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The Most Under-Covered Story of 2024: Trump and Right-Wing Extremism

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.

One of the most under-covered stories of the Trump era and the 2024 presidential campaign is Donald Trump’s relationship with far-right extremism. This has been going on for years. During the 2016 race, he hobnobbed with and praised conspiracy-monger Alex Jones and encouraged anti-Muslim hatred. A few months into his presidency, Trump hailed participants in the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville as “very fine people.” The insurrectionists who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6 for Trump included Christian nationalists, members of right-wing militias, white supremacists, Confederate flag wavers, neo-Nazis, and others. In 2022, he supped with antisemite Kanye West and Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes. He has repeatedly winked and nodded at the unhinged QAnon movement.

These are just a few examples of Trump’s long-running affiliation with radicals of the right—an affinity that has not prevented him from becoming president and, now, the GOP’s banner carrier for a third time. While the instances cited above have been covered by the mainstream press—except perhaps for Trump’s pat on the back for Jones—they haven’t shaped the overall Trump narrative. And Trump’s current ties to fringe and hard-right activists are not at the center stage of the 2024 election. Far more (digital) ink has been spilled on Joe Biden’s age.

Take Project 2025, the operation organized by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks to develop a far-reaching agenda for a second Trump term that would grant him expanded powers to run an authoritarian-ish government in which he could order the prosecutions of his foes and critics and demand loyalty oaths from federal workers. This initiative has earned a couple of stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post. But how many voters are aware of this extensive scheme? A recent poll found that 76 percent of voters said they had heard “a little” or “nothing” about Project 2025.

A recent poll found that 76 percent of voters said they had heard “a little” or “nothing” about Project 2025.

On Saturday, the Washington Post ran a piece on Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who was budget chief when Trump was in the White House and who’s now a major player behind Project 2025. He’s in line to be Trump’s chief of staff, should the convicted felon return to power. And he’s an outright radical right-winger. In a 2022 essay, he claimed, “We are living in a post constitutional moment” because the left over the past century has supposedly hijacked the government. He decried the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the civil service. He denounced the independence of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He grouses that “conservatives find themselves interpreting a revered document [the Constitution] that is no longer in effect, lacking the tools to save their country.”

Vought’s answer is for conservatives to become “radical constitutionalists” and hyper-originalists who “throw off the [constitutional] precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years.” He doesn’t spell it out, but his targets could well be civil rights laws and legal cases that protect an assortment of rights. The goal: to destroy “this regime” that is “increasingly arrayed against the American people” and “woke and weaponized.” This includes annihilating the FBI, which, Vought claimed, is “putting political opponents in jail.” (Narrator: The FBI is not putting political opponents in jail.) The hour, he warned, is late.

Vought’s goal is to load up the federal government with people who share his troglodyte views and prosecute culture wars on multiple fronts, including reproductive rights and immigration. He has recently suggested that United States adopt a “Christian immigration ethic,” which, presumably, would limit legal immigration for non-Christians. As the Washington Post reported, he has been named the policy director for the Republican National Committee, and Trump has applauded Vought as someone who “would do a great job.”

Vought’s goal is to load up the federal government with people who share his troglodyte views and prosecute culture wars on multiple fronts, including reproductive rights and immigration.

The Washington Post effectively depicted Vought’s extremism. But I fear this single shot and much of the media coverage does not capture the full depth of Trump’s ongoing alliance with the far right. For instance: Trump is scheduled to appear this week at the so-called “People’s Convention,” a conference organized by Turning Point Action, a political action committee headed by Trump sycophant Charlie Kirk, who has recently come under fire for a series of racist remarks. The usual assortment of Trumpists are on the bill: Donald Trump Jr., South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Vivek Ramaswamy, Lara Trump, Roger Stone, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Steve Bannon (assuming he’s not in prison). Also listed as a speaker is Candace Owens, who left the right-wing Daily Caller after coming under fire for promoting antisemitic notions. She also has denied Covid existed and apparently excused Hitler, saying, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine.” She has questioned whether dinosaurs “roamed the earth until a great big meteor hit.” Once upon a time, it would have been notable—and not recommended—for a presidential candidate to be hosted by a racist like Kirk or share the stage with such a fringe player as Owens. Not anymore.

Now let’s dive a little deeper. A month after the “People’s Convention,” Kirk’s Turning Point USA is holding “The Believers Summit” in West Palm Beach, Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Its aim is to deploy “biblical truths” to “counteract ‘woke’ narratives” and “to facilitate a God-breathed transformation in our nation.” Speakers include David Barton, who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has “long promoted the idea, now widely popular among the religious right, that the Founding Fathers never intended the separation of church and state but instead sought to construct a Christian nation.” Also on the bill is John Amanchukwu, a North Carolina pastor who preached against the Raleigh school district’s diversity and equality program, claiming it was “grooming children to be the next pervert.” And then there’s Doug Wilson.

Wilson is a leading Christian nationalist on the right. In a 1996 monograph titled “Southern Slavery, As It Was” that he co-wrote, he observed, “Slavery as it existed in the South…was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.” He added, “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.” And there’s more: “Slave life was to [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.” His publishing house published a book in 2023 that, as Reason magazine put it, “advocates an ethnically uniform nation ruled by a ‘Christian prince’ with the power to punish blasphemy and false religion.” The author, not surprising, had a history of associating with white supremacists. Wilson promoted the book on an appearance with Tucker Carlson. He has also called for women to submit to male authority, especially in the bedroom, noting that the lack of such submission can lead to rape.

Trump associates with and legitimizes Kirk, who has recently made racist remarks and who provides a pulpit for Wilson, a Christian supremacist and somewhat of a slavery apologist.

Wilson told Carlson, “As a Christian, I would like that national structure to conform to the thing that God wants, and not the thing that man wants. That’s Christian nationalism.” But it’s the thing that God wants as Wilson interprets it. That’s fundamentalism. In an interview in February with the Religious News Service, he envisioned “a Christian republic” in which people who embrace “loopy-heresy” would be barred from public office. His dream world included a global alliance of Christian states that would exclude any nation that permits same-sex marriage or abortion.

