Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

July 27, 2024 (Saturday)

It's been a long week. Let's take the night off and pick it all back up tomorrow.

[Photo, "Sundog," by Peter Ralston.]

mickeyrat

July 28, 2024 (Sunday)

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.

In 1763, just after the end of the French and Indian War, American colonists loved that they were part of the British empire. And yet, by 1776, just a little more than a decade later, they had declared independence from that empire and set down the principles that everyone has a right to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.

The change was just as quick in the 1850s. In 1853 it sure looked as if the elite southern enslavers had taken over the country. They controlled the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They explicitly rejected the Declaration of Independence and declared that they had the right to rule over the country’s majority. They planned to take over the United States and then to take over the world, creating a global economy based on human enslavement.

And yet, just seven years later, voters put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with a promise to stand against the Slave Power and to protect a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He ushered in “a new birth of freedom” in what historians call the second American revolution.

The same pattern was true in the 1920s, when it seemed as if business interests and government were so deeply entwined that it was only a question of time until the United States went down the same dark path to fascism that so many other nations did in that era. In 1927, after the execution of immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, poet John Dos Passos wrote: “they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors the old judges the small men with reputations….”

And yet, just five years later, voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised Americans a New Deal and ushered in a country that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.

And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.

But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.

And then something fans them into flame.

In the 1760s it was the Stamp Act, which said that men in Great Britain had the right to rule over men in the American colonies. In the 1850s it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave the elite enslavers the power to rule the United States. And in 1929 it was the Great Crash, which proved that the businessmen had no idea what they were doing and had no plan for getting the country out of the Great Depression.

The last several decades have felt like we were fighting a holding action, trying to protect democracy first from an oligarchy and then from a dictator. Many Americans saw their rights being stripped away…even as they were quietly becoming stronger.

That strength showed in the Women’s March of January 2017, and it continued to grow—quietly under Donald Trump and more openly under the protections of the Biden administration. People began to organize in school boards and state legislatures and Congress. They also began to organize over TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and newsletters and Zoom calls.

And then something set them ablaze. The 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision stripped away from the American people a constitutional right they had enjoyed for almost fifty years, and made it clear that a small minority intended to destroy democracy and replace it with a dictatorship based in Christian nationalism.

When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.

He passed it to us.

It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.

It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.

brianlux

Great letter from HRC tonight.   Perfect.

mickeyrat

July 29, 2024 (Monday)

One of the advantages of refusing the Democratic nomination for president is that his decision to do that has left President Joe Biden in the position of being above the political fray and being able to act for the good of the whole country.

Today, Biden noted that the American people have lost faith in the Supreme Court. When he was in office, Trump stacked the court with three extremists who have worked with extremist justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to overturn longstanding legal precedents that protect civil rights and move the country toward a theocracy overseen by a dictator. A statement from the White House today recounted how the Supreme Court has “gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office.” It also noted that “recent ethics scandals involving some Justices have caused the public to question the fairness and independence that are essential for the Court to faithfully carry out its mission to deliver justice for all Americans.”

Today, Biden called for three major changes to restore trust and accountability.

He called for a constitutional amendment to make clear that no president is above the law or immune from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. This is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision of July 1, 2024, in Donald J. Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed in actions that fall under a president’s “official duties.”

The White House wrote that “President Biden shares the Founders’ belief that the President’s power is limited—not absolute—and must ultimately reside with the people.” The “No One Is Above the Law Amendment will state that the Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as President.”

Biden also called for eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices. Noting that Congress approved term limits for the presidency, Biden pointed out that “[t]he United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court Justices.” “Term limits would help ensure that the Court’s membership changes with some regularity; make timing for Court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary; and reduce the chance that any single Presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come,” the White House wrote.

The administration is reacting, in part, to the fact that Trump, with the help of then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), denied Democratic president Barack Obama the right to appoint a Supreme Court justice, holding it for Trump, and then, after Trump had appointed a second justice, rushed through a third Trump appointee at the very end of his term, enabling him to appoint three hard-right justices who will be able to skew the court’s decisions for decades.

With those justices on the court, it has handed down a series of nakedly partisan decisions that represent the goals of the extremist Republican Party rather than the majority of Americans. They have overturned a ban on bump stocks for semiautomatic rifles, made partisan and racial gerrymandering easier, undercut business regulation, ceased to recognize the constitutional right to abortion, and, stunningly, ruled that a president has significant immunity from prosecution for committing crimes while in office.  

Biden also called for Congress to “pass binding, enforceable conduct and ethics rules that require Justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Supreme Court Justices should not be exempt from the enforceable code of conduct that applies to every other federal judge.”

This, too, reflects the problems of the modern court, where several justices, especially Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, have accepted large gifts from those with business before the court and have refused to recuse themselves from those cases. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced articles of impeachment against Thomas and Alito on July 10, and the measures currently have 19 co-sponsors.

As Ankush Khardori noted in Politico today, before Trump’s three justices took their seats, public approval of the court stood at 58%. After its decision to give presidents immunity, that approval fell to a record low of just 38%. More than 75% of Americans, including a large majority of Republicans, support eighteen-year term limits for justices.  

In an op-ed in the Washington Post today, Biden wrote: “This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.”

He noted that as a senator he served as chair and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and has “overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today.” Noting that the current system makes it possible for a single president to radically alter the makeup of the court for generations to come, he warned: “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”

“We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power. We can and must restore the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. We can and must strengthen the guardrails of democracy.
In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.”

Ian Millhiser of Vox points out that these reforms would currently be almost impossible to pass, but Biden’s embrace of them is a powerful political statement for the Democrats to carry into the 2024 election. Until now, Biden has lagged behind popular opinion on the issue of court reform. Now, though, the sitting president is rejecting the power the extremist modern-day Supreme Court conveyed on presidents and reinforcing the rule of law.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, immediately endorsed Biden’s proposals, meaning that she is willing to be bound by our historic understanding that presidents are not above the law. In contrast, Leonard Leo, who has been central to the stacking of the court and who has called for “flood[ing] the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress,” called the plan “a campaign to destroy a court that they disagree with.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called it “dead on arrival in the House.”  

For his part, Biden seemed more optimistic than Millhiser that his reforms could pass. When a reporter asked him how he would get court reform passed, he answered: “You’ve asked me that—on everything I’ve ever passed you’ve asked me that. We’re going to figure a way.”

Today, additional assistance provided to International Brotherhood of Teamsters pension plans thanks to the American Rescue Plan saved the pensions of an additional 70,000 New England Teamsters. This brings the total protected to 600,000. No Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan, and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien stood next to Biden when he put the first protections into place. After O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention earlier this month, Vice President at large John Palmer announced he is challenging O’Brien for the leadership.  

Momentum behind Vice President Harris continues to build. Today John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, the third-largest city in Arizona, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic explaining why “as a Republican mayor, I support Kamala Harris over Trump.” He blamed Trump for abandoning cities while Biden and Harris have made historic investments in them and brought thousands of new jobs to Arizona. Giles urged his fellow Republicans to reject MAGA Republicans and turn back to the principles of an older Republican Party. “Our party used to stand for the belief that every Arizonan, no matter their background or circumstances, should have the freedom, opportunity and security to live out their American Dream,” he wrote.

But today’s Republicans are political extremists who are trying to disrupt elections and who killed immigration reform. “Trump poses a serious threat to our nation,” he wrote. “We can’t have a felon representing us on the national stage, let alone one who would threaten to abandon NATO and ruin our standing abroad.”  

“Arizona Republicans like me can emulate Sen. John McCain's motto of 'Country First' and beat back Trump and his threat to democracy,” Giles wrote. “Kamala Harris is the competent, just and fair leader our country deserves.”

In the New York Times, Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush echoed Giles’s autopsy for his party but, in an important shift, examined its recent changes through a lens of the political theories of autocracy. He concluded: “It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.”  

More than 40 former officials from the Department of Justice agree. On July 25 they wrote an open letter endorsing Harris and warning that “Trump presents a grave risk to our country, our global alliances and the future of democracy. As president, he “regularly ignored the rule of law.” In contrast, as the elected attorney general of California, Harris “oversaw the largest state justice department in the country. She forged strong relationships with law enforcement to keep people safe, fought for American consumers and fought against those preying on the American people…. The stakes could not be higher.”

Tonight, White Dudes for Harris held an online fundraiser. Actor Jeff Bridges, who played The Dude in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, recounted Harris’s popular policies on the call. “I’m white, I’m a dude, and I’m for Harris,” he said. “A woman president, man, how exciting!” Minnesota governor Tim Walz added: “How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come? And how often in the world do you make that b*st*rd wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his a** and sent him on the road?”

The Trump-Vance ticket continues to stumble. In the Washington Post today, Jennifer Rubin noted that the Republicans appear to have gone out of their way to pick a presidential ticket that would offend women. Trump is, she pointed out, “an adjudicated rapist” who bragged about sexual assault, demeans and insults women, “mused about punishing women for having an abortion,” and boasts that he was behind the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Vance wants to ban abortion in all cases, wants the federal government to stop women from traveling across state lines to obtain abortion care, says childless women don’t have a stake in the country’s future, and has implied that women should stay in abusive marriages.

The Republicans embrace the ideas of right-wing groups whose members want to roll back women’s rights; their call for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” is a tenet of fascism. “When Harris declares ‘We’re not going back,’” Rubin notes, “the message has particular resonance among women.”

