt that it’s hard to make disappear. And the story will continue if and when Trump continues to go through with it and the challenges associated with it get aired out a little more. So how do Republicans handle that as it drags out? How can they hold off the congressional scrutiny while also appearing concerned about it and all that? Berman: Right. Well, the challenge for them is that this appears to be the epitome of the need of why you would have an oversight branch, or the legislative branch conduct oversight over the executive branch. And of course, when there’s been a Democratic president, Republicans are all too eager to invoke the solemn responsibility that the legislative branch has to conduct oversight. We saw that obviously with Hunter Biden. We saw that before with Hillary Clinton—and really with the Clintons—and Bill Clinton and on down the line. And yes, while Republicans have been critical or questioning of this, they’ve stopped far short of saying that they’re actually going to investigate it or conduct oversight or do anything to try to stop it.And it was amusing to see Speaker Mike Johnson at his weekly press conference. One, he tried to draw this distinction between what he characterized, I think very questionably, as the secretive dealings of what the Republicans call the “Biden crime family” with what Trump does, which is more transparent in that he does it out in the open—and therefore, because you don’t have the secrecy attached to it, it might seem to the average voter OK. So Johnson said, “Whatever Trump is doing is out in the open, they’re not trying to conceal anything.”Then he also said, I have a big enough job to do as the speaker of the House. But of course, your job as speaker of the House is partially to conduct oversight over the executive branch, whether or not the executive branch is run by a member of your own party. And he made little effort to disguise the fact that Republican or Republican-controlled Congress is really unlikely to investigate a Republican president no matter what the issue is. So when a reporter put this to him directly, he said, “Congress has an oversight responsibility, but I think, so far as I know the ethics are all being followed.” And of course, that is not the standard that he would follow if Joe Biden were president—or Kamala Harris or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. They wouldn’t say, Well, so far as I know, they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. They would say, We’re going to look into it and we’re going to see if they’re following the letter in the spirit of the law. But they don’t seem to have any intention of doing that, at least right now. If pressure is brought to bear—by Democrats potentially but more notably by Republicans—then perhaps that would change.Sargent: Sure looks as if Republicans are going to have a tough time holding this off because, as you point out, the argument is so preposterous. The idea that the fact that he’s doing it out in the open somehow absolves him of corruption seems pretty weak because (a) we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes in his discussions between him and Qatar and (b) it’s becoming an argument against scrutinizing the whole thing even more deeply, which would reveal more. That just doesn’t make any sense on its face, does it?Berman: No, but honestly that’s been his secret sauce: taking advantage of especially the media’s preference for reporting what happens behind closed doors as if it is worse than what happens out in the open. And whether intentionally or not, he’s recognized that—and therefore he just names what is usually unmentionable in the past. He says the quiet thing out loud as they say. And by doing so, it seems—at least to his Republican allies—that, well, if he’s talking about it and if he’s public about it, then there can’t be anything wrong with it. But that’s not how it works, right? It doesn’t matter whether ... If you announce that you are robbing a bank, it doesn’t make it any less illegal than if you go into the bank without announcing it beforehand.Sargent: And this is clearly unconstitutional on its face. It’s a violation of the emoluments clause. And by the way, Congress is the body who the president’s supposed to go to in a situation like this to begin with. That’s what the emoluments clause says. It says you can’t take a gift like this unless it’s approved by Congress. Berman: Right, but we saw in his first term that there was very little accountability for when he did this—arguably less egregious, but still highly questionable ways [like] the use of his hotel, the promotion of his businesses, basically directing anybody who had interests before the U.S. government to stay at his various properties and hold golf tournaments there and all the rest. And that’s only, of course, the tip of the iceberg. The fact that there was little accountability—certainly when Republicans controlled Congress and then even when Democrats controlled Congress and they impeached him twice over different issues and he was not convicted—then, of course ... As we’ve seen across a range of areas, he has acted with impunity in his second term, knowing that he is unlikely to be stopped.Sargent: Well, I want to talk about MAGA opposition to this, which is really striking in a bit of a different way. You quote MAGA influencer Laura Loomer calling this “a stain on the administration” and another media influencer, Mark Levin, agreeing with her. Josh Hawley, who’s a bit more in the MAGA mold than some other Republicans says, “It would be better if Air Force One were a big, beautiful jet made in the United States of America.” There is a deep tension here because this whole scandal clashes so obviously with Trump slogans like “America first” and “drain the swamp,” doesn’t it? Berman: No, that’s right. And this has put Republicans in a very familiar, awkward position of defending moves that they would clearly denounce were they made by Democratic presidents. So I think it’s been interesting because you have seen more questioning and criticism by the people that you mentioned. Some of these people are the people that defend him down the line, no matter what he does.Now, of course, they are, as I indicated earlier, stopping well short of vowing to do anything about it—but the mere fact that they are not singing from the same page as the White House on this is certainly noteworthy and could be an indication that ... Again, Trump is always in search of that line. Is there a line with him where he can’t cross? To quote the president from his first campaign where he said, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, is there anything that he could do that would prompt Republicans in Congress to stand up to him? And they aren’t quite standing up to him yet on this, but they are certainly closer to standing up to him than they have been on many other issues.Sargent: Do you think this goes anywhere? What happens now? Does Trump eventually end up dropping this? Is there a component of MAGA that doesn’t want him to drop it? How does this all play out?Berman: The challenge with Trump is that we’ll probably be talking about something else that is arguably outrageous next week—that Democrats will have to respond to, that Republicans will be questioned about. Maybe the focus next week is on whether the Republicans can pass this “big, beautiful bill” that Trump wants. Maybe it will be something else. And so the challenge with any of these Trump so-called scandals is that there are so many and nobody remembers them. We might hear about this again in a few months when the paperwork is being filed or submitted—if there is any paperwork to be submitted about this. So that’s the big question: whether we’re still talking about this in another week or two.Sargent: Well, this is the thing. It seems like this story is inevitably going to be talked about again later, because there will be more shoes to drop. He’s going to have to say at some point that he actually is going through with this; we don’t know for sure whether he will. Then there will be a focus on, as you mentioned earlier, the security implications and the costs and the logistical problems associated with it. That brings this all back up again, doesn’t it? It’s not an easy story to make disappear.Berman: Right, because if the president gets his way, eventually this airplane will be used as Air Force One. I think, again, using the past as a guide, it is easy to see the president quietly dropping this, right? And again, us not hearing much about it because he has been persuaded by his advisers that this would all be just way too complicated and not worth the fight. And maybe he will move on to some other interest. It’s similar to [him] saying that the U.S. is going to take over Gaza and make it into some luxury resort. And everybody is like, What? Really? And with what troops? It seems like he still wants to do that—but again, this is also the kind of thing that maybe doesn’t go anywhere. So maybe this doesn’t go anywhere, and we don’t hear about it again.Sargent: Just to wrap this up, you guys cited a great quote from a former Air Force colonel. I want to read it, “Those of us who served in the military couldn’t accept a cup of coffee and a donut at a contractor’s site because of the appearance of impropriety. Now Trump is taking a 747 airplane from the government of Qatar for his personal use. Grift and corruption run amok.” That really captures it. There’s something about this story that, for a lot of people, neatly encapsulates Trump’s deep contempt for the very idea of public service and the obligations that come with it. Can you talk a little bit about that? You encountered that in your reporting, and you talked to others who have served the country before and felt the same way. What did you discover?Berman: Right. As you said, this has always been the issue with Trump. When you’re talking about corruption or alleged corruption, it’s that what he is doing is on such a grand scale. And the laws and the rules that are actually on the book for public servants, for federal employees, for congressional staffers about accepting gifts or even taking free food at an event are so tight. They are so restrictive. There’s this huge gap between what your person making $80 or $100 or whatever thousand dollars working for the government is allowed to do and what the president of the U.S. appears to be getting away with.And that’s where the danger is for him, because a lot of these people are nominally in his base. If you’re talking about members of the military, for example, or really, people in the federal government, right? We talk a lot about federal employees and how they are scattered throughout the country. They are not all Democrats and they are not all progressive. Many of them are Trump supporters or would-be Trump supporters. That’s where you see this huge disconnect. And yet, because there’s so much else out there, it doesn’t seem at the end of the day to always stick to him. And that’s how he essentially can get away with it.Sargent: There’s something so simple about this that really captures self-dealing, and self-dealing is something people really, really hate. This is not a hard story to grasp; it captures that perfectly. Russell Berman, thanks for talking to us, man. It was great to talk to you.Berman: Thanks for having me.Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195342/transcript-trump-rages-qatar-jet-fiasco-gop-criticism-worsens

2025-05-15 23:38:13

@nprofile…6kn7
https:https://images.newrepublic.com/2fa57216e89c6905e393ac7350fa58cec53ca1d0.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
President Donald Trump wants to do a lot of things as president. A fair number of them appear to be either illegal or unconstitutional. To that end, Trump wants to make it harder to stop him in court and easier to keep doing things after courts have found them to be illegal. The Supreme Court’s nine justices appear to be divided on whether to let him win.Oral arguments can be an imperfect indicator of how the court will ultimately decide a case. Tuesday’s session added to the uncertainty by giving no clear impression on some of the weightier matters in play. Some of the conservative justices appeared uneasy with the president’s lackadaisical approach to birthright citizenship. It’s also unclear whether a majority of the justices are prepared to support Trump’s demand to defang the lower courts. “On the day after it goes into effect—this is just a very practical question, how it’s going to work—what do hospitals do with a newborn, what do states do with a newborn?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer. He replied that he didn’t think they would do anything different because the order only disallows federal officials from accepting documents that have the “wrong designation of citizenship.”“How are they going to know that?” Kavanaugh continued. “The federal officials will have to figure that out, essentially,” Sauer replied. That did not appear to satisfy Kavanaugh. “How?” the justice asked. “So you can imagine a number of ways that the federal officials could—,” Sauer began to say, before Kavanaugh interjected. “Such as?” he asked.Sauer finally said that the officials could “require a showing of documentation showing legal presence in the country,” which only drew additional skepticism. “For all the newborns?” Kavanaugh said. “Is that how it’s going to work?”At the same time, many of the justices aired their concerns about the potential warping effects that nationwide injunctions from federal district courts can have on the nation’s political system. “This case is very different from a lot of our nationwide injunction cases in which many of us have expressed frustration at the way district courts are doing their business,” Kagan told Kelsi Corkran, who argued on behalf of the immigrant plaintiffs.She noted that because litigants can choose friendly jurisdictions, they can have a fairly good chance of success when asking for a nationwide injunction against the federal government. “You know, in the first Trump administration, it was all done in San Francisco, and then, in the next administration, it was all done in Texas,” Kagan noted.The case, Trump v. CASA, is about Trump’s executive order that purported to no longer recognize birthright citizenship for some children born on U.S. soil to non-citizen mothers who are either “unlawfully present” in the country or whose presence is “lawful but temporary.” It did not apply retroactively, nor does it affect children with at least one U.S. citizen parent or who are born to green-card holders.In practical terms, Trump’s order would direct federal agencies to no longer provide documents to those children that would attest to their U.S. citizenship. More importantly, it would force those agencies to no longer recognize state or local documents that do the same. How this would work in practice is unclear, but the goal appears to be to deny documents like Social Security cards and passports to the targeted children.Whatever the planned outcome may be, the order is unconstitutional on its face. The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is unequivocal: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Congress and the states ratified that clause in 1869 to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous 1857 case where the Supreme Court held that people of African descent could never be citizens, and to indisputably extend citizenship to all formerly enslaved people in the South during Reconstruction.By virtue of that clause, anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen. Courts have traditionally interpreted the “subject to the jurisdiction” limitation to apply to children born to foreign diplomats stationed in the United States, since it could interfere with their ability to acquire citizenship in their parents’ country, and to Native Americans living under tribal jurisdiction. The latter category became defunct with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which extended citizenship to all Native Americans in the country.Some opponents of birthright citizenship, such as the Trump administration, have claimed that it does not apply to children born to foreign-born parents. There is ample historical evidence that the amendment’s drafters meant for it to apply as broadly as possible, and the Supreme Court itself accepted that approach in the 1898 case Wong Kim Ark v. United States, where it held that a California-born man whose parents were subjects of the emperor of China at the time was an American citizen from the moment of his birth.For that reason, every federal court that has heard a legal challenge to Trump’s order has blocked it from taking effect. When the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene, however, it did not ask the justices to review the cases on the merits. Instead, the administration asked the high court to review the lower courts’ practice of issuing nationwide injunctions against the executive branch when they block federal policies.Nationwide injunctions have bedeviled presidents from both parties over the last few administrations. With Congress hamstrung by the Senate’s filibuster and the House’s gerrymander-fueled hyperpartisanship these days, the White House has often sought to use existing legal powers in novel ways to carry out the agenda that it promised to voters. As a result, the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations in particular have faced legal challenges against nearly every policy change that they try to make.In some cases, federal judges have issued what are known as nationwide injunctions. (Some critics call them “universal injunctions,” but there is no evidence that they are obeyed on other planets or galaxies.) Courts generally have broad powers to order remedies for the litigants in a particular case. With nationwide injunctions, federal judges have ordered the federal government to not apply a policy change beyond the litigants themselves. In the birthright-citizenship cases, for example, the lower-court judges ordered the Trump administration not to enforce the executive order against anyone, not just the plaintiffs themselves.Some of the justices have criticized this practice for exceeding a court’s traditional powers. “The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion in 2020, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. “Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case.”Presidential administrations are obviously not happy with this state of affairs either. Since senators have significant influence over the lower-court appointments in their states, federal judges in many states tend to be ideologically homogenous. Trump has suffered frequent legal defeats at the hands of judges in California, New York, and other blue states. Obama and Biden had to run practically everything they did past a handful of federal judges in Texas thanks to forum-shopping by conservative legal groups. That frustration even led Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, to urge the justices to reconsider nationwide injunctions in a court filing last December.Sauer, Prelogar’s successor, urged the court to rein in the injunctions in his opening statement on Thursday. “They encourage rampant forum-shopping,” he told the justices. “They require judges to make rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions. [...] They operate asymmetrically, forcing the government to win everywhere while the plaintiffs can win anywhere. They invert the ordinary hierarchy of appellate review. They create the ongoing risk of conflicting judgments.”At the same time, Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship showed how they can be an important check on presidential power. The asymmetry noted by Sauer would go the other way in a world without nationwide injunctions: Every parent who gives birth to a child potentially covered by the executive order would have to sue on their child’s behalf to get it blocked. (Sauer acknowledged that the plaintiffs could bring a nationwide class-action lawsuit but insisted he would vigorously oppose certifying the class.)Justice Elena Kagan told Sauer that the Trump administration’s procedural approach in this case could allow it to avoid future Supreme Court rulings altogether. She noted that every lower court that had considered the executive order on the merits had ruled against it. By definition, the winning party in a case can’t appeal a ruling that it won. At the same time, the Justice Department did not ask the justices to review the merits question, instead only seeking review of the lower courts’ ability to impose nationwide injunctions as a remedy.If they prevailed, Kagan explained, that could lead to a scenario where the Supreme Court never gets to review the merits at all. “If you win this challenge and say there is no nationwide injunction and it all has to be through individual cases, then I can’t see how an individual who is not, you know, being treated equivalently to the individual who brought the case would have any ability to bring the substantive question to us,” she told Sauer.Sauer replied that other individuals could ask a federal district court to intervene. “Yeah, and then they win, and, again, I mean, you need somebody to lose, but nobody’s going to lose in this case,” she said, to laughter in the courtroom. “You’re going to have individual by individual by individual [cases], and all of those individuals are going to win, and the ones who can’t afford to go to court, they’re the ones who are going to lose.”After some dissembling by Sauer, Kagan stated her point more directly. “The real brunt of my question is, in a case like this, the government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court because it’s not really losing anything,” she explained. “It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies.”Justice Sonia Sotomayor framed the problem in terms that might resonate more with conservatives. “So, when a new president orders that, because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ and he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?” she asked. Sauer suggested that the courts could certify a class-action lawsuit on an emergency basis in such a scenario, which seemed insufficient to the task at hand.In theory, the federal government could accept a court’s precedent as binding throughout that jurisdiction. But the Trump administration apparently had no interest in committing to that. At one point, Barrett pressed Sauer on whether it would respect a court’s opinion within its own jurisdiction. “Did I understand you correctly to tell Justice Kagan that the government wanted to reserve its right to maybe not follow a Second Circuit precedent, say, in New York because you might disagree with the opinion?” she asked.“Our general practice is to respect those precedents, but there are circumstances when it is not a categorical practice,” he replied. “I’m not talking about in the Fourth Circuit are you going to respect a Second Circuit [opinion],” Barrett continued. “I’m talking about within the Second Circuit. And can you say if that this administration’s practice or a longstanding one?” Sauer began to reply that it was “as I understand it, longstanding practice,” to which Barrett sharply replied, “Really?”Sauer suggested that there might be scenarios where the department would try to overturn circuit precedent, but Barrett brushed that aside. “I’m talking about this week the Second Circuit holds that the executive order is unconstitutional, and then what do you do the next day or the next week,” she asked. “Generally we follow that,” Sauer replied. “So you’re still saying ‘generally,’” Barrett reiterated. “Yes,” Sauer confirmed.When members of the court pressed Sauer on whether they should grant certiorari before judgment—an emergency power that the Supreme Court can use to review district-court cases without waiting for the appeals courts—the solicitor general again demurred, suggesting that the legal dispute needed more time to “percolate” in the lower courts before reaching the justices. There did not appear to be much appetite for that: Members of the court ranging from Sotomayor and Kagan to Gorsuch and Justice Samuel Alito all pressed the lawyers on whether they should also take up the underlying merits question.Since the justices did not spend any substantial time discussing the merits of the Trump administration’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause, it remains unclear whether even one of them would ultimately side with it. One possible outcome would be that the justices rehear the case next term by granting the plaintiffs’ oral request during Thursday’s arguments to take up the merits argument as well. That would leave the status quo on birthright citizenship intact until at least the end of the year.To curb nationwide injunctions, the court would also need to reckon with empowering a president who has already shown clear disregard for the courts’ authority. “The real concern, I think, is that your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Sauer at one point.The Supreme Court has already shown extraordinary deference to Trump over the last few years and has occasionally embraced absurd legal theories, such as presidential immunity, that he has proposed. Rewriting the separation of powers to let presidents commit crimes has already had severe consequences for the rule of law. Rewriting the Citizenship Clause on Trump’s behalf could redefine exactly what it means to be an American—a question that the clause was designed to put beyond the whims of presidents, justices, and lawmakers forever.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195338/supreme-court-trump-birthright-citizenship

2025-05-15 23:38:13

@nprofile…6kn7
https:https://images.newrepublic.com/1d941d2ca1c4ebe343b65ddd872cf6ee2609977e.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
It’s time to add yet another instance of blatant insider trading to the Trump administration’s record.Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 and $5 million of her share in Trump Media on April 2, the same day the president’s “Liberation Day” tariff war announcement broke the stock market, according to reporting from ProPublica. Trump Media stocks specifically fell 13 percent that day. While it’s hard to confirm exactly what time Bondi sold the stocks, or what she knew beforehand, this type of behavior is par for the course for a president who has been fairly careless about conflict of interest when it comes to his relentless stock market manipulation. Remember that Trump later posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” on Truth Social a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for China, an announcement that caused the market to shoot up into the green. Insider trading is a blatantly illegal practice that involves using special or private information to give yourself or your friends a market advantage. Someone with knowledge of a major economic policy change that would cause the markets to shoot back up would sell their stocks if they knew a huge drop was coming, which is likely exactly what Bondi did in this situation—a classic pump and dump.Bondi’s Justice Department has yet to comment.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195332/pam-bondi-dump-trump-media-stock

2025-05-15 23:35:28

@nprofile…pyzj
https:https://images.newrepublic.com/2fa57216e89c6905e393ac7350fa58cec53ca1d0.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
President Donald Trump wants to do a lot of things as president. A fair number of them appear to be either illegal or unconstitutional. To that end, Trump wants to make it harder to stop him in court and easier to keep doing things after courts have found them to be illegal. The Supreme Court’s nine justices appear to be divided on whether to let him win.Oral arguments can be an imperfect indicator of how the court will ultimately decide a case. Tuesday’s session added to the uncertainty by giving no clear impression on some of the weightier matters in play. Some of the conservative justices appeared uneasy with the president’s lackadaisical approach to birthright citizenship. It’s also unclear whether a majority of the justices are prepared to support Trump’s demand to defang the lower courts. “On the day after it goes into effect—this is just a very practical question, how it’s going to work—what do hospitals do with a newborn, what do states do with a newborn?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer. He replied that he didn’t think they would do anything different because the order only disallows federal officials from accepting documents that have the “wrong designation of citizenship.”“How are they going to know that?” Kavanaugh continued. “The federal officials will have to figure that out, essentially,” Sauer replied. That did not appear to satisfy Kavanaugh. “How?” the justice asked. “So you can imagine a number of ways that the federal officials could—,” Sauer began to say, before Kavanaugh interjected. “Such as?” he asked.Sauer finally said that the officials could “require a showing of documentation showing legal presence in the country,” which only drew additional skepticism. “For all the newborns?” Kavanaugh said. “Is that how it’s going to work?”At the same time, many of the justices aired their concerns about the potential warping effects that nationwide injunctions from federal district courts can have on the nation’s political system. “This case is very different from a lot of our nationwide injunction cases in which many of us have expressed frustration at the way district courts are doing their business,” Kagan told Kelsi Corkran, who argued on behalf of the immigrant plaintiffs.She noted that because litigants can choose friendly jurisdictions, they can have a fairly good chance of success when asking for a nationwide injunction against the federal government. “You know, in the first Trump administration, it was all done in San Francisco, and then, in the next administration, it was all done in Texas,” Kagan noted.The case, Trump v. CASA, is about Trump’s executive order that purported to no longer recognize birthright citizenship for some children born on U.S. soil to non-citizen mothers who are either “unlawfully present” in the country or whose presence is “lawful but temporary.” It did not apply retroactively, nor does it affect children with at least one U.S. citizen parent or who are born to green-card holders.In practical terms, Trump’s order would direct federal agencies to no longer provide documents to those children that would attest to their U.S. citizenship. More importantly, it would force those agencies to no longer recognize state or local documents that do the same. How this would work in practice is unclear, but the goal appears to be to deny documents like Social Security cards and passports to the targeted children.Whatever the planned outcome may be, the order is unconstitutional on its face. The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is unequivocal: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Congress and the states ratified that clause in 1869 to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous 1857 case where the Supreme Court held that people of African descent could never be citizens, and to indisputably extend citizenship to all formerly enslaved people in the South during Reconstruction.By virtue of that clause, anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen. Courts have traditionally interpreted the “subject to the jurisdiction” limitation to apply to children born to foreign diplomats stationed in the United States, since it could interfere with their ability to acquire citizenship in their parents’ country, and to Native Americans living under tribal jurisdiction. The latter category became defunct with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which extended citizenship to all Native Americans in the country.Some opponents of birthright citizenship, such as the Trump administration, have claimed that it does not apply to children born to foreign-born parents. There is ample historical evidence that the amendment’s drafters meant for it to apply as broadly as possible, and the Supreme Court itself accepted that approach in the 1898 case Wong Kim Ark v. United States, where it held that a California-born man whose parents were subjects of the emperor of China at the time was an American citizen from the moment of his birth.For that reason, every federal court that has heard a legal challenge to Trump’s order has blocked it from taking effect. When the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene, however, it did not ask the justices to review the cases on the merits. Instead, the administration asked the high court to review the lower courts’ practice of issuing nationwide injunctions against the executive branch when they block federal policies.Nationwide injunctions have bedeviled presidents from both parties over the last few administrations. With Congress hamstrung by the Senate’s filibuster and the House’s gerrymander-fueled hyperpartisanship these days, the White House has often sought to use existing legal powers in novel ways to carry out the agenda that it promised to voters. As a result, the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations in particular have faced legal challenges against nearly every policy change that they try to make.In some cases, federal judges have issued what are known as nationwide injunctions. (Some critics call them “universal injunctions,” but there is no evidence that they are obeyed on other planets or galaxies.) Courts generally have broad powers to order remedies for the litigants in a particular case. With nationwide injunctions, federal judges have ordered the federal government to not apply a policy change beyond the litigants themselves. In the birthright-citizenship cases, for example, the lower-court judges ordered the Trump administration not to enforce the executive order against anyone, not just the plaintiffs themselves.Some of the justices have criticized this practice for exceeding a court’s traditional powers. “The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion in 2020, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. “Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case.”Presidential administrations are obviously not happy with this state of affairs either. Since senators have significant influence over the lower-court appointments in their states, federal judges in many states tend to be ideologically homogenous. Trump has suffered frequent legal defeats at the hands of judges in California, New York, and other blue states. Obama and Biden had to run practically everything they did past a handful of federal judges in Texas thanks to forum-shopping by conservative legal groups. That frustration even led Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, to urge the justices to reconsider nationwide injunctions in a court filing last December.Sauer, Prelogar’s successor, urged the court to rein in the injunctions in his opening statement on Thursday. “They encourage rampant forum-shopping,” he told the justices. “They require judges to make rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions. [...] They operate asymmetrically, forcing the government to win everywhere while the plaintiffs can win anywhere. They invert the ordinary hierarchy of appellate review. They create the ongoing risk of conflicting judgments.”At the same time, Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship showed how they can be an important check on presidential power. The asymmetry noted by Sauer would go the other way in a world without nationwide injunctions: Every parent who gives birth to a child potentially covered by the executive order would have to sue on their child’s behalf to get it blocked. (Sauer acknowledged that the plaintiffs could bring a nationwide class-action lawsuit but insisted he would vigorously oppose certifying the class.)Justice Elena Kagan told Sauer that the Trump administration’s procedural approach in this case could allow it to avoid future Supreme Court rulings altogether. She noted that every lower court that had considered the executive order on the merits had ruled against it. By definition, the winning party in a case can’t appeal a ruling that it won. At the same time, the Justice Department did not ask the justices to review the merits question, instead only seeking review of the lower courts’ ability to impose nationwide injunctions as a remedy.If they prevailed, Kagan explained, that could lead to a scenario where the Supreme Court never gets to review the merits at all. “If you win this challenge and say there is no nationwide injunction and it all has to be through individual cases, then I can’t see how an individual who is not, you know, being treated equivalently to the individual who brought the case would have any ability to bring the substantive question to us,” she told Sauer.Sauer replied that other individuals could ask a federal district court to intervene. “Yeah, and then they win, and, again, I mean, you need somebody to lose, but nobody’s going to lose in this case,” she said, to laughter in the courtroom. “You’re going to have individual by individual by individual [cases], and all of those individuals are going to win, and the ones who can’t afford to go to court, they’re the ones who are going to lose.”After some dissembling by Sauer, Kagan stated her point more directly. “The real brunt of my question is, in a case like this, the government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court because it’s not really losing anything,” she explained. “It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies.”Justice Sonia Sotomayor framed the problem in terms that might resonate more with conservatives. “So, when a new president orders that, because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ and he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?” she asked. Sauer suggested that the courts could certify a class-action lawsuit on an emergency basis in such a scenario, which seemed insufficient to the task at hand.In theory, the federal government could accept a court’s precedent as binding throughout that jurisdiction. But the Trump administration apparently had no interest in committing to that. At one point, Barrett pressed Sauer on whether it would respect a court’s opinion within its own jurisdiction. “Did I understand you correctly to tell Justice Kagan that the government wanted to reserve its right to maybe not follow a Second Circuit precedent, say, in New York because you might disagree with the opinion?” she asked.“Our general practice is to respect those precedents, but there are circumstances when it is not a categorical practice,” he replied. “I’m not talking about in the Fourth Circuit are you going to respect a Second Circuit [opinion],” Barrett continued. “I’m talking about within the Second Circuit. And can you say if that this administration’s practice or a longstanding one?” Sauer began to reply that it was “as I understand it, longstanding practice,” to which Barrett sharply replied, “Really?”Sauer suggested that there might be scenarios where the department would try to overturn circuit precedent, but Barrett brushed that aside. “I’m talking about this week the Second Circuit holds that the executive order is unconstitutional, and then what do you do the next day or the next week,” she asked. “Generally we follow that,” Sauer replied. “So you’re still saying ‘generally,’” Barrett reiterated. “Yes,” Sauer confirmed.When members of the court pressed Sauer on whether they should grant certiorari before judgment—an emergency power that the Supreme Court can use to review district-court cases without waiting for the appeals courts—the solicitor general again demurred, suggesting that the legal dispute needed more time to “percolate” in the lower courts before reaching the justices. There did not appear to be much appetite for that: Members of the court ranging from Sotomayor and Kagan to Gorsuch and Justice Samuel Alito all pressed the lawyers on whether they should also take up the underlying merits question.Since the justices did not spend any substantial time discussing the merits of the Trump administration’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause, it remains unclear whether even one of them would ultimately side with it. One possible outcome would be that the justices rehear the case next term by granting the plaintiffs’ oral request during Thursday’s arguments to take up the merits argument as well. That would leave the status quo on birthright citizenship intact until at least the end of the year.To curb nationwide injunctions, the court would also need to reckon with empowering a president who has already shown clear disregard for the courts’ authority. “The real concern, I think, is that your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Sauer at one point.The Supreme Court has already shown extraordinary deference to Trump over the last few years and has occasionally embraced absurd legal theories, such as presidential immunity, that he has proposed. Rewriting the separation of powers to let presidents commit crimes has already had severe consequences for the rule of law. Rewriting the Citizenship Clause on Trump’s behalf could redefine exactly what it means to be an American—a question that the clause was designed to put beyond the whims of presidents, justices, and lawmakers forever.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195338/supreme-court-trump-birthright-citizenship

2025-05-14 08:40:27

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump announced Tuesday he will lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria, but the timing of the lifted international penalties was remarkably suspicious.“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump told an auditorium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, describing the apparently unnecessary sanctions as “brutal and crippling.”“In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace. That’s what we want to see,” he continued. “In Syria, they’ve had their share of travesty, war, killing many years. That’s why my administration has already taken the first steps toward restoring normal relations between the United States and Syria for the first time in more than a decade.”American caution toward Syria has spanned half a dozen administrations. Syria has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. since 1979, when Syrian forces occupied Lebanon. The Bush administration slammed Syria with more sanctions in 2004, condemning Syria’s “pursuit of weapons of mass destruction” and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The Obama administration imposed more sanctions on Syria in 2011, denouncing the country’s dictator, former President Bashar Al Assad, for human rights abuses against its protesting citizens.“We’re taking them all off,” Trump said Tuesday.But the decision to strip what had effectively become an embargo of Syrian goods followed another important development for the Trump family: the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Syria’s capital, Damascus. “[Syrian leader Ahmed Al Sharaa] wants a business deal for the future of his country,” pro-Trump activist Jonathan Bass—who met with Sharaa for hours in late April—told Reuters Monday.Sharaa is working to meet face-to-face with Trump, but his priorities include economic revival, regional stability, and healed relations with Israel, according to Bass.“He told me he wants a Trump Tower in Damascus. He wants peace with his neighbors. What he told me is good for the region, good for Israel,” Bass told the newswire. As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments—but that hasn’t stopped Trump one bit. The Trump family’s Middle East real estate plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion cryptocurrency investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial coin. The family also revealed in December that it would be expanding its presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195205/donald-trump-syria-sanctions-business-deal

