Five years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”
I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.
Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.
And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”
“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”
Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.
And so these Letters from an American were born.
In the five years since then, the details of the Ukraine scandal—the secret behind the whistleblower complaint in Schiff’s letter—revealed that then-president Trump was running his own private foreign policy to strong-arm Ukraine into helping his reelection campaign. That effort brought to light more of the story of Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign, which until Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine seemed to be in exchange for lifting sanctions the Obama administration imposed against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The February 2022 invasion brought renewed attention to the Mariupol Plan, confirmed by Trump’s 2016 campaign advisor Paul Manafort, that Russia expected a Trump administration to permit Russian president Vladimir Putin to take over eastern Ukraine.
The Ukraine scandal of 2019 led to Trump’s first impeachment trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, then his acquittal on those charges and his subsequent purge of career government officials, whom he replaced with Trump loyalists.
Then, on February 7, just two days after Senate Republicans acquitted him, Trump picked up the phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained, and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting the economy.
More than a million of us did not live through the ensuing pandemic.
We have, though, lived through the attempts of the former president to rig the 2020 election, the determination of American voters to make their voices heard, the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd, the election of Democrat Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the subsequent refusal of Trump and his loyalists to accept Biden’s win.
And we have lived through the unthinkable: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob determined to overrule the results of an election and install their own candidate in the White House. For the first time in our history, the peaceful transfer of power was broken. Republican senators saved Trump again in his second impeachment trial, and rather than disappearing after the inauguration of President Biden, Trump doubled down on the Big Lie that he had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.
We have seen the attempts of Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress to move America past this dark moment by making coronavirus vaccines widely available and passing landmark legislation to rebuild the economy. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act spurred the economy to become the strongest in the world, proving that the tested policy of investing in ordinary Americans worked far better than post-1980 neoliberalism ever did. After Republicans took control of the House in 2023, we saw them paralyze Congress with infighting that led them, for the first time in history, to throw out their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
We have watched as the Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with religious extremists, has worked to undermine the proven system in place before 1981. It took away the doctrine that required courts to defer to government agencies’ reasonable regulations and opened the way for big business to challenge those regulations before right-wing judges. It ended affirmative action in colleges and universities, and it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.
And then we watched the Supreme Court hand down the stunning decision of July 1, 2024, that overturned the fundamental principle of the United States of America that no one is above the law. In Donald J. Trump v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties.
We saw the reactionary authoritarianism of the former president’s supporters grow stronger. In Republican-dominated states across the country, legislatures passed laws to suppress Democratic voting and to put the counting of votes into partisan hands. Trump solidified control over the Republican Party and tightened his ties to far-right authoritarians and white supremacists. Republicans nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 2024 to advance policies outlined in Project 2025 that would concentrate power in the president and impose religious nationalism on the country. Trump chose as his running mate religious extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance, putting in line for the presidency a man whose entire career in elected office consisted of the eighteen months he had served in the Senate.
In that first letter five years ago, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”
And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters, and in this election where the issue is not policy differences but the very survival of our democracy, we are working to elect Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
If you are tired from the last five years, you have earned the right to be.
And yet, you are still here, reading.
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
And so I write.
But I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.
To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals (!), and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I was all set to write today when I opened my cartoonist friend Liza Donnelly's Seeing Things newsletter. It had a cartoon of a doctor ordering her patient: "Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, talk politics for twenty-four hours."
Today has been as busy in the news as all the days lately seem to be, but I figured Liza was right that we need a break. Buddy and I spent the day like this turtle, taking it easy and enjoying the warmth of the summer's end.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
In the week since Trump’s disastrous debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, MAGA Republicans appear to be melting down. As Republicans commandeer the disaster news, the Democratic presidential nominee appears to be trying to stay out of their way. Harris sat for an interview with media host Stephanie Himonidis Sedano, known as “Chiquibaby,” of the Spanish-language U.S. audio Nueva Network, an interview that will air tomorrow on more than 100 radio stations.
For the third day in a row, officials today had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, citing threats that have led to safety concerns. The city has also canceled “CultureFest,” its annual celebration of diversity, arts, and culture, and the local colleges are meeting virtually out of safety concerns. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles has had to close, as has the Ohio License Bureau.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said that there have been “at least 33” bomb threats against schools and public offices after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, spread the lie that Haitian immigrants to Springfield have been eating the pets of their white neighbors. DeWine reiterated that the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, and noted that he has authorized troopers from the Ohio State Highway Patrol to provide additional security at the district's 18 school buildings.
On CNN yesterday morning, Vance admitted to Dana Bash that he had created the story of Haitian immigrants eating pets. He justified the lie that has shut down Springfield and endangered its residents by claiming such a lie was the only way to get the media to pay attention to what he considers the crisis of immigration. Once the pet-eating story was debunked, Vance said that Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV and tuberculosis in Ohio; in fact, new diagnoses of HIV dropped from 2018 to 2022, and the director of the Ohio Department of Health says there has been no change in TB rates.
That a politician of any sort would lie to rally supporters against a marginalized population comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook, which seeks to build a community around the idea that the people in it are besieged by outsiders. But when that politician is running for vice president, with the potential to become the president if anything happens to his 78-year-old running mate, who is the oldest person ever to run for president, it raises a whole factory of red flags.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted the support of racist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg of the Nazi Party for the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a text fabricated in the early twentieth century by officials in czarist Russia. Rosenberg stood by the “inner truth” of the text even though it was fake. Like Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote, “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.” While Democratic Ohio representative Casey Weinstein has called for Vance to resign, aside from DeWine, Republican lawmakers have not repudiated Vance’s lie.