Finally, the world is watching events in Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has claimed victory despite exit polls that showed him losing to opposition candidate Edmundo González by more than 30 points. CNN’s Jim Sciutto commented: “Don’t underestimate the loss of U.S. soft power in moments like this after a U.S. president—and current candidate for president—attempted to overturn an election here.”

mickeyrat

July 30, 2024 (Tuesday)

On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions.

John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.”

The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas.

Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.  

That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican.

Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates.

On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”

But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.

On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.”

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”

The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document.

He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”

The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”

The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want.

When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”

mickeyrat

  July 31, 2024 (Wednesday)

Yesterday, from a Harris campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta reporter Tariro Mzezewa noted that the crowd of 10,000 people “was ecstatic. There was chanting, cheering, singing, and dancing for hours in the lead-up to and throughout the event,” Mzezewa wrote today in Slate.

Mzezewa reported that rapper Megan Thee Stallion told the audience “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” before performing her hit “Body.” Georgia Democratic politicians showed up in force: voting rights advocate and former state representative Stacey Abrams, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, state Democratic Party chair Representative  Nikema Williams, and Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens.

“What you’re seeing is very real,” Mzezewa wrote, and she quoted an attendee who said: “it’s nice to witness history, but getting to be a part of it from the ground up is a whole other level.” Certainly, the grassroots enthusiasm for Harris’s presidential candidacy is palpable. More and more self-identified groups are launching fundraising calls for Harris; yesterday the Latter-day Saints for Harris—Mormons—announced that they, too, are “putting [their] shoulders to the wheel!” Today the executive board of the United Auto Workers also endorsed Harris.

At last night’s event, Vice President Harris noted that Trump has pulled out of the September debate to which he had previously agreed. “Here’s the funny thing about that,” she said. “He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” After hitting the campaign’s refrain that marks MAGA Republican behavior as “weird,” she added to applause: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump did not say it to her face, but today he unloaded spectacularly on three Black female interviewers at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago.

When ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott began the interview by quoting a number of his racist statements about Black Americans and asking why, given that history, Black voters should trust him, he lost it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he began. “You don’t even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.”

He went on to try to dominate Scott, listing the policies he claimed to have put into place, and to attack the people who organized the event before saying, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer….  And for you to start off a question and answer period…in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace.”   

As the session began, so it continued, with Trump questioning Harris’s Black identity—while also mispronouncing her name—and warning the attendees that they need “to stop people from invading our country that are…taking Black jobs.” NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor told MSNBC that during the interview, “people were stunned, people were gasping, there were some people who were shouting back at him saying ‘That's a lie!’” Attendees laughed and jeered at Trump throughout the 37-minute session; his handlers made him leave early.

Scott accurately summed up Trump’s long history of racism, but lately he has been advertising it. In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham aired last night, Trump said that Harris would be “like a play toy” for world leaders. “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why,” he said to the camera, “but a lot of people understand it.”

It is unlikely that his insults and naked racism will appeal to anyone but his base, making his performance, as Jessica Tarlov put it on the Fox News Channel, “a complete, absolute dumpster fire.” It is possible that Trump has lost the ability to read a room and reassure his audience that he’s a good bet. But it is also possible that Trump cannot bear to see the enthusiasm building behind Harris, not only because of its electoral meaning, but also because it reveals how small his own following is and how much people loathe him.  

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who produces wonderful video threads of important events, “put together an 11-minute supercut of Trump angrily self-immolating at the NABJ before his handlers pulled him from the stage.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo analyzed Trump’s meltdown in Chicago this way: “I think we’re getting the first view of imploding Donald Trump as he realizes that what was his for the taking ten days ago is slipping away and he’s likely to go to prison rather than the White House. He [is] being dominated and humiliated by Harris and he’s losing it.” His post after the interview, in which he boasted “[t]he questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” seemed an attempt to reassert his old pattern of simply declaring things to be true that…aren’t.

Indeed, one of Trump’s answers to the journalists in Chicago revealed that he cares only about getting elected, rather than governing. It also suggested that his camp is trying to reassure him that his pick of Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate will not hurt their chances, even as more and more videos of Vance attacking women become public and as he is historically bad in front of television cameras.

Vance has only 18 months of experience in elected office, making him one of the least qualified candidates for vice president in U.S. history. When asked if Vance would be ready “on day one,” to assume the duties of the presidency if necessary, Trump answered a different question altogether, revealing what is uppermost in his mind. “I’ve always had great respect for him…but…historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion…and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential thing. Virtually never has it mattered…. Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”   

The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s performance by saying: "The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people…. Today's tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump's MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” while “Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.”

It urged Trump again to “stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10."

Trump’s petulant fury at the Black journalists today suggests just how dangerous it would be to put him in control of the nation’s law enforcement and military capabilities a second time. We were given a glimpse of how eager he was to turn those capabilities against American citizens in his first term when the Department of Justice today released the report of the department’s inspector general concerning the Trump administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020.

The authors of the report emphasized that they were unable to compel the testimony of officials including then–attorney general William Barr, his chief of staff William Levi, FBI deputy director David Bowdich, and FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge Timothy Slater.

But what they were able to put together even without their information was that, although the protests were largely peaceful, Trump was desperate to get 2,000 federal officers into the area around the White House on June 1, 2020, to increase federal control of the city. To the frustration of the people in charge of the agencies, he could not articulate a mission, only that he wanted 2,000 people around him. With only about 90 officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service on hand early on the morning of June 1, Barr told a conference call with Justice Department leadership that  Trump wanted “max strength” on the streets, and to “dominate the streets.”

Trump then echoed that language in a call with the nation’s governors, saying, “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re [going to] walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But you’re going to have total domination.”

Then, the report says, the administration began to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion. At 4:48 that evening, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel, who advise the president, received an email that the president was going to address the nation at 6:00 and that a proclamation invoking the Insurrection Act should be “ready for signing” before then.

Shortly after, additional officers from the Bureau of Prisons—without names on their uniforms because they do not usually wear them, if you remember the concern over those nameless uniforms—arrived at the White House. Barr was in charge of clearing the streets, and ultimately, by about 9:00 he felt things were calm enough that he advised Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act.

But it was evidently a close thing.

mickeyrat

August 1, 2024 (Thursday)

“This is a very good afternoon,” President Joe Biden said today. “[A] very good afternoon.”

“Today, we’re bringing home Paul, Evan, Alsu, and Vladimir—three American citizens and one American green-card holder.

“All four have been imprisoned unjustly in Russia…. Russian authorities arrested them, convicted them in show trials, and sentenced them to long prison terms with absolutely no legitimate reason whatsoever. None.”

In a complicated prisoner swap involving the U.S., Russia, and at least seven other countries, Americans Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, and Alsu Kurmasheva and British-Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who openly opposed the invasion of Ukraine, came home from Russia. Four German citizens who had also been wrongfully detained—meaning they had not broken laws but were being held as political bargaining chips—were also part of the exchange, along with a fifth who was released from Belarus.

Also in the swap were seven Russian citizens who had been detained as political prisoners, four of whom worked with Alexei Navalny, the political opposition leader who died in February in a Russian prison. They have left Russia and will make their way to other countries. It is extraordinary that the U.S. government managed to force Putin to release his own citizens, and Biden called it out. “It says a lot about the United States that we work relentlessly to free Americans who are unjustly held around the world,” he said. “It also says a lot about us that this deal includes the release of Russian political prisoners. They stood up for democracy and human rights. Their own leaders threw them in prison. The United States helped secure their release as well. That’s who we are in the United States.

“We stand for freedom, for liberty, for justice—not only for our own people but for others as well. And that’s why all Americans can take pride in what we’ve achieved today.”

In exchange, Russian president Vladimir Putin got the prisoner he wanted most, hit man Vadim Krasikov, back from Germany. In addition, the U.S. released three Russians, Slovenia released two, and Norway and Poland each released one. All told, eight Russians went home.

Foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted that “a group of brave journalists and democracy activists are being exchanged for a group of brutal spies.” The exchange included no money or sanctions relief.

The U.S. had been calling for the freedom of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny as part of the negotiations when he died abruptly in Russian custody in February 2024. His death briefly derailed the negotiations that had been going on since shortly after Biden took office. Even before he took office, he had asked his national security team to dig into all the cases of hostages being wrongfully detained, which they were inheriting from the previous administration. “I wanted to make sure we’d hit the ground running,” Biden said today, “and we did.”

He noted that with today’s releases, his administration “has brought home over 70 Americans who were wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad, many since before I took office.” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan later noted that the administration has reclaimed U.S. citizens from “Afghanistan, Burma, Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Rwanda, and elsewhere.”

Asking Germany to release Krasikov was a big ask, but the government was willing to exchange him for Navalny. After Navalny’s death, it seemed likely the deal could not be revived. But Sullivan believed he saw a way forward, and Biden called German chancellor Olaf Scholz and asked him to continue to move forward. “For you, I will do this,” Scholz said. The president told Sullivan to get it done. In April President Biden sent a formal request to Scholz asking him to make the complicated swap that transpired today. When a reporter today asked Biden what Scholz had demanded in return, Biden answered: “Nothing.”

In his remarks today, Biden emphasized that the deal was “a feat of diplomacy and friendship—friendship. Multiple countries helped get this done. They joined difficult, complex negotiations at my request. And I personally thank them all again.  And I’ve thanked them personally, and I’ll thank them again.”

