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2024-10-04 11:20:18

Transcript: Trump Initially Denied Disaster Aid to Calif., GOPer Says
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 4, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Trump has continued to push the vile claim that federal officials are withholding disaster aid from Republican areas devastated by Hurricane Helene. GOP governors have contradicted this, and it has backfired, focusing media attention on Trump’s own record of disaster relief as president, which really did feature the ugly politicization he’s now accusing others of. For instance, Politico just reported that President Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after wildfires in 2018 due to the state’s democratic lean, according to two former Trump officials. Today, we’re talking about this with one of those officials, Olivia Troye, who was a senior Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and has since been a leading critic of the former president. Thanks so much for coming on with us, Olivia. Olivia Troye: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: OK, let’s start here. The other day after Trump started pushing that lie that disaster relief is being denied to Republicans, you did a tweet that got some attention. It said this, “As a Homeland Security Advisor in the Trump White House, I witnessed firsthand how Donald Trump politicized disaster relief, leaving devastated Americans waiting for help. Leaders across the country & government were calling my office, desperate for action as Trump failed them in moments of crisis.” Can you expand on that for us? Troye: I have a lot of memories of working in the Trump White House where there are numerous situations where the government apparatus that does the whole disaster relief declaration process would come to a halt because the disaster declaration that needed to be signed by the president was sitting on Donald Trump’s desk. It was frustrating, as you can imagine, because we as national security officials serve for the greater good of the country. Our job is to help Americans, especially someone like me, who’s in the Homeland Security role working and advising the vice president. Our jobs are to work in response to a crisis as fast as possible and manage this. There were numerous instances where I had the head of government agencies calling me saying, Can you maybe get the vice president to weigh in on this because it’s still sitting on his desk and he hasn’t approved it yet.Sargent: You were working for the vice president at the time. Can you characterize your official position? Troye: Sure. I was Mike Pence’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor. In that role, I covered any crisis, global breaking news event that was related to whether it was global terrorism. On the Homeland space, I covered anything that was mass shootings, disaster relief like natural disasters like flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes. Anything that was a crisis domestically here that was related to the security and safety of Americans fall under me.Sargent: All right. Just to be clear, what you just told us is that you had leaders who were trying to deal with disasters, whether in federal agencies or at the level of states or whatever, call you and try to get you to move stuff along that was being held up by the president of the United States, Donald Trump. They would try to get action by coming to you and working through the vice president. Is that what you’re telling us?Troye: Yeah. There were numerous times when it was the secretary of DHS or the head of FEMA or even internally in the National Security Council process with the senior director we worked very closely on this effort. At times when they felt like it was stalled because Donald Trump was sitting on it or somebody had gotten to him, someone in OMB, one of whom was disagreeing with whatever was happening, depending on what state it was, they would come to me and say, We cannot get this moved forward, the people in this state are hurting right now, what can you do to help us? I can think of a time when even Mike Pence was flying out. I believe he was flying to California and he called me. They called me from Air Force Two and said, Where is the disaster declaration? We still haven’t seen it. And I said, Well, sir, it’s sitting on the president’s desk, I can follow up on it. And he said, Please do that. I remember walking over to the West Wing and sitting outside the Oval Office saying the vice president would like to know what the status is on the disaster declaration, he would really like to get this moved along, we’ve been sitting on it for three days. Sargent: Which disaster was this?Troye: I am trying to think. I believe it was wildfire related. Definitely California was an ongoing contentious issue when it came to the president, but I say this because it matters to be nonpolitical when you’re dealing with the safety and security and the well-being of Americans who are in need, right? This carried on into 2020 when we had the global pandemic, the Covid pandemic, that was so devastating. Again, this partisan politics of red states versus blue states and how you’re going to do the response to it or send supplies came into play again and there it was. I had seen it from wildfires. I’d seen it from how we’re going to respond to hurricanes depending on who it was, whether it was Puerto Rico, and what happened in the aftermath of that. And now it’s Covid and I’m seeing it again. It’s looking at, Oh well, it’s New York, it’s Cuomo, we don’t really care, let’s make it harder for them. I remember hearing a call with Vice President Pence who was like... We’re on with a governor who is out west in one of the first states that was hit with Covid that we knew of, and he was like, We’re not going to play partisan politics on this. This is really serious. We’re going to work closely together with you. Again, that’s Mike Pence’s perspective, right? We were trying to figure out how to navigate the situation in the Oval Office that we were up against.Sargent: Politico just had a good scoop on all this too, reporting that in 2018, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid to California after the 2018 wildfires because the state had a lot of Democratic voters. Worse, to change Trump’s mind, according to this report, senior officials showed him data confirming that Orange County, California, where there was wildfire damage, had lots of Republicans in it. That got Trump to finally move, apparently. You were one of the officials who confirmed this report by Politico. Can you confirm the story for us?Troye: Yes. I remember that situation where we basically put together a briefing to inform the president because he wasn’t approving this mandated relief aid, this funding. They were federal management assistance grants—these are mandated funds. These are already approved funds that need to get to the people who are in need of them. And he wouldn’t budge on it. It was this readout put together to present to him and let him know and inform him actually that the people that were in need were in Orange County and that they were his supporters. We compared it to the state of Iowa at the time and said there’s more voters in support of you than in the entire state of Iowa. It’s the way it was put. This is a very real thing. I’m telling you this because these are the conversations that would happen on senior staff, national security officers, working on these issues where our job was just to help, again, the American people in a nonpartisan way. This is the kind of thing that would get Donald Trump to move because for him, everything is through the political lens of anger and vengeance and retribution against the people that don’t stand with him. I say this now, when I look at Donald Trump and disasters in places in red states, red-leaning states, like Florida, I think about his demeanor and his behavior. This is important because while you may have a Republican governor in your state, if you have a falling out with Donald Trump like we’re seeing with Governor Kemp—he constantly attacks Governor Kemp of Georgia—he’s going to turn that on you. He could potentially use disaster relief as one of the tools, because at that moment, he holds the levers when he’s in power, right? That’s the one thing that he can hold over this person’s head. Politics should never play a role when it comes to disaster relief and what is happening here in the apparatus of government. It just shouldn’t even be part of the conversation when it comes to disaster relief in this thing.Sargent: Right. He clearly sees government funds and government resources as a tool to extort people. He did that in Ukraine, of course. I want to ask, though, on this decision involving disaster aid to California after the 2018 wildfires. This is a decision that would have been run through the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. You were on the National Security Council at that time, right? That’s how you know all this? Troye: That is correct. Because as an advisor to the vice president, I’m actually a part of the National Security Council apparatus. I’m in all these meetings. I was in all the civitas as whenever there is a crisis, or planning for a crisis, any of these discussions, we are sitting in the coordination meetings with the entire U.S. government apparatus that plays a role in these things. These are all the things that we work on together as a team. My job is advising the vice president, so of course I have to track everything that’s happening. Sargent: Just to really be as clear as possible about this, all these high-level staff, members, and assistants to the president on the National Security Council are sitting around talking about pulling data on the percentages of Republicans in Orange County in order to get the president to approve aid. That’s what happened? Troye: How do you get Donald Trump to move this forward is what it comes down to. Sargent: And this is what you were discussing. This was actually discussed at these high-level meetings. Troye: Yeah.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186767/transcript-trump-initially-denied-disaster-aid-calif-goper-says

2024-10-04 10:10:24

The New Supreme Court Session Opens Monday. It Will Not Be Pretty.
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The new Supreme Court session will begin, as it always does, on the first Monday in October. As the justices take their seats come October 7, they will do so with ever fewer Americans impressed by the black robes, the Vatican-like intrigues taking place in the marble redoubt on First Street, the authoritative tone of increasingly partisan decisions that are almost impossible to reverse, no matter how infuriating or inexplicable. According to Gallup, only 24 percent of Americans who are or lean Democratic now trust the high court, a drop of 60 percent since the late 1990s. That may largely have to do with the demise of Roe, but there is a broader institutional collapse that cannot be chalked up to abortion alone. And it is all the court’s own doing. “It certainly wasn’t inevitable; it didn’t have to be this way at all,” says Melissa Murray, a constitutional law expert at New York University and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast.If you thought this term might provide a bit of a respite from the tumult, think again. “The first week of arguments will not be a gentle beginning,” says legal expert Mark Joseph Stern of Slate. In its first week alone, the Supreme Court will hear two high-profile cases: Garland v. VanDerStock, about how much power the federal government has the power to regulate “ghost guns,” and Glossip v. Oklahoma, a high-profile capital punishment case that has become something of a referendum on the death penalty. It used to be, Murray said, that there was a “rhythm” to the Supreme Court’s work. “You have some blockbuster terms with a major culture war case, and then the next term would be mundane and quotidian,” she said. That has changed as the court’s ideological tilt has become more pronounced: “Now they’re just doing everything. Because when you have a conservative majority, you’ve got to make the most of it while you have it.”In its second week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in San Francisco v. EPA, which could further weaken an already-eviscerated Clean Water Act. Later in the term, the decision in United States v. Skrmetti—a case originating in Kentucky and Tennessee—will decide how much capacity states have in limiting access to medical treatments for minors with gender dysphoria. “There will continue to be a lot of cases delving into the issue of the scope of the power of the administrative state,” a top expert on the conservative legal movement said (he would only speak under the condition of anonymity). In that regard, conservatives won a huge victory in last June when the Supreme Court overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 case whose outcome, known as the Chevron Deference, gave experts in federal agencies the final say in how to interpret ambiguous laws. “That whole chapter is not over,” the conservative expert said. “You may see some challenges in the DEI space,” too, he predicted, following the blow to affirmative action in college admissions the high court delivered in 2023. Since then, conservative animus to racial diversity programs has continued to build.Immigration could also surface as a major judicial issue, the activist said, especially if Donald Trump wins the presidential election and, come January, issues a series of restrictive executive orders. That was the case in 2017, after Trump stopped people from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Despite a flurry of challenges, the Supreme Court upheld his ban.The growing power of the court, and the conviction of many justices that they are the foremost custodians of the nation’s founding principles, has led to a crisis of “judicial supremacy,” as Georgetown law professor Brad Snyder put it in 2022. Regardless of who wins in November’s presidential race, the Supreme Court will continue to remake vast swaths of American life according to its own hermetic principles, while the rest of us, remembering those long-ago civics lessons about three coequal branches of government with checks and balances, will wonder how we got here.I asked the conservative expert who, in his view, was the most important justice on the court. He answered without needing to give the question much thought: “Without question, right now, it’s Justice Thomas.” Not all that long ago, Clarence Thomas was considered something a fringe figure, his originalism so severe as to be irrelevant. But as the Supreme Court has shifted right, Thomas has come ever closer to its ideological middle, his standing buttressed first by Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and more recently by Neil M. Gorsuch (who is positioned to be “the next intellectual giant” of the court’s conservative bloc, my conservative source told me).But conservatives’ capture of the Supreme Court has come at a price. The loss of public trust, which began in the late 1980s, coincides with an intensifying ideological transformation. Now, many Americans view its decisions as hopelessly compromised, legitimate in name only. It didn’t help that some justices seemed to show contempt for public opinion and the old standards of political neutrality: most notable here was Justice Alito flying an upside-down American flag at his home in Northern Virginia, widely understood as a symbol supporting the January 6 insurrection (he had also flown another insurrection-adjacent flag at his beach house on the Jersey Shore, blaming his wife for both).These revelations, exposed by The New York Times in May, came in the context of the looming ruling in Trump v. United States. When that decision finally came on July 1, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., writing for the court’s six-justice conservative majority, judged that “the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.” Sure, Roberts did make clear that there is “no immunity for unofficial acts,” in case Trump really did decide to test his invincibility by shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. But that was small consolation.The immunity ruling was the capstone of conservative victories handed down by a court where three justices had been nominated by Trump (Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) and two by George W. Bush (Roberts and Alito). During the session that began a year ago and ended last spring, the Supreme Court struck down the Chevron deference; sided with Grants Pass, Oregon, in severely curbing the rights of the homeless to camp in places like parks and public plazas; limited the extent to which prosecutors could charge the Trump supporters who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on January 6; struck down the Biden administration’s rule on air pollution that originates in one states but affects another, as is often the case; nullified a federal ban on gun enhancements known as bump stocks; and upheld South Carolina’s heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, which had been drawn to minimize Black representation.All those decisions came on the heels of 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a case that originated in Mississippi and became the vehicle conservatives had sought for decades to finally shatter the federal reproductive health protections that had been enshrined in Roe v. Wade a half-century before. After that decision, it became difficult for many Americans, who by and large oppose abortion bans, to see the Supreme Court as anything but a catchment basin for the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation.“Courts are supposed to be neutral,” says David Orentlicher, a Supreme Court scholar at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law. “And it’s not a neutral court. Judging shouldn’t work like politics.”It now looks like we were misguided to ever believe that the trends at work on our politics would for some reason spare our courts. “As the nation has become more polarized, especially in the last 15 years, this is what you get,” says author and former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin, whose book The Nine explored the court’s internal dynamics and response to external pressures. “You have a deeply polarized politics, and that’s reflected in the Supreme Court.” Not all that long ago, Antonin Scalia was confirmed with a 98-0 majority in the Senate. His ideological opposite, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, received the votes of 96 Senators, with three “nay” votes and one abstention. “We’ll never see that sort of unanimity again,” Toobin said. In the spring of 2021, The Wall Street Journal published an explosive investigation that found that “152 federal judges around the nation have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing 1,076 court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock.” As head of the Judicial Conference, a body that meets twice a year to consider issues relating to the federal court system, Roberts has oversight not only of the eight other justices, but of the thousands Article III judges (a reference to the U.S. Constitution) on lower federal circuit and appellate beaches that require Senate confirmation. So his response to the scandal exposed by the Journal was exceptionally revealing, even if it did not seem, at the time, to impact his work on the Supreme Court.In the year-end report customarily issued on the last day of December, Roberts opened with a defense of the “ample institutional independence” that courts required. “The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and coequal branch of government,” he wrote.Later in the report, Roberts explicitly acknowledged the Journal investigation, arguing that the ethical lapses the article had identified had allegedly been committed by “a very small fraction” of Article III judges. And their transgressions were “a matter that self-governing bodies of judges from the front lines are in the best position to study and solve.”In other words, Roberts would clean the Augean stables on his own.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186523/new-supreme-court-session-cases-fall-term-monday-not-pretty

2024-10-04 10:09:48

Dreading the Return of the Trump Era’s Exhausting Palace Intrigue
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For four days in mid-September, the most visited page on Wikipedia was the one that covered Laura Loomer. This sudden spike in interest coincided with a rash of press coverage around Loomer and her newfound proximity to Trump. The New York Times headlined their piece “Laura Loomer, a Social Media Instigator, Is Back at Trump’s Side,” while Semafor went with “Republicans Fear Laura Loomer Is Influencing Donald Trump.”The notable aspect of these stories (and in all the Loomer stories) is how the authors of these various pieces chose to introduce readers to this suddenly trending Trumpworld character. Semafor seemingly assumed their politically savvy readership was familiar with Loomer; her name alone suffices. The Times, by contrast, gave her a snappy three-word bio: “social media instigator”—a cringingly vague tag, for sure, but one that invites further research. By the way, that further research is worth the click. Laura Loomer’s Wikipedia page is a treasure trove of bumblings and fumblings, presenting her as a sort of racist slapstick comic. With such an entertaining payoff for the curious, it’s understandable that Americans got sucked in, googling Loomer, going down the rabbit hole on a figure with whom—thanks to the reality show that is Trump-era politics—we all have to be familiar. But it was also an exhausting reminder of what Donald Trump did to the press and to our own powers of attention. For four years, we were saturated with endless palace intrigue, backbiting, and scandal. While the upcoming election is about gaping policy differences, it’s also got us at a crossroads: A return to Trump represents returning to that amphetamine high; to stick with Harris means a big comedown into a life less frenetic.The substance of political journalism underwent a noticeable shift in the Trump years. It was a whiplash of a change from the Obama White House, where personnel rarely made news (yes, a few Obama staffers were famous in D.C., but they weren’t household names), to a Trump White House where the day-to-day coverage of personnel was overwhelming. Stephanie Grisham, the longtime Trump White House staffer, says much of that coverage stemmed from Trump himself. “Our president had this knack for putting together reality TV shows and I think he did that with us brilliantly. And he enjoyed when we fought,” Grisham told me, adding, “He didn’t care whether the press was good or bad—as much as he grouses about it—he just liked that it’s us in the press. He enjoyed the gossip, he enjoyed the backbiting, he enjoyed the rumors.” And the rumors and gossip abounded: Every week, it seemed, Trump staffers were in the press. Every week, there was a new scandal.In retrospect, maybe many of the pseudo-events that spun out of these West Wing psychodramas weren’t really bona fide scandals, but they were the news. It was the news, for example, when chief of staff Reince Priebus was fired via Twitter by then-President Donald Trump. Priebus’s ouster was Section A, Page 1 of The New York Times, under the headline “Reince Priebus Is Ousted Amid Stormy Days for White House.” And this beat—who’s hot (and who’s messy) in the Oval Office—became a moneymaker. White House reporters became household names. Grisham recalls: “Trump made a lot of his staff, including myself, kind of pawns in his reality show, and I think he did that to the press too. And it was all so new that I don’t think anybody recognized what was happening.”Trump’s reality show sold. Digital subscriptions to the Times tripled in the Trump years. They skyrocketed at The Washington Post. We were exhausted and yet we wanted more. Trump books sold, the juicer the better. Michael Wolff’s gossipy tell-all, Fire and Fury, sold 1.4 million copies in a week. It was the best selling book in the whole world, in any genre. The book was even a hot property in Hollywood for a time; it perished in development hell for the same reason it briefly burned so brightly—with the Trump White House, there was always a hotter scandal just around the corner. What’s the point in watching a television show about White House chaos when said chaos is playing out real-time? Why not just doomscroll Twitter during the weekly Friday news dump? If you wanted to sink yourself into a shit show of news cycles with all the orderliness of a Jersey Shore marathon—and we all occasionally do—in the Trump years, you could get the real thing daily on CNN, or just mainline the good stuff straight from the president’s Twitter feed.Trump hardly went quietly, but when he finally did, we collectively logged off. The Washington Post hemorrhaged subscribers. In May of this year, Post publisher Will Lewis said the site has suffered a 50 percent drop in audience since 2020. The Times shifted their focus. Their story on the departure of Biden chief of staff Ron Klain in the summer of 2023—which, unlike Priebus’s Twitter-firing, was actually first reported by the Times—didn’t appear until page 17. In January of 2022, The New York Times bought The Athletic—a sports website with 1.2 million subscribers. A few weeks later, they bought Wordle from a software developer in Brooklyn. These were expensive moves—The Athletic sold for $550 million—but the Times had to evolve in a post-Trump media ecosystem (the paper, it’s worth noting, stayed profitable while The Washington Post plummeted into the red). The Biden White House simply doesn’t sustain the same sort of round-the-clock readership of its predecessor. Alex Thompson of Axios, the present savant of the White House gossip beat, had his Biden book canceled by Simon & Schuster earlier this year because people just aren’t buying Biden books like they bought Trump books. Right-wing media crowed over this development—Fox News’s grinning headline declared: “Books about Biden presidency go ‘bust’ as Trump ‘best-sellers’ prove more popular with readers.” But maybe it’s a good thing that Americans don’t want to read about backstabbing personnel in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe politics is supposed to look boring. Maybe a normal White House aspires to not produce so many juicy tell-all tomes. Grisham, who is famously the first White House press secretary never to hold a press conference, told me, “As a staffer, you should never be in the news—it should always be about your principal or the policy.” We can count on one hand the number of Biden White House staff who broke their own news cycles—T.J. Ducklo’s feud with a Politico journalist, Jenn Psaki’s too-smooth transition from politics to press. Most Americans probably can’t name the current White House chief of staff. Many others probably prefer it this way.We have an annoying tendency to overestimate Trump, to convince ourselves that he’s some sort of master strategist. It would be another gross overestimation to suggest that Trump used the country’s obsession with personnel stories to divert attention from actual policy, but sometimes, that’s what happened. While we were hooked on White House chaos, the Trump administration was quietly making huge policy shifts that flew mostly under the radar. In May of 2018, for example, Trump loosened restrictions on banks for the first time since the financial crisis. But on that day, we were all talking about Jared Kushner finally receiving a security clearance. A year and a half later, Betsy DeVos rolled back Obama-era rules making it harder for students to argue their college defrauded them. But all the media attention that week was on Trump aide Madeleine Westerhout’s firing after she trashed first daughters Ivanka and Tiffany over off-the-record drinks with reporters. Even Melania’s “I Really Don’t Care, Do You,” jacket drew the press’s focus away from the actual policy consequences of the underlying story of the first lady’s trip that drew all the attention—immigrant children being separated from their families.There was occasional pushback to this nonstop barrage of personnel pieces. Michelle Wolf famously infuriated Washington when she criticized the beat in her 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. A sane person can only get so many breaking news push alerts before they want to flush their phone down the toilet. The White House dismissed these stories as “palace intrigue” even while Trump was gleefully consuming them. “He loves that, he loves it,” Grisham says. “I believe that’s why he brought, in part, Corey [Lewandowski] back into the mix. I believe he made us all characters, and a lot of us fell for it. And some of us are still falling for it. And I believe that that’s again why, in his mind, Corey would bring back the Loomers of the world and some of the characters, because Trump firmly believes that if you’re in the press, nobody else is. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, necessarily.”With Laura Loomer by his side, Donald Trump found another way to crash back into the news. We weren’t talking about Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. We weren’t even talking about Taylor Swift (at least, not any more than we’re always talking about Taylor Swift). Instead, we were talking about Laura Loomer’s unabashed racism and her feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene—and maybe what their seemingly close relationship meant for Melania—but more importantly, we were talking about these figures as they relate to Donald Trump. The argument for doing palace intrigue stories has not changed, and it’s not any weaker than it was before. In 2017, one White House reporter defended the beat by explaining that “whoever has the president’s ear has influence over policy because he doesn’t have formed views on a variety of topics.” And the former president’s incapacity for independent thought remains evident. Trump’s current campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, did not advise him to visibly decompensate on live television during the debate and start ranting easily disprovable nonsense about immigrants eating dogs. That was all Laura Loomer’s doing. Now that we’re a few weeks removed from that news cycle, does it feel any more consequential that we all had to learn about Laura Loomer?
https://newrepublic.com/article/186056/media-palace-intrigue-trump-era

2024-10-04 09:10:24

Shocker: Trump Initially Denied Disaster Aid to Blue State, GOPer Says
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Donald Trump keeps pushing the vile claim that federal officials are withholding disaster aid from GOP areas devastated by Hurricane Helene. This has now backfired, focusing media attention on Trump’s own hyper-politicization of disaster relief as president. To wit: Two former Trump officials told Politico that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after wildfires in 2018 due to the state’s Democratic lean. We talked to one of those officials—Olivia Troye, a senior homeland security official in the Trump administration and now a leading critic of the former president—about Trump’s disastrous tenure, and what she told is is not pretty. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186765/shocker-trump-initially-denied-disaster-aid-blue-state-goper-says

2024-10-03 23:00:53

“You’re a Charlatan”: Pro-Trump MAGA Clerk Is Going to Prison
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A former Colorado county clerk was sentenced to prison Thursday for tampering with voting machines in the 2020 election and was thoroughly dressed down by the judge in her case. Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years for allowing a man to use a security card to access her county’s election system, and deceiving investigators about who the person was. He was later determined to be working with MAGA gadfly and pillow magnate Mike Lindell, a prominent election denialist and supporter of Donald Trump. “I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” District Judge Matthew Barrett told Peters in announcing the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”Barrett said that Peters, a Republican, didn’t take her job seriously, espousing claims about rigged voting machines even after they were disproven. During the trial, prosecutors said that Peters was seeking attention after associating with election denialists, and Peters remained unrepentant about her crimes. “I’ve never done anything with malice to break the law. I’ve only wanted to serve the people of Mesa County,” Peters told the court before she was sentenced. She tried to repeat her claims about “wireless devices” and software that altered ballot images, only to be rebuked by Barrett, who said that no discrepancies were found in ballot recounts. “I’ve let you go on enough about this. The votes are the votes,” Barrett said. He added that Peters made multiple appearances broadcasted to fellow election deniers for her own gain. “It’s just more lies. No objective person believes them. No, at the end of the day, you cared about the jets, the podcasts and people flying with you,” said Barrett. “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”While Peters will be going to prison, at least 70 other pro-Trump election denialists today are working in election offices in battleground states across the country, according to a July report. In Georgia, the state election board has been upended by pro-Trump appointees trying to give him every advantage in November to prevent Kamala Harris from winning, as Biden did in 2020. Hopefully, Thursday’s sentence discourages other attempts at election interference, otherwise November will be chaotic.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186764/charlatan-pro-trump-maga-clerk-prison-sentence-election-tampering

2024-10-03 21:59:04

Republican Rep. Has Weirdest Defense Ever for Blackface Costume
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New York Representative Mike Lawler gave the strangest defense for once wearing blackface as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.A photograph of Lawler from 2006, showing him posed like the iconic singer with brown makeup applied to his face, was obtained by The New York Times and published Thursday. Lawler, who is 38, would have been 20 years old when the photo was taken.In a statement, Lawler did not deny the photo’s authenticity. “The ugly practice of blackface was the furthest thing from my mind,” he said. “Let me be clear, this is not that.”“I am a student of history and for anyone who takes offense to the photo, I am sorry,” Lawler said. “All you can do is live and learn.”It’s unclear why Lawler referred to himself as a “student of history” in his apology. Was it to signal that no one needed to chastise him for doing something so obviously and historically wrong? If Lawler knows that to be the case, it’s even stranger that he did it in the first place.This latest scandal has the potential to affect Lawler’s reelection, as he is currently running in a toss-up race against former Democratic Representative Mondaire Jones for New York’s 17th congressional district seat. Lawler has attempted to paint himself as a moderate, and was even lauded by President Joe Biden, who called him “the kind of guy that when I was in the Congress, the kind of Republican I used to deal with.” However, a ProPublica study found that Lawler voted in line with MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Green 81 percent of the time. Last month, Rockland Republican Party Chairman Lawrence Garvey accused Lawler, among several other lawmakers, of retaliating against him for attempting to block an illegal $60,000 corporate donation through the state Republican Party.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186760/republican-representative-mike-lawler-defense-blackface

2024-10-03 20:49:49

Trump’s True Crowd Size Exposed in Embarrassing Video
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Donald Trump was an hour and a half late to his rally in Saginaw, Michigan, on Thursday, but even the extra time couldn’t muster more people to line the stadium.“Who else fills big places like this at three in the afternoon?” Trump asked the roaring crowd.But from another perspective, it was evident that the Republican presidential nominee had only filled a fraction of the event space.A look at the crowd as Trump takes the stage here in Saginaw, Michigan.(For a campaign that often points out when opponents’ venues don’t look full, this visual is striking) pic.twitter.com/NjBVF4M1U1— Taylor Popielarz (@TaylorPopielarz) October 3, 2024Another clip of the space showed the empty, fluorescent backdrop to his speech.Here’s a view from a different angle of Trump’s rally here in Saginaw, Michigan. “Who else fills big places like this at 3 o’clock in the afternoon?” Trump asked his supporters. pic.twitter.com/vOoJOgtheA— Taylor Popielarz (@TaylorPopielarz) October 3, 2024The low turnout is significant for a candidate who has frequently attacked his political opponents for their inability to draw as many people as he’s historically attracted to his boisterous, sprawling campaign stops.In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Kamala Harris’s ability to meet and even exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. Just weeks after the announcement of her campaign, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186758/donald-trump-crowd-size-exposed-video

2024-10-03 18:39:29

Watch: Ta-Nehisi Coates Expertly Calls Out Harris Hypocrisy at DNC
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Ta-Nehisi Coates perfectly dismantled the Democratic Party’s blatant hypocrisy in denying requests for a Palestinian American speaker to address the Democratic National Convention in August. During an interview Monday night with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the Apollo Theater in New York, Coates criticized the Democratic Party for refusing to agree to requests from the Uncommitted Movement. Coates took particular issue with the Democratic Party touting the names of activists like Fanny Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisolm but balking at demands for inclusivity. “And then I’m like, right, but who’s not onstage?” Coates said, as the audience applauded. “Who’s been pushed out of the frame?”“And I’m hearing all of this talk about, you know, ‘woman’s right to choose’ and protecting the autonomy of women’s bodies, and yet I see onstage some of the very people who have put that autonomy in question,” Coates said. The DNC’s lineup had included several Republican lawmakers and politicians, including Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, conservative talk show host Ana Navarro, and former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger. In general, Kamala Harris’s campaign has made significant efforts to attract GOP and independent voters, aligning with voices such as former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, a key architect of the Iraq War. Harris is scheduled to appear with Cheney’s daughter, former Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney, in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party Thursday, as part of that outreach to GOP and independent voters. Coates described what it was like to join delegates from the Uncommitted Movement, who began a sit-in outside the convention center after their requests to have a speaker were denied. The award-winning author said that when he saw members of the Central Park Five addressing the convention, it sparked a thought.“What I know is that when they were going through their stuff, the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with them,” Coates said of the five. “They were dehumanized. They were pushed out of the frame,” he continued. “And I’m standing with people who have been pushed out the frame! You know what I mean? And I’m with people whose families are being bombed literally right now! Right now!”Coates questioned how seriously one could take U.S. and Israeli promises of “Never Again,” while simultaneously funding and conducting a massive military operation in Gaza that has reportedly killed more than 41,500 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children.“We ought to hold folks accountable. Like I just, I don’t believe that you get to take Shirley Chisolm, I don’t believe you get to take Fanny Lou Hamer, and then bankroll those bombs to be dropped on people,” Coates said. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking last night on Uncommitted’s campaign at the Democratic National Convention. pic.twitter.com/SzB59zDpX1— Uncommitted National Movement 🌺 (@uncommittedmvmt) October 2, 2024Hamer testified before the DNC credentials committee in 1964 to challenge the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the convention, and advocated for the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to have access to the national stage.“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the credentials committee. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks, because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186753/ta-nehisi-coates-kamala-harris-hypocrisy-israel-gaza

2024-10-03 16:20:51

Republicans Scramble as Key State Suddenly Becomes a Battleground
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Republicans may be in for a surprise in Texas this November, according to voter registration data that shows the Lone Star State has seen a surge of new voters since 2018.Nearly 2.6 million people have registered to vote in the state since then-Representative Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost the midterm election to Senator Ted Cruz, adding roughly the size of Connecticut’s entire voter roll to the books. The bulk of those new voters originate from some of Texas’s most liberal territories, including the areas surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin, reported the San Antonio Express-News.And while that may not translate to an obvious win in a state with more than 30 million people, it has certainly caught the attention of local Republicans, who have diverted considerable attention toward maintaining their stronghold in the historically red state.“We are in a competitive state and we are not going to win just sitting on our laurels,” Texas Republican strategist Dave Carney told the Express-News.Rodney Ellis, a county commissioner in liberal Harris County, summed it up a little differently: “They’re terrified,” Ellis told the Express-News.Cruz, meanwhile, has turned to begging for help in his own reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Representative Colin Allred. In an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday, Cruz emphasized Democratic spending in his state, as well as his diminishing odds of taking the race.“I want to encourage your viewers this morning: I need your help,” Cruz said, urging people to “contribute” to his campaign website.“Chuck Schumer and George Soros are flooding cash into the state of Texas,” Cruz said. “There have been multiple polls in the last three weeks that show it as a four-point race, a three-point race, a two-point race, and there have been two polls that show it as a one-point race.”But rather than appeal to the surge of new liberal voters in his state, Cruz has spent the last few months doubling down on far-right conspiracies. He helped to elevate a disturbing and baseless lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and has refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the November election if it doesn’t go Donald Trump’s way. Cruz has also continued to idolize Trump, even after enduring possibly the ugliest verbal beating in Trump’s circle during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, which included Trump mocking the unpopular Texas senator for being so short he would need heels to reach the podium and plainly calling his wife ugly.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186728/republicans-ted-cruz-texas-battleground

2024-10-03 16:20:51

JD Vance Finally Answers That Crucial V.P. Debate Question
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Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance might have successfully skirted explaining whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election during Tuesday night’s debate, but his answer eventually came to light.While being chased down by comedian Jason Selvig, the MAGA politico admitted that he did believe the former president won the 2020 election. Still, Vance managed to avoid the immediate concern of the question: whether he would support a similar attempt to overturn the November election results if the Republican presidential nominee loses.“If your opponent gets more votes, will you concede?” Selvig asked, to silence as Vance walked away, in a video posted Thursday.JD Vance refused to answer this question at the debate but he told us Donald Trump won the 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/VyGrnCVAaw— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) October 3, 2024Vance deflected the direct line of questioning Tuesday while on stage opposite Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. He brought up just about every hot-button topic under the sun—from inflation to Facebook’s content moderation policies—to avoid admitting whether he believed Trump won, and whether he would place his oath of office above his loyalty to the top of his ticket.Vance still refused to yield, even during a heated back and forth with Walz, who noted that former Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to certify the election results was the reason why Vance was on the stage instead of the Indiana politician.“Where is the firewall, if he knows he can do anything including taking an election, and his vice president’s not going to stand to it?” Walz asked on Tuesday. “That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn’t?“So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump,” Walz said.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186750/jd-vance-donald-trump-vp-debate-question-2020

2024-10-03 16:20:49

Pennsylvania Town Shreds Far-Right Troll Over Trump’s Immigration Lies
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Residents of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, eviscerated a fascist right-wing YouTuber attempting to report on Donald Trump’s claims that the town had been overrun by Haitian immigrants. “You’re embarrassing your mother!” shouted one man during an on-the-street interview with Tyler Oliveria, a conservative influencer from California who travels the country producing right-wing propaganda for his 1.8 million subscribers.Last month, Trump had named-dropped Charleroi during a campaign event, launching right-wing speculation that an influx of Haitian immigrants had caused the town to become “virtually bankrupt.” Despite testimony from local officials stating that many of the president’s claims about the town were blatantly untrue, Oliveria traveled to Pennsylvania to speak with residents about the president’s outlandish accusations. Suffice to say, his blatant trolling was met with some hostility. “You’re silly, look at you, drinkin’ Monsters. You got a girlfriend?” the man asked, eliciting the devastating response from Oliveria, “I like Monster!”“Bet you don’t got a girlfriend! Call her right now!” the resident shouted as Oliveria laughed, clearly unable to respond. “Bet! Bet! BET! BET YOU DON’T GOT A GIRLFRIEND, BOY! Bet. On camera, you’re a clown!”“Alright,” Oliveria said, shrugging as the man walked away. As Oliveria sang circus music to himself, he became distracted as a woman walking down the street behind him began to shout.“Oh, I need to go back to where I came from? Where?” Oliveria yelled back. “What did I do to you, what did I do to you? What’s the problem?”“You don’t need to be in Charleroi about these poor Haitian people,” she continued. “Making money, and they work FUCKING hard.”“There you go, that’s all we came here to understand. Why did you come in here assuming we came here to serve trouble?” Oliveria asked.“This is my motherfucking town, bitch,” the woman shouted, walking away. “I run this fucking town!” Oliveria smiled uncomfortably. “She runs the town, alright. Well good to know we met the mayor,” he said, turning back to the first resident. “Bro, you just need to understand, you’re going to mature,” said the first resident. “Just understand, understand the fact that what you’re doing, you should expect this to happen.”“I can’t come here and have a conversation with you?” Oliveria asked.“But keep your composure,” the resident warned. Watch these Charleroi, PA locals clown a California right-winger trying to stir up anti-immigrant racism about their town:“You need to go back where you came from. You don’t need to be in Charleroi. These poor Haitian people making money and working hard.” - older white woman pic.twitter.com/Ea9o6AGTem— J.J. Abbott 🦅 (@jjabbott) October 3, 2024Oliveria previously made a video about traveling to Springfield, Ohio, where he interviewed locals about the debunked rumors pushed by the Republican ticket that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets. Oliveria’s video about Springfield was textbook right-wing propaganda, according to The Verge. The video included interviews with some wildly racist locals interspersed with misleading AI-generated images, footage of a woman who was arrested for allegedly eating a cat in Canton, Ohio, and footage of gang members in Haiti.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186732/donald-trump-immigration-lies-haiti-pennsylvania

2024-10-03 15:18:04

Decision Makers
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For those who follow politics, there are few things more mysterious, more inscrutable, more maddening than the mind of the undecided voter. In this year’s election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between the candidates were so obvious, how could any halfway intelligent human remain undecided for long? “These people,” Jonah Goldberg once wrote of undecided voters, on a rare occasion when he probably spoke for the entire political class, “can’t make up their minds, in all likelihood, because either they don’t care or they don’t know anything.”And that was more or less how I felt before I decided to spend the last seven weeks of the campaign talking to swing voters in Wisconsin. In September, I signed up to work for the League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Victory Project—a canvassing operation that recruited volunteers in five states to knock on doors in “swing wards” with high concentrations of undecided or persuadable voters. During my time in suburban Dane County, which surrounds Madison, I knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin residents. Our mission was simple: to identify undecided voters and convince them to vote for John Kerry.My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn’t do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them—just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.Undecided voters aren’t as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We’re giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man’s house, she still couldn’t make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn’t have much luck.Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don’t enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don’t care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, “relatively low-information, relatively disengaged,” the lack of engagement wasn’t a sign that they didn’t care. After all, if they truly didn’t care, they wouldn’t have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn’t enjoy politics.The mere fact that you’re reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I’ll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation—and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy during an election year since 1972.But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn’t mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism—an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument—accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington—that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters—as well as some Kerry supporters—towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the “mess in Iraq” he lit up. “We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil,” he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: “I mean we should have dominated the place; that’s the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats.” I didn’t quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options? Assure him that a Kerry White House wouldn’t waste tax dollars on literacy classes for rodents?)That may have been the most explicit articulation I heard of this mindset—but it wasn’t an isolated incident. A few days later, someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he “knew how to rule these people.” While Bush’s rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its candidate’s frequent—and wince- inducing—America-first rhetoric about opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States.The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president’s undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush’s Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn’t matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what’s Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naïve. C’mon, they’d say, you don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry’s promise to bring in allies was a lame idea—after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation—but precisely because they understood the severity, they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry’s ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed—thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry’s case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the “issues.” That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186709/decision-makers-chris-hayes