2025-05-08 20:33:01

@nprofile…pyzj
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The Trump administration reached what it’s calling a “breakthrough trade deal” Thursday with the United Kingdom. I’m very pleased for the United Kingdom, from which my paternal great-great grandfather Moses Noah emigrated in July 1863 and my maternal grandmother Jean Robertson in October 1922. My wife and I recently enjoyed watching the second season of Wolf Hall on PBS. Rule Britannia and all that.But at the risk of spoiling the party, the United Kingdom is not a country with which the United States has much of a trade problem. A trade problem, as defined (somewhat simplistically) by the Trump administration, occurs when another country sells more stuff to us than we sell to them. Our biggest trade problem, everyone agrees, is China. China sells us $295 billion more in goods than we sell to them. Slapping a 145 percent minimum tariff on all Chinese goods is not an intelligent solution to the problem, but it is a problem, all the same. It is therefore good news that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will finally initiate trade talks with China this weekend—talks that Trump previously claimed were already taking place, but weren’t. One remarkable development since Trump moved back into the White House is that statements from the habitually mendacious Chinese government are now more credible than statements from the president of the United States. But set that aside. If you want to call something a “breakthrough,” sitting down with Chinese trade officials is a much bigger deal than sitting down with a bunch of people who talk like Anthony Hopkins.We don’t have much of a trade problem with the United Kingdom because we sell $12 billion more stuff to them than they sell to us. This is our fifth-largest trade surplus, according to The Motley Fool, after the Netherlands ($56 billion), Hong Kong ($22 billion), the United Arab Emirates ($19 billion), and Australia ($18 billion). Most of the other places with which we have trade imbalances are underdeveloped countries. We don’t have much of a trade problem with the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom has a big trade problem with us, because our trade surplus is their trade deficit. Also, we are, among nations, the United Kingdom’s biggest trading partner, whereas the United Kingdom is only our seventh-largest trading partner. We’re just not that into them. Compounding the UK’s trade difficulties is Brexit, the UK’s spectacularly self-destructive decision to depart the European Union, which took effect in 2020. The UK did manage before that breakup to negotiate a free trade deal with the EU, eliminating the risk of tariffs being imposed on its imports or exports to the EU. But even so, the UK’s exports to the EU, which (as a bloc rather than a nation) is the UK’s biggest trading partner, are down by as much as 30 percent compared to where they would be had Brexit never occurred. This has left the UK a bit frantic to cut trade deals elsewhere, and especially with the United States.Trump’s trade deal with the UK, which exists only in rough outline, makes Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s life somewhat easier. Starmer’s diplomatic strategy has been to flatter Trump at every turn—which can’t have been easy for him—and to get King Charles to invite Trump to visit him at Dumfries House or Balmoral Castle, both situated near Trump golf courses in Scotland. This charm offensive has now been rewarded with a reduction in tariffs, from 27.5 to 10 percent, on Jaguars, Land Rovers, and other British automobiles exported to America, and the complete elimination of tariffs on the UK’s struggling steel industry. In addition, the UK will be permitted to export, tariff-free, up to 13,000 metric tons of beef. All British exports, however, will still be subjected to the same across-the-board 10 percent tariff Trump is imposing on all countries. In return, the United States receives … not much. Some reductions on agricultural tariffs, including tariffs on American beef, although apparently the UK will continue not to import any beef from cattle that have been fed growth hormones (the Trump White House refers to this as “non-science-based standards that adversely affect U.S. exports”). There is no deal on pharmaceuticals, on which Trump has threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff. There, the United States has a trade deficit of $1.4 billion with the United Kingdom, but the paramount consideration must be to keep it easy to get foreign-made drugs to American patients and American-made drugs to British ones, because human health is more important than political one-upmanship on trade.The United States came into being as a result of a trade dispute with Great Britain, and in those days the game really was rigged to benefit the mother country at the expense of the colonies. Lately, though, the United States has had the upper hand—so much so that Trump’s idea of levying heavy tariffs on the United Kingdom was kind of cruel. The benefit of Trump’s Thursday announcement is mainly that the United States can feel a little bit less like the neighborhood bully. That’s worth something. But there’s a reason most of the champagne corks are popping across the Atlantic in this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. In the United Kingdom, there’s reason to celebrate. Here in the United States, it’s just another day.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195028/trump-uk-trade-accord-tariffs

2025-05-07 18:44:46

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The numbers are in, and they don’t look good for the president.The Cook Political Report observed Wednesday that Donald Trump’s poll numbers are in a slump with key groups that helped him win in November, including young voters, Latinos, and independents.Cook’s newly launched poll tracker found that Trump’s net job-approval rating had plummeted just since April 15, dropping by seven points from -3.9 percent to -10.7 percent. The most dramatic shifts were witnessed in the aforementioned groups: For 18- to 29-year-old voters, Trump’s approval dropped by -11.8 points. The president lost Latinos by 10.4 points, and independents soured on Trump by 7.9 points.“It’s worth noting that even significant slumps in the president’s popularity don’t directly translate into shifts in downballot vote choice, particularly in a deeply polarized climate,” the report read. “It’s no guarantee that most—or even many—Americans who ultimately sour on the current occupant of the White House will be driven into the arms of the Democratic Party come next November.”Instead, those voters may be more likely to stay home—though that wouldn’t bode well for Republicans jockeying for other political positions downballot.It’s just the latest in a string of sinking reactions to the president’s performance. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published last month found that Trump’s approval rating had plummeted to 39 percent—a 6 percent drop from February—marking the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began roughly 80 years ago.And an April report by the Conference Board found that its consumer confidence index had fallen by 7.9 points, bringing overall U.S. consumer confidence to 86 points. Consumer futures were brought to a 13-year low, with outlooks on the economy dropping by 12.5 points to 54.5 points—well below the threshold of 80 that “usually signals a recession ahead,” according to the Conference Board.The root cause of the instability was “high financial market volatility in April,” which hit American consumers’ stock portfolios and retirement savings hard and fast, per the Conference Board’s report. That was almost singularly due to Trump’s machinations in the White House, which included releasing (and stalling) a sweeping and vindictive tariff proposal plan that economists observed (and the White House eventually confirmed) was founded on bad math.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194970/donald-trump-lost-support-key-voters-poll

2025-05-05 22:06:43

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“Abundance for me but not for thee” seems to be Donald Trump’s new motto.The president’s argument that children should just have fewer dolls rattled the nation last week. Trump’s tariffs proposals—which were discovered and confirmed by the White House to be based on bad math—have sent markets tumbling and pushed the U.S. economy closer toward a recession. The boss of the biggest shipping port in the country told AFP News Agency that American consumers can expect “less choice and higher prices” once current inventory runs out, which he predicted would occur within the next five to seven weeks.In the face of rising costs and a slowing job market, Trump’s solution is just as simple as it is un-American: Buy less.“I don’t think a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls. She can be very happy with two or three or four or five,” Trump reiterated to reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday.But Trump—whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $5.1 billion—wouldn’t know the first thing about living a modest lifestyle. His own children have been photographed in the lap of luxury, playing with lavish toys backdropped by the ornate interiors of his New York City penthouse, as the internet was quick to point out.Some of Barron Trump’s childhood toys included a customized mini Mercedes convertible featuring a “BARRON” license plate, several life-size stuffed animals, and famously, a Louis Vuitton “soot-case” that reportedly now retails for nearly $10,000. They resided in an entire floor of Trump’s apartment, which Barron apparently had all to himself, Melania told Entertainment Tonight in 2010.Other images of Trump’s brood include photos of Melania holding a baby Barron in front of golden doors, marble floors, and an elaborate pram.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194888/trump-dolls-barron-trump-kids-toys

2025-05-05 22:06:43

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President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office have proved fatal for seven people who were detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, as part of the president’s massive deportation efforts. Of the seven immigrants who have died in ICE custody over the past three months, the agency has only published reports on three of the deaths, which were all reviewed by the Spanish newspaper El Paīs.According to the outlet, all three individuals arrived in detention in good condition, and saw their health rapidly decline.Makysm Chernyak, a 44 year-old Ukrainian man, was arrested in January on assault charges and transferred to ICE detention in Miami where he was found to be totally healthy, with the exception of an elevated heart rate. For a week in mid-February he was in and out of the clinic, after reporting nasal congestion and a cough. On February 18, he was found vomiting and trembling in his cell, and while awaiting transfer to the hospital he suffered six seizures, and vomited blood. Doctors shortly discovered he’d had a hemorrhagic stroke and was determined to be brain dead. He was declared dead two days later.Marie Blaise, a 44 year-old Haitian woman was detained on February 12 in the U.S. Virgin Islands when she tried to board a flight to North Carolina without a valid immigration visa. Another woman detained in Deerfield Beach detention center told the Miami Herald that Blaise began to complain of chest pains on April 25. She was given some pills and told to rest, but hours later she awoke screaming in pain. Later that night she was announced dead, and her cause of death is still under investigation, according to El Paīs.Last week, Florida Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, the only Haitian American member of Congress, slammed ICE over Blaise’s death. “Marie had been complaining about chest pain for hours,” she said on the House floor. “They gave her some pills and told her to go lie down. Unfortunately, Marie never woke up.”ICE is required to report on all in-custody deaths within 90 days, but Cherfilus-McCormick called for a “full, independent investigation” into Blaise’s death. Chernyak and Blaise are two of three immigrants who died in detention in Florida. The other was Genry Ruiz Guillén, a 29-year-old Honduran detained at the Krome center in Florida who died on January 23. Others died in custody in Texas, Arizona, Puerto Rico, and Missouri.In a statement, ICE insisted that it was providing proper care to detainees. “All people in ICE custody receive medical, dental and mental health screening and 24-hour emergency care at each detention facility,” it said.A 2024 report from the American Civil Liberties Union found that 95 percent of deaths at ICE-operated facilities between 2017 and 2021 could have been prevented “if appropriate medical care had been provided.” In a whopping 88 percent of the deaths reviewed as part of the report, medical staff at the ICE detention centers had “made incorrect, inappropriate, or incomplete diagnoses.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/194893/horrifying-report-showcases-dire-conditions-ice-facilities

2025-05-02 22:42:23

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Republican Representative Mike Collins is freaking out over a halal restaurant coming to the cafeteria in the House’s Rayburn building.The skittish conservative complained on X Friday morning about Cha Street Food, a Pakistani restaurant, replacing Steak n Shake this summer, likening it to a religious war from thousands of years ago.If Collins knew anything about cuisines, or even cultures, outside of America, he’d know that Pakistan is thousands of miles away from Jerusalem. His own X post includes a screenshot of an email pointing out that Cha Street Food is actually based out of northern Virginia. Not only that, his beloved Steak n Shake is owned by an Iranian American, Sardar Biglari.If Collins thinks a new halal restaurant in a House cafeteria is like “the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem,” perhaps he should get to know his colleagues. There are currently four Muslims serving in the House: Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Andre Collins of Indiana, and newly elected Lateefa Simon of California. There’s even a congresswoman in his own Republican Party of partial Pakistani descent, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma. But Collins is not known for his nuance or tolerance, cheering on racist protesters in Mississippi last year and blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion procedures for train derailments. Maybe the Georgia congressman ought to try out Cha Street Food and its menu of Pakistani street food, which includes burgers and fries. He might actually have his horizons broadened.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194806/republican-congressman-mike-collins-meltdown-halal-restaurant

2025-05-02 22:42:23

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The Trump administration did not rule out that its pitch to replace the nation’s space launch system could massively benefit Elon Musk.In an interview with Fox Business Friday, Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought refused to clarify if the “Dark MAGA” tech billionaire would be pocketing off the budget increase.“The budget phases out the grossly expensive and delayed space launch system,” Fox Business’s Charles Payne said. “Is there a chance that Elon Musk could benefit from that?”“Look, this is a billion-dollar investment into Mars,” said Vought, a former Project 2025 architect. “We’re doing both, we’re going back to the moon as part of the Artemis. We’ve protected exploration funding that’s open to all companies. Elon Musk hasn’t been a part of the NASA budget conversations at all. And we also provide resources for what we’re doing on Mars.”As part of its budget proposal Friday, the Trump administration is reportedly looking to slash NASA’s budget by 24 percent year over year, amounting to the largest single-year slice to the agency in its history, with $6 billion in cuts.The proposal spells the end of the Space Launch System rocket and NASA’s brand-new Orion spacecraft. It also envisions killing the Gateway space station that is crucial to one of the space agency’s biggest missions: a full-fledged, multistep exploration of the moon dubbed the Artemis campaign. (As soon as the U.S. beats China in its space race.)“We do believe that, after Artemis, it’s time to look for lower cost, commercial, cheaper vehicles that allow us to not have the cost overruns and the delays and the expense that we’ve seen in the SLS and the Orion program,” Vought told Fox. “We’re not doing anything that would in any way delay what’s necessary to get to the moon.”Instead, the White House envisions that the future of the country’s space funding should be spent on Mars—an idea that isn’t too difficult to trace back to the SpaceX CEO.Musk has been a vocal opponent of NASA’s Artemis campaign. In January, Musk posted on X that the moon is just a “distraction” and that his company would be looking to go “straight to Mars.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/194816/elon-musk-poised-get-another-huge-payday-government

2025-04-29 20:55:43

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Consumer confidence in the economy has plummeted for the fifth straight month, sinking to lows not seen since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, all thanks to Donald Trump’s tariffs.The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell by 7.9 points in April, bringing overall consumer confidence to 86, according to a report published Tuesday. Consumer futures were brought to a 13-year low, with outlooks on the economy dropping by 12.5 points to 54.5 points. That’s well below the threshold of 80 that “usually signals a recession ahead,” according to the Conference Board.“The decline was largely driven by consumers’ expectations. The three expectation components—business conditions, employment prospects, and future income—all deteriorated sharply, reflecting pervasive pessimism about the future,” Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at the Conference Board, said in a statement.The number of consumers expecting fewer jobs in the next six months (32.1 percent) was particularly alarming, reaching heights not seen since April 2009, when the country was in the midst of the Great Recession.“Expectations about future income prospects turned clearly negative for the first time in five years, suggesting that concerns about the economy have now spread to consumers worrying about their own personal situations,” Guichard noted.The drop-off in confidence has rattled all ages and income groups, as well as all political affiliations. The group with the sharpest decline in confidence is also America’s most employed, people aged 35 to 55. The root cause of the instability was “high financial market volatility in April” that hit American consumers’ stock portfolios and retirement savings hard and fast, per the Conference Board’s report. That was almost singularly due to Trump’s machinations in the White House, which included releasing (and stalling) a sweeping and vindictive tariff proposal plan that economists observed (and the White House eventually confirmed) was founded on bad math. It’s not the only negative indicator for Trump’s performance. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Sunday found that Trump’s approval rating had plummeted to 39 percent—a six percent drop from February—marking the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began roughly 80 years ago.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194566/donald-trump-economy-consumer-confidence

2025-04-29 20:55:43

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Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to China was confirmed Tuesday with the help of 16 Democratic votes in the Senate. David Perdue, formerly a Republican senator from Georgia, easily sailed through with a 67–29 vote, with four senators not voting. The Democrats who joined all but two Republicans to vote for Perdue weren’t only representing battleground states, either.“Yea” votes included New Jersey’s Cory Booker, whose record-breaking speech on the Senate floor against Trump’s policies earlier this month seemed to inspire the rest of his party, as well as Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who has criticized the administration for firing military veterans from civil service positions. Perdue was confirmed while the U.S. and China are in the midst of a trade war entirely caused by Trump’s ill-conceived 145 percent tariffs against Chinese imports, which China has responded to with its own 84 percent tariffs against U.S. exports to the country. Somehow, 16 Senate Democrats agreed with Trump’s choice of Perdue to deal with Beijing during this manufactured crisis. Here are their names: Cory Booker—New JerseyChris Coons—DelawareTammy Duckworth—IllinoisJohn Fetterman—PennsylvaniaRuben Gallego—ArizonaMaggie Hassan—New HampshireTim Kaine—VirginiaAndy Kim—New JerseyAngus King—Maine (independent who caucuses with Democrats)Amy Klobuchar—MinnesotaGary Peters—MichiganJack Reed—Rhode IslandJacky Rosen—NevadaJeanne Shaheen—New HampshireElissa Slotkin—MichiganMark Warner—Virginia
https://newrepublic.com/post/194575/16-democrats-vote-confirm-trump-appointee-ambassador-china

2025-04-15 21:55:38

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A top adviser for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was abruptly placed on administrative leave after he was connected to an information leak at the Department of Defense, Reuters reported Tuesday. Dan Caldwell was escorted from the Pentagon Tuesday and is being investigated for an “unauthorized disclosure” of classified DOD information, an anonymous U.S. official told Reuters. It’s unclear what leaked intelligence Caldwell is being investigated for, but he was wrapped up in last month’s Signalgate scandal, in which members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet discussed U.S. military plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal group chat that also happened to include The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Along with Caldwell, 18 Trump officials were presumed to be part of the chat, including Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and national security adviser Mike Walz. The following week, the DOD released a memo requesting an investigation into the “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information.” “This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense,” the memo, written by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, reads. “I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.”Caldwell’s investigation “remains ongoing,” the U.S. official told Reuters.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194042/pete-hegeth-adviser-signal-chat-dan-caldwell-leave-defense

2025-04-01 21:53:47

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In a stroke of revenge for Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thousands of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost their jobs Tuesday. The “reduction in force” affected workers across many departments vital to U.S. public health, including the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the Division of Population Health, the Division of Reproductive Health, the Division of HIV Prevention, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, Wired reports.Even programs at the centers on Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion as well as HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention were affected. The HIV program reportedly lost at least half of its workforce. Employees across the agency received notices via email beginning 5 a.m. Tuesday, with some workers showing up to their offices to find their ID badges didn’t work anymore. “I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” the email notice stated, according to Wired. “This RIF does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct. It is being taken solely for the reasons stated in the memorandum. After you receive this notice you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.”One CDC employee told the magazine that “[t]here has been no effort in allowing staff to transfer projects, programs, or responsibilities.” Even the Freedom of Information Act office at the CDC, as well as the FDA’s communications and web office, were cut.The move comes among massive layoffs from Kennedy across the entire Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday. Those firings include people at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Kennedy has long been an anti-vaccine activist, so the move is in line with his beliefs, especially since he has already revoked over $11 billion in Covid-19 aid funding from HHS. Trump has long held a grudge against the CDC and other public health agencies, blaming them for tanking his first term when it was really his own mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, he and Kennedy are dealing a crippling blow to public health in America.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193453/trump-revenge-cdc-layoffs

2025-04-01 21:53:47

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The Trump administration on Tuesday froze $35 million in family planning, sexual, and reproductive health funding.The “Abortion, Every Day” newsletter reports that the move, which targets funding under Title X, will hit multiple nonprofit organizations, including conservatives’ bogeyman Planned Parenthood. Several states will be impacted, with Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Utah having their Title X funds reduced to zero. Other states, such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Alaska will lose the majority of their funding, while Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia will lose part of their funding. Title X provides funds, mostly to uninsured and low-income Americans, for cancer screenings, birth control, and testing for sexually transmitted infections, as the country’s only federal family planning program. Sixty percent of women benefit from publicly funded clinics as their usual source of health care, while for 40 percent, these clinics are their only health care option. The move comes after the White House froze $120 million in Title X program grants last week, half of the entire program, to make sure that recipients were complying with executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Conservatives have also wanted to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that advocate for abortion rights for a long time, despite federal law already prohibiting taxpayer funds being used for the procedure.Now it seems that the right is going even further in targeting family planning and reproductive health altogether. Millions of people will lose access to pregnancy testing, contraception, STI treatment, infertility evaluation and counseling, and numerous other health services. But, as was said in the first Trump administration, the cruelty is the point.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193447/trump-cuts-planned-parenthood

2025-04-01 21:53:47

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Nine House Republicans defected from their party on the parental proxy vote Tuesday in a direct rejection of Speaker Mike Johnson plans.The vote was for a bill regarding whether to allow new parents in the House to have a proxy vote for them in the first 12 weeks after the birth of their child The legislation, which would have helped new mothers and fathers, was put forth by MAGA Republican Anna Paulina Luna and Democrats Brittany Pettersen and Sara Jacobs. Luna and Pettersen each gave birth recently, and there is no parental leave for members of Congress. When Johnson and other House Republican leaders went out of their way to block the bill, nine House Republicans—Luna, Kevin Kiley, Tim Burchett, Jeff Van Drew, Greg Steube, Mike Lawler, Ryan Mackenzie, Nick LaLota, and Max Miller—all turned on Johnson, torpedoing his plans and passing the pare parental proxy bill. The nine betrayals bothered Johnson so much that he cancelled votes in the House for the rest of the week. Johnson, who doesn’t have the greatest working relationship with Luna, insisted that the parental proxy bill would lead to more representatives voting remotely. “I believe it’s unconstitutional. I believe it violates more than two centuries of tradition in the institution, and I think that it opens a Pandora’s box where, ultimately, maybe no one is here, and we’re all voting remotely by AI or something. I don’t know,” Johnson said at a press conference last week. “I don’t think that’s what Congress is supposed to be. This is a deliberative body. You cannot deliberate with your colleagues if you’re out somewhere else.” Republicans are weirdly obsessed with killing this bill, whether it be for anti-work from home reasons, anti-woman reasons, or both. Pettersen, who is the 13th active House member to give birth, spoke in support of Luna’s bill on the House floor while holding her 9-week-old son Sam in her arms. Sam was born prematurely. “No mom or dad should be in the position that I was in and so many parents have found themselves in. It is anti-woman, it’s anti-family and we need to come together,” she said. “We have a long ways to go to make this place accessible for young families like mine…. For all of the parents here, we know that when we have newborns, it’s when they’re the most vulnerable in their life. It’s when they need 24-7 care.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/193448/9-house-republicans-mike-johnson-vote-proxy-voting

2025-04-01 21:51:25

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The Trump administration on Tuesday froze $35 million in family planning, sexual, and reproductive health funding.The “Abortion, Every Day” newsletter reports that the move, which targets funding under Title X, will hit multiple nonprofit organizations, including conservatives’ bogeyman Planned Parenthood. Several states will be impacted, with Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Utah having their Title X funds reduced to zero. Other states, such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Alaska will lose the majority of their funding, while Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia will lose part of their funding. Title X provides funds, mostly to uninsured and low-income Americans, for cancer screenings, birth control, and testing for sexually transmitted infections, as the country’s only federal family planning program. Sixty percent of women benefit from publicly funded clinics as their usual source of health care, while for 40 percent, these clinics are their only health care option. The move comes after the White House froze $120 million in Title X program grants last week, half of the entire program, to make sure that recipients were complying with executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Conservatives have also wanted to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that advocate for abortion rights for a long time, despite federal law already prohibiting taxpayer funds being used for the procedure.Now it seems that the right is going even further in targeting family planning and reproductive health altogether. Millions of people will lose access to pregnancy testing, contraception, STI treatment, infertility evaluation and counseling, and numerous other health services. But, as was said in the first Trump administration, the cruelty is the point.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193447/trump-cuts-planned-parenthood

2025-04-01 21:51:25

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In a stroke of revenge for Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thousands of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost their jobs Tuesday. The “reduction in force” affected workers across many departments vital to U.S. public health, including the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the Division of Population Health, the Division of Reproductive Health, the Division of HIV Prevention, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, Wired reports.Even programs at the centers on Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion as well as HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention were affected. The HIV program reportedly lost at least half of its workforce. Employees across the agency received notices via email beginning 5 a.m. Tuesday, with some workers showing up to their offices to find their ID badges didn’t work anymore. “I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” the email notice stated, according to Wired. “This RIF does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct. It is being taken solely for the reasons stated in the memorandum. After you receive this notice you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.”One CDC employee told the magazine that “[t]here has been no effort in allowing staff to transfer projects, programs, or responsibilities.” Even the Freedom of Information Act office at the CDC, as well as the FDA’s communications and web office, were cut.The move comes among massive layoffs from Kennedy across the entire Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday. Those firings include people at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Kennedy has long been an anti-vaccine activist, so the move is in line with his beliefs, especially since he has already revoked over $11 billion in Covid-19 aid funding from HHS. Trump has long held a grudge against the CDC and other public health agencies, blaming them for tanking his first term when it was really his own mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, he and Kennedy are dealing a crippling blow to public health in America.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193453/trump-revenge-cdc-layoffs

2025-04-01 21:51:25

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Nine House Republicans defected from their party on the parental proxy vote Tuesday in a direct rejection of Speaker Mike Johnson plans.The vote was for a bill regarding whether to allow new parents in the House to have a proxy vote for them in the first 12 weeks after the birth of their child The legislation, which would have helped new mothers and fathers, was put forth by MAGA Republican Anna Paulina Luna and Democrats Brittany Pettersen and Sara Jacobs. Luna and Pettersen each gave birth recently, and there is no parental leave for members of Congress. When Johnson and other House Republican leaders went out of their way to block the bill, nine House Republicans—Luna, Kevin Kiley, Tim Burchett, Jeff Van Drew, Greg Steube, Mike Lawler, Ryan Mackenzie, Nick LaLota, and Max Miller—all turned on Johnson, torpedoing his plans and passing the pare parental proxy bill. The nine betrayals bothered Johnson so much that he cancelled votes in the House for the rest of the week. Johnson, who doesn’t have the greatest working relationship with Luna, insisted that the parental proxy bill would lead to more representatives voting remotely. “I believe it’s unconstitutional. I believe it violates more than two centuries of tradition in the institution, and I think that it opens a Pandora’s box where, ultimately, maybe no one is here, and we’re all voting remotely by AI or something. I don’t know,” Johnson said at a press conference last week. “I don’t think that’s what Congress is supposed to be. This is a deliberative body. You cannot deliberate with your colleagues if you’re out somewhere else.” Republicans are weirdly obsessed with killing this bill, whether it be for anti-work from home reasons, anti-woman reasons, or both. Pettersen, who is the 13th active House member to give birth, spoke in support of Luna’s bill on the House floor while holding her 9-week-old son Sam in her arms. Sam was born prematurely. “No mom or dad should be in the position that I was in and so many parents have found themselves in. It is anti-woman, it’s anti-family and we need to come together,” she said. “We have a long ways to go to make this place accessible for young families like mine…. For all of the parents here, we know that when we have newborns, it’s when they’re the most vulnerable in their life. It’s when they need 24-7 care.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/193448/9-house-republicans-mike-johnson-vote-proxy-voting

2025-03-27 15:27:34

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President Trump had a late-night meltdown on Truth Social about his least favorite federal judge being assigned to the Signalgate lawsuit.“How disgraceful is it that ‘Judge’ James Boasberg has just been given a fourth ‘Trump Case,’ something which is, statistically, IMPOSSIBLE. There is no way for a Republican, especially a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, to win before him. He is Highly Conflicted, not only in his hatred of me—Massive Trump Derangement Syndrome!— but also, because of disqualifying family conflicts,” Trump wrote past one o’clock in the morning on Thursday.“Boasberg, who is the Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court, seems to be grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself, even though it is not supposed to happen that way,” he continued. “Is there still such a thing as the ‘wheel,’ where the Judges are chosen fairly, and at random? The good news is that it probably doesn’t matter, because it is virtually impossible for me to get an Honest Ruling in D.C. Our Nation’s Courts are broken, with New York and D.C. being the most preeminent of all in their Corruption and Radicalism. There must be an immediate investigation of this Rigged System, before it is too late!”Trump officials were sued Tuesday by the government watchdog American Oversight after news broke that The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to a Signal group chat in which multiple Cabinet members and Vice President JD Vance were discussing an attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The administration has denied that anything classified was covered, and Trump himself blamed it on someone who worked at a “lower level.” Now Boasberg will be the judge.Boasberg’s Signalgate assignment comes after he already ruled against the Trump administration’s extrajudicial deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan men with no proven ties to Tren de Agua—the gang that Trump swears they’re all from—to El Salvador.“This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President—He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!” Trump wrote of Boasberg on Truth Social on March 18. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/193232/trump-judge-war-plans-group-chat

2025-03-27 15:27:34

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Elon Musk is so desperate to get Wisconsin voters to sign his petition condemning so-called “activist” judges, he’s paying them a million dollars—but there’s reason to doubt the giveaway is even real. Musk’s America PAC announced the first so-called “winner” of his million-dollar giveaway on Wednesday, in the latest attempt from the oligarch to interfere with the democratic process. “Scott A. From Green Bay, WI is the first $1 Million spokesperson for signing our Petition In Opposition To Activist Judges. Stay tuned between now and April 1st for more surprise announcements from Wisconsin,” a post on X reads. The petition asked voters to reject “the actions of activist judges who impose their own views” and demand “a judiciary that respects its role—interpreting, not legislating.”Musk previously held a $1 million sweepstakes in several swing states, including Wisconsin, ahead of the presidential election. He invited voters to sign a petition endorsing the constitutional right to free speech and to bear arms—potentially collecting data on millions of voters.Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner sued Musk to prevent him from continuing his grift, but a judge said he failed to prove Musk was holding an illegal lottery because Krasner could provide no evidence beyond “speculation.” When Krasner petitioned the court, his bid was denied by the judge because there was only one sweepstakes remaining. Well, it seems like there will be a lot more, as Musk continues efforts to buy the nation’s courts after purchasing the presidency. Crucially, it’s unlikely that there was any “winner” to Musk’s game. In November, America PAC lawyers revealed in court that the so-called winners were paid spokespeople for the PAC, not victors in a game of chance. It seems implausible that this time would be any different—especially when they got away with it so easily before. Musk has been offering $100 to anyone who completes his petition in Wisconsin ahead of the state Supreme Court race on April 1. Musk has also put at least $20 million behind conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is set to weigh questions on hot-button issues, including the use of voter drop boxes in elections, abortion access, and redrawing congressional maps. A Republican majority on the court could influence the outcome in any of these cases, which would have national repercussions. Musk is also waging his own legal battle in the state, after he sued Wisconsin for not allowing Tesla dealerships there.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193237/elon-musk-raffle-wisconsin-supreme-court-election

2025-03-27 15:27:34

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The American public knew before Donald Trump that top administration officials had conducted airstrikes on Yemen via a Signal chat, and now it appears that the president has been left in the dark on other intelligence matters too.At an Oval Office news briefing Wednesday evening, Trump casually admitted that he was not aware that several U.S. army members had gone missing during a training exercise in Lithuania.“Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania who are missing?” a reporter asked.“No, I haven’t,” Trump said.Reporter: Have you been briefed about the soldiers in Lithuania? Who are missing?President Trump: No, I haven't. pic.twitter.com/IP4NKoSsUu— Acyn (@Acyn) March 26, 2025Earlier that day, the U.S. Army released a statement that four soldiers had disappeared on training grounds in a swamp near Pabradė, along the border with Belarus. The soldiers were conducting “scheduled tactical training” at the time of their disappearance, according to the Army. The M88 Hercules armored recovery vehicle they had been using was discovered 16 feet underground a day after the soldiers went missing, reported NBC News. But the armymen were known to be missing as early as Tuesday at 4:45 p.m., the Lithuanian military said, so why Trump was still unaware of the situation more than 24 hours later is unclear.Search efforts are “underway,” the Army said in their statement, specifying that the operation has been a joint effort between U.S. military officials, the Lithuanian Armed Forces, Lithuanian law enforcement, the Lithuanian Fire and Rescue Department, and other groups. Helicopters operated by Lithuanian Air Forces and the State Border Guard began a search and rescue mission on Tuesday, according to the country’s military press office.“I would like to personally thank the Lithuanian Armed Forces and first responders who quickly came to our aid in our search operations,” said Lieutenant General Charles Costanza, the V Corps commanding general. “It’s this kind of teamwork and support that exemplifies the importance of our partnership and our humanity regardless of what flags we wear on our shoulders.”The lapse in Trump’s knowledge begs the question, however, as to just how much intel the president has been left out of within the folds of his own administration.During another White House press briefing on Monday, Trump fumbled by admitting that he was not only not invited to his Cabinet’s Signal exchange, in which his top officials discussed when, how, and where they would bomb Houthi targets in Yemen, but that he actually had no idea it had happened.“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said at the time, noting that a reporter’s question regarding the group chat was the first he had heard of it. “But I know nothing about it, you’re saying that they had what?”
https://newrepublic.com/post/193235/donald-trump-intelligence-group-chat-lithuania

2025-03-27 15:27:34

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Kari Lake, the failed Arizona politician and current special adviser to the president at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has withdrawn the termination of a federal grant to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, one of the agency’s media properties, to end a legal fight. Lake gave notice in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday that the grant termination was being withdrawn, and also sent a letter to RFE/RL’s president, Stephen Capus, notifying the organization that the grant agreement was restored. But the letter added a caveat: The grant was restored “without prejudice,” meaning that Lake and the Trump administration can still terminate the grants at a later date if they so choose.Lake officially serves as a special adviser to the president in charge of the agency while she awaits Senate confirmation to take over as director of Voice of America, also part of the USAGM. Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order gutting USAGM, resulting in all VOA employees being fired and other outlets, such as RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, operating with minimal resources while they challenged the order in court. Now it seems that at least RFE/RL has some temporary relief to be able to serve its mission of reporting in 27 languages to 23 countries around the world, many of which don’t have a functioning free press. But the USAGM’s other media outlets aren’t so fortunate, and for now are still at the mercy of a Trump appointee known for peddling election lies and even lying about the agency she’s now trying to run.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193234/kari-lake-radio-free-europe-liberty