“This deal would not have been made possible without our allies Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, and Turkey. They all stepped up, and they stood with us. They stood with us, and they made bold and brave decisions, released prisoners being held in their countries who were justifiably being held, and provided logistical support to get the Americans home. So, for anyone who questions whether allies matter, they do. They matter.

“And today is a powerful example of why it’s vital to have friends in this world—friends you can trust, work with, and depend upon, especially on matters of great consequence and sensitivity like this.

“Our alliances make our people safer.”  

Sullivan was clear about where specific praise was due. “Today’s exchange is a feat of diplomacy that honestly could only be achieved by a leader like Joe Biden,” he said at a press conference this afternoon.” He directed the team and was personally engaged in the diplomacy necessary. “There is no more singular or concrete demonstration that the alliances that the president has reinvigorated around the world matter to Americans—to the individual safety of Americans and to the collective security of Americans,” Sullivan said. “And honestly, guys, I can just say this was vintage Joe Biden, rallying…American allies to save American citizens and Russian freedom fighters and doing it with intricate statecraft, pulling his whole team together to drive this across the finish line.”

Tearing up, Sullivan added, “Today…was a very good day.”

This deal was in the works during the weeks when the press was hounding the president and suggesting he was not fit to do the work of the office. In fact, a senior administration official briefing reporters this morning pointed out that on July 20, an hour before he announced to the nation that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, Biden “was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart, urging them to make the final arrangements and to get this deal over the finish line.”

This is the largest prisoner swap since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The administration warned journalists that no one should think that there has been a breakthrough in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia or that tensions have eased. Putin’s continuing attacks on Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our European partners, as well as his growing defense relationship with China, North Korea, and Iran, all mean that “you will not see a policy change from President Biden or the administration when it comes to standing up to Putin’s aggression as a result of this,” an official said.

But the deal does suggest that Putin might be finding it in his own interest to look like he might be willing to negotiate on different issues going forward, a reflection of the damage the Ukraine war has inflicted on his own society. Russia has recently pulled its ships from the Sea of Azov, Russian mercenaries just suffered big losses in Mali, and today, Russian media reported that the country’s largest oil refinery was on fire. Putin might also be seeing that Trump’s path to the White House has gotten dramatically steeper in the past couple of weeks.

Indeed, Putin’s decision to go ahead with the swap was a blow to Trump. Gershkovich was a Wall Street Journal reporter when he was taken into custody in March 2023, and the Wall Street Journal covered the negotiations in quite some depth today. Reporters Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski, and Aruna Viswanatha noted that Trump got wind that a deal was coming together and began to insist at his rallies and in interviews that Putin would free Gershkovich only for him.

Putin has proven Trump wrong.

That did not, however, stop Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance from claiming that Trump deserved credit for the swap despite Trump’s insistence that Gershkovich would be released only after Trump was reelected. For his part, Trump didn’t express any joy at all in the deal, simply claiming that Biden got fleeced and saying “[o]ur ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”  

And from the Department of Poor Timing, MAGA representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina tweeted this morning: “Biden is MIA. Why is no one talking about it?”

At today’s White House announcement, a reporter noted that former president Trump “has said repeatedly that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange,” and asked President Biden: “What do you say to that?”

“Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” Biden answered.

mickeyrat

August 2, 2024 (Friday)

Today, Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that there is reason to believe that when Trump’s 2016 campaign was running low on funds, Trump accepted a $10 million injection of cash from Egypt’s authoritarian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It is against the law to accept direct or indirect financial support from foreign nationals or foreign governments for a political campaign in the United States.

In early 2017, CIA officials told Justice Department officials that a confidential informant had told them of such a cash exchange, and those officials handed the matter off to Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was already looking at the links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. FBI agents noted that on September 16, Trump had met with Sisi when the Egyptian leader was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.”

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

An FBI investigation took years to get records, but Davis and Leonnig reported that in 2019 the FBI learned of a key withdrawal from an Egypt bank. In January 2017, five days before Trump took office, an organization linked to Egypt’s intelligence service asked a manager at a branch of the state-run National Bank of Egypt to “kindly withdraw” $9,998,000 in U.S. currency. The bundles of $100 bills filled two bags and weighed more than 200 pounds.

Once in office, Trump embraced Sisi and, in a reversal of U.S. policy, invited him to be one of his first guests at the White House. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sissi,” Trump said.

Mueller had gotten that far in pursuit of the connection between Trump and Sisi when he was winding down his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He handed the Egypt investigation off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D C., where it appears then–attorney general William Barr killed it.

Today, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that Elon Musk and other tech executives are putting their money behind a social media ad campaign for Trump and Vance, and are creating targeted ads in swing states by collecting information about voters under false pretenses. According to Schwartz, their America PAC, or political action committee, says it helps viewers register to vote. And, indeed, the ads direct would-be voters in nonswing states to voter registration sites.

But people responding to the ad in swing states are not sent to registration sites. Instead, they are presented with “a highly detailed personal information form [and] prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age,” handing over “priceless personal data to a political operation” that can then create ads aimed at that person’s demographic and target them personally in door-to-door campaigns. After getting the information, the site simply says, “Thank you,” without directing the viewer toward a registration site.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion.

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman.

In January 2011, when he was director of the FBI, Robert Mueller gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. He explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

In order to corner international markets, Mueller explained, these criminal enterprises "may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat."

In a new book called Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum carries that story forward into the present, examining how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is]  harmful to them,” especially as those are the words that their internal opposition uses. “And so they need to undermine the people who use it and, if they can, discredit it.”

Those people, Applebaum says, “believe they are owed power, they deserve power.” When they lose elections, they “come back in a second term and say, right, this time, I'm not going to make that mistake again, and…then change their electoral system, or…change the constitution, change the judicial system, in order to make sure that they never lose.”

Almost exactly a year ago, on August 1, 2023, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor.

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the government”; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.”

The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3, after which his lawyers repeatedly delayed their pretrial motions until, on December 7, Trump asked the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether he was immune from prosecution. Chutkan had to put off her initial trial date of March 4, 2024, and said she would not reschedule until the court decided the question of Trump’s immunity.

In February the appeals court decided he was not immune. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 1, 2024, to decide that Trump enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Today the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Chutkan, almost exactly a year after it was first brought.

mickeyrat

August 3, 2024 (Saturday)

Buddy says this is one of his favorite photos ever, and it's definitely the kind of portrait of me I like! Taken at Arches National Park in Utah in March, it seems to me to say there's a whole new, amazing world out there, every day.

Going to bed early tonight. Will be back at it tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

mickeyrat

August 4, 2024 (Sunday)

To some fanfare, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign today launched Republicans for Harris, which will kick off with events this week in the swing states of Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Their goal, campaign officials told Zeke Miller of the Associated Press, is to make it easier for Republican voters put off by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to back Democratic presidential nominee Harris. Curiously, though, in their embrace of the nation’s growing democratic coalition, Republicans crossing the aisle in 2024 are returning to their party’s origins.

The Republican Party itself began as a coalition that came together to stand against an oligarchy whose leaders were explicit about their determination to overthrow democracy. As wealth had accumulated in the hands of a small group of elite southern enslavers, those men had turned against American democracy.  “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are created equal,’” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond said.

Enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia rejected the other key principle of the Declaration of Independence: that everyone has a right to a say in the government under which they live. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” he wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “[b]ut we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

Enslavers like Hammond and Fitzhugh believed that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to impose their will on everyone else. If they did not, men like Fitzhugh believed, poor men and marginalized people would insist on being equal, receiving the value of their work and living as they wished.

Under this dangerous system, Fitzhugh wrote, “society is insensibly, and often unconsciously, marching to the utter abandonment of the most essential institutions—religion, family ties, property, and the restraints of justice.” He defended human enslavement as the highest form of society, since paternalistic Christian masters would care for their wards, preventing a world of “No-Government and Free Love.”

The elite enslavers came to control the Democratic Party and, through it, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. The Whig Party tried for decades to make peace with the increasingly extremist southern Democrats, and as they did so, the party splintered, with those opposed either to human enslavement or the spread of human enslavement to the West—those were actually not the same thing—creating their own upstart parties.

And then, in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers managed to push through the Senate a bill to organize the two giant territories of Kansas and Nebraska in such a way that they would be able to spread their system across the American West. The new slave states that would form there would be able to join forces in the House of Representatives with the southern slave states to outvote the northern states that rejected enslavement. Without a brake on their ambitions, the enslavers would be able to spread their worldview across the nation. From their position at the head of the United States, they expected to spread their slave-based economy around the globe.

But their triumph was not to be. With the bill under debate in the Senate, Democrat Amos Tuck of New Hampshire—the state Pierce hailed from—wrote: “Now let Frank Pierce consummate his treason, if he dare. There is a North, thank God!... We have…rebuked treason, condemned the Nebraska Bill, and discarded the President.” Tuck noted that the Democrats were losing “their best men. I think they (the leaders) can never recover from the consequences of having tried to betray their country.” He looked forward to “bringing out in future the true characteristics of our people, so long belied by the most unworthy demagogues….”

Tuck was not alone. The day after the House of Representatives began to debate the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Whig representative Israel Washburn of Maine invited about thirty antislavery representatives to meet at the rooms of his friends, Massachusetts representatives Thomas D. Eliot and Edward Dickinson (whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poetry), in Mrs. Crutchett’s select boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. The men who called the meeting were northern Whigs, and the men who came to it entered the elegant room as members of a variety of political parties, but they all left committed to a new northern organization that would stand against the spread of slavery into the West. They called themselves “Republicans,” hoping to invoke Thomas Jefferson—who had called his own political party Republican—and recall the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

When the House passed the bill on May 22 and Pierce signed it on May 30, the anti-Nebraska movement took off. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.” There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; in the midterm elections that year, voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected 11 senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North.