So Trump associates with and legitimizes Kirk, who has recently made racist remarks and who provides a pulpit for Wilson, a Christian supremacist and somewhat of a slavery apologist. For decades, there’s been an ugly swamp of bigotry, hatred, and intolerance on the right. Republicans have often played footsie with its denizens. (See my book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which, alas, remains far too relevant these days.) But Trump has enthusiastically leaped into this muck, bear-hugging and elevating extremists and miscreants. And he seems poised to welcome them into a Trump 2.0 administration. This ain’t a secret. But it practically might as well be, if the media and the Democrats don’t tell the story of this ongoing crusade loudly and often.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in an expanded paperback edition.

Trump’s Obsession With Revenge: A Big Post-Verdict Danger

Three days after a New York City jury turned Donald Trump into the first former president branded a felon, the onetime reality television host told Fox News, “My revenge will be success.” This above-the-fray rhetoric was not to be believed, for Trump, through much of his life, has exhibited an intense obsession with vengeance and seeking retribution against those he considers his foes and detractors.

In subsequent interviews, Trump adopting contradictory stances on the matter of retaliation. Appearing on Newsmax, he said that if he is elected his political opponents might face prosecution. Then, on Wednesday night, Trump remarked that he would not seek retribution against President Joe Biden and others.

Despite all this back-and forth, the historical record is clear: Trump has long had a love affair with revenge—to such an extent that this fixation should be added to the list of concerns reasonable people ought to have about a Trump restoration. If Trump, with his authoritarian impulses, returns to the White House, it is rather likely he will use his power to extract payback—for this conviction, the other civil and criminal cases filed against him, and all perceived slights and assaults. There will be a revenge-a-thon.

Immediately after the verdict, Trump’s MAGA minions were not as restrained as their Dear Leader, and many explicitly called for retribution. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) tweeted, “Time for Red State AGs and DAs to get busy”—a clear demand for state and local prosecutors to target Democrats. Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon each called on Republican prosecutors to launch probes against Democrats. Mike Davis, a right-wing legal activist who’s been mentioned as a possible attorney general if Trump wins, told Axios that Republican prosecutors in Florida and George should initiate criminal investigations of Democrats for engaging in election interference by indicting Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson informed his Republican colleagues that he was plotting ways to punish the Justice Department and local jurisdictions that prosecute Trump. After Republican Larry Hogan, the former Maryland governor now running for US Senate, issued a pre-verdict tweet urging “all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process” and “not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita spitefully responded: “Your campaign is over.”

Commenters on pro-Trump websites called for violence against the judge in Trump’s hush-money/election-interference case and against liberals in general. Trump supporters also tried to dox the jurors—setting them up as targets—and posted violent threats against the prosecutors. John Eastman, the indicted lawyer who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election (and whose law license has been suspended in California and Washington, DC), came close to justifying violence when he warned that if Trump is sentenced to prison, Trump supporters will be “taking matters into their own hands” and “seeking remedies on their own.”

All these responses—and other similar reactions—were extemely Trumpian. Throughout his presidency, Trump condoned and encouraged violence. And for decades, Trump has cited revenge as one of his key motivators. He has even touted it as crucial to his success.

During the 2016 campaign, I tried to bring attention to this worrisome facet of Trump’s psychological make-up. I reported many examples of his long-held passion for revenge—including the time he tweeted in 2014 a quote from legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock: “Revenge is sweet and not fattening.”

Before running for president, Trump gave many speeches and public talks in which he expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia and explained how he had achieved his wealth and fame. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that people aiming to be successful must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”

In a 2012 speech, he offered a longer version of this riff:

One of the things you should do in terms of success: If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit ’em back five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even. Get even. And the reason, the reason you do, is so important…The reason you do, you have to do it, because if they do that to you, you have to leave a telltale sign that they just can’t take advantage of you. It’s not so much for the person, which does make you feel good, to be honest with you, I’ve done it many times. But other people watch and you know they say, “Well, let’s leave Trump alone,” or “Let’s leave this one,” or “Doris, let’s leave her alone. They fight too hard.”  I say it, and it’s so important. You have to, you have to hit back. You have to hit back.

At a speech in 2007 in Toronto, Trump railed against actor Rosie O’Donnell with whom he had a celebrity feud. He then pivoted to his deeper message: “The point is, one of the things I say later is…get even. When somebody screws you, you screw them back in spades. And I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve gotta hit people hard. And it’s not so much for that person. It’s other people watch.”

For Trump, acts of revenge are essential for demonstrating he’s a tough guy. It’s evidently an important component of his own self-image.

During another speech that year, he shared his first rule of business:

It’s called “Get Even.” Get even. This isn’t your typical business speech. Get even. What this is a real business speech. You know in all fairness to Wharton, I love ’em, but they teach you some stuff that’s a lot of bullshit. When you’re in business, you get even with people that screw you. And you screw them 15 times harder. And the reason is, the reason is, the reason is, not only, not only, because of the person that you’re after, but other people watch what’s happening. Other people see you or see you or see and they see how you react.

In a 2010, interview with journalist Erin Burnett, Trump thumped his chest on this point:

There are a lot of bad people out there.  And you really have to go…If you have a problem, if you have a problem with someone, you have to go after them. And it’s not necessarily to teach that person a lesson. It’s to teach all of the people that are watching a lesson. That you don’t take crap. And if you take crap, you’re just not going to do well…But you can’t take a lot of nonsense from people, you have to go after them.”

Again and again, Trump hailed the power and necessity of retribution. As he tweeted in 2013, “Always get even. When you are in business, you need to get even with people who screw you.” – Think Big.”

Even if Trump has yet to respond to the guilty verdict with a bombastic public vow of vengeance, his record of celebrating revenge remains. (Perhaps he is refraining while awaiting sentencing.) Yet he hasn’t been shy on other fronts. Trump recently endorsed the GOP primary opponent to Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, even though Good was one of the Republican officeholders who made the pilgrimage to Trump’s trial to show fealty to the accused. Trump did so because Good earlier supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump in the Republican presidential contest. Trump characterized this endorsement as payback for Good’s sacrilege.