2024-10-03 15:18:03

The Detail in Jack Smith’s Trump Filing That Made Even Experts Gasp
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One gruesome detail in Jack Smith’s sweeping legal brief about Donald Trump’s involvement in January 6 has shocked legal experts. The 165-page filing, which was unsealed Wednesday by Judge Tanya Chutkan, provides new details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election-subversion scheme—including one about former Vice President Mike Pence.As MAGA rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, chanting their demand to “Hang Mike Pence!” a Trump aide received word that his running mate had been moved to a secure location for his safety, according to the filing. The aide “rushed into the dining room to inform [Trump] in hopes that [Trump] would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.”Instead, after the aide delivered the news, Trump allegedly replied, “So what?”MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said Wednesday night, during an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, that she was taken aback by multiple moments described in the filing, but Wallace plucked that one out as the most disturbing.“I’ll read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” said Wallace, before reading from page 142. “The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news certainly is news to me,” Rubin said. During an interview on CNN Wednesday, Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Tribe told host Erin Burnett he also found that quote to be one of the most outlandish. “There are lots of jaw-dropping things; you’ve named some of them. You know: ‘So what’ if this vice president is hung? ‘It doesn’t matter’ whether we’ve won or lost. That’s just a sampling; it’s the tip of a horribly large and scary iceberg,” Tribe explained. In the filing, Trump allegedly made a comment to his family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186702/jack-smith-donald-trump-evidence-mike-pence

2024-10-03 15:18:03

Watch: Trump-Backed Senate Candidate Crashes and Burns on Debate Stage
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In a Virginia Senate debate Wednesday night, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine’s Trump-endorsed opponent Hung Cao took the stage with some unhinged remarks about drag queens, alpha males, and DEI. Cao, a Navy veteran, was asked about his previous statements about what he sees as the “growing obsession” with diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military—and somehow answered with a cannibalistic rant. “When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” said Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”CAPT Cao: “When you're using a drag queen...to recruit for the Navy, that's not the people we need. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds." pic.twitter.com/1sCSZ8AZVh— Hung Cao (@HungCao_VA) October 2, 2024It’s unclear what Cao meant in the cannibalistic part of the rant, beyond scorning drag queens and anyone he doesn’t see as “alpha.”When NBC News reached the Republican’s office for comment, he doubled down about his debate remarks: “I just said what everyone believes as fact.”In the debate, he also parroted Trump’s lines about immigration and the so-called migrant crisis. Cao, whose family came to the U.S. from Vietnam, did not push back against the moderator’s question about deporting all undocumented immigrants. Instead, he made a call for assimilation. “Don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture.” On his campaign website, the candidate promises to “repel this invasion.” According to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Kaine leads Cao by 10 points in the state.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186707/virginia-senate-candidate-hung-cao-cannibal-rant-debate-stage

2024-10-03 15:18:03

Is Jack Smith’s Filing “Shocking”? No, It’s Just What Republicans Do.
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The media is shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Jack Smith has the goods on Trump and, holy cow, we had a traitor in the White House! And he committed crimes to both gain and try to hold office!But our media continually ignores context: This is nothing new for Republican presidents.What’s troubling isn’t so much Trump’s being busted for a very small slice of his multitude of crimes, but that our media so consistently ignores the crimes of past Republican presidents as if they never happened.For example, Tuesday was Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, but did you read in any media reports that the 1980 election was stolen from him by the Reagan campaign cutting an arguably treasonous deal with the Iranians to hold the American hostages?Isn’t that important context when considering Carter’s legacy?Or that the former president of Iran (who was there) outed the entire scheme, and that the former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes (who was also there), also admitted the entire scheme to The New York Times?Similarly, one of the mentions in Smith’s most recent recounting of Trump’s crimes around January 6th has an unnamed co-conspirator arguing that they needed to blow up the 2020 vote-counting process much as Republicans had done in 2000: “When the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, [redacted] responded, ‘Make them riot’ and ‘Do it!!!’”But does any media point out the context showing that this is nothing new? That the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot was largely orchestrated by now-Trump ally Roger Stone who, along with Bush’s attorneys John Roberts, Bret Kavanaugh (after his gig helping Ken Starr persecute Bill Clinton), and Amy Coney Barrett, worked to stop the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount of the Florida vote?More than a year after the election, a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida—manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year—and concluded that Al Gore most likely did indeed win the presidency in 2000.As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read: “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote that year by a half-million, and that five Republicans on the Supreme Court—along with a crime committed by Bush’s brother—denied him the presidency.Surpassing anything Trump could have pulled off, Florida’s then-Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb Bush had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the 2000 election but then—when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won—she invented a brand new category of ballots for the 2000 election that she wouldn’t have to count: so-called “spoiled ballots.”As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots: “While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”George W. Bush “won” that election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount—which would have revealed Harris’s crime and forced a count of the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore—was stopped when George H.W. Bush appointee Clarence Thomas (who should have recused himself) became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.Katherine Harris’s decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: there was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.And then, of course, there was Richard Nixon, who was the first to commit treason in 1968 by contacting the Vietnamese to blow up the peace deal that President Johnson had negotiated that summer.Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then, causing the war to last another seven long years and killing more than 20,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese.The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s U.S. agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (you can listen to the entire conversation here):President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.Sen. Dirksen: I know.This is what Republicans have done ever since the 1960s. Power at any cost, regardless of truth, ethics, or the law.Even Poppy Bush had his allies in Kuwait lie to Congress to justify his war against Iraq which he hoped, like Reagan’s “little war” with Grenada, would guarantee his reelection.Bill Clinton had an affair and tried to cover it up, but that’s about it for Democratic presidents since the Nixon era. They’ve otherwise been pillars of rectitude.But the simple reality about the modern GOP—the simple context for Trump’s indictment—is that the last Republican president who wasn’t a criminal and didn’t commit treason by conspiring with foreign governments to acquire or hold power was Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.Which raises the question: When Benjamin Netanyahu visited Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago, did they work out an October Surprise that might help out both of these now-indicted men politically? Has this year’s GOP candidate followed in Nixon’s, Reagan’s, and Bush’s footsteps?It’s beyond time to tell the truth and provide context about the GOP and its candidates over the past 56 years. By regularly failing to do so, our media (and the Democratic Party) are doing both America and democracy itself a disservice.Because, as the Trump candidacy proves, when Republicans’ crimes are not outed and punished, those Republicans simply come back and keep on criming.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186731/jack-smith-filing-republicans-shocking

2024-10-03 15:18:02

Top Republican Begs People to Move on From Trump’s Favorite Topic
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MAGA allies are trying to move on from their cataclysmic reaction to losing the 2020 presidential election—but that doesn’t mean that their leader is trying to do the same.In an interview Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer brushed off concerns about the Republican reaction to the last election, claiming that no one but Collins was still focused on the election conspiracy.“In 2020, you did sign onto that brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the election results in four states,” Collins said. “But you ultimately chose to certify the election, you broke with some of your Republican colleagues, and you chose to certify.“You said in a statement that ‘Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their Constitution,’” Collins continued. “And you yourself said, ‘Doing so sets a precedent that I believe undermines the state-based system of elections that defines our Republic.’ Do you still feel that way tonight?”“Again, Kaitlan, we’re talking about an election that’s going to take place in 35 days,” Emmer responded. “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago? We can have this debate at some other time going forward, but the people are hurting.”But Collins had a point.“Donald Trump is still talking about it,” the CNN anchor threw back.Trump was posting about the election he lost as recently as Wednesday night, writing on Truth Social that he “didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!”Emmer: What are you doing talking about something that's four years ago?Collins: Donald Trump is still talking about it pic.twitter.com/NhRuDa1pUa— Acyn (@Acyn) October 3, 2024Some of Trump’s closest allies have refused to admit that the former president lost the 2020 election, dodging direct questions about whether they plan to reenact the same political violence after November’s election results roll in. During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator JD Vance refused to concede that the Republican presidential nominee lost the last election before doubling down during a heated exchange with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186705/donald-trump-tom-emmer-2020-election

2024-10-03 15:18:02

Trump Is Beyond Pissed at Jack Smith After Seeing His New Evidence
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Donald Trump is not taking the release of new evidence in his 2020 election fraud case well.The 165-page motion from special counsel Jack Smith was released to the public on Wednesday, and it detailed not only the former president’s efforts to overturn the election but also his indifference to the violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Trump took to Truth Social to complain almost immediately.“The release of this falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the Most Important Election in the History of our Country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and Weaponize American Democracy, and INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” Trump wrote in one long-winded post.“Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power,” the former president added.Trump made several other posts into Thursday morning complaining that Democrats were interfering in the election, “Weaponizing the Justice Department against me,” and calling the Justice Department “THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE.”The former president is famously thin-skinned, but he also has reason to be worried. Smith’s legal filing includes wild details about Trump blatantly presenting lies and showing indifference to rioting in his name, as well as his plans to undermine the election results before they took place. It also is tailored to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, in an effort to ensure Trump faces accountability for his attempts to overturn the election. Trump’s outbursts online might be his attempt to distract the public from the damning proof against him.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186701/trump-pissed-jack-smith-new-evidence-election-interference

2024-10-03 14:09:33

Trump Is Now Threatening to Deport Legal Immigrants
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It’s official: Doanld Trump’s plan for massive deportations would apply to legal immigrants, as well as undocumented immigrants. During an exclusive interview with NewsNation, Trump said he planned to strip the legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been granted Temporary Protected Status. “Springfield is such a beautiful place, have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. They have to be removed,” Trump said.“So you would revoke the Temporary Protected Status?” asked the interviewer.“Absolutely, I’d revoke it and I’d bring them back to their country,” Trump said. During his first administration, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation. Now, Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.It’s not surprising that Trump has gotten to this place. The former president has falsely claimed that Springfield had suffered a “hostile takeover” by undocumented immigrants, and that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield had begun eating their neighbors’ pets. Last month, after practically admitting that he’d created the story about cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance also said that he doesn’t care about the legal status of immigrants.“Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said during a campaign event in North Carolina. “An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.”During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance echoed this rhetoric when he was fact-checked about the Haitian immigrants’ legal status. He ranted that Harris could grant citizenship “at the wave of a Kamala-Harris-open-border wand.”Both Trump’s and Vance’s statements demonstrate that under a second Trump administration, no legal immigrant will be safe in the United States, because the president could always decide that there are too many of them, create some story, and then kick them out.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186693/donald-trump-threatening-deport-legal-immigrants

2024-10-03 14:09:31

Jack Smith Hilariously Zings Supreme Court in New Trump Filing
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Special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page unsealed motion included revelations about Donald Trump in his January 6 election interference case and a plea for the judge overseeing it to carefully consider the boundaries of what constitutes an “official act” under the new, expanded definition of presidential immunity.But it also included a jab at the nation’s highest court, using Trump’s private phone calls to underscore that the Supreme Court had extended their aid to a former president who had no appreciation for their labor.In a section of the document outlining the similarities between Trump’s private rhetoric and that included in his January 6 Ellipse speech, Smith’s office highlighted how Trump, even then, was attacking the nation’s highest court for “not stepping up to the plate” in his legal woes.“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They are not stepping up to the plate. They’re not stepping up,” Trump said in a private conversation. Then, at the Ellipse, he shared a near-verbatim gripe: “I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They love to rule against me.”The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when they ruled 6-3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regards to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the Constitutional principle that “no man is above the law,” and that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186691/jack-smith-donald-trump-supreme-court-filing

2024-10-03 10:46:38

The V.P. Candidates’ Terrible Responses to Hurricane Helene
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In Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, moderator Norah O’Donnell asked JD Vance about the death toll from Hurricane Helene, while referring to the research showing that climate change intensifies the rainfall from these storms. “What responsibility,” she asked, “would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?” Vance, after expressing horror over the loss of life, moved on to what one might charitably call the substance of his response: If, “just for the sake of argument,” he said, carbon emissions really were driving climate change, the goal should be “to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the world.” (We are not.) Tim Walz responded by saying that “my farmers know climate change is real,” but then he too shifted his focus to American manufacturing, citing “the E.V. technology that we invented,” “the largest solar manufacturing plant in North America,” and “jobs all across the country” created by the Inflation Reduction Act. When O’Donnell followed up by asking about Trump calling climate change a hoax, Vance pivoted again to the need to make solar panels in the U.S., not China; Walz touted record oil and gas production.Of the swing voters who participated in The Washington Post’s focus group, 13 thought Vance had the better answer, while only nine thought Walz did.TNR’s Kate Aronoff has written previously about the strange difficulty that Democrats have demonstrated in crafting a compelling narrative around climate change and climate policy. The presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Trump, she wrote, “should be a cautionary tale for how stupid and dangerous it is for Democrats to keep taking on Republicans’ talking points as their own.”And the horrifying reality of Hurricane Helene, she wrote earlier this week, exposes the moral insufficiency of portraying global warming as primarily a narrative about American manufacturing: “Next to images of entire downtown areas half-submerged in floodwaters, or homes moving faster than a river tube, touting the administration’s successful boost of the construction of manufacturing facilities rings hollow,” Kate wrote. “Framing climate action primarily as a good-news story in which the U.S. will come to dominate green export sectors overlooks the very real pocketbook struggles the climate crisis is already causing.”Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have already estimated that climate change “caused over 50 percent more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas,” due to laws of physics dictating that warmer air holds more water vapor. Before Helene made landfall, the storm traveled over Gulf waters that were significantly warmer than average. And this is part of a broader trend. As Inside Climate News reported this week, “The amount of rain in the most intense rainstorms has increased 37 percent in the Southeast since 1958.”In the past few days, news outlets have reported some of the stories from the communities deluged with Helene’s increased rainfall: a 75-year-old man calling for help for seven hours before falling into the floodwaters, as horrified friends and family watched; two grandparents stranded on their roof before drowning, along with with their 7-year-old grandchild; a mother and her 1-month-old twin boys killed by a tree falling on their mobile home. There was an American manufacturing angle in there as well: the factory employees who were left holding onto pipes on the back of a truck that eventually flipped, leaving them to the mercies of the raging floods. One of the workers is confirmed dead; another told reporters their managers ordered them to keep working as the waters rose.Over 160 people have now been confirmed dead. Millions are without power, and at least 400,000 people have seen their water systems fail and are now without potable water except for what is being distributed by relief teams—the true number is likely higher, since 1,293 water systems are either “non-operational,” only semi-operational, or of unknown status, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Restoring water access in Asheville, North Carolina, could take “weeks.”The question of what responsibility politicians have to address this devastation and prevent it in the future can be answered many ways. Congress could cancel its long recess and return to Washington to pass the supplemental disaster funding it left out of a bill last week. Policymakers could start rethinking home insurance as the first line of defense in these disasters: Most of the homes affected by Helene didn’t have flood insurance because it’s not included in regular home insurance. Moreover, the insurance industry doesn’t have the best track record in states feeling the effects of climate change, such as California and Florida, where premiums are rising. Some insurers have simply abandoned these states altogether. Major infrastructure investments could make communities more resilient in the future, and as these severe weather events become more common, we also might want to make sure that people affected by them aren’t disenfranchised because of difficulties voting in the aftermath of these disasters. Then there’s the underlying problem: Unless the world starts burning fewer fossil fuels, this will only get worse. But that’s not what people heard Tuesday night in the vice presidential debate. Instead, the vice presidential candidates argued about who would create more jobs and eat China’s lunch. If politicians can’t talk seriously about climate change even in the wake of a “biblical” disaster wiping out areas once described as “climate havens,” when will they?Good NewsThe U.K.—the ultimate coal nation—has shut its last coal-fired plant, becoming the first G7 country to close the book on coal power.Bad NewsA new analysis finds that the destruction from hurricanes and tropical storms has a long tail: “Death rates in affected states remain elevated for 15 years after a storm makes landfall,” The Washington Post reports.Stat of the Week40 trillionThat’s how many gallons of rain dropped on the Southeastern United States in just five days, thanks to Hurricane Helene and the storm that preceded it, according to one calculationWhat I’m ReadingAs climate change helps mosquitoes spread disease, critics push for alternative to pesticidesAs mosquito populations rise and spread, bringing West Nile and other diseases with them, a lot of areas are looking to reduce their numbers. The typical way to do that is by spraying pesticides that kill adult mosquitoes—“adulticide,” Diana Kruzman reports. But there’s reason to worry about the effects that spraying endocrine-disrupting pesticides might have on vulnerable humans like pregnant women and children, let alone the rest of the ecosystem. There could be another way, Diana Kruzman reports at Grist:Some governments are also experimenting with releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild to breed sterile offspring, reducing mosquito populations. Nanopesticides, which are less toxic to mammals but still affect mosquitoes, are also a promising area of research. However, advocates say that the most proven way to deal with mosquitoes is by reducing their ability to breed—by clearing away pools of standing water and utilizing larvicides—and educating the public to protect themselves using long clothing and repellents. Feldman pointed to the success of programs in cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., as proof that adulticides don’t need to be a major part of mosquito control efforts. The agency responsible for tracking and preventing the spread of West Nile virus in the nation’s capital, for example, does not use adulticides; instead, the D.C. Department of Health concentrates its efforts on larviciding, even handing out free larvicides for residents to apply in their own neighborhoods. Boulder, meanwhile, utilizes an explicitly “ecological” approach; boosting biodiversity, local officials have found, can lower populations of disease-carrying mosquitoes by forcing them to compete for resources with other species of mosquitoes as well as other kinds of insects.Read Diana Kruzman’s full report at Grist.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/186666/debate-walz-vance-hurricane-helene-climate

2024-10-03 10:46:38

Will This Election Be Decided By Non-Voters?
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Donald Trump polls better with people who don’t vote (especially men) than with people who do. A New York Times/Siena poll of registered voters conducted September 3-6 showed Trump leading Kamala Harris narrowly, 48-46 percent. But the same poll showed that, among those who didn’t vote in 2020, Trump led decisively, 48-41 percent. In a Times/Siena poll of registered voters conducted September 21-26 in the battleground state of Michigan, Harris led Trump narrowly, 48-47 percent. But among those who didn’t vote in 2020, Trump crushed Harris, 50-40. Elections are won by securing support from those who vote, not those who don’t. But the 2024 race is so tight that the Trump campaign is vigorously courting so-called “low-propensity” voters. “We know they agree with us,” the Trump campaign’s political director, James Blair, told Reuters. “We know they favor us, but we have to get them to the polls.” According to Reuters, Elon Musk’s America PAC and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action are both targeting people who don’t vote, in the hope that this year they will.Who is this low-propensity voter? According to a poll conducted September 13-23 in Michigan by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and polling firm (toplines here; crosstabs here), the infrequent voter is more likely than not white (51 percent) and employed either full-time (51 percent) or part-time (9 percent). If our low-propensity voter isn’t working, that’s probably because he’s retired (14 percent) or a student (10 percent). He is most likely a political independent (56 percent). Not voting in 2020 situates him among roughly one-third of eligible voters who failed to do so, even though turnout was higher in 2020 than in any election since 1900, according to the Pew Research Center. Turnout could well be higher in 2024. That’s why the Trump campaign is stalking this group.A word about voter turnout. Since the start of this century, Republicans have, through various disenfranchisement schemes, devoted themselves to reducing it. These efforts have enjoyed some success in the South, but nationally they’ve mostly been self-defeating. In fact, the GOP has so thoroughly pissed off the targeted groups (mainly African Americans and college students) that turnout for these cohorts has mostly increased. All good small-d democrats favor high voter participation, and I do, too. But it isn’t necessarily a sign that our republic is in good health. You may have noticed that ours is not exactly an Era of Good Feelings, and historically, I’m sorry to report, high voter turnout tends to coincide with Eras of Bad Feelings. In the United States, turnout among eligible voters, who did not yet include women or, practically speaking, African Americans, reached its all-time high between 1840 and 1900 (70-80 percent; sometimes higher). That epoch, you’ll recall from high school history class, encompassed the divisive period leading up to the Civil War; the Civil War itself; and the war’s dismal aftermath, four decades characterized by three presidential assassinations; the craven abandonment of Reconstruction; the rise of economic trusts; the broad acceptance of eugenics and social Darwinism; the violent suppression of unions; and a level of political corruption that would make Robert Menendez blush. If you think things are bad today, they were worse then.Republicans have expanded voter participation not only by trying to limit it, but also by turning their party into a MAGA cult that promotes violent insurrection, nativism, racism, and authoritarianism. The cult draws a lot of bottom-feeders to the polls, while simultaneously repelling so many others that come election day they set the alarm clock one hour early and sleep with their running shoes on. Now the GOP is experimenting with this new idea of increasing turnout more deliberately, by courting non-voters. But according to the Data for Progress poll in Michigan, and a second poll of low-propensity voters in Georgia (toplines here; crosstabs here), this group ought to be receptive to the same sort of messaging I’ve been urging Democrats to step up—especially with working class voters. Low-participation voters are not as conservative as they think they are.First, the bad news. Infrequent voters don’t care very much about health care. In Michigan, only 4 percent said it was their top priority; in Georgia, only 3 percent did. Even the Democrats among them were indifferent, with 6 percent making it their top priority in Michigan and 5 percent in Georgia. I have argued, strenuously, that health care is the paramount economic issue, and that Democrats should exploit their huge advantage on this topic over Republicans. But to whatever extent Democrats are doing so, it isn’t getting across.With that out of the way, let’s consider the good news. For starters, these voters don’t care very much about Trump’s (and the GOP’s) two biggest issues, “taxes and government spending.” In both Michigan and Georgia, only 3 percent chose these as their top priority. (Sorry, Ludwig von Mises!) Even among Republicans, only 5 percent in Michigan and 4 percent in Georgia ranked these highest.What does this election-avoiding creature care about most? “Economy, cost of living, and inflation,” according to the survey. Thirty-seven percent ranked it highest in Michigan, and 43 percent ranked it highest in Georgia. Because of the description’s emphasis on inflation (did Data for Progress really have to say both “cost of living” and “inflation”?) these responses cut against Harris. But in second and third place we find “abortion” (9 percent in both states) and “threats to democracy” (8 percent in Michigan, 6 percent in Georgia). These cut much more heavily against Trump.Low-propensity voters are pretty fed up with the government’s coddling of corporations and the rich. An overwhelming majority—75 percent in Michigan, 81 percent in Georgia—agreed that “the government generally favors wealthy individuals and corporations over working and middle-class Americans” Even most Republicans agreed with this (Michigan: 58 percent; Georgia: 74 percent). An overwhelming majority also agreed that “The government should be doing more” to regulate corporations (Michigan: 62 percent, including 46 percent of Republicans; Georgia: 63 percent, including 43 percent of Republicans). Given these responses, low-propensity voters should be receptive to Democratic messaging about Trump’s appalling giveaways to the rich and contempt for the administrative state.And yes, these voters like labor unions! Sixty-seven percent in both Michigan and Georgia either “strongly” or “somewhat” support “making it easier for workers to form unions and collectively bargain with employers while protecting them from retaliation at work.” Even among Republicans, fully 49 percent in both states said the same. I’ve looked high and low for the voter who would object were Harris to more forthrightly embrace organized labor. I have yet to find him—because the taboo dwells not with voters but with donors. (In fairness, she did very well Wednesday when she said striking dockworkers “deserve a fair share” of the maritime industry’s record profits and took the opportunity to attack Trump’s dismal labor record.)The 2024 election will more likely be decided by people who showed up in 2020 than by people who didn’t. But all signs indicate this contest will be close, and any success that Trump has in adding to his coalition could be decisive. Harris should at least match Trump’s efforts to win support from low-propensity voters. Many of them seem at least to think that this year they really will remember to show up on election day. The majority told Data for Progress that they are “more enthusiastic” than usual: 57 percent in Michigan, 56 percent in Georgia. And in both places, significantly higher proportions of Democrats than Republicans were “more enthusiastic” (with a spread of 14 points in Michigan and 9 points in Georgia). That makes sense. If I were a Republican, I’d feel less motivated to vote this year, because the GOP is a hot mess. The Democrats can’t afford to ignore non-voters, because if these folks do get it together and vote, their plan right now is to vote for Trump. It’s well worth trying to persuade them that Harris is the better candidate, because she is, damn it—especially for them.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186684/non-voters-2024-trump-harris

2024-10-03 10:46:37

Transcript: Trump-MAGA Erupt at CBS over Debate—Exposing Big MAGA Scam
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 3, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: At the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, the CBS news moderators fact-checked JD Vance a single time. Once. That was all it took to trigger Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who fanned out and hammered CBS relentlessly for that enormous transgression. All this opens a window on a larger story: the degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on top of an immense superstructure of endless and shameless lies. Bullying the media into not fact-checking Trump and Vance is essential to that larger project. Today, we’re talking about all this with Jamison Foser, who writes regularly about media capitulation to the right wing on his Substack, Finding Gravity. Thanks for coming on, Jamison. Jamison Foser: Thanks for having me, Greg. Sargent: At the debate, JD Vance exaggerated wildly about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, an obsession of his, suggesting that they’re here illegally. CBS’s moderator pointed out that they’re actually here legally on temporary protected status. Vance objected saying, “Hey, the rules were that you’re not supposed to fact-check.” That triggered MAGA. Trump erupted on Truth Social. Other Republicans jumped in. Here’s audio of Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on Newsmax:Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming, especially since the rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves because I think they were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.Sargent: Jamison, I guess CBS maybe violated its rules, but still it was one extremely minor correction. What’s your reaction to all this? Foser: Yeah, extremely minor is exactly right. The moderator literally just said, “To clarify for our viewers, there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield who are here legally.” Vance then flipped out, and first we have to acknowledge just how pathetic he sounded saying, “The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” I immediately thought of that old Saturday Night Live skit in which Chevy Chase is playing a befuddled Gerald Ford in a debate and says, “It was my understanding that there’d be no math involved.” It was just ridiculous. He looked small and weak and dishonest. That was my first reaction. But we have to understand this objection Vance had in the moment and the reaction since that you’ve highlighted from his fellow conservatives, that it’s extremely just completely insincere, right? They don’t actually believe that the moderators were biased against them. They were going to attack the moderators no matter what happened. It’s what they do after the Trump–Harris debate. Trump attacked the moderators claiming they were biased against him, even though they gave him five minutes more speaking time than Harris and routinely let him interrupt both them and Harris and break the rules. It’s just not a sincere objection. That’s the first thing everybody should understand. We shouldn’t treat it as such. We shouldn’t treat it as a legitimate complaint. But there is a piece of it that I do think that they really do believe, and that’s that JD Vance and Donald Trump fundamentally think they should be able to do and say whatever they want, whenever they want, and nobody should even question them. It’s just a very fundamentally authoritarian worldview that shows up in small ways like this and in large ways like talking about jailing journalists and others who say and do things they don’t like. Sargent: To highlight a point you made, Trump and MAGA know the ability to lie with impunity, and that’s the essential thing. Impunity is absolutely central to the success of their political project. The debate really showed this in a new way. Vance lied about everything. The borders are open when in fact crossings are down. Immigrants take Americans jobs when in fact they’re helping grow the economy and labor force. Trump tried to protect people on the Affordable Care Act when in fact he tried to destroy it. Trump’s economy was uniformly fantastic when it actually ended in Covid-fueled catastrophe. Biden and Harris have decimated energy production when in fact oil production has soared. It’s really endless. Now Jamison, we all recall George Bush, Karl Rove, and the making of their alternate reality. Is what we’re seeing now something different? Foser: I think it’s something different in kind of a hyperinflation of it. What we’re seeing now in terms of how the Republican candidates and the conservative movement are behaving and how the media reacts to it are trends that have been in place for decades and that many of us have been talking about and highlighting. I know you have been, and I have been for a very long time. What’s happened in the current MAGA era and the Trump era is the natural conclusion of those trends continuing unchecked. They’re just going to grow. It’s not hard to see the connection between the Bush administration saying “we create our own reality” and the way Donald Trump and JD Vance are behaving right now. If they’re allowed to do that and the media goes along and helps them in doing that by treating their lies and their fabrications as legitimate topics for discussion on things we should focus on, then they’re just going to do more and more of that. Sargent: You had an interesting piece recently comparing coverage of Trump to coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. The press at that time decided that Gore was a liar and an exaggerator and they covered him that way in a concerted relentless way. Can you talk about that and how it compares to the present? Foser: A core theme of the 2000 presidential campaign coverage was that Al Gore was this fundamentally untrustworthy figure, this compulsive liar. It was based on a couple pretty trivial small examples that weren’t even true. There were ironically enough things that the media exaggerated from Gore’s comment in order to portray Gore as an exaggerator. What you had all that year was this constant through line in coverage of the campaign. George Bush was a straight talker, and Al Gore was fundamentally dishonest. It wasn’t just that they’d fact-check him in one piece when he’d say something. They’d criticize it. That was then the dominant frame through which they covered him. And that’s a striking contrast to the way the media treats Donald Trump and JD Vance. With Trump and Vance, to your point, they do fact-check some of the lies. Sometimes they even do it pretty consistently. We’ve seen in the lie that JD Vance and Donald Trump have been telling about Haitian immigrants. If you look at the articles about that, the media has actually done a pretty good job of saying, It’s not actually true, Haitian immigrants aren’t eating cats…Sargent: Or spreading diseases.Foser: ...or spreading diseases. But the way they do that actually helps further the core agenda that Trump and Vance have here. They do something that I call “privileging the lie.” This is a concept I developed about 15 years ago during the 2008 campaign. When the news media reports a lie, even if they make clear that it’s false, if they adopt the lie as the framing of their story, they’re helping the liar. They’re giving the liar the license to set the terms on the topic of discussion. All these stories about Vance’s Haitian immigrant lie, they’d point out that it’s not actually true what he’s saying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, but the whole article would then be about Haitian immigrants and the effect that they’re having on the communities in Ohio and elsewhere, and the problems that this is causing according to some of the residents and on the other hand, some of the benefits from it. That core story would be one about immigration, which is what Trump and Vance wanted. JD Vance has explicitly said he made these stories up to get that outcome. The other way of approaching that would have been the way they approached Al Gore. The story here is not immigration. The story here is that JD Vance is a fundamentally untrustworthy figure who is lying yet again—he has a long history of lying. That then becomes the story and the focus: JD Vance and Donald Trump and their history of lies, their fundamental dishonesty and untrustworthiness. If you cover it that way, you don’t privilege the lie. You don’t privilege the liar. You don’t incentivize future lies. But instead what we’ve seen is [the media] giving the Trump campaign exactly what they wanted.Sargent: Yeah, I like your coinage there. There’s another device or at least another technique that’s used by these guys, and I’ve been calling it the “secondary lie” or the “subordinate lie.” What happens is the press gets relentlessly focused on a falsehood like “Haitian immigrants are eating pets.” And understandably, it’s a pretty big story, that they went there, right? But for days and days and days, every story about that would have the fact-check of the lie about eating pets, but then underneath it, JD Vance or whoever was speaking would advance another set of lies, like Haitians are spreading diseases. Readers and viewers are seeing, OK, the pet eating isn’t true, but then they’re hearing Vance say, Well, there are these other problems, like they’re spreading diseases, and that isn’t checked. That’s a subsidiary problem to what you’re talking about. Foser: Yeah. That’s a core part of the Trump and Vance strategy, and that’s a core reason why privileging the lie and allowing… Not just allowing, because news companies have agency here, right? They’re not allowing Trump and Vance to dictate anything. The news companies are making a decision to cover the topic that JD Vance wants them to cover when he tells these lies. The consequence of doing that is you then create this story that has space for all these other lies and you can’t possibly keep up with them. You can’t possibly correct them all.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186690/transcript-trump-maga-erupt-cbs-debateexposing-big-maga-scam

2024-10-03 10:46:37

Helene Should Trigger a National Rethink of Home Insurance
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As people across the Southeast continue to pick up the pieces from Hurricane Helene, many will continue to face a rude awakening: that they—or their landlords—don’t have flood insurance. Those facing damages from winds or mudslides are more likely to be covered, since that type of damage is included in many basic home insurance packages. But policyholders shelling out potentially record sums for that coverage may still only see a fraction of what repairs, replacement and rebuilding will actually cost.Hurricane Helene crashed into an insurance sector facing a series of potentially existential questions, and a policy landscape in which the U.S. has left key decisions about how communities prepare for and recover from disasters in the hands of companies that exist to turn a profit—not provide protection. “Right now, we’re essentially leaving all of these decisions about land use and where risk mitigation happens up to insurance companies,” says Moira Birss, a longtime organizer and fellow at the Climate & Community Institute. Preventative risk reduction—for example raising low-lying coastal homes up on on stilts—can offer as much as a $13 in savings on disaster losses for every dollar spent, according to one 2019 study from the National Institute of Building Sciences. The burden of making those sorts of changes often falls largely on individual homeowners. “Maybe your insurance company tells you directly, or your prices are rising and you get the message to put on a new roof or trim the trees around your house,” Birss told me. The problem is that a lot of people don’t have the money up-front to make those kinds of changes.”The cost of home insurance in the U.S. has increased by roughly 20 percent over the last two years, and is on track to reach new highs in 2024. The consequences of that extend well beyond individual policyholders. Affordable housing developers—already discriminated against by insurance providers—have been forced to delay and cancel projects amid skyrocketing premiums. In some cases they can’t even get a quote. Between 2022 and 2023, nearly 30 percent of the 400 affordable housing companies surveyed by the National Leased Housing Associations—a trade association for those developers—saw premiums increase by at least 25 percent, leading many to raise rents and cut costs. More than half of renters nationwide now hand at least 30 percent of their income over to landlords each month, meaning that home insurance increases are now exacerbating the crisis in affordable housing for renters, too. Those pressures are especially intense in some of the areas worst-hit by Hurricane Helene. That includes famously red-hot housing markets in South Florida, but also the more temperate, mountainous regions of North Carolina and Tennessee that were hammered with as much as 2 feet of rainfall over the weekend. Between 2015 and 2021, the median rent in Asheville increased by 33 percent; wages in the city’s biggest industries only grew by 15 percent. Median home values nearly doubled over the same time period, jumping from $199,800 to $319,400. Many of those living in Helene’s 800-mile path of destruction—whether renters or homeowners—may not be able to afford to move back. “It’s usually not build back better. It’s usually build back bougie,” says Zac Taylor, assistant Professor in the Department of Management in the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. “It’s the up-front mitigation,” especially oft-neglected larger-scale efforts like updating public infrastructure and building codes, ”that really mitigates the risk of a market-driven fallout after the fact.” The situation in Appalachia could be especially dire. Despite the fact that home insurance packages are marketed under names like “all peril,” those policies generally don’t include flood insurance. That’s typically provided by the country’s only public insurance program: the National Flood Insurance Program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Just 4 percent of homeowners have flood insurance nationwide, and they’re typically near large bodies of water; as little as 2.4 percent of homes in the areas hit by Helene are estimated to have coverage.People looking to buy houses in FEMA-designated “special flood hazard areas” are typically required to get flood insurance coverage in order to secure a loan from the federally-backed mortgage lender. Those maps are notoriously out of date. Not everyone who buys a house takes out a mortgage, either. And while lenders would seem to have a built-in incentive to ensure that homes on their books aren’t catastrophically inundated, flood insurance policies often lapse after a few years—potentially because banks often securitize those mortgages and sell them off to investors as complex financial products. “It’s a perfectly plausible interpretation on the part of a homeowner in inland North Carolina to think, ‘I’m not in a flood zone, and I’m not require to have a flood insurance policy so therefore I must be safe,” says Rebecca Elliott, an associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States. “When a storm like Helene hits, the fact that they are becomes so obvious so quickly.” As the full picture of the damage across rain-ravaged parts of Appalachia becomes clear, she says, “I think what we’re going to find is that many people are going to have nothing to rebuild with aside from what they can scrounge together from their own savings.”Birss and Taylor are both among the co-authors of a new report from the Climate & Community Institute that recommends the creation of Housing Resilience Agencies, “state-level entities with democratic governing structures and public risk modeling that would be tasked with studying and determining where community oriented and comprehensive risk reduction should happen,” Birss explains. Rather than continuing to leave critical planning decisions up to the insurance industry, HRAs would provide public disaster insurance—filling the considerable gaps in private sector coverage—and coordinate comprehensive disaster risk reduction activities, taking the burden off of individuals to “harden” their homes against worsening extreme weather events. The idea, Taylor tells me, is to “make sure we’re deploying resources to de-risk communities before storms. Prevention is the strongest way of getting ahead of this problem. Prevention can look like all sorts of different things: from building infrastructure to hardening assets,” including homes and businesses. “Maybe it means selective managed retreat. But it means really reducing the harm before it happens.” Supplemental public insurance would provide coverage to multi-family housing providers, mobile home dwellers and other neglected sectors, with the aim of creating a more direct relationship between risk mitigation and insurance provision than what currently exists. That set-up incentives the HRA to reduce risks across the state through public investment—i.e. strengthening bridges against severe flooding—rather than curating a more favorable risk pool by dropping customers, or whole geographic areas.The approach is a stark contrast to the one being taken by both the state and federal level. In Florida—arguably the epicenter of the climate-induced insurance crisis—the state has been eager to “depopulate” the state’s insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, created to address major private insurers fleeing the state. Doing so has entailed offering generous handouts to smaller, sometimes shady insurers to entice them to stay in business. Many of those smaller insurers have gone bankrupt in recent years and left policyholders holding the bag. Florida now has some of the highest home insurance premiums in the country; last year, the average annual policy there cost $10,966—almost five times the national average.The National Flood Insurance Program, Elliott explains, has been similarly eager to offload policies onto a fledgling private flood insurance market and lessen its $20.5 billion debt load. While that might make it easier for more people to get flood insurance, it may also exacerbate longstanding issues that have plagued that program. Because only the highest-risk areas are required to get flood insurance, the NFIP functions like a health insurer that only takes on the sickest patients. “Private insurers are in a position to cherry pick the best risk out of the NFIP,” Elliot tells me, making its already risky pool even riskier. Those companies are also free to raise rates at will and drop customers, which the NFIP is statutorily forbidden from doing. “The idea that the way to solve the flood insurance protection gap is to increase consumer choice isn’t surprising. That’s sort of the American ethos,” Elliot says. “But there are reasons to suspect that it’s not going to resolve that issue. If it does, it’s going to bring people into risk pools on terms that aren’t very secure.”Given the sheer extent of uninsured flood losses that Appalachians, especially, could be facing, Hurricane Helene could provide an opportunity to discuss more transformative reforms to the program than just raising rates to better reflect risk. “If there’s an understanding that there are no safe places, then maybe we’ll see a reckoning with the possibility that this is a risk and a cost that needs to be socialized much more broadly,” Elliot added. “Extending mandatory coverage to all property owners,” in line with the approach taken in New Zealand, “could become thinkable in a way that it never has been before.” Absent serious investments in risk mitigation efforts, the home insurance crisis is only likely to worsen: leaving the least risky policies to private insurers, overburdening public insurers of last resort, and displacing lower income renters and owners who can no longer afford their homes—all trends exacerbated by wide-reaching disasters like Hurricane Helene. “The idea that you need to pool risk smartly is a smart one,” Taylor tells me.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186663/helene-trigger-national-rethink-home-insurance