In 1855, Pierce insisted that Americans opposing the spread of human enslavement were trying to overturn American traditions, insisting that the United States was a white man’s republic and that the Founders had intended to create a hierarchy of races.

But those coming together to oppose enslavement denounced Pierce’s recasting of American history as “False all through!” As for the Founders, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill wrote, “their ‘one guiding thought,’ as they themselves proclaimed it, was the inalienable right of ALL men to Freedom, as a principle.”

When Democrats tried to call those coming together as Republicans “radicals,” rising politician Abraham Lincoln turned the tables by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. “[Y]ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort,” he said, addressing the Democrats who remained determined to base the United States in enslavement.

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’; while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”

When voters elected Lincoln president, the fledgling Republican Party turned away from a government that catered to an oligarchy trying to overturn democracy and instead reinvented the American government to create a new, active government that guaranteed to poorer men the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to a say in their government, and access to resources that had previously been monopolized by the wealthy.

The present looks much like that earlier moment when people of all different political backgrounds came together to defend the principles of the United States. In today’s moment, when someone like J.D. Vance backer billionaire Peter Thiel says, “Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted,” and the Republicans’ Project 2025 calls for replacing democracy with Christian nationalism, it makes sense for all people who care about our history and our democratic heritage to pull together.

Today, Olivia Troye, who served on national security issues in the Trump White House, said, “[W]hat is happening here with the Republican Party… is dangerous and extreme. And I think we need to get back to the values of…observing the rule of law, of standing with our international allies and actually providing true leadership to the world, which is something that Kamala Harris has exhibited during the Biden Administration.”

As Lincoln recalled, when people in his era realized that the very nature of America was under attack, they “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We…are rapidly closing in…. “ And, he said, “When the storm shall be past,” opponents “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Indeed, when the storm passed in his day, Americans found that the magnitude of the crisis they had weathered and the rise of entirely new issues meant that old party lines had fallen apart and people reorganized along entirely new ones. Famously, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who in 1860 had worked for the election of extremist Democrat John C. Breckinridge, stood heartbroken by Lincoln’s bedside as he breathed his last and blessed him, saying: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

mickeyrat

August 5, 2024 (Monday)

Christi Carras of the Los Angeles Times reported today that the reality TV industry has collapsed. From April to June, reality TV production in the Los Angeles region fell by 57% compared to the same period in 2023; that’s a 50% drop over the five-year average, excluding the Covid-induced production shutdown. The immediate reasons for the dropping production are systemic to the business, Carras reports, but the change seems to represent Americans’ souring on the blurring of reality and entertainment that gave us the Trump era.

Trump rose to political power thanks to his appearances on reality TV, which claimed to be unscripted but was actually edited to emphasize ruthless competition among people striving for ultimate victory in a closed system. The Apprentice launched in 2004, and its highly edited episodes portrayed its star, Trump, as a brilliant and very wealthy businessman despite his past failures.

Since 2015, Trump has offered a simple narrative of American life that did not reflect reality. Using the sort of language rising authoritarians use to attract a disaffected population, he promised those left behind economically by forty years of supply-side economics that he would bring back manufacturing, close tax loopholes, promote infrastructure, and make healthcare cheaper and better. He also promised sexists and racists who wanted to roll back the gains women and racial and gender minorities had made since the 1950s that he would, once again, center white, heteronormative men.

He never delivered on his economic promises: manufacturing continued to decline, he cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, “infrastructure week” became a national joke, and rather than expand the Affordable Care Act, Republicans repeatedly tried to kill it. But Trump and his followers did center those who had gravitated toward the MAGA movement for its cultural promises. Now, in 2024, that gravitation means that the Republican Party has become an antidemocratic vehicle for Christian nationalism.

In the 2024 contest, Trump has continued to push a fake narrative, but his ability to dominate the political conversation is slipping. Last Wednesday, his interview before the National Association of Black Journalists began more than an hour late; Trump publicly blamed the delay on the association’s technology, and there was, in fact, a brief issue with the audio. But it turns out that the delay was due primarily to Trump’s not wanting to be fact-checked during the interview. He was not willing to go on stage without a promise that the journalists would permit him to say whatever he wanted. They declined.

Trump’s determination to have a friendly audience to promote his narrative was behind the dust-up over planned presidential debates. Trump has not sat down for an interview with any but friendly right-wing interviewers. He agreed to a September 10 debate on ABC News back when he assumed the Democratic presidential nominee would be President Joe Biden. As soon as Biden said he would not accept the nomination, Trump suggested he would not be willing to follow through with the ABC News event if Vice President Kamala Harris was his opponent.

Over the weekend, he announced that he would be willing to debate Harris on September 4, but only on his terms: he wants the Fox News Channel—which had to pay a $787 million settlement for lying that Trump won the 2020 election—to host such an event, and he wants the arena full of people. Essentially, he wants to set up the conditions for one of his rallies and then “debate” Harris in that right-wing bubble.

But Harris has stood firm on the previous agreement, condemning Trump’s trash talk about her and daring Trump instead to “say it to my face.” She is taunting him for chickening out of the arranged debate, and says she will follow through with the September 10 event to which both campaigns agreed. Trump’s new plan doubles as a way to get out of debating altogether: he’s saying that if she doesn’t show up at his event, he won’t debate her at all.

At the same time, Americans have seen the Biden-Harris administration actually do the hard work of governing, completing the promises Trump made but didn’t deliver. Manufacturing has surged under Biden, with factories under construction and about 800,000 manufacturing jobs created. The Biden-Harris administration more fully funded the IRS to go after tax cheats, passing the mark of recovering more than $1 billion from high-income, high-wealth individuals earlier this month and scoring a $6 billion judgment against Coca-Cola Co. for back taxes just last week. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges, and a record high number of people have enrolled in affordable health coverage plans since January 2021.

The difference between sound bites and the hard work of governance was illustrated last week when Biden and Harris were the ones who pulled off a complicated multi-country swap that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—whom Trump had repeatedly boasted that he alone could get Russian president Vladimir Putin to release—along with fifteen other Russian-held prisoners.

That focus on complicated governance rather than sound bites has paid off in the Indo-Pacific region as well. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote in the Washington Post today that “enhanced U.S. power in the [Indo-Pacific] region is one of the most important legacies of this administration.”

They note that “[n]o place on Earth is more critical to Americans’ livelihoods and futures than the Indo-Pacific.” It generates nearly 60% of global gross domestic product and its commerce supports more than 3 million U.S. jobs, while the area’s security challenges—North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and China’s provocations at sea—have far reaching effects.

As the U.S. turned inward during the Trump administration, China’s power grew, and when Biden and Harris took office, America’s standing in the Indo-Pacific was at “its lowest point in decades.” Biden’s transformation of the nation’s Indo-Pacific policy “is one of the most important and least-told stories of the [administration’s] foreign policy strategy,” the authors write. Biden’s team replaced one-to-one relationships in the region with wider partnerships: AUKUS, a new security partnership comprising Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.; a trilateral summit with Japan and South Korea; and a summit with Japan and the Philippines. It elevated the Quad—Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.—and hosted both the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum. With 13 other countries, it created the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity.

These partnerships do not translate to easy slogans, but they have strengthened defense and supply chains and helped address climate change. “Our security partnerships across the Indo-Pacific” make “us and our neighbors safer and stronger,” they wrote.

The stock market fell today, with the big indices—the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite, and the S&P 500—all sliding. The Dow, which measures 30 of the nation’s older, prominent companies, and the S&P 500, which measures 500 of the largest companies on the U.S. stock exchanges, took their biggest daily losses since September 2022, although they still remain up about 60% from the time of Biden’s election.

In June, Moody’s Analytics assessed that the economy would grow less under Trump’s policies than under a continuation of Biden’s, but today, Trump promptly wrote: “Stock markets are crashing, jobs numbers are terrible, we are heading to World War III, and we have two of the most incompetent ‘leaders’ in history.” His running mate, J.D. Vance, followed that up by blaming Vice President Kamala Harris. “The stock market is crashing because of weak and failed Kamala Harris’ policies and the world is on the brink of WW3,” he said.

But what is really at stake here is the complicated business of balancing the economy as it has come out of the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. The Biden-Harris administration made the decision to invest money in ordinary Americans, and it worked: the U.S. came out of the pandemic with a stronger economy than any other nation.

That economic strength came with inflation, both because people had more money to spend thanks to higher wages and because that cash meant that corporations could continue to charge higher prices: the net profits of food companies, for example, are up by a median of 51% since just before the pandemic, according to Tom Perkins of The Guardian, and one egg producer’s profits went up by around 950% (not a typo). To get inflation under control, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell—a Trump appointee, by the way—kept interest rates high.

He has been under pressure to cut interest rates in order to keep the economy humming but has not, and on Friday a jobs report showed that U.S. employers had added fewer jobs than economists had expected, while the unemployment rate ticked up. This hiccup in the booming economy prompted investors to sell.

Fine-tuning the economy through interest rates is like catching an egg on a plate. Economist Robert Reich notes that the economy will continue to need the antitrust regulations the administration has put in place to bring down costs, and just today federal judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly for internet searches, a decision likely to influence other antitrust lawsuits the government has undertaken.