Astonishingly, Vance is trying to rise to power on lies about the people of his own state, the people he is supposed to represent. Not only have Democratic politicians demanded that he stop, but also amidst the chaos, the Republican mayor of Springfield and two Republican county commissioners would not commit to voting for Trump. The popular backlash against this lie has also been swift and strong. The Ohio-based Red, Wine, and Blue organization has organized the #OHNoYouDont campaign to reiterate on social media their stance against the division Vance and Trump are stoking.
Trump seemed to try to regain control of the political narrative on Sunday by posting on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” a comment that looked like an attempt to change the subject from the backlash to the pet-eating lie, the continuing disparagement of Trump’s debate performance, and increasing attention to Trump’s attachment to right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
In the days since Trump took Loomer to a commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—which she has suggested were an “inside job”—the media has paid more attention to the 31-year-old extremist who has been Trump’s close companion since Spring 2023. Loomer has cheered the drowning of 2,000 migrants and called for “2,000 more.” In June she said that Democrats should not just be prosecuted and jailed, but “they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.”
When some commenters suggested her relationship with Trump was sexual, she countered with a truly vile statement about Vice President Kamala Harris. The increasing visibility of Loomer near Trump has made those Republicans trying to run a more traditional campaign beg him to cut her loose, but Trump seems reluctant to distance himself from her. Sam Stein of The Bulwark today wrote that those Republicans worried about Trump being surrounded by conspiracy theorists are a decade late. After listing Trump’s many years of conspiracy theories, Stein wrote, they’re not “worried that Loomer will turn Trump into a raving lunatic. They’re simply worried that Trump might lose.”
As Trump seems increasingly detached from reality, Vance has become the face of the Republican presidential campaign. He seems desperate to turn the media cycle from Trump and the extraordinary unpopularity of the plans outlined in Project 2025 and toward immigration. It’s a hard sell, since voters correctly note that it was Republicans, egged on by Trump, who killed the strong bipartisan border bill in the spring. On Thursday, September 12, Vance said on CNBC that if immigration were the path to prosperity, “America would be the most prosperous country in the world.”
Outside of the hellscape in MAGA Republicans’ mind, it is. The Federal Reserve recently noted that as of the second quarter of 2024, U.S. household net worth is growing by a strong 7.1% a year. The stock market is also strong, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 228 points today to set an all-time high.
On Sunday afternoon, shortly after Trump’s Taylor Swift post and another calling the “failing” New York Times a threat to democracy, as Trump was golfing at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Secret Service agents noticed and fired on a man holding a rifle with a scope. Today, Carol Leonnig, Josh Dawsey, and Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported that authorities have warned Trump of the risks of golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads, but Trump insisted they were safe and kept using them.
The acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., said today that Trump’s plan for golfing on Sunday was unscheduled, so the secret service used an emergency plan for protecting Trump. Rowe said the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, a convicted felon with a history of apparent mental illness, did not have a line of sight to the former president and did not shoot. He escaped and was later caught. Cell phone records suggest he was in the vicinity for 12 hours before being flushed out of the bushes.
Democratic leaders again denounced violence and said it has no place in our country. Observers noted that it was Trump who signed a bill revoking gun-checks for people with mental illnesses put in place by President Barack Obama and that he promised the National Rifle Association (NRA) that he would roll back all the gun safety provisions President Joe Biden has put in place if he wins in 2024. But the Trump campaign called for donations on a website suggesting, as MAGA Republicans did after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that Democrats were complicit in the threat to Trump. “There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us,” Trump’s campaign said.
Unfortunately, two attempts on a president’s life in such short order are not unprecedented. As Tom Nichols pointed out today in The Atlantic, Gerald Ford survived two attempts in 15 days in 1975. But, as Nichols also points out, Ford did not fundraise off the attempts or blame his opponents for them.
Opponents are pointing out that it is Trump and the MAGA Republicans, not the Democrats, who are stoking violence. Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel noted that in July 2023 Trump posted an address for former president Barack Obama on his social media network, prompting a stalker, and that in four different jurisdictions, Trump’s lawyers have argued that the First Amendment protects Trump’s right to attack the judges, prosecutors, and witnesses in the cases against him, as well as their families. Other’s recalled MAGA’s “jokes” about the brutal attack on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.
Trump supporter Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, wrote, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he later called a “joke” after observers asked about the national security implications of a defense contractor who has $15 billion in federal contracts suggesting the assassination of the president and vice president. Musk’s post had more than 39 million impressions before he deleted it.
After his own incendiary post, Musk wrote: “The incitement to hatred and violence against President Trump by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop.” Conservative lawyer George Conway retorted: “What utter nonsense.”
Indeed, the MAGA attempt to tie the shootings near Trump to the Democrats is pretty clearly an attempt to stop Democrats from talking about the issues of the campaign by claiming that any public discussion of Trump’s own unpopular policies and hateful words will gin up violence against him.
One of the biggest issues MAGA Republicans would like to stop people from talking about is abortion. Reproductive healthcare journalist Kavitha Surana explained in ProPublica today that every state has a committee of experts that meet to examine women’s deaths during or within a year of pregnancy. Those committees operate with a two-year lag, meaning that we are now learning about women dying after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Georgia’s state committee has recently concluded that at least two women have died in Georgia from preventable causes after hospitals in the state denied them timely reproductive healthcare.