2024-10-03 10:46:36

Ted Cruz Silent About Activist Who Said Judaism “Perverted
Itself”
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Texas Republican Ted Cruz would not say if Troy Newman is advising his Senate reelection campaign against Democrat Colin Allred. Three times in the past week—once in the Senate parking lot and twice in the Capitol’s hallways—I tried asking Cruz if Newman had a role in his campaign. “Nice try,” Cruz laughed each time. Newman, an anti-choice extremist, is best known as the leader of Operation Rescue, the group best known for leading the protests outside an abortion clinic in Kansas where George Tiller, one of the few doctors who would perform late-term abortions, was assassinated in 1991.Back in 2016, when he was running for president, Cruz did not equivocate about Newman at all. “I am grateful to receive the endorsement of Troy Newman,” Cruz said then, after naming Newman a co-chair of his failed presidential election campaign. “He has served as a voice for the unborn for over 25 years and works tirelessly every day for the pro-life cause. We need leaders like Troy Newman in this country who will stand up for those who do not have a voice.”Cruz has long been a right-wing firebrand when it comes to abortion and a litany of other social conservative issues. In 2016, he tried to attack Donald Trump for being insufficiently opposed to abortion rights. He pledged back then that he “would sign any legislation on my desk to defend the least of these,” even without exception for the life of the mother.But much has changed since Cruz’s failed campaign. In 2021, Texas’s Heartbeat Act went into effect, which included a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, along with provisions empowering individuals to enforce the law through civil lawsuits against anyone who performed or assisted in an abortion. Then, in 2022, thanks to three jurists whom Cruz voted to confirm, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.Now Cruz faces a tough reelection fight against Allred, a Democratic congressman and former NFL player. Polls show Allred either narrowly behind or even ahead of Cruz. And Cruz’s ties to Newman might complicate his prospects. Allred is campaigning hard on his support for abortion rights.The altered landscape has some observers wondering where Newman fits in with Cruz today. Last month, Mother Jones reported that a Cruz campaign press release from 2016 announcing the “Pro-Lifer for Cruz” group Newman co-chaired cited some extremist quotes from the activist’s 2001 book, Their Blood Cries Out, which Newman co-authored with Cheryl Sullenger. In the book, MoJo reported, Newman and Sullenger wrote that, in dealing with the “blood-guilty,” the U.S. government’s responsibility “rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes.”The book also includes previously unreported antisemitic tropes, thematically linking abortion supporters today to alleged Jewish sins of the past. “The bloodguilt associated with murdering Jesus, the prophets, and then the Apostles caused a great firestorm of judgment to fall upon the Jewish people,” Newman writes. “It was a judgment so severe that the Jewish people will never recover. There has been a partial retribution. All the righteous blood from Abel to Jesus has been paid for through the destruction of Israel in 70 AD. In the same way that Israel was polluted with innocent blood, so is America defiled and cursed with the innocent blood of aborted children.”This rhetoric is not all 20 years old. Last December 15, over two decades after his book was first published, Newman posted publicly on his Facebook profile, “Is it Christians[’] job to assist those who reject Jesus Christ to build a temple so they can offer animal blood and blaspheme the Blood of Jesus?” One of Newman’s followers replied to his post: “What makes you think that is what you’re called to do? Or even that others think you should do?”Newman continued, that same evening, “Many Christians are donating to build a third temple in Jerusalem. So they can sacrifice the perfect red heifer and usher in a new kingdom. In my opinion, that’s anathema to God.” “Red heifer” references a purification ritual in ancient Judaism.In his book, Newman uses the sacking of Jerusalem and destruction of the Jewish temple there by the Romans to argue that so-called Jewish bloodguilt is similar to the bloodguilt Planned Parenthood has today for providing abortion services.“As Baal worshipers filled Israel with sexual immorality and child-sacrifice, Planned Parenthood and others of their ilk film America with the worship to the idol gods of the sexual revolution and abortion,” Newman writes. “The people of Israel refused to rebuke those who sacrificed people to Baal. Christians seem shocked when they read that the apostate Israelites allowed Baal worship even in the temple of God all the while Planned Parenthood board members are allowed to sit as elders in some of our churches. This is the height of hypocrisy!” he continues.In another passage, Newman writes: “Just as in the days of Gideon, Elijah, and Ezekiel, idolatry was the order of the day. The Jewish religion had perverted itself to the point where from all outward appearances, it looked like Judaism but it was a counterfeit religion.”Danya Ruttenberg, a Chicago rabbi who is an award-winning author once listed by the Daily Forward as among the country’s most influential women rabbis, said Newman’s argument “is textbook antisemitism. It’s also wildly ignorant of history (the Romans killed Jesus, and the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, both for pretty much the same reasons—Empires crush dissent) and the content of the actual Bible to which he professes to adhere. The Book of Exodus (21:22-25) itself distinguishes between the consequences for causing a miscarriage (one must pay monetary damage) and the death of a pregnant person (it’s treated as manslaughter).”Moreover, Ruttenberg said by email, the “child sacrifice” that Newman cites “was condemned by the Hebrew Prophets, and was that of actual born babies. Exodus is clear that causing the termination of a pregnancy—of potential life—is not murder.”Newman did not reply to two email requests for comment.Cruz likely could get away with tying himself to such figures when Texas was a firmly red state. But as he faces a tight Senate race where he must actually do his job instead of record another episode of his podcast, Newman might prove to be a drag on him. After all, there must be a reason he refused to answer a question about Newman three different times.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186572/ted-cruz-troy-newman-antisemitism

2024-10-03 10:03:20

Trump-MAGA Erupt in Fury at CBS over Debate—Exposing a Big MAGA Scam
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At the vice-presidential debate, the CBS News moderators fact-checked one of JD Vance’s lies—and that was all it took to trigger an epic attack on CBS from Donald Trump and his MAGA allies. Which highlights a larger story: The degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on an immense superstructure of endless, shameless lying. Bullying the media into not fact checking Trump and Vance is essential to that project. We talked to Jamison Foser, who writes about the media and the right on his Finding Gravity Substack, about the ways our institutions are capitulating to authoritarian attacks and threats—and what can be done in response. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186681/trump-maga-erupt-fury-cbs-debateand-expose-magas-big-scam

2024-10-02 21:26:53

How Jack Smith Plans to Use a Damning 2020 Phone Call Against Trump
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Special counsel Jack Smith plans to use Donald Trump’s 2020 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as evidence against the former president in his Washington, D.C., election fraud trial. On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan released Smith’s findings in the case to the public, and within the redacted 165-page document is the prosecutor’s contention that Trump’s infamous phone call does not fall under presidential immunity as defined by the Supreme Court in its July 1 ruling. The Supreme Court ruling contended that a U.S. president is immune from “official acts” conducted in their capacity as the nation’s chief executive, dealing a major obstacle to the multiple legal cases against Trump. The former president was initially indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election back in August 2023, but after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Smith filed a superseding indictment, over a year later, taking the expansion of immunity into account. In his 2020 call to Raffensperger, Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In his legal filing, Smith argues that the phone call “was purely a private one, which [Trump] undertook as a candidate and the plaintiff in a lawsuit,” noting that a federal district court already determined that it was a “campaign call rather than official business.” Smith’s filing also points out, “Under the Constitution, the Executive Branch has no constitutionally assigned role in the state-electoral process. To the contrary, the constitutional framework excludes the president from that process to protect against electoral abuses.”Smith is hoping that this case against the former president—arguably the most damning of the criminal charges against him—can withstand the Supreme Court’s constraints on what criminal charges a president can actually face. Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election in 2020 led to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and he has not faced any legal consequences for his involvement with the riot. He still refuses to commit to accepting the results of an election in which he loses. There’s no telling what Trump will do if the 2024 election doesn’t go his way, and that is in part because he still has not faced legal consequences for his actions in the last presidential election. Smith is hoping that Trump can finally face accountability and to ensure that American elections are never threatened again.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186675/jack-smith-filing-2020-phone-call-trump

2024-10-02 21:26:52

Vance Used the V.P. Debate to Lie About Abortion
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During the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, former President Trump tried to bail his running mate out of an abortion question with a series of half-truths and lies. “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,” Trump posted to social media, “BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!).”This is a nonsensical sentence for many reasons. Among them: No one is saying that Congress would pass a new federal ban and hand it Trump to sign or veto. What Trump might do—what his allies want him to do—is enact a ban by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which can’t be vetoed since it’s already on the books. Trump’s misdirection distracts from his consistent anti-abortion record while in office, what the Republican Party platform states, and the very public plans of his former staffers detailed in Project 2025, which Trump also pretends he has nothing to do with. That is part of the Trump-Vance campaign’s plan on abortion: to do whatever they can not to talk about that plan, or at least to confuse the public about what that plan is.The questions moderators posed to vice presidential candidates Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance on Tuesday night did little to clear matters up. They were not about abortion or abortion rights; they were questions about whether the candidates were lying about abortion.The question one moderator asked Walz reinforced anti-abortion misinformation spread by Trump. “After Roe v. Wade was overturned, you signed a bill into law that made Minnesota one of the least restrictive states in the nation when it comes to abortion. Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no? Is that what you support?” asked Norah O’Donnell of CBS News. “I’ll give you two minutes.” O’Donnell’s own news organization debunked this same “ninth month abortion” point after the last debate. “Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed during Tuesday night’s presidential debate that Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports the ‘execution’ of babies after they are born, repeating earlier false assertions that Democrats support killing babies,” CBS News fact-checker Laura Doan wrote way back on September 11. Walz answered the question posed to him about Minnesota’s abortion law very, very briefly—“That’s not what the bill says”—before pointing out the simple truth that, via his appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump helped end the federal right to an abortion in this country. “He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v. Wade, 52 years of personal autonomy.”Trump typically responds to this kind of argument by talking about “the will of the people,” as he did in his all-caps post. But when voters have been asked directly about abortion through ballot measures, they affirm the right to abortion. Trump is going to have his say as one of these voters: As a Florida resident, he will be able to vote on the Florida ballot measure that would repeal Florida’s post-Dobbs six-week abortion ban. He has said he would vote “no.” The Republican Party’s platform advances the idea that a fetus is a legal person with rights under the Fourteenth Amendment—which, should the courts agree, would effectively make abortion a crime in every state. Failing that, Trump’s former head of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, argues that a national abortion ban already exists, in his section of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” This argument that the Comstock Act of 1873 could be enforced today to ban abortion is legally dubious at best, but it enjoys the support of 145 Republican members of Congress and has already been entertained at the Supreme Court by Justices Thomas and Alito.The first abortion question moderators posed JD Vance was about whether he and Trump would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. “No, Norah, certainly we won’t,” he said, before launching into a lengthy digression about how the Republican Party needs to win back Americans’ trust on “this issue.” But having affirmed the importance of trust, in subsequent questions, he went on to lie spectacularly on two fronts: First, by saying “I never supported a national ban” (in 2022 he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks), and later, by making an utterly bizarre claim about Minnesota abortion law. “The Minnesota law that you signed into law, the statute that you signed into law,” Vance said to Walz, “it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”“The idea of abortion being performed after birth is sometimes used to stigmatize abortion care received later in pregnancy,” as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists write in a fact sheet responding to such misinformation. Talking points like Trump’s also distort perinatal palliative care, ACOG points out, which is given to reduce the discomfort of sick or disabled newborns whose conditions cause them to die shortly after birth. “At no point in the course of delivering a newborn with life-limiting conditions and subsequently providing palliative care does the obstetrician–gynecologist end the life of the newborn receiving palliative care.” Walz tried to push back again, to say this isn’t what the law said. Vance adopted a know-it-all debate club stance: “What was I wrong about? Governor, please tell me. What was I wrong about?”In this way, the debate became more about competing claims of what the other person said than about clarifying the candidates’ actual positions. If this sounds tedious to you and impossible to follow, well, you’re not alone. The meta-debate about abortion is boring and exhausting. But you can see why Trump and Vance would prefer to stay there, in the meta-debate. So long as the campaign sows confusion and rewrites reality around a policy position that is wildly unpopular—restricting abortion access—it helps Trump.Democrats should take every opportunity to argue for what they want and reassert reality, as Walz tried to do. But there’s still a lot further to go: According to a May 2024 Times/Siena poll, around 17 percent of registered voters in swing states said that Biden is more responsible “for the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to abortion” than Trump. Twelve percent of Democrats in those states said the same thing. What more proof do Democrats need that they have more and better storytelling to do?
https://newrepublic.com/article/186670/vance-vp-debate-lie-abortion

2024-10-02 21:26:51

Jack Smith Filing Reveals Crucial Detail About What Trump Knew in 2020
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While Donald Trump and his allies pushed lies about widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election, his former Vice President Mike Pence apparently urged him to admit defeat.Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Jack Smith’s 165-page motion pertaining to Trump’s January 6 trial Wednesday, which revealed details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election subversion scheme. The details allege that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the outcome or what anyone said to the contrary, including his own running mate. Trump allegedly told his campaign advisers that he planned to take advantage of Democratic voters’ preference for mail-in ballots, which take longer to tabulate, and “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”He then allegedly planted the seeds for such a plan by publicly undermining the results of the election before it had even taken place, claiming that all mail-in voting was inherently fraudulent. In early November, Trump allegedly received an “honest assessment” stating that he “could not mount successful legal challenges to the election.” Trump was told by a White House aide who “served as a conduit of information from the campaign,” that there was no way Rudy Giuliani would be successful in challenging the election results. Trump responded, “We’ll see.”In a meeting with Trump and Giuliani, that staffer told them both that they would be unable to prove Giuliani’s “speculative” allegations of voter fraud in a courtroom. When the staffer privately repeated this concern to Trump later, Trump responded saying, “The details don’t matter.”The filing detailed many conversations between Trump and Pence as running mates, “in which they discussed their shared electoral interests. This is distinct from conversations had between the two where they are acting in their official capacity as President and Vice President, which would be inadmissible as evidence, per the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States.” As early as November 4, Trump allegedly asked Pence to “study up” on claims of voter fraud in the states that they had won in 2016. Pence said that Trump was already stating that the campaign was “going to fight.” In the post-election period, Pence told Trump that “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the election,” according to the filing, and repeatedly urged Trump to accept the results. As media organizations began on November 7 to project that Joe Biden had won the election, Pence “tried to encourage” Trump to accept defeat “as a friend.” Pence reminded him that he’d taken “a dying political party and given it a new lease on life.”A few days later, on November 12, Pence said that Trump received a “sober and somewhat pessimistic report” on the status of his election challenges, and Pence urged Trump to give up. “Don’t concede, but recognize that the process is over,” Pence said, according to the filing. In a conversation on December 21, Pence again “encouraged” Trump to “not look at the election ‘as a loss—just an intermission.’” Later in the day, Trump asked Pence what he thought they should do, and Pence replied, “After we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, Trump should ‘take a bow.’”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186678/jack-smith-donald-trump-filing-knew-lost-2020

2024-10-02 20:17:08

Biden Gets Stunning Letter on Gaza Cease-Fire
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Almost 100 health volunteers who worked in Gaza demanded a U.S. arms sales embargo to Israel Wednesday in a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “President Biden and Vice President Harris, we are 99 American physicians and nurses who have witnessed crimes beyond comprehension. Crimes that we cannot believe you wish to continue supporting,” stated the letter, which was obtained by HuffPost. The letter included first-hand accounts of the brutality that the doctors, nurses, midwives, surgeons, and other health care practitioners had seen during their collective 254 weeks serving in Gaza’ hospitals. The tragedy is a direct result of Israel’s nearly year-long military campaign in Gaza, which has reportedly killed more than 41,500 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children.The letter noted that the death toll is likely significantly higher than what is reported by the Gaza Health Ministry.“I’ve never seen such horrific injuries, on such a massive scale, with so few resources. Our bombs are cutting down women and children by the thousands. Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty,” said Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California. Sidhwa spent two weeks volunteering in Khan Younis, where an Israeli strike killed 51 people just on Tuesday. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child,” the letter said.The letter urged Biden and Harris to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel and to participate in an international arms embargo of Israel and all Palestinian armed groups until a permanent ceasefire is established in Gaza.” “We appreciate that you are working on a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, but you have overlooked an obvious fact: the United States can impose a ceasefire on the warring parties by simply stopping arms shipments to Israel, and announcing that we will participate in an international arms embargo on both Israel and all Palestinian armed groups,” the letter said. “We stress what many others have repeatedly told you over the past year: American law is perfectly clear on this matter, continuing to arm Israel is illegal.”Last month, a report found that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had received reports from USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration detailing how Israel had deliberately blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, but still told Congress the exact opposite. The State Department even recommended that shipments of nearly $830 million in weapons and bombs to Israel, paid by U.S. taxpayers, ought to be frozen under the Foreign Assistance Act.Harris has not signaled a significant break with Biden on his policy of empowering Israel’s violence in the Middle East, as Israel has launched a ground offensive into Lebanon, sparking missile strikes from Iran and threatening to blossom into regional war.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186664/joe-biden-health-workers-letter-gaza

2024-10-02 20:17:07

CNBC Journalists Crack Up as Tim Scott Tries to Explain Trump Tariffs
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Tim Scott continues to be a laughingstock of the Republican Party with his latest comments. Joining CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, Scott made the entire roundtable laugh when he desperately tried to defend Donald Trump’s economic plans. “Do you agree with all the tariffs?” Joe Kernen asked, referring to Trump’s isolationist economic agenda. “John Deere, 200 percent? Do you think companies that make stuff here should be at 15 percent tax? That’s industrial policy, isn’t it?”“I believe that President Trump often times talks in the abstract,” the South Carolina senator responded.CNBC hosts laughed at the ridiculous nonanswer. “What are we supposed to believe then?” asked one journalist. CNBC: Do you agree with all the tariffs?TIM SCOTT: I believe President Trump often talks in the abstractCNBC: What are we supposed to believe then?SCOTT: Believe in his performanceCNBC: That excludes covid, right? pic.twitter.com/YrrXXik6ki— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 2, 2024“Believe his performance,” said Scott. “Believe what we saw from 2017 to 2020.” He then proceeded to stumble over words and throw out numbers about jobs Trump brought home. “Obviously, that excludes Covid,” said the CNBC host, referring to the devastation the economy and everyday people endured while Trump was president in 2020—as well as its effects on how we compare economic numbers under the Trump and Biden administrations. While Trump’s team continues to slam Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the economy, as the hosts pointed out, they want economists and pundits to cherry-pick the highlights of Trump’s time as president. It’s not a surprise that Scott can’t defend Trump’s economic plan. When Scott was running for president last year, he openly criticized Trump’s tariff plan on the campaign trail. “An across-the-board 10 percent [tariff would] increase … the cost of everything,” Scott told The New York Post a year ago. “In the current inflationary environment [that] would not be helpful.”In reality, experts are warning that Trump’s economic plans, including his new tariff policies, might be even more harmful during a second go-around. “Despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” wrote independent nonprofit nonpartisan researchers at the Peterson Institute in a report from September.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186656/cnbc-tim-scott-trump-tariffs-abstract

2024-10-02 20:17:07

Biden Admin Makes Shocking Confession on How Extreme It Is on Israel
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On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was confronted during a press conference over whether the United States was using leverage to rein in Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and Gaza. BBC News reporter Tom Bateman cited a diary entry from Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982, where Reagan phoned Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, and told him to stop Israel’s shelling of Beirut. Bateman asked Miller if U.S. officials were similarly doing everything they could for a cease-fire. Miller claimed in his reply that during the current conflict, U.S. intervention had led Israel “to take steps that they were not previously doing” regarding humanitarian access and “the shape of their military operations.” “I do think it is often simplistic to reduce the … understanding of what’s happening to the bilateral relationship between two countries,” Miller added.Bateman followed up, noting that Begin stopped bombing Lebanon 20 minutes after Reagan’s phone call. Miller deflected. “I think we have made clear on a number of occasions with the government of Israel what we believe, and there have been times when our intervention has led to direct action by the government of Israel. There are times when they have disagreements with us,” Miller said. “And by the way, that was true in the Reagan administration too.” .@tombateman: In 1982 Reagan phoned the PM of Israel and told him to stop bombing Beirut or US-Israel relations would be endangered…you have not used leverageMiller: Every country makes their own decisions…Tom: Reagan did stop the bombing, Begin stopped it 20 minutes later pic.twitter.com/81xed6BK68— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 2, 2024Miller’s comments seem to show an unwillingness by President Biden and his administration to use any kind of leverage—such as the billions of dollars in weapons sales or the billions in foreign aid to Israel—to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail Israel’s military actions in Lebanon or Gaza. In 1982, Reagan’s administration halted cluster-bomb shipments to Israel over their use on civilian areas in Lebanon. Reagan then followed with a phone call to Begin where he used language that would seem unfathomable by any American politician today. “Here, on our television, night after night, our people are being shown the symbols of this war, and it is a holocaust,” Reagan told the Israeli prime minister, warning that it was endangering the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It had an immediate effect, with the bombing not only stopping but with Begin pleading with Reagan not to harm ties between the two countries. Biden initially spurned months of calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, and still continues to back Israel in its brutal war that has claimed at least 41.000 Palestinian lives. Now Israel, thanks to a green light from the Biden administration, has expanded the war to Lebanon and killed hundreds of lives just in the past week. Biden can call for an arms embargo against Israel at any time, but as Miller’s comments illustrate, he won’t even touch the idea.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186669/biden-admin-miller-confession-extreme-israel-reagan

2024-10-02 20:17:05

Rudy Giuliani Brutally Schooled Over Fake Trump Electors Case Request
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An Arizona judge torched a legal request by Rudy Giuliani in the fixer’s fake elector case Wednesday, ruling that the ex-Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.Last month, Giuliani filed a request demanding information about the grand jury, alleging that the group was politically compromised and biased. But the judge overseeing the case, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohen, wasn’t impressed by the conjecture-laden inquiry.“The underlying claim that formulates the request is based upon pure speculation and abject conjecture,” Cohen wrote. “He alleges not one scintilla of information that would support this claim.”Further still, Cohen noted that this particular grand jury was not specifically crafted to oversee Giuliani’s case but was rather a sitting grand jury, further shrinking the likelihood that it was arranged specifically to malign Giuliani and his co-defendants.“There is therefore no reliable information to suggest that the empaneling of this grand jury occurred in contemplation of this case or with a political agenda in mind,” Cohen wrote.Giuliani was one of nearly two dozen Trump allies indicted for their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Christina Bobb.The indictment charged 18 individuals, some of whose names have been redacted, with orchestrating a scheme to use fake electors to flip Arizona’s 2020 election results over to Donald Trump. It also names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. All of the indicted individuals face the same slew of charges, which includes counts for conspiracy, forgery, fraudulent schemes and practices, and fraudulent schemes and artifices—the last of which holds a potential sentence of up to five years in prison.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186661/rudy-giuliani-schooled-fake-trump-electors-request

2024-10-02 18:26:42

GOP Congressman Dragged After Posting Weird Edited Photo of J.D. Vance
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Republican Representative Mike Collins tried to support J.D. Vance by posting a picture of the vice presidential nominee on X Wednesday morning. It backfired. Collins inexplicably posted a very clearly edited image of Vance’s face, slimmed down with enhanced features like a chin implant. The post immediately drew mockery, with social media commentators coming up with their own photoshopped pictures. Other commentators pointed out how this is another example of the Republicans coming off as weird. Collins’s post reminded some X users about the GOP culture-war stance of opposing gender-affirming care, with the post exposing conservative hypocrisy over medical procedures to change one’s appearance. The roots of the photo seem to come from a years-old meme of “yassifying” photos to improve a person’s physical appearance, as well as the online far-right obsession over a standard of male physical appearance, specifically the “Chad” archetype that has become prevalent in right-wing memes. Was this image a nod to that far-right online base and its infamous 2016 efforts, or was it just a misguided attempt to boost J.D. Vance? Either way, much of the internet was left scratching their heads.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186646/gop-congressman-collins-posts-edited-photo-jd-vance

2024-10-02 17:00:58

J.D. Vance Accidentally Reveals the Darkest Truth About Trump of All
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In the biggest exchange of the vice-presidential debate, J.D. Vance left little doubt: Had he been Donald Trump’s vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have faithfully done Trump’s bidding and tried to scuttle the congressional count of electors to help Trump overturn his presidential election loss. In other words, Vance would have done what Mike Pence would not.As many have correctly noted, this showed that Vance would not have stood up to Trump when democracy itself hung in the balance. Vance would have put Trump’s likely criminal scheme to remain in the presidency illegitimately above his duty to help execute the peaceful transfer of power, the bedrock of self-rule and our stable (sometimes, anyway) political order.But we risk overlooking something important if we narrow the question to what Vance would have done in the situation Pence faced. Trump is explicitly vowing to violate his oath of office in numerous other ways in a second term, from prosecuting political opponents without cause to seeking to bar the news media from reporting critically on him. In the key exchanges of the night, what Vance really revealed is that he cannot be counted on to put the rule of law and the Constitution above Trump if he wins and commits those violations of his oath as well, as he inevitably would.In those exchanges, a CBS News moderator reminded Vance that he has said he wouldn’t have certified the electors on January 6 and would instead have asked key states to submit alternate electors. Asked if Vance would again challenge a Trump loss if it is certified by swing state governors, Vance defended his previous statement, saying that “all” he had advocated for is having a “debate” over the “problems” that Trump identified in the 2020 election.That’s false: Vance actually has said he would have “told the states” that “we needed to have multiple slates of electors” so Congress could debate over what really happened in the election. But the vice president’s role in counting electors is purely ceremonial, and he has no constitutional authority to reject the legitimate electors. In short, Vance himself previously said he would have unconstitutionally, illegally abused that role to thwart the counting of the legitimate electors. At the debate, this is what he effectively defended.Vance also completely rewrote the history of January 6, declaring that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th.” The weeks-long efforts to corrupt government officials at all levels in the runup to that transfer of power; the incitement of the mob to intimidate lawmakers into abandoning their own role in executing the transfer; the deliberate manipulation of the mob to threaten Pence—Vance erased all these things, and thus acted as an apologist for all of it. There’s also the crucial exchange in which Tim Walz pressed Vance to acknowledge that Trump had lost the election. Vance dodged, replying that “I’m focused on the future,” prompting Walz to rejoin: “That is a damning non-answer.” As Walz added, this shows that one of the two men will honor democracy, and the other will “honor Donald Trump.”But to grasp the full import of this, recall what Trump has threatened in a second term beyond subverting hated electoral outcomes. He has vowed to prosecute political opponents regardless of what evidence shows. He has called for baseless indictments of lawmakers who investigated his insurrection. He has floated sending the military into Democratic-run cities to carry out his domestic agenda. He has mused about groundless prosecutions of elections officials. He has threatened to prosecute Google for carrying negative stories about him and has suggested television networks should not be “allowed” to air the political opposition’s criticism of him, a suggestion that he’d resort to untold executive abuses to suppress critical media coverage.We don’t know how far Trump would get with such designs. But at a minimum he has expressly telegraphed a willingness—and even an active intent—to attempt them once back in the presidency.“Each of these threats by Trump would be a violation of the pledge a president makes to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” said Corey Brettschneider, a political scientist and author of The Presidents and the People, a book about authoritarian presidencies and violations of the oath of office. “Vice presidents are also obliged to protect the Constitution. But what Vance showed is that his commitment would be to the authoritarian vision of Trump.”It’s theoretically possible that Vance would resist some of these things as vice president. But why have any confidence in that after seeing his debate performance? Vance knew perfectly well that he had to publicly reaffirm his willingness to violate his Constitutional duty on Trump’s behalf—as Pence would not—lest he incur the anger of the Audience of One. That’s exactly what Vance did at the debate, even if he did not say it quite that way.What’s more, certain things about Vance’s worldview should cause additional doubts. Vance’s evolution from Never Trumper into a full MAGA disciple appears rooted in the idea that Trump mystically revealed the deep rot of corruption infesting our entire political and social order. As Ian Ward usefully details, Vance harbors a genuine openness to Trumpian lawlessness—such as believing Trump should dramatically purge the government and defy the courts if they stand in the way—because he sees such acts as necessary to reverse the moral and political corruption, exposed by Trump, that has mired the nation as Vance understands it in an existential crisis. The problem with this vague diagnosis is that, if the system is in such deep trouble, thus requiring a Trumpian figure to set it right, then it’s not clear what sort of nakedly authoritarian actions would not be justified by this mission.Indeed, Trump picked Vance in part precisely because his previous comments about January 6 indicate his willingness to place Trump above the Constitution when it really counts. The dark truth is that Trump is campaigning on an explicit promise of an authoritarian presidency—an open vow to serially violate his oath of office in untold ways—and he fully expects his consiglieres not to go weak-kneed about it this time around.What Vance really displayed at the debate is that he understands all this about Trump with perfect clarity. And he’s fully on board with all of it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186634/jd-vance-accidentally-reveals-darkest-truth-trump

2024-10-02 17:00:57

MAGA Is Having a Meltdown Over J.D. Vance Being Fact-Checked In Debate
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Donald Trump and his MAGA fans have aligned on one sad talking point about Tuesday’s vice presidential debate: CBS did a bad job and broke its own fact-checking rules. “Margaret Brennan just ‘fact checked’ JD, incorrectly, on ‘Climate Change.’ When is she going to fact check Tampon Tim on all of his false statements?” wrote Trump on Truth Social as the debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz aired live. Trump got especially heated after fellow moderator Norah O’Donnell asked about his efforts to steal the 2020 election. “CBS is LYING AGAIN about the 2020 Election,” complained Trump, calling the question a “statement.” “CBS IS FAKE NEWS!” he declared. To be clear, though CBS said the onus was on the candidates to correct each other, the moderators made no promise to stay out of the fray completely. But that didn’t stop Republicans. Perhaps the biggest outrage came when Vance freaked out after being fact-checked live on his immigration claims, as the moderators cut his microphone and reminded him that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have legal status. Many of Trump’s biggest fans, including Elon Musk, quickly complained that CBS wasn’t playing fair.Fox News’s Sean Hannity took to the spin room to slam the vice presidential debate moderators as “blatantly biased.” “CBS, they should frankly be ashamed, they didn’t keep to the rules,” said Hannity Tuesday night. “So-called moderators immediately broke their promise not to serve as fact-checkers in order to help Tim Walz.” “CBS was terrible,” said Fox News’s Jesse Watters. Megyn Kelly put it simply: “F you CBS—how DARE YOU.” On Wednesday, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Newsmax she wasn’t happy with the network. “When they fact-checked Senator Vance and shut off his mic, I thought that was pretty alarming,” Leavitt whined. “The rules they agreed to were not to fact-check the candidates on the stage, but they just could not help themselves.”“They were getting triggered by Senator Vance speaking the truth so powerfully and so eloquently.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186626/maga-meltdown-jd-vance-fact-check-debate

2024-10-02 17:00:57

Key V.P. Debate Takeaway Blows Huge Hole in Trump’s Abortion Claims
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American voters had one unanimous takeaway from the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, and it veered directly into territory that the Republican ticket has spent months trying to avoid.Google Trends data indicates that, despite the country’s divided attention on various key political issues, all 50 states were laser focused on just one topic after the 90-minute matchup between Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: abortion.Vance, who has previously likened abortion to murder, spent some of his time outright flaunting his support for a national abortion ban for cameras, attempting to frame himself as a flexible moderate on the issue rather than a politician who in 2023 described the procedure’s near-total restriction as a “minimum national standard.” Language on Vance’s website from his 2022 Senate race also described him as “100 percent pro-life.”“I never supported a national ban,” Vance claimed during the debate. “I did, during when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard. For example, we have a partial-birth abortion ban … in place in this country at the federal level. I don’t think anybody is trying to get rid of that, or at least, I hope not, though I know the Democrats have taken a very radical pro-abortion stance.”Vance also made an appeal to the hearts of Americans, invoking the image of a friend who he said required an abortion to escape an abusive relationship. But he failed to mention that the legislation he supported would have forced her to remain in the situation.That discrepancy was enough to catch the attention of the country, who merged their disparate interests into a unanimous search engine query that swept the nation.That data flies in the face of a major Republican claim: that people don’t actually care about abortion and are more interested in other issues.The Republican ticket has attempted to soften its anti-choice position in the weeks building up to the election in an attempt to appeal to women’s rights activists and draw more voters to Donald Trump’s campaign. But the practical effects of Trump’s last administration are still obvious, not least of all instilling a hyperconservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which Trump has proudly taken credit for. In 2023, the former president also claimed that he should be celebrated for every single state abortion ban.Project 2025, the far-right, Christian nationalist blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, is also all in on banning the procedure, going so far as to propose criminalizing the mailing of abortion medications and devices.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186637/donald-trump-jd-vance-abortion-vp-debate-takeaway

2024-10-02 15:54:41

Watch: Trump Adviser Doubles Down on J.D. Vance’s Worst Debate Answer
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During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance refused to answer a direct question on whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Vance’s response “a damning non-answer.”CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask the same simple question to Corey Lewandowski, a senior adviser with the Trump campaign in an interview on Wednesday.“Yeah Corey, why is this so difficult for the Trump campaign to answer, I mean, it’s 2024,” Acosta said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election, can you answer that?”Like Vance, Lewandowski attempted to sidestep actually answering the question. “Jim, I think it’s very simple,” Lewandowski said. “The American people have passed the 2020 election, and focused on an election which is just under five weeks away.”“So look, we can go back and relitigate the 2020 election or we can look at what we can do to make America for the everyday Americans who are struggling under Bidenomics—” “Yeah, but Corey,” Acosta interjected. “It’s not relitigating, it’s just a simple question. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? I mean, that’s easy.”“Why are we talking about 2020 anymore?” Lewandowski said. “Does the American people care about the 2020 election anymore?”Acosta pointed out that on the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly claimed that there was “widespread fraud” in 2020, and had already begun to tee up challenges to election results. “But Jim, Jim we know there was fraud, there’s no question there was some fraud that took place in the 2020 election,” Lewandowski said. “There’s no question about that.”“No widespread fraud,” Acosta clarified.“But what does widespread mean, Jim? I mean, is one vote that was illegal enough?” Lewandowski said, exasperated.“There were instances of voter fraud from Trump supporters,” Acosta pointed out. “I mean, you know that from the 2020 campaign.” Trump and his allies have been accused of coordinating a plot in which 84 fake electors across seven states signed false electoral certificates claiming that Trump won the presidential election in their states. Acosta noted that experts, including officials from the Trump campaign, had affirmed that there was no widespread voter fraud, as Lewandowski continued to spiral about what “widespread” actually meant.“So I guess what you’re saying is, is that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election,” Acosta interjected. “Is that what you’re saying?”“What I’m saying is Joe Biden is the president of the United States. You recognize that and I recognize that,” Lewandowski said, continuing to whine about how they ought to talk about the 2024 election instead. “Will Donald Trump honor the results of the 2024 election?” Acosta pressed. “Will he do that?”“Jim, did-did-did Hillary Clinton honor the results? No. Did Democrats honor the results?” Lewandowski cried.“Yes she did. She called and conceded the election,” Acosta replied. As Lewandowski continued to rant, Acosta explained, “Corey I was with you guys on Election Night in Manhattan in 2016. She called, she called the then-president elect and conceded the election.”Completely unwilling to address any of Acosta’s “hypotheticals” or reckon with his own damning non-answer, Lewandowski continued to rant about illegal immigration and the economy. ACOSTA: Did Trump lose the 2020 election? Can you answer that?COREY LEWANDOWSKI: Jim, I think it's very simple -- the American people have passed the 2020 election and are focused on an election that's five weeks awayACOSTA: So what you're saying is that Trump didn't lose? pic.twitter.com/DlpRe5Gcp4— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 2, 2024It’s become increasingly clear that no member of the Trump campaign is willing to answer simple questions about the previous election, or ensure a peaceful transition of power in the next one.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186632/donald-trump-jd-vance-debate-2020-answer