Voters seem increasingly aware of the difference between image and reality. Today the hospitality workers’ union UNITE HERE, which plays a big role in Nevada politics, endorsed Vice President Harris for president. Trump had tried to court the union with a promise to end taxes on tips, a plan Americans for Tax Fairness says avoids increasing the low minimum wage for waitstaff and instead opens the door to tax abuse by high-income professionals who reclassify their compensation as tips.

Union president Gwen Mills told Josh Boak of the Associated Press that Trump was just “making a play” for votes. The union says its members will knock on more than 3.3 million doors for Harris in swing states.

mickeyrat

  August 6, 2024 (Tuesday)

Today Vice President Kamala Harris named her choice for her vice presidential running mate: Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz grew up in rural Nebraska. He enlisted in the Army National Guard when he was 17 and served for 24 years, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major, making him the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress, according to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.  

He went to college with the educational benefits afforded him by the Army, and graduated from Chadron (Nebraska) State College. From 1989 to 1990, he taught at a high school in China, then became a social studies teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, where he met fellow teacher Gwen Whipple, who became his wife. They moved to Minnesota, where they both continued teaching and had two children, Hope and Gus, through IVF.

Walz became the faculty advisor for the school’s gay-straight alliance organization at the same time that he coached the high-school football team from a 0–27 record to a state championship. The advisor “really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married," Walz said in 2018.

Walz ran for Congress in 2005 after some of his students were asked to leave a rally for George W. Bush because one of them had a sticker for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Walz won and served in Congress for twelve years, sitting on the House Agriculture Committee, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

Voters elected Walz to the Minnesota state house in 2018, and in his second term they gave him a slim majority in the state legislature. With that support, Walz signed into law protections for abortion rights, supported gender-affirming care, and legalized the recreational use of marijuana. He signed into law gun safety legislation and protections for voting rights, and pushed for action to combat climate change and to promote renewable energy.

Strong tax revenues and spending cuts gave the state a $17.6 billion surplus, and the Democrats under Walz used the money not to cut taxes, as Republicans wanted, but to invest in education, fund free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren, make tuition free at the state’s public colleges for students whose families earned less than $80,000 a year, and invest in paid family and medical leave and health insurance coverage regardless of immigration status.

While MAGA Republicans are already trying to define Walz as “far left,” his votes in Congress put him pretty squarely in the middle.  His work with Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan to expand technology production and infrastructure funding in the state was rewarded in 2023, when Minnesota knocked Texas out of the top five states for business. The CNBC rating looked at 86 indicators in 10 categories, including the workforce, infrastructure, health, and business friendliness.

Walz checks a number of boxes for the 2024 election, most notably that he hails from near the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and comes across as a normal, nice guy. He favors unions, workers’ rights, and a $15 minimum wage. He is also the person who coined the phrase that took away the dangerous overtones of today’s MAGA Republicans by dubbing them “weird.” As a student of his said: “In politics he’s good at calling out B.S. without getting nasty or too down in the dirt…. It’s the kind of common sense he showed as a coach: practical and kinda goofy.”

Walz is also a symbol of an important resetting of the Democratic Party. He has been unapologetic about his popular programs. On Sunday, July 28, when CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.”

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”

Right-wing reactionary politicians have claimed to represent ordinary Americans since the time of the passage of the Voting Rights Act—on August 6, 1965, exactly 59 years ago today—by insisting that a government that works for communities is a “socialist” plan to elevate undeserving women and racial, ethnic, and gender minorities at the expense of hardworking white men.

Historically, though, rural America has quite often been the heart of the country’s progressive politics, and the Midwest has had a central place in that progressivism. Walz reintegrates that history with today’s Democratic Party.

That reintegration has left the Republicans flatfooted. Trump and J.D. Vance expected to continue their posturing as champions of the common man, but on that front the credentials of a New York real estate developer who inherited millions of dollars and of a Yale-educated venture capitalist pale next to a Nebraska-born schoolteacher. Bryan Metzger, politics reporter at Business Insider, pointed out that J.D. Vance tried to hit Walz as a “San Francisco-style liberal,” but while Vance lived in San Francisco as a venture capitalist between 2013 and 2017, Walz went to San Francisco for the first time just last month.

Head writer and producer of “A Closer Look at Late Night with Seth Meyers” Sal Gentile summed up Walz’s progressive politics and community vibe when he wrote on social media: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your [carburetor], replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”

Vice President Harris had a very deep bench from which to choose a running mate, but her choice of Walz seems to have been widely popular. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who are usually on opposite sides of the party, both praised the choice, prompting Ocasio-Cortez to post: “Dems in disconcerting levels of array.”

Harris and Walz held their first rally together tonight in Philadelphia, where Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who had been a top contender for the vice presidential slot, fired up the crowd. “Each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, to get in the game, and to do our part,” he said. “Are you ready to do your part? Are you ready to form a more perfect union? Are you ready to build an America where no matter what you look like, where you come from, who you love, or who you pray to, that this will be a place for you? And are you ready to look the next president of the United States in the eye and say, ‘Hello, Madam President?’ I am too, so let’s get to work!”

Pennsylvania is a crucial state, and Shapiro issued a statement offering his “enthusiastic support” to the ticket. He pledged to work to unite Pennsylvanians behind my friends Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and defeat Donald Trump.”

mickeyrat

August 7, 2024 (Wednesday)

The Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz continues to gain momentum, with people flocking to their events and pouring money into the Democrats’ campaign: in the first 24 hours after Walz joined the ticket, the party raised $36 million from more than 450,000 donors, more than a third of them giving for the first time. In contrast, the Republicans seem to be imploding. For years, people have noted that the party seemed to be painting itself into a corner, but it’s very odd to watch it now seem to be trapped.

Yesterday afternoon, after Harris’s selection of Walz had hit social media and enthusiasm was building, Trump posted on his social media company an elaborate and bizarre fantasy that President Joe Biden would suddenly try to take back the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Aside from Trump’s obvious yearning to go back to running against Biden, on whom his personal attacks seemed to stick, and his attempt to find some nickname that will stick to Harris, this rant shows that the Republicans seem unable to counter popular Democratic policies.

The heart of their policies were in Project 2025, the extremist vision of a country ruled by a strongman who took the civil service, the Department of Justice, and the military under his own control in order to slash the popular, secular parts of the government and replace them with Christian nationalism. Right-wing evangelicals liked what was outlined in the project, but when the majority of Americans began to understand what was in it, they were quite clear they wanted no part of it. Trump then tried to distance himself from it, although he had publicly praised it, his political action committee had called it his plan, and more than 100 of its architects were people who had served in his administration.

And then it turned out that Trump’s vice presidential pick, J. D. Vance, had written the introduction for a book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the chief author of Project 2025. The original publication date for the book, which calls for “a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution,’” was in September, shortly before the election, but today the publisher announced it would put off publication until November, after the election.

But advance reader copies of Roberts’s book are already in the hands of reviewers, and Madeline Peltz of Media Matters is posting some of the content online. In it, she notes, Roberts “rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. He says that having children should not be considered an ‘optional individual choice,’ but a ‘social expectation,’” and that reproductive choice is a “snake strangling the American family.” It is no accident that Vance’s numbers with women continue to fall.

And the Roberts book is only one of Vance’s recent unpopular steps: it turns out that he also wrote a glowing blurb for a book written by ghostwriter Joshua Lisec under the name of far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. The book, titled “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them),” calls for purging their enemies from society. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags,” Vance wrote. “Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people… In ‘Unhumans,’ Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Without popular policies, MAGA Republicans are simply falling back on the old narrative techniques they used in the past. This morning, Trump called into Fox & Friends, where he fell back on the old argument that Democrats are essentially communists who are undermining American culture. Of Harris-Walz, he said, “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately if not sooner.” Trump also tried to hit on the culture wars Republicans have fallen back on since the 1970s, warning that Walz is “very heavy into transgender. Anything transgender he thinks is great.”

Trump also tried to push the idea that Harris’s choosing of Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro proves that the Democrats are antisemitic. “I think it's very insulting to Jewish people,” Trump said. This is a hard sell considering that of the 26 members of Congress who are Jewish, 24 are Democrats, and of the 9 Jewish senators, 8 are Democrats and 1 is an Independent. And then, of course, there is the fact that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is himself Jewish.

When the stock market tumbled Monday, Trump tried to pin the slide on Harris—calling it the Kamala Crash—and Vance seemed to bet against the United States, predicting that “[t]his moment could set off a real economic calamity around the globe.” When the market rebounded Tuesday, the two remained silent.   

Indeed, Trump is largely off the campaign trail, raising suggestions that his handlers don’t want him in public out of concern about what he will do—not a frivolous concern after his angry performance last week before the National Association of Black Journalists.

Meanwhile, Vance is traveling around to the sites where Harris and Walz are speaking. His crowds are embarrassingly small compared to theirs, and he seems perhaps to be trying to intimidate his opponents as Trump tried to do when he loomed behind his 2016 Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Today Vance and a phalanx of his team approached reporters near Harris’s plane to attack her, only to discover she wasn’t around, at which point he boasted the plane would soon be his.

But rather than seeming intimidating, he came across as so desperate for attention that he had to stalk a more popular figure across the tarmac. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) apparently thought so: she reposted Vance’s photo of his group of about nine people walking away from Harris’s plane and commented: “Looks like [Vance] brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today.”  