Amber Nicole Thurman died just weeks after the Georgia abortion ban went into effect. She went into sepsis from unexpelled fetal tissue after an abortion she obtained legally in North Carolina. Georgia’s law made the routine dilation and curettage procedure, or D&C, a felony with vague exceptions that make doctors worry about prosecution if they perform it. Reports show that doctors repeatedly discussed a D&C for Thurman but put it off even as her organs began to fail. By the time they performed the procedure, it was too late.
Surana notes that Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” when the law went into effect, and that it would keep women “safe, healthy, and informed.” Attorneys for the state of Georgia accused abortion rights activists who said the law endangered women of “hyperbolic fear mongering” just two weeks before Thurman died.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Fifteen years later, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written.
“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”
The framers of the new constitution hoped it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in lawmakers’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.
The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the 13 new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”
Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.
The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.
And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”
The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”
The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.
A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.
In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States,” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”
Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such,” Franklin said after a weary four months spent hashing it out, “because I think a general Government necessary for us,” and, he said, it “astonishes me…to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our…States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”
“On the whole,” he said to his colleagues, “I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility—and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Today, at a White House reception in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, President Joe Biden said: "We don't demonize immigrants. We don't single them out for attacks. We don't believe they're poisoning the blood of the country. We're a nation of immigrants, and that's why we're so damn strong."
Biden’s celebration of the country’s heritage might have doubled as a celebration of the success of his approach to piloting the economy out of the ravages of the pandemic. Today the Fed cut interest rates a half a point, a dramatic cut indicating that it considers inflation to be under control. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has maintained that it would be possible to slow inflation without causing a recession—a so-called soft landing—and she appears to have been vindicated.
Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell said: “The labor market is in solid condition, and our intention with our policy move today is to keep it there. You can say that about the whole economy: The US economy is in good shape. It’s growing at a solid pace, inflation is coming down. The labor market is at a strong pace. We want to keep it there. That’s what we’re doing.”
Powell, whom Trump first appointed to his position, said, “We do our work to serve all Americans. We’re not serving any politician, any political figure, any cause, any issue, nothing. It’s just maximum employment and price stability on behalf of all Americans.”
Powell was anticipating accusations from Trump that his cutting of rates was an attempt to benefit Harris before the election. Indeed, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump advisor Steven Moore called the move “jaw-dropping. There's no reason they couldn't do 25 now and 25 right after the election. Why not wait till then?” Moore added, "I'm not saying [the] reduction isn't justified—it may well be and they have more data than I do. But i just think, 'why now?’” Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville called the cut “shamelessly political.”
The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch noted that “Trump has been begging officials worldwide not to do the right thing for years to help rig the election for him—no deal in Gaza, no defense of Ukraine, no Kremlin hostages release, no border deal, no continuing resolution, no interest rate cuts etc—just sabotage & subterfuge.”
That impulse to focus on regaining power rather than serving the country was at least part of what was behind Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. That story has gotten even darker as it turns out Vance and Trump received definitive assurances on September 9 that the rumor was false, but Trump ran with it in the presidential debate of September 10 anyway. Now, although it has been made very clear—including by Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine—that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, Vance told a reporter today that he personally considers the programs under which they came illegal, so he is still “going to call [a Haitian migrant] an illegal alien.”
The lies about those immigrants have so derailed the Springfield community with bomb threats and public safety concerns that when the Trump campaign suggested Trump was planning a visit there, the city’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, backed by DeWine, threw cold water on the idea. “It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Rue said. Nonetheless, tonight, Trump told a crowd in Long Island, New York, that he will go to Springfield within the next two weeks.
The false allegation against Haitian immigrants has sparked outrage, but it has accomplished one thing for the campaign, anyway: it has gotten Trump at least to speak about immigration—which was the issue they planned to campaign on—rather than Hannibal Lecter, electric boats, and sharks, although he continues to insist that “everyone is agreeing that I won the Debate with Kamala.” Trump, Vance, and Republican lawmakers are now talking more about policies.
In the presidential debate of September 10, Trump admitted that after nine years of promising he would release a new and better healthcare plan than the Affordable Care Act in just a few weeks, all he really had were “concepts of a plan.” Vance has begun to explain to audiences that he intends to separate people into different insurance pools according to their health conditions and risk levels. That business model meant that insurers could refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and overturning it was a key driver of the ACA.
Senate and House Republicans told Peter Sullivan of Axios that if they regain control of the government, they will work to get rid of the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. Negotiations on the first ten drugs, completed in August, will lower the cost of those drugs enough to save taxpayers $6 billion a year, while those enrolled in Medicare will save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses.
Yesterday Trump promised New Yorkers that he would restore the state and local tax deduction (SALT) that he himself capped at $10,000 in his 2017 tax cuts. In part, the cap was designed to punish Democratic states that had high taxes and higher government services, but now he wants to appeal to voters in those same states. On CNBC, host Joe Kernan pointed out that this would blow up the deficit, but House speaker Mike Johnson said that the party would nonetheless consider such a measure because it would continue to stand behind less regulation and lower taxes.