2024-10-02 15:54:39

Trump Made a Menacing Election Threat Just Before the V.P. Debate
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On Tuesday night, Donald Trump made a threat against the electoral process that was quickly overshadowed by the vice presidential debate. The former president was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a campaign speech, after which he took questions from the press. Trump was asked whether “he trusts the process this time around,” alluding to his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and attempts to overturn it. “I’ll let you know in about 33 days,” Trump said, about the time until November’s elections. REPORTER: Do you trust the election process this time around?TRUMP: I'll let you know in about 33 days pic.twitter.com/nLCUOoy9IF— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2024It’s a disturbing statement from Trump, and this close to the election, it’s a promise to follow through on the other similar election threats he’s made in the last few months. It’s worth remembering that he’s been refusing to say that he would accept unfavorable election results since his 2016 campaign for president. And his infamous rejection of the 2020 presidential election results was followed by the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, as well as fake elector plots across the country in states including Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.This time around, his supporters are already plotting to swing the election in his favor. In Georgia, his supporters are using the state election board to make changes that would help him. Across the country, many Republicans say they won’t accept the election results if he loses and even pledge to take action. Trump himself is attacking the U.S. Postal Service and laying the groundwork to delegitimize mail-in ballots, even though his handpicked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is hurting the postal system on his own. November’s election could very well be chaotic, especially if results are very close in battleground states. Trump is desperate to return to the White House and enact vengeance on his enemies, as well as bury the legal cases against him. Will the electoral system be able to withstand MAGA’s plots?
https://newrepublic.com/post/186624/trump-election-threat-before-vp-debate

2024-10-02 14:48:22

Trump Just Took His Project 2025 Promise a Step Further
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Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.” Trump in Milwaukee says he wants to close down the Department of Education and have parents run public schools to make sure teachers aren't "teaching woke" or "start teaching a language we don't want them to teach" pic.twitter.com/HTjYIIqfQU— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2024Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.Project 2025 has also proposed revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186620/donald-trump-education-project-2025-parents-rights

2024-10-02 14:48:08

J.D. Vance Dragged Over Bonkers School Shooting Solution in Debate
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J.D. Vance’s big idea to prevent school shootings is … bigger locks?During the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Vance offered his answer to how he would address school shootings. “And I say this, not loving the answer,” Vance said. “We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger,” Vance explained. “We’ve got to make the windows stronger, and, of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers. Because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it just doesn’t fit with recent experience.”It was a particularly weak moment for Vance, who had previously touted that he had “well-developed views on public policy” he planned to put on display during the debate. Online, it seemed like Vance was the only one into his limp answer to gun violence.Vance: Better Doors. pic.twitter.com/tLvLNPj0gZ— Michael Lee (@IamMichaelJLee) October 2, 2024A Gen-Z college student interviewed by MSNBC after the debate called Vance’s answer “ridiculous.”“I mean, the issue is guns, the issue is not better locks on doors,” she said.California Representative Adam Schiff wrote in a post on X, “Vance solution for gun violence? Stronger doors at school? Stronger windows? Really?How about an assault weapons ban and background checks. And a VP who put kids over the NRA.”Meanwhile, Vance’s opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz replied, “Sometimes it is just the guns.”Last month, after a deadly mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, Vance resigned himself to school shootings as a bleak “fact of life” and made a similar suggestion about school security being the solution.“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” Vance said. At the time, Vance was criticized for his callous acceptance of mass violence and blatant reluctance to strengthen gun laws.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186623/jd-vance-school-shooting-solution-vp-debate

2024-10-02 13:36:30

Who Won the V.P. Debate? Here’s What the Polls Say
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Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate may not have changed many minds in the electorate. Polls following the contest between Republican Senator J.D. Vance and Democratic Governor Tim Walz don’t show an uncontested winner, with CNN reporting that 51 percent of viewers gave the edge to Vance versus 49 percent for Walz. The favorability numbers for both candidates improved after the debate: Walz’s went from 46 percent favorable and 32 percent unfavorable to 59 percent favorable and 22 percent unfavorable among people who watched the debate. Vance’s numbers went from 30 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable to 41 percent favorable and 44 percent unfavorable. But largely, the debate didn’t change many people’s minds. Politico’s polls found that who viewers thought won the debate depended on their political loyalties. About 72 percent of Democrats think Walz won the debate, with a similar number ofRepublicans thinking Vance won. Perhaps more importantly, Walz won over independents, with 58 percent of them saying that he was the winner as opposed to 42 percent for Vance—but these people were also more likely to say they didn’t even watch the debate. Demographically, Walz’s strongest support came from people who tend to support the Democratic Party: younger people, those aged between 25-34, people with college degrees, and Black and Latino poll respondents, according to Politico. Vance drew his support from Republican standbys: people over 55, white voters, and people without college degrees. Men and women were evenly divided on who won. Vance came into Tuesday night’s debate in a massive polling deficit showing him as more unpopular than any other vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race. He may have improved his standing somewhat given that starting point, but it wasn’t at the expense of Walz. Republicans don’t have much of an answer for Vance’s unpopularity, so it’s up to the Republican vice presidential nominee to improve his stock. On Tuesday night, while Vance did say some horrific things about January 6 and immigration, it doesn’t appear to have hurt him, at least according to these early polls. Now, he just has the task of staying away from weirdness and hoping more damaging statements from his past don’t resurface.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186617/who-won-vp-debate-polls

2024-10-02 13:36:29

Trump Jr. Gets Brutal Reminder About Hitler Comparisons on Live TV
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There was another incredible fact-check during debate night on Tuesday that came only after the stage lights turned off.In the spin room, Donald Trump Jr. spoke with CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins, using the opportunity to complain about what he sees as the demonization of his father by the media. “The media has radicalized the people that are trying to kill my father. I’ve had to deal with that twice now in the last two months,” said Trump’s eldest son. “That didn’t just magically happen, that’s not him. The media created the fake Russia scenario,” he continued, winding up to place the blame of political violence squarely on Democrats and journalists. “You can’t blame the media for those threats,” Collins replied. “There’s been no evidence that that’s what drove those—”“When someone calls and allows people to have a platform to call someone literally Hitler every day for nine years, it creates it,” Trump interjected. “Whether you want to believe it or not, that’s a fact.” What he didn’t realize, however, is that he set the journalist up for a scathing correction. “But as you know, J.D. Vance once likened your dad to Hitler as well. He questioned if he was America’s Hitler,” Collins reminded him. Epic fact-check from Kaitlan Collins. Donald Trump Jr: "When someone calls and allows people to have a platform to call someone literally Hitler."Collins: "But as you know once JD Vance once likened your dad to Hilter." pic.twitter.com/12l6Q3Dybt— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) October 2, 2024One wonders how Don Jr. could even forget this, considering that Vance himself was asked about his disparaging comments about Trump, including the Hitler comparison, on the debate stage just an hour before. In his response, Vance similarly blamed the media for misleading him about the former president. “I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” said Vance, using the typical MAGA scapegoat to explain away his long list of previous critiques.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186618/trump-jr-brutal-reminder-hitler-comparisons-live-tv

2024-10-02 10:20:42

The Appalling Attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates Is a Massive Media Failing
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The Jewish high holidays—the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—are built on the paradigm of “On Rosh Hashanah, your fate is written. On Yom Kippur, your fate is sealed.” In these ten days, we are supposed to pray, repent and commit good deeds to bolster our chances for the privilege of another year on Earth—whatever we would say that privilege is at this point.For all my life, I viewed this paradigm as a personal moral framework, a mandate to reflect on the past year, to take accountability for my failings, to consider how I could have contributed better or more to the community, which we are taught to view as the people who create the context of our lives: colleagues, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens. What I loved about Judaism was this annual opportunity to take stock, not necessarily because I thought there was some greater being out there keeping tabs on me, but because I felt my Judaism required that I reevaluate myself and recommit to continuous and just improvement.That’s why as we approach this high holiday season, which in 2024 contains the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks on Israel and falls one month before the U.S. presidential election, I have never felt more alone, more upside down or more fearful for the next year.To recognize Palestinians are human has become a flashpoint, a red line to not be crossed in Washington discourse, an invitation to be tagged as an antisemite, whether by your cousin at a Passover seder or by a network morning news anchor on live national television (more on that later). The Discourse tells us there is a “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and that it is “complicated.” But somewhere in this word soup we have simmered long enough to deflect attention from how power works, who benefits from it and who loses everything, the remaining goop to be scraped from the bottom of the pot can no longer be accurately conveyed as “conflict” but instead a stark, wrong binary between Palestinian existence and a broad definition of antisemitism, which if we choose as a society to accept, will only serve to drive us deeper into the void.This week, I was horrified to witness one such attempt to drag a reasonable and humane person into this toxic abyss, in the form of what was supposed to be an interview of award-winning writer, thinker and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS Mornings Tony Dokoupil. Whatever promise of reasoned discourse producers may have made to Coates when they booked him for the show instantly vanished for the audience the moment Dokoupil started questioning the author. Dokoupil opened his questioning with a bizarrely aggressive monlogue that patronized Coates by calling his book extreme and positing that it only could have been produced by someone who harbors ill-will towards Jewish people.“No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their abilities to exist through force, as America did,” Coates told Dokoupil. “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question I would be faced with, with any other country.”“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are,” Coates continued.To me, Coates’ calm in the face of the anchor’s aggression and willful misinterpretation of his work reminded me of the Passover parable of the four sons. In it, we are instructed on how to explain the story of the journey from Jewish enslavement to freedom to a son who does not even know how to ask a question, and our clear articulation to him of the meaning of freedom is what opens up our deepest understanding of the truth.But what really struck me about this moment is that Coates’ treatment does not exist in isolation but rather as part of a pattern that systematically targets those who want to affirm the humanity of Palestinians or defend those who are fighting for that affirmation. Is this the price we must pay for just having a shred of humanity? Who among us has the power to challenge what needs to be challenged to set the conditions of possibility for progress? Who, ultimately, will bear the cost of silence?It is extremely disorienting to find yourself in the season of personal accountability described above while also reckoning with the total abdication of accountability from the institutions that hold the actual power to grapple with and correct the utter destruction this past year has wrought—from establishment Judaism to American politics and the mainstream media. We have watched Israel kill civilians, parents, children, doctors, aid workers, journalists, and many more, ostensibly in the name of Judaism but more likely in the furtherance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s craven political career—and ultimately in the abandonment of every value our religion and basic human rights should uphold.We have witnessed “antisemitism” get stripped of its meaning and used as a tool to silence legitimate criticism of these very structures and their failure to stop the killing. We are told consistently that there is no right way to speak out against a clear wrong because systematically every method of protest, from campus demonstrations to essays to books to social media posts to peaceful marches on the streets are framed as amorphous attacks on Jews everywhere as opposed to focused critiques of a specific wrong being perpetrated by a few powerful individuals.Coates is back in the news lately because his new book attempts to offer just such a focused critique of power: The Message, which in part detailed his travels to Israel and Palestine, what he witnessed there, and what he learned about how Palestinians were treated. As he even told CBS, he never set out to write a detailed dissertation on every moment in the history of Israel, but rather provide a testimonial to give voice to those who have been overlooked, ignored, or erased from our discourse on the Middle East. When pushed on why it didn’t include more history on Israel, bombings of Israeli civilians or the Intifadas, Coates (rightfully) pointed out: “There’s no shortage of that perspective in American media.”In an interview with New York’s Ryu Spaeth, Coates broadly hints that The Message was not likely to endear himself to everyone. But even he seemed blindsided when Dokoupil stated—with all the authority bestowed to an anchorman by his coif — that Coates’ book would “not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and not-so-subtly-hinted that Coates is antisemitic, pressing him with loaded question after loaded question: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place and not any of the other states out there?”It is hard to imagine another author, especially a white author, on any other topic being summarily and unapologetically questioned and dismissed in this way on national television. The interview was biased (Dokoupil never disclosed his ex-wife and two children live in Israel) and racist (sorry, the presence of two other anchors who happen to be Black but said nothing does not change this interpretation). We’ll wait forever for CBS’s apology.We’re waiting for similar reparations from another television news outlet that engaged in similar slander. A week prior to Coates’ on-air mugging, Rep. Rashida Tlaib was baselessly smeared on CNN, with anchor Jake Tapper fabricating comments from Tlaib to frame a “gotcha” question for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, trying to get Whitmer to condemn Tlaib as antisemitic for something she never said. When Whitmer wouldn’t, another CNN anchor, Dana Bash did a very special segment where she stated antisemitism is a both-sides problem and then refused to apologize for having mischaracterized Tlaib, in a follow-up segment to address the widespread criticism of her first.CNN harmfully distorted a legitimate critique: Tlaib, in an interview with a Detroit news outlet and in alignment with the position of the American Civil Liberties Union, opposed Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s decision to charge peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan, saying, “This is a move that’s going to set a precedent, and it’s unfortunate that a Democrat made that move. We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”But on a deeper, darker level, CNN’s refusal to interrogate why it is allowed to comb every word Tlaib says for antisemitism while never having to confront whether wrongly and constantly accusing Tlaib of antisemitism—a serious accusation!—is Islamophobic is part and parcel with our society’s refusal to recognize Palestinians as full people. Because if Palestinians do not get to exist fully in the world, then certainly the first Palestinian woman elected to Congress cannot enjoy the full benefits and privileges afforded to every other member of the House of Representatives.We need to be clear that policing who gets to make criticisms, how and when are not hallmarks of a functioning democracy, and again, that using claims of antisemitism to subvert legitimate critiques of government—in this case, Nessel’s decision to prosecute peaceful campus protesters—cheapens antisemitism and threatens everyone’s freedoms.Which brings me to my final, and perhaps most important point: One of the reasons CNN was so set on baselessly attacking Tlaib in this fashion was because she criticized Nessel the same week former president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump preemptively blamed “the Jews” for his potential loss in November. Trump said “a lot of bad things will happen” if the Jews, held by Democrats in a “curse” to oppose him, succeed in getting Vice President Kamala Harris elected. That special segment from Bash? By design, it treated Whitmer and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who refused to denounce Trump’s comments, as equal.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186577/ta-nehisi-coates-media-antisemitism

2024-10-02 10:20:41

Why Some People Will Vote for Abortion Rights—and Trump
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Ever since voters in red states like Kansas and Ohio turned out in droves in 2022 and 2023 to protect abortion rights in their states, some in the Democratic Party have hoped abortion ballot measures in swing states might increase turnout and shift the course of this year’s election. Ten states have abortion measures on the ballot this year—including swing states like Florida and Arizona. But last month, a New York Times/Siena College poll from Arizona disrupted this narrative: Likely voters’ support for Harris, at 45 percent, seemed to be trailing support for the state’s abortion rights ballot measure, at 58 percent. These numbers may seem surprising to those who hoped ballot measures would boost Democratic turnout, but they reflect a broader reality: legal abortion is more popular than Democrats are.For those who research and run ballot measure campaigns, the Arizona polling is not an unusual finding. Since 2021, Benjamin Case has lead ballot initiative research at the Center for Work and Democracy, a labor-funded research center at Arizona State University. “Pretty consistently, we see results where people will vote differently when they’re allowed to vote on a policy versus when they have to vote for a politician as a proxy for all their views on different policies,” said Case. “The conventional wisdom was that abortion was this polarizing issue that splits the country down the middle,” said Case. But “one of the things that allowed that misperception to survive was the fact that voters weren’t really asked very often directly.”Kansas broke this dynamic open, when anti-abortion groups working alongside the Republican-led state legislature rushed a ballot measure ending abortion rights in front of voters, months after Dobbs. Kansas voters rejected it firmly, and in some counties that Trump had won in 2020, though the ballot measure lost, the margins were much closer than Trump’s margin. Then came Ohio in 2023: voters passed, 57 to 43 percent, a constitutional amendment to protect legal abortion. “The scope of the victory for the Yes side suggests that a significant number of Republicans voted in favor,” according to an AP analysis. It wasn’t universal: 44 counties Trump had won by 70 percent or more in 2020 voted against protecting abortion rights. But nine out of the ten counties where Trump won by 60 percent or less in 2020 voted yes on the abortion rights measure. It appeared that some Trump voters were “flipping.”Such results helped fuel the notion that abortion rights ballot measures were good for Democrats: they might increase Democratic turnout, benefiting not only the presidential race but down-ballot Democrats. The numbers looked strong after Ohio and heading into the 2024 election. “The abortion rights position has over-performed Democrats’ presidential vote share by an average of nine points since 1970,” noted a Washington Post story on a recent Ballotpedia analysis. “But in 5 of 7 cases post-Roe, it has over-performed by double digits.” Another way of looking at those figures is that abortion rights were more popular than some Democratic candidates for president.“The very existence of my organization,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of The Fairness Project, “is evidence that there is a gap between people’s partisan affiliations and how they are willing to vote on specific issues when they’re brought to them as ballot measures.” The group is nonpartisan, and provides strategy and communications support to state-based ballot measure campaigns. Given what they have seen, Hall said she’s “pretty dubious of those turnout arguments” about the measures boosting Democrats. Those arguments get a lot of attention, she because the press focuses on the Republican and Democrat horse race, Hall said. “They try to fit everything in the political landscape into that box.” The Arizona poll showing Harris at 45 percent and the state’s abortion rights ballot measure at 58 percent, while a good reality check, isn’t necessarily a reason for Harris supporters to panic: to start, the poll has a margin of error of 4.4 percent, meaning the Harris support might be nearer to the 50 percent support for Trump. It’s also just one poll; a new one released this week puts Harris just two points behind Trump in the state. The Arizona case is particularly complex, and not easy to capture in polls. Overall, two-thirds of the state’s women voters say they support abortion until presumed fetal viability, as the ballot measure proposes, according to a KFF poll of women voters published in June. That includes 68 percent of independents in a state where voters who list no party affiliation have at times outnumbered those registered Republican or Democrat. Six in ten Democratic women voters said they would be more motivated to vote with an abortion rights measure on the ballot, along with 52 percent of independent women voters—indicating some potential impact on turnout.It’s not just independents; there’s substantial support for the ballot initiative among Republicans. About four in ten Republican women voters in Arizona said they support the ballot initiative—perhaps not that surprising, since nationwide, about half of Republican women voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. (The Harris campaign has also been courting Republicans, for example sending surrogates out to “Republicans for Harris” campaign events in Arizona, specifically on the issue of abortion rights.) What this reflects is that when voters are asked directly to vote on a policy, their votes don’t necessarily align with those of the politicians they also vote for.But what should we make of the four in ten women voters in Arizona who said they would vote for Kari Lake for Senate and yet also support the ballot measure? Lake has backed laws banning abortion over the course of her political career, has praised a near-total abortion ban, and still denies that she and Trump lost their last elections. At first, these numbers can seem shocking, or lend themselves to hopes that those Lake voters could be flipped if only they had the “right” information.“The shocking thing to me,” Kelly Hall said, “is the number of Arizona voters who believe that Joe Biden was to blame for the fall of Roe, because it happened on his watch—the number of folks who do not pay attention to this for a living, who don’t fundamentally understand that there is a major difference between the parties on this issue.” In Arizona, according to a May 2024 Times/Siena poll, around 16 percent of registered voters said that Biden bears a lot or some responsibility “for the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to abortion.” (56 percent said it was Trump’s responsibility.) On this question, the Arizona voters were in line with those in other swing states, where on average, 17 percent of voters blamed Biden for the end of Roe, including 12 percent of Democrats. “There is actually not as deep and well-worn a connection between ‘Democrats are good on this issue and agree with me and Republicans are not’ as folks in DC and the coast would like to believe,” Hall continued. And some Republican candidates, including Donald Trump, who claims he merely “returned abortion to the states,” are working to muddy that distinction. “It is the job of the Democratic party, if they want to take it on, to draw that distinction,” Hall said.The problem of voter information goes deeper than just what voters know or don’t know about where candidates stand on abortion, though. In a state like Arizona, where the legality of abortion has remained in flux—bans came into effect, and were blocked—many voters this year may not know if abortion is legal or not. (It is—up to 15 weeks.) Another KFF survey, conducted this spring, found that among women of reproductive age, only 21 percent knew that in their state, abortion was legal but only earlier in pregnancy. In light of this, the ballot measure campaigns might also serve as political education, and in a way that electoral campaigns do not. Abortion ballot measure campaigns are a way to let people know what the status quo is, and what would change if they measure passes.Mobilizing voters for abortion rights is a different project than electing Democrats. In fact, ballot measures give voters an opportunity to divorce their vote for abortion rights from their votes for any particular candidate; that opportunity may be precisely what motivates them to turn out and vote in an election where they aren’t enthusiastic about their candidate options. Having both approaches open to voters—the ability both to elect candidates they hope will do right by them, and also the ability to directly vote for the policies they want—Hall said, is “a net positive—a very good thing.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/186599/arizona-abortion-ballot-measure-trump

2024-10-02 09:19:50

Trump’s Angry Tirade at “Sick” Tim Walz Hints at Way for Harris to Win
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With five weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump has decided to win over swing voters by rhapsodizing about police violence, threatening to prosecute anyone who displeases him, and unleashing disgusting insults toward his opponents. His latest? Raging that Tim Walz is a “moron” and “sick.” We talked to A.B. Stoddard, columnist at The Bulwark and author of a new piece suggesting a closing strategy for Kamala Harris, about how Democrats can use Trump’s angry, unhinged eruptions to fashion a winning endgame against him. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186596/trumps-angry-tirade-sick-tim-walz-hints-way-harris-win

2024-10-02 04:43:15

J.D. Vance Is the Future of the Republican Party
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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s disastrous performance in his first—and perhaps only—debate against Kamala Harris, Republicans kept bemoaning their candidate’s lack of discipline. Instead of talking about inflation or immigration or, for that matter, any basic needs or concerns of ordinary Americans, Trump spent 90 minutes raving about crowd sizes and lying about immigrants eating dogs and cats. “He [is] right on policy but can’t keep to a message,” one House Republican told The Hill. “Many are disappointed he couldn’t stay focused or land a punch.” Of the many delusions and fantasies of the Trump era, the notion that he will at some future date emerge from his chrysalis as a disciplined and focused statesman is one of the dumbest and most persistent. When pressed, Trump will always talk about himself. Bored by the minutia of politics, he will, given even the slightest opportunity, veer wildly off course. That he would say some of the most outrageous and extreme things that have ever been said on in an American political debate is, and always has been, a given: It is what he has been doing now for nearly a decade. Give him the choice between talking about inflation and a minor slight about people being bored at his rallies, Trump will dispute that the people at his rallies are bored every single time. To a large extent, his political project is built on his failure to stay on message, which only reifies the fact that he is not like other politicians. His authenticity—the core of his appeal—is built on ill-discipline. Trump tells voters he represents a break from politics as usual. He proves it by saying things—often crazy, extreme, and/or deeply stupid things—that other politicians, very much including his fiercest and most loyal backers, won’t. Staying on message, in other words, isn’t Donald Trump’s deal. But it is J.D. Vance’s. Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate between the Ohio Senator and Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was in many ways a do-over of the first debate. Vance was disciplined. He knew his talking points and he hit them again and again. He gish-galloped with real authority. He got revenge on many of his haters by reminding many liberals why they actually liked the older version of Vance, the one who criticized the man who is now his running mate: Vance is pretty good on TV—provided you agree with what he’s saying.In the depressing world of American punditry, where style matters more than substance, Vance is already being anointed as the “winner.” He was assured, he didn’t fall down any rabbit holes; in a few instances, when addressing Walz personally, he seemed almost decent—a word you would only use to describe him in rare occasions since his Trumpist turn. J.D. Vance’s biggest job in this debate was to seem normal. He almost got there. Vance is already being praised in some circles—particularly on cable news—for his discipline and cordiality. We will hear, again and again, about how this was the performance Trump should have given but didn’t. But that is the superficial view of what transpired. Substantively, the political ideas that Vance delivered were not just the more radical of the two men on the debate stage Wednesday night, they were arguably more extreme than the ideas Trump promoted when it was his turn last month. At every instance, Vance blamed America’s ills—the cost of housing, illegal drugs, violent crime—on immigrants. He endorsed deporting millions and refused to rule out violently separating immigrant children from their parents. He lied through his teeth about supporting a national abortion ban and the (legal) immigration status of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, he has viciously denigrated for weeks. He pushed a health care “policy” that would ruin the lives of millions of elderly people and people with pre-existing conditions. He pushed anti-vaccine positions with no scientific basis that will undermine public health. In response to a question about school shootings, he suggested strengthening “doors and windows.” And he endorsed Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election. So yes, Vance had message discipline—but that was the message. Tonight was a good reminder that Vance—arguably more than any other Republican—embodies the future of the Republican Party. A Yale-educated lawyer, he has deep ties to both Silicon Valley oligarchs and the think tank brahmins on the right. Although he has attempted to obscure—and at times literally suppress—his deep ties to the Heritage Foundation’s radical Project 2025, he has done as much as anyone to both intellectually backfill Trumpism’s many holes with the pages of that manifesto. Regardless of what happens in November, Vance’s debate performance should leave no doubt about where his party is headed: Somewhere deeply dark and authoritarian. All of which leads forces us to reckon with another one of those pesky, persistent inquiries of the Trump era: What is Trumpism without Trump? Is such a thing even possible? Trumpism is highly dependent on its leader’s charisma and his outsider status. Aside from its vehement xenophobia and old-fashioned devotion to tariffs, the appeal of Trumpism is rooted in his lack of expertise—and often interest—in most areas of policy. Governance requires doing many things that bore Donald Trump, and this translates: His base is bored with governing too! Since his late-stage conversion to the Trumpian faith, Vance has done as much to flesh out his political program as anyone on the political right. On Tuesday, we saw the result: A remarkably extreme future of forced births and the military being deployed on American streets to deport people who have been living here for decades and who, in many instances, are legal citizens who are entitled to be here. This is Donald Trump’s political project, yes. But it is now J.D. Vance’s. The electoral appeal of Trumpism without Trump is still untested. The available data we have in the form of competitive Senate and House races—and, for that matter, in the form of Vance’s staggeringly bad favorability ratings—suggests any successor will struggle to recreate both the vibe and the coalition that Trump has built. Vance was disciplined on Tuesday but he was also fortunate: Tim Walz started the debate nervously and, perhaps surprised by Vance’s friendly, at time self-effacing demeanor, often let the Ohio Senator off the hook. Still, there was nothing to suggest that Vance is the obvious successor to Trump or, for that matter, a generational talent. What was clear, however, is that Vance’s approach to politics is not going away any time soon—perhaps not even if Trump and Vance are defeated in November. It will likely not involve wild digressions about crowd sizes, but it will involve calculated lies demonizing immigrants. It will be relentlessly focused on remaking America, politically and culturally, and on punishing anyone deemed to be an enemy of that project: Immigrants, women, liberals. It may not feature raucous rallies and digressions about Hannibal Lecter or electrocuting sharks. But it will be built on relentless lies about its true aims. The future of the GOP is locked in. It will arrive, as Vance did on Tuesday, with a smile.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186612/jd-vance-future-republican-party

2024-10-02 03:40:13

The Most Disturbing Question CBS Asked in the Entire V.P. Debate
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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was asked to respond to Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion talking point during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.“Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe that abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no, is that what you support?” asked CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell. “That’s not what the bill says, but look, this issue is what’s on everyone’s mind,” Walz replied, explaining that Trump had made way to destroy national protections for abortion. During the presidential debate last month, Trump had claimed that Walz supported abortion in the ninth month—and after. Trump claimed that Walz “also says, ‘Execution after birth’—execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born—is OK. And that’s not OK with me.”No one supports “abortion in the ninth month,” which is not a medical procedure, but Republicans continue to claim Democrats do in order to fear-monger about abortion.During the vice presidential debate, Trump posted an all-caps rant on Truth Social claiming he doesn’t support a national abortion ban.The moderators repeatedly asked questions of Walz that were shaped around right-wing talking points. When asking the two candidates to explain their leadership qualities, Walz was asked specifically to respond to reporting Tuesday that suggested he’d lied about being in Tiananmen Square in May of 1989—a startlingly specific question, which clearly knocked Walz off his game. Walz took the opportunity to introduce himself to the viewers, and when pushed on the question, said that he “misspoke.”Meanwhile, J.D. Vance was not asked about admitting to blatantly lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186608/cbs-vp-debate-question-abortion-china

2024-10-02 02:30:53

J.D. Vance’s Most Horrific Promise Is in What He Didn’t Say
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The Trump-Vance ticket hasn’t ruled out bringing back one of the Trump administration’s most insidious policies.During CBS’s vice presidential debate Tuesday night, J.D. Vance skirted and deflected a direct line of questioning about a highly controversial immigrant processing program that separated children from their families. “Senator Vance, your campaign is pledging to carry out the largest mass deportation plan in American history and to use the U.S. military to do so,” started CBS’s Margaret Brennan. “Could you be more specific about exactly how this will work, for example, would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?”But the Republican number two pick wouldn’t answer the question outright. Instead, Vance went on a conspiratorial tangent about the influx of fentanyl (the vast majority of which is actually trafficked in by U.S. citizens), crime, and minimum wage before finally touching on the policy’s victims.“We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” Vance said. “Some of them have been sex trafficked. Some of them hopefully are at home with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules.”Vance didn’t cast judgment on the Trump-era program, though. Instead, he opted to deflect the blame of the program onto someone who had absolutely no involvement in its proliferation: Vice President Kamala Harris.“The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s wide open southern border and I’d ask my Americans to remember when she came into office, she said she was going to do this,” the vice presidential pick said. “Real leadership would be saying, you know what I screwed up. We’re going to go back to Donald Trump’s border policies. I wish that she would do that. It would be good for all of us.”Trump, meanwhile, has made his stance on the cruel policy perfectly clear. In an interview with Univision in 2023, the former president appeared open to resurrecting the violent blueprint, arguing that his administration’s family separation policy was not only an effective deterrent, but actually decreased the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country.“When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come,” Trump said at the time. “When you think you’re going to come into the United States with your family, you come. And we did for a period of time family separation, and others have, too, by the way.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186605/jd-vance-vp-debate-immigration-family-separation

2024-10-01 22:07:52

The Dockworkers’ Strike Is a Big Test for Kamala Harris
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Globalization has been a catastrophe for just about every industrial worker in America except dockworkers. People who make things no longer occupy much of a choke point in our economy, but people who transport things still matter a great deal. Hence the tendency for recent large strikes (and threatened strikes) to involve people in the business of moving stuff around: United Parcel Service, railroad workers, stevedores. That is the reality—leverage—behind the strike begun Tuesday morning by 47,000 dockworkers, all represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association, or ILA, and all situated along the eastern seaboard and the Gulf coast The dilemma faced by both presidential candidates is what to say about it.Dockworkers have more clout than other transportation workers because they’re more concentrated spatially (in ports) and therefore easier to unionize; because ports don’t lend themselves to deregulation, something trucking, railroads, and airlines underwent starting in the 1970s; and because nearly every import must arrive by boat. Export or import, it’s all the same to the dockworker, on whom the $79 billion United States trade deficit weighs lightly.The container ships that dockworkers load and unload keep getting bigger. By one estimate their capacity has grown, since their introduction in the 1950s, by 2,900 percent. In August the country’s ten largest ports increased inbound volume more than 19 percent over the previous year, according to industry analyst John D. McCown.Dockworkers represented by the ILA earn a base pay of $81,000, and the most senior can earn, with overtime and benefits, up to $200,000. The ILA is asking for a 61.5 percent pay raise over the life of the six-year contract, along with certain limits on automation. That’s an aggressive demand, but shipping industry profits exceeded $400 billion in each of the previous four years. “They don’t want to share it,” ILA President Harold Daggett complained to CNN.You can be forgiven for thinking dockworkers are forever going on strike, or threatening to do so. That’s true of west coast dockworkers, who handle the majority of United States imports and are represented by the more militant International Longshore and Warehouse Union, or ILWU, founded by Harry Bridges, a radical whose ties to the Communist Party prompted the CIO to expel the ILWU in 1950. (The ILWU rejoined the combined AFL-CIO in 1988, then quit it again in 2013.) The ILWU went on strike in 1971, 2012, and, very nearly, last year, when it engaged in a series of work slowdowns before Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su helped negotiate a contract.The ILA, on the other hand, hasn’t gone out on strike since 1977, when dockworkers walked out for 45 days. The ILA can be faulted on other grounds (past involvement with organized crime, famously dramatized in the 1954 film On The Waterfront; mob ties are said to linger in the ports of New York and New Jersey). But given that the ILA represents workers who move close to half of all United States imports, the union has been very restrained in its dealings with management compared to the ILWU. For Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the timing of this strike is very inconvenient. The interruption of supply chains and its potential impact on inflation must be music to Trump’s ears. But if Trump publicly mentions the strike he’ll be expected to say whether he supports it, and it would be foolhardy for Trump to state out loud that he doesn’t (even though this is almost certainly his opinion) because that could cost him some working-class support. For Harris, however, the strike is an opportunity to declare solidarity with union workers, something she does far too little. But the inconvenience that the strike may cause consumers, especially on prices, likely terrifies Harris, who has hesitated to challenge the Republican narrative that inflation is out of control.The Teamsters, who last month declined to endorse either presidential candidates, issued a press release backing the ILA and bluntly warning the Biden administration to “stay the fuck out of this fight.” (The press release used asterisks for the U and the C, but the warning was still pretty crude.) The union justified not endorsing Harris in large part on the (dubious) pretext that the Biden administration used its legal authority to force ratification of the rail workers’ contract way back in 2022. President Joe Biden has similar authority, under the Taft-Hartley Act, to force the ILA to end its strike, as President George W. Bush did in 2022 to end an 11-day ILWU lockout at the west coast ports. But Biden has stated, wisely, that he has no interest in intervening. “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley,” Biden told reporters. “Now is not the time for ocean carriers to refuse to negotiate a fair wage for these essential workers while raking in record profits,” the White House added in a written statement.A good question for J.D. Vance in tonight’s vice presidential debate would be whether he agrees with a letter that 69 House Republicans, including the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, sent Biden urging him to “utilize every authority at its disposal [italics mine] to ensure the continuing flow of goods and avoid undue harm to American consumers and the nation’s economy.”Senator Vance, do you favor using Taft-Hartley to force an immediate end to this strike?Should the same question be directed at Tim Walz, here is how he should answer: I oppose invoking Taft-Hartley, a law that would be largely repealed by the PRO Act, a bill to expand worker rights that I favor. As governor, I signed into law similar legislation. I would urge the maritime industry to use its $400 billion in annual profits to resolve this dispute quickly, because dockworkers deserve their fair share.Walz probably doesn’t need my help, but something tells me Harris does. I hope somebody is writing this down for her.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186588/dockworkers-strike-test-kamala-harris

2024-10-01 20:54:01

Trump Trashes Freeing of American Hostage in Unhinged Speech
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Donald Trump goaded the crowd at a campaign rally Tuesday into booing WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was released from Russian detainment in 2022. During an event at Dane Manufacturing in Waunakee, Wisconsin, Trump quickly turned away from talking about current events and almost immediately started complaining about a hostage trade that happened nearly two years ago. President Joe Biden had successfully negotiated Griner’s return in a prisoner swap for former Russian military officer and arms dealer Viktor Bout, who Trump claimed was “the greatest buyer of military equipment, they say, anywhere at any time.”“They got him back … and we got our basketball player back,” Trump said, pausing as the crowd began to boo. “That was the trade.”“Well, if it is true, she used to tie her sneakers during the national anthem, right?” Trump said. “And we got her … back, and they got the best, the b—and I’m not saying he’s a nice human being, but he was the number one arms dealer in the world for a long time.”This isn’t the first time that Trump has made this exact comment. Trump, who has a tendency to repeat his own jokes over and over, complained about Griner during an interview with Logan Paul in June. He said that a “great arms dealer” had been exchanged for “the basketball player that wouldn’t stand up during the national anthem.” Trump complained the deal that freed Griner after she was imprisoned for 10 months “wasn’t exactly the greatest trade.”Several other MAGA conservatives, including Trump’s own son, also callously criticized Griner’s release. But Trump doesn’t seem to be thrilled by the release of any U.S. hostages from Russia. Earlier this year, he heaped criticism on Biden for securing the release of four American citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. It’s clear the only exchange Trump would approve of is one that he oversees.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186586/donald-trump-hostage-exchange-brittney-griner-russia

2024-10-01 20:54:00

Ted Cruz Begs for Money as Stunning Polls Spell His Doom This November
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Senator Ted Cruz is getting worried in his reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Representative Colin Allred in Texas. Cruz told Newsmax on Tuesday morning that Chuck Schumer said, “I’m his number one target in the country, and the Democrats are spending over $100 million.”“Chuck Schumer and George Soros are flooding cash into the state of Texas. There have been multiple polls in the last three weeks that show it as a four-point race, a three-point race, a two-point race, and there have been two polls that show it as a one-point race,” Cruz said. Cruz warned that Allred was “an extreme left-wing Democrat,” throwing out the usual accusations that the congressman supports open borders, defunding the police, and higher taxes, and that he is targeting Cruz with “relentless attack ads.” “I want to encourage your viewers this morning: I need your help,” Cruz said, directing people to his campaign website to “contribute, because we are getting swamped by Chuck Schumer and George Soros.”“We are getting swamped!” Ted Cruz pleads for money from viewers, knowing he’s on the verge of losing in Texas. It’s a beautiful thing to see, hopefully he goes down in a crushing defeat. (Video: Newsmax) pic.twitter.com/ZwsyA9z8zM— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) October 1, 2024It’s telling how desperate Cruz is getting if he’s using a TV appearance to plead for campaign contributions in a solid Republican state like Texas. He isn’t exaggerating about the polls, one of which shows Allred behind Cruz by only a single percentage point in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office in 30 years. Cruz was struggling to raise money early in the race in April, and at the time, he also invoked Soros in a similar plea for donations on Fox News. But his last entreaty didn’t seem to help him, and his attacks on Allred are falling flat in the face of the congressman’s moderate reputation. One might think Cruz would try a more moderate approach to combat Allred, but instead, he’s continued to push a right-wing message. He’s helped to spread a debunked racist attack on Haitian immigrants, refuses to say whether he’d accept a Democratic presidential victory in November, and continues to fawn over Donald Trump, who has insulted him numerous times. Is any of that going to help him defeat Allred, or will he have to flee to Cancún?
https://newrepublic.com/post/186583/ted-cruz-begs-money-polls-doom-allred-texas-senate-election