MAGA Republicans also appear to be reaching to their past by attacking Walz with the sort of “swift boat” smear campaign attacking his military service they launched against decorated veteran John Kerry when he ran for president in 2004. Indeed, the Republican operative widely thought to be behind the attacks on Kerry, Chris LaCivita, is now in charge of the Trump-Vance campaign. Vance today suggested that Walz is engaging in “stolen valor.” Vance served for four years as a Marine, including as a military journalist in Iraq, where he did not experience combat. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, during which he deployed in response to natural disasters in the United States and served in Europe in support of U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

A number of observers are saying that part of the genius of the Walz pick is that he seems to many people to be the dad and grandfather stolen away by the right-wing rage machine of talk radio and the Fox News Channel and replaced with frightened, angry people who suspect their neighbors and insist the country is going to hell. It seems unlikely that doubling down on that narrative will attract the voters the MAGA ticket needs to win a majority of votes in 2024.

Yesterday the Republican-dominated Georgia State Election Board passed a rule that could delay the certification of an election until “after reasonable inquiry that the tabulation and canvassing of the election are complete and accurate and that the results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election.” In a rally on Saturday, Trump thanked the three Republican members of the board—Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King—by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”

In 2020, Trump tried to get Georgia to throw out its certification of Biden’s victory there, claiming the vote had been marred by fraud, especially among the state’s Black population. He told Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes—one more than the 11,779 that had given Biden the state.

Yesterday, news broke that former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, who was indicted in Arizona for her participation in the scheme to replace the state’s real electors for Biden with fake ones for Trump, has agreed to a plea deal. In exchange for the state dropping its charges against her, she has agreed to provide information and materials about the scheme and to testify “at any time and place.”

mickeyrat

August 8, 2024 (Thursday)

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat.

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers.

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files.

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote.

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

mickeyrat

August 9, 2024 (Friday)

When President Joe Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21—less than three weeks ago—the horizon for the 2024 presidential election suddenly shortened from years to about three months. That shift apparently flummoxed the Republicans, who briefly talked about suing to make sure that Biden, rather than Harris, was at the head of the Democratic ticket, even though the Democrats had not yet held their convention and Biden had not officially become the nominee when he stepped out of contention. Lately, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that Biden might suddenly, somehow, change his mind and upend the whole new ticket, although Biden himself has been strong in his public support for Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Democrats held a roll-call vote nominating Harris for the presidency.

The idea that presidential campaigns should drag on for years is a relatively new one. For well over a century, political conventions were dramatic affairs where political leaders hashed out who they thought was their party’s best standard-bearer, a process that almost always involved quiet deals and strategic conversations. Sometimes the outcome was pretty clear ahead of time, but there were often surprises. Famously, for example, Ohio representative James A. Garfield went to the 1880 Republican convention expecting to marshal votes for Ohio senator John Sherman—General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brother—only to find himself walking away with the nomination himself.

As recently as 1952, the outcome of the Republican National Convention was not clear beforehand. Most observers thought the nomination would go to Ohio senator Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, but after a tremendous battle—including at least one fist fight—the nomination went to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who challenged Taft because of the senator's opposition to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Taft supporters took that loss hard: Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. drove Eisenhower’s victory, prompting right-wing Republicans’ enduring hatred of what they called the “eastern establishment.”

The 1960 presidential election ushered in a new era in politics. While Eisenhower had turned to advertising executives to help him appeal to voters, it was 1960 Democratic nominee Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy who was the first presidential candidate to turn to a public opinion pollster, Louis Harris, to help him adjust his message and his policies to polls.

Political campaigns were modernizing from the inside to win elections, but as important in the long run was Theodore H. White’s best selling account of the campaign, The Making of the President 1960. White was a successful reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer who, finding himself flush from a movie deal and out of work when Collier’s magazine went under, decided to follow the inside story of the 1960 presidential campaign. “I want to get at the real guts of the process of making an American president—what the mechanics, the mystique, the style, the pressures are with which an American who hopes to be our President must contend,” White wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN).

White set out to follow the campaigns of the many primary candidates that year: Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy and Republicans Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller.

Before White’s book, political journalism picked up when politicians announced their candidacy, and focused on candidates’ public statements and position papers. White’s portrait welcomed ordinary people backstage to hear politicians reading crowds, fretting over their prospects, and adjusting their campaigns according to expert advice. In heroic, novelistic style, White told the tale of the struggle that lifted Kennedy to victory as the other candidates fell away, and his book spent 20 weeks at the top of the bestseller lists and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

White’s book emphasized the long process of building a successful presidential race and the many advisors who made such building possible. In the modern world a presidential campaign lasted far longer than the few months after a convention. In his intimate portrait of that process, White radically transformed political journalism. As historian John E. Miller noted, journalists who had previously covered the public face of a candidacy “now sought to capture in minute detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the candidates and their strategy boards and to probe beneath the surface events of political campaigns to ascertain where the ‘real action’ lay.”

For journalists, seeing the inside story of politics as a sort of business meant leaving behind the idea that political ideology mattered in presidential elections, a position that political scientists were also abandoning in 1960. It also meant getting that inside story by preserving the candidates’ goodwill, something we now call access journalism. Other journalists leapt to follow the trail White blazed, and by 1973 the pack of presidential journalists had become a story in its own right. White told journalist Timothy Crouse that he had come to regret that his new approach to presidential contests had turned presidential campaigns into a circus.

Over time, presidential campaigns began to use that circus as part of their own story, spinning polls, rallies, and press coverage to convince voters that their candidate was winning. But now the 2024 election seems to be challenging the habit of seeing a presidential campaign as a long, heroic sifting of advice and application of tactics, as well as the perceived need for access to campaign principals.

Yesterday, apparently chafing as the Harris-Walz campaign turns out huge crowds, Trump called reporters to his company’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. Those determined not to miss any twist of the campaign—and who had enough advance notice to make it to Florida—listened to him serve up his usual banquet of lies: that doctors and mothers are murdering babies after they’re born; everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, no one died on January 6, 2021; he loves autocrats and they love him; and so on. The journalists there did not ask him about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign.

But, as conservative writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted, Trump appears nonetheless to have gone entirely off the rails. He claimed that the crowd he drew on January 6 was bigger than those who gathered in 1963 to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous I Have a Dream speech, and he told the fabricated story of surviving an emergency landing in a helicopter with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, a story that appears to have involved a different Black man, at a different time, and did not feature the conversation he recounted.*

As Nichols put it, “The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

But the media appears to be sliding away from Trump: today he angrily insisted he could prove that the dangerous helicopter trip actually occurred, leading New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman to note that “Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.” When asked to produce the flight records he claimed to have, Trump “responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice.”

In contrast, as presidential candidates, first Biden and now Harris have not appeared to bother with access journalism or courting established media. Instead, they have recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy.

Yesterday, after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, “What’cha got?” All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview.

--

*I corrected this sentence, which said the helicopter story was “entirely fabricated,” shortly after midnight on August 10, in light of a new story by Christopher Cadelago in Politico that says Nate Holden, a former city councilman and state senator from Los Angeles, says he was on a frightening helicopter ride with Trump at some point in the 1990s.

mickeyrat

August 10, 2024 (Saturday)

Leaving you tonight with a picture from one of our favorite places. It's a bit hard to find from the land and always magical, as if it's carved from the past. And, indeed, if anyone ever gets to watch the 1922 film The Seventh Day— which has the crazy unrealistic plot of a woman from away and a local Maine mariner falling in love— there is a scene shot from this very spot.  

Will be back to work tomorrow.

mickeyrat

August 11, 2024 (Sunday)

Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.

When he took office in January 2021, President Joe Biden was clear that he intended to launch a new era in America, overturning the neoliberalism of the previous forty years and replacing it with a proven system in which the government would work to protect the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. Neoliberalism relied on markets to shape society, and its supporters promised it would be so much more efficient than government regulation that it would create a booming economy that would help everyone. Instead, the slashing of government regulation and social safety systems had enabled the rise of wealthy oligarchs in the U.S. and around the globe. Those oligarchs, in turn, dominated poor populations, whose members looked at the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few people and gave up on democracy.

Biden recognized that defending democracy in the United States, and thus abroad, required defending economic fairness. He reached back to the precedent set by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and followed by presidents of both parties from then until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Biden’s speeches often come back to a promise to help the parents who “have lain awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering how they will make rent, send their kids to college, retire, or pay for medication.” He vowed “to finally rebuild a strong middle class and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up, giving hardworking families across the country a little more breathing room.”

Like his predecessors, he set out to invest in ordinary Americans. Under his administration, Democrats passed landmark legislation like the American Rescue Plan that rebuilt the economy after the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, and airports, as well as investing in rural broadband; the CHIPS and Science Act that rebuilt American manufacturing at the same time it invested in scientific research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, invested in addressing climate change. Under his direction, the government worked to stop or break up monopolies and to protect the rights of workers and consumers.

Like the policies of that earlier era, his economic policies were based on the idea that making sure ordinary people made decent wages and were protected from predatory employers and industrialists would create a powerful engine for the economy. The system had worked in the past, and it sure worked during the Biden administration, which saw the United States economy grow faster in the wake of the pandemic than that of any other developed economy. Under Biden, the economy added almost 16 million jobs, wages rose faster than inflation, and workers saw record low unemployment rates.

While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.

She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”

To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.