In a conversation with Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary, Trump delivered another stream of consciousness commentary in which he appeared to suggest that he would lower food prices by cutting imports. Economics professor Justin Wolfers noted: “I'm exhausted even saying it, but blocking supply won't reduce prices, and it's not even close.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark added, “Tell me more about why you have to vote for Trump because of his ‘policies.’”
Trump has said he supports in vitro fertilization, or IVF, as have a number of Republican lawmakers, but today, 44 Republican senators once again blocked the Senate from passing a measure protecting it. The procedure is in danger from state laws establishing “fetal personhood,” which give a fertilized egg all the rights of a human being as established by the Fourteenth Amendment. That concept is in the 2024 Republican Party platform.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans in Congress shut down the government unless a continuing resolution to fund the government contains the so-called SAVE Act requiring people to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Speaker Johnson continues to suggest that undocumented immigrants vote in elections, but it is illegal for even documented noncitizens to do so, and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the nonprofit American Immigration Council notes that even the right-wing Heritage Foundation has found only 12 cases of such illegal voting in the past 40 years.
Johnson brought the continuing resolution bill with the SAVE Act up for a vote today. It failed by a vote of 202 to 220. If the House and then the Senate don’t pass a funding bill, the government will shut down on October 1.
Republican endorsements of the Harris-Walz ticket continue to pile up. On Monday, six-term representative Bob Inglis (R-SC) told the Charleston City Paper that “Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the republic” and said he would vote for Harris. “If Donald Trump loses, that would be a good thing for the Republican Party,” Inglis said. “Because then we could have a Republican rethink and get a correction.”
George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, conservative columnist George Will, more than 230 former officials for presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and 17 former staff members for Ronald Reagan have all recently added their names to the list of those supporting Harris. Today more than 100 Republican former members of Congress and national security officials who served in Republican administrations endorsed Harris, saying they “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” They cited his chaotic governance, his praising of enemies and undermining allies, his politicizing the military and disparaging veterans, his susceptibility to manipulation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to overthrow democracy. They praised Harris for her consistent championing of “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
Yesterday, singer-songwriters Billie Eilish, who has 119 million followers on Instagram, and Finneas, who has 4.2 million, asked people to register and to vote for Harris and Walz. “Vote like your life depends on it,” Eilish said, “because it does.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a dramatic drop in deaths from drug overdoses for the first time in decades. Between April 2023 and April 2024, deaths from street drugs are down 10.6%, with some researchers saying that when federal surveys are updated, the decline will be even more pronounced. Such a decline would translate to 20,000 deaths averted.
With more than 70,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2020 and numbers rising, the Biden-Harris administration prioritized disrupting the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. They worked to seize the drugs at ports of entry, sanctioned more than 300 foreign people and agencies engaged in the global trade in illicit drugs, and arrested and prosecuted dozens of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and money launderers.
In March 2023 the Biden-Harris administration made naloxone, a medicine that can prevent fatal opioid overdoses, available over the counter. The administration invested more than $82 billion in treatment, and the Department of Health and Human Services worked to get the treatment into the hands of first responders and family members.
Addressing the crisis of opioid deaths meant careful, coordinated policies.
Also today, markets all over the world climbed after the Fed yesterday cut interest rates for the first time in four years. In the U.S., the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an older index that tracks 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, all hit new records. The rate cut indicated to traders that the U.S. has, in fact, managed to pull off the soft landing President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worked to achieve. They have kept job growth steady, normalized economic growth and inflation, and avoided a recession.
As they have done so, the major U.S. stock indices have had what The Guardian's Callum Jones calls “an extraordinary year.” Jones notes that the S&P 500 is up more than 20% since the beginning of 2024, the Nasdaq Composite has risen 22%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up 11%.
Bringing the U.S. economy out of the pandemic more successfully than any other major economically developed country meant clear goals and principles, and careful, informed adjustments.
And yet the big story today is that Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson frequented porn sites, where between 2008 and 2012 he wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography; referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”; called for reinstating human enslavement and wrote, “I would certainly buy a few”; called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “f*cking commie bastard”; wrote that he preferred Adolf Hitler to former president Barack Obama; referred to Black, Jewish, Muslim, and gay people with slurs; said he doesn’t care about abortions (“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” he wrote); and recounted that he had secretly watched women in the showers in a public gym as a 14-year-old. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN, who broke the story, noted that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”
After the first story broke, Natalie Allison of Politico broke another: that Robinson was registered on the Ashley Madison website, which caters to married people seeking affairs.
Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. He has attacked transgender rights, called for a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, mocked survivors of school shootings, and—after identifying a wide range of those he saw as enemies to America and to “conservatives”—told a church audience that “some folks need killing.”
That this scandal dropped on the last possible day Robinson could drop out of the race suggests it was pushed by Republicans themselves because they recognize that Robinson is dragging Trump and other Republican candidates down in North Carolina. But here’s the thing: Republican voters knew who Robinson was, and they chose him anyway.
Indeed, his behavior is not all that different from that of a number of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including former president Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) embraced Robinson’s candidacy, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) welcomed “NC’s outstanding Lt. Governor” to a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee meeting “on the importance of election integrity. “He brought the truth with clarity and conviction—and everyone should hear what he had to say!” Johnson posted to social media. Robinson spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s.
Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.
And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.
But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject.
In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.
And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.
In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery.
When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.
The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.
The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump.
And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."
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Five years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”
I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.
Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.
And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”
“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”
Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.
And so these Letters from an American were born.