And it was only a few months ago that the Washington Post reported that Trump and his allies “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute.” That list included people who had worked for Trump and became critics, including former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Biden and his family. The article—headlined “Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term”—generated much reaction, with pundits pointing to it as more evidence of Trump’s extremism and authoritarian yearnings.

The Post report was an important story but also an old one. Anyone who has paid the least bit attention knows that Trump has always been a revenge addict. This is a dangerous and fundamental character trait. Naturally, as he has turned the Republican Party and conservative movement into a personality cult, a craving for retribution has become a core value in these circles.

During a public rant the day after his trial concluded, Trump inveighed against the “bad people” and “sick people” responsible for the cases against him, slammed the judge in the New York City case, and excoriated the Biden administration as a “group of fascists…destroying our country.” This is the sort of terminology Trump has deployed in the past to identify those who warrant his vengeful wrath. He fervently believes in retaliation, and he keeps a list.

For years, political observers have speculated that Trump entered the 2016 presidential content in part to avenge the humiliation he suffered when President Barack Obama skewered him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. Maybe. But certainly one factor driving him this time around is his desire to even the score with those who opposed him during his first term and thwarted the reaffirmation he yearned for in 2020. This guilty verdict adds more names to his hit list and will, without doubt, intensify the already excessive and alarming lust for revenge that Trump, if elected, will bring with him back to the White House.

Mother Jones illustration; Doug Mills-Pool/Getty; Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa/AP; Jose Luis Magana/AP; Michael Brochstein/Sipa/AP

Trump Loses a Big Battle in His Lifelong War Against Accountability

Donald Trump has been in a war with accountability his entire adult life, and accountability has usually lost. In a New York City courtroom on Thursday, accountability triumphed, when a jury of his fellow citizens found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to cover up his hush-money/election-interference payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. This historic case—the first criminal trial of a former president and of a major party presidential nominee—showed that the legal system could handle the prosecution of a person of such high status, wealth, and influence and that Trump’s long run as an escape artist has (pending an appeal) come to an end.

After decades of crookedness, it’s finally official: Trump is a felon.

For years, Trump has gotten away with it—whatever “it” was. He misled investors in his early real estate deals. He cut deals with mobsters. He abused undocumented employees. He walked away from huge casino bankruptcies. He didn’t pay contractors. He lied incessantly as a businessman. He peddled racism (see the Central Park Five and his promotion of the racist birther conspiracy theory). He pretended to be a non-existent publicist to plant positive stories about himself in the press. He cynically flip-flopped on loads of important issues. He was accused of sexual harassment and assault and relentlessly spewed misogynistic remarks. He was a loudmouth lout who trampled on norms, rules, and decency—and perhaps violated laws.

His biggest escapes came during the 2016 campaign, when he sidestepped culpability for aiding and abetting Russia’s attack on the election by denying it was happening (thus providing cover for a foreign adversary’s assault on America) and, more obviously, when he survived the fallout from the emergence of the Access Hollywood video in which he bragged that, due to his celebrity, he could grab women “by the pussy.” His election that year was his ultimate triumph (so far) over accountability. None of his past or present malfeasance prevented him from snatching the keys to the nation’s prime political real estate.

Imagine how that victory fueled Trump’s sense of impunity. On the campaign trail, he had crudely joshed that he could shoot somebody in the “middle of Fifth Avenue” and not “lose any voters.” (Factcheck: Maybe—at least among the GOP base). Trump’s election demonstrated that honesty, decency, ethics, and, yes, accountability did not matter to many voters. (Hillary Clinton had her own problems in these areas, but they couldn’t hold a candle to Trump’s blowtorch.) Trump had defied multiple standards of probity, and he was mightily rewarded. In fact, it may well be that many of his voters loved him for his scoundrel ways and his ability to elude punishment for his never-ending run of transgressions. They wanted an SOB in the White House.

As president, Trump continued to evade responsibility for his misdeeds. He was impeached for muscling a foreign president to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden—but the Senate Republican majority voted against conviction. And no matter his offense—profiting off the presidency, engaging in brazen conflicts of interest, fueling a politics of hatred and polarization, politicizing the Justice Department, trying to impose an illegal Muslim ban, encouraging cronyism and nepotism, failing to act on basic policy promises regarding health care and the infrastructure, allegedly obstructing justice, and grossly mismanaging the tragic Covid pandemic (and causing the avoidable deaths of 200,000 or so Americans)—the Republican Party and his tens of millions of supporters stayed fiercely loyal to him.

As a president, Trump confronted the ultimate moment of accountability—and he lost his bid for reelection in the 2020 election (just barely). Finally, he had to answer for his wrongdoings. The voters had cast judgment and punished him for his actions. Presidencies have consequences. His was, you’re fired.

Not surprisingly, Trump could not accept this chastisement. He concocted the Big Lie about the 2020 election, covertly plotted to overturn the results, incited the insurrectionist riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and that day did nothing at first to stop the violence and defend the Constitution, presumably believing the melee would prevent the certification of the election results and perhaps offer him further opportunity for scheming to stay in power.

Once more, he was back on the same path: no accountability. His assault on the constitutional order did not lead to political exile or even excommunication from the Republican Party. After he was impeached a second time by the House, with a smidgeon of Republican support, a bipartisan majority in the Senate supported conviction. But with most Republicans standing by Trump, the vote against him fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority. He was in the clear. More important, the GOP’s leaders and voters remained devoted to the man who had attempted a coup against American democracy. Yet again, there were no immediate consequences for Trump’s wrongdoing.

New York City’s case made Trump face the music before he faces the voters.

After that, the record was mixed. Trump was found liable in civil trials for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay $88.3 million, and his business, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of massive fraud and fined $355 million. (Trump is appealing these cases.) And he was indicted in four criminal cases—two for endeavoring to subvert the 2020 election results, one for allegedly swiping top-secret documents, and the New York City case.