The Republican Party’s roots were in the Midwest, where ordinary people were determined to stop wealthy southern oligarchs from taking over control of the United States government. That determination continued after the war when people in the Midwest were horrified to see industrial leaders step into the place that wealthy enslavers had held before the war. Their opposition was based not in economics alone, but rather in their larger worldview. And because they were Republicans by heritage, they constructed their opposition to the rise of industrial oligarchs as a more expansive vision of democracy.

In the early 1870s the Granger movement, based in an organization originally formed by Oliver H. Kelley of Minnesota and other officials in the Department of Agriculture to combat the isolation of farm life, began to organize farmers against the railroad monopolies that were sucking farmers’ profits. The Grangers called for the government to work for communities rather than the railroad barons, demanding business regulation. In the 1870s, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois passed the so-called Granger Laws, which regulated railroads and grain elevator operators. (When such a measure was proposed in California, railroad baron Leland Stanford called it “pure communism” and hired former Republican congressman Roscoe Conkling to fight it by arguing that corporations were “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment.)

Robert La Follette grew up on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, during the early days of the Grangers and absorbed their concern that rich men were taking over the nation and undermining democracy. One of his mentors warned: “Money is taking the field as an organized power. Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?”

In the wake of the Civil War, La Follette could not embrace the Democrats. Instead, he and people like him brought this approach to government to a Republican Party that at the time was dominated by industrialists. Wisconsin voters sent La Follette to Congress in 1884 when he was just 29, and when party bosses dumped him in 1890, he turned directly to the people, demanding they take the state back from the party machine. They elected him governor in 1900.

As governor, La Follette advanced what became known as the “Wisconsin Idea,” adopted and advanced by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. As Roosevelt noted in a book explaining the system, Wisconsin was “literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” La Follette called on professors from the University of Wisconsin, state legislators, and state officials to craft measures to meet the needs of the state’s people. “All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote.

In the late twentieth century, the Republican Party had moved far away from Roosevelt when it embraced neoliberalism. As it did so, Republicans ditched the Wisconsin Idea: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to do so explicitly by changing the mission of the University of Wisconsin system from a “search for truth” to “improve the human condition” to a demand that the university “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

While Republicans abandoned the party’s foundational principles, Democratic governors have been governing on them. Now vice-presidential nominee Walz demonstrates that those community principles are joining the Democrats’ commitment to economic fairness and civil rights to create a new, national program for democracy.

It certainly seems like the birth of a new era in American history. At a Harris-Walz rally in Arizona on Friday, Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, who describes himself as a lifelong Republican, said: “I do not recognize my party. The Republican Party has been taken over by extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the party. I have something to say to those of us who are in the political middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party…. [Y]ou don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt…. [I]n the spirit of the great Senator John McCain, please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump, and protecting the rule of law, protecting our Constitution, and protecting the democracy of this great country. That is why I’m standing with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.”

Vice President Harris put it differently. Speaking to a United Auto Workers local in Wayne, Michigan, on Thursday, she explained what she and Walz have in common.

 “A whole lot,” she said. “You know, we grew up the same way. We grew up in a community of people, you know—I mean, he grew up…in Nebraska; me, Oakland, California—seemingly worlds apart. But the same people raised us: good people; hard-working people; people who had pride in their hard work; you know, people who had pride in knowing that we were a community of people who looked out for each other—you know, raised by a community of folks who understood that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down. It’s based on who you lift up.”

mickeyrat

August 12, 2024 (Monday)

The 2024 election is shaping up to be bizarre on the Republican side. The party’s presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has largely stayed home and posted on social media while his vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance has been trying to cover the campaigning for the team. Indeed, Vance’s offer on Wednesday during a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to debate Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggests that Vance is not unwilling to be seen as the face, if not the leader, of the Republican ticket.

The actual presidential nominee appears even more unstable than usual, and it certainly appears that his handlers are trying to keep him off stage. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted yesterday, “When Trump is on TV a lot, his approval goes down. When he’s in hiding and his surrogates are rearranging his bonkers crazypants word salads into something like real thoughts, his approval goes up.”

Observers, including Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times, have been clear that “Donald Trump’s state of mind should be under debate.” “Trump’s fire hose of cray-cray has inured Americans to his outrages,” Calmes wrote today. “But now that President Biden, a normal and empathetic man, has been pushed out of the 2024 race over concerns about his age and mental acuity, Trump’s more manifest unfitness for office should be ignored no longer—by the media, former advisors and military leaders who remain silent and, yes, Republicans.”

Trump held a surprise “press conference” on Thursday, where, according to a team of reporters and editors at NPR, he misstated things, exaggerated, or lied outright at least 162 times in 64 minutes, a rate of more than two times a minute.

He said that the United States “is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint,” and warned we could end up in another depression like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the economy is strong and growing at a faster rate than it did in three of the four years of Trump’s presidency.

He warned of a national crime wave although crime has been plummeting after a surge in 2020, during Trump’s term, and said that we are “very close to a world war,” which illustrates that Trump’s main lever to turn out voters is fear. With the successes of the Biden-Harris administration having neutralized the economic fears that worked in the past, and with the goals of antiabortion activists achieved in 2022 with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Trump is apparently going for broke with the threat of World War III.

Altogether, the event did Trump no favors.

Poll numbers for Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz have climbed since President Joe Biden announced on July 21 he would not accept the Democratic nomination, and observers have reported that Trump’s anger is leading him into unforced errors, picking fights with allies and seemingly unable to let go of his focus on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a focus that his advisors warn is turning off voters.

Trump has repeatedly seemed to fantasize that Biden will return to the head of the Democratic ticket, and on Sunday, seemingly frantic about Harris’s huge rallies while he can no longer attract big crowds, released a rant accusing Vice President Harris of using AI to create fake footage showing large groups of supporters greeting her airplane. Faking crowds with AI is a technique we know Trump uses, but there is no evidence Harris does. Immediately, people who attended her events released their own videos proving the size of the crowds, and political pundits openly questioned Trump’s mental health.

Then, this morning, Trump posted on his social media channel: “I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their Primary Winning Candidate, Sleepy Joe Biden, midstream.” He went on until his closing: “We are going to WIN BIG and take our Country back from the Radical Left Losers, Fascists, and Communists. We will, very quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” This afternoon, Five Thirty Eight showed Harris up 2.7 points in the national polling average.

Trump’s advisors are pleading with him to stop name-calling and to stay on message. His campaign began today to run ads on X that look like his tweets but are much more like standard political ads.

Tonight, X owner Elon Musk planned to “interview” Trump, although it seemed pretty clear the event was intended simply to be a long advertisement for him. European Union commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wrote an open letter to Musk warning about E.U. laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.” Breton warned that his team “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “E.U. citizens from serious harm.” Musk responded with a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”

Last month the European Union charged X with failing to respect its social media law by letting disinformation and illegal content run rampant. X faces fines of up to several million euros.

In the end, technical difficulties delayed the start of the X Spaces event. Instead, wrote BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who specializes in exposing disinformation, a “deepfake livestream of the Trump-Musk interview” was playing “on a fake Tesla channel on YouTube, with 200,000 people watching.” Sardarizadeh noted that the channel was running a crypto scam, and YouTube finally suspended it. When the real X channel finally began to function, it showed Musk and Trump heaping praise on each other. But Trump was slurring his words, and when HuffPost White House journalist S.V. Dáte asked the campaign about his inability to articulate, it answered: “Must be your sh*tty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”

Trump went to Montana on Friday in support of Republican candidate Tim Sheehy, who is running to unseat popular Democrat Jon Tester, but otherwise has said he is not planning to hit the road until after the Democratic National Convention concludes next week, an odd lack of campaigning at this point in a presidential contest. He seems to be trying to regain control of the political narrative through tweets and social media. Today he said he is suing the government over the raid on Mar-a-Lago that recovered hundreds of classified national security documents, but this is almost certainly posturing to try to make him look strong: he would never be willing to undergo the discovery phase of such a lawsuit.

In the midst of Trump’s frenzy, J.D. Vance has been doing the usual appearances of a campaign, although, unable to generate rally crowds himself, he has been reduced to following Harris and Walz to theirs and trying to grab headlines there.

On Sunday he did the rounds of the morning talk shows, where on CNN he complained that Democrats are bullying him by calling the MAGA Republicans “weird.” Political journalist Brian Tyler Cohen promptly answered: “Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Sleepy Joe, Coco Chow, Lyin Ted, Ron DeSanctimonious, Birdbrain Nikki Haley, Old Crow McConnell, Gavin Newscum, Pencil Neck Schiff, Pocahontas, Cryin Chuck, and Kamabla would all like a word.”

Republicans have made punching down a key part of their rhetoric since at least the 1980s, and Vance’s frustration that the tables have turned feels a bit as if someone is finally standing up to the schoolyard bully.

Outside of the MAGA frenzy, Harris and Walz last week held big, joyous rallies in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, contrasting their happy campaign with the MAGA Republicans’ drumbeat of carnage and revenge. A cover article from Time magazine today by Charlotte Alter described the scene of one of her rallies as a mashup of a Beyoncé concert, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and “the early days of Barack Obama”: “a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.”

At the same time, the grave issues that are propelling the Democrats continue to gain traction. The Associated Press today reported that in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than 100 pregnant women have been treated negligently or turned away from emergency rooms despite federal law. Two women, each of whom lost a fallopian tube to an undertreated ectopic pregnancy—one also lost 75% of one of her ovaries, and the other nearly bled to death—have asked the federal government to investigate whether the hospitals that sent them home to miscarry without medical assistance violated federal law.   