2025-03-24 20:31:50

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Everyone knows what it’s like to be unwillingly added to a group chat—but it’s not usually a threat to national security. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported Monday that earlier this month, he’d been dropped into a Signal group chat with several high-ranking members of Donald Trump’s administration, where they plotted a bombing campaign in Yemen. The 18 members of the group chat called “Houthi PC small group” appeared to include senior Trump officials and Cabinet members such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Goldberg said that he had been inexplicably added to the group chat on March 11 by a user called Michael Waltz, whom Goldberg determined to be Trump’s national security adviser. There, in full view of the head of a publication Trump recently called a “Third Rate Magazine,” senior-most officials hatched what appears to be a moneymaking scheme to bomb a foreign country. The latest round of strikes last week killed more than 50 people so far, and injured 100 more, according to Al Jazeera. On March 13, Waltz wrote that he was creating a “principles group,” or principals committee of senior officials, to discuss national security plans. Waltz requested points of contact from the group’s many high-ranking members, and the names seemed to be reasonably real. For instance, Vance said his point of contact would be Andy Baker, his national security adviser, and Rubio said the State Department’s would be Mike Needham, Rubio’s counselor and chief of staff. The next day, a signal user identified as “JD Vance” aired his hesitations about moving forward with bombing Yemen. The alleged Vance claimed that it would be a “mistake” to defend trade in the Suez Canal because that would mostly benefit Europe, which sees 40 percent of its trade travel through that route. Meanwhile, the U.S. only ships 3 percent of trade through the Suez Canal. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.,” Vance wrote. A user called “Pete Hegseth” said that Vance should raise his concerns with the president. “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” He pushed for them to proceed with the campaign in case Israel took action first or the plans leaked.“This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered,” the user called Hegseth wrote. Waltz also pushed that they move forward with strikes, reminding members that the president had directed the Defense and State departments to “compile the costs associated and levy them on Europeans.” Later that day, the alleged Vance agreed with alleged Hegseth, writing, “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” The possible DOD head replied, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”One user, called “S M,” who Goldberg believed could be Stephen Miller, said that the U.S. should seek remuneration for the strikes in Yemen from Europe and Egypt, and figure out a way to “enforce such a requirement.”“If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” the user “S M” wrote. Goldberg wrote that the next day, March 15, Hegseth sent lengthy messages that could not be repeated. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility,” Goldberg said.To confirm that the group chat was legitimate, Goldberg said he waited for the first round of detonations to hit Sanaa, and they did, exactly when the user identified as “Pete Hegseth” said they would. A round of congratulatory messages were sent in the chat. Goldberg, having concluded that the conversation was real, exited the group chat, and received no follow-up from Waltz. Goldberg’s surreal experience among the decision-makers of the Trump administration comes amid promises to crack down on leakers within the government. Just hours before the U.S. began strikes on Yemen, Gabbard warned that the Trump administration would be aggressively pursuing leakers from within the intelligence community. By including Goldberg in the conversation, Waltz has made himself the classic definition of a leaker. But it may be worse than that.“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain [has] now committed a crime—even if accidentally. We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe,” wrote Delaware Senator Chris Coons in a post on X Monday. The Atlantic reported that several national security experts surmised that Waltz’s use of Signal had likely violated the Espionage Act, because he had discussed information related to national defense. Typically, discussing military activity requires officials to enter a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, where cell phones are not allowed. “Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe,” Goldberg wrote. Signal is also not an approved venue for sensitive information, and because Waltz had set some of the messages to automatically disappear after a few weeks, it seems that the group chat likely violated federal rules about keeping records of official acts.National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes confirmed Monday that the group chat was legitimate.“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our servicemembers or our national security,” he said.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193098/donald-trump-advisers-journalist-top-secret-war-group-chat

2025-02-10 23:30:36

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The Supreme Court’s decision to expand the definition of presidential immunity may have just caused a hiccup for Donald Trump’s administration.A federal judge ruled Monday that Trump’s FBI must disclose records from its Mar-a-Lago case file, complying with a FOIA request by Business Insider’s Jason Leopold. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell decided that the Supreme Court’s decision—combined with his return to the White House and its executive privileges—has insulated Trump enough from further criminal prosecution to allow the release of documents.“With the far dampened possibility of any criminal investigation to gather evidence about a president’s conduct and of any public enforcement proceeding against a president, the [Supreme Court’s] decision … has left a FOIA request as a critical tool for the American public to keep apprised of a president’s conduct,” Howell ruled.Howell also ordered the FBI to provide a timetable of release for files pertaining to Leopold’s request, with a mandatory update required by February 20.The FBI had used Glomar arguments to retain the privacy of the Mar-a-Lago case files, falling back on its typical refusal to “confirm or deny” a criminal investigation in order to safeguard ongoing investigations. But the decimation of any future case against Trump on the details of the case has completely undermined that argument, according to the judge.“In these circumstances, defendants’ Glomar arguments crumble with no more weight than dust and just as little persuasiveness,” Howell wrote. “As plaintiff pointedly highlights, as to President Trump, ‘there is a reasonable argument that [he] is immune from prosecution for flushing his own records down the toilet while in office.’”In a footnote, Howell torched the high court’s decision to grant Trump such sweeping protections, likening their actions to enablers of the fascist regime of Nazi Germany.“Of course, while the Supreme Court has provided a protective and presumptive immunity cloak for a president’s conduct, that cloak is not so large to extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president,” Howell wrote. “The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of ‘just following orders’ has long been rejected in this country’s jurisprudence.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/191370/donald-trump-supreme-court-immunity-lawsuit

2025-02-10 23:30:36

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Vice President JD Vance is exactly as irrelevant to Donald Trump as he is to everyone else. In an interview Sunday with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump threw Vance under the bus when asked about the future for the former never-Trump Republican who sold out his principles, his dignity, and even his own family, to boost Trump’s shot at unchecked power. His reward? Nothing, it seems. “Do you view Vice President JD Vance as your successor, the Republican nominee in 2028?” Baier asked.“No,” Trump replied. “But he’s very capable!“I mean I don’t think that it—you know, I think we have a lot of very capable people,” Trump continued. “So far, I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting.”“But by the time you get to the midterms, he’s going to be looking for an endorsement,” Baier pressed. “Yeah, a lot of people have said this has been the greatest opening, almost three weeks, in the history of the presidency,” Trump said, weaving into a rant about how amazing he is at being president.Baier: Do you view JD Vance as your successor?Trump: No.. pic.twitter.com/tjlbPEQoX5— Acyn (@Acyn) February 10, 2025It’s possible that Trump tried to sidestep answering because he already has a candidate in mind for 2028, and—spoiler alert—it’s not Vance. Although he isn’t allowed to run again, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of doing so, both on the campaign trail and since winning the presidency. It doesn’t seem as if Trump cares very much about what is legal and what’s not.In lieu of actually governing, Vance seems to be filling his empty hours posting on X about a range of random topics, including rubber-stamping the rehiring of a racist to DOGE, undermining the checks and balances that underpin our democracy, and complaining about dog cross-breeding.
https://newrepublic.com/post/191372/donald-trump-jd-vance-humiliated

2025-02-10 23:30:35

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A federal judge has indefinitely extended the deadline for federal workers to accept Donald Trump’s buyout offer.The president had posed a “fork in the road” ultimatum for federal employees via the Office of Personnel Management late last month: Either opt for a “deferred resignation” that would pay them through September, or face a possible furlough. The temporary restraining order on the program put in place by U.S. District Judge George O’Toole will remain in place while the court weighs the legality of the buyout, reported CNN Monday.Eligible federal workers had originally faced a midnight deadline on Thursday to accept or deny Trump’s offer. O’Toole imposed an initial restraining order, just hours before the offer expired, delaying the deadline to late Monday. “The pressure that comes from that deadline where people have to make their choice about their livelihood,” argued Elena Goldstein, an attorney for the plaintiffs: “Irreparable harm will continue. They will be asking what they actually accepted. OPM is making it up as they go along.”Unions for federal employees were behind the lawsuit, calling OPM’s “Fork Directive” a “sweeping and stunningly arbitrary action to solicit blanket resignations of federal workers,” according to court filings.Attorneys for the Justice Department counterclaimed that Trump had “campaigned on reducing the federal workforce” and that the mass dismissal program should come as no surprise to Washington’s civil servants. The administration “knew they’d come to a disappointment to a lot of the workforce … so this would be an off-ramp for those employees,” said Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton, per NBC News.
https://newrepublic.com/post/191374/donald-trump-federal-worker-buyout-legal-hurdle

2024-12-31 16:22:49

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The world’s richest man has decided to change his digital look, opting to resurrect a dated image that the Anti-Defamation League flagged as a hate symbol in 2016.Musk’s rebranded account began posting to his 209 million followers on X under the name Kekius Maximus on Tuesday, a blend between “kek”—a gaming variant of “LOL”—and Maximus Decimus Meridius, the main character in Ridley Scott’s 2000 action film Gladiator.“Kekius Maximus will soon reach level 80 in hardcore PoE,” Musk posted.Musk’s memeified alter ago also includes an archaic reference in the annals of internet history: Pepe the Frog, a character that has existed on internet message boards and blogs like 4chan and Tumblr since 2008. In 2015, Pepe was co-opted by the far-right, and recent usage of the image in the U.S. has become synonymous with anti-semites and white nationalists, and harkens back to its presence at the forefront of violent movements like the Charlottesville riot and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.Under his new guise, Musk decided to attack Wikipedia, resharing a three-year-old clip of the digital encyclopedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger torching his creation for going “woke.”“Don’t take it from me (I’m just a frog after all), take it from the co-founder of Wikipedia,” Musk wrote under his new pseudonym.(Sanger wasn’t amused by the drudged up interview. Instead, he torched the billionaire for refusing to refund an “ineffective annual subscription” to X. “Tell your staff to refund my money, Elon,” Sanger wrote.)Don’t take it from me (I’m just a frog after all), take it from the co-founder of Wikipedia https://t.co/jrh08VOQHn— Kekius Maximus (@elonmusk) December 31, 2024Musk’s alleged burner account, Adrian Dittman, also got in on the tired meme, preemptively toying with the idea that journalists would legitimately refer to the incoming Department of Government Efficiency co-chair via his chosen joke title.“Imagine you’re a journalist who’s writing about Elon on X and it goes: ‘Elon Musk, aka ‘Kekius Maximus’ on X…” Dittman posted Tuesday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189752/elon-musk-far-right-troll-x-profile-change-pepe-frog

2024-12-27 11:53:51

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Of all the developments that conspired to wreck Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, none has received more retroactive blame than the international revolt against incumbents.In the weeks following the Democrats’ Waterloo, academics and journalists were quick to point to the body count of foreign leaders who have been felled by their electorates’ fickle loyalties over the last few years. After the defenestration of the Conservatives in the U.K., the once unbeatable ANC in South Africa, and even North Macedonia’s Social Democratic Union, Donald Trump’s return to power struck some commentators as simply the American adaptation of an unstoppable global trend. There are reasons to be leery of this explanation. One principled objection is that it tends to absolve the Democrats themselves, along with their aligned complex of policy and campaign professionals, of responsibility for voters’ low opinion of them. The actual contingencies of governance in the world’s oldest democracy—including years of corrosive inflation and unchecked migrant flows, and the Biden administration’s disputed responsibility for each—ought not be reduced to a variation on themes also playing out in North Macedonia.There are also exceptions to the anti-incumbency rule. In Spain, where the runaway economy resembles that of the United States much more closely than its European neighbors’, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez received a higher share of the popular vote in last year’s parliamentary contest than in 2019. And earlier this year, Mexicans cheerfully elected Claudia Sheinbaum of the leftist Morena party to succeed her mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.The particulars of the recent U.S. election were also globally, and historically, unique. The Democratic Party was fully aware of the headwinds facing Joe Biden, but still stuck with its own incumbent far too long before nervously anointing Harris, the single figure most connected with his unpopular presidency. She was not, in fact, the incumbent, and she ran against a cult figure whose ubiquity in American culture made him a kind of crypto-president while out of office. All those caveats aside, it’s true that running for reelection in a post-Covid, high-inflation environment has been a macabre proposition for virtually anyone attempting it. Every plausible Democratic candidate, from Biden to Harris to the host of aspirants who might have jumped into a contested primary, likely would have met the same fate. Even so, the popular narrative misses something critical: Americans’ distaste for their own elected officials is not the symptom of a memetic bug recently caught from Argentina or Poland, but a distinctly homegrown phenomenon. In fact, it has been at work for the better part of two decades.This becomes clear when one asks which recent election, whether in a presidential or midterm cycle, was decided in favor of continuity rather than change. Control of either the White House or at least one chamber of Congress switched parties in nine of the last 10 federal elections dating back to 2006; even in the lone exception, 2012, Republicans held onto their majority in the House of Representatives despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents nationwide. While Biden’s belated exit from the 2024 race will be remembered as a singular episode of political hubris, the whiplash of those results has befooled a generation of leaders in both parties—periodically leading them to make, and lose, political gambles that subsequently appear mysterious. George W. Bush staked the political capital he won in 2004 on Social Security reform, only to have it open a trapdoor under his entire second term. Barack Obama hit the Tea Party wall just two years after charging into office on a generational tide of progressive enthusiasm. Mitt Romney’s team was reportedly dumbfounded on election night in 2012, just as Clinton advisers deluded themselves on their way to a 2016 shock for the ages. The list goes on.The peculiarity of the age is even more apparent when examined over the sweep of the twentieth century, during which an incumbent president was reelected in almost every decade. More impressive still, he typically captured more votes, a higher vote share, and often a better Electoral College margin than in his previous race (or that of the man he succeeded in office). Theodore Roosevelt accomplished the feat in 1904, Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1996.You can throw in Bush II for good measure, but none others have followed. Barack Obama, as gifted a vote-getter as any of his predecessors, couldn’t recreate his huge 2008 margins after four years in Washington. Trump collected 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet still lost by a considerable margin. Add it up, and a different party has won the White House in each of the last four consecutive elections. The most recent time that happened was between 1880 and 1896, when Republicans traded blows for five straight campaigns with a Democratic Party that had finally washed off the reek of slavery and secession. Not coincidentally, it was also the only other period when a president—New York’s Grover Cleveland, beloved of bar trivia contestants and mugwumps alike—served two nonconsecutive terms. The politics of the late nineteenth century are often cited as an analogue for those of modern times. We too live in an era of close elections and ultra-high voter turnout, each driven by our intense partisan identification. And, as in the Gilded Age, modern Americans’ animus toward incumbent politicians extends from the Oval Office to Congress. Back then, the House flipped between parties six times in the span of 20 years. The political entrepreneurs of our own times have put a ceiling on that kind of volatility through the use of algorithm-powered gerrymandering, but it is impossible to imagine one party installing a four-decade majority, as the Democrats did in the 1950s. The electoral lessons of this comparison are undeniably murky. In 1884, the Democrats managed to break the GOP’s 24-year stranglehold on the White House by running Cleveland, the governor of what was then the country’s most important swing state. If they wish to turn the page from the Obama-Biden-Harris epoch, they can choose from among its talented governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or North Carolina, none of whom are closely associated with the party’s disastrous 2024 performance. (They could follow Cleveland’s example even more closely by tapping a known moderate to attract defecting Republicans, but this is a doubtful proposition.) But nominating a few outsiders in the short run won’t quell the apparently perpetual disgust that Americans feel for their leadership class.Perhaps our contemporary political disillusionment seems drawn out of the Gilded Age because the social conditions of the two eras are so similar. Rapid industrial change has transformed, or destroyed, whole communities and industries while producing a new vanguard of corporate titans in the mode of Gould, Carnegie, and Rockefeller. The country’s demographic composition has been transformed by historically high rates of immigration, even as the clustering of opportunity in cities exhausts the urban housing supply. What’s more, as in the 1890s, marriage and childbearing rates are sinking noticeably as both sexes navigate an economy that increasingly devalues blue-collar work. These essential features of American life were only harmonized through the political reforms of the Progressive era, when both parties helped lay the groundwork for workers’ rights, the welfare and regulatory states, antitrust enforcement, and early efforts for equality among sexes and races. Much more controversial initiatives, including Prohibition and drastic immigration restrictions, reshaped society in their own ways. Though we are inclined to remember its most heated moments of partisan competition, from McCarthyism to Watergate, the political milieu experienced by our parents and grandparents was actually marked by extraordinary stability when contrasted with what came before—and since. Our lengthy experiment of continually throwing the bums out may also be consigned to history if one or both parties can offer the public a revised social contract along similar lines. In that case, they will have earned a few reelection wins.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189429/anti-incumbent-bias-america-worse-global-wave

2024-12-27 11:53:50

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The American economy seems to be doing pretty well right now, at least on paper. Unemployment is low. Stocks are up from last year. Inflation is slowing. Things aren’t great for everyone, of course, but they could be a lot worse. President-elect Donald Trump hopes to upend that status quo in the new year.On the campaign trail and since election night, Trump has vowed to impose significant tariffs on some of the nation’s largest trading partners, which will make things more expensive for the American consumer. Trump’s mass deportation plans could cause economic chaos if carried out at enough scale, particularly in the agriculture and construction sectors. His administration’s plans to disrupt and dismantle the federal bureaucracy could take a toll as well.Trump tends to overpromise and under-deliver, so some or most of this may not happen. If his policies do lead to a recession, however, I think Americans will make an unsettling discovery: A significant portion of the American economy is essentially fake. Some of the nation’s wealthiest people are going to great lengths to keep it propped up, even to the point of swaying the presidential election to help preserve it. If anything, 2024 may be remembered as the year that the bubble took over.Two separate but related industries exemplify what some have called the “bullshit economy.” The American Prospect’s David Dayen memorably wrote about it after Iowa Democrats paid a curiously well-connected tech company to develop an unnecessary app called Shadow to more speedily report the results of the 2020 caucus. When the app crashed on caucus night, bedlam followed, and it took longer to find out the results than if they’d done it the old-fashioned way.“This is reflective of the rolling incompetence covered by confidence within the modern economy, especially when you sprinkle on the labor-saving promise of techtopia,” Dayen wrote. “When the bullshit economy fails, it robs people’s belief in the basic bargain of commerce, the idea that you get what you pay for, that companies operate in good faith to provide quality service.”Two examples exemplify this trend. One of them is “crypto,” a term that now encompasses cryptocurrencies, blockchains, NFTs, and so on. Until recently it has been a grim time in the crypto world. In my 2022 retrospective column, I described crypto as the “boondoggle of the year,” partly because many of its highest-profile figures and companies had collapsed or been disgraced, with ruinous consequences for their customers and employees, and partly because “boondoggle” is a great word that I rarely get to use. “Hopefully Americans exit this year with a healthy dose of wariness toward the crypto ‘industry’ and a deeper skepticism of get-rich-quick schemes,” I wrote at the time. How naïve I was. Some of crypto’s leading figures went to prison for fraud, tax evasion, and more. But the ones who didn’t are now stronger than ever. Not because crypto’s creators and evangelists have finally fashioned a productive or efficient use for it. Perish the thought. You are no closer to being able to buy a loaf of bread from your local grocery store with tether or ethereum or dogecoin or whatever the latest “coin” is than you were two years ago.Instead, crypto’s survival has come through betraying its original ambitions. Crypto advocates have been correct about one thing over the years: The United States dollar, like nearly all modern currencies, is a fiat medium of exchange that is intrinsically vulnerable to inflation, deflation, and other forms of government manipulation. By unmooring itself from government control, the original, Great Recession–era creators of cryptocurrencies hoped to create an alternative to the dollar that would benefit ordinary people instead of banks and politicians.The difference—what makes the dollar “real” and crypto “fake”—is that the dollar has an army, a navy, and courts that can render legally binding judgments upon creditors and debtors. Crypto’s wealthy backers have responded to this counterpoint in a simple, brute way—by simply buying Congress and the White House. The crypto industry spent at least $135 million on congressional candidates from both parties during the last election cycle, hoping to maximize their influence in Washington. It now enjoys support from Trump and the Republican Party, as well as a considerable number of Democrats.What do they expect to get in return for these campaign donations? A more favorable regulatory and law enforcement environment, for one thing. Leading crypto figures know that all those pesky regulators and investigators in Washington—the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, and so on—could bring their party to an end. Trump has even pledged to make the U.S. a “Bitcoin superpower,” whatever that means. For now, it means installing pro-crypto figures atop the SEC and other key agencies.In cryptocurrency, scams are so common that there is a special lingo surrounding them. Early adopters will create a coin, promote it, and then sell their supply at the top in what is known as a “rug-pull,” meaning that they pull the rug out from under the feet of their putative investors. Those left behind are known as “bag-holders.” The most recent one involved a young woman who became famous for a viral two-second joke about oral sex. For some reason, thousands of people bought a cryptocurrency that she promoted and brought its value up to $500 million—which then plummeted back to earth when the creators apparently cashed out.The crypto industry’s greater ambition may be to get the federal government—and, by extension, all Americans—to be the ultimate bag-holder by directly buying cryptocurrencies with taxpayer dollars. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of the industry’s leading allies, introduced a bill this summer titled the Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024, or Bitcoin Act of 2024. (I’ve previously given my thoughts on acronym bills.)If enacted, Lummis’s bill would require the Treasury Department to purchase 200,000 Bitcoins every year for five years after it is enacted. At current market prices, that would amount to roughly $10 trillion in real money. Those Bitcoins would then be placed in a “strategic Bitcoin reserve,” from which the federal government could not sell them for 20 years. Other Bitcoins already held by federal agencies would be transferred into this “reserve” as well. And then they would just … sit there.This is a dream scenario for early crypto adopters and no one else. Forget trying to time the market’s peak before people inevitably catch on to crypto’s weaknesses or they fall into an unfavorable regulatory environment. They can simply unload all these unproductive, intangible, nonfungible, and inexplicably expensive assets onto the federal government of the United States and get real money for them in return. Lummis described it as “our Louisiana Purchase moment,” but that only makes sense if we’re the French.While crypto has failed to achieve widespread use, AI is making extraordinary inroads into everyday life. It’s important to distinguish “generative AI,” which is the term I’ll use for the modern form, from actual artificial intelligence, which only appears in science fiction. Generative AI programs cannot replicate human intelligence. They lack creativity, imagination, self-doubt, and emotion. Branding triumphs over everything, however, and “artificial intelligence” probably appealed more to investors than “generative language learning models,” so now we are stuck with that term.One of AI’s fundamental flaws is that it “hallucinates,” the term used by developers for when it gives wrong information based on its corpus of accurate information. Lawyers who use ChatGPT to research precedents for a lawsuit have been sanctioned for giving fake case citations in court. BBC News criticized Apple this month after the tech giant’s AI software incorrectly summarized its news articles to say that the UnitedHealthcare CEO murder suspect had shot himself.There are some differences between these two industries. Crypto does not do anything or solve any problems; generative AI can at least do things, even if it currently or inherently does them poorly. There is genuine scientific and technological advancement behind AI software and the hardware that fuels it. It’s possible, if not probable, that generative large language models might have productive use cases in the near future. Even if Silicon Valley can’t create Data from Star Trek, it might be able to create, say, the universal translator or something extremely close to it.The other problem is that people are mistaking existing AI products for actual artificial intelligence and using them in self-destructive ways. Even if one assumes AI will someday play a positive role in society, that day is not today. Major companies are stumbling over each other to launch AI-driven products and AI-connected services with little care for what consumers want or desire. When Apple added Apple Intelligence to its newest phones, most users reportedly found it largely useless.AI’s top boosters aren’t aiming for something more humble, however. What they are promising is nothing less than a fundamental shift in the human experience. Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital fund, wrote a manifesto in 2023 that illustrates how they promote the new technology and dismiss its critics. Apparently not one to set low expectations, he titled it, “Why AI Will Save the World.”Some of Andreessen’s points have merit. He is skeptical of the claims from some AI critics—and even a few of its enthusiasts—that AI could present some sort of extinction-level threat to humanity, dismissing them as either flawed misunderstandings of the technology or self-interested promotions by its boosters. (His ally Elon Musk, another AI hype enthusiast, is sometimes guilty of this.)“The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave,” he wrote. “In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine—[it] is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.”Some of his other defenses of AI were less persuasive. In one section, he dismissed fears that AI will eliminate jobs and industries by noting that technology has always done that, and it has eventually led to new jobs and new industries. “We’ve been through two such technology-driven unemployment panic cycles in our recent past—the outsourcing panic of the 2000’s, and the automation panic of the 2010’s,” he wrote, noting that despite these fears “the world had more jobs at higher wages than ever in history” before Covid-19.This argument likely plays better in Silicon Valley C-suites than, say, among steelworkers in Pennsylvania or automakers in Michigan who saw their livelihoods shipped off to foreign countries with weaker labor laws by corporate executives focused on maximizing shareholder value. The problem is not just that AI boosters hope to eliminate entire professions and industries, but that they are replacing them with inferior, hackneyed, hallucinating substitutes. UnitedHealthcare, for example, reportedly used it to deny medically necessary claims from elderly patients. It also did not help Andreessen’s case that he undercut it himself almost immediately. After making a fairly reasonable argument for why technological innovation doesn’t necessarily reduce a society’s overall wealth, he let the mask slip a bit and invited his audience to “think of what it would mean for literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.”It would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent. Prices of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero. Consumer welfare would skyrocket. Consumer spending power would skyrocket. New demand in the economy would explode. Entrepreneurs would create dizzying arrays of new industries, products, and services, and employ as many people and AI as they could as fast as possible to meet all the new demand.Suppose AI once again replaces that labor? The cycle would repeat, driving consumer welfare, economic growth, and job and wage growth even higher. It would be a straight spiral up to a material utopia that neither Adam Smith or Karl Marx ever dared dream of. We should be so lucky.Consider me somewhat skeptical that AI actually could do any of that. To be as specific as possible, the problem here isn’t that AI programs will render entire industries and forms of human endeavor obsolete and redundant. It’s that a lot of wealthy, powerful people think and want AI to do that, and are willing to replace flesh-and-blood Americans who have mortgages to pay and kids to raise with sloppy, hallucinatory chatbots that won’t take sick leave or request PTO.Those who think this might be a net negative for American society are described as “doomers” by Andreessen and other AI investors for their Luddite resistance to their utopia. The solution, he argued, is for the government to make it as easy as possible for AI companies to immanentize the eschaton by shredding any troublesome regulations that could stand in their way. Any obstacles raised by broader societal concerns are dismissed out of hand.“Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can—but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect[ed] cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk,” he wrote as part of his conclusions. “This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.”And if you don’t give the oligarchs of Silicon Valley what they want, well, then you’re just helping Beijing. “To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself,” Andreessen wrote. “We win, they lose.”Another way to put this manifesto is that the Silicon Valley oligarchs who have invested billions of dollars in AI programs want to maximize their potential market share and reduce regulatory costs. They appear to think they are the first capitalists in history to argue that if they can make as much money as possible with no guardrails, it would be beneficial to society as a whole. They would be the first ones to be correct.The problem with overpromising and under-delivering is that it catches up to you. Some Wall Street firms and Silicon Valley funds are already raising concerns about whether AI companies can achieve a return on the hundreds of billions they have spent. Sequoia Capital, one of the nation’s most prominent tech funds, noted last year that there is a growing gap between the amount of investment into hardware and software and the revenue that it generates.Consider the following: For every $1 spent on a GPU, roughly $1 needs to be spent on energy costs to run the GPU in a data center. So if Nvidia sells $50B in run-rate GPU revenue by the end of the year (a conservative estimate based on analyst forecasts), that implies approximately $100B in data center expenditures. The end user of the GPU—for example, Starbucks, X, Tesla, Github Copilot or a new startup—needs to earn a margin too. Let’s assume they need to earn a 50% margin. This implies that for each year of current GPU CapEx, $200B of lifetime revenue would need to be generated by these GPUs to pay back the upfront capital investment.Sequoia’s original version of that analysis was written in September 2023. When it revisited the question this summer, that number had risen to $600 billion of revenue needed just to pay off the initial investment. In the September version, it estimated that companies were only $125 billion off in annual revenue to meet that goal. Investment costs brought that number up to $500 billion when they reran the calculations this summer. These are roughly hewn figures, but they illustrate the scale of the problem: Way, way more money is being spent on AI than is being made on AI at the moment.As a result, the valuations of some AI companies—and, thus, the wealth of their investors—are starting to look a little wonky. OpenAI, the top AI firm in town, recently announced an additional $6.6 billion in funding, bringing it up to a whopping $157 billion valuation. That would make it as valuable on paper as nine-tenths of the S&P 500 combined. Even though OpenAI had a net loss of $5 billion this year, it expects to make $100 billion in revenue—but not until 2029. Nvidia, the world’s largest chipmaker and a key supplier for AI companies, surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable company last month at a $3.57 trillion valuation.Again, there are important differences between crypto and AI, between a scam and excessive hype. But there are also some striking similarities in how the tech industry is selling them to the American people. Their top backers emphasize the importance of buying in early and lean heavily into the fear of missing out. They claim to be able to provide utopian or near-utopian outcomes, either by preventing the next Great Recession with a stateless, bankless currency or by creating a post-scarcity society of all-knowing AI servants. And they claim that the only way to achieve it is by dismantling any potential obstacles in their way.With Trump’s reelection, 2024 represents their capture of the federal government and the chance to put all their plans into effect—unless the bubble bursts first.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189541/tech-bubble-trump-crypto-ai

2024-12-23 20:52:51

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President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row, before Donald Trump could return to office and carry out his planned “execution spree.”“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said in a statement. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”The prisoners on death row will now serve life in prison instead. Biden also noted that he wouldn’t commute the sentences of those charged with hate crimes or terrorism. Dylan Roof, who killed nine Black people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston in 2015, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, will each remain on death row. Biden’s announcement has already infuriated the right, who see it as some great injustice that men who were set to be executed will instead be spending the rest of their lives in a cage. “It’s horrifying that Pres. Biden has granted clemency to some of our nation’s most monstrous killers,” Senator John Kennedy wrote on X. “Their victims deserve better, and justice demands more.”“I think it’s yet another abuse of the pardon power,” said Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy. “He wiped the slate clean … and he did it in a way that is a categorical change of the law.” “It wasn’t BAD ENOUGH Joe Biden let in violent criminals and terrorists across our border ON PURPOSE. Now, he’s commuting the sentences of 37 of America’s OWN most dangerous criminals,” chimed Speaker Mike Johnson on X. “This is a slap in the face to the families who have suffered immeasurably at the hands of these animals.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/189650/maga-reaction-biden-commute-sentences-death-row-prisoners

2024-12-23 20:52:51

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Luigi Mangione’s lawyer slammed Mayor Eric Adams during a hearing Monday, after the embattled New York politician made public statements about her client. “I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mangione’s lawyer. “He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials.”Friedman Agnifilo said that her client was being used as “political fodder” when New York officials on Thursday made a theatrical show of transporting him from Pennsylvania to New York, where he will face state and federal charges.“He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career,” Friedman Agnilio said. “It was absolutely unnecessary.”She argued that it was also illegal, given that a perp walk is unconstitutional if not used for a “legitimate law enforcement objective,” citing a Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling, Lauro v. Charles. Mangione was escorted away from a helicopter surrounded by a massive entourage of more than 15 people, including some heavily armed New York Police Department officers, and one special guest. “And what was the NYC mayor doing at this press conference? That just made it utterly political,” Friedman Agnifilo said. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges in October, inexplicably loomed behind Mangione. “There was absolutely no need for that whatsoever, and frankly, your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone of the presumption of innocence that he too is afforded when he [is] dealing with his own issues,” Friedman Agnifilo said. “And frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione.”In an interview with Pix11 News Thursday, a transcript of which Friedman Agnifilo read out for the record, Adams had explained why he wanted to be present for the stunt. “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we are leading from the front,” Adams said. “I’m not going to just allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state that, ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that the people of New York love.’ And I wanted to be there to show the symbolism of that.”Agnifilo pointed out that Adams was missing a crucial “allegedly” in there. “Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He is somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial, he’s innocent until proven guilty.”Mangione pleaded not guilty to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Last week, Mangione was indicted on several charges, including “murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/189647/luigi-mangione-lawyer-rips-eric-adams-perp-walk-photoshoot

2024-12-23 18:37:45

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The House Ethics Committee report on former Representative Matt Gaetz released Monday details the downright shady ways the Florida Republican would allegedly pay—or not pay—several women and an underage girl with whom he had sexual encounters.The long-awaited report that chased Gaetz out of his House seat determined that the Trump-backed Republican had “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” between at least 2017 and 2020. And the bill is nothing to scoff at.To one woman, whom the committee determined had a long-term relationship with Gaetz from 2017 to 2020, the Florida Republican allegedly shelled out a whopping $63,836.58.The report determined that due to the nature of their relationship “some of the payments may have been of a legitimate nature,” but the woman pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked if the payments were for sexual activity, drugs, or distributing payments to other women. “Based on that assertion combined with evidence received from other sources, the Committee found substantial reason to believe that most of these payments were for such activity,” the report stated. In addition to his payments to that woman, Gaetz allegedly paid nearly a total of $27,500 to eleven different women between 2017 and 2020. This total includes the $400 that Gaetz paid to a 17-year-old girl with whom he allegedly had a sexual encounter, according to the report.An additional $3,950 was paid to Joel Greenberg between 2018 and 2019. Greenberg is Gaetz’s associate who would find girls for them to party with through sugar dating websites and be reimbursed for payments made by the former lawmaker, according to the report. In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to underage sex trafficking, wire fraud, identity theft, stalking, producing a fake ID card, and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. The Committee did not conclude that Gaetz had committed sex trafficking. The report alleged that Gaetz would not set an amount to be paid before his sexual encounters, but that “the women had a general expectation that they would typically receive some amount of money after each sexual encounter.” Gaetz allegedly used this power imbalance to his advantage, according to the report. In one instance, a 21-year-old woman who had expressed to Gaetz that she needed help with her tuition said that he had told her to meet him at a hotel room where he would provide her with a check, which she noted to the Committee was “interesting because he had normally sent Venmo payments.” When the woman arrived at the room, she said she was surprised to find Gaetz, Greenberg, and another 20-year-old woman, and she said there was an “expectation” of a “sexual encounter.” The four engaged in sexual activity, and the 21-year-old woman received a $750 check with “tuition reimbursement” as the memo line. She told the Committee she believed that the encounter “could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money.”Sometimes, it seems, Gaetz would get a little stingy, or fail to make payments to the women. In another instance, Gaetz balked at a woman’s request for money in a text exchange reviewed by the committee. Gaetz bashed the woman for “ditching” him when she was feeling tired, claiming she only gave him a “drive by.” The woman told Gaetz that she was being “treated differently” than the other women he paid fo sex. In a third instance, Gaetz’s then-girlfriend informed some of the women that he paid for sex that Gaetz and Greenberg were a “little limited in their cash flow this weekend,” and said that Gaetz was hoping it could be “more of a customer appreciation week.” In a message a few months later, she wrote that Gaetz now intended to be “a bit generous cause of the ‘customer appreciation’ thing last time.” One woman recalled to the committee a conversation with Gaetz about Greenberg’s issues with “following through” on expected payments after Greenberg’s sexual encounters.According to the report, Gaetz was given opportunities before the committee to discuss his payments to women, but he did not take them. “While he has been unwilling to address the allegations under oath, Representative Gaetz has made several public statements regarding the allegations under the Committee’s review, including that his ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends’ is being misconstrued and that he has ‘never, ever paid for sex,’” the report stated. “The Committee found this to be untrue.”“Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter,” the report concluded. “Such behavior is not ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends,’ and it does not reflect creditably upon the House.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/189645/matt-gaetz-report-paid-women-sex