2024-10-01 19:48:37

Congressional Dysfunction Has Helene Relief Efforts in Limbo
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Days before southeastern states were ravaged by Hurricane Helene—with catastrophic flooding affecting inland areas previously thought to be relatively protected from the increasingly frequent storms intensified by climate change—Congress left Washington without approving any additional funding for disaster relief.Despite the knowledge that Helene would make landfall on Thursday, lawmakers embarked on a six-week recess for the pre-election campaign sprint last Wednesday, after passing a bill keeping the government funded temporarily through December. Left out of the measure: billions of dollars in supplemental disaster funding. Although the temporary measure extended funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency through December 20, the agency’s disaster relief fund is facing a $3 billion deficit by February. Rather than receiving the bulk of its money through the regular appropriations process, the relief fund is primarily funded through supplemental appropriations bills in response to major disasters—measures that come with their own complications.“Sometimes Congress is very quick to respond to a disaster, sometimes they’re not, and you don’t know what else is going on in the political cycle that will affect the decision-making,” said Andy Winkler, leader of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Task Force on Disaster Response Reform. “Any kind of delay or uncertainty in what the resources are that are available can create delays in the recovery.”FEMA has been “pushed to its limits” since 2017, which saw massive damage wrought by Hurricanes Maria, Harvey, and Irma, Winkler said. It continues to run on fumes: In August, FEMA announced it was shifting into “immediate needs funding” mode, meaning that it will prioritize emergency life-saving work over more long-term recovery projects. Meanwhile, several states are waiting on recovery assistance for disasters that happened earlier this year—or even last year, such as the devastating fires in Maui and the collapse of a bridge in Baltimore. Other federal disaster recovery programs that fall outside of FEMA’s purview involving long-term recovery, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s long-term block grant program known as CDBG-DR, have also not received new funding this year.Winkler noted that the stress on FEMA may also be attributable to shifting perceptions of what the agency’s role should be whenever the need for post-disaster relief and recovery arises, highlighting the recent increase in the number of federal disaster declarations, which kicks off the emergency funding process. “The mission is expanding, and at the same time you’re seeing really difficult workforce shortages at FEMA. And so we’re asking them to do more, we expect more, but at the same time, we’re not necessarily giving them the tools and the resources to be able to do that well,” said Winkler.Despite the pending shortfall in the disaster relief fund, federal officials have insisted that they are able to adequately respond to the damage wrought by Helene. In an interview with CBS News’ Face The Nation on Sunday, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said “we absolutely have enough resources from across the federal family.”“FEMA is one part of the team, and we have the ability to bring in all of our team members from many other federal agencies to support this response,” Criswell said. However, while the stopgap measure temporarily funding the government allowed for FEMA to tap into $20 billion that was part of last year’s spending levels, the extent of the crisis caused by Helene may result in the agency burning through that money more quickly.“Americans, in their greatest time of need when an area gets hit by disaster, expect government to work. FEMA is one of those agencies that people rely on when disaster strikes in their community,” Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida and a leader in disaster response efforts in the House. “Congress is the disaster. And getting anything done there now, in the 118th Congress—anything that makes sense in the 118th Congress seems impossible.”Since 2005, when several massive hurricanes—including Hurricane Katrina—rampaged through the South, supplemental appropriations funding for disaster relief has spiked. Between 1992 and 2004, disaster relief fund spending averaged to around $5 billion annually; between 2005 and 2021, that spending rose to an average of $12.5 billion annually, excluding pandemic expenses, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, the number of billion-dollar natural disasters has also climbed over the past two decades; according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2023 saw a record 28 billion-dollar natural disasters. The annual number of thunderstorms costing $1 billion or more has also increased significantly since 2000.Rather than approving funding on a piecemeal basis through supplemental legislation, Congress should fund FEMA more fully from the beginning, argued Moskowitz. “You fix that problem by giving them the correct amount of money that they need at the beginning of the budget cycle. If you give them $20 billion for their budget, and then they need a $12 billion supplemental during the year, you should have just given them $32 million from the beginning,” he said.Part of the issue with approving supplemental disaster relief stems from larger institutional problems on Capitol Hill, as the appropriations process writ large has increasingly fallen victim to toxic partisan politics. Congress is generally so dysfunctional that only a few must-pass items are guaranteed approval in a given year: namely, the massive legislation authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars in defense funding, and legislation to keep the government funded. While the latter has become more difficult than the former—often resulting in a slapdash appropriations process, monster omnibus bills and the occasional shutdown—Congress is usually able to keep the lights on in the federal government. Given that political gridlock means fewer bills are actually able to pass through Congress, lawmakers with an agenda to push have little recourse for their individual crusades—meaning that must-pass legislation can be forced to become a vehicle for partisan fights. The urgency of supplemental disaster relief funding typically ensures its passage, although not without some political acrimony.”If everyone thinks that it’s got to pass because it is really important to get that money out the door, then we also get into the question of, are there other political conflicts that are going to get wrapped up in trying to get that done?” said Molly Reynolds, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institute and an expert on congressional process.Moreover, certain segments of the Republican Party—particularly in the House—are often concerned with ensuring that spending on disaster relief is offset by cutting costs elsewhere. Nearly 200 House Republicans famously voted against emergency relief after Superstorm Sandy ravaged much of the northeast in 2012.The politicization of climate change also makes it difficult for members of Congress to agree that there is a problem in intensifying natural disasters, which in turn can make it harder to pass preventative measures. Congress has generally struggled to approve such measures for other disasters, such as pandemic preparedness. But when proposing the idea that preventive funding is necessary because climate change is intensifying natural disasters, that then “takes the issue squarely into the contentious political debate over whether climate change is real,” said Reynolds. (For the record, it is.)“The idea of Congress acting in advance to prepare for these sorts of natural disasters. Is difficult simply because we’re talking about the future, and then it’s made more difficult because we’re talking about a problem that the two parties don’t agree is a problem,” said Reynolds. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate due to human activity—and despite the majority of Americans who acknowledge that global warming is happening—climate change remains a contentious political subject in Congress.Aside from the political dynamics of climate change, immediate action on disaster relief is unlikely. When asked whether he would have to call Congress back into session to address disaster relief, President Joe Biden said on Monday that possibility was “something I may have to request, but no decision’s been made yet.”Although some lawmakers have called on Congress to return to Washington in October to address the issue of disaster relief funding, it is more probable that this issue will be addressed during the lame duck session between election day and the end of the year—along with priorities such as the National Defense Authorization Act, the farm bill, and appropriations. Nonetheless, some members of Congress have identified disaster relief as the first ticket on the lame duck to-do list.“When we return in November, passing disaster aid has to be the top priority of the United States Congress,” Democratic Senator Brian Schatz, who represents Hawaii, said in a speech on the Senate floor last week. “This is an American priority, and we cannot close up shop for this Congress leaving all these Americans behind.”This piece has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186576/congress-helene-relief-efforts-fema

2024-10-01 19:48:30

Trump Just Responded to Middle East Conflict. You’ll Wish He Hadn’t.
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Iran launched a missile attack on Israel Tuesday, plunging the war-torn region into another layer of conflict. But one American politician was quick to make the violence about himself.Moments after the strike, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to soak up any social credit available from the Middle Eastern provocation.“Look at the World today—Look at the missiles flying right now in the Middle East, look at what’s happening with Russia/Ukraine, look at Inflation destroying the World,” Trump wrote in one post. “NONE OF THIS HAPPENED WHILE I WAS PRESIDENT!”In another post, Trump decried the conflict as “TOTALLY PREVENTABLE.”“IT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED,” Trump said. “IF I WERE PRESIDENT, IT WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED!”While it’s impossible to say exactly how a Trump presidency would have handled the rolling, devastating fallout from the October 7 attack in Israel, Trump has not exactly been on the side of peace. Instead, he has claimed that Israel will face “total annihilation” if he isn’t elected in November, has openly questioned the faith of Jewish Americans if they don’t support him over Vice President Kamala Harris, and has encouraged the Jewish state to “finish what they started.”Meanwhile, some members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, have been extremely vocal about the multipronged conflict, urging Israel to continue escalating violence against its neighbors.“Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the north is wrong. There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance,” Kushner posted on X Saturday.The Republican presidential nominee also caught flack from some of his supporters last month when he hosted Qatari leaders at his Palm Beach resort, with some potential MAGA voters decrying the Middle Eastern leaders as antisemitic for their country’s role in moderating cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas.To date, the Health Ministry in Gaza has recorded more than 41,500 deaths from the cataclysmic conflict in which Israel has weaponized mass starvation as well as blocked or destroyed access to critical resources such as water, food, fuel, electricity, and medical aid.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186581/donald-trump-middle-east-conflict-iran-israel

2024-10-01 19:48:27

Trump Desperately Tries to Hide Jack Smith’s New Evidence Against Him
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Suddenly, Donald Trump cares about witness safety and privacy in his court cases, but only when it comes to his January 6 case. On Tuesday, Trump’s legal team filed a motion demanding Judge Tanya Chutkan to redact even more of Jack Smith’s dossier against him in the federal election interference case. As Smith has compiled and submitted new evidence of the former president’s work to overthrow the 2020 election, Trump’s lawyers have asked the special counsel for redactions of “identity-related information” and “sensitive witness statements” before it is released to the public.In their court filing, Trump’s lawyers accuse Smith’s office of politicizing the trial with disregard to witness safety and anonymity. “The Office believes President Trump’s Constitutional rights to impartial jurors and fair proceedings—to say nothing of witness privacy and even safety—all take a back seat to the Office’s political goals.”This motion comes after Smith submitted a new, still-sealed brief on Trump’s actions in 2020, following the Supreme Court’s controversial presidential immunity ruling. The brief, with previously unseen evidence, is designed to convince Chutkan, and any higher courts, that the former president should still face justice for attempting to overturn the election.Smith asked Chutkan to allow the public to see a redacted version of the brief. To be clear, Smith is not asking for the witnesses be named outright, but rather is asking that the public be able to see the broad strokes of his brief. As expected, Trump’s team is yelling election interference. “The Office wants their politically motivated manifesto to be public, contrary to the Justice Manual and longstanding DOJ norms in cases not involving President Trump, in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their filing. Interestingly, Trump didn’t seem to care about safety when he unleashed his followers on witnesses and courtroom staff in his New York fraud case. Earlier this year, he also asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon if he could out some of the witnesses in his classified documents case. The threat of being identified caused one witness to preemptively come forward for their own safety. It’s fair to say from Trump’s response, his team does not want these statements and evidence to see the light of day.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186578/trump-tries-hide-jack-smith-new-evidence-chutkan-trial

2024-10-01 17:39:10

Elon Musk Weighs in on Trump’s Fight With Biden Over Hurricane Helene
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Donald Trump is taking credit for getting Appalachians connected to Elon Musk’s Starlink before President Joe Biden, and Musk—still hoping for a job in a Trump Cabinet—is helping him with the lie. “I just spoke to Elon. I’m getting him—we want to get Starlink hooked up because they have no communication whatsoever. And Elon will always come through. We know that,” Trump said Monday during a visit to Georgia, while mischaracterizing the federal response to Hurricane Helene. “And so we’re working on that, getting them hooked up.” Musk backed Trump’s claim on Tuesday morning, asserting that Trump alerted him “to additional people who need Starlink Internet in North Carolina.” There’s just one problem with Trump taking all the credit though. According to White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, this was “already happening.”A Monday press release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency showed that 40 Starlink satellite systems are available” in the region for emergency communications, with another 140 satellites “being shipped to assist with communications infrastructure restoration.” Jaclyn Rothenberg, director of public affairs for FEMA, told Business Insider that Trump wasn’t involved in sending satellites to disaster areas and that the federal government made the decision on Sunday.In Trump’s speech, it wasn’t clear if he was calling for more Starlink satellites to be deployed, but given his general lies about the federal government’s hurricane response, it’s likely he was ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts altogether. And now, Musk is helping him push the narrative that Biden is “sleeping” through the hurricane damage. Also on Monday, Trump claimed that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper was ignoring Republican hit areas (not true) and that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone,” despite Biden having spoken with Kemp the day before. It’s clear that Trump, and his billionaire friends, will do anything to make this natural disaster a publicity stunt.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186571/elon-musk-trump-biden-starlink-hurricane-helene

2024-10-01 16:30:04

Biden Officials Backed Israel’s Attack on Lebanon, Says Damning Report
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Despite President Biden’s public comments stating the opposite, the U.S. government actually backed Israel’s attacks and bombing of Lebanon. Citing Israeli and U.S. officials, Politico reported Monday that White House officials told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to bomb Hezbollah targets, despite the fact that publicly, Biden was urging a cease-fire. Specifically, presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told Israeli officials that the U.S. supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to launch military attacks on Lebanon in order to convince Hezbollah to engage in diplomatic talks. The U.S. government wasn’t united in this stance, however. Some officials in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and in the intelligence establishment warned Israel’s move could pull the U.S. further into another war in the Middle East. Israeli officials told their U.S. counterparts in mid-September of the change in military strategy, but didn’t mention any specifics. McGurk and Hochstein, while reportedly urging caution, replied that it was a good time to attack Lebanon as Hezbollah had suffered losses in previous months. The report contradicts what the administration has said publicly. Biden was asked Monday if he was comfortable with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, and replied, “I am comfortable with them stopping. We should have a cease-fire now.”But, cease-fire talks are seemingly in limbo as Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, killing more than 700 people since September 23, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. Israeli officials dropped multiple U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs on residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs to kill Nasrallah. The U.S. government, led by Biden, appears unwilling to use its military support of Israel as leverage to stop the latest conflict, much as it refused to do in Gaza.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186565/biden-officials-backed-israel-attack-lebanon-report

2024-10-01 16:30:04

Why J.D. Vance Is Already at a Huge Disadvantage Ahead of Debate
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Ohio Senator J.D. Vance already has a major setback in his Tuesday matchup against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: Nobody seems to like him.Favorability ratings aggregated by CNN political analyst Harry Enten indicate that the country’s opinion of Vance is appallingly low, at -11 percentage points, lower than any other politician currently in the race for the White House. That makes Vance the least liked vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race—that is, before he’s even had a proper face-off against his opponent. He’s also the second vice presidential pick with a net negative favorability, preceded only by Dan Quale in 1988, who actually had a stronger position than Vance before his first debate with a -3 percent favorability rating. Walz, meanwhile, is soaring. The “Midwestern Dad” ranked head and shoulders above the favorability ratings of everyone else in the race, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with a +4 percent favorability rating.Enten’s analysis also suggested that 72 percent of polled Americans believed that Walz has the upper hand in Tuesday night’s debate, making Vance an aggressive underdog with just 28 percent of the country thinking he stands a chance of winning.My phrase to describe JD Vance's standing heading into tonight "Oy Vey"... He's the least liked on either major party ticket... Vance is also the least like VP nominee ever heading into his 1st debate & only the 2nd with a net negative favorable. Quayle in 88 is the other. pic.twitter.com/DGUsUymw9y— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) October 1, 2024Vance’s aggressive rhetoric, baseless conspiracies, and just plain weird comments have rubbed Americans the wrong way in the months since he was selected to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man. The Republican vice presidential pick has ardently defended his position that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, and derided Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.”He also invented a lie about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has sparked at least 33 bomb threats to the sleepy city, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.And Vance’s more general appearances out in public have done everything but humanize him to the country’s voting class. In August, the MAGA Republican’s quick stop for some glazed donuts in a Georgia shop ended up going viral when it became clear that the visit—and his general abrasiveness—was making a couple of people behind the counter painfully uncomfortable.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186561/jd-vance-disadvantage-debate-popularity

2024-10-01 16:30:01

Walz-Vance V.P. Debate Bingo
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The first—and probably only—vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance is taking place Tuesday evening.It’s sure to be entertaining, given both candidates’ unique tendency to be turned into memes, whether willing or not.This may also be the last debate at all before the November election, as Donald Trump is thus far chickening out of a second debate with Kamala Harris. That makes it an important one, especially as early voting is already underway in much of the country.If you are watching the debate, join The New Republic in a game of Bingo. (You can also throw our key terms into a Bingo card generator if you’d like to play with friends.)The vice presidential debate will begin at 9 p.m. EST. The debate will air in full on CBS News and its YouTube channel. Other outlets including C-Span and PBS News will also broadcast the event.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186564/walz-vance-vp-debate-bingo

2024-10-01 15:20:49

Eric Adams’s Latest Legal Move Shows He’s Getting Desperate
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams is really hoping to get his five-count federal corruption indictment thrown out.Adams’s lawyer Alex Spiro filed a motion Tuesday seeking sanctions against the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, alleging that it had leaked sensitive grand jury materials to the press.In the filing, Spiro wrote that the government had been facilitating a slow drip of information to the media, so that by the time Adams’s damning federal corruption indictment was unsealed on Friday, “most of the details of the indictment and evidence underpinning the government’s case (weak as it is) had already been widely reported in the national and local press.”Spiro cited The New York Times, which reported Thursday evening that Adams had been indicted and announced that additional details would be released the next day. Spiro argued that only the prosecution would have been “privy to the government’s plan to announce additional details the next day,” and so it was “therefore clear that the prosecution team is behind the leak.”Spiro requested an evidentiary hearing to “develop the record as to the scope of the prosecution team’s misconduct and the appropriate remedy, including dismissal of the indictment.”At a press conference on Monday, Spiro claimed that the prosecution team had committed a “grave breach of the public’s trust” for leaking information. Adams is accused of unlawfully receiving $10,000,000 in public funds as part of a slew of public corruption charges, including one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals.Adams has also been charged with one count of bribery, which his lawyer is also desperate to see tossed from his case. Spiro argued that the types of gratuities the federal government alleged Adams took don’t actually count as bribes at all.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186562/eric-adams-legal-move-desperate

2024-10-01 15:20:48

Project 2025 Contributor Finally Addresses Alleged Gay Porn Past
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After a contributor to Project 2025 was outed for his gay porn past, he has finally addressed the controversy. Last week, online sleuths uncovered 2014 adult film videos of Corey DeAngelis, a right-wing school privatization advocate affiliated with the American Federation for Children and the Cato Institute. And after more than a week of silence, DeAngelis has finally said his mistakes make him an expert in protecting childrens from “transgender ideology.”“As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal,” DeAngelis wrote on X on Monday. “I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children.”DeAngelis didn’t specifically mention what “poor decisions” he was referring to, but he was allegedly featured in gay adult films under the name “Seth Rose” a decade ago. His past was discovered by a gay porn blog, according to HuffPost, and his apology Monday was praised by fellow conservatives. He is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 on behalf of the Betsy DeVos–backed American Federation for Children. The federation has since stripped references to him from their website and placed DeAngelis on leave. The Human Rights Campaign warned that Project 2025 would “take a wrecking ball” to LGBTQ rights. The plan calls for Donald Trump to imprison teachers or librarians who allow students to read LGBTQ materials and register them as sex offenders. Further, it defines pornography as intertwined with the queer and trans community. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed.As Melissa Gire Grant wrote for The New Republic, the intended enemies of Project 2025’s war on pornography are not abusers or the patriarchy but teachers and LGBTQ Americans. And as a school-choice culture warrior, DeAngelis made a living portraying public schools as sites of left-wing indoctrination. “DeAngelis’ connections to the longtime anti-LGBTQ group Heritage Foundation and his co-authorship of Heritage’s fascist, dangerous blueprint Project 2025, are further proof that he is willing to sell out student safety to anti-LGBTQ extremists,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis told The Advocate. “Targeting any student makes every student and school less safe.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186560/project-2025-contributor-corey-deangelis-gay-porn-past

2024-10-01 14:29:32

How Tim Walz Can Take Down J.D. Vance—in the Nicest Possible Way
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Like many who enjoy dunking on J.D. Vance, I hope Tim Walz uses tonight’s debate to stunt on J.D. like a white man who installed a lower-than-reg-hoop on his garage. I suspect that Walz would also enjoy 90 minutes of screwing J.D.’s tiny little face into every own goal the emo boy has ever committed. The gleam in Walz’s eye when he makes a direct reference to one of Vance’s many trips into the uncanny valley is a rare flaw in the Minnesotan’s almost supernatural level of appeal. (I mean, only at this debased point in American political history does “Look at me, I have no problem picking out donuts” sound even a little like a brag, but here we are.)A recent NBC Poll found Walz to be more popular than Taylor Swift, a fact that the Harris campaign might trumpet were Walz not also more popular than his running mate. Here’s a brief list of other figures that Walz came out on top of: Joe Biden, Elon Musk, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and, of course, J.D. Vance. Vance was the most unpopular human of all the options offered respondents, though as a concept Vance beat out both “socialism” and Project 2025. (Capitalism outperformed everyone, as it must if we are to keep the illusion going.)But risking that almost supernatural level of appeal is the one reason Walz should probably restrain himself from the sort of taunts that have surely followed Vance around for his whole damn life. Don’t get me wrong: Mocking the conservative movement is always punching up. Mocking a venture capitalist will never make you look like the small one, either. But right now, Walz’s enormous cache of positive name recognition balances on being the guy that protects people from bullies, and IRL, J.D. Vance’s chin-trembling attempts to ape normalcy look too much like those of a scared child for Walz to benefit from in a “they’re weird”–centered strategy.Focusing too much on “they’re weird” in the brightest spotlight Walz and Vance will see all season would also underserve the scale of both the moment and the epic tragedies unfolding around us. The aftermath of the last debate showed us the risk of dismissing hateful rhetoric as merely deviant. It was weird to accuse Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs, sure. And amplifying that internet conspiracy has led to racial terrorism, which is, unfortunately, well within historical norms for this country. Not weird at all, in a way.To actually take Vance, Trump, and the rest of the MAGA ghouls more seriously suggests a different kind of direct assault: Instead of mocking Vance, and risking that he’ll come off looking like a victim, Walz should use his time to make sure people know who the real victims are. Let him speak with tight-lipped anger over what’s happened to the people of Ohio—especially those in its Haitian American community. Let him pound the table over the climate catastrophe that currently has the Southeast United States in its grip; lend his voice to the grief felt by people who have lost loved ones to the bans on reproductive care. Walz’s biggest asset as a politician is weaponizing the energy of a dad whose child has suffered.By comparison, Vance is the disfigured vessel of horrific policy. Walz can talk to him like you talk to a customer service guy for the insurance company that’s ripping you off: “Look, I know you just work there, I’m sorry they’re making you do this! But, man, your boss is a real asshole, and people are dying.” There’s little risk of making Vance look like a victim and a fairly large chance that Vance will insist that he’s actually a real big boy who helps make policy! “Aww, sure you do, kid, sure you do.”My real suggestion for Walz, however, is neither japery nor indignation. I think Walz should shuffle onto stage in a thick cardigan and glasses, letting Vance know he’s coming in for a Robin Williams–in–Good Will Hunting hug. Just murmur, “Son, it’s not your fault” for 90 minutes, because J.D. Vance is an American White man (the Americanest, whitest, really). That oughtta bring him to tears.Bear with me in this fantasy for a second. In a debate that CBS has already freed from fact-checking, openly weeping on national television might be the only thing that would disqualify Vance in the eyes of Republican voters. Viewers not already aligned with Trump would see the absolute best version of Tim Walz that exists: serenely secure in his masculinity, a rock that a weaker soul can rely on. It’s an intervention—not just for Vance but potentially an intervention for the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of white men who flock to Trumpian cruelty and xenophobia because it makes sense of a changing world they are otherwise too scared to experience. The problem with my plan is not that it’s hitherto gone unattempted. In its most general outline, my suggestion is a continuation of what American politics has always been: a system to help white men feel safe and seen. The problem with my plan is that it’s a really direct expression of that pattern—and that Tim Walz might not carry off a chunky cardigan. Still, the larger goal of this debate, if you’re Walz, is to peel back the many layers of odd artifice that Vance has built around his psyche like a protective labyrinth and expose what’s squirming around down there. There’s a scenario in which that happens and Vance gets some healing. There’s also a scenario where Walz stomps the living shit out of Vance’s sluggish, dark heart. That too would be satisfying to see.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186550/tim-walz-vance-presidential-debate

2024-10-01 14:29:31

Trump Is Already Preparing for J.D. Vance to Lose the V.P. Debate
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Donald Trump is already explaining away J.D. Vance’s performance during the vice presidential debate, and it hasn’t even happened yet. During an interview on Fox Business Monday, Kellyanne Conway asked Trump whether he would consider doing another debate. The former president tried to downplay his outright refusal to go head-to-head with Kamala Harris again, and implied that Vance would face the same treatment Tuesday night. “I would love to have two or three more debates, I like it, I enjoy it. But they’re so rigged and so stacked,” Trump said. “You’ll see it tomorrow with J.D., it’ll be stacked.”Trump says the VP debate tomorrow night will be rigged against Vance, and he would love to have more debates against Kamala Harris but they are too rigged and unfair to him. pic.twitter.com/ZrZ4WPhTFx— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 1, 2024Trump has used a similar playbook to undermine the outcomes of his own debates, both before and after they happened. Before the first presidential debate in June, the Republican nominee attacked CNN’s hosts, and then walked back his claims after they didn’t fact-check him on air. Before his debate with Harris, he claimed that ABC News would be biased against him. He and his MAGA acolytes continued to insist this was the case after the debate moderators fact-checked him on air for his outlandish lies about babies being aborted after they’re already born and Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.Now Trump is claiming the debate will be rigged as a safety net for Vance, who has his own problems with the truth to contend with. CBS News, which is hosting the debate, said that it will be up to the candidates to fact-check each other. Conway went on to say that when asked about doing a second debate, Trump “said no, but he didn’t totally say no,” according to The Hill. Crucially, in Trump speak, that was a definite no.Harris previously accepted CNN’s invitation to appear in another presidential debate on October 23, but Trump claimed last week that it was “too late” for another debate because early voting had already begun in some states. Before that, Trump had a different excuse, declaring that he wouldn’t seek a rematch because only someone “beaten” would ask for one. Instead, the former president has run scared from a second matchup. The vice presidential debate will take place at 9 p.m. at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186555/donald-trump-jd-vance-preparing-lose-vp-debate

2024-10-01 10:56:25

The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs
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Brian Armstrong has become a familiar face—or should we say pate—in the U.S. Capitol. The 41-year-old billionaire CEO of Coinbase, the nation’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by a country mile, has regularly traveled to Washington since at least 2018 to lobby members of Congress for friendly regulations for his industry. He was back on the Hill in June, donning a slim black suit—rather than his usual black t-shirt and black slacks—for a 48-hour bipartisan blitz. And it’s safe to say that he has never been more popular there. That’s not because senators and representatives are suddenly scooping up Bitcoins and meme coins and NFTs in some ill-advised bid to diversify their investment portfolios; just two members of Congress reportedly bought cryptocurrencies in 2022 and 2023. But politicians do see dollar signs when someone like Armstrong rolls into town because Washington is suddenly awash in crypto cash. Almost overnight, the industry has become a dominant force in American politics.The numbers boggle: A Public Citizen study last month found that crypto companies, which contributed less than $10 million to super PACs over the past two election cycles combined, have raised more than $200 million in 2024—accounting for nearly half of all corporate contributions this cycle. Most of that money has flowed into pro-crypto Fairshake, the largest corporate-backed super PAC in this election cycle (and the second-largest overall, after a pro-Trump PAC); as of Friday, Fairshake had spent $120 million on U.S. House and Senate races this year, according to an analysis by Sludge. Notably, Armstrong’s Coinbase accounts for nearly a quarter of Fairshake’s coffers, which might explain his baller smirk here: I met with more than a dozen Dem and GOP Senators in DC over the last 48 hrs to discuss creating clear rules for the crypto industry and consumer protection for crypto users. There’s strong bi-partisan momentum to get this done in the Senate now that FIT21 has passed in the… pic.twitter.com/KWVylw1kDL— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) June 12, 2024But don’t be fooled by his bipartisan platitudes; Armstrong is not just another tech CEO making the rounds in Washington, seeking a few regulatory advantages. While pitching crypto as a tool for economic opportunity to the rubes in Congress, he harbors radical ideas about crypto’s true purpose. He believes the United States is in “slow decline” and embraces the Network State, a cultish tech movement that ultimately seeks to end countries as we know them—to decentralize governance in the same way that crypto seeks to decentralize finance.“I do think crypto has implications far beyond just payments and money,” Armstrong said during a podcast interview in August, when asked about crypto’s relationship to the Network State. He said that he’s “definitely very interested” in special economic zones—in which typically cash-strapped countries cede land to tech bros who want to play a real-life version of SimCity—and other “ways that you can tokenize real estate and actual physical land to create better forms of society.” “We’re actually losing freedoms,” added Armstrong, who has an estimated net worth of $8.4 billion. “So I would like us to all in crypto think about how we actually go create physical places in the world to preserve freedom over the long term. I think that’s ultimately crypto’s destiny.”In a chat earlier this month with Balaji Srinivasan (more on him later) at the annual Network State conference in Singapore, Armstrong was even more explicit. “I also believe in exit,” Armstrong said, with “exit” meaning the process by which a person abandons existing nations for network states. “We need to start developing those backup options.” It’s hard to imagine any other American CEO openly discussing plans to undermine the U.S. government and start their own country. Even more unimaginably, politicians across the spectrum are openly embracing Armstrong and the scammy, crime-fueling, environmentally destructive industry he represents. Indeed, no matter who wins the presidential election this fall, he will have a friend in the White House.When it comes to personal investing, cryptocurrencies are casinos at best and Ponzi schemes at worst: The FBI’s latest Cryptocurrency Fraud Report estimates that crypto scammers stole $5.6 billion from Americans in 2023. The most famous crypto scammer of all time, of course, is Sam Bankman-Fried, who alone stole $8 billion from customers of his now-defunct crypto exchange, FTX. Federal authorities say he illegally poured $100 million of those funds into political campaigns before his 2022 arrest. He’s now serving a quarter-century in prison. But this only scratches the surface of the damage wrought by cryptocurrencies. Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, in February tallied the illicit flow of $24.2 billion in cryptocurrency worldwide in 2023, the majority occurring in sanctioned “entities and jurisdictions.” Translation: Terrorist groups like Hezbollah and pariah nations like North Korea are big fans of crypto. Pyongyang’s crypto scammers have stolen over $3 billion since 2017. “[M]ost experts agree the North Korean government is using these stolen assets to fund its nuclear weapons programs,” Chainalysis told CNBC. Meanwhile in Russia, where crypto is banned, Vladimir Putin has embraced its limited use in an effort to evade international sanctions. The industry is also a plague on the environment. Cryptocurrencies famously burn through massive amounts of energy, thus driving up greenhouse gas emissions: A 2022 White House report warned that crypto’s use of dirty energy could “hinder the ability of the United States” to meet its Paris Agreement commitments and “to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.” But the industry also devours water, which is used in cooling systems in crypto data centers; a study last year found that a single Bitcoin transaction can use enough water to fill a small swimming pool.Despite this parade of red flags, Congress remains hesitant to crack down—though a few Democratic senators have tried. “Crypto plays a role at every stage in the illicit fentanyl trade,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Washington’s most vocal crypto critic, during a hearing in January. “The drug cartels and the traffickers sell their deadly drugs in the darkest marketplaces, and they get paid in crypto.” She’s right. And yet, fierce crypto lobbying has so far scuttled her Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, which the industry claims will stifle innovation—an argument that succeeded in getting the bill’s top Republican co-sponsor, Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, to withdraw support.Pro-crypto legislation has fared better. In May, in a bipartisan 279-136 vote, the House passed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, which would legitimize crypto while defanging its hated nemesis, the Securities and Exchange Commission. SEC chairman Gary Gensler warned that the bill “would create new regulatory gaps and undermine decades of precedent regarding the oversight of investment contracts, putting investors and capital markets at immeasurable risk.” The legislation faces tougher odds—for now—in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where crypto critic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio helms the Senate Banking Committee. No wonder, then, that crypto PACs have spent $40 million against Brown’s re-election bid. Whether Brown will survive the onslaught is unclear—he leads slightly in polls—but either way, Republicans are projected to win control of the chamber this fall. If they also hold the House and win the presidency, there will be no guardrails left. Crypto will have the run of the Capitol.Armstrong put it succinctly, and perhaps accurately, during a Bloomberg TV interview earlier this year: “Being anti-crypto is political suicide.”When it comes to swaying voters, that may or may not be true. Fewer than 17 percent of Americans have ever used crypto, according to polling by the Pew Research Center, and 75 percent of those who have heard of crypto don’t trust it. According to a May report from the Fed, just 7 percent of Americans hold cryptocurrencies. That said, there are undoubtedly single-issue crypto voters—though in unknown numbers.But is it suicide to oppose crypto because the industry will pour money into your opponent’s campaign? Quite possibly. That might explain why Donald Trump, who once called Bitcoin “a scam against the dollar,” changed his tune this year. “If you’re in favor of crypto,” he declared in May, “you better vote for Trump.” By July, he was promising to turn the U.S. into the “crypto capital of the planet” and suggesting that a “little crypto check” could erase the nation’s $35 trillion national debt. And in mid-September, amid a historically tight presidential race, the convicted fraudster nonetheless made time to launch his family’s new crypto business, World Liberty Financial—while remaining comically vague on the subject. “Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” wrote Trump on X. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”Top Democrats sound similarly obtuse. “We all believe in the future of crypto,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on a recent “Crypto4Harris” fundraising call, promising swift action on crypto legislation. (Earlier that day, the Fairshake PAC had donated $3 million apiece to Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego, two pro-crypto Democrats running for Senate.) In campaigning for president, Kamala Harris has broken with Joe Biden—a crypto skeptic—and called for a “reset” with the industry. In an economic policy document released by her campaign on Thursday, Harris said she would “encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets,” and Semafor reported the same day that Harris is “already dispatching aides to court well-heeled crypto investors and their Democratic allies in Congress.”With crypto pointing a $200 million gun at their heads, it makes sense that Democrats would seek détente. Yet it’s not clear whether they grasp the inherently extremist politics of crypto, with its seditious fantasies of sovereignty.
https://newrepublic.com/article/185738/coinbase-brian-armstrong-crypto-lobbying-washington-politicians

2024-10-01 09:52:22

Transcript: Trump Already Pushing Ugly, Hateful Lie About Hurricane
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The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the October 1, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Right now, western North Carolina is in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe. Due to extreme damage unleashed by Hurricane Helene, towns have been destroyed, roads have been washed out, people are frantically trying to locate friends and relatives, and there have been dozens of deaths. Enter Donald Trump. In a pair of truly ghoulish messages on social media, Trump declared that the federal government and North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, are deliberately neglecting MAGA parts of the state. Trump said President Biden and Vice President Harris are deliberately letting Americans drown in the state and elsewhere in the South. Today, we’re talking to North Carolina’s Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, about the horrors that the state is going through and about Trump’s reaction to it. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us, Anderson.Anderson Clayton: Thank you for uplifting an important part of our state right now that needs it, Greg.Sargent: Anderson, the stories coming out of the western part of the state are just heartbreaking. Can you bring us up to date on what’s going on? Clayton: As folks know, almost 35 counties across western North Carolina are under a federal advisement right now for emergency services after Hurricane Helene came through and ultimately destroyed huge parts of the western part of the state. Asheville and Barnardsville and places like that being the closest impacted, places like Spruce Pine and Mitchell County right now that are still going to be impacted. Folks who are needing help or would like to know more or are being impacted by it can go to readync.gov and be able to find out more information on the ground about how you can access shelters, traffic. Right now they’ve closed off I-40 when you hit Statesville, which is in Iredell County in North Carolina, telling people not to travel to the western part of the state because the terrain out there is not traversable yet, and we want to make sure that emergency personnel are the folks that are getting to have the priority of the roadways right now throughout the western part. Sargent: It’s looking like the rescue of residents is being complicated by cell phone services being down, rescue vehicles are having trouble getting through, gas supplies are running low, and people are having to make these really hard choices about whether to try to move with the gas they have. I think Asheville’s mayor described this as “historic devastation.” The pictures we’re seeing of Asheville underwater, whole towns destroyed. It’s just a horror. What can we all do? Listeners and anyone else, what can we all do right now to make a difference? Clayton: Governor Roy Cooper has opened up a way that you can donate directly to Hurricane Relief. So folks can go to nc.gov/donate, and we’ll make sure we’ve got it on the state party website, too, for the North Carolina Dems. The website’s been published on the governor’s website front page just to make sure that people know where they can support if you are out of state. Supplies is the biggest thing right now. We’re hearing out of Asheville the need for water. We know that water treatment plants were flooded from this crisis, so they’re having to either rebuild treatment plants or wait for the water to go down in them to be able to actually fix whatever may be wrong with them right now. So we’re expecting water delays for at least and up to two weeks in Asheville and surrounding counties. But it wasn’t just places like Buncombe County that got hit, which is one of the hardest things to note. To your point, cell phone access has been down across that entire region. Places like Polk and Henderson counties still have not heard from some folks out there yet that have been lacking that access. We know that it is a true tragedy for just the infrastructure that we’re seeing lost. This changed the entire geography of western North Carolina. Roadways entirely were wiped out. We have bridges going to homes that are up in the hollers in the mountains that are not able to be accessible right now. So we definitely still see this as a full search and rescue in North Carolina and trying to make sure that we’re getting out to people that may be in the more rural and remote and isolated locations in western North Carolina. It’s going to take time. We are really grateful though; the National Guard and over 11 states have sent in folks to help us out. We know that Governor Cooper is on the ground today in Asheville. He waited until the roads were safe to travel to be honest and to make sure that he was not going at a time that would be inconvenient for emergency personnel out there, which we thought was definitely important. He’s going to make sure that our FEMA director is staying out there with him until the situation stabilizes more and that we’ve rescued everyone that we need to. I’ve gotten calls from folks all over the country right now: if you’re missing somebody in western North Carolina or have not heard from them, you can call 211, and please fill out the missing persons with their location and their full description. Make sure that you do a wellness check on somebody if you heard from them two days ago, but you haven’t heard from them since, and that you also dial that number 211 in the state. Sargent: As far as I can tell: Republicans and Democrats pulling together at a time of disaster, not attacking each other, with one exception. Donald Trump. He enters the picture. Now look, I get that people are not going to want to think about Trump at a time like this, but Trump is running for president, and what he’s just done is a reminder of what kind of president he has been and would be again. He figured out a way to pretend that MAGA parts of the state are being neglected deliberately. He claimed that a photo on social media showing Vice President Harris working the phones on the disaster had been staged. What’s your response to all this?Clayton: No one right now should be stoking division at a time where we still have missing people in a state like this. To your point, we have seen Republicans working together, local elected state legislative leaders, and Democrats and Republicans that have been making sure that resources get up to the western part of the state, doing supply drives together. What you see on the ground is a lot different than what you see represented in the Republican Party nationally right now for just how communities are rallying. Roy Cooper as a governor does not care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat right now. He cares that you’re a North Carolinian and that you’re struggling or that you need help or that someone in your family is still missing and you don’t know where they are. We have definitely had folks that we know are still out there that may have walked or had to leave their cars because of flooding. There was someone that we heard the other day, his son had walked almost 11 miles to get home. He had no idea where he was or if he was all right, but he had gotten there through the woods. Just making sure that we’re taking care of people, and Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any interest in doing that or making sure that people in North Carolina are OK. Sargent: He’s just doing something altogether different from what most Republicans are doing. Republicans are calling for everyone to pull together. Republicans are not saying what Trump is saying. Trump claimed Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, which is also getting hammered, had trouble getting President Biden on the phone. But Kemp then said he got Biden quickly and Biden offered Kemp whatever he needs. I think Kemp said he appreciated that. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, also praised the federal response. It’s Trump and MAGA influencers who are using this disaster to inflame their people. Republicans aren’t doing this. Democrats aren’t doing this. What are you personally hearing from other Republicans on the ground? What’s the chatter?Clayton: I’ll be honest, today I was talking with the Iredell Dems chair, Beth Kendall. Anybody that’s interested, if you’re in Statesville right now or any of the surrounding areas…Like I said earlier, I-40 is closed getting out to the western part of the state through Statesville, but our Democratic headquarters out there is still doing supply drives and actually making sure that we’ve got tractor trailers that are busing supplies up to Watauga County and counties surrounding like Polk County as well in that region. I was on the phone with Beth Kendall talking about what we could do to coordinate more resources, and she had someone, a Moms for Liberty voter, that came in and she said, I wish that our side was doing this and had their headquarters open. It doesn’t have to be something that’s polarizing to folks. Sargent: It doesn’t, but that’s what Trump does. I think we need to talk a little bit about what this says about a second Trump term, what it would be like. He was president during a global disaster, Covid. His incompetence and derangement caused untold numbers of needless deaths. But additionally, he used Covid as a chance to divide people. He said nasty and vicious things about blue states and their need for federal help and so forth. We don’t need to recap all that here. But when Trump falsely claims Biden and Harris are doing the thing he actually did do, it’s not only a grotesque lie, it’s also a reminder that this is how he sees the world, including at times of disaster. Shouldn’t people take that under advisement right now? Clayton: I think that folks have to look at the fact that something like Project 2025 that’s been endorsed by Donald Trump wants to disband something like the National Weather Service that actually targeted where this hurricane would hit landfall right within 25 miles of where it actually did. Something like that has been a huge resource federally.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186553/transcript-trump-already-pushing-ugly-hateful-lie-hurricane