In the five years since then, the details of the Ukraine scandal—the secret behind the whistleblower complaint in Schiff’s letter—revealed that then-president Trump was running his own private foreign policy to strong-arm Ukraine into helping his reelection campaign. That effort brought to light more of the story of Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign, which until Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine seemed to be in exchange for lifting sanctions the Obama administration imposed against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The February 2022 invasion brought renewed attention to the Mariupol Plan, confirmed by Trump’s 2016 campaign advisor Paul Manafort, that Russia expected a Trump administration to permit Russian president Vladimir Putin to take over eastern Ukraine.
The Ukraine scandal of 2019 led to Trump’s first impeachment trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, then his acquittal on those charges and his subsequent purge of career government officials, whom he replaced with Trump loyalists.
Then, on February 7, just two days after Senate Republicans acquitted him, Trump picked up the phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained, and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting the economy.
More than a million of us did not live through the ensuing pandemic.
We have, though, lived through the attempts of the former president to rig the 2020 election, the determination of American voters to make their voices heard, the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd, the election of Democrat Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the subsequent refusal of Trump and his loyalists to accept Biden’s win.
And we have lived through the unthinkable: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob determined to overrule the results of an election and install their own candidate in the White House. For the first time in our history, the peaceful transfer of power was broken. Republican senators saved Trump again in his second impeachment trial, and rather than disappearing after the inauguration of President Biden, Trump doubled down on the Big Lie that he had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.
We have seen the attempts of Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress to move America past this dark moment by making coronavirus vaccines widely available and passing landmark legislation to rebuild the economy. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act spurred the economy to become the strongest in the world, proving that the tested policy of investing in ordinary Americans worked far better than post-1980 neoliberalism ever did. After Republicans took control of the House in 2023, we saw them paralyze Congress with infighting that led them, for the first time in history, to throw out their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
We have watched as the Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with religious extremists, has worked to undermine the proven system in place before 1981. It took away the doctrine that required courts to defer to government agencies’ reasonable regulations and opened the way for big business to challenge those regulations before right-wing judges. It ended affirmative action in colleges and universities, and it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.
And then we watched the Supreme Court hand down the stunning decision of July 1, 2024, that overturned the fundamental principle of the United States of America that no one is above the law. In Donald J. Trump v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties.
We saw the reactionary authoritarianism of the former president’s supporters grow stronger. In Republican-dominated states across the country, legislatures passed laws to suppress Democratic voting and to put the counting of votes into partisan hands. Trump solidified control over the Republican Party and tightened his ties to far-right authoritarians and white supremacists. Republicans nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 2024 to advance policies outlined in Project 2025 that would concentrate power in the president and impose religious nationalism on the country. Trump chose as his running mate religious extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance, putting in line for the presidency a man whose entire career in elected office consisted of the eighteen months he had served in the Senate.
In that first letter five years ago, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”
And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters, and in this election where the issue is not policy differences but the very survival of our democracy, we are working to elect Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
If you are tired from the last five years, you have earned the right to be.
And yet, you are still here, reading.
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
And so I write.
But I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.
To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals (!), and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.
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her intention was to stop at the 100 day mark of bidens term......
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I was all set to write today when I opened my cartoonist friend Liza Donnelly's Seeing Things newsletter. It had a cartoon of a doctor ordering her patient: "Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, talk politics for twenty-four hours."
Today has been as busy in the news as all the days lately seem to be, but I figured Liza was right that we need a break. Buddy and I spent the day like this turtle, taking it easy and enjoying the warmth of the summer's end.
I'll be back at it tomorrow.
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In the week since Trump’s disastrous debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, MAGA Republicans appear to be melting down. As Republicans commandeer the disaster news, the Democratic presidential nominee appears to be trying to stay out of their way. Harris sat for an interview with media host Stephanie Himonidis Sedano, known as “Chiquibaby,” of the Spanish-language U.S. audio Nueva Network, an interview that will air tomorrow on more than 100 radio stations.
For the third day in a row, officials today had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, citing threats that have led to safety concerns. The city has also canceled “CultureFest,” its annual celebration of diversity, arts, and culture, and the local colleges are meeting virtually out of safety concerns. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles has had to close, as has the Ohio License Bureau.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said that there have been “at least 33” bomb threats against schools and public offices after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, spread the lie that Haitian immigrants to Springfield have been eating the pets of their white neighbors. DeWine reiterated that the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, and noted that he has authorized troopers from the Ohio State Highway Patrol to provide additional security at the district's 18 school buildings.
On CNN yesterday morning, Vance admitted to Dana Bash that he had created the story of Haitian immigrants eating pets. He justified the lie that has shut down Springfield and endangered its residents by claiming such a lie was the only way to get the media to pay attention to what he considers the crisis of immigration. Once the pet-eating story was debunked, Vance said that Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV and tuberculosis in Ohio; in fact, new diagnoses of HIV dropped from 2018 to 2022, and the director of the Ohio Department of Health says there has been no change in TB rates.
That a politician of any sort would lie to rally supporters against a marginalized population comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook, which seeks to build a community around the idea that the people in it are besieged by outsiders. But when that politician is running for vice president, with the potential to become the president if anything happens to his 78-year-old running mate, who is the oldest person ever to run for president, it raises a whole factory of red flags.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted the support of racist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg of the Nazi Party for the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a text fabricated in the early twentieth century by officials in czarist Russia. Rosenberg stood by the “inner truth” of the text even though it was fake. Like Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote, “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.” While Democratic Ohio representative Casey Weinstein has called for Vance to resign, aside from DeWine, Republican lawmakers have not repudiated Vance’s lie.