With three of the four criminal cases bogged down by either legal maneuvering or side-show controversy, the hush-money/election-interference case up to now has presented the best opportunity for Trump to face the music before he faces the voters as the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee. For all his crookedness over the decades, he has finally been judged a criminal. It’s official: Trump, a past president and current presidential candidate, is a felon.

This unprecedented conviction aside, Trump still has dodged legal accountability for much of his assorted misconduct, particularly his attempt to destroy the American democratic system. The New York case involved merely one sleazy episode—though it aptly captured the sordid world of celebrity, lies, hush-money, and fake news from which Trump emerged. Yet none of that—including his alleged tryst with a porn star while his wife was home with a four-month-old baby and Trump’s scuzzy deal with the Nation Enquirer to publish scurrilous stories about his political rivals and to catch-and-kill unfavorable ones about him—have yielded career repercussions for Trump. Long before the verdict was in, the Republicans essentially rewarded him with their nomination and a shot at redemption and presidential restoration.

If Trump succeeds in reclaiming the White House, he will be able to end the two federal criminal cases against him, thus smothering a key effort to hold him accountable for his biggest and most serious misdeed of all. Only the Georgia RICO case against him and 18 others who allegedly plotted to undo the 2020 election results would remain. And there’s no telling how a state case would proceed against a sitting president, let alone what might happen, in that instance, should it continue and a jury finds Trump guilty.

For now, though, Trump is branded by the criminal justice system a lawbreaker. This is not likely to affect his standing with his followers and the Republican Party. And it is quite possible he could go scot-free for his unsuccessful connivings to blow up an election and grab power. This trial is merely one battle. Trump’s war against accountability is far from over.

Here Come the Russians, Again

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.

Sometimes I’d rather not be right. In January, reacting to Donald Trump affectionately referring to the trio of tyrants Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un as “very fine people,” I wrote that two constants in the Trump Era are his affection for murderous authoritarians and Russian efforts to screw with American politics. The former is well-known, the latter, less recognized. Moscow mounted information warfare operations to boost Trump during both the 2016 election—most notably, the hack-and-leak attack in which Russian cyber-operatives swiped Democratic emails and documents and WikiLeaks released them—and the 2020 election, when Russian intelligence operatives spread disinformation about Joe and Hunter Biden and Ukraine. The first op helped the Putin-friendly Trump reach the White House; the second failed to keep him in office, but it had the side-benefit of fueling the House Republicans’ baseless (and now fizzling) impeachment crusade against President Biden. Putin went one for two.

I noted in that Our Land issue: “[I]t’s a good bet that Putin this year will try once again to mess in an American election…[As Putin] continues to commit horrendous war crimes in Ukraine, he has even more reason to clandestinely boost Trump and win the rubber match.” At long last, official warnings have arrived.

Two weeks ago, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia remains “the most active foreign threat to our elections.” She noted that the Kremlin’s “goals in such influence operations tend to include eroding trust in US democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.” All of this, obviously, would be to Trump’s benefit. She pointed out that artificial intelligence and deepfakes will presumably be deployed in this effort, and she cited China and Iran as other threats.

Russia’s latest attack on the United States is already underway. As the Associated Press reported in March:

Russian state media and online accounts tied to the Kremlin have spread and amplified misleading and incendiary content about US immigration and border security. The campaign seems crafted to stoke outrage and polarization before the 2024 election for the White House, and experts who study Russian disinformation say Americans can expect more to come as Putin looks to weaken support for Ukraine and cut off a vital supply of aid.

The New York Times reported recently that a disinformation operation—most likely mounted by Russians—has been circulating a video that purports to disclose the existence of a troll farm in Ukraine that is being run by the CIA and targeting the US election to prevent Trump’s election. It’s a clever instance of cyber-gaslighting, for it is Russian trolls who are disseminating fakery to hurt Biden and help Trump.

Microsoft, according to the Times, concluded this video “came from a group it calls Storm-1516, a collection of disinformation experts who now focus on creating videos they hope might go viral in America. The group most likely includes veterans of the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-aligned troll farm that sought to influence the 2016 election.” Another recent video from this gang—or a similar one—claimed to show Ukrainian soldiers burning an effigy of Trump and blaming him for delays in military aid shipments to Ukraine. The aim was to bolster MAGA’s opposition to aid for Ukraine. (You can’t send money to those anti-Trump ingrates!) Alex Jones’ conspiracy site posted the video that was not hard for experts to spot as a ruse. (The Ukrainian soldiers had Russian accents.)

A disinformation operation has been circulating a video that purports to disclose the existence of a troll farm in Ukraine that is being run by the CIA and targeting the US election to prevent Trump’s election.

At the Senate hearing, Haines testified that combatting disinformation “from foreign influence or interference is an absolute priority for the intelligence community” and that the US government is prepared “to address the challenge.” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the chair of the intelligence committee, said, “We’ve got to do a better job of making sure Americans of all political stripes understand what is very probably coming their way over the next…less than six months.”

In fact, disinformation experts in and out of government regularly say a crucial element in thwarting such operations is to alert the public that it is being targeted by bad-faith actors with false messages. Basically, you have to educate people about the big picture and then try to counter the specific instances as they occur. Here’s the rub: In a time of political division, not all major players are keen to do this. Especially when they, too, are engaging in similar activities.

Let’s rewind to the summer of 2016. When the Obama administration determined that Russia was covertly assaulting the US election, the White House reached out to Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, to form a united front against the Kremlin’s interference. McConnell told President Obama to take a hike. At the time, Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, was falsely claiming there was no Russian intervention underway. McConnell didn’t want to cross-swords with Trump, and, ever the cynical political operative, he suspected the White House wanted to use this issue to undermine the Republicans. Consequently, he took a powder and placed party over country.

Since then, it’s only gotten worse. Republicans have generally waved away concerns about Putin’s war on US elections, echoing Trump’s phony assertion—disinformation—that it’s a big hoax concocted by Democrats and the media. Moreover, as noted above, many Republicans have gone further, embracing and amplifying Russian disinformation about both Biden and the war in Ukraine. Don’t take my word for it. Recently, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, groused, “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” And Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, complained that anti-Ukraine messages from Russia are “being uttered on the House floor.”