2024-12-23 17:30:47

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The long-awaited House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz is out, and it finds that the former Florida representative did have sex with an underage girl, among many other offenses. The committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.” The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office, and even lied to the State Department about the identity of one of his sexual partners so that she could get a passport. “Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report stated. Even still, it found no evidence that Gaetz was involved in sex trafficking, as the women were over 18 when they traveled.The report also noted that “nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption.”At least one woman told the committee that drugs at the events with Gaetz may have “impair[ed their] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent.”Among other charges, Gaetz was also found to have accepted an illegal gift via a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, lodgings included, which exceeded the amount allowed for members of Congress.Gaetz has denied all allegations, even going so far as to request a restraining order against the House Ethics Committee. “Giving funds to someone you are dating - that they didn’t ask for - and that isn’t ‘charged’ for sex is now prostitution?!?” Gaetz wrote on X ahead of the report’s release. “There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/189643/matt-gaetz-report

2024-12-23 16:23:38

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Not content with trying to incorporate Canada, President-elect Donald Trump has set his sights further north to Greenland. Too bad it’s not for sale. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede told Trump Monday to back off his outlandish bid to control the world’s biggest island. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” Egede said in a written comment. In a post on Sunday, the president-elect announced that Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term, would serve as the ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, which holds control of the semiautonomous Greenland. He also re-upped a bid to take Greenland off its hands. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Trump previously floated the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland in 2019, which the Danish prime minister at the time called “absurd.” His megalomaniacal musings never came to anything, and likely won’t this time around either. Greenland is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base that, among other things, “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to its website. Greenland is strategically significant to the U.S because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York. It’s also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian navy’s northern fleet operates. U.S. expansion seemed to be on Trump’s mind Sunday, and the geopolitical mastermind also threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, which has been the property of Panama since 1999. “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Trump captioned a photograph of the canal in a post on Truth Social Sunday. Earlier this month, when facing criticism about his plan for harsh tariffs on Canadian imports, Trump made a crack about Canada becoming the 51st state. The last time the U.S. tried to make a play for Canada, the British burned down the U.S. Capitol.It’s difficult to consider Trump’s latest imperialist dreams as anything other than a distraction from his sinister plans stateside—which include violently rounding up undocumented immigrants into camps and deporting them en masse.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189641/greenland-reaction-trump-threat

2024-12-23 16:23:38

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It takes my brother four hours to get to an in-person doctor’s appointment. He has Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, is in a wheelchair, and uses a feeding tube to eat and a ventilator to breathe. To get to the doctor’s office, he needs the assistance of a caregiver and at least one family member in order to pack up and drive his custom-designed wheelchair van and to make sure he’s traveling with everything he needs: backup equipment, supplies, batteries, and medication. If his ventilator or other breathing machines fail, he will die, so this gear is critical. It is in every definition an ordeal. By contrast, it takes him approximately five minutes to sign onto a telehealth visit on his computer, which he can do from his bed.The ability to see doctors virtually has been a silver lining of the pandemic. It’s gone a long way to making health care more accessible to those who are too disabled or too vulnerable to go to the doctor, as well as making things much more convenient for everyone else—especially those living in underserved rural areas. It is perhaps the only improvement to the health care industry in recent years. Telehealth funding for Medicare patients—some 66 million Americans, which includes seniors as well as many with long-term disabilities—was enacted in March 2020 but was set to expire at the end of December 2024 if Congress did not act. In its current state of dysfunction, multiple bipartisan bills oriented at extending telemedicine floundered in committee all year, only for parts to end up hastily shoved into a continuing resolution that lawmakers had actually, somehow, agreed upon—just days before the government was set to run out of funding. That initial deal was better than expected for health care; it included an extension for telehealth, continued community health care center funding, and measures to both lower prescription drug prices, as well as (mostly) reverse a pay cut to Medicare providers. But that plan fell apart for a familiar reason: Republican Party nonsense, with a new disturbing twist. On Wednesday, Elon Musk and Donald Trump trashed the continuing resolution, causing “an epic meltdown” as House Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to come up with a new bill that could be passed in two days, under threat of government shutdown. The bill that ultimately passed is a stopgap measure, extending telehealth for Medicare for three months but leaving out pharmacy benefit manager reforms and maintaining the Medicare provider pay cut. If extending telehealth was the low bar to clear, Congress managed to do even less. Though the measure, in theory, has bipartisan support and may be extended further in the next congressional session, we can be pretty certain that the next bill won’t be increasing pay for Medicare doctors. While most of the expanded social safety net measures granted in the early days of Covid have become vestiges of the past, in this case lawmakers did choose to continue it, but its long-term future remains uncertain. Ahead of Trump’s daunting threats to cut Medicaid, continuing telehealth services remains an urgent necessity for health care access, especially for disabled people, seniors, and rural populations. “Telehealth access changed healthcare for the better, narrowing the gaps in health disparities between different populations,” stated a recent press release from People’s CDC, a public health advocacy organization. Ending telehealth would “force disabled, terminally-ill, high risk, immunocompromised people into in-person visits for services that absolutely don’t require in-person exams.”People with chronic health issues, who have more appointments generally, face challenges in accessing in-person care. Plus, avoiding going to the doctor while actively ill helps protect other patients and staff at health care facilities and avoid forcing themselves out of the house when they feel unwell. Among older Medicare beneficiaries, nearly 20 percent reported difficulty getting to appointments, which for people over 65 averaged about 17 visits per year, as Judy Stone reported in Forbes. People eligible for Medicare due to long-term disabilities report higher use of telemedicine—37 percent versus 23 percent of those who qualify due to age, according to KFF. But telemedicine is popular overall. In the early pandemic, nearly half of Medicare patients used telehealth. While this number dropped to around 13 percent by the end of 2023, that is still a significant chunk. Telehealth can also help bridge disparities in access among people of color, who disproportionately report difficulty accessing necessary health services, as Dr. Tem Woldeyesus, a clinical assistant professor at Stanford Medicine who works as a primary care provider at Roots Community Health in Oakland, California, noted. He told The New Republic that telehealth, and especially phone-based telehealth, has significantly helped his patient population, who are primarily Black and on Medicare or MediCal (California’s version of Medicaid).“A lot of our patients have difficulty with taking time off from work, traveling to our clinic. That’s all costs that they incur, whether it’s from time paid off at work versus the Uber costs or childcare costs they would have to pay for,” he said. Not only does telehealth increase the clinic’s capacity, it “also helps us advance their care along and save lives down the road.”Research suggests that this increased access to preventative care also helps improve patients’ ability to adhere to patient plans and reduces emergency department visits. Dr. Woldeyesus has found that phone appointments are especially beneficial in tackling access gaps for patients. “Oftentimes the folks that are the sickest and have the highest needs may be the ones that have the most limited digital literacy and ability to connect over video,” he said. “So, phone appointments actually become the lowest-tech but highest-impact mode of communication.” Unfortunately, he noted, the expiration of the Affordable Connectivity Program in June, which discounted broadband internet access for eligible households, will make it more difficult for some low-income patients to conduct video appointments. “Seeing some of the support that made [health care] accessible now start to diminish, whether it’s funding or reimbursement or affordability of broadband,” is “kind of an unfortunate story that’s unfolding,” he said.These concerns speak to the importance of pay parity—that doctors get paid the same amount from insurance for in-person and telehealth visits, including audio-only. The telehealth policy changes introduced at the beginning of the pandemic guaranteed this, and must continue for safety net clinics like Dr. Woldeyesus’s to continue providing this service. Though the stopgap bill does include a measure to bill audio services at the same rate as video or in-person, it also upholds a pay cut for Medicare providers, and left out $4.6 billion towards community health center funding, which was included in the original version.Telemedicine coverage is also crucial for increasing health care access for people who live in rural communities. Leigh Boyd, a Medicare patient who lives in the 300-person town of Irwin, Idaho, said that taking away telemedicine coverage would be “a disaster.” Where she lives, there is no mass transit or Uber, so transportation can be an issue, especially in inclement weather. The closest medical hub is an hour away in Idaho Falls, she said, but for more complex care people might have to travel over four hours to Salt Lake City. “It’s not like a post-Covid leftover,” she said. “It’s become a real thing for people to be able to do to continue to get good medical care.” Taking away telehealth access, she continued, would feel like “discrimination” against people living in rural communities. Since the end of the state of emergency in May 2023, several bills have circulated in the House and Senate to extend the coverage, which advocate either for a permanent extension or a two-year extension to the benefit.One that has gained traction is the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2024, introduced in the House by Representative Earl “Buddy” Carter, a Republican from Georgia, and in the Senate by Florida Senator Rick Scott in March. The bill proposes a permanent expansion of telehealth benefits for Medicare patients. “In every congressional district in America, there are patients who rely on telehealth for quality medical care,” said Representative Carter to The New Republic. “We must ensure that this critical access point remains available to seniors, especially those who may live hours away from the nearest health care provider.”Though the bill counted with dozens of sponsors from across the political spectrum, it was not brought to a vote, nor have the other similar bills introduced in Congress. Perhaps it will gain more traction under the next congressional session, and pass on its own, outside of an omnibus legislation bill. But there’s always the possibility that a critical window has now closed. Momentum had been building in the lead-up to the end of the year. In early December, dozens of industry leaders sent a letter to Congress imploring them to extend the telehealth benefits folded into last year’s appropriations. A letter from 100 legislators advocating for an extension, led by Senators Brian Schatz and Roger Wicker, followed. In addition, an online petition garnered nearly 18,000 signatures, while leading industry associations such as the American Medical Association also voiced their support. Insurance companies like Cigna and Blue Cross Blue Shield have also lobbied for the bills, indicating a financial benefit to all stakeholders involved.The initial bill included substantial reforms and guardrails on Pharmacy Benefits Managers, or PBMs, middlemen who notoriously jack up drug costs. PBM reforms are a part of the Preserving Telehealth, Hospital, and Ambulance Access Act, Rep. David Schweikert’s bill. Rep. Carter also supported PBM reform as a way to “offset telehealth expenses,” he told The New Republic. But because PBM reform was slashed from the final bill, it is unclear how telehealth benefits will continue to be funded in the long term. As the end of the year drew closer (and closer), extending telehealth for Medicare patients seemed like a no-brainer. But the intervention by Elon Musk disrupted that plan, which was already beset by the now familiar sight of lawmakers making last-minute scrambles through their incompetence. After the administration and government ignored health care issues all year, things like disaster relief, telemedicine benefits, and pediatric cancer research were at stake in the omnibus bill, not to mention funding the government period. But Musk and Trump decided to go scorched earth, consequences be damned.Ahead of the specter of the next Trump presidency, with cuts to Medicare and Medicaid hanging in the balance as well as the omnipresent threat to repeal the Affordable Care Act, all we can hope for is that the next administration realizes just how unpopular that would be, and shifts course. Not to mention whatever RFK, Jr., plans to do to health care policy, if confirmed. While patients don’t have to worry about losing telemedicine benefits in a week, their respite may prove to be terribly temporary.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189338/telemedicine-benefits-became-casualty-congresss-chaos

2024-12-23 15:16:50

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Former Representative Matt Gaetz is filing a restraining order against the entire House Ethics Committee to stop them from showing the world their findings, which reportedly includes evidence that he paid an underaged girl for sex.Gaetz accuses the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen through the threatened release of an investigative report containing potentially defamatory allegations, in violation of the Committee’s own rules.”This is the result of a yearslong investigation into allegations that Gaetz had paid a teenage girl and multiple women thousands of dollars for sex and drugs since 2017. This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189640/matt-gaetz-lawsuit-stop-ethics-report-release

2024-12-23 14:09:17

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Donald Trump dismissed the “President Musk” jokes Sunday, and it was less than convincing. During his address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona, the president-elect pushed back on claims that Musk planned to supplant him as president.“No, he’s not gonna be president, that I can tell you,” Trump said. “And I’m safe, you know why? He can’t be, he wasn’t born in this country.”But Trump carefully elided the actual criticism of Musk’s growing political influence. People aren’t worried that Musk is plotting to steal the presidency—they’re worried he already has. Last week, Musk issued his own set of marching orders to Congress, ordering Republicans to oppose a massive spending bill to avert a government shutdown, or face being primaried by a Musk-backed candidate. Meanwhile, Trump stayed more or less silent, and Democratic leaders began to criticize the president-elect for allowing Musk to lead his party.When Trump eventually did weigh in, also issuing a request to lift the debt ceiling, his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt issued a chilly statement to make sure everyone knew there was only one man in charge. “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,” said Leavitt. Only when both Musk and Trump approved of the spending bill was it able to move forward. While the changes Musk sought were made, Trump’s request got left on the cutting room floor. Musk’s recent behavior indicates not only a growing influence on Trump, but on the Republican Party at large, as Republicans immediately fell in line. Already, many have begun pledging themselves to assist the unelected bureaucrat with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a scheme to eradicate federal programs and workers and replace them with pricey corporate contracts and vendors.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189638/trump-responds-president-musk-claims

2024-12-23 11:56:21

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Donald Trump’s election provides a useful occasion to examine the difference between what rich people want and what constitutes a thriving economy.The stock market, which is where rich people live, has been climbing since Election Day. On November 6, the day Trump was declared the winner, the Dow rose 3.6 percent; the S&P 500 scored its biggest gain in two years; and the world’s 10 richest people, nine of whom live in the United States, saw their wealth increase by a combined $63.5 billion. Over the month of November, the S&P 500 rose 5.7 percent. Stocks fell in December after the Fed signaled it would ratchet back rate cuts, but as of December 18, U.S. equities were still up 29 percent for the year.The economy, on the other hand, is starting to falter. The Fed ratcheted back future rate cuts because Trump keeps threatening to slap tariffs on every conceivable import. On Friday, Trump boasted on Truth Social: “I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous deficit with the United States by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!” The United States is the largest exporter of oil to the EU already, and the European Commission previously floated the idea of buying more liquefied natural gas from the United States (because it’s cheaper than Russian LNG). So it’s quite possible Trump is merely trying to take credit for something that’s happening anyway. But if Trump aims to push the EU further, he could start a trade war. Everybody knows that Trump is all about reviving American manufacturing. But the National Association of Manufacturers, whose president, Jay Timmons, praised Trump in 2017 as “a true champion for our industry,” forecast in a postelection survey that in 2025 capital investment would grow only 1.6 percent. “That’s not particularly robust,” Timmons told Bloomberg’s Mark Niquette. In a December forecast, another manufacturing trade group, the Institute for Supply Management, predicted a more robust increase of 5.2 percent. But that’s compared to an increase of 5.6 percent this calendar year—when, Niquette pointed out, high interest rates inhibited investment.Vanguard is an investment management firm and therefore part of the rich-people ecosystem, not the economy. But in addition to forecasting market trends it forecasts bona fide economic trends, and late last month it said gross domestic product growth, which has been 3 percent or higher under the supposedly ruinous economic policies of President Joe Biden, will fall to 2.7 percent next year under Trump. And that’s assuming Trump is mostly blowing smoke about tariffs and a mass roundup of immigrants. If he isn’t blowing smoke, says Vanguard, then GDP growth will be more like 2 percent.Like the Fed, Vanguard is worried that Trump’s trade policies will increase so-called “core” inflation, or inflation minus volatile food and energy costs. On Friday the Commerce Department’s personal consumption expenditures index, which the Fed and Vanguard both prefer to the Labor Department’s consumer price index, showed core inflation to be 2.8 percent in November, same as it was in October. Trump promised in July that if voters elected him “inflation will vanish completely.” But Vanguard says that “inflation will remain above 2.5 percent for most of 2025.” Even Trump has stopped pretending he’ll conquer inflation, telling Eric Cortellessa in his Time “Person of the Year” interview, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” In that same July speech, Trump said, “Incomes will skyrocket.” But according to the website Trading Economics, which compiles statistics from official sources, nominal wage growth will fall from its October level of 5.6 percent (and a projected 5.4 percent for the final quarter of 2024) to 4.7 percent, 3.5 percent, and 2.5 percent during the respective first, second, and third quarters of 2025. If Vanguard is right that inflation won’t fall below 2.5 percent next year, then real wages will either stop growing next year or start falling. Under Biden, real median and real average wages have been rising for two and a half years. Of course, these are all predictions; we can’t know precisely what’s coming in 2025. But my own view is that these respectable calculations err on the side of optimism. The pros predict that the economy will fare somewhat worse. Freed of their imperative to give every benefit of the doubt, I believe the economy will tank. Your investments may appreciate in value, which is all the oligarchs really care about. But this time next year, I doubt your boss will promise you a raise for 2026. Instead, he may tell you to clean out your desk.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189632/trump-stock-market-economy-tanking

2024-12-23 11:56:21

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Greil Marcus opened his Rolling Stone review of Bob Dylan’s ironically titled 1970 covers album Self-Portrait with a not-so-rhetorical question: “What is this shit?” Marcus was writing not only as a scorned fan but also as a concerned citizen of the music world. His fear was that an inveterate shape-shifter had succumbed to his own penchant for alienation effects. “Self-Portrait is a concept album from the cutting room floor,” he wrote. “It has been constructed so artfully, but as a coverup, not a revelation.”Of course, cover-up-as-revelation is Dylan’s paradoxical methodology: For all his dalliances with religious themes, he’s fundamentally a worshipper at the church of the uncertainty principle. “All I can do,” he told an interviewer in 1965, “is be me … whoever that is.” Like Pablo Picasso, who also knew a thing or two about being tangled up in blue, Dylan’s myth and music are essentially cubist, demanding multiple angles of approach and observation in order to see the entire picture, or to attempt to deconstruct it. Such tactics should not place him above criticism, but few singers and composers look better than he does in the long view, and he hasn’t run out of road yet. In the 50-plus years since its release, Self-Portrait—and its willful suppression of the things that initially made Dylan so vital: the grit of his vocals, the activist urgency of his lyrics, the slouched defiance of his public posture—has been reevaluated, including by Marcus himself, as a signature work by an artist whose greatest gift is for the mask.The idea of an ascendant megastar less interested in a-changing with the times than somehow positioning himself behind, ahead, and against them is deeply seductive and at the center of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which casts a resplendently scruffy Timothée Chalamet as the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman in his early, world-beating phase. This is the Dylan of the Gaslight and Folk City, who reluctantly adopted the mantle of overnight sensation from a media trying to harness the messianic vibes of JFK and Camelot; the screenplay, co-written by Mangold with Jay Cocks, is freely adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, which covered the years from Dylan’s appearance in 1961 as the heir to Woody Guthrie up to his perceived betrayal of the Dust Bowl Troubadour tradition at the 1965 Newport folk festival. There, against the wishes of the organizers, he plugged in a Fender Stratocaster and declared, with no shortage of smirking, don’t-fence-me-in-symbolism, that he no longer wished to work on Maggie’s farm. Chalamet capably sings “Maggie’s Farm” and several dozen other songs, having spent several years with a guitar teacher and a dialect coach to prepare for his performance; he also dons a prosthetic nose several sizes less conspicuous than the one plastered onto Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein last year in Maestro. Like Maestro, A Complete Unknown has been styled conspicuously as an award-season contender, and it’s teeming with craftsmanship at every level. It’s got a fine cast of talented and entertaining actors; it’s shot in muted, lovely LP-cover tones and swiftly cut. And yet, to paraphrase Marcus, if it’s not quite shit, it’s shlock, a mostly standard-issue biopic designed to promote an official version of Dylan: one that flatters his forward-thinking artistry by scoring easy points off the people around him. It’s a star-is-born fable viewed with 20/20 hindsight and through rose-tinted glasses.It might be possible, perhaps, to read A Complete Unknown as a poker-faced send-up of its own much-parodied genre, as an attempt to walk hard, as it were, into the maw of cliché and emerge out the other side. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norton revealed that Dylan had given Mangold marching orders to include at least one wholly fabricated incident in the storyline, which led to a telling exchange between the musician and his Hollywood bard. “When Mangold told Dylan he was worried about viewers’ reactions, as Norton tells it, Bob stared at him: ‘What do you care what other people think?’”That Mangold was worried in the first place about alienating the audience tells you something about his tendencies to walk the line, stylistically speaking—especially as compared to a filmmaker like Todd Haynes, whose prismatic 2007 film I’m Not There split its focus between a sextet of surrogates, resulting in a genuinely freewheeling approach. The more that Haynes embellished and enmeshed his material, the more he gave the viewer to think about. A Complete Unknown rarely trusts the audience to think for themselves. When Bob writes an inpromptu song in the living room of a family that’s briefly taken him in as a foundling, the film holds nicely on his ardent concentration before stooping to smiling, wide-eyed reaction shots, as if we couldn’t figure out his genius for ourselves. The film’s structure aims for the long, winding lines of a ballad, but the overall effect is more like a series of catchy, finger-picked jingles; we go behind the music without getting inside of it. The most interesting idea in A Complete Unknown has to do with the tension between inhabiting and extending a folk tradition and the challenges of rewriting it (a theme the Coen brothers already limned to perfection in Inside Llewyn Davis, which re-created Greenwich Village more vividly on a smaller budget and featured a climactic cameo from you-know-who). When Bobby rolls up on his motorcycle in the film’s opening sequence to visit the bedridden Woody Guthrie in a New Jersey hospital, there’s a nicely ambiguous tone to their interaction: the upstart and the elder, measuring each other out of mutual respect. The implication is that the wizened, stroke-afflicted Guthrie—embodied with silent, stoic fragility by Scoot McNairy—sees the kid for what he really is: a raw, unpolished inheritor who’s going to have to learn to go his own way. By contrast, everyone else who comes into Dylan’s orbit sees him as a potential project, whether it’s Edward Norton’s aggressively avuncular Pete Seeger, who generously offers his “fellow traveler” a place to stay in the hopes he can help galvanize a left-leaning constituency; Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo, a painter and social justice activist modeled on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo; or Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), a fellow emerging guitar slinger in search of a collaborator, a kindred spirit, and a lover, if not necessarily in that order. Dylan’s shortcomings as domestic partner are as legendary as his wordplay, and he wrote plenty of songs about them; both Sylvie and Joan have late nights where they’re roused from slumber by his furious scribblings and noodlings. During one postcoital idyll with Joan, Bob spontaneously road-tests “Blowing in the Wind,” like a scrawny, drawling Mozart tossing off operas in a hipster Amadeus. Fanning and Barbaro are both fine actresses—and the latter does a striking vocal impersonation of Baez’s warm, trilling songbird singing voice—but they’re mostly reduced to looking sad-eyed and hypnotized by Chalamet’s Dylan, who’s too busy acting out Behind-the-Music vignettes to consider their feelings, and whose charisma ultimately never quite proves worthy of their—or our—sustained gaze. Playing a man who’s great at playing himself is a potentially thankless task—unless one considers an inevitable Oscar nomination sufficient compensation for such self-effacement. Playing a man who’s great at playing himself is a potentially thankless task—unless one considers an inevitable Oscar nomination sufficient compensation for such self-effacement. When Dylan magnanimously took to social media to call his eager interpreter a “brilliant actor,” it was a vote of confidence that was light on specifics (“I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me,” Bob tweeted). When he’s good, as he was in his dual breakthroughs in Call Me by Your Name and Ladybird, and as the reluctant messiah of the Dune films, Chalamet is able to leverage callowness against gravitas in ways that recall several generations of teen idols before him. But the common denominator in those performances is that the characters are all, to some degree, posturing pseuds, and that try-hard quality—which surely manifests in the actor’s impressively note-perfect cadences and body language—simply isn’t right for Bob Dylan, who made agitation and inspiration seem effortless. The impression is of a talented movie star playing dress-up rather than the staggering, transformative effect authored by an androgenized Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There or even the lived-in pathos of Oscar Isaac’s Dave Van Ronk manqué in Inside Llewyn Davis, whose ambivalence about the music industry and his place in it was as sharp and acute as a kick to the ribs. There are moments in A Complete Unknown that work just fine, and they’re mostly musical ones: the raucous studio recording of “Highway 61,” which starts with Bob lasciviously puckering his lips around a slide whistle; a special guest-star stage performance of “Folsom Prison Blues” from a soused but electrifying Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook); the aforementioned squalling, feedback-drenched assault of “Maggie’s Farm.” Mangold’s feel for the way a well-turned song can stop and elasticize time is real, and it’s clear something is at stake in the staging: the spontaneous outdoor group sing-along to “The Times They Are a Changin’” achieves its intended catharsis.The majority of the dialogue scenes, meanwhile, are a slog, including and especially the ones built around Norton’s comically gormless interpretation of Seeger, reduced to a goody-goody characterization so hapless you’re expecting Tim Meadows and some groupies to pop up and offer Pete a snort of coke. For the movie’s jerry-rigged Dylan to work, the filmmakers have to turn the people around him into props as well, and Norton’s acting suffers in the process, as does Norbert Leo Butz’s buffoonish field-recording-guru Alan Lomax, who gets caricatured as a quintessential straight man—a staunch traditionalist covering his ears while history turns the volume up to 11.As anybody who’s seen D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal 1967 one-man-band-on-the-run documentary Don’t Look Back can attest, Dylan was a master of the deadpan comeback, as when he informs the journalist trying to bait him with tales of his own grumpiness, “I’m not angry … I’m delightful.” There’s a difference, though, between getting the last word in edgewise and trying to have it for posterity, and A Complete Unknown struggles to realize it. In light of its subject’s reluctance to be used as an avatar of any particular movement, the film seems too eager to enshrine Dylan as an icon, and on terms that seem borrowed from some incompatible cinematic traditions. In what is supposed to be a portentous and yet wide-open ending, an exhausted but energized Dylan picks through the wreckage of his Judas moment, stops in for one final audience with Woody and rides off down the road, bound for glory (and, as we are all too aware, an impending and near-fatal motorcycle accident). A more adventurous movie might have taken the opportunity to take the road less traveled here—to hit us with an unexpected jump in time and space or deploy some sort of shocking Tarantino-style revisionism. Instead, the shot suggests hagiography, and proves oddly out of step with its subject; the last thing Bob Dylan should be asked to do is drive down the middle of the road.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188994/complete-unknown-misses-elusive-genius-bob-dylan

2024-12-21 13:06:34

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It’s a weird time for religion in the United States. Christians are on track to become a religious minority in the country within a few decades but also, soon, to wield incredible power in a second Trump administration—thanks not least to a neo-Crusader defense secretary nominee, Christian nationalists likely leading the Office of Management and Budget as well as the House of Representatives, and an array of powerful Christian judges appointed in Trump’s first term whose numbers will only grow in his second. Meanwhile, amid a devastatingly grim Advent season for other communities, Latino Christian leaders interviewed by Axios “say they will unpack the Holy Family’s immigration plight during Christmas services to offer hope for immigrants” facing ICE raids and deportations in the new administration. White Protestants and Catholics voted by large margins for Trump; Black Protestants, Jews, atheists, and agnostics voted overwhelmingly against him. Muslim voters outraged by Biden’s support for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza abandoned the Democrats at striking rates, many voting instead for Jill Stein.So while the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or even nonreligious may be growing, the relevance of religion to politics clearly persists. And that means religion is relevant to climate change too.The Pew Research polls in 2022 found that moderately or highly religious people were much less likely to rate climate change as a serious problem than atheists were. But the surveys also showed huge numbers of religious people to be concerned. Growing numbers of religious leaders and groups—even among white evangelicals—are pushing for policies protecting the climate and environment.To learn about the contours of the growing religious advocacy for climate and environmental protection, I called up the Reverend Susan Hendershot, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and president of Interfaith Power and Light, a group focused on engaging people of faith in environmental causes and climate action. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.How do you perceive your job in terms of engaging religious communities in climate advocacy?Interfaith Power and Light started in 2000 because our founder was seeing a disconnect between what she was hearing from environmental organizations, in terms of climate change and care for the earth, and the fact that she was not hearing that in her place of worship. For her, it became a mission to say that as faith communities, we are called to care for creation and we need to find ways to live that out: It’s not just talking about it, it’s doing something. From the start, there was a focus on greening houses of worship as an act of faith. So everything from energy efficiency upgrades to installing solar in houses of worship. And the other side of that has been the focus on policy advocacy, to say personal action is important and it gets us a certain way down the road as part of civil society, but unless we have the right policies in place, we can’t actually make the progress that we need to make. It’s centered on spiritual values and on the moral opportunity to take action—to say people of faith are and should be leaders in working for climate and environmental justice. But this is focused on people from many different religious backgrounds, right?We say we work with people of all spiritual traditions and no spiritual traditions, recognizing that there are a lot of spiritual but not religious folks that are out there and that is a growing percentage. We want to make sure that there’s a big tent out there that’s for everyone who wants to take action from a place of spiritual values.Climate anxiety is on the rise. What does the lens of faith or spiritual values have to offer the climate fight, in your view?I see faith communities and leaders having three roles in the climate movement. The first one is pastoral, because there’s a lot of climate anxiety and grief out there, whether it’s people who have suffered from a climate disaster who are recovering and need a support system or young people who are considering whether they even want to have a family because do you want to bring children into a climate-changed world? So that pastoral role is really, really important. Faith leaders are trained to work with people who are suffering, grieving, in trauma.The second role I see as the practical role, which is offering leadership within their own faith community, working to move climate solutions forward in their houses of worship: renewable energy systems, energy efficiency, electric vehicles. Just serving as models in the community of what’s possible. The third role is the prophetic role. We have to talk about this. One of the things Katharine Hayhoe says as a climate scientist and person of faith is that the most important thing you can do for climate change is to talk about it, because part of the problem is it’s not being discussed enough. Pastors are called to use their prophetic voices in their places of worship to move people to action. How does the fragmentation of religious groups right now complicate your work? I’m thinking about the very prominent evangelical voices allied with Trump who see fossil fuels as part of a kind of a nationalist vision. I like to use Yale Climate Communication’s “Six Americas” study as an example. If you compare when they first started doing those studies to now, over time there has been an increase in the people who are alarmed and concerned about climate change and a really big decrease in those who are what we would call doubters. There are folks who have a lot of influence and power who are pushing fossil fuels and looking to continue to have an “all of the above” energy strategy—we see that in the news media every day now—but the reality I think is that for most folks on the ground, they are grappling with the real climate challenges that they’re facing every day. It used to feel sort of far away, like you’re talking about polar bears and ice caps. Now we’re seeing floods and droughts, and farmers are seeing changes in their growing seasons for their crops. That makes it more real to people. I think those powerful voices pushing fossil fuels will be drowned out by the realities on the ground.So how do you envision people of faith being mobilized for climate policy advocacy?The Inflation Reduction Act was the result of many years of advocacy amongst people from all walks of life across the country, and this money is starting to make a real difference on the ground. There’s a lot of money going into nonprofits, including houses of worship, who are installing solar and other energy efficiency systems and getting rid of their gas appliances and so on. One of the things that we found in our recent solar survey is that there are about 2,500 communities of faith around the country that have installed solar, with more coming through the direct pay mechanism with the IRA. We have a few congregations that have received their payment for direct pay, and many many more that have applied, and others that are in the exploratory phase. This trend is competitive with businesses like Starbucks and Walmart and all these other businesses that get a lot of attention around their solar installations.That’s also happening on the consumer level—faith communities are made up of people, many of whom have homes, and they’re also looking for ways they can adapt, use this federal funding to make these improvements in their own homes that improve their lives, their bottom line, as well as the health of their families.The next piece of work is to protect what those incentives are and have done so that they won’t be rolled back or clawed back. There’s a lot of personal connection to that for folks, whether that’s because they live near drilling sites and they don’t want to see methane rules rolled back because it’s improving the health and air quality in their community, or folks who are saying we don’t want to roll back the direct pay portion of the IRA funding because that’s a way that’s helping faith communities install solar and be able to put more money into the mission and serve their communities. I think part of the opportunity here is to make those connections for individuals that are personal for them—whatever that means for them or their family.Good News/Bad NewsThe BBC has put together a list of “seven quiet breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2024.” They include the U.K. finally closing its last coal-fired power plant and deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil falling to a nine-year low.Driven by the climate crisis, the country’s home insurance problem is growing. Nonrenewal rates (that’s when an insurance company drops a home that was previously covered) rose in 46 states in 2023, according to data obtained by the Senate Budget Committee. Read The New York Times’ feature on this or check out their accompanying data visualization to see where insurers are dropping coverage in your state.Stat of the Week$100 per yearThat’s the possible extra cost to American consumers of increasing liquefied natural gas exports (as the Trump administration plans to do), according to a new study released by the Department of Energy this week. It also found that the LNG exports could lead to an extra 1.5 gigatons of greenhouse gases by 2050.What I’m ReadingAs Clock Ticks to Act on the Climate Crisis, N.C. Activists Target a ‘Carbon Plan’At Inside Climate News, Lisa Sorg profiles the activists fighting a longtime villain in the environmental justice movement, Duke Energy, which has released a “carbon plan” that involves building numerous natural gas plants while keeping their coal plants open for years, completely missing the company’s 2030 emissions-reduction goals. Some of these activists, like 74-year-old Bobby Jones, have been fighting Duke Energy for years.“I know my children and grandchildren will not be the ones who can afford clean water and clean air,” Jones said. “They will be the ones relegated to cancer alleys. So I’ve got to fight. And I’ve got to encourage others to fight. Because we already see climate change. We don’t have to wait for it to happen.”Jones often thinks of the final words of [environmental justice advocate] John Gurley, as cancer had hollowed out his body. “The last conversation we had, we were talking about Duke Energy. And he said, ‘Bobby, hold them accountable.’”Read Lisa Sorg’s full report at Inside Climate News.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189543/religion-activists-climate-faith