2024-10-01 09:52:20

Horror in NC: Trump Already Pushing Ugly, Hateful New Lie About Helene
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Western North Carolina is enduring full-blown catastrophe. In the wake of Hurricane Helene, towns have been destroyed, roads have been washed out, people are frantically trying to locate loved ones, and dozens have died. Enter Donald Trump, who just declared that the federal government—and Democratic governor Roy Cooper—are deliberately neglecting MAGA parts of the state, and charged that the Biden administration is consciously letting Americans drown. We talked to state Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton about the horrors that the state is suffering, and about Trump’s ugly reaction to them. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186546/horror-nc-trump-already-pushing-ugly-hateful-new-lie-helene

2024-09-30 22:37:30

MAGA Is Claiming “Political Violence” Over a Giant Nude Trump Statue
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On Saturday, a 43-foot tall nude statue of Donald Trump was installed near Interstate 15 just outside of Las Vegas, immediately drawing a backlash from the former president’s supporters. The foam-and-rebar art installation, weighing about 6,000 pounds, is titled “Crooked and Obscene,” and is expected to travel to other cities, although dates and cities for the tour have not been announced, according to The Wrap. The artists behind the “anatomically correct” statue, who want to stay anonymous, said in a statement that the former president’s nudity was “intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability, and the public personas of political figures.” But Republicans, as one might expect, are livid. “While families drive through Las Vegas, they are forced to view this offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue,” the Nevada Republican Party said in a statement, according to The Telegraph. Right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong posted on X that Trump, if elected president, “should jail everyone who was a part of this effigy’s creation.” Fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist Catturd (real name Phillip Buchanan) called the people behind the statue “demons,” piggybacking on yet another right-wing influencer’s post calling the art piece “POLITICAL VIOLENCE.” While these right-wing figures are freaking out, this isn’t even the first instance where a nude Trump statue has been erected. In 2016, just before the election, five small naked Trump statues went up on street corners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City, only to be taken down by local authorities because the artist didn’t secure a permit. The artists behind this latest art project are pretty tight-lipped, so there’s no word on if they secured a permit themselves. On a related note, Trump on Sunday told supporters in Wisconsin that if he wasn’t campaigning, “I could’ve been sunbathing on the beach. You have never seen a body so beautiful. Much better than Sleepy Joe.” He probably won’t like this statue, though, and definitely won’t add it to his NFT trading card collection.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186544/maga-political-violence-reaction-nude-trump-statue

2024-09-30 21:29:11

Georgia Judge Strikes Down State’s Abortion Ban in Stunning Ruling
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A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban. Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney quoted “liberty” in a ruling that rejected the controversial ban outlawing abortion after six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant. Abortions in the state will now be allowed until 22 weeks, as they were before the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law the six-week ban. McBurney had some choice words for politicians in his ruling, writing, “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.” He added, “our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”The state law prohibited abortions after six weeks, based on the misleading notion that a “heartbeat” could be detected in an embryo around that time. In reality, an embryo does not have a heart at six weeks, let alone cardiac activity. A fetus is also not viable outside the body till much later in a pregnancy.McBurney got the chance to rule on the law after it was sent back to Fulton County court by the state Supreme Court last year. Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban killed at least two women since its passage and caused Georgia’s monthly abortion totals to drop by roughly half. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186539/georgia-judge-six-week-abortion-ban-ruling

2024-09-30 21:29:10

Watch: Trump Appears Not to Understand How Hurricanes Work
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In just three days, Hurricane Helene gas killed at least 119 people as it trailed its way along the Southeast, making it one of the deadliest storms in modern U.S. history.The real scope of devastation is difficult to define before such an unprecedented hurricane hits land, but it’s not impossible to predict a storm’s scale, timing, and general path. Somehow, that information isn’t obvious to Donald Trump, who, after surveying some of the storm’s devastation in Georgia, told reporters Monday that “nobody” could have forecast Helene.“That’s a big one. And the devastation wrought by this storm is incredible,” Trump said during a presser in Valdosta, Georgia. “It’s so extensive, nobody thought this would be happening, especially now it’s so late in the season for the hurricanes.”Trump: Nobody thought this would be happening, especially now it’s so late in the season for hurricanes pic.twitter.com/tnLCkwKSXM— Acyn (@Acyn) September 30, 2024It is, of course, not late in the season for hurricanes: September tends to be the most active month in the calendar year for the superstorms.But Trump’s own policy proposals are likely to keep him—and every other American—from obtaining such life-saving weather forecasts and emergency weather alerts in the future. Trump has touted elements of Project 2025, a 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto that proposes completely demolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose responsibilities as a federal agency include tracking the weather and predicting hurricanes.“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the far-right proposal reads on page 664.That would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions that would include crucial national weather alert systems for emergencies such as flash flooding, extreme heat, earthquakes, or otherwise.Trump has spent months trying to distance his campaign from Project 2025, but a flurry of the Republican presidential nominee’s recent comments, which include supporting demolishing the Department of Education, have practically glued himself to its policy points.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186532/donald-trump-understand-hurricane-helene-season

2024-09-30 20:23:08

Georgia’s Republican Governor Shuts Down Trump’s Hurricane Conspiracy
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In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s destruction, Donald Trump is eager to spread rumors about President Joe Biden’s inaction. The problem is, at least one Republican politician on the frontlines is willing to call Trump out on his lies. On Monday, Trump visited Georgia, one of the six states seriously hit by the natural disaster, and claimed that while Governor Brian Kemp was “doing a very good job,” he was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.”“I guess they’re not being responsive, the federal government is not being responsive,” he continued. “They’re having a very hard time getting the president on the phone. He won’t get on it. ” While it’s true that the federal response to the hurricane leaves much to be desired, Trump was stretching the truth when he said that Kemp hadn’t heard from Biden.Just a few hours earlier on Monday, Kemp told press that Biden called yesterday afternoon and asked the Georgia governor what further support his state needed. Biden last week also declared a state of emergency in Georgia, approving federal disaster assistance for the state.Has Trump told Gov. Kemp, who said this today?"The President just called me yesterday afternoon." "And he just said ‘hey, what do you need?’" "He offered that if there's other things we need, just to call him directly, which, I appreciate that." https://t.co/ABiE0AE0GS pic.twitter.com/Y9WcwULJes— Andrew Bates (@AndrewJBates46) September 30, 2024As Trump tours Georgia and North Carolina, Republicans continue to slam Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for not showing face in disaster zones. But perhaps while roads remain closed and many remain without power, it’s a better use of resources for the federal government to provide actual disaster relief, rather than divert resources for a tour bus. At least, that’s what many residents in Georgia thought about Trump’s publicity stunt Monday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186529/georgia-republican-governor-kemp-trump-hurricane-helene-conspiracy

2024-09-30 20:23:08

Hurricane Helene Proves There Are No Climate Havens
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More than 110 people are now believed to have died as a result of Hurricane Helene, the storm that swept through the Southeast over the weekend and left some 500 miles of destruction in its wake. Hundreds are missing and millions still don’t have electricity. Cell phone service is spotty, while incapacitated roads and bridges are complicating an already strained recovery effort. Asheville—recently dubbed a “climate haven” for its historically mild climate and perch within the Blue Ridge Mountains—is among the areas worst hit; so far, 30 people have been reported dead there.The idea of a “climate haven” is a seductive one: that some places will be relatively insulated from extreme heat, stronger hurricanes, and any number of other threats posed by rising temperatures. That’s all the more enticing if you’ve got the means to move to one of those places. Some cities have even started advertising themselves as “climate refuges” in order to attract warming-weary—and relatively well-off—new residents. There’s a kernel of truth in all this. It is, of course, more pleasant to be in Burlington, Vermont, than Phoenix, Arizona, in July. As western North Carolina can attest, though, the climate crisis isn’t especially good at respecting either municipalities’ marketing pitches or borders. The nature of global warming is that it is, well, global: Nowhere will be spared. This reality makes a mockery of our geographical boundaries. But it shows how arbitrary other boundaries are, as well: specifically, the bounds of what counts as “climate policy.” Policymakers and media outlets, for example, typically treat fuel efficiency standards as climate policy. They’re less likely to view financial regulators’ intervention in insurance companies’ risky speculation that way. Yet those in the Southeast who’ll attempt to pick up the pieces over the coming weeks, months, and years will probably be less worried about miles per gallon than whether they can afford skyrocketing premiums. In recent years, the definition of what counts as climate policy has gotten even stranger in the United States. On the campaign trail, Democrats haven’t talked about global warming all that much. To the extent that they do mention climate policy, it’s mainly discussed as a means to spur investment in low-carbon technologies like electric vehicles and solar panels. The Harris campaign’s website cites the Inflation Reduction Act’s “historic work” in “lowering household energy costs, creating hundreds of thousands of high-quality clean energy jobs, and building a thriving clean energy economy.” The site makes brief mention of increasing “resilience to climate disasters,” holding “polluters accountable,” and “continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership.” But next to images of entire downtown areas half-submerged in flood waters, or homes moving faster than a river tube, touting the administration’s successful boost of the construction of manufacturing facilities rings hollow. Framing climate action primarily as a good-news story in which the U.S. will come to dominate green export sectors overlooks the very real pocketbook struggles the climate crisis is already causing.Climate change isn’t a discrete issue so much as the foundation on which all politics happens. All policy, in other words—from housing to trade and financial regulation—is climate policy. Rather than acting as if these “natural disasters” are one-off tragedies, Democrats could treat disasters like Hurricane Helene as a chance to hammer Republicans on any number of fronts: for having spent decades colluding with fossil fuel companies to block federal emissions-reduction efforts, for showering insurance companies with giveaways while their own constituents struggle to afford policies, for failing to fund essential disaster relief. The GOP has no plan to help Americans survive a hotter and wetter world other than to make it a meaner one, too. In response, Democrats should debut a vision for our climate-changed country that’s meaningfully different—something they’ve struggled with so far—and which makes communities safer in the long run, not just filled with more factories.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186526/hurricane-helene-asheville-climate-havens

2024-09-30 20:23:08

Rudy Giuliani’s Daughter Backs Harris in Dire Warning on Trump
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Rudolph Giuliani’s daughter Caroline Rose Giuliani endorsed Kamala Harris Monday, writing for Vanity Fair about how she has watched her father’s life “crumble since he joined forces with [Donald] Trump.” Caroline Giuliani wrote an article for the magazine warning of the dangers of another Trump presidency, saying his first term “was the worst thing that ever happened to my dad, to my family, and to our nation’s modern history.” “The consequences will only be more severe—and irreversible— a second time around. Thanks to the extremist Supreme Court he stacked, Trump would take office with full immunity: no checks on his power whatsoever,” Giulaini said. “If the president isn’t going to be subject to the law like every other citizen, which remains incomprehensible to me, then our president had better have a moral compass.”The article carries the headline “Trump Took My Dad From Me. Please Don’t Let Him Take Our Country, Too,” and Giuliani not only mentions the danger that Trump presents to the country, but also how her father’s work for the former president and convicted felon has brought him down and hurt their relationship. “I spent a lot of my life wishing my father had less power. But I never wanted it to happen like this. And selfishly, the deeper my dad gets stuck in the quicksand of his problems, the more fleeting our opportunities to connect as father and daughter become,” Giuliani said, alluding to her father’s financial and legal difficulties. “After months of feeling the type of sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one, it dawned on me that I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too,” Giuliani wrote. Giuliani also praised Harris for her understanding of the climate crisis and her support for reproductive rights, calling the vice president “a life-long public servant who has spent her career upholding justice and fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.” Endorsing Harris is a big step for the daughter of a close confidant of Trump who also served as his lawyer. But as she wrote, Rudy Giuliani’s work for Trump has indeed imploded his life. He has been disbarred in Washington, D.C. and New York state. He’s on the verge of losing his assets thanks to a defamation lawsuit from Georgia poll workers and is facing criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona for election interference, as well as a pending sexual harassment lawsuit from one of his former assistants. Now, his daughter is openly expressing her sadness and shame over his support for Trump and where it was taken him. Will he listen to her?
https://newrepublic.com/post/186534/rudy-giuliani-daughter-endorse-harris-warning-trump

2024-09-30 19:16:50

Eric Adams’s Lawyer Just Blew a Big Hole in His Fraud Defense
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New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s lawyer is trying to get his federal bribery allegations dismissed by arguing that even if the mayor did accept gifts and favors from one Turkish official for years, it didn’t constitute bribery because it happened before Adams was elected mayor. Alex Spiro, Adams’s attorney with a long list of celebrity clients, argued in a filing Monday that the bribery charge against Adams should be dismissed. He argued that the alleged scheme did not satisfy the definition of bribery because Adams’s agreement to receive free and discounted travel and accommodations from a senior Turkish official was not quid pro quo in exchange for an official act.Rather, Spiro argued that Adams’s indictment simply alleged that he had “agreed to generally assist with the ‘operation’ or ‘regulation’ of a Turkish consulate building in Manhattan, where he had no authority whatsoever, in exchange for travel benefits.”Spiro cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Snyder v. United States in June, which found that it is not illegal under federal anti-bribery law for state and local officials to accept gratuities for acts they have already taken. This decision, which overturned the conviction of a former Indiana mayor, substantially weakened the government’s ability to pursue federal anti-bribery complaints and challenge corruption.According to the indictment, Adams had been receiving benefits in the form of travel perks and straw-man donations long before the Turkish official allegedly tried to cash in on them. But Spiro argued that because one favor did not directly result in another, Adams’s alleged behavior does not constitute bribery, as the government accused in the indictment. During a press conference Monday, Spiro tried to downplay the allegations against Adams, while seeming to confirm that the mayor had in fact received travel perks, as alleged. “In the events in question, Mayor Adams was the Brooklyn borough president. He was not the mayor, he wasn’t even the mayor-elect, and the position of Brooklyn borough president does not have vast powers,” Spiro said. “It has, frankly, very little.”Spiro made no mention of allegations that those very same Turkish officials, who had allegedly given Adams so many freebies, had helped to illegally fund his ascendancy to a higher office. Adams, who was once lauded as the future of the Democratic Party, has been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals. He was also charged with one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of bribery.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186518/eric-adams-lawyer-fraud-defense-bribes

2024-09-30 18:09:05

Trump Decides Hurricane Helene Is Perfect Time to Start New Conspiracy
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Hurricane Helene has devastated much of the American Southeast, and yet Donald Trump thinks it’s a good time to push a new conspiracy theory against Democrats. The former president posted a long message on Truth Social Monday that he was headed to Georgia “to pay my respects and bring lots of relief material, including fuel, equipment, water, and other things, to the State.” But he added an unproven accusation to the end of that message, claiming that he received reports of “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina], going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” Trump didn’t elaborate on where these “reports” were coming from, which don’t seem to have any factual basis. Much of North Carolina votes Republican, so it would be near impossible for any relief efforts to occur that would neglect conservatives. Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor since 2017, has deployed the National Guard and undertaken statewide efforts to help those affected by the hurricane, which has hit his state hardest, killing nearly 50 people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power. President Biden has pledged “every available resource, as fast as possible, to your communities, to rescue, recover, and to begin rebuilding,” and even plans to visit communities affected by the hurricane later this week. On Sunday, Biden approved disaster declarations for both Florida and North Carolina, which allows immediate access to emergency funds for recovery efforts. Trump is clearly attempting to play politics with a natural disaster in a state where Kamala Harris is polling neck and neck with him. It’s a disturbing and familiar move for the former president, who, while in office, sought to withhold federal help from areas where people didn’t support him. As president, Trump deliberately downplayed the damage from wildfires in Oregon and California, and said he didn’t want “another single dollar going to [Puerto Rico],” even as the U.S. territory struggled to recover from Hurricane Maria. Perhaps he doesn’t think the public remembers how he handled those disasters and thinks projecting his old actions onto Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democrats is a winning strategy. In any case, it does nothing to help people trying to recover from Hurricane Helene.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186521/trump-hurricane-helene-conspiracy-theory

2024-09-30 17:01:29

Trump Proudly Brags About How He Got Out of Paying Workers Overtime
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At an Erie, Pennsylvania, rally Sunday, Donald Trump let slip how he really feels about workers, telling his crowd of well-wishers how much he hated paying overtime at his companies. “I know a lot about overtime. I hated to give overtime, I hated it. I’d get other people—I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay,” Trump said, basically admitting to wage theft and hiring scabs. Trump: "I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I shouldn't say this, but I'd get other people in. I wouldn't pay." pic.twitter.com/S5uVQw9V3b— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2024Kamala Harris’s campaign immediately attacked Trump’s statement, with a spokesperson telling The Daily Beast that “Donald Trump is finally owning up to it: He’s built an entire career on screwing over workers. It’s exactly what he did in the White House—trying to rip away tips and overtime pay for millions of workers–and exactly what he plans to do in a second term.”Indeed, Trump’s statement exposes the truth behind the GOP effort to woo working-class voters. The former president’s running mate, J.D. Vance, along with fellow Senator Marco Rubio and others, have long made token statements supporting workers and unions. But, as with Trump, it doesn’t take much to reveal these statements as hollow. Conservatives actively work against unions and organizing, voting against pro-labor bills in Congress, with Republican-led states seeking to undermine organized labor with so-called “right-to-work” bills. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien caused a stir by speaking at the Republican National Convention over the summer, only for his speech to be met with crickets from the audience when he criticized corporations and championed union rights. The Trump campaign, along with Republicans in recent years, has made inroads with working-class voters, even polling well with them. But as The New Republic’s Timothy Noah points out, every time the Republican Party regains control of the House of Representatives, it changes the Education and Labor Committee’s name to the “Education and the Workforce” Committee, going out of its way to dissociate itself from organized labor. Republicans, including the ones who feign support for workers like Vance and Rubio, also oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would ease restrictions on forming a union, strengthen protections for labor unions, and eliminate right-to-work laws. Trump was anti-union long before his Saturday speech, going back to before his time as president. Democrats and those who support workers’ rights need to sound the alarm to prevent Trump and the GOP from making the lives of working people much, much worse.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186505/trump-brags-got-paying-workers-overtime-scab

2024-09-30 15:58:44

Kamala Harris’s Gun Rhetoric Is Reckless
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Until recently, Democratic candidates fled from the topic of guns. Onetime campaign consultant Matt McTighe told NPR last month that in the early 2000s, his clients would shut down the conversation. “We just can’t talk about it,” he said, mimicking a client. “It’s not a winning issue. There’s no constituency for it. Just don’t make me say anything about it.”Not anymore, apparently. In this election cycle, the Democratic nominees are not shy to talk about guns—their own guns, that is. “I’m a gun owner; Tim Walz is a gun owner,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a recent interview with Oprah. Then she shocked her interviewer by adding, “If someone breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” She laughed, the audience laughed, and she seemed immediately contrite. “I probably should not have said that. My staff will deal with that later.” But what’s there to fix or spin? Harris was being crystal clear, deadly serious, and, I believe, perfectly intentional. This is how she hopes to lure independents and erstwhile conservatives, especially in Midwestern swing states: by confidently and fluently speaking the language of gun owners. As an electoral strategy, there may be some logic to it. In all other respects, it is dumb and dangerous, pandering to fatal illusions and temptations about owning a gun. Harris never considers, for example, if her intruder is a criminal—that is presumed. What if he (or she) were mentally ill, or disoriented by drugs? What if he made a mistake, like a deliveryman who knocked on the wrong door? What if he had just been in a bad car accident and needed urgent medical assistance for his passenger? That is, what if this person were unarmed and actually posed no physical threat? Would Harris shoot him down all the same? And what if he were armed: with an AR-15. Would pulling a gun save her anyway? These are all crucial considerations Harris glides over. They are crucial considerations too often cast aside in the national frenzy to arm up, and with fatal, tragic consequences. We are in the midst of a frightening arms race in America—as if our absurd civilian arsenal were not already massive enough. Once dominated by conservative white men, researchers note, the ranks of gun owners continues to swell and grow more diverse. There are 400 million guns and 20 million assault rifles in America. Seemingly everyone now, on all sides of the political and cultural spectrum, is arming up.As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent piece titled, “The Most Surprising New Gun Owners Are U.S. Liberals,” as of 2022 nearly 30 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Americans now own a gun, up from 22 percent only a decade ago. During the pandemic, nearly 70 percent of new gun buyers were people of color, and Black gun ownership has spiked 17 points since 2019. Half of new gun buyers in 2020 were women, Vox reported last month, whereas only 9 to 14 percent of women owned guns between 1980 and 2014. No wonder we’re fast approaching the day when half of all American households have at least one gun. Why are they rushing to be armed? There is a familiar driver: fear. Researchers and gun owners cite various factors, including worries about the breakdown of civil society sparked by the isolation and lockdowns of Covid—and amplified by the tumult that gripped cities after the police killing of George Floyd. Throughout, we have been terrorized by Donald Trump, who incited a deadly insurrection and has threatened violence against his supposed enemies so many times we’ve lost count. The Trump era has also encouraged a resurgence of (often armed) neo-Nazi and otherwise extremist right-wing groups, making minorities understandably fearful of rising hate crimes. Meanwhile, mass shootings remain a persistent scourge, making news on a near-daily basis. And on an hourly basis, you can find media stories and politicians telling you that violent crime is everywhere, inescapable.In the face of these manifold perceived threats, people feel they have no choice but to get a gun. But there’s another reason many people feel this way: Seemingly everyone has a gun already. People feel the need to have a gun, in other words, because society is so deadly—from all the guns. It’s a self-reinforcing doom loop that ends with the entire nation armed.I’ve always felt this was by design. The NRA successfully lobbied its elected allies to pass permissive laws across America, recklessly emboldening gun owners and degrading the security of society. So-called Stand Your Ground laws, enacted by 28 states since only 2004, protect gun owners who shoot someone they believe threatens them with bodily harm. In 26 states, people are allowed to carry a concealed gun in public without a permit and without safety training. In half of America, therefore, you have to worry about gun owners who might see you as a threat, are empowered by the law to draw their weapon, and have no training in how to use it. No wonder people feel terrorized. The problem is, more guns will not solve the problem; they will not make us safer. And now, chief among those spreading this lie is the vice president herself. Harris wants you to know she protects herself and home with a gun; she is her own “first line of defense,” as the NRA would have it. But, as public health researchers note, residents of gun-owning households are more likely to be harmed or killed by a gun—not less. Guns at home are used in escalating incidents of domestic violence; they’re accidentally discharged by children; they’re intentionally fired in suicides. They also get stolen, and end up in the hands of criminals. Lost in all the hyperbole over crime, and presidential candidates’ rush to prove themselves tough on crime, is a crucial fact: This country is growing safer, with a notable decline in gun violence. Here in Baltimore, where there were more than 300 murders per year between 2015 and 2022, the city is on pace to fall below 200 this year for the first time in over a decade. Boston, recently celebrated by The Economist as “America’s Safest City,” has had just 14 murders in 2024.Most remarkably, this has happened without measurable changes in gun regulations, which our Supreme Court has effectively blocked. Baltimore and many other cities have invested in violence intervention programs, where mediators negotiate brewing conflicts and persuade belligerents that it’s not worth it to draw a gun. That message evidently works. Kamala Harris should try it.
https://newrepublic.com/series/50/kamala-harris-dangerous-rhetoric-guns

2024-09-30 15:58:42

Here’s the Toll Hurricane Helene Is Taking on North Carolina Voting
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North Carolina may struggle to send out mail-in ballots following the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Helene and chaos wrought by former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. The United States Postal Service announced Sunday that operations at more than two dozen facilities across North Carolina had been suspended due to the effects of Hurricane Helene. The Category 4 storm has caused widespread flooding, killing more than 100 people across several Southern states. North Carolina’s early voting had previously been delayed by Kennedy’s efforts to have his name removed from the ballot, after more than one million ballots had already been printed. Although Kennedy’s request was denied at first, the state Supreme Court ultimately ordered that the ballots be reprinted, delaying the beginning of early voting by two weeks, costing the state thousands of dollars, and shortening the legally required voting period. Kennedy has plainly stated that he intends to get his name off the ballot in states where its presence would detract from Donald Trump—such as North Carolina, a key battleground state. As a result of Kennedy’s plot to see Trump elected president, military ballots for the state were sent out on September 20, and roughly 190,000 absentee ballots were mailed out on September 24. Now it’s unclear when these ballots will arrive with voters.Hurricane Helene demonstrates the existential threat of a changing climate to a democratically held election. This catastrophic storm could have other effects on election administration by potentially destroying voters’ ballots, displacing poll workers, and damaging voting sites.North Carolina’s voter ID law does contain an exemption for victims of a natural disaster within 100 days of an election who cannot produce identification. Last week, the North Carolina state Board of Elections announced that it had removed 747,274 names from its voter rolls since 2023, mostly people who had moved from one county to another and people who had not voted in the last two federal elections, according to WECT.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186508/north-carolina-voting-hurricane-helene-robert-f-kennedy-jr

2024-09-30 15:58:42

Trump Has Stupidest Defense for Copying This Project 2025 Policy
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Donald Trump is continuing to hitch himself to Project 2025’s policy proposals, even after he spent months working to publicly disavow the Christian nationalist manifesto.During a campaign stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated a key talking point of the 920-page executive branch blueprint: dismantling the Department of Education. But this time, Trump offered the radical policy shift with a candid dismissal, asking the crowd, “What the hell do you have to lose?”“You know I’m gonna take the Department of Education, close it in Washington, let the states run their own education,” he said. “Very important. Because we spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world by far, and yet we’re ranked at the bottom of every list.”Neither of those points are true. A 2023 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found that while the U.S. did spend 38 percent more per student than the average of other member countries, it still ranked behind Luxembourg, Norway, Austria, and the Republic of Korea for its per-pupil spending. And America’s education system doesn’t rank last, either—instead, it ranks twenty-second out of 41 countries, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Index.“So, you know the expression? What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump added, shortly before blaming the current state of America’s education system on incoming migrants.Last week, Trump shared his vision for the country’s education system without the massive federal agency guiding it. According to him, some states will “do very good,” while others will, admittedly, be “terrible.”“We’re going to have 35 like, different ones—Iowa will do good. A lot of the states will do very good. I can think of probably 30, 35 will be do—five will be OK, 10 will be OK. You’ll have four or five that will be terrible, but that’s OK, we have to control it,” Trump told 5,000 people in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “But you’ll have, you’ll have Idaho, you’ll have Idaho will do a great job, no debt, they run a great state.”Project 2025 has advanced seemingly outrageous policy positions, including dismantling wholesale staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education. It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, banning pornography nationwide, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and increasing funding for the U.S.-Mexico border wall.In July, Trump claimed that he “knew nothing about Project 2025” and had “no idea who is behind it.”“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186507/donald-trump-defense-project-2025-education

2024-09-30 14:50:40

J.D. Vance Offers Defense of Racism at Christian Nationalist Gathering
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J.D. Vance is now offering a religious justification for the bigoted immigration policies touted by Donald Trump and himself. Vance on Saturday appeared at Christian nationalist preacher Lance Wallnau’s election-season revival tour in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, hoping to appeal to the right-wing Christian population, which has always been a key part of the Republican base. While sitting for an interview with Pastor Jason Howard, the leader of the nearby Sanctuary church, Vance defended his campaign’s immigration policies while answering questions about faith, invoking a “Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family.” “It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean to other people, but it means that your first duty as an American leader is to the people of your own country,” said Vance. Vance said supporters of himself and Trump “should not let Kamala Harris claim the high ground on compassion,” saying President Biden and her immigration policies are “a disgrace.” Vance said he and Trump’s immigration plan will “maximize compassion,” despite the fact that it calls for mass deportations. Vance’s comments seem to be defending his previous racist rhetoric against Haitian immigrants, particularly repeating a disproven story that they are capturing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The result has been violent threats against schools, hospitals, and government buildings in the town, for which Vance and Trump refuse to take responsibility, even after some Haitian immigrants filed charges against them. Some Republicans have echoed Trump’s comments with their own racist statements. Trump has pushed more racist rhetoric against other towns that have welcomed immigrants from Haiti, including Charleroi, Pennsylvania, drawing a backlash from town officials. One would hope that the Democrats would speak out against the racism and regressive immigration policies, but their response has been lacking.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186501/jd-vance-defense-racism-immigrants-christian-nationalist-gathering

2024-09-30 13:46:22

Trump Proposes Stunningly Stupid Idea for Public Safety
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Donald Trump threw around some strange ideas on public safety during a rally Sunday in Erie, Pennsylvania—but none more bizarre than seemingly hopping on board with the premise of the 2013 horror film The Purge.Per the former president, the best way to keep America safe would be to allow criminals to get their fix on “one really violent day.”“Now, if you had one really violent day—like a guy like, Mike Kelly, put him in charge, Congressman Kelly, put him in charge for one day—Mike would you say, you’re right here, he’s a great congressman, would you say, Mike, that if you were in charge, you would say, ‘Oh please don’t touch them, don’t touch them, let them rob your store,’” Trump said, imagining a scenario in which thieves loot a hypothetical storefront.“All these stores go out of business, right? They don’t pay rent, the city doesn’t have—the whole—it’s a chain of events, it’s so bad. One rough hour, and I mean real rough—the word will get out and it will end immediately,” the Republican presidential nominee said to befuddled applause.Trump on theft: If you had one really violent day.. .. … One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. pic.twitter.com/DkOdULcV32— Acyn (@Acyn) September 29, 2024It’s hard to imagine where Trump could have cooked up such a lawless, irrational idea—unless he had recently seen the dystopian horror flick, in which a family attempts to survive a state-sanctioned night during which all crime, including murder, is legalized.Incredibly, the new position is just a drop in the bucket for Trump’s hair-raising ideas about how to combat crime in American cities. The former president has also advocated for expanding the death penalty to criminals convicted of minor crimes, such as drug dealing, and during his time in office revoked an Obama-era executive order that limited the distribution of military-grade weapons to local law enforcement.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186496/donald-trump-public-safety-police-violence-purge

2024-09-30 10:22:16

Saturday Night Live Deserved Better Than Saturday Night
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“Take me to Rockefeller Center! I’m going to go do Saturday Night Live, a new show on NBC.”“TV at night? That’ll never work!”“Fuck you, you fucking dumb cabbie. It’ll be so famous and good at sketch comedy.”Sadly, the above exchange is not actually from Jason Reitman’s new film, Saturday Night, which dramatizes the circumstances around Saturday Night Live’s fraught and triumphant premiere episode. Rather, it’s from John Mulaney’s recent talk-show appearance alongside fellow former SNL writer Seth Meyers, in which an ostensibly good-natured discussion of Reitman’s film—which is being released to coincide with both awards season and the series’s fiftieth anniversary—mutated into something a little less innocuous. “I worked for five years at Saturday Night Live,” said Mulaney, in the cast-iron deadpan that’s become his trademark. “But I had no idea the kind of pressure cooker that it was. Apparently, it’s high stakes.” Even if these and other jibes from Mulaney’s conversation with Meyers have plausible deniability as just so much good-natured joshing from professional funny people, they direct attention toward the thin layer of moisture coating Reitman’s slippery act of homage—an admixture that’s one part slickness, one part flop sweat. Such clamminess is admittedly organic to the screenplay, conceived by Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan as a kind of real-time thriller, counting down 90 (or so) minutes during the evening of October 11, 1975, when the NBC honchos reportedly hovered over the control-room kill switch until the final moment. The intention of the real-time conceit is to illuminate SNL creator Lorne Michaels’s famous dictum that “the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; the show goes on because it’s 11:30.”Such multidirectional chaos is a staple of behind-the-scenes melodramas from 42nd Street to Showgirls, and Saturday Night throws its hat into the ring with a freewheeling panache; cinematographer Eric Steelberg traces graceful figure eights through painstakingly recreated versions of NBC’s downtown Manhattan stronghold, with each and every hallway, dressing room, and loading dock visualized as contested territory in a turf battle between the ruling TV establishment and a merry band of coked-up night owls. The latter group is led by Lorne Michaels, impersonated with poker-faced aplomb by Gabrielle Labelle, already a specialist in the portraiture of moguls as young men after playing Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans. Here, he’s depicted as a self-styled visionary whose inability to articulate his concept of a sketch-comedy show turned inside out is less a liability than a point of pride. Stepping out of the elevator ferrying him between potential catastrophes, Lorne walks blindly onto a prop cannon showering him in a geyser of crimson goop: It’s a witty bit of slapstick symbolism casting him as infantryman and general in a culture war he doesn’t yet know will turn his way, a righteous naïf stumbling through the corridors of power with his bleeding heart on his sleeve.In their indispensable SNL oral history, Live From New York, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales allot an entire chapter to what could be called the metaphysics of Lorne Michaels—specifically, the tricky mix of sophistication, self-effacement, and subtle psychological terrorism that’s allowed him to hold sway over a carousel of cast members for five decades. (“He picked the right profession, because he gets to lord over people who want to kneel at his feet,” snarked Jane Curtin. “He doesn’t acknowledge them, which makes them work harder.”) Michaels, who will turn 80 shortly after SNL’s fiftieth anniversary broadcast, has indicated that he’s not leaving his post anytime soon—a refusal that aligns with the reluctance of Boomer figureheads in all kinds of elevated posts to cede territory to a new generation. The premise of an entrenched, and only semi-benevolent, industry tyrant digging in his heels even as a bunch of gifted kids are nipping at them is potentially the stuff of good cinema; in lieu of anything resembling a long view, however, Saturday Night offers only ring kissing.Creation myths are by their nature irresistible, and SNL’s debut is even more ready-made for the big-screen treatment than that of Nike, Pop Tarts, or Flamin’ Cheetos, to cite just three examples of the emergent (and singularly pernicious) cinematic subgenre of corporate origin stories. (“Wake me up for the Ambien movie,” tweeted the film critic A.S. Hamrah last year.) The scenario comes fully loaded with a cast of real-life comedy icons, a suite of fetishistic retro signifiers, and a pressurized ratio of suspense to schadenfreude; on some level, you’d have to be a hack to screw it up.In this imagining of studio 8H, subplots abound. Will the show’s affable but ineffectual network babysitter, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), allow himself to get on the right rabble-rousing wavelength or torpedo morale by cluelessly shilling for more product placement? Will Lorne’s wife and behind-the-scenes talent-whisperer, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), assert herself enough to be given credit for her contributions? Is the mercurial John Belushi (Matt Wood) likely to finally sign his contract before the cameras roll, or before he murders his narcissistic co-star Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith)? How does Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) feel about being the only African American member of an all-white cast? What about the mutual suspicions of Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) that they’re distaff interlopers in a sexist boys’ club? Was muppeteer Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) really a clueless, gormless naïf? And did Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) really have a foot-long member? Never exactly a formalist by trade, Reitman works diligently to replicate the virtuoso, whirligig schematism of films like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman or Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, borrowing their trademark repertoires of snaky tracking shots and staccato whip pans. In theory, such gold-plated aspirations should be at odds with the underdog storyline, but history is written by the winners, and Reitman—a showbiz kid who once actually made a movie called The Front Runner—isn’t remotely interested in subversion or, heaven knows, critique. Rather, he’s a lapsed satirist whose mode of punching down and sucking up first surfaced in Thank You for Smoking—a meditation on “moral flexibility” (executive produced by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel), which hinted that anybody who falls for the silver-tongued sophistry of Big Tobacco deserves what’s coming to them—and was fully formed in Up in the Air, a heinous post-bailout crowd-pleaser, in which documentary interviews with recently unemployed civilians were used to lubricate a lament for the itinerant, existential loneliness of the executive class.One wonders what O’Donoghue—who was hired and fired three times in his 10 years at Saturday Night Live—would make of a movie that’s so afraid of even slightly defacing its subject?In spite of its manipulativeness—or maybe because of it—Up in the Air raked in Oscar nominations and momentarily positioned its maker as a potential twenty-first-century heir to Billy Wilder. Fifteen years later, after a middling series of bids for indie and festival-circuit credibility, Reitman has embraced a new role as a caretaker of valuable and inherited intellectual properties. These include Ghostbusters—whose legacy sequels, Afterlife and Frozen Empire, are textbook exercises in profitable nostalgia (and necrophilia, as it used CGI to resurrect deceased cast members)—and, now, Saturday Night Live, which served as an incubator for the comedians populating many of the early-’80s hits of his father, Ivan Reitman. In Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, J. Hoberman persuasively suggests that Ghostbusters—originally conceived by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, and featuring Bill Murray in his signature hipster role—permanently crossed the streams between blockbuster special effects spectacle and hip countercultural cynicism. He doesn’t mean it as a compliment: The trickle-down effect can still be felt in every meretricious piece of franchise dreck leveraging sentimental fan service against smug self-reflexivity. It’s worth asking, circa 2024, what kind of filmmakers would seek to further enshrine Saturday Night Live in general and its intractable, multimillionaire commander in chief in particular. Last year, in her fair-use parody tour de force, The People’s Joker, director Vera Drew reimagined Michaels as a cheapjack, computer-generated fascist lording over the American comedy establishment; it was a genuinely imaginative engagement with SNL’s institutional power, and a savage update of the affectionate character assassination previously enacted by Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films (Myers reportedly modeled his performance of Dr. Evil on Michaels). If there’s one thing that champions and detractors of Michaels alike can probably agree on at this point, it’s that he can take a joke, but Reitman and Kenan push in the other direction. At one point, their Michaels invokes Che Guevara in his presentation to NBC’s money men. Later the filmmakers literally set their hero next to the sculpture of Prometheus adorning the entrance to Rockefeller Center—a moment that is pretty definitively not played for laughs. It’s telling that Saturday Night tries to align itself philosophically with the figure of SNL’s original head writer, Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), a pop-Voltaire-ian wit who spray-painted the word “danger” on the walls of his office as a kind of artistic ultimatum. One wonders what O’Donoghue—who was hired and fired three times in his 10 years at Saturday Night Live—would make of a movie that’s so afraid of even slightly defacing its subject? The most egregious case is probably when Morris breaks the tension backstage and clears his conscience—by caustically serenading the cast and crew with the immortal refrain “Gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186393/saturday-night-live-deserved-better-saturday-night