Astonishingly, Vance is trying to rise to power on lies about the people of his own state, the people he is supposed to represent. Not only have Democratic politicians demanded that he stop, but also amidst the chaos, the Republican mayor of Springfield and two Republican county commissioners would not commit to voting for Trump. The popular backlash against this lie has also been swift and strong. The Ohio-based Red, Wine, and Blue organization has organized the #OHNoYouDont campaign to reiterate on social media their stance against the division Vance and Trump are stoking.
Trump seemed to try to regain control of the political narrative on Sunday by posting on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” a comment that looked like an attempt to change the subject from the backlash to the pet-eating lie, the continuing disparagement of Trump’s debate performance, and increasing attention to Trump’s attachment to right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
In the days since Trump took Loomer to a commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—which she has suggested were an “inside job”—the media has paid more attention to the 31-year-old extremist who has been Trump’s close companion since Spring 2023. Loomer has cheered the drowning of 2,000 migrants and called for “2,000 more.” In June she said that Democrats should not just be prosecuted and jailed, but “they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.”
When some commenters suggested her relationship with Trump was sexual, she countered with a truly vile statement about Vice President Kamala Harris. The increasing visibility of Loomer near Trump has made those Republicans trying to run a more traditional campaign beg him to cut her loose, but Trump seems reluctant to distance himself from her. Sam Stein of The Bulwark today wrote that those Republicans worried about Trump being surrounded by conspiracy theorists are a decade late. After listing Trump’s many years of conspiracy theories, Stein wrote, they’re not “worried that Loomer will turn Trump into a raving lunatic. They’re simply worried that Trump might lose.”
As Trump seems increasingly detached from reality, Vance has become the face of the Republican presidential campaign. He seems desperate to turn the media cycle from Trump and the extraordinary unpopularity of the plans outlined in Project 2025 and toward immigration. It’s a hard sell, since voters correctly note that it was Republicans, egged on by Trump, who killed the strong bipartisan border bill in the spring. On Thursday, September 12, Vance said on CNBC that if immigration were the path to prosperity, “America would be the most prosperous country in the world.”
Outside of the hellscape in MAGA Republicans’ mind, it is. The Federal Reserve recently noted that as of the second quarter of 2024, U.S. household net worth is growing by a strong 7.1% a year. The stock market is also strong, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 228 points today to set an all-time high.
On Sunday afternoon, shortly after Trump’s Taylor Swift post and another calling the “failing” New York Times a threat to democracy, as Trump was golfing at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Secret Service agents noticed and fired on a man holding a rifle with a scope. Today, Carol Leonnig, Josh Dawsey, and Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported that authorities have warned Trump of the risks of golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads, but Trump insisted they were safe and kept using them.
The acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., said today that Trump’s plan for golfing on Sunday was unscheduled, so the secret service used an emergency plan for protecting Trump. Rowe said the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, a convicted felon with a history of apparent mental illness, did not have a line of sight to the former president and did not shoot. He escaped and was later caught. Cell phone records suggest he was in the vicinity for 12 hours before being flushed out of the bushes.
Democratic leaders again denounced violence and said it has no place in our country. Observers noted that it was Trump who signed a bill revoking gun-checks for people with mental illnesses put in place by President Barack Obama and that he promised the National Rifle Association (NRA) that he would roll back all the gun safety provisions President Joe Biden has put in place if he wins in 2024. But the Trump campaign called for donations on a website suggesting, as MAGA Republicans did after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that Democrats were complicit in the threat to Trump. “There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us,” Trump’s campaign said.
Unfortunately, two attempts on a president’s life in such short order are not unprecedented. As Tom Nichols pointed out today in The Atlantic, Gerald Ford survived two attempts in 15 days in 1975. But, as Nichols also points out, Ford did not fundraise off the attempts or blame his opponents for them.
Opponents are pointing out that it is Trump and the MAGA Republicans, not the Democrats, who are stoking violence. Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel noted that in July 2023 Trump posted an address for former president Barack Obama on his social media network, prompting a stalker, and that in four different jurisdictions, Trump’s lawyers have argued that the First Amendment protects Trump’s right to attack the judges, prosecutors, and witnesses in the cases against him, as well as their families. Other’s recalled MAGA’s “jokes” about the brutal attack on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.
Trump supporter Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, wrote, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he later called a “joke” after observers asked about the national security implications of a defense contractor who has $15 billion in federal contracts suggesting the assassination of the president and vice president. Musk’s post had more than 39 million impressions before he deleted it.
After his own incendiary post, Musk wrote: “The incitement to hatred and violence against President Trump by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop.” Conservative lawyer George Conway retorted: “What utter nonsense.”
Indeed, the MAGA attempt to tie the shootings near Trump to the Democrats is pretty clearly an attempt to stop Democrats from talking about the issues of the campaign by claiming that any public discussion of Trump’s own unpopular policies and hateful words will gin up violence against him.
One of the biggest issues MAGA Republicans would like to stop people from talking about is abortion. Reproductive healthcare journalist Kavitha Surana explained in ProPublica today that every state has a committee of experts that meet to examine women’s deaths during or within a year of pregnancy. Those committees operate with a two-year lag, meaning that we are now learning about women dying after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Georgia’s state committee has recently concluded that at least two women have died in Georgia from preventable causes after hospitals in the state denied them timely reproductive healthcare.