2024-12-20 23:46:42

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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a simple fix for the current government shutdown battle.“How about the House add campaign finance reform to the CR so Republicans and Democrats alike can stop being so scared about what a billionaire man-child thinks before they vote on anything around here,” AOC wrote on X Friday.The “billionaire man-child” in question is Elon Musk, who has been threatening to primary any representatives who don’t back his preferred version of the spending bill. Musk helped tank the bipartisan spending bill on Wednesday through a barrage of posts on X, and on Thursday, a Trump-backed bill failed to win over enough Republicans. On Friday afternoon, Musk again began hinting at his opposition to the revised Republican plan.Musk’s outside role in these negotiations has called into question who’s really calling the shots in the Republican Party.“The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk,” Representative Brendan Boyle wrote on X. “I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office,” said Representative Greg Cesar.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189631/ocasio-cortez-aoc-musk-problem-government-shutdown

2024-12-20 22:39:42

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Roger Stone said Friday he wants to fix America’s broken justice system, conveniently forgetting the time he got bailed out of criminal charges by his buddy Donald Trump.During Stone’s address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, the longtime GOP operative and self-proclaimed “agent provocateur” explained what he believed Trump’s allies hope to gain from a second stint in the White House. “What we seek is a rebalance of the scales of justice, so this country can return to one standard of justice, not the two-tiered justice system,” Stone said in a video posted on X by CBS News’s senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs.It’s sort of unclear to which two-tiered justice system Stone was referring—could it possibly have been the one that secured him a presidential pardon after he was indicted for lying to Congress about Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential election, witness tampering, and obstruction? The very same system that rescued him, the president-elect’s longtime friend and ally, from a 40-month prison sentence? Surely not that one, right?There are certainly serious problems with the country’s justice system worthy of the attention of the president of the United States—but Stone’s not talking about those. No, he’s most likely talking about the system that pardoned Hunter Biden for gun charges and tax evasion, or the system that pursued charges against the rioters at the January 6 insurrection, whose violence Stone cheered on. Ultimately, MAGA is not seeking to “rebalance the scales”; it’s seeking to throw the scale out and do whatever the hell Trump wants. But if Stone is seriously interested in being prosecuted for tax evasion, the Justice Department can definitely make that happen.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189628/roger-stone-wild-claim-justice-system

2024-12-20 22:39:42

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Elon Musk is hoping to dispel the widely circulating notion that he, not President-elect Trump, is really calling the shots.On Thursday, X user Lulu Cheng Meservey called such speculations indicative of a wider “strategy” to sow discord between Musk and Trump. “By jabbing Trump about not being the alpha, the idea is to provoke him to sideline Elon and to fray the relationship,” Meservey wrote.Musk agreed, writing in a quote-tweet Friday, “The political & legacy media puppets all got their new instructions yesterday and are now parroting the same message to drive a wedge between [Trump] and me. They will fail.”The “President Musk” rhetoric began after the billionaire, whose financial support for Trump and other Republican candidates made him 2024’s biggest political donor, helped tank a bipartisan spending bill. Musk unleashed a fusillade of criticism on his social media platform, X, as well as a threat to fund primary challenges against representatives who voted to pass the deal.Later that day, President-elect Trump came out against the deal, and after a failed vote on a revised bill Thursday, House Republicans are scrambling to put together an eleventh-hour plan to avoid a government shutdown.Musk has since tried to shift blame and downplay his role in the outcome. He’s also apparently hoping to shut down Democrats’ suggestions that his outsize role in the legislative process indicates that he’s the one truly pulling the strings in the incoming Trump administration.Many Democrats leapt on the events of the week to say just that: “The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk,” tweeted Representative Brendan Boyle. “I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office,” said Representative Greg Cesar. “It’s clear who’s in charge, and it’s not President-elect Donald Trump,” posted Pramila Jayapal, saying Trump followed the lead of “Shadow President Elon Musk.” (Jayapal’s were the comments that specifically drew Meservey’s, and in turn Musk’s, ire.)Whatever the state of Musk and Trump’s relationship after the world’s wealthiest man flexed his political muscles this week, the notion that Musk is delivering marching orders seems to have struck a nerve with team Trump. On Thursday, a Trump spokesperson insisted that the president-elect, and no one else, was in charge, saying, “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/189622/elon-president-musk-reaction

2024-12-20 21:30:32

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House Republicans seem poised to give Donald Trump the finger for the second time in less than 24 hours. Speaker Mike Johnson announced a new continuing resolution plan on Friday that does not include what the president-elect has been pining for for days: an extension to the debt ceiling. “We have a unified Republican conference. There’s a unanimous agreement in the room that we need to move forward,” Johnson told a room full of reporters. “I will not telegraph to you the specific details of that yet.… I expect that we will be proceeding forward. We will not have a government shutdown.”Johnson’s new plan, which he has not yet discussed with Trump, will instead be one vote that includes a spending package, disaster aid, farm aid, and the farm bill extension—no debt ceiling changes included. The plan C comes after 38 House Republicans on Thursday evening voted against a Trump-backed plan that would extend the debt ceiling by two years.Johnson’s move is sure to draw the ire of both Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who has been threatening to primary any Republican who does not agree to a continuing resolution on Trump’s terms (or his).
https://newrepublic.com/post/189624/mike-johnson-republican-snub-trump-plan-c-shutdown-debt-ceiling

2024-12-20 20:24:01

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Elon Musk is now threatening to get rid of Democratic lawmakers, but he has no idea who he’s dealing with … no, seriously he has no idea who he’s complaining about. Musk responded Friday to a video of Representative Richie Neal, the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, where the Massachusetts Democrat slammed the unelected bureaucrat for trying to kill the bipartisan spending bill needed to keep the government running. “A tweet changed all of it?” Neal scoffed, referring to Musk’s deluge of posts on X Wednesday and Thursday instructing Republicans to oppose the bill, threatening to oust the ones who didn’t, and cheering on the increasingly inevitable government shutdown. “Can you imagine what the next two years will be like if every time that Congress works its will, and then there’s a tweet, or from an individual who has no official portfolio, who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?” Neal asked.“This institution has a separate responsibility based on the separation of powers,” he warned.Musk didn’t like this at all, apparently, and replied in his new favorite way: a threat to buy Neal out of his seat. “Oh … forgot to mention that I’m also going to be funding moderate candidates in heavily Democrat districts, so that the country can get rid of those who don’t represent them, like this jackass,” Musk wrote. But Neal is a fairly moderate Democrat, who has been a representative in Massachusetts—a fairly Democratic state—for more than three decades. In November, he was reelected to his role leading the state’s first district by 62 percent of the vote, handily beating an independent challenger. That’s not to say Musk couldn’t somehow find a challenger to oppose Neal, but the billionaire technocrat clearly thinks he can throw money at any problem and move the dial. While money and a right-wing propaganda machine may have an outsized influence in Congress, Musk may be starting to realize that he’s just not cut out for this whole politics thing.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189615/elon-musk-tantrum-primary-no-idea

2024-12-20 19:15:51

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Elon Musk has spent the week derailing a bipartisan funding bill, sending the U.S. government hurtling toward a shutdown. But on Friday, the tech billionaire broadened his scope from domestic to international politics with a ringing endorsement of the Alternative for Germany, the country’s far-right political party.Early Friday morning on his social media platform, X, Musk posted, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” The AfD is an ethnonationalist party, which has faced criticism for its ties to neo-Nazis and, per the BBC, considers immigrants “not ‘properly German’” regardless of citizenship status. The party has gained traction in recent years, with Vox’s Li Zhou writing that AfD support is based on a vision of Germany “that’s white, that relies on fossil fuels, that’s hostile toward more immigrants, and that’s adopted many of the same anti-LGBTQ positions that are common among conservatives in the US.”Musk’s endorsement, which comes with a February election on the horizon in Germany, has been celebrated by the AfD, its members, and leadership—but slammed by many others. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said of Musk’s post: “We have freedom of opinion—it also goes for multibillionaires, but freedom of opinion also means that you can say things that aren’t right and don’t contain good political advice.”In the U.S., observers have railed against the endorsement, with conservative commentator Bill Kristol writing, “I think this should be kind of a big deal.… The AfD is Germany’s neo-Nazi party,” and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeting examples of AfD officials’ hateful actions and remarks, writing, “The AfD’s mission is to rehabilitate the image of the Nazi movement.”Over the past year or so, Musk has gradually aligned himself with the AfD.In October 2023, he quote-tweeted a post from a far-right German X account, which supported the AfD stopping search-and-rescues of asylum-seekers in the Mediterranean, which the user said facilitated “European suicide.” “Is the German public aware of this?” Musk wrote, but, amid backlash, later posted, “I have not ‘supported’ any political party and don’t know AFD from a hole in the ground.”In June, Musk expressed curiosity about the party in a reply to Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old far-right German political activist known as the “anti-Greta.” “Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD?” Musk wrote. “They keep saying ‘far right’, but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.” Musk’s Friday endorsement came in a response to Seibt on X.The world’s richest man has occasionally dipped his toes into European politics, with a major throughline in his forays being opposition to immigration. Musk himself is an immigrant from South Africa.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189609/elon-musk-blowback-praise-germany-far-right-afd

2024-12-20 19:15:51

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The list of people who hate Nancy Mace is growing longer with each passing day.On Friday, the cantankerous Republican representative’s former consultant took to X to air her out. “You can stop texting me. I fired Nancy Mace as [a] client a few months back because I’m a political consultant and not a babysitter, a sex therapist or a doctor who can prescribe fixes for chemical imbalances,” wrote Wesley Donehue, CEO of the political consulting firm Push Digital. “I don’t have time for her constant egotistical bullshit and drama in my life.”In a follow-up tweet, Donehue clarified that he was reacting to Mace’s own attack on fellow Republicans. His comment seems to align with the jabs Mace and fellow Republican Representative Trey Gowdy have been exchanging. “Nancy Mace would not be in the House if it weren’t for Donald Trump, and she can’t vote the way that he asks her to today?” Gowdy told Fox News on Thursday. “I hope he’s got as long a memory for House members as he does senators that even threaten to not support one of his nominees.” “I have a message for Trey Gowdy: You let Hillary Clinton off the hook for Benghazi. Sit your ass back down,” Mace posted on X later that night. “Which bathroom do we think Trey Gowdy uses? #HoldTheLine,” she said in another, attaching a picture of Gowdy and bizarrely implying he is transgender. Donehue responded to this directly on X. “Imagine wanting to run statewide and thinking this is a good idea. The upstate loves Trey Gowdy. This is what happens when a person cannot control their emotions enough to think strategically.”Mace has made a fool of herself multiple times since the election: going on a public transphobic tirade to target Sarah McBride, the first and only trans member of Congress, claiming that she was assaulted by a trans activist who says he simply shook her hand, and now the intraparty bullying. Can’t wait to see the next desperate media ploy for attention.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189612/ex-nancy-mace-adviser-explains-dropped-client

2024-12-20 19:00:02

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Senator Kyrsten Sinema, former Democrat and current party thorn, made her feelings known in an “exit interview” with Semafor.The Arizona senator, who is perhaps best known for opposing key Democratic policies, along with her DINO collaborator Senator Joe Manchin, reflected on her time in office—revealing little regret.On her recent decision to vote with Manchin to block President Biden’s reappointment of a top labor board nominee, she simply stated, “Don’t give a shit.”She showed little remorse for other major decisions, like going against Democrats in 2022 to oppose filibuster reform, calling it the “most important decision I’ve ever made in my life.”“I know some people think I’m, like, this enigma or whatever, but I don’t think that’s true at all,” Sinema said. “I think, maybe, this is a place where sometimes people say things that they don’t mean. I am not one of those people.… I think I’m highly predictable.” She then refused to say who she voted for.“Honestly, I feel like we got 40 years’ worth of work done in one term,” she continued. “I do wish we had gotten immigration done. We tried really hard, but everything else was just pretty freaking amazing.”Again, this from the woman who was often absent from key Democratic votes to go run in an Ironman or work at some winery. She noted that she (thankfully) is done running for public office. We’ll see what kind of chaos she can cause next in the consulting and lobbying world.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189607/kyrsten-sinema-responds-critics-exit-interview

2024-12-20 17:03:27

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Trump and the rest of the GOP seem to be even more at odds over the debt ceiling than initially believed. “Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous debt ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social in the early hours of Friday morning. “Remember, the pressure is on whoever is president.” “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’ This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!” he continued in another post.This is bad news for the party of “fiscal responsibility.” Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, telling NBC News that it would be the “smartest thing to do.” “I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically.”On Thursday evening, the House voted on a Trump-backed spending bill that included a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling. That more modest measure was rejected by a whopping 38 Republicans who voted against. The infighting is set to come to a head on Friday, as the government will shut down at midnight Saturday if an agreement is not reached. Perhaps Republicans aren’t as beholden to Trump and his budget wishes as we initially thought.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189602/trump-new-debt-ceiling-idea

2024-12-20 17:03:27

@nprofile…6kn7
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A month out from Biden’s transfer of power to Trump, the president used his power to announce a massive new round of student loan forgiveness for public service workers. The news comes as Republicans in Congress are still scrambling to avert a government shutdown.The Biden administration Friday morning said it would cancel $4.28 billion in student loans for 55,000 teachers, nurses, service members, law enforcement officials, and other public servants. The relief brings the total of student debt forgiveness under Biden to nearly $180 billion for nearly five million people, according to a Department of Education statement.The cancellations will be through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, or PSLF, which forgives public service workers’ remaining federal student loan balance after 10 years of payments. In recent years, the Biden administration has taken steps to reform and improve access to the program, which had long been plagued by mismanagement.Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement praised the administration’s newly announced relief and broader success revamping PSLF, saying, “Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America’s teachers, service members, nurses, first responders, and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I’m proud to say that we delivered.”A White House statement from President Biden said, “Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt.”As Biden’s efforts to enact sweeping student forgiveness have largely been mired or dashed by Republican-led legal challenges, the administration has since pivoted to a revised “Plan B,” which targets specific groups of borrowers. The incoming Trump administration is expected to take a hostile stance toward student debt forgiveness.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189601/biden-forgives-billions-student-loans

2024-12-20 17:03:27

@nprofile…6kn7
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Elon Musk really hopes you don’t remember when he was cheering on a government shutdown … less than 48 hours ago. Shortly after a new “clean” spending bill failed to pass the House Thursday night, Musk took to X to lament how this was all the Democrats’ fault. “A super fair & simple bill was put to a vote and only 2 Democrats in Congress were in favor,” Musk wrote. “Therefore the responsibility for the shutdown rests squarely on the shoulders of @RepJeffries.”“Shame on @RepJeffries for rejecting a fair & simple spending bill that is desperately needed by states suffering from hurricane damage,” he wrote in another post. Musk conveniently did not mention that 38 Republicans also voted against the bill.And on Wednesday, Musk was more than happy to stir up revolt among the GOP. Not only did he blast the original continuing resolution and threaten any Republican who supported it, but he even ranted about how the government actually ought to shutter, at least until Donald Trump enters office.“We’ll be fine for 33 days,” wrote one X user, to which Musk replied an enthusiastic, “YES.”“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” Musk wrote in a separate post, which read like marching orders to the more sycophantic GOP members, some of whom began to fantasize about a Congress led by Musk himself. Yeah, it’s gotten that bad. Musk’s major blow-up and Trump’s last-minute request to raise the debt ceiling sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling to assemble a “clean” bill. By Wednesday evening, Musk’s toddler-like tantrum had gotten him exactly what he wanted: an impending government shutdown. Too bad that wasn’t what the actual president-elect, not the unelected billionaire, was hoping for. Now Musk’s only hope is to cast blame on Democrats, who probably would’ve supported the original bipartisan bill.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189603/elon-musk-backtrack-govern-shutdown

2024-12-20 17:02:41

@nprofile…pyzj
https://images.newrepublic.com/f560ab46595fab5519782d5cf9bf7f2e5d1a2c88.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
A month out from Biden’s transfer of power to Trump, the president used his power to announce a massive new round of student loan forgiveness for public service workers. The news comes as Republicans in Congress are still scrambling to avert a government shutdown.The Biden administration Friday morning said it would cancel $4.28 billion in student loans for 55,000 teachers, nurses, service members, law enforcement officials, and other public servants. The relief brings the total of student debt forgiveness under Biden to nearly $180 billion for nearly five million people, according to a Department of Education statement.The cancellations will be through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, or PSLF, which forgives public service workers’ remaining federal student loan balance after 10 years of payments. In recent years, the Biden administration has taken steps to reform and improve access to the program, which had long been plagued by mismanagement.Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement praised the administration’s newly announced relief and broader success revamping PSLF, saying, “Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America’s teachers, service members, nurses, first responders, and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I’m proud to say that we delivered.”A White House statement from President Biden said, “Because of our actions, millions of people across the country now have the breathing room to start businesses, save for retirement, and pursue life plans they had to put on hold because of the burden of student loan debt.”As Biden’s efforts to enact sweeping student forgiveness have largely been mired or dashed by Republican-led legal challenges, the administration has since pivoted to a revised “Plan B,” which targets specific groups of borrowers. The incoming Trump administration is expected to take a hostile stance toward student debt forgiveness.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189601/biden-forgives-billions-student-loans

2024-12-20 17:02:41

@nprofile…pyzj
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Elon Musk really hopes you don’t remember when he was cheering on a government shutdown … less than 48 hours ago. Shortly after a new “clean” spending bill failed to pass the House Thursday night, Musk took to X to lament how this was all the Democrats’ fault. “A super fair & simple bill was put to a vote and only 2 Democrats in Congress were in favor,” Musk wrote. “Therefore the responsibility for the shutdown rests squarely on the shoulders of @RepJeffries.”“Shame on @RepJeffries for rejecting a fair & simple spending bill that is desperately needed by states suffering from hurricane damage,” he wrote in another post. Musk conveniently did not mention that 38 Republicans also voted against the bill.And on Wednesday, Musk was more than happy to stir up revolt among the GOP. Not only did he blast the original continuing resolution and threaten any Republican who supported it, but he even ranted about how the government actually ought to shutter, at least until Donald Trump enters office.“We’ll be fine for 33 days,” wrote one X user, to which Musk replied an enthusiastic, “YES.”“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero,” Musk wrote in a separate post, which read like marching orders to the more sycophantic GOP members, some of whom began to fantasize about a Congress led by Musk himself. Yeah, it’s gotten that bad. Musk’s major blow-up and Trump’s last-minute request to raise the debt ceiling sent House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling to assemble a “clean” bill. By Wednesday evening, Musk’s toddler-like tantrum had gotten him exactly what he wanted: an impending government shutdown. Too bad that wasn’t what the actual president-elect, not the unelected billionaire, was hoping for. Now Musk’s only hope is to cast blame on Democrats, who probably would’ve supported the original bipartisan bill.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189603/elon-musk-backtrack-govern-shutdown

2024-12-20 17:02:41

@nprofile…pyzj
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Trump and the rest of the GOP seem to be even more at odds over the debt ceiling than initially believed. “Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous debt ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social in the early hours of Friday morning. “Remember, the pressure is on whoever is president.” “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’ This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!” he continued in another post.This is bad news for the party of “fiscal responsibility.” Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, telling NBC News that it would be the “smartest thing to do.” “I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically.”On Thursday evening, the House voted on a Trump-backed spending bill that included a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling. That more modest measure was rejected by a whopping 38 Republicans who voted against. The infighting is set to come to a head on Friday, as the government will shut down at midnight Saturday if an agreement is not reached. Perhaps Republicans aren’t as beholden to Trump and his budget wishes as we initially thought.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189602/trump-new-debt-ceiling-idea

2024-12-20 15:56:57

@nprofile…6kn7
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Donald Trump is desperate to pretend his shoddy leadership isn’t about to cause a government shutdown. A “clean” spending bill, which contained a Trump-requested provision to suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, failed to pass on the House floor Thursday evening, earning just 174 votes in favor and 235 against.Trump tried to push the blame onto President Joe Biden, in a Truth Social post Friday.“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP,’” wrote the president-elect. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”But it’s not clear that Republicans are interested in solving anything. Thirty-eight Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting against the pared-down bill, and a good portion of those GOP lawmakers spent the preceding 36 hours cheering on a shutdown alongside Elon Musk, the billionaire trying to run Congress through threats to oust elected officials. Now Trump’s not even really trying to avert a shutdown but simply hoping that no one will blame him for it. Government funding is set to expire at midnight.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189600/donald-trump-joe-biden-blame-shutdown

2024-12-20 15:55:46

@nprofile…pyzj
https://images.newrepublic.com/e85353b33c994d45abcd56f070e963f7cc655d24.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
Donald Trump is desperate to pretend his shoddy leadership isn’t about to cause a government shutdown. A “clean” spending bill, which contained a Trump-requested provision to suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, failed to pass on the House floor Thursday evening, earning just 174 votes in favor and 235 against.Trump tried to push the blame onto President Joe Biden, in a Truth Social post Friday.“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP,’” wrote the president-elect. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”But it’s not clear that Republicans are interested in solving anything. Thirty-eight Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting against the pared-down bill, and a good portion of those GOP lawmakers spent the preceding 36 hours cheering on a shutdown alongside Elon Musk, the billionaire trying to run Congress through threats to oust elected officials. Now Trump’s not even really trying to avert a shutdown but simply hoping that no one will blame him for it. Government funding is set to expire at midnight.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189600/donald-trump-joe-biden-blame-shutdown

2024-12-20 13:43:20

@nprofile…6kn7
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 19 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.As of this recording, things are in full-blown chaos in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers race to negotiate a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. And already, there are a couple things we can conclude about the coming Donald Trump presidency. One is that Trump is going to screw over his voters very badly, including rural voters—we’re already seeing the beginnings of that in this shutdown fight. Another is that Trump is going to humiliate Mike Johnson mercilessly going forward, and Republicans are going to have one heck of a time trying to minister to the whims of Trump and Elon Musk, which are already being revealed to be deeply dangerous and crazy. We’re chatting about this with Paul Waldman, who’s the co-author with Tom Schaller of the book, White Rural Rage. Good to have you on, Paul.Paul Waldman: Thank you.Sargent: To quickly catch people up, House Republicans thought they had negotiated a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, but then Elon Musk attacked the bill’s spending and then Trump opposed it. Republicans then declared it dead because Trump and Musk are their masters. As of this moment, House Republicans have a new deal which Trump endorsed: a two-year extension of the debt limit until January 2027, a continuation of current government funding levels, extension of disaster aid in the farm bill, and some other stuff. Paul, I don’t know what Democrats are going to do here, but it seems like they shouldn’t support this because it just keeps the debt limit intact. What do you think?Waldman: Democrats have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently for a long time. And over the years, you and I have both written many articles explaining why it’s a terrible thing to have this extra vote that needs to be taken in order to validate the spending that has already been allocated, in order to satisfy this archaic idea that you have to keep coming back again and again and again to allow the government to keep borrowing money. All it is is a tool to create government shutdowns. Democrats have long thought we should just get rid of it—there’s only one other country in the world that has anything like it—and Republicans have been resistant to that because they like the idea that they can force these shutdowns and use it as a tool to extract spending cuts that would be difficult to get otherwise.Now, you have a situation where it almost seems like Donald Trump just woke up yesterday and realized that the debt ceiling was going to be a problem for him: He’s going to be president, and this could cause shutdowns that he would get blamed for. So he has now demanded that they make a two-year suspension. Not a permanent elimination of the debt ceiling but two years, which would probably take him to the point where the Democrats will take back the House in the 2026 midterms and maybe they can get the blame for that then.The problem, at the moment, is that Republicans have this razor-thin majority in the House, and you have a group of people in the Republican caucus, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus, who are real serious anti-government ideologues. They’re not just Trump loyalists—that’s an important distinction here because you have a lot of far-right people in the Republican caucus who will do anything for Donald Trump. You have a group of people, including Chip Roy from Texas, whom Trump now says he wants to find a primary challenger for, who are genuine, committed, principled ideologues who say that they are never going to vote to increase the debt limit without serious spending cuts, that any time we get into one of these situations they want to see the size of government brought down. They’re willing to shut down the government, even if it’s something that is damaging to Trump and the rest of their party. That’s what they’re dealing with right now.Sargent: I want to talk about the early signs here that Trump is going to really screw over as voters. Trump and Musk killed the first deal, even though it included a lot of direct payments for farmers. The New York Times reports that lawmakers from rural areas were furious that Musk had killed the bill. Paul, your book is all about how rural voters stick with Trump, despite him being really terrible for their material interests. Now we’ve got Trump’s favorite billionaire directly shafting them in the name of spending cuts. Can you talk about this dynamic broadly?Waldman: This is the essence of what rural politics has become. One of the arguments we make is that voters in rural areas keep electing Republicans and are represented by Republicans at all levels, from president all the way down to dogcatcher, and yet what they don’t give them is material improvements to their lives. They give them a lot of culture-war campaigning, and a lot of emotional satisfaction. That was what Donald Trump really gave them: the feeling that he hated the same people they hated, and he would basically be a weapon against the people they despise. Even if it didn’t change their lives for the better—it didn’t improve their education systems, their economic opportunities, their local infrastructure—it wasn’t as important as the emotional satisfaction that they got from Donald Trump. Data is still coming in, but it looks like Trump got the votes of rural Americans, and especially rural whites, at about the same rate that he did four years ago. According to the best data that we have, he got about 71 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2020. He’ll probably do at least as well in 2024. And then he comes into office, and he starts talking about all these things that are not just not helpful to rural people but are actually going to be incredibly damaging.For instance, he says he wants to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Well, who benefits most from the postal service the way it is now? It’s rural people. He’s talking about promoting school vouchers, which don’t benefit rural people at all because they just don’t have private schools where they live. Mass deportation is going to have a devastating effect on a lot of rural communities; not just because the farmers themselves are employing a lot of undocumented people to pick crops in the fields, but because those people are spending money in those communities where they’re living. The cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating? That is devastating to rural communities because there have been hundreds of rural hospitals that have closed in recent years, and they absolutely depend on Medicaid funding in order to stay alive.Then you have the tariffs. This is another thing that is going to be really damaging. We saw this last time when he was president. The story that he tells about the tariffs that he put on is he put on all these tariffs and we took in all this money from the tariffs. Well, do you know where the money from the tariffs went? It went to repay farmers because as a result of the tariffs that he put on China, China responded by cutting off its imports of American agricultural products. That resulted in billions of dollars of losses for American farmers. So the Trump administration took the money that was being brought in by the tariffs, which is being paid by American consumers, and basically passed it right back to the farmers to bail them out. According to one study, 92 percent of the revenues in the tariffs that he put on just went back into bailouts for former.We’re going to go back into that cycle again. You have all of these ways in which Trump’s most adoring voters are going to get screwed over by the policies, when they thought that he was just going to come back in and make America great again and make eggs cheap.Sargent: Well, it actually could even be worse if you think about Elon Musk’s role in all this. You mentioned that you guys found, in the writing of your book, that Trump had essentially offered rural voters this cultural comfort. Somehow, Elon Musk has now become a cultural champion for MAGA voters too. I’m just not sure how that happened. And with Musk being given all this influence over spending, it’s almost profoundly insulting if you really think about it. My initial thought was that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was just going to be a plaything for him with no real influence, but now it’s not so clear. It looks like his drive for serious cuts is going to be taken more seriously. And as you say, those voters are the losers from these types of spending cuts. On what planet is Elon Musk a warrior for these people? How on earth could they come to see him that way?Waldman: A lot of it has to do with this fundamental orientation against institutions and establishment power. People have a lot of anger at not just the government, but other established institutions like news media, big business. There’s a lot of free-floating anger at the establishment. And looking at a figure like Musk, it looks like the establishment hates him. He’s so disruptive and erratic in his way, and he insults people all the time. He has some of that same characteristic that Trump has: He pisses people off, and he looks like he’s just changing everything willy-nilly.If your feeling about all the established institutions, including government, is that they just need to be torn apart and made uncomfortable, then you can look at him and say, He seems like he’s a hero. He seems like he’s on my side. But where the rubber actually meets the road, things get a little more complicated because the people who feel that actually depend on government in a lot of different ways. Musk comes out during the campaign and says, I think we could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. And when people who know what they’re talking about actually look at the federal budget, they say, Well, if you set aside Social Security and Medicare, which Trump had claimed he’s not going to touch, and you set aside military spending, which Trump and Republicans want to increase, and veterans benefits, which he says he’s not going to cut, the $2 trillion cut means eliminating basically everything else that the government does. And if you like driving on roads and having a border and having national parks and money for schools and all of these things? Well, it turns out that if you want to cut the amount that Musk says he wants to cut, then you’re going to have to eliminate all those things.It may not happen, but all of a sudden now, he’s taking away things that people really depend on. A lot of the ideology—this is especially true in rural America—is that people don’t want to see what government does for them. They want to believe that everything that they have in their lives is because of their own efforts, and that they are independent and self-reliant. This is very much a part of the rural ethos especially. The people who live in rural areas believe I’m connected to the material world, I know how to fix my car, I know how to fix my house. I don’t need government to tell me what to do.That may be true in some ways, but it’s also true that a lot of those programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, are used at higher levels in rural areas. They are more dependent. There are 400 separate programs within the federal government that are specifically targeted at rural areas. So in a lot of ways, rural Americans are more dependent on government. Once you start taking stuff away, that’s when they’re going to finally notice that this is actually a problem for them; that it’s not just about Elon Musk being cool and tweeting a bunch of stuff that gets the swells and the people in Washington angry; that this actually has material consequences for them.Sargent: Ron Brownstein got at this very well on a piece he wrote recently where he said Trump is about to betray his rural supporters. The way he put it, and you’re making this point as well, is that throughout the last three elections, Trump’s messaging resonated strongly in rural communities because a lot of it is all about hostility to racial and cultural change. Now on this second Trump term, we’re going to have a more stringent test of whether that cultural and racial affinity that rural voters have with Trump will actually sustain itself. We’re looking at a level of attack on their material interests from people like Musk, if he gets his way, that goes significantly further than anything he was able to do during his first term, don’t you think?Waldman: Yeah. A lot of that comes from the fact that Trump has a much more specific and well articulated and well thought-out policy agenda this time around. When he came into office last time, he didn’t think he was going to win. It was a scramble, and a lot of people in the Republican establishment who would normally move into a Republican administration didn’t come with him, so he had a collection of people who didn’t really know what they were doing. That meant that, in a lot of cases, he just didn’t really get very much done. This time around, that’s not the case. We spent a lot of time talking about Project 2025. Whether or not each one of the specifics in there gets put into effect, the point is that the people he’s bringing with him now, they actually do know what they’re doing and they have thought about this and they do have a very specific policy agenda. You and I may think it’s an extraordinarily damaging one, but it’s likely that they’re going to do a lot more of the things that they want to do, and they’re going to be successful in those policy terms. For a lot of Americans, that’s going to mean real damage, in ways that they hadn’t really thought of before.Sargent: I want to add to that Paul, because the fact that Trump has come in with a more detailed agenda is also a reflection of the collection of people who have had more time to really plan for a second Trump term. As you say, the Project 2025 people, this collection of ideologues out there is saying to themselves, My God, Trump is the best demagogue we have seen in many decades. He can convince his voters of anything. So let’s come up with a whole bunch of things that we can try to glom onto Trump and see if we can get them through. That’s what we’re really seeing here, right?Waldman: I think so. We’re still going to be dealing with a similar situation to before in that Trump has very few of his own policy preferences. He’s very much open to influence from what he sees in the news every day, what somebody tells him. So a lot of those people who have their own particular agenda, they’re just trying to follow in his wake, not make him too mad, get him to, even in a lot of cases, not even notice what they’re doing. That’s going to be true within all of the federal agencies.For instance, most of the time, Trump is not going to care what happens at the Environmental Protection Agency, so there could be a lot of policy changes that come about there that could result in higher pollution in a lot of places, including a lot of rural places. And Trump neither knows nor cares what’s actually happening there—that has to do with some particular agenda of the people who are there who have been thinking about this for a long time, as you said. He’s going to be just dipping into policy wherever he sees that there’s something that catches his attention or creates a scandal that he finds embarrassing, but a lot of the time, he’s just going to float above it. There’s going to be much more intense activity going on at all the different agencies of the federal government in ways that they’re going to really harm people. Sargent: And throw in there the volatility of Elon Musk. Right now, Musk is essentially threatening to primary Republicans who don’t support whatever it is constitutes the agenda that day, I guess. In the case of this spending deal that was just killed, Elon Musk basically killed it. Anne Applebaum had an amazing tweet where she said, “I spent the day talking to Europeans and no one can think of any precedent for what Musk just did to the U.S. Congress. There’s no businessman with that much power, the power to stop a routine spending bill anywhere else in the democratic world.” That’s remarkable stuff. By all indications, Trump isn’t really going to get in Musk’s way? It all strikes me as a recipe for an absolute policy catastrophe for Trump’s voters.Waldman: We’ve known for a long time that if Trump doesn’t like what a Republican politician does, he can say, I want to see them primary, and that could be the end of their career. And that’s just about loyalty to him. But Elon Musk, turns out, may be able to do exactly the same thing for his own agenda, which might or may not be exactly the same as Trump’s. He spent $277 million, according to reports we’ve gotten, in the 2024 election. It’s stunning—I don’t know if anybody’s ever spent that much before—the fact that a billionaire can come in and put that much money into a campaign to get his favorite president elected. And he has now over $400 billion. That’s nothing to him.He can mount primaries against anybody he wants, and that’s going to become something that is going to seep into the awareness of more and more Republicans; that if you make him angry, regardless of whether it’s something that Donald Trump cares about, for whatever reason, Musk can say, Well, you’re in the House of Representatives? I think I’ll just toss $20 million into a campaign to get you booted, and that’s going to be the end of your career. They are all going to understand that. And we don’t know exactly where his agenda is going to diverge from Trump’s or where there are going to be things that Elon Musk cares about that Trump doesn’t really care about, but [we know] that he is willing to invest money to keep members of Congress in line.What’s different about this is that it is so direct. We’re not talking about a guy who has a lot of money, giving a million dollars to a super PAC to get low taxes. This is the world’s richest man, who now seems like he can if he wants, and he does appear to want it, have a stranglehold on the federal government, on what Congress decides to do and decides not to do, and is able to pick up the phone and tell Donald Trump what policies he wants. And Trump will do it, because most of the time he just likes to be in Musk’s favor and wants to have this relationship with him. We’ve never, certainly in modern history [I’m not a historian, but it seems like in all of American history] had one rich individual who had the control over the federal government that it looks like Elon Musk is poised to have.Sargent: But Paul, you’re forgetting something. Elon Musk lives rent free in your head and mine. So that’s a big win for rural America, right?Waldman: [laughs] Yeah, they’re not going to get anything from him.Sargent: We’ll be angry, right? We’ll be upset.Waldman: That is true. Especially having co-written a book called White Rural Rage, I’m sure that there are a certain number of rural Americans who, if I am mad, can feel like they’ve gotten something out of that. But it’s not going to do much to improve their lives, just as Trump didn’t. He told people in coal country that all the coal jobs were going to come back. They didn’t. He promises material things, even if what he’s really giving them is something emotional, but the deep and abiding difficulties that people in rural America have did not get any better during Trump’s first term, and they’re not going to get any better in Trump’s second.Sargent: We should absolutely be clear that we think that Democrats really have to do a better job of explaining to rural Americans what the agenda of the Democratic Party is, and why it’s better for them. And [Democrats] maybe have to come up with a more populous set of policies as well to appeal to rural Americans. You and I aren’t of the view, I don’t think, that rural Americans owe their votes to Democrats. We agree that Democrats have to do a better job of appealing to them. It’s just hard to look at this situation with Musk and Trump and see why on earth they would feel good about what’s coming.Waldman: Yeah. One of the things that we say in our book at the end is that at the very least, if rural people don’t want to vote for Democrats, they should get themselves better Republicans. The Democrats have been told over and over again that what you need to do in order to appeal to rural Americans is to go there and listen and be respectful and understand people’s problems. That’s all well and good, but it is necessary but not sufficient. The other part of it that they haven’t done a good enough job of going to rural America and telling people why the Republican Party is screwing them. That’s the thing that Democrats are really reluctant to do. They’re so busy being respectful and listening that they’re not making a strong case to say, You are being taken to the cleaners by the people who you keep reelecting, who keep coming to you every two years or every four years and saying, “Don’t you hate those liberals up in the cities?” And then nothing gets better in your community. Your schools don’t get any better. Your roads don’t get any better. You don’t have any better access to health care. And it’s the people you elect who you have to hold accountable for that. Even if they’re all going to be Republicans, you have to make sure you get Republicans who will actually do something for you.Sargent: And that can coexist with a stronger case from Democrats for why Democratic policies will be better, and can coexist with a new agenda from Democratic politicians that is even more economically populist, more pro-worker, more pro-reformist, right?Waldman: Absolutely. Look, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, especially over the last four years, did a lot of stuff that was specifically aimed at rural communities. They sent a lot of infrastructure funding their way. There was a lot of broadband funding—and that’s a big problem in rural America, not having sufficient access to broadband. That has all kinds of effects. They put a lot of money, billions of dollars, that are going to be spooled out over the next few years, and that Trump will probably take credit for. They did a lot of things that were specifically aimed at trying to improve the lives of rural Americans. They didn’t get credit for it. They didn’t get any votes for it. But you can still keep trying to make that case and keep explaining to people.It’s going to be easier if you’re in those communities more. And it’s true that Democrats have abandoned, to a large extent, doing politics in a lot of big swaths of rural America—but that allowed Republicans to abandon them, too, because they don’t have to work either. If they know that they’re going to get 80 percent of the votes in a particular county, Republicans don’t bother campaigning because they’ve got it sewn up. So you have to make them work for it.Sargent: And I’m not sure where this government spending fight is going to end up. By the time people listen to this, it may be either resolved or a whole lot more chaotic, I don’t know. One thing we do know is that that dynamic is not going to be changing anytime soon under Trump and Musk.Waldman: Absolutely not. This is going to be a tumultuous four years, to say the least. Sargent: Paul Waldman, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. It was good to talk to you. Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189599/transcript-trump-musk-fiasco-shows-badly-maga-voters-got-scammed