On Saturday, Trump’s campaign said it had been hacked, after Politico reported that it had received communication from an account called “Robert” about internal Trump campaign documents. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo put together a helpful timeline of the story today, explaining that on Sunday the Washington Post said it had also received some of that information and said it believed the information to be that referred to in an August 9 warning from Microsoft that Iran was engaged in an influence campaign. Today the New York Times also said it had received the information, and this afternoon the FBI said it is investigating attempted hacking against both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns.

CNN national security and justice reporter Zachary Cohen reported tonight that the hackers apparently were able to access the campaign by compromising the personal email account of Trump operative Roger Stone.

“Buckle up,” Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on X. “Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems—95% votes on paper ballots is a strong resilience measure, combined with audits. But the chaos is the point….”

mickeyrat

August 13, 2024 (Tuesday)   

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship of the government to its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945.

Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, where she witnessed a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.

Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.

It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn't have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn't stay long enough in any one place, they didn't have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”

FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled:  “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”

By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.

When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don't know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”

With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.

In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.” In 2014, Perkins’s Maine home was designated a National Historic Landmark.

But in 2024 it is no longer guaranteed that Social Security is “safe forever.” The Republican Party has called repeatedly for cuts to the popular program. As recently as March 2024, the Republican Study Committee, which includes the Republican House leadership and about 80% of House Republicans, said it is “committed to protecting and strengthening” Social Security by raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for those who are not yet approaching retirement. The Heritage Foundation, the main organization behind Project 2025, said in June that the retirement age should be raised.

There was such an outcry over that plan that Republicans backed away from it. By July, the Republicans promised in their 2024 platform to “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY…WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE,” but offered no plan for making it solvent except further deregulation and tax cuts. Indeed, Trump’s recent promise to end federal taxes on Social Security benefits for wealthier recipients could, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, increase the budget deficit by $1.6  to $1.8 trillion by 2036, making the plan insolvent two years earlier than currently projected.

As Minnesota governor, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz expanded the state tax exemption for Social Security, eliminating it for most seniors but not affecting the program’s solvency. One hundred and eighty-eight Democrats have cosponsored the Social Security 2100 Act, which expands Social Security benefits and raises payroll taxes on those who earn more than $400,000 a year to pay for it.

mickeyrat

August 14, 2024 (Wednesday)

The July report for consumer prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which came out today, showed that prices rose less than 3% in the previous twelve months. Core inflation has fallen to its lowest rate since April 2021. For well over a year, wages have grown faster than inflation.

President Joe Biden cheered the news but added in a statement, “Prices are still too high. Large corporations are sitting on record profits and not doing enough to lower prices. That’s why we are taking on Big Pharma to lower prescription drug prices. We’re cutting red tape to build more homes while taking on corporate landlords that unfairly increase rent. And we’re taking on price gouging and junk fees to lower everyday costs from groceries to air travel.”

When a reporter asked Biden if the U.S. has beaten inflation, Biden answered: “Yes, Yes, Yes. I told you we were going to have a soft landing…. My policies are working. Start writing that way.”

Just yesterday, the administration announced $100 million worth of investments in new housing in the form of grants to state and local governments to spur the production of new housing. Kriston Capps of Bloomberg reports that “more housing units are under construction now than at any point in half a century—some 60,000 multifamily units were completed in June alone—and rents are stabilizing in some areas as a result.”

Single-family home construction is slower, and with Senate Republicans having blocked a $78 billion tax deal that would support housing tax credits that promote the construction of housing, the White House is finding other ways to spur housing construction.

On Monday the White House continued its attempt to protect the interests of consumers after years in which they lost ground. Continuing to combat junk fees, it proposed rules to fight back against “all the ways that corporations—through excessive paperwork, hold times, and general aggravation—add unnecessary headaches and hassles to people’s days and degrade their quality of life.”

Companies deliberately design processes to be burdensome in order to deter people from getting a refund or a rebate, or canceling a membership or a subscription. Those frustrations waste money and time, the administration said, and after listing some of its own proposals for making it easier to navigate ending subscriptions or activating insurance coverage, it invited Americans to submit their own on a public portal.

In a speech on Friday in North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to take on the issue of price gouging by large corporations. Researchers for U.K. think tanks Institute for Public Policy Research and Common Wealth found in late 2023 that profiteering, or “greedflation,” “significantly” boosted prices, leading to increases of 30% or more in corporate profits. “Excessive profits were even larger in the US, where many important sections of the economy are dominated by a few powerful companies,” wrote Phillip Inman of The Guardian.

Responding to today’s news that inflation is coming down, the stock market ticked up in expectation that the Fed will now be more likely to cut interest rates in September.

The White House took notice today of the fact that applications for small businesses continue to boom across the country, with 19 million new business applications since Vice President Harris and President Biden took office, an annual growth rate 90% higher than prepandemic averages. The White House also noted that congressional Republicans are trying to cut the Small Business Administration and to cut taxes for big corporations.

Politico greeted today’s economic news with a headline saying, “Inflation is easing. Now, Harris has an even bigger problem with the economy.” And the New York Times reported that in a speech in North Carolina, “Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Details,” adding that she is expected to tweak Biden administration themes “in a bid to turn the Democratic economic agenda into an asset.”

The United States economy under Biden and Harris has been the strongest in the world, and now that inflation seems to be under control as well, Harris needs to turn that record “into an asset”? Political journalist James Fallows wrote: “Now they are all just trolling us.”

The Biden-Harris administration has changed the orientation of the United States government from relying on markets to order society and protecting the interests of wealthy Americans in the expectation that they would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered by protecting workers and consumers. Biden and Harris, along with the cabinet officers and staff of the executive branch, revived an older ideology calling for the government to promote the interests of the American people as a whole. This means regulating business and providing government services and oversight to make sure no interest can run the table.

What the two different worldviews look like was on display earlier this month, when Republicans and a few Democrats in the Senate killed a bipartisan expansion of the child tax credit, a tax break for parents with dependent children. A hike in that credit during the pandemic cut child poverty dramatically, only for that rate to bounce back when the pandemic relief expired and dropped five million U.S. children back into poverty in 2022. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that the change “underscores the fact that the number of children living in poverty is a policy choice.”

On January 31, 2024, the House passed an expansion of the child tax credit that was smaller than the one in place during the pandemic, and Republican vice presidential hopeful Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who has been criticized for comments about “childless cat ladies,” seemed to support the measure when he said, “If you’re raising children in this country, we should make it easier, not harder. And unfortunately it’s way too expensive and way too difficult.” He then falsely accused Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris of calling for ending the child tax credit (she has actually called for expanding it).  

But Vance missed the vote, and before it, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told colleagues that passing the bill would “give Harris a win before the election.” According to Chabeli Carranzana of The 19th, Tillis “printed out fake checks made out to ‘millions of American voters’ with the memo: ‘Don’t forget to vote for Kamala!’”  

The two different worldviews were also on display Monday night when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump complimented X owner Elon Musk for firing workers who threatened to strike. The right to strike is protected under federal labor law, and the Biden-Harris administration has stood firmly for workers’ rights.

On Tuesday the United Auto Workers union filed charges against Trump and Musk with the National Labor Relations Board for threatening and intimidating workers. “When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW president Shawn Fain.

Tonight, Trump gave a speech in Asheville, North Carolina, that was supposed to be about the economy. Before he could appear, Trump had to pay the city $82,247.60 in advance, with city officials apparently concerned about the candidate’s habit of skipping out on costs associated with his rallies. Once on stage, he tossed economic issues overboard and concentrated on personal attacks on Biden and Harris, along with stream-of-consciousness musings on tampons and socialism. Apparently speaking of his campaign aides, he said: They wanted to do a speech on the economy. They say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is.”

The era of unfettered markets and the concentration of wealth may be coming to an end. In late July, the finance leaders of the Group of 20 (G20), a forum of the world’s major economies, agreed to cooperate on fair taxation of  "ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” although they did not agree as to whichinternational body should lead.

But yesterday, Joe Perticone of The Bulwark noted that MAGA Republicans appear to have figured out a way to use the struggle over the nation’s economic ideology to elect Trump.

The House recessed in late July having failed to pass a single one of the 12 appropriations bills the government needs to stay in operation because, although the appropriations bills are traditionally kept “clean” of anything extraneous, extremist members of the House Freedom Caucus insist on making extreme cuts and adding their culture war items to the bills. Congress doesn’t reconvene until early September, and the new fiscal year starts on October 1, leaving the House very little time to pass the necessary bills.

Yesterday, members of the House Freedom Caucus called for Republicans to return to Washington, D.C., to pass the bills “to cut spending and advance our policy priorities.” If they can’t pass the bills—and they failed all spring—the extremists want a short-term fix just into “President Trump’s second term.” But they also want the fix to include the SAVE Act, “as called for by President Trump—to prevent noncitizens from voting [and] to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years.”

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. As Perticone notes, Trump’s own 2017 commission to find evidence that undocumented immigrants voted in 2016 disbanded without finding any, and another audit, led by Georgia Republicans before the 2022 midterms, found not a single successful attempt of noncitizens to vote in the previous five years.

Perticone reports that the measure is designed to suppress legitimate Democratic voting and, if Trump still loses, by claiming that Trump lost, again, because the election was stolen by illegal voters.

Trump continues to insist that Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket was a “coup,” partly because he wants to face off against Biden, rather than Harris. But he also is priming his supporters to believe that those Americans who want the government to work for them rather than the very wealthy are illegitimate.