2024-09-30 10:22:14

The Democrats’ Shameful, Foolish Surrender on Immigration
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Vice President Kamala Harris was in Arizona last Friday to engage in the periodic political pilgrimage to the southern border, where she pledged to continue President Biden’s crackdown on asylum if she defeats Donald Trump in November. She would not only keep in place an executive action that severely restricts the ability to apply for asylum at all, but actually expand it, as well as “ramp up prosecutions of those who illegally cross the border—including potential felony charges for repeat offenders, according to two sources briefed on her plans,” Axios reported.With this, the Democrats’ transition to a default restrictionist approach on immigration—and an adoption of MAGA’s messaging on the issue—is all but complete. It shows that our leading Democrats still don’t know how to do politics; they only know how to react to opponents, allowing the right to set the terms of debate. That’s the polite way to put it, anyhow. Perhaps more accurately, this is shameful, wholesale surrender on the part of Democrats.Think about the immigration rhetoric over the last several years. When was the last time you heard a nationally known Democrat discuss the issue in a way that wasn’t a direct response to something insane that Trump or some MAGA acolyte put forward; an assertion that they, too, are Tough On The Border and have the workable plan to limit migration; or wishy-washy filler about immigrants being “our strength,” with little underlying substance? Can you remember?Maybe this isn’t a question you’ve thought to pose to yourself before because our mainstream political firmament has, at some point in the last five or so years, settled on an artificially narrow band of right-left political stances on immigration that have as their locus the beliefs of extreme hard-liners like Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It’s not that everyone has adopted this stance per se, but it has become the center of gravity to which every other position is tethered, measured in essence by their distance to it, which can never get too far.This is not exactly a historical anomaly, admittedly. Even as American political attitudes have shifted on a number of fronts over the last two centuries, immigrant-bashing has been a proud tradition, and preoccupations about exactly who is allowed into the country and what danger they might pose to the polity have always been an easy hook for populist politicking.Behind closed doors and among the politico cognoscenti, the reason for this is a simple calculation: Tough on immigration rhetoric is politically popular and only getting more-so, with polls showing a sharp collapse of public support for immigration since 2021. A CBS News/YouGov poll from this summer shocked observers by concluding that 62 percent of adult voters would favor some sort of nationwide mass deportation program for all undocumented immigrants.Let’s set aside for a minute the moral questions and tackle this question on the terms of shark-eyed political strategists interested mainly in winning—those who believe Democrats can’t afford any perceived weakness on immigration as the existential threat of Trump Redux looms.We have here something of a chicken-and-egg problem on narrative and attitudes. Since he first descended that escalator nearly a decade ago, Trump has made immigration a cornerstone issue with a relatively simple and repeatable set of narrative planks: Immigrants are disease-ridden and dangerous, alternately living on the dole and taking all your jobs, and they will vote in great numbers even if they are not legally allowed to.All of this is base and blunt and not particularly novel in the scheme of American political dialogue, but Trump’s innovations have really always been about branding and reach. He’s effectively the McDonald’s of xenophobic slop, producing serviceable and easily replicable product in mass quantities that’s now everywhere, franchised around the country by his cadre of sycophants for reasons of true belief or mere expediency. You can’t escape it and it’s basically a background drumbeat to any sort of political conversation.And what has been the Democrats’ response? Teetering around, feebly trying to sidestep the issue or meeting it head on by effectively insisting they can make the better burger. Behind the scenes, there have been some clear distinctions in approach, with the Biden administration having rejiggered ICE enforcement priorities away from the shock-and-awe campaign that Miller and Trump were trying to run; stepped away from mass detention and wound down family detention altogether; and generally tried to foment more humanitarian migration via the refugee system and parole. Yet this has gotten little play on the rhetorical front, almost as if the White House and its advisers didn’t want people to find out about it.So yes, if voters are on the one hand bombarded with a simplistic and all-encompassing vision of a country beset by the perils of masses of faceless immigrants, and on the other hear crickets or a sort of tepid agreement with the promise that Democrats will actually be better at handling it, of course their opinions are going to trend in a restrictionist direction. It’s no contest, and there’s no way for liberals to actually win on these terms. Attitudes will keep getting harsher and they’ll keep rushing to catch up, but of course they’ll never manage to outrun the shameless fascists, untethered as they are by considerations of either humanity or reality—just look at J.D. Vance’s flippant admissions that the Ohio pet-eating story is false, but that doesn’t matter in service to the narrative.For low-information voters—and the truth is almost every voter and a substantial chunk of elected officials are low information on immigration, which is a policy issue that inflames much passions but almost no one understands below the very surface level—all they see is strong versus weak. This isn’t going to work, and it’s past due time to try something else; liberals must coalesce around a concrete, straightforward, memorable, and forceful pro-immigration message that constitutes a full alternate vision, not just playing defense or shackled to the right’s terms.So allow me to humbly propose a better approach for Democrats. Point to how immigrants helped economically revitalize a depressed Springfield, Ohio, and cities across the United States instead of just ridiculing the pet-eating lie. Don’t let the right ever get away with talking about birthrates without hounding them over how this squares with the prospect of new arrivals. Force right-wing figures to explain how, exactly, the United States would have become a global economic and cultural locus without massive immigration, or how all this contemporary business about revitalizing domestic high-tech manufacturing or keeping domestic food production running could be accomplished without it. Ask voters: Do you like the prospect of Social Security and Medicare remaining solvent? Great, immigration is the straightest path there.Just say it: Immigration is good. We should consider ourselves lucky to have had so much, and we should strive to have more. This psychopathic and—you can say it—white supremacist fixation on punishment and control of migration is not just a moral stain but a disastrous economic policy. If carried out to its full effect, it would represent one of the greatest acts of national self-immolation in our history. Say it over and over, a coordinated message across the country, a full alternative to what is a terrible but at this point default vision. Some voters will hate it, and centrist commentator types will lose their minds. That’s fine, because staying the course is a losing message—and not to mention, just plain wrong.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186487/kamala-harris-democrats-shameful-foolish-surrender-immigration

2024-09-30 10:22:14

Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rant About Fox News Contains Hidden Warning
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The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the September 30, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: At the rally in Wisconsin over the weekend, Donald Trump really cranked up the rage and hate speech about immigrants in a major way. He seethed at Kamala Harris over a speech she gave laying out her own vision of immigration. But something else Trump said at the rally deserves special attention. He directly attacked Fox News for the mere act of carrying Harris’s speech on the network. He said they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. This, when taken along with other things Trump has been saying lately, should be seen as a warning of sorts, a preview about what might happen to dissent if Trump wins a second term. Today we’re discussing all this with Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, who is very good at interpreting the dangerous subtexts of Trump’s most unhinged public utterances. Good to have you on, Amanda. Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.Sargent: At his rally in western Wisconsin, Trump said that migrants will “walk into your kitchen and cut your throat.” He called Kamala Harris “mentally impaired.” He said migrants will transform every American town into a “third-world hellhole.” This is a way of getting the MAGA masses excited about the bloody mass deportations and detention camps to come if he’s elected. You wrote recently in your newsletter that Trump’s language is getting more violent to create permission to persecute enemies within. Is this more of the same? Marcotte: Yeah. It’s getting to the point of fantasyland, right? We saw that going on with the cat- and dog-eating accusations. It’s convincing people to live in a mental space that’s outside of their normal reality. You see in history that this has been very effective at getting people to think about committing violence and doing acts of violence that are outside of what they would normally be willing to put up with. It’s going to cause hate crimes, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s also about accepting any kind of violence that’s coming. It’s putting people in this space of the unimaginable and keeping them there. It’s telling people to think in a sense that, Look, you can just invent a whole alternate world where all this is OK, meaning the violence toward migrants. It’s very much reminiscent, and I’m not the first person to say this, of the satanic panic in the 1980s where the level of accusations against daycare workers and other people, that heavy metal musicians and stuff just got completely out of control, that they were engaging in human sacrifice, that they somehow had murdered thousands and hidden it and things like that. A lot of that was about justifying the religious right’s grab for power, their crackdown on music, their censorship, other things that I think previous to that would have been not allowed in American society. They work themselves into a frenzy of moral justification by imagining enemies that were so bad, so evil that everything was justified in stopping them.Sargent: You just gave me a flashback to Stranger Things, which is also set in the ’80s where there’s this witch hunt for this one guy who’s called a freak because he wears a denim jacket that has a heavy metal logo on the back. I want to play a specific quote from Trump at the rally. He talked about the speech that Harris gave Friday night, laying out her plans for stricter border security and comprehensive immigration reform. Then he said this:Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night. And who puts it on Fox News? And they shouldn’t be allowed to put it on. It’s all lies. It’s all lies. Everything she said is a lie.Sargent: Amanda, this is really unhinged. Trump just said Fox News shouldn’t be allowed to air the opposition’s criticism of him. You have to take that along with his recent threat to prosecute Google if elected, for no reason other than it carried stories that criticize him. Amanda, does this also fit into your frame in that it creates a permission structure for persecution of the media for criticizing him later? Marcotte: Absolutely. Trump has long held the opinion that one of the most important benefits of power is silencing people who criticize you. And he’s getting louder and louder about it and more and more obnoxious about the double standard that he holds, which is if you say things I like, then that’s free speech, and if you say things I don’t like, then that should be criminal, right? Trying to hold him to any legal or morally consistent standard is ridiculous because his only standard is if I like it, it’s good and legal, if I don’t like it, it should be criminal. The scary thing here is that that narcissism is spreading out across the supporters. Elon Musk is a good example. He’s somebody who calls himself a free speech warrior because he lets Nazis run rampant on Twitter. He published the “Twitter files,” which were all these interior communications at Twitter under the guise of free speech. But then what happened was a journalist got his hands on a dossier that the Trump campaign had made up about J.D. Vance that was supposed to be private, published it, put it on Twitter, and Elon Musk censored that. The only consistent standard here is if it’s for Trump, he’s for it, and if it’s against Trump, he will censor it. He doesn’t even try to be consistent anymore. Sargent: I want to pick up on that because I think it’s crucial for people to understand that the explicit declaration of a double standard is the thing here. That is the thing that Trump is promising. He’s saying, We no longer have to be consistent. Everything should be rigged in our favor. Elections that we lose are illegitimate. Elections that we win are legitimate. The media is being fair when it criticizes our opponents. The media is being unfair when it criticizes us. He is essentially selling a liberation from consistency and neutrality to his supporters. Marcotte: It’s very explicitly this end-of-liberal-democratic ideals, right? And replacing them with fairly classic fascist ideals, “blood and soil” notions. J.D. Vance’s speech at the RNC was very clear on this, that what makes you an American is that you’re born here and your ethnicity and your history here. And he played a little around the edges to imply that there was some allowance for racial diversity in there, but we all heard what he was saying, which is Americans are an ethnic group and that ethnic group is obviously a white one and a conservative one and a Christian one and all these other things. Once you’ve redefined American-ness in those lines, you can redefine the law and who is in and who is out. And the consistency here is not that we have free speech for all citizens or all people actually. It’s that the in-group are real Americans and they have all the rights and privileges and the out-group are not real Americans and they deserve nothing. Sargent: The bigger context here though is CBS News just announcing that its moderators won’t be fact-checking the vice presidential candidates at this week’s debate. Remember, ABC News did fact-check Trump and Harris at their debate. And as a result, Trump and top MAGA propagandists attack ABC relentlessly for weeks. Trump even said ABC should lose its license for telling the truth about his lies. Is it fair to read this and the attack on Fox News for merely airing Harris’s criticism of him as a clear advertisement of what a President Trump would try to do to dissent with executive power in a second term? Marcotte: Absolutely. He’s made it very clear what he thinks the new order should be. It’s interesting to me, too, that Fox News continues to do right-wing propaganda in the old-fashioned way, which is they create the appearance of a news network so that it legitimizes what is actually just right-wing propaganda. It shows that they’ve long believed, and I think correctly, that conservatives want to view themselves as engaging in a liberal democracy just with a different value system and a different set of beliefs. They would mimic what that would look like while not actually doing that. Trump is saying we don’t need that anymore, that everyone’s on board with just straight-up fascist views on how government should run, how society should be run, that, for me and my friends, everything, for the opposition, nothing, right? Sargent: Persecution. Marcotte: Yeah, persecution. I don’t know that he is as right as he thinks he is. He goes to his rallies and people cheer him on when he says things like this. I think he has it in his head that this is the majority view on the conservative side. And I think that that’s not true…Sargent: Right.Marcotte: …that the kind of people that go to MAGA rallies are just full blown fascists. But there are a lot of people that don’t really want to accept that this is what they signed on to. And they like the comfort blanket of being told that Trump is a normal Republican. This is a normal political party. We’re still engaging in liberal democracy. And that’s how they tell themselves how to sleep at the end of the day. Sargent: Right. It’s a little hard to say exactly what MAGA rally attendees believe. I think certainly some of them are there for the authoritarian display. Whether all of them are, I don’t know. I will tell you, there was some really interesting polling from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that something like high 60s, low 70s percent of people who view Trump positively agree with the statements that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America as Trump has put it, and agree that immigrants are invading our country in a way that eradicates our culture. By the way, Trump started using that word “culture” at this rally as well. What do you think of that? That’s really a euphemism, isn’t it? “Culture”? In other words, it’s a euphemism when Trump says they’re a threat to culture. Marcotte: Western civilization, Western culture, these have been euphemisms that have been used by the “alt-right.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186494/transcript-trumps-angry-rant-fox-news-contains-hidden-warning

2024-09-30 10:22:13

The Grim Truth Behind Microsoft’s Plan for Three Mile Island and AI
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Microsoft has long wanted to power the AI future with nuclear fission, and has hinted at plans to be at the forefront of this technology. AI data centers are notorious power-hogs, their electrical demand projected to grow 160 percent by 2030. But nuclear energy, Microsoft suggested, might offer a way out of this problem. Last year, the tech giant posted a job ad seeking a manager with at least six years of experience in the nuclear energy industry for a role leading “all aspects of energy infrastructure for global growth.” What hi-tech magic did Microsoft have up its sleeve? Was it about to crack the code and roll out the long awaited series of small modular reactors that have been touted for years with “let’s get real” smugness by activists like Michael Shellenberger as the only way to cut greenhouse gases and still meet the world’s energy needs? Would Microsoft’s “AI For Good” team, supposedly “working to accelerate solutions and develop climate resilience with AI,” somehow find the silver bullet?Now, almost exactly a year later, Microsoft has finally announced at least one part of what this energy plan actually is: to reopen America’s most cursed nuclear generating station, Three Mile Island. Microsoft and Baltimore’s Constellation Energy will bring the shuttered 835 megawatt Three Mile Island Unit 1 back online after five years out of service. Unit 1 is not, it should be noted, the same unit that melted down in 1979 in America’s worst and most notorious commercial nuclear accident. That would be unit 2—which will remain closed. The enterprise will be renamed “Crane Clean Energy Center.”In a sane world, this farce should mark the end of the romance between Big Tech and nuclear power. But that is not the world we live in.The publication Crude Oil Prices Today was impressed by the plan, praising it as a “breakthrough” not so much in energy, but finance. Typically, nuclear projects involve massive federal loans and subsidies, but despite the $1.6 billion Constellation will need to get the unit cooking again, this project appears to be bankrolled entirely by Microsoft. “Unlike typical regulated utility investments where the public ultimately pays, this transaction involves no public funds or support at all. This is a transaction solely between Constellation’s non-regulated energy subsidiary and Microsoft,” Crude Oil Prices Today wrote.But the project will almost certainly need more money in the future. “The $1.6 billion is just the start,” Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Jacobson told me. “Microsoft will be asking for government handouts just like most all other aged nuclear reactor owners have asked in multiple states.”When reached for comment on the likelihood of subsidies being involved, a PR representative speaking on behalf Microsoft, Ben Wilsker, reiterated that Constellation Energy is the owner, not Microsoft, but didn’t comment on the subsidies. Jacobson is skeptical about nuclear energy’s usefulness for meeting AI’s energy demands. “Microsoft is far better off investing in real solutions: solar photovoltaics, onshore wind, offshore wind, batteries, and geothermal electricity,” he said. “But Bill Gates is good at making bad decisions about energy, and investing in completely useless solutions.” According to Wilsker, Microsoft “promotes and purchases,” grid energy including “wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear, and green hydrogen.” It’s not uncommon for consumers in general to purchase grid power that includes energy from renewables.Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder, still works at the company as technology advisor to CEO Satya Nadella. He’s now also the founder of the nuclear energy company TerraPower. In June, a crowd showed up in Kemmerer, Wyoming for the groundbreaking of TerraPower’s new nuclear generating station. Gates told his Kemmerer audience that they were standing on “what will soon be the bedrock of America’s energy future.” In theory, Kemmerer Power Station, Unit 1 is the only new U.S. nuclear generating station currently under construction. But the forward momentum implied by the groundbreaking ceremony seems to be smoke and mirrors: The reactor design has yet to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, The New York Times reported, and this type of reactor design relies on Russian innovation. The plant requires a special kind of fuel, according to University of British Columbia physicist M.V. Ramana—one that “they were originally hoping to import from Russia,” Ramana told me. “But those plans fell through after Russia invaded Ukraine,” he said. In other words, offices and parking lots can be built in Kemmerer, but the crucial reactor at the station’s center is on hold until some other enriched uranium supplier can ship commercial quantities of viable fuel, and there’s no word on when that will be. Andy Hallmark, a communications representative at TerraPower confirmed to me that the groundbreaking in June was for the “non-nuclear sections of the plant.” TerraPower’s view is that the necessary fuel will become available, because “other global suppliers are expected to develop similar capacity as demand grows,” and that his company is “confident in securing a solution for our plant, which is why we remain on schedule with its construction.”Microsoft owns power-hungry data centers in Wyoming, and the company’s angst about the carbon footprint of those data centers is well-documented. As of 2013, it powered at least one with waste methane given off by a local water treatment facility, and in 2021, it announced grants to local environmentalists as it built more, along with promises that they’re “built with sustainability top of mind.” It’s hard not to feel, however, that the company is now entering the realm of self-satire. For example, if I were writing a darkly comedic prestige drama about Microsoft’s efforts to green up, even as its AI ambitions cause its energy needs to spike, I might worry that having the company sell AI products to ExxonMobil and Chevron designed to help find new oil and gas deposits would be, while delightfully nefarious, too implausible. Amazingly, Microsoft is actually doing this. Still, after Bill Gates’s nuclear power project went off the rails, I would resist the temptation to have my CEO character say “Fuck it! Let’s reopen Three Mile Island.” That would be downright hacky.Yet by 2028, pending regulatory approval, Three Mile Island will be back online. The people of Pennsylvania will reportedly receive their share of what Constellation claims will be $3 billion in state and federal taxes. An average climate-concerned person, hoping nuclear energy might offset some of their carbon footprint, has probably been looking for hopeful messages about nuclear for years. Alas, this latest headline is far from it. Microsoft’s message is: “Low-carbon energy for me, not for thee, but you’re welcome for Copilot, now available on Windows 11.” It’s an energy plan so gut-wrenchingly bleak, one can’t help but wonder if one of Microsoft’s “AI for Good” chatbots really did come up with it.
https://newrepublic.com/series/49/microsoft-three-mile-island-ai-nuclear

2024-09-27 21:09:14

Trump Is So Mad About His Bad Press That He’s Unleashed a New Threat
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On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump called for the prosecution of Google for displaying negative stories about him. The remarks are characteristic of the Republican nominee, who often vows retribution and elevates baseless claims of bias, but chilling nonetheless.“It has been determined,” the Republican nominee posted on Truth Social, “that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris.“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY,” he said, adding that, if the Justice Department does not “criminally prosecute” Google for election interference, he will “request their prosecution, at the maximum levels” if elected president.The source of Trump’s claim appears to be the right-wing Media Research Center, which published a report on Wednesday covered this week by Fox News and The New York Post. MRC’s report “analyzed the Sept. 6 Google search results” for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” The group alleges that the results favored outlets with “a history of leftist bias,” and that, while Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in his search results, Harris’s campaign website appeared third in hers.Dismissing MRC’s report, a Google spokesperson told Fox, “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”Trump’s Truth Social post recalls his previous claims that Google search results are biased against him, which Google has denied. It is also yet another example of Trump promising to prosecute his perceived political foes if he retakes the White House. Earlier this month, for example, Trump posted to Truth Social that, if he wins, “those people that CHEATED”—such as “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials”—“will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186471/trump-proseuction-threat-bad-press-coverage

2024-09-27 21:09:12

Taylor Swift Has Republicans Seeing Red
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Who’s afraid of little old me? Republicans, it seems, who are unsurprisingly pissed that Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris earlier this month. A recent NBC News poll found that 47 percent of Republicans had an unfavorable view of Swift, a significant increase from the same poll taken a year before, which found that only 26 percent viewed her negatively. Only 12 percent of Republicans reported having a favorable view of the global pop singer, down from 28 percent the year before. Swift has also seen a drop in favorability among independents, from 34 percent to 26 percent.Meanwhile, Swift has seen a slight uptick in favorability from Democrats, from 53 percent to 58 percent. Trump claimed that Swift would suffer in the market for his failure to endorse him, but either way she was bound to have Bad Blood with someone. Naturally, the more batshit side of the conservative base has been railing for months that Swift’s career (as well as that of her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce) was a Democratic psyop, all but teeing her up to endorse Harris. Now that it’s finally happened, her decision appears to have pushed away the more hardline Trump supporters. Swift’s endorsement of Harris was relatively diplomatic toward Trump, as she urged her followers to “do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most.” Swift cited fake, A.I.-generated images that purported to be a bona fide endorsement of Trump as the thing that forced her hand, writing, “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter.” Look what you made her do, alas.For Trump’s part, he stayed characteristically calm—oh, no wait. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” he posted in a rage. Ah well, Siri, play “Cassandra.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186479/taylor-swift-republicans-approval-rating

2024-09-27 19:58:23

The Fear That’s Keeping Mitt Romney From Endorsing Harris
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Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who has said he would not vote for Donald Trump, has expressed some reticence about endorsing Trump’s opponent over a particularly grim worry. The Washington Post reported Friday that Romney has cited concern for his family’s safety as one of the reasons he has not publicly supported Kamala Harris, according to one person familiar with the Utah politician’s thinking. This isn’t the first time that Romney has expressed this particular fear. After the January 6 riot, the former Republican presidential nominee started paying $5,000 a day for private security for his family, according to The Atlantic. Romney said he could understand why some of his colleagues were fearful about voting to impeach Trump, because it might place figurative bull’s-eyes on their backs, ripe targets for the more violent members of Trump’s base. In an interview with The Atlantic published earlier this week, Romney fretted over his ability to keep his entire family safe from Trump’s ire, should he be reelected in November. (Trump has made it clear that his plans for a second term include seeking revenge on those who’ve wronged him.)“How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids?” Romney told The Atlantic. “I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.”Republicans being influenced by the threats and intimidation campaigns of MAGA members is hardly a new phenomenon.Romney has also questioned the value of his endorsement in a post-Trump America, and whether it might hurt his credibility as a conservative voice, according to the Post. Earlier this year, Romney said he would not vote for Trump but refused to say whether he would support Joe Biden. Romney has remained quiet, unlike other Republicans who have found themselves targeted by MAGA Republicans, like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who endorsed Harris last month. (Her dad did too!)Earlier this month, more than 100 former GOP officials signed a public letter endorsing Harris, warning that Donald Trump is “unfit” for the presidency or “any office of public trust.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186473/mitt-romney-endorse-harris-violence

2024-09-27 17:48:02

Tucker Carlson Just Hit a New Low
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Comedian Roseanne Barr is all in on the right-wing conspiracy hype train.During a leg of ex–Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s tour in Fort Worth, Texas, on Tuesday, the Trump-supporting actress echoed QAnon theories, insisting that Hollywood denizens are “gay as hell,” and likened liberals to “vampires” that “love the taste of human flesh.”“You know they eat babies. That is not bullshit, it’s true,” Barr said. All the while, Carlson nodded along and giggled, seemingly in agreement.In fact, Carlson prodded her to continue, echoing a similarly baseless and asinine theory that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets.“It’s not just the dogs and the cats,” Barr said, not joking. “They are full-on vampires, and everybody still thinks I’m crazy. But I’m not crazy. They’re full-on vampires. They love the taste of human flesh, and they drink human blood. They do.” Of course, according to Barr, Trump will be the antidote to all this madness. “By the time we go in to vote for Trump, that he will open up everybody’s eyes and they will stop pretending to be asleep,” she continued. “You know what they say. You can’t wake people up that are pretending to be asleep. But I pray to God, please wake up. Even those who are pretending to be asleep with the irrefutable truth of what the worst people on this planet are really up to. They are really up to that. They’re doing it. There are so many victims. There are so many victims!”During the same interview, Barr went on a tangent against liberals for accepting the 2020 presidential election results, clamoring that it was Democrats—not registered Republicans supporting the former president—who attempted to thwart the results “with their insurrection.”“They overthrew the constitutional republic of the United States of America,” Barr said. “And then they covered it up with their January 6 bullshit. With their insurrection!”“President Trump … God bless that man, I love him, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “I love him more now than I ever loved him, and I loved him pretty damn good. He drove me out in a Bentley when I did my second HBO special at Trump Palace in Atlantic City, if you’ve seen it.”As Tucker Carlson’s tour rolls on, headliner Roseanne Barr tells a cheering audience that the elites are eating babies and are vampires who drink blood and love the taste of human flesh but Trump is going to stop it. pic.twitter.com/ohLDmCm1It— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 27, 2024
https://newrepublic.com/post/186458/tucker-carlson-just-hit-new-low

2024-09-27 17:47:23

The Most Important Thing for Harris Isn’t the Economy. It’s This.
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Kamala Harris’s economic vision speech (delivered in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, a mere two days after yours truly wrote that she needed to give an economic vision speech!) was … fine. Was she offering the second coming of the New Deal? No. Her rhetoric is cautious. More cautious, as American Prospect editor David Dayen interestingly pointed out this week (because Dayen is strongly of the economic populist school), than the plan itself as described in an 82-page “fact sheet” distributed by the campaign. The plan, he wrote, is more progressive than the rhetoric. But on the stump, Harris is not suddenly going to morph into Elizabeth Warren.And today she goes to the Arizona border to try to establish more swing-voter cred. Am I loving the fact that it’s become a big Democratic applause line that she wants to sign conservative GOP Senator James Lankford’s border security bill? No, not by a long shot. On the other hand, in purely naked political terms, is it smart to go at your opponent’s strengths? Yes, it is. It’s pretty basic politics. Trump, for all his extremism, does this frequently. Think of his twisted pitch to women this week. Campaigns that successfully neutralize the other side’s advantages tend to win (George W. Bush on John Kerry’s war record). Campaigns that let disadvantages fester tend to lose (Mitt Romney not convincingly answering Barack Obama’s Bain Capital–related attacks).So Harris is cutting into Trump’s advantages on those two issues. That’s fine, especially with respect to the economy. But issues are the science of campaigning. There’s an art to campaigning too, and it’s on this front that the Harris campaign needs to keep pushing, because it’s here where her biggest advantage over Trump lies.Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark had a smart piece this week reminding us that campaigns consist of news cycles, and the point of news cycles is to win them. Remember how Harris came out of the gate like a rocket in July? That’s because she was doing everything right. She was making news and winning news cycles. The early speeches, the choice and unveiling of Tim Walz, the near-flawless convention—Harris was firing on all cylinders.Back then, practically everything about her was new to most people. But that was bound to end. Now we’re through that discovery phase. And she’s not dominating news cycles the way she was six weeks ago.So, Last writes, the campaign needs to find ways to drive the news. It’s especially important when running against Trump, because he drives news nearly every day. Most of it is madness. But the media machine, as we have learned and relearned, has little capacity to punish madness. It rewards performance. This is what Trump has known for 40 years.The Harris campaign seemed to know this at first, but it has lost a little momentum in these recent weeks as she’s settled more into normalcy—and, I’d say, defense. The economic speech and the border appearance are essentially defense: They’re defending or inoculating her against possible Trump attacks. As I said, they’re justifiable as politics. But they’re not offense.So it’s time to play offense. This is where the art of campaigning comes in, and subconsciously taking advantage of her greatest strengths over Trump:1. She’s not mentally unfit to be the president of the United States.2. She’s not pushing 80.3. People seem to like her. They even seem to like, or at least not dislike, her once-infamous laugh. 4. She proved in the debate that she is smarter than he is, sharper on her feet, his mental and intellectual superior in every way.5. She knows how to get under his skin while keeping her cool.What do these factors add up to? The idea that the Harris campaign should be tossing grenades at Trump that mock and expose him and that make news. Force him to respond. Make him explain. As an analogy, think of a tennis match: One player is sitting calmly at the center of the base line firing ground strokes left and right, while the other is running side to side, panting, covering 25 feet between each shot. It’s pretty obvious who’s going to win most of the points, and the match.Here’s an example. Just yesterday, Trump spoke on Mark Robinson for the first time since the latter’s insane past comments (“I’m a Black NAZI!”) became public. He was making remarks at Trump Tower. As he finished and walked toward a bank of elevators, a reporter asked him if he was “going to pull” his Robinson endorsement. Trump, who once called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” paused and said: “Uh, I don’t know the situation.”Obviously, he knows the situation. The Harris campaign should be out with an ad today mocking this, tying it to other similar remarks of his, like when he pretended he didn’t know who David Duke was. But more: Harris herself should talk to reporters mocking Trump’s lame denial. It needs to be Harris herself, not Walz or Doug Emhoff. There are tons of opportunities. Trump’s liquid rhetoric is such that he constantly contradicts himself and often just makes no sense. It makes me crazy that Harris is being knocked for not having “positions.” Do those critics seriously think that what Trump is saying constitutes “positions”? Remember that answer of his a few weeks ago when the woman asked him about childcare? It was embarrassing to listen to. He does that all the time. Make sure voters know it. Attack. In a mocking way. Make news. Play offense.People like me aren’t supposed to say things like this, but here it is: A lot of these swing voters, they’re not voting on issues. The economy, maybe. But generally, they vote on vibes. Who has the look of a winner? Who looks fresh and ready to tackle this big job, and who looks tired? Who appears to be having fun?That was the Harris of July and August. She had some magic. It’s hardly panic time. A raft of swing state polls came out Thursday night, and she leads in every state except Georgia, where it’s tied. She’s ahead, and he’s weak and worried and knows he might lose (and then face sentencing). He’s crumbling, psychologically. Now is the time to step on the gas.This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186462/harris-economy-border-not-most-important-thing

2024-09-27 17:47:22

J.D. Vance’s Stunning 2020 Admission About Trump Exposes Big MAGA Scam
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J.D. Vance has a long history of telling the truth about Donald Trump, which is proving awfully inconvenient now that Vance’s chief public role as Trump’s vice presidential running mate is to lie about him and “sanewash” his most unhinged claims at every conceivable opportunity. The latest example of Vance’s unfortunate truth-telling? In direct message exchanges from February 2020, Vance flatly declared that he saw Trump’s presidency as largely a failure by one of Vance’s own most important metrics.“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism,” Vance said in the exchanges obtained by The Washington Post, while adding a parenthetical about how Trump’s policies toward China were a partial exception to that rule.The immediate significance of this—expect Tim Walz to mention it in passing at next week’s vice-presidential debate—should be self-evident. One of Vance’s key arguments for Trump is that his first presidency was a right-populist success story on behalf of American workers. Yet as that presidency wound down, Vance apparently admitted privately to something very different.But let’s not overlook the explanation for this apostasy that Vance’s spokesman offered to The Post, because it, too, shines a harsh light on Vance’s evolution from Trump critic to MAGA devotee. The spokesman insisted that in his messages, Vance was merely criticizing the failure of others during the Trump years, i.e., “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda.”But this tidy excuse is undermined by another Vance message. As The Post notes, Vance’s claim that Trump had failed to deliver on economic populism came in the context of a discussion about wealthy people running for president in 2020 and whether Trump donors would back one of them instead:Vance said he doubted that Trump’s richest donors would abandon him in 2020 because he had continued to serve their interests as president, despite his populist rhetoric. “Not sure any of these people feel like they need to switch sides,” he wrote.Recall that Trump’s single biggest initiative as president was arguably his multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, which made the rich richer without delivering promised trickle-down economic growth or other benefits to workers. Trump enthusiastically championed these tax cuts. That cannot be blamed on “establishment Republicans.” Vance himself said then—correctly—that Trump had faithfully served the GOP donor class’s interests. The after-the-fact spin from Vance’s spokesperson is absurd.Then there’s another big first-term initiative, Trump’s 2017 drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Here again Trump was as enthusiastic a proponent of repeal as any Paul Ryan disciple in Congress. And we know that Vance himself viewed this as a sellout of populism. How can we be certain of that? Because at the time, Vance said so.In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in June of 2017, Vance decried the version of Obamacare repeal-and-replace that Republicans were moving through Congress at the time. He faulted its deep cuts to the ACA’s Medicaid spending, and explicitly cast this as a betrayal of Trump voters. Trump had been elected because he was a Republican who wasn’t saying, “I’m going to take away your Social Security and your Medicaid,” Vance said, allowing Trump to differentiate himself from other Republicans who wouldn’t “take care of working-class people.” That bill would indeed have hurt untold numbers of poor and working class Trump voters.Yet Trump aggressively pushed for it to pass—while congressional Republicans were a major driver of it, Trump absolutely was as well. Indeed, you can watch video of Trump celebrating the House’s passage of the plan as then-Speaker Ryan and other Republicans applauded gleefully (before repeal died in the Senate). That plainly was a betrayal by Vance’s own lights. There’s no way to pretend now that Trump was stymied by them into committing this sellout.If anything has changed since then, it’s that along these lines, Trump has only gotten more shameless. It’s true that Trump does differ from Ryan-style Republicans in some ways, such as with his promise of more tariffs, which the GOP donor class likely will oppose. But Trump has vowed that in a second term he would make his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations permanent, and he has even promised to cut corporate taxes further, which could be a huge giveaway to the biggest, richest corporations in America.Even worse, during this cycle, Trump has literally promised roomfuls of top GOP donors that he will keep their taxes low while soliciting bucketloads of campaign contributions. Let’s not let it be lost that another Vance spokesman, under questioning from New York Times reporters, admitted that Vance supports this corporate-tax-cutting aspect of Trump’s agenda. During his convention speech, Vance tried to package another Trump term as the second coming of Trumpist populism, describing Trump as “a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business” and “won’t sell out to multinational corporations.” Perhaps some reporter might ask the Great Populist Intellectual Vance how this squares with the corrupt gilded-back-room promises to chortling plutocrats that Trump has been making of late.Trump has also renewed his vow to repeal the ACA and replace it with something indeterminate. Here Vance has helped clarify Trump’s intentions, suggesting recently that a Trump-Vance presidency would allow insurance companies to segment people into different risk pools, which would probably push many people with preexisting conditions off insurance or cause their premiums to soar. In some respects, this idea is similar to the 2017 plan pushed by Trump and the GOP in 2017, as Brian Beutler and Jonathan Cohn helpfully detail. That’s the scheme Vance once described as anathema to right-populism. It’s all but certain that as part of this promised repeal push, Trump and a GOP Congress would again target Medicaid for savage cuts. Now, however, Vance is actively helping Trump spin all this as unthreatening, as maximizing “choice” for regular Americans. That’s the language Ryan-esque Republicans used to sell the previous iteration, only with a more populist gloss: Vance says all this while also pushing the fiction that Trump doesn’t want to kick people off the ACA at all.When Vance declared in 2020 that Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism,” Vance almost certainly meant it as direct criticism of Trump. It’s remarkable that one of Vance’s primary roles is now to employ his populist cred to bury that history—and to seduce working class voters into accepting an agenda that promises an even bigger betrayal of that populism than Trump could even attempt the first time around.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186456/jd-vance-2020-admission-trump-exposes-maga-scam