2024-12-20 13:41:36

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 19 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.As of this recording, things are in full-blown chaos in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers race to negotiate a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. And already, there are a couple things we can conclude about the coming Donald Trump presidency. One is that Trump is going to screw over his voters very badly, including rural voters—we’re already seeing the beginnings of that in this shutdown fight. Another is that Trump is going to humiliate Mike Johnson mercilessly going forward, and Republicans are going to have one heck of a time trying to minister to the whims of Trump and Elon Musk, which are already being revealed to be deeply dangerous and crazy. We’re chatting about this with Paul Waldman, who’s the co-author with Tom Schaller of the book, White Rural Rage. Good to have you on, Paul.Paul Waldman: Thank you.Sargent: To quickly catch people up, House Republicans thought they had negotiated a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, but then Elon Musk attacked the bill’s spending and then Trump opposed it. Republicans then declared it dead because Trump and Musk are their masters. As of this moment, House Republicans have a new deal which Trump endorsed: a two-year extension of the debt limit until January 2027, a continuation of current government funding levels, extension of disaster aid in the farm bill, and some other stuff. Paul, I don’t know what Democrats are going to do here, but it seems like they shouldn’t support this because it just keeps the debt limit intact. What do you think?Waldman: Democrats have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently for a long time. And over the years, you and I have both written many articles explaining why it’s a terrible thing to have this extra vote that needs to be taken in order to validate the spending that has already been allocated, in order to satisfy this archaic idea that you have to keep coming back again and again and again to allow the government to keep borrowing money. All it is is a tool to create government shutdowns. Democrats have long thought we should just get rid of it—there’s only one other country in the world that has anything like it—and Republicans have been resistant to that because they like the idea that they can force these shutdowns and use it as a tool to extract spending cuts that would be difficult to get otherwise.Now, you have a situation where it almost seems like Donald Trump just woke up yesterday and realized that the debt ceiling was going to be a problem for him: He’s going to be president, and this could cause shutdowns that he would get blamed for. So he has now demanded that they make a two-year suspension. Not a permanent elimination of the debt ceiling but two years, which would probably take him to the point where the Democrats will take back the House in the 2026 midterms and maybe they can get the blame for that then.The problem, at the moment, is that Republicans have this razor-thin majority in the House, and you have a group of people in the Republican caucus, some of whom are in the Freedom Caucus, who are real serious anti-government ideologues. They’re not just Trump loyalists—that’s an important distinction here because you have a lot of far-right people in the Republican caucus who will do anything for Donald Trump. You have a group of people, including Chip Roy from Texas, whom Trump now says he wants to find a primary challenger for, who are genuine, committed, principled ideologues who say that they are never going to vote to increase the debt limit without serious spending cuts, that any time we get into one of these situations they want to see the size of government brought down. They’re willing to shut down the government, even if it’s something that is damaging to Trump and the rest of their party. That’s what they’re dealing with right now.Sargent: I want to talk about the early signs here that Trump is going to really screw over as voters. Trump and Musk killed the first deal, even though it included a lot of direct payments for farmers. The New York Times reports that lawmakers from rural areas were furious that Musk had killed the bill. Paul, your book is all about how rural voters stick with Trump, despite him being really terrible for their material interests. Now we’ve got Trump’s favorite billionaire directly shafting them in the name of spending cuts. Can you talk about this dynamic broadly?Waldman: This is the essence of what rural politics has become. One of the arguments we make is that voters in rural areas keep electing Republicans and are represented by Republicans at all levels, from president all the way down to dogcatcher, and yet what they don’t give them is material improvements to their lives. They give them a lot of culture-war campaigning, and a lot of emotional satisfaction. That was what Donald Trump really gave them: the feeling that he hated the same people they hated, and he would basically be a weapon against the people they despise. Even if it didn’t change their lives for the better—it didn’t improve their education systems, their economic opportunities, their local infrastructure—it wasn’t as important as the emotional satisfaction that they got from Donald Trump. Data is still coming in, but it looks like Trump got the votes of rural Americans, and especially rural whites, at about the same rate that he did four years ago. According to the best data that we have, he got about 71 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2020. He’ll probably do at least as well in 2024. And then he comes into office, and he starts talking about all these things that are not just not helpful to rural people but are actually going to be incredibly damaging.For instance, he says he wants to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. Well, who benefits most from the postal service the way it is now? It’s rural people. He’s talking about promoting school vouchers, which don’t benefit rural people at all because they just don’t have private schools where they live. Mass deportation is going to have a devastating effect on a lot of rural communities; not just because the farmers themselves are employing a lot of undocumented people to pick crops in the fields, but because those people are spending money in those communities where they’re living. The cuts to Medicaid that Republicans are contemplating? That is devastating to rural communities because there have been hundreds of rural hospitals that have closed in recent years, and they absolutely depend on Medicaid funding in order to stay alive.Then you have the tariffs. This is another thing that is going to be really damaging. We saw this last time when he was president. The story that he tells about the tariffs that he put on is he put on all these tariffs and we took in all this money from the tariffs. Well, do you know where the money from the tariffs went? It went to repay farmers because as a result of the tariffs that he put on China, China responded by cutting off its imports of American agricultural products. That resulted in billions of dollars of losses for American farmers. So the Trump administration took the money that was being brought in by the tariffs, which is being paid by American consumers, and basically passed it right back to the farmers to bail them out. According to one study, 92 percent of the revenues in the tariffs that he put on just went back into bailouts for former.We’re going to go back into that cycle again. You have all of these ways in which Trump’s most adoring voters are going to get screwed over by the policies, when they thought that he was just going to come back in and make America great again and make eggs cheap.Sargent: Well, it actually could even be worse if you think about Elon Musk’s role in all this. You mentioned that you guys found, in the writing of your book, that Trump had essentially offered rural voters this cultural comfort. Somehow, Elon Musk has now become a cultural champion for MAGA voters too. I’m just not sure how that happened. And with Musk being given all this influence over spending, it’s almost profoundly insulting if you really think about it. My initial thought was that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was just going to be a plaything for him with no real influence, but now it’s not so clear. It looks like his drive for serious cuts is going to be taken more seriously. And as you say, those voters are the losers from these types of spending cuts. On what planet is Elon Musk a warrior for these people? How on earth could they come to see him that way?Waldman: A lot of it has to do with this fundamental orientation against institutions and establishment power. People have a lot of anger at not just the government, but other established institutions like news media, big business. There’s a lot of free-floating anger at the establishment. And looking at a figure like Musk, it looks like the establishment hates him. He’s so disruptive and erratic in his way, and he insults people all the time. He has some of that same characteristic that Trump has: He pisses people off, and he looks like he’s just changing everything willy-nilly.If your feeling about all the established institutions, including government, is that they just need to be torn apart and made uncomfortable, then you can look at him and say, He seems like he’s a hero. He seems like he’s on my side. But where the rubber actually meets the road, things get a little more complicated because the people who feel that actually depend on government in a lot of different ways. Musk comes out during the campaign and says, I think we could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. And when people who know what they’re talking about actually look at the federal budget, they say, Well, if you set aside Social Security and Medicare, which Trump had claimed he’s not going to touch, and you set aside military spending, which Trump and Republicans want to increase, and veterans benefits, which he says he’s not going to cut, the $2 trillion cut means eliminating basically everything else that the government does. And if you like driving on roads and having a border and having national parks and money for schools and all of these things? Well, it turns out that if you want to cut the amount that Musk says he wants to cut, then you’re going to have to eliminate all those things.It may not happen, but all of a sudden now, he’s taking away things that people really depend on. A lot of the ideology—this is especially true in rural America—is that people don’t want to see what government does for them. They want to believe that everything that they have in their lives is because of their own efforts, and that they are independent and self-reliant. This is very much a part of the rural ethos especially. The people who live in rural areas believe I’m connected to the material world, I know how to fix my car, I know how to fix my house. I don’t need government to tell me what to do.That may be true in some ways, but it’s also true that a lot of those programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, are used at higher levels in rural areas. They are more dependent. There are 400 separate programs within the federal government that are specifically targeted at rural areas. So in a lot of ways, rural Americans are more dependent on government. Once you start taking stuff away, that’s when they’re going to finally notice that this is actually a problem for them; that it’s not just about Elon Musk being cool and tweeting a bunch of stuff that gets the swells and the people in Washington angry; that this actually has material consequences for them.Sargent: Ron Brownstein got at this very well on a piece he wrote recently where he said Trump is about to betray his rural supporters. The way he put it, and you’re making this point as well, is that throughout the last three elections, Trump’s messaging resonated strongly in rural communities because a lot of it is all about hostility to racial and cultural change. Now on this second Trump term, we’re going to have a more stringent test of whether that cultural and racial affinity that rural voters have with Trump will actually sustain itself. We’re looking at a level of attack on their material interests from people like Musk, if he gets his way, that goes significantly further than anything he was able to do during his first term, don’t you think?Waldman: Yeah. A lot of that comes from the fact that Trump has a much more specific and well articulated and well thought-out policy agenda this time around. When he came into office last time, he didn’t think he was going to win. It was a scramble, and a lot of people in the Republican establishment who would normally move into a Republican administration didn’t come with him, so he had a collection of people who didn’t really know what they were doing. That meant that, in a lot of cases, he just didn’t really get very much done. This time around, that’s not the case. We spent a lot of time talking about Project 2025. Whether or not each one of the specifics in there gets put into effect, the point is that the people he’s bringing with him now, they actually do know what they’re doing and they have thought about this and they do have a very specific policy agenda. You and I may think it’s an extraordinarily damaging one, but it’s likely that they’re going to do a lot more of the things that they want to do, and they’re going to be successful in those policy terms. For a lot of Americans, that’s going to mean real damage, in ways that they hadn’t really thought of before.Sargent: I want to add to that Paul, because the fact that Trump has come in with a more detailed agenda is also a reflection of the collection of people who have had more time to really plan for a second Trump term. As you say, the Project 2025 people, this collection of ideologues out there is saying to themselves, My God, Trump is the best demagogue we have seen in many decades. He can convince his voters of anything. So let’s come up with a whole bunch of things that we can try to glom onto Trump and see if we can get them through. That’s what we’re really seeing here, right?Waldman: I think so. We’re still going to be dealing with a similar situation to before in that Trump has very few of his own policy preferences. He’s very much open to influence from what he sees in the news every day, what somebody tells him. So a lot of those people who have their own particular agenda, they’re just trying to follow in his wake, not make him too mad, get him to, even in a lot of cases, not even notice what they’re doing. That’s going to be true within all of the federal agencies.For instance, most of the time, Trump is not going to care what happens at the Environmental Protection Agency, so there could be a lot of policy changes that come about there that could result in higher pollution in a lot of places, including a lot of rural places. And Trump neither knows nor cares what’s actually happening there—that has to do with some particular agenda of the people who are there who have been thinking about this for a long time, as you said. He’s going to be just dipping into policy wherever he sees that there’s something that catches his attention or creates a scandal that he finds embarrassing, but a lot of the time, he’s just going to float above it. There’s going to be much more intense activity going on at all the different agencies of the federal government in ways that they’re going to really harm people. Sargent: And throw in there the volatility of Elon Musk. Right now, Musk is essentially threatening to primary Republicans who don’t support whatever it is constitutes the agenda that day, I guess. In the case of this spending deal that was just killed, Elon Musk basically killed it. Anne Applebaum had an amazing tweet where she said, “I spent the day talking to Europeans and no one can think of any precedent for what Musk just did to the U.S. Congress. There’s no businessman with that much power, the power to stop a routine spending bill anywhere else in the democratic world.” That’s remarkable stuff. By all indications, Trump isn’t really going to get in Musk’s way? It all strikes me as a recipe for an absolute policy catastrophe for Trump’s voters.Waldman: We’ve known for a long time that if Trump doesn’t like what a Republican politician does, he can say, I want to see them primary, and that could be the end of their career. And that’s just about loyalty to him. But Elon Musk, turns out, may be able to do exactly the same thing for his own agenda, which might or may not be exactly the same as Trump’s. He spent $277 million, according to reports we’ve gotten, in the 2024 election. It’s stunning—I don’t know if anybody’s ever spent that much before—the fact that a billionaire can come in and put that much money into a campaign to get his favorite president elected. And he has now over $400 billion. That’s nothing to him.He can mount primaries against anybody he wants, and that’s going to become something that is going to seep into the awareness of more and more Republicans; that if you make him angry, regardless of whether it’s something that Donald Trump cares about, for whatever reason, Musk can say, Well, you’re in the House of Representatives? I think I’ll just toss $20 million into a campaign to get you booted, and that’s going to be the end of your career. They are all going to understand that. And we don’t know exactly where his agenda is going to diverge from Trump’s or where there are going to be things that Elon Musk cares about that Trump doesn’t really care about, but [we know] that he is willing to invest money to keep members of Congress in line.What’s different about this is that it is so direct. We’re not talking about a guy who has a lot of money, giving a million dollars to a super PAC to get low taxes. This is the world’s richest man, who now seems like he can if he wants, and he does appear to want it, have a stranglehold on the federal government, on what Congress decides to do and decides not to do, and is able to pick up the phone and tell Donald Trump what policies he wants. And Trump will do it, because most of the time he just likes to be in Musk’s favor and wants to have this relationship with him. We’ve never, certainly in modern history [I’m not a historian, but it seems like in all of American history] had one rich individual who had the control over the federal government that it looks like Elon Musk is poised to have.Sargent: But Paul, you’re forgetting something. Elon Musk lives rent free in your head and mine. So that’s a big win for rural America, right?Waldman: [laughs] Yeah, they’re not going to get anything from him.Sargent: We’ll be angry, right? We’ll be upset.Waldman: That is true. Especially having co-written a book called White Rural Rage, I’m sure that there are a certain number of rural Americans who, if I am mad, can feel like they’ve gotten something out of that. But it’s not going to do much to improve their lives, just as Trump didn’t. He told people in coal country that all the coal jobs were going to come back. They didn’t. He promises material things, even if what he’s really giving them is something emotional, but the deep and abiding difficulties that people in rural America have did not get any better during Trump’s first term, and they’re not going to get any better in Trump’s second.Sargent: We should absolutely be clear that we think that Democrats really have to do a better job of explaining to rural Americans what the agenda of the Democratic Party is, and why it’s better for them. And [Democrats] maybe have to come up with a more populous set of policies as well to appeal to rural Americans. You and I aren’t of the view, I don’t think, that rural Americans owe their votes to Democrats. We agree that Democrats have to do a better job of appealing to them. It’s just hard to look at this situation with Musk and Trump and see why on earth they would feel good about what’s coming.Waldman: Yeah. One of the things that we say in our book at the end is that at the very least, if rural people don’t want to vote for Democrats, they should get themselves better Republicans. The Democrats have been told over and over again that what you need to do in order to appeal to rural Americans is to go there and listen and be respectful and understand people’s problems. That’s all well and good, but it is necessary but not sufficient. The other part of it that they haven’t done a good enough job of going to rural America and telling people why the Republican Party is screwing them. That’s the thing that Democrats are really reluctant to do. They’re so busy being respectful and listening that they’re not making a strong case to say, You are being taken to the cleaners by the people who you keep reelecting, who keep coming to you every two years or every four years and saying, “Don’t you hate those liberals up in the cities?” And then nothing gets better in your community. Your schools don’t get any better. Your roads don’t get any better. You don’t have any better access to health care. And it’s the people you elect who you have to hold accountable for that. Even if they’re all going to be Republicans, you have to make sure you get Republicans who will actually do something for you.Sargent: And that can coexist with a stronger case from Democrats for why Democratic policies will be better, and can coexist with a new agenda from Democratic politicians that is even more economically populist, more pro-worker, more pro-reformist, right?Waldman: Absolutely. Look, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, especially over the last four years, did a lot of stuff that was specifically aimed at rural communities. They sent a lot of infrastructure funding their way. There was a lot of broadband funding—and that’s a big problem in rural America, not having sufficient access to broadband. That has all kinds of effects. They put a lot of money, billions of dollars, that are going to be spooled out over the next few years, and that Trump will probably take credit for. They did a lot of things that were specifically aimed at trying to improve the lives of rural Americans. They didn’t get credit for it. They didn’t get any votes for it. But you can still keep trying to make that case and keep explaining to people.It’s going to be easier if you’re in those communities more. And it’s true that Democrats have abandoned, to a large extent, doing politics in a lot of big swaths of rural America—but that allowed Republicans to abandon them, too, because they don’t have to work either. If they know that they’re going to get 80 percent of the votes in a particular county, Republicans don’t bother campaigning because they’ve got it sewn up. So you have to make them work for it.Sargent: And I’m not sure where this government spending fight is going to end up. By the time people listen to this, it may be either resolved or a whole lot more chaotic, I don’t know. One thing we do know is that that dynamic is not going to be changing anytime soon under Trump and Musk.Waldman: Absolutely not. This is going to be a tumultuous four years, to say the least. Sargent: Paul Waldman, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. It was good to talk to you. Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189599/transcript-trump-musk-fiasco-shows-badly-maga-voters-got-scammed

2024-12-20 12:37:42

@nprofile…6kn7
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In Democrats’ seemingly endless election postmortems—and in the postmortems on the postmortems—a persistent theme has been to blame the reddening of blue states like New York and New Jersey on crime in their big cities. On Pod Save America, the political commentator Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of taking crime seriously as a factor in voters’ decisions. To explain why he wasn’t surprised by blue states’ “sharp red shift,” he said: “Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that, like … ‘Crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News’—like, shut the fuck up with that.” Klein argued that when it comes to crime and criminal justice policy, fact-checking is a political dead end for Democrats. Instead, Democrats need to “talk to some people who live near you” and grasp “the sense of disorder rising”—a disorder fueled by migrants, homeless encampments, turnstile jumping, and crime in general. In San Francisco, he noted, “the fury is overwhelming.” As evidence, he pointed to the losses of reform prosecutors and the defeat of San Francisco Mayor London Breed. At bottom, Klein’s claim was that it’s bad politics to respond to people’s fears about crime by saying that crime is actually down (even though it is) or by pointing out that their fears are the product of misleading press coverage (even though they are). In other words, facts don’t matter, the vibes do, and we need to govern in response to the vibes. At a fundamental level, I agree with Klein. He’s right that we cannot fact-check our way out of a fear of crime; I’ve said this myself. As a quant type, I find it depressing to admit, but politics are about vibes, and vibes cannot be fact-checked. This is especially true when it comes to crime, where fear is often a reflection of deeper anxieties about noncrime disorder, about outside threats, about social upheaval and change. Fact-checks that say (very true) things like, “We are in the midst of a historic drop in homicides” can’t really address those deeper currents.But on another, equally fundamental level, I disagree with what the New York Times journalist, influential podcaster, and longtime wonk is saying. Because the vibes are coming from somewhere. And for most people, the vibes about crime are not coming from their lived experiences. Crime is not like inflation, a phenomenon everyone experiences because everyone buys stuff. Instead, crime is densely concentrated geographically and among certain people, in the areas that suffer the most from poverty, unemployment, and government disinvestment. When a prominent journalist on a widely popular podcast tells listeners to “talk to some people who live near you,” the people he’s referring to are probably not going to be those living in the areas where crime is most common—they are, rather, going to be those whose lives are least likely to be affected by crime.It is among this group that, in Klein’s telling, “the fury is overwhelming.” But where does the fury fueling the bad vibes come from? From the media. From a media that routinely misrepresents crime and tends to ignore the voices of those actually affected by the policies: bail reform, reform prosecution, policing alternatives, and so on. Here are two powerful examples of how the media shapes misleading vibes about crime for those who rarely experience it.A 2022 analysis of media coverage of crime in New York City paints a damning picture of how the news distorted people’s perceptions. Toward the end of the analysis, a graph compares two values: actual shootings in New York City and mentions of shootings in local media, from 2019 to the end of 2022. For most of the graph, the two are uncorrelated at best; spikes in shootings often produce no change in coverage, and coverage sometimes spikes even as shootings remain flat. In 2022, in the run-up to a crucial federal midterm election, however, the picture becomes much worse: Shootings themselves remain almost completely flat, but the coverage of them soars, hitting levels about three to four times higher than during previous periods with similar levels of gun violence. As Politico noted, these “blood and guts headlines” helped Republicans claim one open New York House seat and take three more from Democratic control.The report, published by Bloomberg, made clear that the spike in crime coverage had nothing to do with actual violence and everything to do with Eric Adams’s launching his campaign to become mayor. People’s sense of violence stemmed from the narrative-driving efforts of a tough-on-crime politician and the media’s willingness to advance that narrative.Along similar lines, there was basically zero discussion in the press of striking data, released last summer by the Major City Chiefs Association, that suggested we were on pace for a historic drop in homicide rates for the second year in row, a drop that could wipe out the 2020–21 spike in lethal violence. The 2020 surge—which was bloody, and merited attention, to be clear—received breathless coverage. But nowhere near the same attention was given to the reversal of the trend, even though a two-year decline of nearly 30 percent is an almost unprecedented reduction in violence. So of course, per Klein, the “people who live near you” are filled with “rage” over violence: People who generally only experience trends in homicide vicariously, through the media, had been subjected to constant coverage of a rise in crime and heard next to nothing about a stunning complete reversal.In other words, why did New Yorkers think violence was up when it was really flat or down? Because of what they were told. And Klein’s theorizing glosses over this. He’s right that people are upset and that anger puts constraints on political possibility. But we have two options: to simply accept that anger as some sort of exogenous thing we cannot change, and govern accordingly, or to ask the difficult questions about why people feel as they do and what might be done to help them feel differently.Perhaps worse than the media’s emphasis on crime spikes, however, is that coverage of crime policy, especially of reform efforts, rarely elevates the voices of those who favor reforms—those who are not gentrified white voters but are the people most touched by crime, violence, and ineffective policing and prosecutorial policies.A remarkable example of this is how The New York Times covered an effort by the nonprofit advocacy organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights to bail out every woman and child in the New York City jail system in October 2018. The Times published three articles on the plan, two before it happened and one after. These were not short pieces: Together, they came to 2,500 words, and all were published in the A-section of the print paper. In this prime media real estate, whose voices were heard? The reporters quoted two elected district attorneys, the mayor’s office, two current and one former City Council members, the police commissioner, the head of the correctional officers’ union, the director and a lawyer for RFK Human Rights, and a senior public defender. Notice who was missing? There was not a single quote from a single person or family impacted by the bailout. Not one person was asked what it meant to have a mother or wife or child or friend home from the dangerous New York City jails, one of which was just found in contempt by a federal judge for failing to stem overwhelming violence. Not one person was asked what it meant to be free from those places. Even when addressing the potential risks of the bailout, those who actually faced the risks were ignored in favor of takes from elite lawyers and politicians whose perceptions of those benefits and risks are surely shaped by their lack of direct exposure to them.Further aggravating this error, the article noted that fears about the bailout may have been misplaced because the rate of reoffending was remarkably low. But that was offered as the sole metric of success. There was no discussion of the affirmative good the bailout might have done: family dinners, parents at school events, mothers and children retaining and trying to rebuild the bonds that incarceration can fray. The coverage rendered the humans at the heart of the bailout—the people whose lives motivated the RFK Human Rights experiment in the first place—invisible. They, and their experiences, were treated as irrelevant. The clear message to the readers, whether intended or not, was that the actual subjects of the policy do not matter. This, in turn, implies that reforms have only downsides, and that we should only fear them. The only way the reform succeeds is if reoffending rates stay low or close to zero. In this framing, there are basically no benefits to offset the potential costs—because the beneficiaries are ignored. So when a reform goes wrong, we should feel, well … fury and rage at those who adopted it. How can reforms look like good governance when the media silences the beneficiaries and dedicates exactly zero words to talking about the good these policies do?In the short term, of course, Klein is surely right: Democratic politicians are going to have to contend with the vibes as they are, particularly as they are felt by Times readers and Pod Save America listeners. But journalists have an obligation to confront their own role in producing those vibes. There has been a 30-plus percent decline in homicides in Oakland, a nearly 40 percent decline in New Orleans, a nearly 40 percent decline in Philadelphia. Baltimore may end the year with fewer than 200 homicides for the first time since 2011. Journalists do not get to take fury at alleged bad governance as a given when they encourage that fury with the stories they choose to tell—and not to tell.This article was produced in partnership with the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189562/democrats-crime-problem-blame-media