Republicans have generally waved away concerns about Putin’s war on US elections, echoing Trump’s phony assertion—disinformation—that it’s a big hoax concocted by Democrats and the media.

Theirs is a minority position. Most Republicans don’t want to broach the subject of Russian meddling. Putin’s operations are useful for these useful idiots. And their Dear Leader certainly desires no discussion of this. Any such talk is a reminder of how he slid into the White House with Russian assistance, which, in an act of grand betrayal, he aided and abetted by claiming no such thing was happening. Of course, conservative media and ex-lefty Trump-Russia denialists (Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and others) will pooh-pooh this and pump up the conspiracy theory that countering Russian disinformation is a scheme to impose state-sponsored censorship.

Given all this, how can a strategy to counter Russian information be implemented? If the Biden administration or congressional Democrats elevate these concerns, Trump and his minions will insist this is a plot to undermine him. The Trumpers don’t need to win the argument; they succeed if they turn this matter into yet another political mud-wrestling match that confuses or confounds voters. Still, Haines and others ought to keep trying.

The media has an important role to play. The more attention it can cast upon the Russian efforts, the greater the odds that a slice of the electorate will comprehend the threat and perhaps be inoculated from being unduly influenced by these operations. But how many of you saw coverage of this hearing? How about of the recent Russian actions? The New York Times did not consider this threat to American democracy front-page news, and buried its account of that phony video and the hearing on the bottom of page A19. (The Washington Post did not assign its own reporter to the hearing; it ran an AP account.) My hunch is that Trump’s ceaseless grousing about the “Russia hoax” has made some in the media gun-shy about this stuff.

As McConnell demonstrated eight years ago, it is tough to devise an effective and nonpartisan counter to a foreign threat when an entire political party denies that threat or, worse, sees benefits from it. The Russians aren’t coming, they’re here. Preserving democracy could depend on making sure Putin doesn’t win this round.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in a new and expanded paperback edition.

RFK Jr. Is Even Crazier Than You Might Think

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being normalized. 

He’s a conspiracy theorist who has made a lot of money pushing baseless or disproven notions about vaccines, Covid, and other hot-button subjects. At the start of his 2024 presidential bid, the media reported his history as a disinformationalist on multiple fronts. Yet now he’s largely covered as another character in the ongoing presidential horse race.

Most of the recent stories about him focus on his standing in the polls, what voters he’s attracting, and speculation regarding his potential impact on the outcome. In such pieces, his extreme conspiracism is often not conveyed fully and sometimes not even mentioned. A recent Washington Post story on Kennedy family members endorsing President Joe Biden noted in mild fashion that  RFK Jr. “has embraced controversial, unfounded claims on issues including vaccines and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.” A Wall Street Journal article on chaos within his campaign merely said Kennedy “has promoted conspiracy theories—in particular on vaccines—and espouses political views from across the spectrum.” A New York Times piece referred to him as a “vaccine skeptic” who has promoted “vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the government.”

Those descriptions of Kennedy do not do him justice. He is much further around the bend than they indicate. With his advancement of unhinged and outlandish conspiracy theories, RFK Jr. is in the league of Alex Jones. There’s at least one difference. While Jones comes across as a shameless charlatan grifting his audience, Kennedy does seem to fervently believe the dark nonsense he spews. That makes him particularly dangerous, not merely because he may influence a critical election but because his presidential run is something of a super-spreader event for false information, lies, and paranoia. 

One could spend countless hours examining and countering the long list of hair-raising and unsubstantiated allegations Kennedy, once known mainly as an environmental lawyer, has peddled over the years in books, interviews, articles, and public appearances. But I took a deep dive into one that serves as an example of how far out-of touch from reality he can be—and how far he will go to twist the truth to serve his ideology of conspiracy. 

In May 2022—about a year before he announced his presidential bid—Kennedy appeared on the podcast of comedian and reality TV star Theo Von, a recurring guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and he presented a harrowing tale: A global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. He claimed to have proof: the ominous-sounding Event 201.

This was the name of a pandemic simulation held at a New York City hotel in October 2019, months before the Covid pandemic struck. In his usual frenetic and rambling style, Kennedy told Von that the cohosts of the event were billionaire Bill Gates and Avril Haines, whom he identified as the deputy director of the CIA. He asked, “What is the CIA doing at a public health forum. They don’t do public health. They do coup d’etat.” He dwelled on Haines’ participation, noting she was now the “top spy of the country”—the Director of National Intelligence—and “also in charge of the coronavirus response.” He pointed out that in attendance at Event 201 were “people from all the social media companies” and from “the pharmaceutical companies, mainly Johnson and Johnson.” He added, “you have another guy, a peculiar guy, George Gao, who’s the head of the Chinese CDC.” And he reported there were participants from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kennedy asserted that the timing of the event was curious. He stated, “We now know, according to the National Security Agency, that Covid-19 began circulating on September 12 [2019] in Wuhan,” and he suggested this was due to a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NSA, he said, had reached this conclusion for a number of reasons: that at that time there had been “chatter all over the internet coming out of Wuhan, people talking about symptoms,” that three lab workers fell ill about then, that aerial photographs showed hospital parking lots were full, that on the evening of September 12 the Chinese government went into the Wuhan lab and removed 22,000 samples of coronavirus, and that pages of the lab’s website were taken down. “This is what the National Security Agency is saying,” he remarked, “that they believe that September 12 was the day that it actually began circulating.”

Consequently, Kennedy contended, it was quite odd that Gao was part of this simulation and that Event 201 was being held after Covid had started spreading: “The world did not know until around January 3…And they’re all together planning what are we—here’s how we’re going to handle a coronavirus pandemic if it happens.”

Kennedy then described to Von the nefarious agenda of Event 201:

The interesting thing is there was no discussion of public health. They weren’t saying how are we going to repurpose medications. How are we going to link 11 million doctors, front-line-physicians, around the world on a communications grid that we can quickly figure out what’s working, what’s working in Bangladesh, what’s working in Argentina. What are the best protocols? What are the best repurposed medications?…  The only thing they were doing was they were saying how do we use a pandemic to clamp down totalitarian controls to essentially execute a coup d’etat against democracy and the Bill of Rights.