Amber Nicole Thurman died just weeks after the Georgia abortion ban went into effect. She went into sepsis from unexpelled fetal tissue after an abortion she obtained legally in North Carolina. Georgia’s law made the routine dilation and curettage procedure, or D&C, a felony with vague exceptions that make doctors worry about prosecution if they perform it. Reports show that doctors repeatedly discussed a D&C for Thurman but put it off even as her organs began to fail. By the time they performed the procedure, it was too late.
Surana notes that Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” when the law went into effect, and that it would keep women “safe, healthy, and informed.” Attorneys for the state of Georgia accused abortion rights activists who said the law endangered women of “hyperbolic fear mongering” just two weeks before Thurman died.
She left behind a 6-year-old son.
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In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Fifteen years later, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written.
“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”
The framers of the new constitution hoped it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in lawmakers’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.
The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the 13 new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”
Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.
The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.
And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”
The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”
The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.
A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.
In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States,” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”
Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such,” Franklin said after a weary four months spent hashing it out, “because I think a general Government necessary for us,” and, he said, it “astonishes me…to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our…States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”
“On the whole,” he said to his colleagues, “I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility—and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”
On September 17, 1787, they did.
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Today, at a White House reception in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, President Joe Biden said: "We don't demonize immigrants. We don't single them out for attacks. We don't believe they're poisoning the blood of the country. We're a nation of immigrants, and that's why we're so damn strong."
Biden’s celebration of the country’s heritage might have doubled as a celebration of the success of his approach to piloting the economy out of the ravages of the pandemic. Today the Fed cut interest rates a half a point, a dramatic cut indicating that it considers inflation to be under control. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has maintained that it would be possible to slow inflation without causing a recession—a so-called soft landing—and she appears to have been vindicated.
Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell said: “The labor market is in solid condition, and our intention with our policy move today is to keep it there. You can say that about the whole economy: The US economy is in good shape. It’s growing at a solid pace, inflation is coming down. The labor market is at a strong pace. We want to keep it there. That’s what we’re doing.”
Powell, whom Trump first appointed to his position, said, “We do our work to serve all Americans. We’re not serving any politician, any political figure, any cause, any issue, nothing. It’s just maximum employment and price stability on behalf of all Americans.”
Powell was anticipating accusations from Trump that his cutting of rates was an attempt to benefit Harris before the election. Indeed, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump advisor Steven Moore called the move “jaw-dropping. There's no reason they couldn't do 25 now and 25 right after the election. Why not wait till then?” Moore added, "I'm not saying [the] reduction isn't justified—it may well be and they have more data than I do. But i just think, 'why now?’” Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville called the cut “shamelessly political.”
The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch noted that “Trump has been begging officials worldwide not to do the right thing for years to help rig the election for him—no deal in Gaza, no defense of Ukraine, no Kremlin hostages release, no border deal, no continuing resolution, no interest rate cuts etc—just sabotage & subterfuge.”
That impulse to focus on regaining power rather than serving the country was at least part of what was behind Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. That story has gotten even darker as it turns out Vance and Trump received definitive assurances on September 9 that the rumor was false, but Trump ran with it in the presidential debate of September 10 anyway. Now, although it has been made very clear—including by Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine—that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, Vance told a reporter today that he personally considers the programs under which they came illegal, so he is still “going to call [a Haitian migrant] an illegal alien.”
The lies about those immigrants have so derailed the Springfield community with bomb threats and public safety concerns that when the Trump campaign suggested Trump was planning a visit there, the city’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, backed by DeWine, threw cold water on the idea. “It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Rue said. Nonetheless, tonight, Trump told a crowd in Long Island, New York, that he will go to Springfield within the next two weeks.
The false allegation against Haitian immigrants has sparked outrage, but it has accomplished one thing for the campaign, anyway: it has gotten Trump at least to speak about immigration—which was the issue they planned to campaign on—rather than Hannibal Lecter, electric boats, and sharks, although he continues to insist that “everyone is agreeing that I won the Debate with Kamala.” Trump, Vance, and Republican lawmakers are now talking more about policies.
In the presidential debate of September 10, Trump admitted that after nine years of promising he would release a new and better healthcare plan than the Affordable Care Act in just a few weeks, all he really had were “concepts of a plan.” Vance has begun to explain to audiences that he intends to separate people into different insurance pools according to their health conditions and risk levels. That business model meant that insurers could refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and overturning it was a key driver of the ACA.
Senate and House Republicans told Peter Sullivan of Axios that if they regain control of the government, they will work to get rid of the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. Negotiations on the first ten drugs, completed in August, will lower the cost of those drugs enough to save taxpayers $6 billion a year, while those enrolled in Medicare will save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses.
Yesterday Trump promised New Yorkers that he would restore the state and local tax deduction (SALT) that he himself capped at $10,000 in his 2017 tax cuts. In part, the cap was designed to punish Democratic states that had high taxes and higher government services, but now he wants to appeal to voters in those same states. On CNBC, host Joe Kernan pointed out that this would blow up the deficit, but House speaker Mike Johnson said that the party would nonetheless consider such a measure because it would continue to stand behind less regulation and lower taxes.