2024-12-20 12:37:42

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Lady Liberty turned on her head is the sort of image one might expect a surly teenager with artistic aspirations to produce after reading The Great Gatsby or Howard Zinn, and it is the first image that the viewer of Brady Corbet’s third feature, The Brutalist, sees once the VistaVision logotype, announcement of an overture, and a countdown have flitted across the screen. Such elaborate window dressing is clearly intended to convey the magnificence of classic cinema, but also America, which Hungarian refugee László Tóth first glimpses from the hull of a ship approaching Ellis Island. “Your face is ugly,” a prostitute tells him once he reaches dry land. “I know it is,” he replies in a goulash-thick Magyar accent, but we know that it is not, because Tóth is played by Adrien Brody, whose crooked nose and watercolor eyes define one of contemporary Hollywood’s most distinctive canvasses for expression.Brody always looks at least a little sad, a trait that lends his tragic heroes instant pathos and gives other characters an edge when he plays against type. Whether he is an Anglophile punk stripper from the Bronx, a tax-evading art dealer, a billionaire in athleisure, Arthur Miller, Salvador Dalí, or a stop-motion field mouse, melancholy seasons the motivations of his roles into more precise emotions, establishing a link between grief and indignation, determination and disappointment, loneliness and regret, guilt and shame, fear and defeat. It should come as no surprise, then, that his finest performance—as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), for which he won an Academy Award—should portray a survivor of one of the most obscene tragedies ever to befall humankind. Like Szpilman, Tóth is an Eastern European Jew, a victim of the Holocaust, and an artist—not a musician, but an architect. He is also a heroin addict—a habit he picks up after suffering a nasal fracture on the transatlantic passage—and an estranged family man plagued by ambiguous sexual malaise. These are a lot of characteristics to stuff inside a sprawling immigrant narrative, but the complexity rescues Corbet’s film from the sentimentality to which so many treatises on the American dream succumb. His story spans decades and continents but mostly elapses on the Pennsylvania estate of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist who employs Tóth to design and construct a mysterious edifice in honor of his own late mother that is only completed by the film’s epilogue, three hours in. If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware.As Corbet’s script, which he wrote with his collaborator and wife, Mona Fastvold, plumbs the metaphorical richness of architecture as a means for self-invention, Tóth triumphs, stumbles, and fails in cyclical ascension to the top. His pinnacle is the 1980 Venice Biennale, where a major retrospective celebrates the expansive achievements of this now elderly and Israeli champion of brutalism. If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware. Corbet’s indulgence in symbolism is heavier-handed than a fistful of concrete and steel, and yet it works, primarily due to a strong ensemble, Lol Crowley’s expressionistic cinematography, and an uncompromisingly willful directorial vision, imperfect though it may be.After the much delayed opening credits roll, Tóth takes a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his “shiksa” wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), own a furniture store, Miller & Sons (“No Miller, no sons,” Tóth cracks at the newly assimilated, Catholic persona of his relative and countryman, who “speaks like an American from television”). Showing Tóth to a makeshift bedroom in a storage closet, Attila makes clear that he has brought the “maestro” here to modernize his wares. And he does, showcasing in the storefront a Corbusian table and chair that look “like a tricycle” to Attila (“It’s a bike for kids,” he offers by way of explanation).Meanwhile, Tóth meets Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), a Black widower, waiting in the breadline of a church only to get turned away; Tóth becomes a white savior immediately, promising to hold a place in line for Gordon and his son, William (Charlie Esoko and, later, Zephan Hanson Amissah), the next morning. The two men go into business together when Miller & Sons scores a premium client and Tóth hires Gordon as his foreman. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) wants to surprise his father with a renovation of the library at his Doylestown estate into something “proper”: “Maybe make him a ladder with little wheels on it?”Tóth, it turns out, is a licensed architect who designed the city library in Budapest; his negotiation skills suddenly outpace those of his entrepreneurial cousin, quickly convincing the junior Van Buren to agree to a $1,200 budget, though Tóth “was ready to settle at $450.” By the time the job is complete, the library’s skylight has been accidentally shattered, the space has been transformed into an ethereal cathedral to reading (Tóth’s chair placed precisely at a 45-degree angle), an enraged elder Van Buren has chased the crew off his property, his son has refused to pay, and Attila has kicked Tóth to the curb, accusing him of sleeping with Audrey.Months later, Tóth is bearded, smoking opium in the shower of the charity mission where he has joined Gordon and William in seeking shelter. The two men are working construction when Van Buren Sr., pulls up with an envelope of cash and a copy of Look magazine, in which the library is featured. The millionaire has done his homework, learning that Tóth studied at the Bauhaus, and digging up a dossier of his designs. “I did not realize these images were still available, much less of consequence,” Tóth modestly responds. The two men hit it off: “I found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating,” Van Buren rattles off with the fast-talking 1940s patter that Pearce mastered in L.A. Confidential (1997) and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce (2011).After splurging the overdue payment on drinks and drugs at a jazz club with Gordon, Tóth takes the black car Van Buren has sent for him back to the estate, where he meets the rest of the family, including Harry’s twin sister, Maggie Lee (Stacy Martin), and Van Buren’s Jewish lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), who promises to help Tóth’s wife, Erzsébeth (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy and, later, Ariane Labed), to secure visas to emigrate via the Displaced Persons Act. What luck! Before the party comes to an end, Van Buren leads his guests to the top of a hill, where he publicizes ground breaking of a “community center” on this very site, to be designed by none other than Tóth. Doylestown is not a “cultural” place, he admits; for this reason, “money is no object,” but the “specific and meaningful” purpose is to serve a Christian congregation in apparent need of an auditorium, gymnasium (with a swimming pool), library, and chapel all in one. “It’s ambitious,” Van Buren concedes. “My father would like that.” Impressed by the ability of Tóth’s creations to withstand a war (Harry says his scale models “look like a barracks”), Van Buren enlists the architect to join him on a protracted ego trip in the hope that its fruition will immortalize them both, as if to refute F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Approval of the $850,000 project concludes the initial half of the film, which is interrupted by a built-in, 15-minute intermission (again, with the countdown), and a second act. Tóth is reunited with his wife and niece, though Erzsébeth is in a wheelchair (famine-induced osteoporosis) and Zsófia is a mute but stunning young woman, no longer a small girl. As husband and wife attempt an awkward reconciliation, the Tóths and Van Burens grow uncomfortably close; a veteran journalist, Erzsébeth gets a newspaper job in New York, while Tóth is left to fight penny-pinching engineers and consultants over the height of the ceiling. A train transporting materials derails, sending laborers to the hospital and convincing Van Buren to cut his losses and send the crew home.It isn’t until 1963 that Van Buren once again fetches Tóth, underemployed as a draftsman in an architecture firm. They both want to complete the community center, though a pregnant Zsófia and her husband, Binyamin (Benett Vilmanyí), try to convince their aunt and uncle to make aliyah with them instead. Thus begins the film’s most arresting sequence, in which Van Buren and Tóth travel to Italy in search of marble. Functional as he may be, Tóth is still an addict, and Van Buren reveals that his interest in the brutalist exceeds the normal bounds of patronage or financial investment. What happens next is too deliberately shocking to spoil with summary—suffice it to say that Corbet does what he can to dispute Susan Sontag’s claim in On Photography that, even “at the farthest reach of metaphor,” the “camera doesn’t rape.” Corbet and Fastvold are more adamant than Fitzgerald was in psychologizing the depravity of privilege and wealth, and though there is truth in the caricature, the lack of subtlety feels juvenile, unbecoming of the film’s enterprising scope.The Brutalist is almost exaggeratedly humorless, and it’s often unclear on which side of the screen what, if any, punch line is supposed to land.The Van Burens’ villainy may be inseparable from their status, but under their influence, Tóth has changed: He fires Gordon, and after he dips into his stash to alleviate Erzsébeth’s chronic cramps, she tells him, “You’ve become a selfish old bastard before my eyes.” With their romance perversely rekindled, she overdoses, then shows up at the Van Buren estate without invitation to stand up for her wounded husband. “He’s a sick, senile old dog,” Van Buren barks back. “And when dogs get sick, they often bite the hand that feeds them until someone puts them down.” But Tóth, we glean from the epilogue, has survived everyone but Zsófia, who introduces him at the Biennale, insisting that her uncle’s “aim was not to define an epoch, but to transcend all time”; his buildings “indicate nothing, tell nothing, they just are.” This explication seems to contradict the fact that the Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Activity and Research, finished in 1973, directly references Buchenwald and Dachau, where Tóth and Erzsébeth were respectively imprisoned—a concentration camp in rural Pennsylvania the survivor’s last laugh. But is it a joke? Corbet makes that hard to tell: The Brutalist is almost exaggeratedly humorless, and as with his previous film, Vox Lux (2018), it’s often unclear on which side of the screen what, if any, punch line is supposed to land. The stilted formality of the dialogue and melodramatic plot wink at noir, while the preoccupations with historical verisimilitude and a veneer of intellectual heft reach for grander heights. Brody has defended the personal inspiration of his accent—his maternal grandfather was a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat—though it tends to distract from the honesty of his performance, not unlike the pseudo-Portuguese lilts of Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver in Martin Scorsese’s devotional epic, Silence (2016).Still, The Brutalist’s eccentricities result in a movie far more exciting than the vast majority of blockbusters at its scale, and it was produced—with a $6 million budget—at a fraction of the cost. Corbet may direct a great film someday soon, but this ain’t it, and as a filmmaker working outside of the studio system, he would be wise to mull over the rhetorical question Van Buren poses to Tóth at this one’s climax: “If you resent your persecution, why then do you make yourself such an easy target?”
https://newrepublic.com/article/189193/brutalist-pairs-modern-architecture-post-war-trauma

2024-12-20 12:37:42

@nprofile…6kn7
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In late December 2022, a rancher in Johnson County, Texas, called the constable’s office to complain about his neighbor. The neighbor had recently spread a kind of waste-derived fertilizer, known as biosolids, over his land, the caller said, and the piles were smoking. The caller and his wife were struggling to breathe, the fish in his pond had died, and he thought the biosolids were making him, his wife, and their animals sick.Dana Ames, the county’s environmental crimes investigator, had gotten complaints about biosolids before—the human waste product also known as sewage sludge has a particularly noxious smell—but this felt different. She did some research and found news articles about a dairy farmer in the state of Maine who had used biosolids on his land and whose milk showed sky-high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.Known as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in our environment, PFAS have been linked to a wide variety of human health concerns—and are also present in a range of industrial and consumer products, from firefighting foam to nonstick frying pans. While industry has known about the harms of these chemicals for decades, the government is just catching up: In April of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency set a first-ever drinking water standard for some of the most common forever chemicals, setting a maximum enforceable level of just four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied compounds. Some states, meanwhile, have taken regulation into their own hands. Because sludge can accumulate high levels of forever chemicals from municipal sewage, Maine banned the use of biosolids on farmlands entirely in 2022.After the rancher made his complaint, Johnson County tested his property and animals. A drinking water well tested at 268.2 parts per trillion of PFAS, more than 65 times over the new EPA standards. The flesh of a fish taken from the property tested at 74,000 parts per trillion of PFAS. (One 2023 study found that eating just one serving of fish with 11,800 parts per trillion of PFAS would be the equivalent of drinking water contaminated with more than 10 times the new EPA levels of PFAS for a whole month.) The liver of a stillborn calf, meanwhile, tested with more than 610,000 parts per trillion of PFOA, indicating that its mother was routinely exposed to the chemicals in her environment.The company that produced the biosolids applied to the neighbor’s land, Synagro, had recently distributed samples of sludge at the grand opening of its Fort Worth location. Ames was able to get a jar to test. The biosolids tested at 35,610 parts per trillion of total PFAS. “You can make a scary movie out of this,” Ames says.For years, farmers around the country have used biosolids on their fields, a practice touted by industry interests and the government as a safe, environmentally friendly use of waste. But recently, a handful of farmers in different states hundreds of miles apart have seen products from their farm—and even their own bodies—test positive for worrying levels of forever chemicals. Biosolids, a growing number of experts say, are likely to blame, endangering these farmers’ livelihoods and health.Regulators in Maine are some of the only ones in the country to take aggressive action, but those closest to the issue say it’s time for the federal government and other states to follow suit. Earlier this year, a group of Johnson County residents, including those who originally called Ames in 2022, filed a lawsuit against Synagro, North America’s largest biosolids producer, alleging that the PFAS seeping into their land may have caused serious medical issues and the deaths of multiple animals. (A company spokesperson said in an email to The New Republic that Synagro denies the “unproven and unprecedented” allegations, that the biosolids applied to the land in Johnson County “met all USEPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements,” and that subsequent test results showing lower PFAS levels on the farm with the biosolids “strongly suggest that the farm where biosolids were used cannot be a source for the PFAS allegedly found on the plaintiffs’ farms.”) Johnson County, meanwhile, has teamed up with a farmers’ advocate group in Maine to sue the EPA for its lack of regulation on PFAS in biosolids. And in Congress, Maine legislators in both houses are trying to pass national legislation to make sure farmers affected by PFAS can access funds for support. The question now is whether anyone will listen.One of the first phone calls that Nancy McBrady got when she joined Maine’s Department of Agriculture in 2019 was from the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. “She said, ‘Do you know about PFAS?’” McBrady recalls. “I really had to jump in and get smart.”McBrady found herself in the middle of a mounting agricultural crisis that had begun just a few years before. In late 2016, Maine regulators had found PFAS contaminating water wells on the property of dairy farmer Fred Stone in Arundel, Maine. Stone voluntarily tested his milk, finding PFAS levels so high that his purchaser, Oakhurst Dairy, stopped buying his product. In early 2019, as Stone was losing hundreds of dollars a day and dumping dozens of gallons of milk in an attempt to fix the problem, Maine’s new governor formed a task force to investigate the larger issue of PFAS pollution in the state—an effort McBrady was pulled into.In order to see if Stone’s farm was an anomaly, regulators designed a sampling scheme for milk available for sale in Maine. The tests traced PFAS pollution back to another farm—this time in Fairfield, about 100 miles north of Stone’s property. This farm, like Stone’s, had a history of using biosolids on its land.“We did the testing with the expectation that we wouldn’t find much,” McBrady says. “In hindsight, that was incorrect thinking.”McBrady and her colleagues were facing a peculiar vacuum of information when it came to PFAS. While the government has been aware of the potential harms of forever chemicals since the 1990s, there are few definitive federal standards in place for safe human consumption. What’s more, PFAS is not just one chemical but rather a class of thousands; many of the lesser-studied PFAS have been almost totally ignored by regulators.In 2016, the same year that Stone’s farm was tested, the federal government had just set a standard for drinking water for the two most studied types of PFAS at 70 parts per trillion. The new four parts per trillion level set in April tightens this dramatically. But to this day, the EPA does not set any official limits for PFAS levels in sewage sludge applied to farms, nor does it regulate the presence of PFAS in sludge in any way.When McBrady started her job, no states required that products from farms that used biosolids be tested for PFAS. On the federal side, the nation’s milk supply is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while meat is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Both agencies regularly test samples of food products for PFAS and other contaminants, but those tests are designed in such a way that they may miss intense spots of pollution at the local level. (When it comes to the FDA’s food testing of products grown in areas with known PFAS pollution, for instance, the agency says on its website that “technical support generally occurs at the request of states and before the food enters the market”—meaning that states have to raise the alarm first.) Each agency has intervened in instances where high PFAS levels have shown up in food products, but neither the FDA nor the USDA maintains specific standards for how much PFAS in milk, beef, or any kind of food is safe for human consumption. In an email to The New Republic, an FDA spokesperson said that “understanding PFAS exposure from food is an evolving area of science and more data are needed.”McBrady and her colleagues began working with Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention to create action levels for PFAS in beef and milk in the state. “We just had to start building this program on the fly,” McBrady says.Maine’s environmental agencies found allies in the statehouse. In 2021, the legislature created a fund to enable the Department of Environmental Protection to test land and water at farms that had spread sewage sludge before 2019. Thus far, the investigation has found more than 60 farms where PFAS contamination was high enough that action needed to be taken. At one vegetable farm in Unity, Maine, the owners’ blood levels tested with PFAS levels hundreds of times over the safe limit. In 2022, Maine banned biosolids application altogether. That same year, Mills’s administration created a $60 million support fund for farmers whose land was contaminated; the first payouts from that fund were distributed earlier this year. “We cannot be in the position of telling people that something is contaminated and then just not be able to help them,” McBrady says.When Representative Chellie Pingree, who represents the first of Maine’s two congressional districts, talks to other politicians in Washington about PFAS on farms, her warnings often fall on deaf ears. “There’s a sense of, well, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem,” she tells me. “If you don’t have a constituent in your district who’s got a huge problem on their farm, you may not have heard about it, or you think it’s only happening somewhere else.”In 2023, Maine’s representatives in Washington joined together to introduce dual legislation in the House and Senate to provide the same kind of support Maine offers farmers on a national level. The Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act, which is designed to be included in the Farm Bill, would allow states to allocate money for PFAS testing and supporting farmers whose farms have been contaminated.“We’ve set up this model, and we know it can work—but unfortunately, we’re the only state that has this safety net in place,” Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, says. “More farms are going to keep finding contamination. We need a federal safety net.”It’s not just Maine and Texas with a toxic sludge problem. In 2022, Michigan officials shut down a 400-acre cattle farm after biosolids applied on that farm—and, subsequently, the meat, which was sold directly to farmers’ markets and schools—tested with high levels of PFAS. While Michigan routinely tests sludge from its wastewater treatment plants that it sends out for application, it only banned the application of biosolids with high levels of PFAS in 2021. It also does not test farms with a previous history of sludge applications like Maine does; there’s no way of knowing if other farms that spread biosolids in the past also have contamination. Earlier this year, Harvest Public Media surveyed 13 states across the Midwest, finding that only Michigan had any limits on the allowable amount of PFAS in biosolids. “Commissioners of agriculture would rather not have this seen as a big problem, because nobody wants to be the state where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t buy soybeans from Kansas now, they’re all contaminated,’” Pingree says. “Nobody wants to be tagged with the PFAS label.”To its credit, the Biden administration made significant strides on PFAS. In addition to tightening the new drinking water standards, the EPA this spring designated two of the most common PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under the Superfund program, meaning that companies, not taxpayers, would be on the hook for cleaning up major spills.The new federal movement on PFAS, especially the drinking water standards, may help raise the bar for gauging safe consumption of other substances, like milk. In April, Consumer Reports conducted its own PFAS testing of milk available for sale in five states. While only six of the 50 samples tested positive for PFAS, those samples all tested several times over the new EPA standards for drinking water, and all tested high enough that they would trigger an investigation in the European Union. One of the samples, Kirkland Signature milk from California, tested with 84 parts per trillion of PFOA.Most experts agree that any additional action or information at the federal level on PFAS would help shed some light on just how much of a problem sewage sludge is. Biosolids, after all, aren’t the only potential source of PFAS pollution on farms: In 2018, water well testing of a dairy farm in New Mexico found that firefighting foam from a nearby Air Force base had polluted the water supply. The FDA determined that the milk from the dairy tested with high enough PFAS levels to be a human health concern, and the farm subsequently went out of business.But while the EPA may be making progress on some PFAS research, advocates say it’s lagging when it comes to biosolids, and putting farms at risk in the process. The agency says on its website that it is currently conducting a risk assessment for PFAS in biosolids—due at the end of this year—and suggests that states monitor sludge for contamination. In June, the farmers in Johnson County in Texas, represented by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the EPA, alleging that the agency is neglecting its duty under the Clean Water Act to regulate PFAS in biosolids. (Maine’s MOFGA later joined the suit.) In a response filed in September, the agency pushed to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it actually has no current responsibility to regulate biosolids at all. “That’s not our understanding of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Alexander says.There are some good signs. Only five of the more than 60 farms that Maine has found contaminated with PFAS have had to shut down. The rest have, with significant help, been able to find a way to survive: to shift crops, clean up their water and soil, and protect their families and animals from further contamination.Through trial and error, Maine regulators are figuring out how PFAS works. Leafy greens, for instance, tend to be more vulnerable to contamination; McBrady says that fruit plants, by contrast, seem to store PFAS in the plant material, while the fruit remains relatively PFAS-free. One Maine farm with PFAS-contaminated soil successfully switched from growing foraging grasses for cattle to growing grains, whose stalks seem to protect the harvestable material from PFAS contamination. The farm now raises pigs who eat the safe grains.But Maine is still the only state doing regular testing of farms that applied biosolids. Without widespread local testing like the kind Maine is providing, it’s difficult to get a grasp on how pervasive the problem is. “It’s not like it makes your food taste funny,” Pingree says.How the Trump administration will handle PFAS remains an open question. The EPA has told advocates that its risk assessment on PFOA and PFOS in biosolids—the required first step to create more regulations—is due at the end of this year, but any further regulations will be out of Biden bureaucrats’ hands. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, has a history of voting in favor of PFAS protections. Project 2025, meanwhile, explicitly calls for the EPA to reverse its designation of PFAS as hazardous chemicals under the Superfund law. Environmental advocates worry that the administration could prolong the implementation of the new drinking water standards, even if it ultimately decides not to roll them back. One waste management executive told the trade publication WasteDive that he foresees a “patchwork quilt” of regulations cropping up as states continue to regulate PFAS without federal input.For an agency that seems to just now be finding its stride on regulating PFAS, an industry-friendly administration could spell trouble for the crucial early work.“If I were EPA right now, I would be very worried that [the work on the PFAS risk assessment] would all be scrapped,” says Laura Dumais, an attorney at PEER involved in its lawsuit against the EPA. “I cannot imagine this next administration, based on the positions that it took last time around, would go against industry and for public health.”Even with an agency committed to regulating the chemicals in our environment, the problems posed by PFAS seem to just keep getting bigger. Public awareness of PFAS, until recently, has mostly focused on large-scale pollution from industrial facilities or military bases making it into the water supply. But removing PFAS from biosolids isn’t as simple as removing a single point of industrial pollution. Because biosolids are made from municipal waste—what we flush down the toilet—they serve as a terrifying indicator of just how pervasive forever chemicals really are in our everyday life. We, ourselves, now shed a chemical that doesn’t degrade, that intensifies in our wastewater, and then is spread on our food. Even if all states banned biosolids use tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve the problem of eliminating PFAS within our waste system—or even help us to understand basic facts about how these chemicals contaminate our environment and affect our bodies.“You start legislating one thing, and it’s going to have effects on another thing—that’s the case with biosolids,” McBrady says. “There’s hesitancy on the parts of some states because it’s such an intractable, big problem—where do you begin?”
https://newrepublic.com/article/187106/pfas-milk-maine-texas-biosolids-sewage

2024-12-20 12:34:31

@nprofile…pyzj
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Lady Liberty turned on her head is the sort of image one might expect a surly teenager with artistic aspirations to produce after reading The Great Gatsby or Howard Zinn, and it is the first image that the viewer of Brady Corbet’s third feature, The Brutalist, sees once the VistaVision logotype, announcement of an overture, and a countdown have flitted across the screen. Such elaborate window dressing is clearly intended to convey the magnificence of classic cinema, but also America, which Hungarian refugee László Tóth first glimpses from the hull of a ship approaching Ellis Island. “Your face is ugly,” a prostitute tells him once he reaches dry land. “I know it is,” he replies in a goulash-thick Magyar accent, but we know that it is not, because Tóth is played by Adrien Brody, whose crooked nose and watercolor eyes define one of contemporary Hollywood’s most distinctive canvasses for expression.Brody always looks at least a little sad, a trait that lends his tragic heroes instant pathos and gives other characters an edge when he plays against type. Whether he is an Anglophile punk stripper from the Bronx, a tax-evading art dealer, a billionaire in athleisure, Arthur Miller, Salvador Dalí, or a stop-motion field mouse, melancholy seasons the motivations of his roles into more precise emotions, establishing a link between grief and indignation, determination and disappointment, loneliness and regret, guilt and shame, fear and defeat. It should come as no surprise, then, that his finest performance—as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), for which he won an Academy Award—should portray a survivor of one of the most obscene tragedies ever to befall humankind. Like Szpilman, Tóth is an Eastern European Jew, a victim of the Holocaust, and an artist—not a musician, but an architect. He is also a heroin addict—a habit he picks up after suffering a nasal fracture on the transatlantic passage—and an estranged family man plagued by ambiguous sexual malaise. These are a lot of characteristics to stuff inside a sprawling immigrant narrative, but the complexity rescues Corbet’s film from the sentimentality to which so many treatises on the American dream succumb. His story spans decades and continents but mostly elapses on the Pennsylvania estate of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist who employs Tóth to design and construct a mysterious edifice in honor of his own late mother that is only completed by the film’s epilogue, three hours in. If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware.As Corbet’s script, which he wrote with his collaborator and wife, Mona Fastvold, plumbs the metaphorical richness of architecture as a means for self-invention, Tóth triumphs, stumbles, and fails in cyclical ascension to the top. His pinnacle is the 1980 Venice Biennale, where a major retrospective celebrates the expansive achievements of this now elderly and Israeli champion of brutalism. If the central conceit—that the style of Tóth’s structures links the brutality of his American sojourn with his European trauma—seems too obvious or facile, beware. Corbet’s indulgence in symbolism is heavier-handed than a fistful of concrete and steel, and yet it works, primarily due to a strong ensemble, Lol Crowley’s expressionistic cinematography, and an uncompromisingly willful directorial vision, imperfect though it may be.After the much delayed opening credits roll, Tóth takes a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) and his “shiksa” wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), own a furniture store, Miller & Sons (“No Miller, no sons,” Tóth cracks at the newly assimilated, Catholic persona of his relative and countryman, who “speaks like an American from television”). Showing Tóth to a makeshift bedroom in a storage closet, Attila makes clear that he has brought the “maestro” here to modernize his wares. And he does, showcasing in the storefront a Corbusian table and chair that look “like a tricycle” to Attila (“It’s a bike for kids,” he offers by way of explanation).Meanwhile, Tóth meets Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé), a Black widower, waiting in the breadline of a church only to get turned away; Tóth becomes a white savior immediately, promising to hold a place in line for Gordon and his son, William (Charlie Esoko and, later, Zephan Hanson Amissah), the next morning. The two men go into business together when Miller & Sons scores a premium client and Tóth hires Gordon as his foreman. Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) wants to surprise his father with a renovation of the library at his Doylestown estate into something “proper”: “Maybe make him a ladder with little wheels on it?”Tóth, it turns out, is a licensed architect who designed the city library in Budapest; his negotiation skills suddenly outpace those of his entrepreneurial cousin, quickly convincing the junior Van Buren to agree to a $1,200 budget, though Tóth “was ready to settle at $450.” By the time the job is complete, the library’s skylight has been accidentally shattered, the space has been transformed into an ethereal cathedral to reading (Tóth’s chair placed precisely at a 45-degree angle), an enraged elder Van Buren has chased the crew off his property, his son has refused to pay, and Attila has kicked Tóth to the curb, accusing him of sleeping with Audrey.Months later, Tóth is bearded, smoking opium in the shower of the charity mission where he has joined Gordon and William in seeking shelter. The two men are working construction when Van Buren Sr., pulls up with an envelope of cash and a copy of Look magazine, in which the library is featured. The millionaire has done his homework, learning that Tóth studied at the Bauhaus, and digging up a dossier of his designs. “I did not realize these images were still available, much less of consequence,” Tóth modestly responds. The two men hit it off: “I found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating,” Van Buren rattles off with the fast-talking 1940s patter that Pearce mastered in L.A. Confidential (1997) and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce (2011).After splurging the overdue payment on drinks and drugs at a jazz club with Gordon, Tóth takes the black car Van Buren has sent for him back to the estate, where he meets the rest of the family, including Harry’s twin sister, Maggie Lee (Stacy Martin), and Van Buren’s Jewish lawyer, Michael Hoffman (Peter Polycarpou), who promises to help Tóth’s wife, Erzsébeth (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy and, later, Ariane Labed), to secure visas to emigrate via the Displaced Persons Act. What luck! Before the party comes to an end, Van Buren leads his guests to the top of a hill, where he publicizes ground breaking of a “community center” on this very site, to be designed by none other than Tóth. Doylestown is not a “cultural” place, he admits; for this reason, “money is no object,” but the “specific and meaningful” purpose is to serve a Christian congregation in apparent need of an auditorium, gymnasium (with a swimming pool), library, and chapel all in one. “It’s ambitious,” Van Buren concedes. “My father would like that.” Impressed by the ability of Tóth’s creations to withstand a war (Harry says his scale models “look like a barracks”), Van Buren enlists the architect to join him on a protracted ego trip in the hope that its fruition will immortalize them both, as if to refute F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Approval of the $850,000 project concludes the initial half of the film, which is interrupted by a built-in, 15-minute intermission (again, with the countdown), and a second act. Tóth is reunited with his wife and niece, though Erzsébeth is in a wheelchair (famine-induced osteoporosis) and Zsófia is a mute but stunning young woman, no longer a small girl. As husband and wife attempt an awkward reconciliation, the Tóths and Van Burens grow uncomfortably close; a veteran journalist, Erzsébeth gets a newspaper job in New York, while Tóth is left to fight penny-pinching engineers and consultants over the height of the ceiling. A train transporting materials derails, sending laborers to the hospital and convincing Van Buren to cut his losses and send the crew home.It isn’t until 1963 that Van Buren once again fetches Tóth, underemployed as a draftsman in an architecture firm. They both want to complete the community center, though a pregnant Zsófia and her husband, Binyamin (Benett Vilmanyí), try to convince their aunt and uncle to make aliyah with them instead. Thus begins the film’s most arresting sequence, in which Van Buren and Tóth travel to Italy in search of marble. Functional as he may be, Tóth is still an addict, and Van Buren reveals that his interest in the brutalist exceeds the normal bounds of patronage or financial investment. What happens next is too deliberately shocking to spoil with summary—suffice it to say that Corbet does what he can to dispute Susan Sontag’s claim in On Photography that, even “at the farthest reach of metaphor,” the “camera doesn’t rape.” Corbet and Fastvold are more adamant than Fitzgerald was in psychologizing the depravity of privilege and wealth, and though there is truth in the caricature, the lack of subtlety feels juvenile, unbecoming of the film’s enterprising scope.The Brutalist is almost exaggeratedly humorless, and it’s often unclear on which side of the screen what, if any, punch line is supposed to land.The Van Burens’ villainy may be inseparable from their status, but under their influence, Tóth has changed: He fires Gordon, and after he dips into his stash to alleviate Erzsébeth’s chronic cramps, she tells him, “You’ve become a selfish old bastard before my eyes.” With their romance perversely rekindled, she overdoses, then shows up at the Van Buren estate without invitation to stand up for her wounded husband. “He’s a sick, senile old dog,” Van Buren barks back. “And when dogs get sick, they often bite the hand that feeds them until someone puts them down.” But Tóth, we glean from the epilogue, has survived everyone but Zsófia, who introduces him at the Biennale, insisting that her uncle’s “aim was not to define an epoch, but to transcend all time”; his buildings “indicate nothing, tell nothing, they just are.” This explication seems to contradict the fact that the Margaret Lee Van Buren Center for Activity and Research, finished in 1973, directly references Buchenwald and Dachau, where Tóth and Erzsébeth were respectively imprisoned—a concentration camp in rural Pennsylvania the survivor’s last laugh. But is it a joke? Corbet makes that hard to tell: The Brutalist is almost exaggeratedly humorless, and as with his previous film, Vox Lux (2018), it’s often unclear on which side of the screen what, if any, punch line is supposed to land. The stilted formality of the dialogue and melodramatic plot wink at noir, while the preoccupations with historical verisimilitude and a veneer of intellectual heft reach for grander heights. Brody has defended the personal inspiration of his accent—his maternal grandfather was a Catholic Hungarian aristocrat—though it tends to distract from the honesty of his performance, not unlike the pseudo-Portuguese lilts of Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver in Martin Scorsese’s devotional epic, Silence (2016).Still, The Brutalist’s eccentricities result in a movie far more exciting than the vast majority of blockbusters at its scale, and it was produced—with a $6 million budget—at a fraction of the cost. Corbet may direct a great film someday soon, but this ain’t it, and as a filmmaker working outside of the studio system, he would be wise to mull over the rhetorical question Van Buren poses to Tóth at this one’s climax: “If you resent your persecution, why then do you make yourself such an easy target?”
https://newrepublic.com/article/189193/brutalist-pairs-modern-architecture-post-war-trauma