At this point, Von, who had been nodding along, interjects with a brief dose of skepticism: “You think they brought this up in this meeting?”

Kennedy replied:

Nobody should believe me on anything. They should do the research themselves. You go to Event 201, and this is what you will see. The fourth simulation that day. They took breaks. There was a total of four. The fourth one is the longest one. And the whole simulation is how do you get the social media companies to censor dissent and how specifically do you get them to not talk about the fact that this was a lab-generated virus. This is what they’re talking about for two hours. This is in October… [Their fear was] then they would start pointing fingers and blaming, not only the Chinese, but blaming public health officials who were all funding those studies in Wuhan.

In another interview, Kennedy, calling this simulation a CIA event, said the point of this last conversation was “how do we hide it.” (Other proponents of Covid conspiracy theories have cited Event 201 as proof of a malevolent worldwide plot.)

During his chat with Von, Kennedy remarked, “Any of your listeners who do not believe what I am saying can go and look up Event 201. It’s still on YouTube.” He was right about that. The video of Event 201 remains on YouTube—as does an entire website devoted to the exercise—and it in no way matches Kennedy’s description. Not even close. 

First, Kennedy was wrong about the NSA concluding that Covid first circulated in Wuhan in mid-September 2019. This was the conclusion of a report released by House Republicans—the minority staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—in August 2021. The report cited several pieces of information (which Kennedy referenced) to claim this earlier date for the origin of the pandemic and to suggest a Chinese cover-up. An intelligence community report released in June 2023 noted there was no consensus position among the intelligence agencies on whether Covid emerged due to natural exposure to an infected animal or a laboratory-associated incident. But it did state that “almost all” of the agencies assessed that Covid “was not genetically engineered” and that all of the agencies agreed it was “not developed as a biological weapon.” (Kennedy wrote a book claiming Covid was designed as a bioweapon.) 

Kennedy had cooked up a non-existent NSA conclusion. There’s a big difference between an NSA determination and allegations from House Republicans.

As for Event 201, it was not cohosted by Avril Haines and the CIA. At the time of the simulation, Haines was not, as Kennedy stated, serving in the US government. She was a senior research scholar at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. This public event was organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was held before a live audience and streamed in real-time.

Appearing on Russell Brand’s podcast last year, Kennedy claimed that Event 201 was part of a long series of pandemic simulations sponsored by the CIA that had occurred over the past 23 years and that the CIA “wrote the script for it.” There is no evidence of that.

Haines was one of 15 “players” from the worlds of global business, nonprofits, and public health. Other participants included executives and officials from UPS, Marriott International, the UN Foundation, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and a dean from McGill University’s medical school. There was one person from the pharmaceutical industry (the vice president for global health at Johnson & Johnson). Contrary to what Kennedy said, there were no representatives from social media companies.

The simulation began with Anita Cicero, a member of the team from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, explaining its mission: “To illustrate the potential consequences of a pandemic and the kind of societal and economic challenges it would pose.” She explained that the focus would be on how the private sector—not the public health community—could respond. She encouraged people watching it to tweet. This was the scenario presented to the participants: A new coronavirus originates in a pig herd in Brazil, and farmers fall ill, with symptoms ranging from a mild flu to severe pneumonia. Many die, and the disease spreads quickly through family members and health care personnel. International travel turns this outbreak into a pandemic. Within three months, there are 30,000 cases and nearly 2,000 deaths. Estimates show millions of deaths are coming.

The simulation was divided into four parts, with the first one centering on the global allocation and distribution of medical countermeasures—such as antiviral drugs that might be effective, testing materials, and other medical supplies—and supply chain problems with personal protection equipment. It was all straightforward. Would more economically advanced countries horde medicines and supplies for their own citizens, while the pandemic devastated impoverished communities elsewhere? The goal was clear: how to help those with the disease and thwart the spread. The next two discussions zeroed in on the pandemic’s impact on trade, travel, and global finance.

Kennedy was flat-out wrong to say that there was no consideration of public health or the repurposing of medicines. That was covered. He also mischaracterized the simulation as only concentrating on the flow of information.

The fourth conversation did address disinformation and misinformation. And Kennedy misrepresented this, as well. It was not the longest. Nor was it a planning session for a totalitarian clampdown.

At this point in the scenario, two months into the pandemic, the participants were informed, there have been 240,000 worldwide deaths, with 1 million predicted to occur in the next four weeks. Financial markets are down by 15 percent. There’s no end in sight. And disinformation and misinformation are spreading. Rumors that health workers are purposefully spreading the disease have led to attacks on them. Pharmaceutical companies have been accused of introducing the virus so they can profit off drugs and potential vaccines. Social media companies are attempting to limit the use of their platforms for misleading purposes, but, as a set-up video stated, “false, misleading or half-true information is difficult to sort without limiting potentially true messages.” The public no longer knows who to trust.

The panel was asked, “How can government, international business, international organizations ensure that reliable information is getting to the public and prevent highly damaging and false information, to the extent that’s possible, about the pandemic from spreading and causing deepening crisis around the world? How much control of information should there be and by whom? And how can false information be effectively challenged?”

The ensuing conversation was rather pedestrian. Matthew Harrington, the global chief operating officer at Edelman, a communications and PR firm, noted that CEOs can be a good source of information and that social media platforms should partner with scientific and health communities to “flood the zone with good information.” Jane Halton, a board member for ANZ Bank, chimed in: “I personally do not believe that trying to shut things down in terms of information is either practical or desirable.” Martin Knuchel, the head of Crisis, Emergency and Business Continuity Management for Lufthansa Airlines, suggested that governments and business should “find a way to cooperate [with social media]…but not to hamper them.” Stephen Redd, a deputy director of the CDC, pointed out that social media could be used to “quickly counter” claims about “treatments purported to be effective that are harmful.” Gao said it was vital to ensure front-line health care workers “have the right information.”