In a conversation with Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary, Trump delivered another stream of consciousness commentary in which he appeared to suggest that he would lower food prices by cutting imports. Economics professor Justin Wolfers noted: “I'm exhausted even saying it, but blocking supply won't reduce prices, and it's not even close.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark added, “Tell me more about why you have to vote for Trump because of his ‘policies.’”
Trump has said he supports in vitro fertilization, or IVF, as have a number of Republican lawmakers, but today, 44 Republican senators once again blocked the Senate from passing a measure protecting it. The procedure is in danger from state laws establishing “fetal personhood,” which give a fertilized egg all the rights of a human being as established by the Fourteenth Amendment. That concept is in the 2024 Republican Party platform.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans in Congress shut down the government unless a continuing resolution to fund the government contains the so-called SAVE Act requiring people to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Speaker Johnson continues to suggest that undocumented immigrants vote in elections, but it is illegal for even documented noncitizens to do so, and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the nonprofit American Immigration Council notes that even the right-wing Heritage Foundation has found only 12 cases of such illegal voting in the past 40 years.
Johnson brought the continuing resolution bill with the SAVE Act up for a vote today. It failed by a vote of 202 to 220. If the House and then the Senate don’t pass a funding bill, the government will shut down on October 1.
Republican endorsements of the Harris-Walz ticket continue to pile up. On Monday, six-term representative Bob Inglis (R-SC) told the Charleston City Paper that “Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the republic” and said he would vote for Harris. “If Donald Trump loses, that would be a good thing for the Republican Party,” Inglis said. “Because then we could have a Republican rethink and get a correction.”
George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, conservative columnist George Will, more than 230 former officials for presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and 17 former staff members for Ronald Reagan have all recently added their names to the list of those supporting Harris. Today more than 100 Republican former members of Congress and national security officials who served in Republican administrations endorsed Harris, saying they “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” They cited his chaotic governance, his praising of enemies and undermining allies, his politicizing the military and disparaging veterans, his susceptibility to manipulation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to overthrow democracy. They praised Harris for her consistent championing of “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
Yesterday, singer-songwriters Billie Eilish, who has 119 million followers on Instagram, and Finneas, who has 4.2 million, asked people to register and to vote for Harris and Walz. “Vote like your life depends on it,” Eilish said, “because it does.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a dramatic drop in deaths from drug overdoses for the first time in decades. Between April 2023 and April 2024, deaths from street drugs are down 10.6%, with some researchers saying that when federal surveys are updated, the decline will be even more pronounced. Such a decline would translate to 20,000 deaths averted.
With more than 70,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2020 and numbers rising, the Biden-Harris administration prioritized disrupting the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. They worked to seize the drugs at ports of entry, sanctioned more than 300 foreign people and agencies engaged in the global trade in illicit drugs, and arrested and prosecuted dozens of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and money launderers.
In March 2023 the Biden-Harris administration made naloxone, a medicine that can prevent fatal opioid overdoses, available over the counter. The administration invested more than $82 billion in treatment, and the Department of Health and Human Services worked to get the treatment into the hands of first responders and family members.
Addressing the crisis of opioid deaths meant careful, coordinated policies.
Also today, markets all over the world climbed after the Fed yesterday cut interest rates for the first time in four years. In the U.S., the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an older index that tracks 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, all hit new records. The rate cut indicated to traders that the U.S. has, in fact, managed to pull off the soft landing President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worked to achieve. They have kept job growth steady, normalized economic growth and inflation, and avoided a recession.
As they have done so, the major U.S. stock indices have had what The Guardian's Callum Jones calls “an extraordinary year.” Jones notes that the S&P 500 is up more than 20% since the beginning of 2024, the Nasdaq Composite has risen 22%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up 11%.
Bringing the U.S. economy out of the pandemic more successfully than any other major economically developed country meant clear goals and principles, and careful, informed adjustments.
And yet the big story today is that Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson frequented porn sites, where between 2008 and 2012 he wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography; referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”; called for reinstating human enslavement and wrote, “I would certainly buy a few”; called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “f*cking commie bastard”; wrote that he preferred Adolf Hitler to former president Barack Obama; referred to Black, Jewish, Muslim, and gay people with slurs; said he doesn’t care about abortions (“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” he wrote); and recounted that he had secretly watched women in the showers in a public gym as a 14-year-old. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN, who broke the story, noted that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”
After the first story broke, Natalie Allison of Politico broke another: that Robinson was registered on the Ashley Madison website, which caters to married people seeking affairs.
Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. He has attacked transgender rights, called for a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, mocked survivors of school shootings, and—after identifying a wide range of those he saw as enemies to America and to “conservatives”—told a church audience that “some folks need killing.”
That this scandal dropped on the last possible day Robinson could drop out of the race suggests it was pushed by Republicans themselves because they recognize that Robinson is dragging Trump and other Republican candidates down in North Carolina. But here’s the thing: Republican voters knew who Robinson was, and they chose him anyway.
Indeed, his behavior is not all that different from that of a number of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including former president Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) embraced Robinson’s candidacy, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) welcomed “NC’s outstanding Lt. Governor” to a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee meeting “on the importance of election integrity. “He brought the truth with clarity and conviction—and everyone should hear what he had to say!” Johnson posted to social media. Robinson spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s.
Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.
And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.
But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject.
In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.
And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.
In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery.
When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.
The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.
The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump.
And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."
Mark Robinson has said he will not step aside.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14