2024-12-20 12:34:31

@nprofile…pyzj
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In late December 2022, a rancher in Johnson County, Texas, called the constable’s office to complain about his neighbor. The neighbor had recently spread a kind of waste-derived fertilizer, known as biosolids, over his land, the caller said, and the piles were smoking. The caller and his wife were struggling to breathe, the fish in his pond had died, and he thought the biosolids were making him, his wife, and their animals sick.Dana Ames, the county’s environmental crimes investigator, had gotten complaints about biosolids before—the human waste product also known as sewage sludge has a particularly noxious smell—but this felt different. She did some research and found news articles about a dairy farmer in the state of Maine who had used biosolids on his land and whose milk showed sky-high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.Known as “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist in our environment, PFAS have been linked to a wide variety of human health concerns—and are also present in a range of industrial and consumer products, from firefighting foam to nonstick frying pans. While industry has known about the harms of these chemicals for decades, the government is just catching up: In April of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency set a first-ever drinking water standard for some of the most common forever chemicals, setting a maximum enforceable level of just four parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied compounds. Some states, meanwhile, have taken regulation into their own hands. Because sludge can accumulate high levels of forever chemicals from municipal sewage, Maine banned the use of biosolids on farmlands entirely in 2022.After the rancher made his complaint, Johnson County tested his property and animals. A drinking water well tested at 268.2 parts per trillion of PFAS, more than 65 times over the new EPA standards. The flesh of a fish taken from the property tested at 74,000 parts per trillion of PFAS. (One 2023 study found that eating just one serving of fish with 11,800 parts per trillion of PFAS would be the equivalent of drinking water contaminated with more than 10 times the new EPA levels of PFAS for a whole month.) The liver of a stillborn calf, meanwhile, tested with more than 610,000 parts per trillion of PFOA, indicating that its mother was routinely exposed to the chemicals in her environment.The company that produced the biosolids applied to the neighbor’s land, Synagro, had recently distributed samples of sludge at the grand opening of its Fort Worth location. Ames was able to get a jar to test. The biosolids tested at 35,610 parts per trillion of total PFAS. “You can make a scary movie out of this,” Ames says.For years, farmers around the country have used biosolids on their fields, a practice touted by industry interests and the government as a safe, environmentally friendly use of waste. But recently, a handful of farmers in different states hundreds of miles apart have seen products from their farm—and even their own bodies—test positive for worrying levels of forever chemicals. Biosolids, a growing number of experts say, are likely to blame, endangering these farmers’ livelihoods and health.Regulators in Maine are some of the only ones in the country to take aggressive action, but those closest to the issue say it’s time for the federal government and other states to follow suit. Earlier this year, a group of Johnson County residents, including those who originally called Ames in 2022, filed a lawsuit against Synagro, North America’s largest biosolids producer, alleging that the PFAS seeping into their land may have caused serious medical issues and the deaths of multiple animals. (A company spokesperson said in an email to The New Republic that Synagro denies the “unproven and unprecedented” allegations, that the biosolids applied to the land in Johnson County “met all USEPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements,” and that subsequent test results showing lower PFAS levels on the farm with the biosolids “strongly suggest that the farm where biosolids were used cannot be a source for the PFAS allegedly found on the plaintiffs’ farms.”) Johnson County, meanwhile, has teamed up with a farmers’ advocate group in Maine to sue the EPA for its lack of regulation on PFAS in biosolids. And in Congress, Maine legislators in both houses are trying to pass national legislation to make sure farmers affected by PFAS can access funds for support. The question now is whether anyone will listen.One of the first phone calls that Nancy McBrady got when she joined Maine’s Department of Agriculture in 2019 was from the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. “She said, ‘Do you know about PFAS?’” McBrady recalls. “I really had to jump in and get smart.”McBrady found herself in the middle of a mounting agricultural crisis that had begun just a few years before. In late 2016, Maine regulators had found PFAS contaminating water wells on the property of dairy farmer Fred Stone in Arundel, Maine. Stone voluntarily tested his milk, finding PFAS levels so high that his purchaser, Oakhurst Dairy, stopped buying his product. In early 2019, as Stone was losing hundreds of dollars a day and dumping dozens of gallons of milk in an attempt to fix the problem, Maine’s new governor formed a task force to investigate the larger issue of PFAS pollution in the state—an effort McBrady was pulled into.In order to see if Stone’s farm was an anomaly, regulators designed a sampling scheme for milk available for sale in Maine. The tests traced PFAS pollution back to another farm—this time in Fairfield, about 100 miles north of Stone’s property. This farm, like Stone’s, had a history of using biosolids on its land.“We did the testing with the expectation that we wouldn’t find much,” McBrady says. “In hindsight, that was incorrect thinking.”McBrady and her colleagues were facing a peculiar vacuum of information when it came to PFAS. While the government has been aware of the potential harms of forever chemicals since the 1990s, there are few definitive federal standards in place for safe human consumption. What’s more, PFAS is not just one chemical but rather a class of thousands; many of the lesser-studied PFAS have been almost totally ignored by regulators.In 2016, the same year that Stone’s farm was tested, the federal government had just set a standard for drinking water for the two most studied types of PFAS at 70 parts per trillion. The new four parts per trillion level set in April tightens this dramatically. But to this day, the EPA does not set any official limits for PFAS levels in sewage sludge applied to farms, nor does it regulate the presence of PFAS in sludge in any way.When McBrady started her job, no states required that products from farms that used biosolids be tested for PFAS. On the federal side, the nation’s milk supply is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while meat is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Both agencies regularly test samples of food products for PFAS and other contaminants, but those tests are designed in such a way that they may miss intense spots of pollution at the local level. (When it comes to the FDA’s food testing of products grown in areas with known PFAS pollution, for instance, the agency says on its website that “technical support generally occurs at the request of states and before the food enters the market”—meaning that states have to raise the alarm first.) Each agency has intervened in instances where high PFAS levels have shown up in food products, but neither the FDA nor the USDA maintains specific standards for how much PFAS in milk, beef, or any kind of food is safe for human consumption. In an email to The New Republic, an FDA spokesperson said that “understanding PFAS exposure from food is an evolving area of science and more data are needed.”McBrady and her colleagues began working with Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention to create action levels for PFAS in beef and milk in the state. “We just had to start building this program on the fly,” McBrady says.Maine’s environmental agencies found allies in the statehouse. In 2021, the legislature created a fund to enable the Department of Environmental Protection to test land and water at farms that had spread sewage sludge before 2019. Thus far, the investigation has found more than 60 farms where PFAS contamination was high enough that action needed to be taken. At one vegetable farm in Unity, Maine, the owners’ blood levels tested with PFAS levels hundreds of times over the safe limit. In 2022, Maine banned biosolids application altogether. That same year, Mills’s administration created a $60 million support fund for farmers whose land was contaminated; the first payouts from that fund were distributed earlier this year. “We cannot be in the position of telling people that something is contaminated and then just not be able to help them,” McBrady says.When Representative Chellie Pingree, who represents the first of Maine’s two congressional districts, talks to other politicians in Washington about PFAS on farms, her warnings often fall on deaf ears. “There’s a sense of, well, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem,” she tells me. “If you don’t have a constituent in your district who’s got a huge problem on their farm, you may not have heard about it, or you think it’s only happening somewhere else.”In 2023, Maine’s representatives in Washington joined together to introduce dual legislation in the House and Senate to provide the same kind of support Maine offers farmers on a national level. The Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act, which is designed to be included in the Farm Bill, would allow states to allocate money for PFAS testing and supporting farmers whose farms have been contaminated.“We’ve set up this model, and we know it can work—but unfortunately, we’re the only state that has this safety net in place,” Sarah Alexander, the executive director of the Maine Farmers and Gardeners Association, or MOFGA, says. “More farms are going to keep finding contamination. We need a federal safety net.”It’s not just Maine and Texas with a toxic sludge problem. In 2022, Michigan officials shut down a 400-acre cattle farm after biosolids applied on that farm—and, subsequently, the meat, which was sold directly to farmers’ markets and schools—tested with high levels of PFAS. While Michigan routinely tests sludge from its wastewater treatment plants that it sends out for application, it only banned the application of biosolids with high levels of PFAS in 2021. It also does not test farms with a previous history of sludge applications like Maine does; there’s no way of knowing if other farms that spread biosolids in the past also have contamination. Earlier this year, Harvest Public Media surveyed 13 states across the Midwest, finding that only Michigan had any limits on the allowable amount of PFAS in biosolids. “Commissioners of agriculture would rather not have this seen as a big problem, because nobody wants to be the state where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t buy soybeans from Kansas now, they’re all contaminated,’” Pingree says. “Nobody wants to be tagged with the PFAS label.”To its credit, the Biden administration made significant strides on PFAS. In addition to tightening the new drinking water standards, the EPA this spring designated two of the most common PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under the Superfund program, meaning that companies, not taxpayers, would be on the hook for cleaning up major spills.The new federal movement on PFAS, especially the drinking water standards, may help raise the bar for gauging safe consumption of other substances, like milk. In April, Consumer Reports conducted its own PFAS testing of milk available for sale in five states. While only six of the 50 samples tested positive for PFAS, those samples all tested several times over the new EPA standards for drinking water, and all tested high enough that they would trigger an investigation in the European Union. One of the samples, Kirkland Signature milk from California, tested with 84 parts per trillion of PFOA.Most experts agree that any additional action or information at the federal level on PFAS would help shed some light on just how much of a problem sewage sludge is. Biosolids, after all, aren’t the only potential source of PFAS pollution on farms: In 2018, water well testing of a dairy farm in New Mexico found that firefighting foam from a nearby Air Force base had polluted the water supply. The FDA determined that the milk from the dairy tested with high enough PFAS levels to be a human health concern, and the farm subsequently went out of business.But while the EPA may be making progress on some PFAS research, advocates say it’s lagging when it comes to biosolids, and putting farms at risk in the process. The agency says on its website that it is currently conducting a risk assessment for PFAS in biosolids—due at the end of this year—and suggests that states monitor sludge for contamination. In June, the farmers in Johnson County in Texas, represented by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against the EPA, alleging that the agency is neglecting its duty under the Clean Water Act to regulate PFAS in biosolids. (Maine’s MOFGA later joined the suit.) In a response filed in September, the agency pushed to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it actually has no current responsibility to regulate biosolids at all. “That’s not our understanding of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Alexander says.There are some good signs. Only five of the more than 60 farms that Maine has found contaminated with PFAS have had to shut down. The rest have, with significant help, been able to find a way to survive: to shift crops, clean up their water and soil, and protect their families and animals from further contamination.Through trial and error, Maine regulators are figuring out how PFAS works. Leafy greens, for instance, tend to be more vulnerable to contamination; McBrady says that fruit plants, by contrast, seem to store PFAS in the plant material, while the fruit remains relatively PFAS-free. One Maine farm with PFAS-contaminated soil successfully switched from growing foraging grasses for cattle to growing grains, whose stalks seem to protect the harvestable material from PFAS contamination. The farm now raises pigs who eat the safe grains.But Maine is still the only state doing regular testing of farms that applied biosolids. Without widespread local testing like the kind Maine is providing, it’s difficult to get a grasp on how pervasive the problem is. “It’s not like it makes your food taste funny,” Pingree says.How the Trump administration will handle PFAS remains an open question. The EPA has told advocates that its risk assessment on PFOA and PFOS in biosolids—the required first step to create more regulations—is due at the end of this year, but any further regulations will be out of Biden bureaucrats’ hands. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, has a history of voting in favor of PFAS protections. Project 2025, meanwhile, explicitly calls for the EPA to reverse its designation of PFAS as hazardous chemicals under the Superfund law. Environmental advocates worry that the administration could prolong the implementation of the new drinking water standards, even if it ultimately decides not to roll them back. One waste management executive told the trade publication WasteDive that he foresees a “patchwork quilt” of regulations cropping up as states continue to regulate PFAS without federal input.For an agency that seems to just now be finding its stride on regulating PFAS, an industry-friendly administration could spell trouble for the crucial early work.“If I were EPA right now, I would be very worried that [the work on the PFAS risk assessment] would all be scrapped,” says Laura Dumais, an attorney at PEER involved in its lawsuit against the EPA. “I cannot imagine this next administration, based on the positions that it took last time around, would go against industry and for public health.”Even with an agency committed to regulating the chemicals in our environment, the problems posed by PFAS seem to just keep getting bigger. Public awareness of PFAS, until recently, has mostly focused on large-scale pollution from industrial facilities or military bases making it into the water supply. But removing PFAS from biosolids isn’t as simple as removing a single point of industrial pollution. Because biosolids are made from municipal waste—what we flush down the toilet—they serve as a terrifying indicator of just how pervasive forever chemicals really are in our everyday life. We, ourselves, now shed a chemical that doesn’t degrade, that intensifies in our wastewater, and then is spread on our food. Even if all states banned biosolids use tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve the problem of eliminating PFAS within our waste system—or even help us to understand basic facts about how these chemicals contaminate our environment and affect our bodies.“You start legislating one thing, and it’s going to have effects on another thing—that’s the case with biosolids,” McBrady says. “There’s hesitancy on the parts of some states because it’s such an intractable, big problem—where do you begin?”
https://newrepublic.com/article/187106/pfas-milk-maine-texas-biosolids-sewage

2024-12-20 11:30:22

@nprofile…6kn7
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As of this recording, lawmakers are still chaotically rushing to avoid a government shutdown. And one thing is already clear from this fiasco: Donald Trump will betray his voters very, very badly. Trump and Elon Musk killed a compromise bill, demanding deep spending cuts that would inflict real harm on Trump country, portending a lot more like this to come. (After we recorded, the House voted down the second government funding bill House Republicans advanced.) We chatted with Paul Waldman, author of The Cross Section Substack and co-author of White Rural Rage. He explains why all this is happening, the tensions it reveals among Republicans, and how the Trump-Musk alliance looks poised to sell out MAGA voters. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189598/trump-musk-fiasco-worsens-exposing-badly-maga-voters-got-scammed

2024-12-20 11:28:56

@nprofile…pyzj
https://images.newrepublic.com/f8b5833815da60e9f6de00e1d7ebbf63a8244da6.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
As of this recording, lawmakers are still chaotically rushing to avoid a government shutdown. And one thing is already clear from this fiasco: Donald Trump will betray his voters very, very badly. Trump and Elon Musk killed a compromise bill, demanding deep spending cuts that would inflict real harm on Trump country, portending a lot more like this to come. (After we recorded, the House voted down the second government funding bill House Republicans advanced.) We chatted with Paul Waldman, author of The Cross Section Substack and co-author of White Rural Rage. He explains why all this is happening, the tensions it reveals among Republicans, and how the Trump-Musk alliance looks poised to sell out MAGA voters. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189598/trump-musk-fiasco-worsens-exposing-badly-maga-voters-got-scammed

2024-12-20 01:25:19

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The highest-paying part-time job in human history is the position of chief executive at Tesla—or rather, it would be the highest if the legal system didn’t keep disallowing Tesla’s pay package for Elon Musk. Twice in the past year, the Delaware Court of Chancery struck it down, siding with shareholders who said the board that granted it was insufficiently independent. The first time the court did so, about a year ago, the package’s value was $56 billion, which worked out to $9 billion per year. The second time, on December 2, the package’s value was $101 billion, which works out to about $14 billion per year. Not bad pay for a side hustle! For months now, Musk has been busy promoting—and funding—Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and since November he has committed himself, as the co-chair of Trump’s loftily titled Department of Government Efficiency (really just a White House commission-in-waiting) to disrupting the workings of a federal government over which his new boss has yet to assume control. These labors paid off on Wednesday when Musk, with a series of posts on X, successfully derailed a bipartisan spending bill to keep the government running through mid-March, thus bringing Congress to the brink of a government shutdown. On that same day, Tesla’s stock price, which had been soaring since Election Day amid the blossoming of the Musk-Trump bromance, fell 8 percent. How does Musk divide his time? We don’t really know, but as of 2017, Musk’s attorneys revealed, Tesla’s chief executive allocated about 48 hours per week to running Tesla; about 32 hours per week to running Space X; and another eight or nine hours per week running Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Open AI. (Musk claimed to work 80-90 hours total per week.) If we were to assume the same time allocation continued after Musk negotiated his controversial pay package in 2018, then Tesla’s board would be trying (thus far unsuccessfully, because of the two legal judgments; the case is on appeal) to pay Musk $437.5 million per hour.But of course we can’t assume that same time allocation, because Musk has taken on more roles since then. In 2022, he acquired the aforementioned X, then called Twitter, and put a great deal of effort into running it into the ground (losing, according to the financial columnist Allan Sloan, more than $25 billion). Now Musk appears to spend most of his time screwing up the federal government. Ipsa scientia potentia est, wrote Frances Bacon, later shortened by his former secretary Thomas Hobbes to “Knowledge is power.” But in the Age of Trump power often flows from ignorance. As Politico’s Daniella Diaz and Katherine Tully-McManus pointed out, Musk’s tweets against the spending bill contained an impressive number of falsehoods, starting with his retweeting with a “YES” that “We will be fine for 33 days” if the government stays shut until Trump assumes office. A five-week shutdown of approximately the same length in late 2018 and early 2019 cost taxpayers $3 billion, the equivalent of about three months’ Tesla pay for Musk. The brunt would be borne by federal workers, who would lose five weeks’ pay just as the holidays start.Tesla’s $14 billion-dollar-a-year-man also begrudges Congress a raise to about $181,000, which Musk calls a “40% pay increase”; in fact, it’s a maximum increase of just 3.8 percent. Musk reposted a claim that transferring control of the former site of RFK stadium, where the Washington Redskins (now the Washington Commanders) once played, would cost U.S. taxpayers $3 billion; in fact, it would cost these taxpayers nothing. And so on.The crowning irony—besides the fact that this wage-withholding Scrooge is the richest person ever—is that Musk himself sucks assiduously from the government teat. A decade ago, The Los Angeles Times estimated he’d received nearly $5 billion in state and federal subsidies for his various enterprises; in addition, his companies have received hundreds of billions from government contracts. As Musk’s own lawyers admitted, the billionaire’s attention is divided among many supposedly full-time responsibilities. Did I mention he also has a drug habit? If Musk’s first venture into ferreting out government waste is any sign, the quality of his work product will not be good. As I observed around this time one year ago, Musk is what we get when society values “creativity” over everything else, including knowledge, discipline, public-spiritedness, and basic human decency. Tesla may fetishize Musk’s flights of fancy, but the country’s going to learn how little value the man really delivers. Musk won’t be paid by the federal government, but even so he’s demonstrating already that the price of employing him is too high.
https://newrepublic.com/article/189593/elon-musk-congress-spending-bill-scamming-washington

2024-12-19 23:12:52

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House Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy has no intentions of backing down after Donald Trump personally singled him out in a threat to get with the program on the spending bill. The president-elect cut through an unusually quiet day from him to directly attack the Republican representative, suggesting he could be primaried next if he doesn’t fall in line.“The very unpopular ‘Congressman” from Texas, Chip Roy, is getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory—All for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself. Republican obstructionists have to be done away with. The Democrats are using them, and we can’t let that happen,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “Weak and ineffective people like Chip have to be dismissed as being utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics, and as to Making America Great Again.” “Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy, with no talent. By the way, how’s Bob Good doing?” he continued in another post, referencing the Republican representative from Virginia who Trump helped oust in the primaries. “I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary. He won’t have a chance!”Roy likely became Trump’s target of the day after being unsatisfied with how far the spending cuts went in the last spending bill. But despite Trump’s direct threat, Roy held his ground in a message directed to the president.“My position is simple—I am not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling (racking up more debt) without significant & real spending cuts attached to it,” Roy wrote on X. “I’ve been negotiating to that end. No apologies. CC: @realDonaldTrump @SpeakerJohnson @SenJohnThune @freedomcaucus.”Trump on Thursday suggested outright abolishing the country’s debt ceiling, something that clearly makes the conservative Roy uncomfortable. On Tuesday, Roy introduced the DOGE Act to further cut federal spending on nonmilitary programs. “We’re working right now on how to actually cut spending, which is what the voters sent me to Washington to do. So that’s what we’re working on,” Roy told the media when asked about Trump’s threat.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189588/chip-roy-war-trump-spending-bill-cuts

2024-12-19 23:12:52

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Mike Johnson is about to be hoist by his own petard, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t coming to the rescue this time. During a press conference Thursday with House Democratic leaders, Jeffries was asked whether his party would consider voting for Johnson to retain the speakership amid a Republican “revolt,” if the speaker were to put something “amiable” in his continuing resolution.“No,” Jeffries answered flatly.The House minority leader spoke harshly about Republicans’ antics, which upended the hefty bipartisan spending bill that would have funded the government until March. “That bipartisan agreement has now been detonated because House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government, and hurt the very working-class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help,” Jeffries said. CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju posted on X that sources in a closed-door meeting said that Jeffries and other top Democrats have been “conveying to their members that they are in no mood to bail out Speaker Johnson from the spending drama after Donald Trump’s late demands.”Raju wrote that Johnson had yet to connect with Jeffries since the original spending bill collapsed, and that Johnson was seeking a way forward among GOP members, who don’t exactly seem to be in agreement.Late Wednesday, almost 24 hours after the 1,547-page bill had been released and Republicans had been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, Trump finally responded to the bill, demanding that House Republicans find a way to raise the debt ceiling—or abolish it altogether, he said later. Jeffries previously moved to save Johnson’s job when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to have him ousted in April, dismissing her motion to remove the Louisiana Republican as “pro-Putin Republican obstruction.”While House Democrats sought to minimize the chaos eight months ago, their will to fight for the embattled Johnson to retain his gavel appears to have greatly diminished. And this time, Greene’s floated replacing Johnson with Elon Musk.By Thursday evening, the image of a new “clean” continuing resolution began to emerge. This bill would suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, until January 2027, as Trump had requested. It would also give $110 billion in disaster aid and extend the farm bill, while cutting some other provisions, such as one promoting the sale of high-ethanol gasoline.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189585/hakeem-jeffries-mike-johnson-spending-bill

2024-12-19 22:06:47

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The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report Thursday, based on interviews with nearly 50 people knowledgeable of the operations of the Biden White House. The story details the extent to which the president’s age has posed an issue throughout his presidency, including from the very start, and the lengths to which aides went to conceal it.President Biden, now 82, was 78 years old when he took office, and the Journal reports that administration officials began to notice signs of his age “in just the first few months of his term,” as he would grow “tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”Those who met with the president were reportedly told that “exchanges should be short and focused.” Meetings were strategically scheduled and, sometimes, if Biden “was having an off day,” they were simply canceled. A former aide recalled a national security official saying, regarding one rescheduled meeting, “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”The Journal reported that lawmakers, Cabinet members, and the public all seemed to have less face time with the president than in previous administrations and that senior advisers were “often put into roles that some administration oﬃcials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy.” Namely, administration officials like Jake Sullivan, Steve Ricchetti, and Lael Brainard frequently functioned as intermediaries for the president.House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith reportedly sought to reach Biden ahead of his withdrawal from Afghanistan “but couldn’t get on the phone with him.” Smith noted that he was more frequently in touch with Barack Obama when he was president, though he wasn’t then the House Armed Services chair. Representative Jim Hines, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, similarly told the Journal, “I really had no personal contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama, which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior.”As for Biden and his Cabinet members, the Journal reports that interactions “were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted.” One reportedly gave up on trying to request calls with him altogether “because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome.” The report reveals too that Biden struggled to “recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him” as he prepared for his interview with special counsel Robert Hur—who was investigating whether Biden mishandled classified material and in February determined that a jury would consider him “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”On the 2024 campaign trail, the report says, Biden’s team often vetted questions from event attendees in advance. Pollsters for the campaign were also seemingly kept at arm’s length: The Journal reports that “Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him,” as the president often seemed unaware of the ample polling showing he was trailing Trump.Years of such incidents culminated in Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance. President-elect Donald Trump will, like Biden, be 78 at his inauguration and 82 by the end of his term.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189578/wsj-report-biden-decline

2024-12-19 20:57:15

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Trump is rushing to remind the media that he is the captain of the GOP, not Elon Musk.The “President Musk” rhetoric gained steam among Democrats after the billionaire helped kill the continuing resolution to keep the government open, voicing his opposition long before the president-elect did.But Trump wants the world to know he’s still the one calling the shots.“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, as reported by Business Insider’s Bryan Metzger.The statement may be a sign of growing friction between Trump and the world’s richest man, who backed his return to the White House.Musk has been threatening Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, about the spending bill, even as the prospect of a government shutdown looms. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” the SpaceX CEO and Department of Government Efficiency co-lead posted on Wednesday.“It’s not Donald Trump asking for this, it’s very clearly President Elon Musk asking for this,” Representative Dan Goldman said Wednesday on The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell. “The fact that Donald Trump has been completely AWOL during these negotiations to the point where only after Elon Musk publicly tweets about his displeasure about this budget deal, all of a sudden, Donald Trump, chief of staff to Elon Musk, comes trotting in and blows up the deal.”There’s no telling just yet how much of a rift this has caused between the two men, as Musk seems to be a long-term fixture in Trump’s inner circle. But if this kind of public one-upping continues, who knows how long this bromance will last.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189580/trump-reaction-pissed-elon-musk-spending-bill

2024-12-19 20:57:15

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The Georgia appeals court’s decision to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting the 2020 election interference case against Trump has launched the ongoing case into chaos. State officials must now find someone to fill her role, a process that could, at best, bring things to a screeching halt—or kill the case altogether. The court announced Thursday that it had overturned a decision by Judge Scott McAfee allowing Willis to remain on the case after she faced accusations of having an improper relationship with Nathan Wade, her special prosecutor. McAfee said Willis could remain on the case if she cut ties with Wade.Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants had appealed the ruling, and the Georgia appeals court decided that the “appearance of impropriety” was just too much. While the indictment would not be dismissed, Willis’s “disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” according to Thursday’s court filing.The appeals court’s decision doesn’t just knock Willis out of the driver’s seat, though—it disqualifies her entire office from trying the case. Willis’s office filed a notice Thursday afternoon indicating that it intends to appeal the court’s decision, which, if taken up, could move the case to Georgia’s Supreme Court. In the meantime, Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, will be responsible for determining who will take up the task of prosecuting the president-elect and his co-defendants, Lawfare’s senior editor Anna Bower wrote on X. But she warned that’s easier said than done.“Realistically, it will be quite difficult to find another prosecutor who would be willing to take on this case. *If* the appeals court decision is not overturned by the GA Supreme Court, this likely spells the end of the prosecution against Trump and others in Fulton County,” Bower wrote.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189576/donald-trump-fani-willis-georgia-what-next

2024-12-19 18:44:32

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Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has thrown her weight behind Senator Rand Paul’s ridiculous proposal that Elon Musk be elected the speaker of the House of Representatives.“The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Paul posted Thursday morning on X. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk … think about it … nothing’s impossible. (not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka ‘uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds).”Quote-tweeting Paul’s proposal approvingly, Greene wrote that she would be “open to supporting” Musk for the speakership.“DOGE can only truly be accomplished by reigning [sic] in Congress to enact real government efficiency,” Greene wrote, referring to the austerity agenda of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory panel to be co-led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. “The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way.”If Paul and Greene were to have it their way, Musk would be the first nonmember to hold the speakership.Musk has been crusading against Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan spending bill, which would avert a government shutdown. On Wednesday, the billionaire sent over 100 tweets on his platform, X, railing against the bill—with “a number of misleading or outright false claims,” per Politico—and expressing indifference about the prospect of a shutdown.Musk’s efforts culminated in President-elect Trump coming out against the bill, dealing “a likely death blow” to budget negotiations, per the Associated Press. As Trump and Musk send the government hurtling toward a shutdown, many observers have criticized elected officials for taking marching orders from an unelected billionaire.Amid this wrangling, the right-wing populist House Freedom Caucus, of which Greene is a member, expressed its dissatisfaction with the proposed bill, touting instead Representative Chip Roy’s proposed DOGE Act, which would slash federal spending—though not, of course, the Pentagon budget.There’s scarcely a better illustration of Greene’s phony brand of populism than her support for installing the world’s richest man to, as she put it, rein in the people’s elected body.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189568/mtg-marjorie-taylor-greene-elon-musk-house-speaker

2024-12-19 18:44:32

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Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth still isn’t in the clear just yet—and now even Republicans want to see the receipts. At least 12 senators have requested to review the FBI’s background check on Hegseth, according to Politico. While Hegseth’s nomination was believed to be safe earlier this month after a media blitz by his mother and a few laps around the Senate, this surprising development suggests otherwise. Hegseth’s background check was initially delayed by Trump’s refusal to sign key transition documents but is now likely to be completed before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on January 14. “It would be helpful, given the allegations that have been lodged against Mr. Hegseth, to be able to see the FBI background check,” Republican Senator Susan Collins told Politico. “I’m going to see it,” said Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville. Usually two senators handle this kind of check, but the litany of allegations against Hegseth has prompted more attention on his confirmation. The former Fox & Friends host is accused of sexual assault, harassment, financial mismanagement of two different veterans’ groups, and workplace misconduct, including intoxication and sexism.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189574/trump-defense-secretary-pick-hegseth-republicans-fbi-check

2024-12-19 18:44:32

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House Speaker Mike Johnson has begun the steady descent out of Donald Trump’s favor.A source close to Trump told NOTUS Thursday that the president-elect initially supported Johnson’s plan to keep the government funded, but was surprised to find that the whopping 1,547-page bill was filled with plans to spend billions of dollars on Democratic priorities, farmers, and disaster relief. Senator Josh Hawley told CNN Wednesday that Trump had said Johnson had not told him everything in the massive spending bill.Trump has been a staunch ally of the Louisiana Republican, including in May when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to have him removed from the speakership. Johnson has remained cozy with the president-elect, but all of that could change in the wake of his continuing resolution, which is particularly unpopular with unofficial, unelected co-President Elon Musk. Trump’s defection could spell trouble for Johnson, who needs to be speedily reelected next year so that Congress can go on to certify the results of the presidential election. Trump spoke with Fox Digital Thursday and indicated that Johnson would have no trouble getting reelected … so long as he is able to clean up the spending bill. “If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump said.Meanwhile, members of Johnson’s own party appear to have already moved on. Representative Thomas Massie said Wednesday night he would not vote for Johnson as speaker in January, and some lawmakers are even suggesting Musk as a potential replacement.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189573/donald-trump-mike-johnson-ally-budget

2024-12-19 18:42:37

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Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth still isn’t in the clear just yet—and now even Republicans want to see the receipts. At least 12 senators have requested to review the FBI’s background check on Hegseth, according to Politico. While Hegseth’s nomination was believed to be safe earlier this month after a media blitz by his mother and a few laps around the Senate, this surprising development suggests otherwise. Hegseth’s background check was initially delayed by Trump’s refusal to sign key transition documents but is now likely to be completed before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on January 14. “It would be helpful, given the allegations that have been lodged against Mr. Hegseth, to be able to see the FBI background check,” Republican Senator Susan Collins told Politico. “I’m going to see it,” said Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville. Usually two senators handle this kind of check, but the litany of allegations against Hegseth has prompted more attention on his confirmation. The former Fox & Friends host is accused of sexual assault, harassment, financial mismanagement of two different veterans’ groups, and workplace misconduct, including intoxication and sexism.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189574/trump-defense-secretary-pick-hegseth-republicans-fbi-check

2024-12-19 18:42:37

@nprofile…6kn7
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House Speaker Mike Johnson has begun the steady descent out of Donald Trump’s favor.A source close to Trump told NOTUS Thursday that the president-elect initially supported Johnson’s plan to keep the government funded, but was surprised to find that the whopping 1,547-page bill was filled with plans to spend billions of dollars on Democratic priorities, farmers, and disaster relief. Senator Josh Hawley told CNN Wednesday that Trump had said Johnson had not told him everything in the massive spending bill.Trump has been a staunch ally of the Louisiana Republican, including in May when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to have him removed from the speakership. Johnson has remained cozy with the president-elect, but all of that could change in the wake of his continuing resolution, which is particularly unpopular with unofficial, unelected co-President Elon Musk. Trump’s defection could spell trouble for Johnson, who needs to be speedily reelected next year so that Congress can go on to certify the results of the presidential election. Trump spoke with Fox Digital Thursday and indicated that Johnson would have no trouble getting reelected … so long as he is able to clean up the spending bill. “If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump said.Meanwhile, members of Johnson’s own party appear to have already moved on. Representative Thomas Massie said Wednesday night he would not vote for Johnson as speaker in January, and some lawmakers are even suggesting Musk as a potential replacement.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189573/donald-trump-mike-johnson-ally-budget

2024-12-19 18:42:37

@nprofile…6kn7
https://images.newrepublic.com/6337e443e64e29483d68009b390deca0e0c388ed.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has thrown her weight behind Senator Rand Paul’s ridiculous proposal that Elon Musk be elected the speaker of the House of Representatives.“The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” Paul posted Thursday morning on X. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk … think about it … nothing’s impossible. (not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka ‘uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds).”Quote-tweeting Paul’s proposal approvingly, Greene wrote that she would be “open to supporting” Musk for the speakership.“DOGE can only truly be accomplished by reigning [sic] in Congress to enact real government efficiency,” Greene wrote, referring to the austerity agenda of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory panel to be co-led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. “The establishment needs to be shattered just like it was yesterday. This could be the way.”If Paul and Greene were to have it their way, Musk would be the first nonmember to hold the speakership.Musk has been crusading against Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan spending bill, which would avert a government shutdown. On Wednesday, the billionaire sent over 100 tweets on his platform, X, railing against the bill—with “a number of misleading or outright false claims,” per Politico—and expressing indifference about the prospect of a shutdown.Musk’s efforts culminated in President-elect Trump coming out against the bill, dealing “a likely death blow” to budget negotiations, per the Associated Press. As Trump and Musk send the government hurtling toward a shutdown, many observers have criticized elected officials for taking marching orders from an unelected billionaire.Amid this wrangling, the right-wing populist House Freedom Caucus, of which Greene is a member, expressed its dissatisfaction with the proposed bill, touting instead Representative Chip Roy’s proposed DOGE Act, which would slash federal spending—though not, of course, the Pentagon budget.There’s scarcely a better illustration of Greene’s phony brand of populism than her support for installing the world’s richest man to, as she put it, rein in the people’s elected body.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189568/mtg-marjorie-taylor-greene-elon-musk-house-speaker

2024-12-19 17:36:52

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Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, surprising Democrats and Republicans alike. The shocking demand comes as the president-elect revealed his opposition to the bipartisan spending bill, bringing the federal government another step closer to a shutdown. Trump told NBC News over the phone that it would be the “smartest thing” Congress could do. “I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said.He went on to assert that the debt ceiling is a frivolous, imaginary concept intended to scare people into abiding by it. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” he said.This isn’t necessarily new for Trump, who signed laws to lift the debt ceiling three separate times during his first term while also suggesting the debt ceiling be killed off in 2017. “It complicates things, it’s really not necessary,” he said of the debt ceiling then. Still, it goes against the rest of his party, as Republicans often campaign against raising the debt ceiling, let alone abolishing it entirely. That’s not the case with Democrats. Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle has been advocating for his Debt Ceiling Reform Act since 2023, a law that would weaken Congress’s ability to use shutdown as a threat to pass legislation. The bill currently has 55 Democratic Party co-sponsors. Already, at least one Democrat has backed Trump’s demand. “I agree with President-elect Trump that Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage taking,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189565/trump-debt-ceiling-government-shutdown

2024-12-19 17:36:18

@nprofile…6kn7
https://images.newrepublic.com/356b1edd2fca94dc51789cc36649d1065720f593.jpeg?w=1200&h=630&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg
Trump floated completely abolishing the debt ceiling on Thursday, surprising Democrats and Republicans alike. The shocking demand comes as the president-elect revealed his opposition to the bipartisan spending bill, bringing the federal government another step closer to a shutdown. Trump told NBC News over the phone that it would be the “smartest thing” Congress could do. “I would support that entirely.… The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump said.He went on to assert that the debt ceiling is a frivolous, imaginary concept intended to scare people into abiding by it. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” he said.This isn’t necessarily new for Trump, who signed laws to lift the debt ceiling three separate times during his first term while also suggesting the debt ceiling be killed off in 2017. “It complicates things, it’s really not necessary,” he said of the debt ceiling then. Still, it goes against the rest of his party, as Republicans often campaign against raising the debt ceiling, let alone abolishing it entirely. That’s not the case with Democrats. Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Brendan Boyle has been advocating for his Debt Ceiling Reform Act since 2023, a law that would weaken Congress’s ability to use shutdown as a threat to pass legislation. The bill currently has 55 Democratic Party co-sponsors. Already, at least one Democrat has backed Trump’s demand. “I agree with President-elect Trump that Congress should terminate the debt limit and never again govern by hostage taking,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189565/trump-debt-ceiling-government-shutdown