This was standard stuff. When it was Haines’ turn to weigh in, she asserted it was important to “work with telecommunications companies to actually make sure everybody has access to the communications.” She added, “We shouldn’t be trying to control communication but rather flood the zone, in a sense, with a trusted source.” And it would be critical, she said, to communicate constantly: “For all the disinformation that will be put out, it’s important to actually have a response to those questions and to those concerns… We need to be able to respond quickly.” Later in the discussion, she remarked, “You want to work with the private sector and those who are spreading information generally to see that they can bring things down that are lies or false information that’s being put forward as a way to minimize it.”

That’s it. No diabolical planning about covering up a lab leak that came from a bioweapons program. Kennedy had told a wide-eyed Von that “the whole simulation” was designed and conducted to hide “the fact that this was a lab-generated virus” and to plan how to exploit a pandemic to “execute a coup d’etat against democracy.” Only an observer removed from reality could watch the three-and-a-half-hour-long Event 201 and reach that conclusion. There was not much, if any, mention of a lab leak. The scenario was clear. In this case, the virus had jumped from pigs to humans. While Haines and the others did discuss how to counter disinformation—especially on social media—they tended to take a soft approach to censorship. 

Yet for Kennedy, the timing of the simulation was proof of evil scheming, and he cites this event as slam-dunk evidence of a fiendish conspiracy run by the CIA. “Either they’re incredible soothsayers or there’s something weird going on,” he told Brand. 

Moreover, this particular conspiracy theory championed by Kennedy makes no sense. If the goal of these treacherous people was to formulate a secret strategy for global censorship and totalitarianism, why hold this simulation in full public view and ask people to tweet about it? (Even Von could see that was strange.) If the Deep State wanted to cover up a lab leak, would it create a plan to do so by live-streaming a conversation among corporate execs and nonprofit leaders? Furthermore, if that was the grand scheme, why would the NSA reveal that the spread of Covid began in mid-September? (The NSA did not say this, but Kennedy claimed it did.) It doesn’t add up. 

I sent a query to the Kennedy campaign asking for comment regarding his false claim that the NSA concluded the coronavirus began spreading in mid-September 2019 and his assertion that Event 201 was evidence that the CIA and others planned to exploit the pandemic to implement a “totalitarian” clampdown and a “coup d’etat against democracy.”

Regarding Kennedy’s citation of the NSA, the campaign said that he “was referring to a statement by John Ratcliff, former director of US National Intelligence. Many of his statements are quoted in this article in Sky News.” In that piece, which was about an Australian documentary that alleged the virus originated at the Wuhan lab, Ratcliffe—it’s spelled with an “e”—noted (at a time when he was out of government) that there had been intelligence indicating three lab workers had fallen sick in October 2019 (not September). Ratcliffe’s remarks hardly support Kennedy’s assertion that the NSA reached the widespread conclusion he declared it had.

As for Kennedy’s comments about Event 201, the campaign insisted that his remarks have been “misconstrued.” It replied, “He does not believe that the pandemic was planned in advance. He believes that the administrative machinery for the pandemic response, which amounted indeed to a totalitarian clampdown, was already being developed before the pandemic.” That’s subtle and inaccurate revisionism that downplays what Kennedy has repeatedly and wildly alleged. As the campaign describes it, Kennedy merely thinks that the preparatory planning for a pandemic reaction yielded measures that “amounted” to a repressive response. That’s not the story he has been pitching. He has clearly claimed more than once that Event 201 was part of a long-standing devilish plot to use the pandemic to impose a dictatorship.

With his dissemination of this conspiracy theory, Kennedy is not heroically revealing a heinous plan. He is demonstrating his methodology. He misrepresents facts. He fabricates. He sounds authoritative. He presents what he cites as evidence. But he blends dollops of reality with his fevered fantasies and concocts a goulash of irrational conspiracy. If he’s not a self-aware con man, he must be delusional.

Donald Trump has long pitched assorted conspiracy theories—most notably, the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Yet he does so as a carnival barker who will say whatever he needs to say whenever he needs to say it. Kennedy comes across as a true believer in the lunacy he peddles. And the depth of his battiness has not received the attention it warrants. Kennedy is not just a possible spoiler candidate; he is a crackpot candidate. The less that is covered, the greater his opportunity to spoil. 

Modern-Day Lessons From Hiroshima

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.

For four decades, I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which a nuclear blast occurs. The scenario is not always the same. Occasionally, the detonation is an escalation in an ongoing conventional war. More often, it’s a bolt out of the blue: I and others are on the street, and we spot incoming missiles and have but a moment to realize what is about to transpire before the warheads explode.

These dreams began, not surprisingly, when I was a reporter-editor in the 1980s for a now-defunct publication that covered arms control issues. After several years in the job, I found the task of constantly thinking about nuclear warfare psychologically burdensome and moved on—though I have dutifully maintained an interest in the subject. During my stint at that magazine, I met victims of the nuclear era, including downwinders (people suffering severe medical ailments due to exposure to radioactive contamination and nuclear fallout from nuclear tests) and survivors of the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Their tales were haunting and cautionary, descriptions of the past and foretellings of a possible and awful future. Given all this, when I visited Japan as a tourist last month, I felt compelled to go to the first of the only two cities that have experienced nuclear devastation.

On the day I visited, it was full of life and people: families, tourists, young couples, street performers. It is a testament to resilience.

Hiroshima is a wonderment. At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, on the orders of President Harry Truman, an American B-29 dropped a bomb that contained 141 pounds of uranium-235 over the center of the city. Hiroshima had been selected as a target by a committee comprising military officials and scientists from the Manhattan Project because it was an industrial center and home to a major military command—and its surrounding hills, according to the committee, would likely “produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.” The bomb detonated about 1,900 feet above ground. The blast leveled a 4.5-square-mile area and set off a firestorm that spread throughout the city. Tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated or injured that day. An estimated total of 140,000 Hiroshima residents were killed by the bombing or the ensuing radioactive fallout over the next few months. Many more died in succeeding years.