2024-09-27 17:47:20

Netanyahu Trashes Progressives in U.N. Speech, as Israel Bombs Beirut
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked “self-described progressives” during his speech at the United Nations Friday—barely an hour before Israel began bombing civilian areas in Beirut. Netanyahu attacked progressives for deciding to “march against the democracy of Israel,” while supporting the “Iranian-backed goons in Tehran who gunned down protesters, murdered women for not covering their hair, and hang gays in public squares.” The claim that pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by Iran, or support the Islamic Republic, is far-fetched. But it’s a common smear, associating all pro-Palestine activism with Hamas, which has Iranian support. Netanyahu’s speech of course ignored all the Jewish organizations protesting for Palestinian rights and demanding an end to Israel’s brutal year-long assault on Gaza, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Netanyahu also accused Iran of directly funding pro-Palestine protests. “According to the U.S. director of national intelligence, Iran funds and fuels many of the protesters against Israel. Who knows, maybe, maybe some of the protesters or even many of the protesters outside this building now,” said the Israeli prime minister. In reality, the evidence provided for such claims is thin at best, made in passing by U.S. officials and right-wing media. Shortly after Netanyahu used his U.N. speech to share elementary school graphics calling Israel’s enemies “a curse” and its allies “a blessing,” Israel began bombing civilian areas in Beirut and its suburbs, claiming to be targeting Hezbollah’s central headquarters and leaving smoldering craters in the densely populated city. Beirut now; they are carpet bombing the city.100,000 people fled to Beirut from the South in search of safety pic.twitter.com/mmFxRUwHfS— Philip Proudfoot 🇱🇧🇵🇸 (@PhilipProudfoot) September 27, 2024None of this bombastic rhetoric is out of character for Netanyahu, who has complained that the Biden administration hasn’t sent Israel enough weapons despite Israel’s bombing of Gaza and Lebanon continuing unabated. He has humiliated President Biden and cozied up to Donald Trump. And of course, he faces a possible arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Netanyahu ought to be reined in with an arms embargo against Israel, but Biden has refused.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186453/netanyahu-trashes-progressives-un-speech-israel-bombs-beirut

2024-09-27 16:45:37

Harris Is Crushing Trump Among Key Voters in Two Battleground States
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According to new polling, Donald Trump is losing a key demographic in two battleground states. A survey of Hispanic voters in Arizona and Georgia, conducted by TelevisaUnivision and reported in Newsweek, shows Trump faring considerably worse than Kamala Harris. The poll shows Harris enjoying a comfortable, 34-point lead among Hispanic voters in Arizona. About 52 percent of respondents, up from 43 last month, said they would “definitely” vote for the vice president, while 18 percent, down from 25, said the same of Trump.Harris leads Trump among Hispanic voters in Georgia as well, albeit by only seven points. Forty-four percent, up from 38 in July, said they would “definitely” vote for her, while the percentage of respondents who said the same of Trump increased by just one point in the same period.Still, 35 percent of the Arizonan and 38 percent of the Georgian respondents remain “undecided about whether the candidate they are supporting is the right choice.” Regarding the findings, a TelevisaUnivision representative told Newsweek that the Harris and Trump campaigns should “do more to engage these voters with messaging that addresses the issues that matter to them, and, most importantly, they should do that in Spanish.” According to the poll, Hispanic voters in the Grand Canyon and Peach States see “cost of living, inflation and the economy and jobs” as the most pressing issues.On Tuesday, Univision announced that it will host a town hall event with each candidate early next month (Trump’s on October 8 and Harris’s on October 10), where “undecided Hispanic voters … will take the microphone to ask questions of each candidate.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186441/harris-trump-poll-hispanic-voters-arizona-georgia

2024-09-27 15:33:31

J.D. Vance’s Christian Nationalist Ties Are Growing
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The Republican vice presidential nominee will attend an event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday hosted by The Lance Wallnau Show.Wallnau is a one of the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sect of evangelical Christianity devoted to proselytizing the Seven Mountain Mandate, referring to the seven aspects of society—government, family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, education, and business—that its followers are meant to influence with their faith so that Christians can hold dominion over the world. Unsurprisingly, he’s adamantly pro–Donald Trump. Wallnau has been associated with Trump’s campaign since at least January 2024, when he announced his “Courage Tour” in collaboration with the far-right youth organization Turning Point USA, another group hoping to flesh out Trump’s lackluster ground game. Wallnau said the tour aimed to get “civically enlightened” pastors to turn out their church members for the “America First agenda,” according to Rolling Stone. The Courage Tour urges attendees not only to vote but to sign up as election workers and poll watchers. In an interview with CBS News, Wallnau called it “spiritual activism,” but it’s actually likely illegal under U.S. tax code. (Kirk had offered resources to pastors seeking to “challenge the IRS,” and Wallnau has pushed for churches to be “courageous.”) Now Vance and Wallnau will join forces in an essential battleground state for Trump. It seems like Vance and Wallnau may have a lot to talk about, considering the fact that they’re both raging misogynists. Wallnau has repeatedly referred to Kamala Harris as a “Jezebel,” a racist and misogynist trope with distinctly violent implications. Shortly after Harris’s candidacy for president was announced in July, Wallnau said Trump’s opponent represented “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”They could also talk about Wallnau’s podcast, where he regularly pushes far-right talking points, like a resented episode in which he fomented the dangers of “hit squads” coming over the “open borders” to assassinate Trump. Vance’s nomination electrified the Christian nationalist corners of the internet, and recently he’s been doing more outreach to Christian voters. Earlier this week, Vance spoke at the Believers and Ballots event in Charlotte, North Carolina, a key swing state. Vance complained about “crazy transgender bills,” claimed that Christianity is the “most persecuted faith in the world today,” and called Harris “the biggest threat to religious liberty we’ve had in at least a generation.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/186446/jd-vances-christian-nationalist-ties-growing

2024-09-27 15:33:26

Major Conservative Poll Cited by Media Secretly Worked With Trump Team
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A major polling organization is reportedly giving Donald Trump’s campaign previews of its results before the public sees them. On Thursday, American Muckrakers posted about emails it received detailing how the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports, which claims to be nonpartisan, shared polling results with Trump advisers and campaign officials like Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, and John McLaughlin. The advisers, Rasmussen, and the nonprofit organizations that pay it for polling are violating tax and election laws, according to American Muckrakers. One of the emails details close collaboration between the Trump campaign, Rasmussen, and the Heartland Institute, which calls itself a national free-market public policy think tank. However, it’s also a 501(c)3 nonprofit and is not allowed to engage in political activity benefiting a political candidate. Rasmussen has long been criticized for its polling, which focuses on “likely voters,” and for skewing toward older Americans and providing favorable results to conservatives. During the Trump administration, its website became overtly supportive of the right wing, with many of its polls sponsored by conservative personalities and causes. On social media, Rasmussen appeared to legitimize many conspiracy theories on the right, such as election fraud and vaccine denialism. Earlier this year, the polling aggregator 538 dropped Rasmussen Reports from its averages and forecasts, saying that the firm couldn’t meet 538’s standards for objectivity and methodology. This drew a major backlash from right-wing media, especially after Rasmussen published a letter from 538 asking the polling firm questions about its procedures and biases. The revelations from American Muckrakers go beyond simple political bias and into outright collaboration between Republicans and Rasmussen, explaining the organization’s overt partisan change. It would seem to invite possible legal trouble for Rasmussen too, although there’s no shortage of conservative judges and lawyers ready to shield it from consequences.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186444/conservative-poll-rasmussen-secretly-worked-trump-team

2024-09-27 14:25:26

J.D. Vance Was Criticizing Trump More Recently Than You Think
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It turns out that as recently as 2020, J.D. Vance was critical of Donald Trump. The Washington Post reported Friday that the Republican vice presidential nominee called out Trump as having “just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” in one of multiple direct messages on Twitter (now X) back in February 2020. Vance has explained his shift from being a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016, promoting his book Hillbilly Elegy, to supporting Trump in 2020 by saying Trump’s presidential term changed his mind. But apparently, that wasn’t really the case. In another message in June 2020, just months before the election, Vance wrote, “I think Trump will probably lose.” When Trump did lose, Vance claimed the election was stolen by the Democrats. The messages were shared with the Post by their recipient anonymously out of fear of retaliation. They were also sent years after Vance was critical of Trump during his 2016 campaign for president, when he called Trump “reprehensible” and “America’s Hitler.” A Vance spokesperson told the Post the Ohio senator wasn’t actually criticizing Trump but “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” said William Martin. But this statement doesn’t take into account that Vance also correctly predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election, only to deny that after the fact. Vance has never been particularly clear on when he started to support Trump, the Post notes, begging the question of whether it was him actually changing his mind or making a calculated political decision. In another direct message, Vance even seemed open to government-run universal health care, saying Medicare for All “is a net positive, maybe not (details matter).” But Martin told the Post that Vance now believes “the Democrats[’] top-down Medicare for All plan would make healthcare worse for Americans,” which is backed up by Vance and Trump’s regressive health care proposals. Whatever the case may be, Vance is fully defending Trump and providing his own defenses for the former president’s proposed policies, nonsensical as they may be. But the Post’s revelations suggest that Vance could just be saying whatever he thinks will satisfy the MAGA faithful.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186439/jd-vance-criticize-trump-failed-to-deliver

2024-09-27 10:34:20

Throw the Book at Visa
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The Justice Department’s antitrust case against Visa, which was announced Tuesday, is best understood as an important (and, in my view, overdue) new stage in the history of money, which is basically a sad tale of tangible currency becoming ever-less-tangible and therefore ever-easier for a private third party (typically banks; in this case, Visa) to siphon away a portion without attracting notice from nice people like you and me. Other, less-nice people may notice, but when they do the third party can buy their silence. Eventually the government catches on and puts a stop to this anti-competitive behavior. But as we’ll see in the case of Visa, the arc of the moral universe is long.I’m getting ahead of our story.According to the American Numismatic Society, money was first used in Mesopotamia and Egypt about 4500 years ago. Gold and silver, then (as now) precious metals, were traded “in the form of metal bars or bits of wire.” Later, starting around 650 B.C. in Lydia (situated in modern-day Turkey), money came in “little round lumps of electrum (a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver).” These were “the first coins.” About a century later, King Croesus accumulated enough of these lumps to be remembered as the richest person in history, though in fact Croesus doesn’t even crack Forbes’s top 25. (More on the history of extreme wealth here.)At this early stage, money was free. Every transaction was a straight-up exchange of coins for whatever goods or services were desired. Manufacturing the coins created an external cost, of course, but this was absorbed by emperors and kings. When you bought something, you paid no additional transaction fee.Eventually it became a nuisance to cart around a lot of gold and silver coins, prompting the Chinese, in the seventh century AD, to invent paper money. Paper money wasn’t real money, because pretty obviously a piece of paper is not in itself worth anything. It was an IOU promising to fork over a certain quantity of silver or gold, which was worth something, in exchange for some item or service. For a long time, such promises aroused suspicion, often justified, that the IOU would never be honored. Consequently, western nations looked askance at paper money until the 17th century, when the Swedes started experimenting with it. By the 18th century paper money was in common use. With paper money, currency shifted from being an item of intrinsic value (the British “pound sterling” being quite literally a quantity of silver that weighed one pound) to an item of no intrinsic value except as a promise to furnish something of value on request (the British pound note). The recipient extended credit; the giver incurred debt; and the government balanced the scales with precious metals—silver at first, then later gold, which, being more scarce, made the paper flow less freely (thereby bequeathing America Populism, The Wizard of Oz, and William Jennings Bryan). As with coins, purchases by paper money incurred no transaction fee. The emperors and kings who printed it had by this time devised an infinite variety of superior means to extract wealth from their populations—methods that did not impede commerce.Eventually governments figured out that they didn’t really need gold to control the circulation of money; indeed, going off the gold standard, as the United States did temporarily during the Great Depression and, later, permanently in the 1970s, gave governments more control. (It took the Federal Reserve about a decade to master that control, greatly worsening in the meantime what’s now remembered as the Great Inflation.) With the United States off the gold standard, a dollar bill became an item of no intrinsic worth that was valuable not because it could be redeemed in gold but because we all chose to believe it was valuable. But paper money was almost as big a nuisance to cart around in large quantities as silver and gold, necessitating the creation of checking accounts, which first gained widespread use in the United States around the middle of the 19th century. A check was a paper IOU redeemable for another paper IOU (cash). Its value, rather than fixed in advance, as paper money was, varied according to the transaction. The guarantor of this do-it-yourself currency was not a government, but a private bank. The snake had entered the garden.Paying by check incurred a transaction fee (direct or indirect) because the bank needed to cover the cost of printing the check, or of moving your money from Point A to Point B, or of providing some other banking service such as mailing you a monthly statement. For the first time, it cost (slightly) more to buy something than the price of the thing itself. The next stage in money’s march toward intangibility arrived in 1958 with the advent of Bank Americard, which we know today as Visa. Credit cards came into being because carting around a checkbook—like carrying pieces of silver and paper money before it—became a nuisance. With Bank Americard, you could carry a small piece of plastic in your wallet, use it pay for stuff, then decide when to hand over the cash. There had been charge cards before (Diners Club, Carte Blanche, American Express among them), but these required that you pay off your entire tab every month. Bank Americard did not. In fact, it preferred that you didn’t, because then it could charge you interest on the unpaid portion. Everyday consumption became everyday debt. This feature allowed Bank Americard (then an arm of the Bank of America) to greatly increase what your bank charged you to buy stuff, spawning a new industry. Let’s call it the Buying Stuff Industry. Then, in 1969, something terrible happened. Terrible for the Buying Stuff Industry, anyway. Chemical Bank installed in Rockville Centre, New York, something called a Docuteller, which turned out to be the first Automatic Teller Machine, or ATM. The ATM, which took about a decade to catch on—I saw my first one in 1976—allowed you to extract cash from your account at any time of day or night; all you had to do was insert a card that looked exactly like a credit card but was called a debit card. The debit card was not an instrument to borrow money and pay interest to credit card companies and banks. It was an instrument to withdraw money in your possession and not pay interest, or even a check fee, to anyone. For many years debit cards incurred no transaction fees at all. You didn’t pay a transaction fee during bank hours when a human teller handed you cash from your account. Why should you pay a fee when a machine (my first was called, I kid you not, “the Cool-O-Mat”) did the same thing? To the Buying Stuff Industry, the ready availability of cash at all hours was bad. But much worse was that, within a few years of the debit card’s debut, it could be used to buy stuff in stores, displacing purchases by credit card. Suddenly people were buying stuff not by incurring debt but by spending money in their bank accounts. This was intolerable! Then, in the early 1990s, the point-of-sale terminal came to the rescue.Credit cards were processed initially with a manual imprinter (“knuckle buster”) that made a carbon copy of your credit card. The cashier also had to call the issuing bank to make sure the card number wasn’t stolen. Later, these two functions were combined digitally, but the process still took about five minutes. Only in the 1990s did point-of-sale technology become available that could process credit card payments as quickly as cash or a paper check.In theory, this same technology also enabled a retailer to process a debit card payment as quickly as cash or paper check. But the credit card companies owned the computer networks that processed point-of-sale transactions, charging a swipe fee for each transaction, and they didn’t feel like sharing them with debit cards. For a while this slowed the spread of debit cards. Eventually, though, debit cards became too popular to exclude. The credit card companies then created a new kind of “offline” debit card. You couldn’t use this card to withdraw cash from an ATM, but you could use it to make a retail purchase that took money out of your bank account. Unlike an ATM card, the offline debit card incurred swipe fees comparable to those for credit cards. Later, ATM cards started charging swipe fees, too, but these were only half those for offline debit cards. Still later, ATM cards and offline debit cards were combined into a single “general purpose” debit card—and these new hybrids incurred retail swipe fees as high as 44 cents per transaction. Buying stuff with your own money was now an invisible transaction conducted silently with a stripe or a chip on a piece of plastic. It had lost all sense of being an interaction between two humans. And it was getting very expensive.The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law directed the Fed to put a ceiling on debit-card swipe fees. But after considering a ceiling of about 12 cents per transaction, the Fed settled for a too-generous 21 cents, plus an “ad valorum” equal to 0.05 percent of the purchase price and a 1-cent charge to cover fraud protection. Last November, the Fed issued a proposed rule that would lower the ceiling to 14.4 cents and the ad valorum to 0.04 percent. (Credit cards can still charge whatever swipe fee they want.)All this happened well outside the consciousness of the ordinary shopper. When you buy something with a debit or credit card, the receipt doesn’t include an entry for a swipe fee, because that’s charged directly to the merchant (who has already raised prices to cover it). On rare occasions the merchant may tell you that an item will be more expensive if you purchase it with plastic, but most of the time he just charges everybody a little bit more. Debit card usage has now grown to the point where it matches or outpaces credit card usage. In 2020, debit card spending for the first time exceeded, in dollars, credit card spending. Back in 1969, Bank Americard would have considered this a catastrophe. But, in fact, it was very good news for the successor company, Visa, because Visa now dominates the debit card business, and has for many years.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186435/visa-antitrust-suit-monopoly-biden

2024-09-27 10:34:18

Schools Face More Uncertainty as Pandemic-Era Funding Ends
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One of the final vestiges of pandemic relief is set to end on Monday, with states scrambling to finalize their spending plans for Covid-era federal education block grants and reckoning with a future without additional funds. As school districts face compounding crises—including persistent learning loss among students, lower enrollment, inflationary pressures, and difficulty retaining teachers—the looming loss of these emergency funds could have far-reaching consequences.In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress approved billions of dollars for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program funds, commonly known as ESSER. The third and largest round of ESSER grants were implemented by the American Rescue Plan Act, the nearly $2 trillion coronavirus relief measure approved by Congress in 2021, appropriating around $122 billion to help schools recover from the pandemic. The law required schools to dedicate at least 20 percent of the funds to addressing learning loss from students’ extended time away from school.States and school districts were required to obligate the funds by September 30, 2024, and spend the money by January 25, 2025. (States may seek a 14-month extension to liquidate the funds by March 30, 2026.) Four states and Puerto Rico have seen their extension requests approved, but many states are not expected to seek extensions. After the September 30 deadline, states and school districts can no longer use the funds for employee expenses, such as teacher salaries—instead, that money must be dedicated to vendor contractors.The money from ESSER grants amounted to roughly $2,500 per student nationwide, but higher-poverty districts received more funds, amounting to an even larger amount of spending per student. A 2023 report by the Brookings Institute estimated that the end of the program would result in a significant fiscal cliff, with an average of $1,000 less being spent per student across school districts; this effect would be particularly dramatic for students in high-poverty districts, where the end of ESSER will have a 6 percent impact on school budgets. “As this funding expires, the disparities in achievement that widened during the pandemic have not closed yet,” said Joanna LeFebvre, a research associate at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “States will need to step in and make up for some of that funding loss in order to sustain the growth that was made possible [by the grants].”The reduced revenue streams will also likely force school districts to make tough decisions about what to cut. That includes the looming possibility of layoffs; school districts in Arlington, Texas and Missoula, Montana announced earlier this year that they would need to reduce staffing when the grants expired. School districts may also try to increase class sizes, or delay pay raises for teachers.“The next two years are going to be tight for many, many schools around the country as they figure out how to live without those relief funds. And some will be better at managing that, and some will find themselves really in financial trouble,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.Recent evidence has indicated that ESSER grants helped students recover from learning loss during the pandemic, and helped narrow the gap between school districts with high poverty levels and wealthier districts. One recent study found that “federal relief can explain between one-third to one-half of the improvement in districts with more than 70 percent of students receiving federal lunch subsidies.”How school districts spent the ESSER grants varied somewhat by location, and as the pandemic progressed. A 2022 study by FutureEd found that urban districts were more likely to spend ESSER money on social and emotional learning, while rural districts were more focused on upgrades to facilities. This result was also borne out in an August survey of school superintendents by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, which found that rural districts were far more likely to have reported an investment in facilities than their urban counterparts. The AASA survey also found that the majority of districts invested emergency funds in programs intended to combat learning loss, such as summer learning and afterschool programs. The second-most common expenditure was for addressing students’ mental health and behavioral needs through staffing, programming, curriculum, and professional development.Afterschool programs may also be affected by the end of the ESSER funds. An October 2023 survey of thousands of school districts nationwide by the Afterschool Alliance found that districts dedicated around $5.4 billion to afterschool and summer programming. The study found that many school districts used the ESSER funding to address some of the challenges in implementing successful afterschool programs, such as hiring staff and offering transportation. Despite knowing the deadline for the funds for years, school districts may still be unprepared for the end. Education budgets are generally static year-over-year, said Roza, meaning that when school districts saw a dramatic increase in funds, they immediately took advantage of those new dollars to hike up teacher salaries or hire more staff. “I did hear plenty of districts say, ‘Oh, I’m sure the state will cough up money, because they’re not going to expect us to cut this.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, they are,’” said Roza.The end of the ESSER grants will be accompanied in several states by cuts to other funding streams for education. A recent report by the left-leaning CBPP found that 17 states—more than half of them in the South—are pursuing two or more policies that would cut education revenue even as they face a loss of more than 5 percent in education funding due to the end of ESSER. Arkansas, for example, is facing a 6.8 percent decrease in education funding due to the end of ESSER, even as it is pursuing income and property tax cuts and funding shifts to school vouchers. The CBPP report estimates that the ESSER loss, as well as these tax policies, will result in a loss of nearly $2 billion in education funding in Arkansas in the 2025 fiscal year.“Many states in recent years have cut taxes, and will be much worse positioned to make ongoing investments in education,” said LeFebvre.Regardless of what states do, there will almost certainly be no movement on ESSER on a federal level. Although the first rounds of ESSER grants were approved on a bipartisan basis at the beginning of the pandemic, the American Rescue Plan Act was pushed through Congress with only Democratic votes. Last year, a trio of House Republicans sent a letter to the Department of Education questioning the use of funds on equity initiatives, arguing that these obligations of funds “appear to have nothing to do with COVID-19 mitigation or learning loss and are a waste and misuse of taxpayer-funded COVID-19 relief programs.” Senate Republicans have also questioned the level of oversight on ESSER expenditures.Roza also said that the lack of clear communication on the purpose of the grants led to some confusion from school districts. She relayed the story of a superintendent who believed it was supposed to act as stimulus money, and be spent as soon as possible. “I heard district leaders say, ‘I’m supposed to diversify the workforce, or I’m supposed to invest in technology, or I’m supposed to give pay raises to my team,’” Roza said. “That was the missing piece—that North Star: What do we hope to accomplish with that money?”Conversely, having a clear focus for the funding could result in greater learning recovery. Mississippi, which has a significant number of high-poverty and rural districts, dedicated much of its funding to revamping crumbling infrastructure. According to the Education Recovery Scorecard by researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and Dartmouth College, the state was also one of the few that saw an improvement on pre-pandemic reading levels between spring 2022 and spring 2023.There was a question as to whether school districts would be able to spend all of their remaining ESSER funds before the January deadline, particularly if their state does not seek an extension for the program. The AASA survey found that around 15 percent of superintendents believe they need more time to liquidate all of the funds. Nationwide, school districts have obligated around 87 percent of ESSER funds, and the Department of Education has said it expects 99 percent to have been spent by January. If there is any money left on the table by school districts by the deadline, it will need to be returned to the federal government.Like other Covid-era relief measures, the ESSER grants helped address a short-term problem caused by pandemic societal changes—in this case, learning loss among students—which then highlighted preexisting inequities. The ESSER expiration exposes some of the lingering achievement gaps between high-poverty school districts and their wealthier counterparts; according to the Education Recovery Scorecard survey, poorer districts are still further behind on achievement levels as compared to 2019 levels than wealthier districts. But with states responding differently to the end of ESSER grants, the long-desired return to normal will continue to be uneven.“Kids are still behind where they would have been, and now the money is going away. So the question is, what’s going to happen to the recovery?” said Roza. “Are we going to continue to see recovery now the money’s gone, or is this the new world order for our kids now is that they never recover from Covid, and that’s the new level of their scores.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/186421/schools-esser-grants-funding-gap

2024-09-27 09:57:30

Transcript: Trump’s Angry Eruption at Jack Smith Reveals Deeper Fear
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The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the September 27, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Donald Trump has been pretty quiet about January 6 lately, but out of nowhere he suddenly erupted at special counsel Jack Smith, unleashing an epic rant on social media about supposed new revelations that the deep state deliberately allowed the violent insurrection to go forward against his will. We don’t think it’s a coincidence that Trump is exploding like this, because Jack Smith is submitting a court filing as we speak detailing his full case against Trump’s alleged January 6 related crimes. Depending on how that goes, the public could learn a lot of new information about what Trump did that day and in the run-up to it. Today, we’re talking about all this with Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, who to our mind is one of the best chroniclers of the legal machinations around January 6 out there. Really glad to have you on, Kyle.Kyle Cheney: Good to be with you, and thank you. That was very kind.Sargent: Trump’s latest claim on Truth Social is that House Republicans have uncovered smoking-gun proof that Trump actually did call for 10,000 National Guard troops to come to the Capitol that day and that deep-state subversives disregarded that order. Trump said this proves he did nothing wrong. Now, the January 6 committee completely debunked the idea that Trump called in troops. We saw that in the report. Can you walk us through what this new House GOP finding is supposed to be and what the reality is? Cheney: The rhetoric from Trump is an escalation of claims he’s been making for forever that are just not based in reality. First of all, to my understanding, there aren’t even 10,000 National Guard troops available in Washington, DC. That’s the first giveaway that that was never a serious offer. And it wasn’t even an offer. As you pointed out, the January 6 committee has debunked that, using Trump’s own aides to say there was never an actual offer. I think what we’ve seen House Republicans do is get at this idea that Trump supposedly wanted more law enforcement, more security presence in Washington that day, and that the testimony they’ve got from members of the National Guard, leaders of the Pentagon somehow lend support to this idea that Trump wanted more security and therefore, how could he have wanted what happened to happen at the Capitol? There’s an argument for that, but if you actually look at the totality of evidence, what Trump wanted was his people to be protected from antifa. It’s pretty clear when you look at the sum total of evidence, they were always talking about our people, protect our people from whatever the left is going to throw at them on January 6. It was never about protecting the Capitol. Sargent: Right. It also bears mentioning that none of what Trump or House Republicans are saying now cancels what has been documented about January 6 anyway, which is incredibly damning both in terms of what he did while the violence raged, like point the mob right at his vice president, and what he did in the run-up to it, which showed a multilayered plot to subvert our institutions at every turn. As you said, and I really think this is worth underscoring, much of what was documented about Trump’s own conduct was done with the help of his own aides and advisors who showed extraordinary courage in detailing it, at least some of them did, and have paid a major price for it. Cheney: It’s true, and even the House Republicans who are now reinvestigating this in an attempt to undermine it, what they found… I reviewed some of the transcripts of the National Guardsmen, and leaders who testified, and they said, Had Trump been alarmed enough to call down to DC National Guard headquarters, he might have been able to cut through some red tape to get the guard to the Capitol faster. That’s a big point of contention. The people of the Pentagon said, No, no, no, we had all the authority we needed. But what these guard leaders said was, If you get a call from the president and he says stop the hand-wringing, get people to the Capitol now, it would have happened and it might have happened immediately. Trump never made that call that day. Sargent: He certainly did not. Some of the evidence that’s come out that the January 6 committee documented was that whatever he said was so convoluted and vague and almost meaningless that it just doesn’t come close to showing what he says and shows. Jack Smith just submitted a new dossier to the court, laying out the evidence that he and his prosecutors have of Trump’s criminality. We should remind people that the trial won’t take place until after the election, but you reported in your piece today that this dossier is expected to contain a lot of new information. Before we get to those details about what might be in there, what’s the basic purpose of this move right now by Jack Smith?Cheney: You’re going to hear a lot of complaining that this is Jack Smith trying to influence the election. This was really made necessary, in a sense, by the Supreme Court putting this case on hold for eight months. The ruling that they issued on presidential immunity, which forced Jack Smith to go back to the drawing board for how he was going to craft and frame his case against Trump, created this process. What happened is the Supreme Court said, The judge in your trial, Tanya Chutkan, has to decide whether any of the conduct, any evidence Jack Smith wants to use against you is protected by presidential immunity. Smith said, Let me file all my evidence and show it to you, Judge Chutkan, and you can decide whether it’s subject to presidential immunity or not. And Trump’s attorney said, Well, hold on, if you’re going to start dumping your evidence on the public docket, that’s a month before the election, this is election interference. The judge said, From the beginning, I’ve said I’m not thinking about the election calendar. She also hasn’t said she’s going to make it public, which is the biggest question at the moment. But she has said she will receive Jack Smith’s brief and review it and decide eventually what, if any of it, will become public. Sargent: Let me ask you, though. It’s reasonable to assume that at least some of it will become public, right? Judge Chutkan is someone who seems willing to push the envelope and doesn’t really get pushed around too easily. I’ve got to think there’s a strong public interest here in Americans learning at least some of this stuff, right? Cheney: Yes. Judge Chutkan, maybe above any other judge involved in this process, has cited the public interest in these proceedings to justify scheduling the trial for what she initially did back in March and keeping things moving along. Even her ruling on presidential immunity, which was overturned by the Supreme Court, cited the immense public interest in accountability for these alleged crimes. Some of the information Jack Smith submitted presumably would not be covered by some of the confidentiality rules governing the case, the grand jury secrecy rules, and could be made public. But he has signaled himself that a lot of it would be in those sensitive categories that Chutkan may have a decision to make about. Sargent: I think a lot of people believe that we know everything there is to know about Trump and January 6. But that’s really not true. To remind people, some of his advisors, the less heroic ones, like Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and social media guru Dan Scavino, defied January 6 Committee subpoenas. As a result, we have an incomplete picture of his conduct on that day. This could be extremely damning, couldn’t it? Because while we know that he sat around and watched the violence on television and seemed to enjoy it, and refused desperate and frantic entreaties including from Republicans to call off the rioters, he very well might have said things that we don’t know about. Jack Smith probably has some of the stuff, right? What do you anticipate? Cheney: That’s my view of this. There were moments in the January 6 committee interviews with important people like White House lawyer Pat Cipollone, or, like you said, people they never got to like Dan Scavino who, I don’t know what they actually said to Jack Smith, but they cited privileges or refused to come in at all. Jack Smith, we know, overcame those privileges in secretive court battles with some of these same witnesses and he won those. So they had to testify about their conversations with Donald Trump, their interactions with him that would otherwise have been shielded. Pat Cipollone’s interview with the January 6 committee was very explosive, but he stopped at certain points that I can’t get into because that’s privilege, and they agreed with him to not push that envelope as a condition of his willingness to come in. Jack Smith certainly got past the committee and into areas that are probably the most sensitive and potentially explosive. Sargent: I will say that I have interviewed Tom Joscelyn, who was one of the January 6 committee’s top investigators. He dug extraordinarily deeply into it. He wrote a lot of the January 6 committee report, apparently, and he has said, straight up, there were things we could not learn that we wanted to know.Cheney: Just to throw a couple examples out: when Donald Trump tweeted at Mike Pence during the riot. Pence is in the process of being evacuated from the mob and came within about 100 feet of the rioters, Trump is tweeting an attack on him. It’s very famous now, obviously. He said, Pence didn’t have the courage to do what I wanted him to do and overturn the election. The details behind that tweet: who was with him when he crafted it? Did he craft it by himself? Was he the one who hit the send button? And were people around him telling him not to do that? Those details may come out in this kind of filing. Not to mention, Jack Smith got a search warrant to get all of Trump’s Twitter data about where he was when he sent things during the riot. Those details could be in a filing like this too.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186437/transcript-trumps-angry-eruption-jack-smith-reveals-deeper-fear

2024-09-26 21:48:43

MTG Freaks Out That Republicans Don’t “Deserve to Be Reelected”
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Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is so angry at House Speaker Mike Johnson that she said she doesn’t think Republicans deserve to keep the majority in the House. The House passed a three-month stopgap bill Wednesday to prevent a government shutdown, amid loud opposition from the Georgia Republican and her far-right pals. In getting the spending bill passed, Johnson went against the wishes of Donald Trump and MAGA. During a call into Steve Bannon’s War Room, Greene railed against Johnson and made a startling remark, according to RawStory. “Mike Johnson is not our speaker. He is the speaker for the Democrats,” Greene ranted.Greene blamed Johnson for funding the Biden-Harris administration, the “weaponized” Department of Justice, and the FBI that “raided Mar-a-Lago and has raided a lot of January 6 defendant homes.” It doesn’t seem apparent to Greene that funding the government is not only Johnson’s job but hers as well. She claimed Johnson had “fully funded the invasion at our border that is, that is killing Americans every single day.” “He’s been a great speaker of the House for Democrats, and he has absolutely helped the Biden-Harris administration destroy this country,” Greene continued. “I share the anger and frustration, and I don’t think Republicans deserve to be reelected to hold a majority,” Greene admitted.“We have to elect President Trump in order to control the federal government,” Greene said. She immediately walked back her remark, insisting that Republicans needed to be reelected because if Democrats got control of the House, they would “rewrite the tax codes.” She urged voters to “hold your nose and vote for that RINO that you absolutely hate, because we need a good tax code in place.”Last week, Greene went on a tear against Johnson for his plan to attach the SAVE Act, which is based on faulty election data and seeks to solve the practically nonexistent problem of widespread noncitizen voting, to a six-month continuing resolution to fund the government. The move would have been a nonstarter for Democrats. This is far from the first time the two have butted heads. In May, Greene tried to have Johnson removed from the speakership, but was quickly shot down. At the end of the day, Greene and Johnson are both far-right congressional proxies for Trump. It’s just that only one of them seems to actually care about doing their job.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186429/marjorie-taylor-greene-mike-johnson-budget

2024-09-26 21:48:42

Trump Is on the Brink of a Win in His Massive New York Fraud Case
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Donald Trump may soon get a reduced penalty in his civil fraud case, if oral arguments in an appeals court Thursday are any indication. The intermediate appeals court in Manhattan heard Trump’s appeal against a New York ruling from February where he was not only fined $450 million plus interest but also barred from doing business in New York. Some of the judges on the five-member panel seemed at least receptive to the former president. “The immense penalty in this case is troubling,” said Justice Peter Moulton. “How do you tether the amount that was assessed by the Supreme Court to the harm that was caused here where the parties left these transactions happy?”Deputy New York Solicitor General Judith Vale, representing the state, was ready with a response, though. “Although this is a large number, it’s a large number for a couple reasons. One, because there was a lot of fraud and illegality,” Vale said. “That is an enormous benefit they got from this conduct” of falsifying financial statements to obtain better loan rates, she added, referring to the Trump Organization. Justice David Friedman argued that the ruling against Trump was undercut by Deutsche Bank saying Trump’s actions did not harm them. “It hardly seems to justify bringing an action to protect Deutsche Bank against President Trump, which is what you have here,” Friedman said. “You have two really sophisticated players, in which no one lost any money.”Vale said that state law did not require being harmed, and also noted that the bank actually complained when it heard about false statements and pulled out of its agreement with Trump. At one point, Trump’s lawyer John Sauer tried to argue that the former president and his businesses were following “generally accepted accounting principles,” only to be rebuked by Justice Peter H. Moulton. “It’s the factual inaccuracies that are important,” Moulton countered. “You might be following GAAP principles, but if your data is terrible, you’re creating a fallacious statement.”The former president and convicted felon had to pony up a $175 million bond in April to stop the judgment while he appeals. His fine, thanks to 9 percent interest accruing every year, has now grown to more than $478 million. If he wins, it will be dropped, and Trump has had some success in New York courts as of late.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186425/trump-brink-win-new-york-fraud-case-appeals-court

2024-09-26 20:35:37

Elon Musk’s X Suspends Journalist Who Reported Leaked J.D. Vance Docs
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Free speech hero Elon Musk is yet again silencing his perceived opponents. This time, he is doing J.D. Vance’s dirty work. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on Thursday reported on the leaked 271-page dossier on Vance, allegedly from the Trump campaign’s research team, which mainstream media outlets had refused to publish. Just hours later, Klippenstein was banned from X, where he’d shared a link to his reporting and to the dossier. X users have found that they are unable to even post the link to Klippenstein’s Substack newsletter on X without receiving a message that the link is “potentially harmful.”For ease, here is Klippenstein’s reporting on the dossier: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-the-jd-vance-dossier This isn’t the first time Musk has used X to meddle with progressive accounts on the platform. X has come under fire for banning or limiting an NPR story critical of Trump, the Uncommitted Movement account, and even KamalaHQ. In January, Musk temporarily banned Klippenstein, who worked for The Intercept at the time, and a handful of other journalists. The only connection between them: their left-wing politics and their criticism of Musk. Though some may try to argue that Klippenstein’s post broke X guidelines by publishing hacked materials and is thus “doxxing” Vance, Twitter actually changed its terms of service years ago, in part thanks to the Hunter Biden laptop story and claims of “anti-conservative” bias. The page regarding the platform’s hacked materials policy no longer exists. Musk heavily criticized Twitter’s supposed suppression of the laptop story, later elevating the so-called “Twitter Files” with right-wing journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss to expose the social media company’s previous content-moderation strategies.At the time of publication, Klippenstein’s account is still suspended.
https://newrepublic.com/post/186423/elon-musk-x-suspends-journalist-klippenstein-leaked-jd-vance-documents