Today, 79 years later, Hiroshima, founded as a castle town in 1589, is a thriving city of 1 million people that boasts an active port and assorted industrial facilities and that is renowned for its delicious oysters. After the bombing, experts proclaimed that nothing would grow for at least 75 years in the wasteland created. Yet today the main avenue that leads to the blast site—Peace Boulevard—is lined with large leafy trees that were donated to Hiroshima from cities across Japan. And Peace Memorial Park, located where the bomb fell, is lush with flora. On the day I visited, it was full of life and people: families, tourists, young couples, street performers. It is a testament to resilience. What was once a hellscape is now a lovely spot where one can watch a Japanese troupe performing traditional Hawaiian dances alongside the Motoyasu River and eat takeout sushi beneath the iconic Atomic Bomb Dome, the only structure that was left standing in the blast zone. It was hard to reconcile the utter pleasantness of this Saturday morning with the horrific destruction that had occurred here merely a single lifetime ago.

 

Children playing beneath the Atomic Bomb Dome

The resurrection of Hiroshima—evidence that the greatest of calamities can be surmounted—is not the only lesson the city offers. The Peace Park is home to several memorials and a museum each designed to convey the message that the horrors of nuclear warfare must not be forgotten and, moreover, must be prevented by the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. At the Children’s Peace Monument, glass booths are full of thousands of colorful paper cranes—a symbol of peace—folded and sent in from kids around the globe.

 

The Children’s Peace Monument features booths with thousands of colorful paper cranes—a symbol of peace—folded and sent to Hiroshima by kids around the world.

The years since the bombings, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not wallowed in victimhood. Instead, they have attempted to use their experiences to serve as peace advocates and messengers warning of the immense danger of nuclear weapons. The Hiroshima Peace Museum chronicles the nightmarish details of what occurred on August 6. It is full of harrowing descriptions of individual deaths. The museum displays the two known photographs from that day, showing survivors seeking assistance. More disturbing are the many drawings from people who lived through the blast. They depict scenes of a previously unfathomable human-made inferno showing, for example, civilians—men, women, and children—on fire. (There were many children in the center of Hiroshima that day, enlisted for work crews that were razing buildings to create fire breaks in case the Allies added Hiroshima to the list of cities targeted for their ongoing firebombing campaign.) Display cases contain artifacts of the blast: a melted Buddha, the charred uniform of a schoolchild, a kitchen clock stopped at 8:15.

One of the many drawings made by Hiroshima survivors on display at the Hiroshima Peace Museum

The museum presents the stories of scores of victims, including those later stricken by cancer and other diseases caused by radioactive poisoning. (Hiroshima has strived to identify all 140,000 victims, and these names are contained in a crypt in the park, close to the museum. Inscribed on this tomb: “Let all souls here rest in peace; for we shall not repeat the evil.”) It’s unsettling, as it should be, to confront such graphic accounts of carnage and pain. (As I noted last year, the blockbuster Oppenheimer film mistakenly opted not to include any scenes depicting the death and destruction caused by the bombing.) With its intent to share the full horror of the bombing, the museum is not for the faint of heart. But at the end of the exhibition, a visitor is guided to a room dedicated to efforts to reduce and eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenal. It describes the global lobbying work of Hiroshima and Nagasaki officials and residents who for decades have been pressing for nuclear disarmament. Their simple plea: Don’t forget and never again.

The tomb in Hiroshima’s Peace Park contains the names of the 140,000 victims of the atomic bombing.

A sidenote: Everyone gets to write their own history. One display in the museum explains that the United States decided to use the A-bomb because it believed that “ending the war with an atomic bombing would help prevent the Soviet Union from extending its sphere of influence” and that this would “also help the US government justify to the American people the tremendous cost of atomic bomb development.” These might have been factors in the decision, but this simple explanation leaves out Truman and his advisers’ desire to end World War II and avoid a massive and costly invasion of Japan, which was refusing to surrender unconditionally. I’ve long been sympathetic to the argument that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not justified, but it was bemusing to see how the custodians of Hiroshima contend with this question.

That exhibit highlighted the Franck Report, a document signed by a number of nuclear physicists who recommended in June 1945 that the United States not deploy the atomic bomb against Japan. It cited this passage:

We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.

That was rather prescient.

It is moving and inspiring to see how Hiroshima has combined its remembrance of the atomic bombing with a passionate call for action to prevent any future use of nuclear weapons. And that means finding ways to avoid war. While absorbing the horrendous accounts in the museum, it was tough not to think about other bombings of civilian targets—past and present—that have caused tremendous casualties. (The American firebombing of Tokyo on a single night in March 1945 killed 100,000 civilians and left 1 million homeless.) This obviously includes Israel’s assault on Gaza following the October 7 attack from Hamas. The images we see of destruction in the Palestinian territory are not dissimilar to those of Hiroshima.

If the world cannot move beyond the use of war, the odds are that one day the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be repeated—and probably on a much larger scale. In March, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the architect of the brutal and criminal invasion of Ukraine, said that he was “ready” for nuclear war if American troops were deployed to Russia in that conflict. Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted that its Doomsday Clock—which characterizes the threat to the planet from nuclear weapons—is still set at 90 seconds to midnight.

The museum and the memorials in the Peace Park tell a blended story of human darkness and human hope. The United States caused terrible suffering and colossal damage—demonstrating what could become the fate of the world—and the victims responded by assuming the grand task of trying to protect others from such a catastrophe. A plaque in the museum describes the mission of Hiroshima:

On August 6, 1947, Hiroshima city delivers its first Peace Declaration. Ever since, the city has been telling the world about the reality of the A-bomb damage and calling for lasting world peace…Nuclear weapons and humankind cannot coexist indefinitely. Today more than ever, we must all embrace the A-bomb survivors’ desire to ensure that no one else will suffer their pain and sorrow. We must inherit their determination and pass it on to future generations.

My trip to Hiroshima felt like a pilgrimage. As I walked through the museum (packed with visitors, mainly Japanese) and strolled in the Peace Park, I wondered if this visit would trigger the return of that all-too-familiar nightmare. Yet there was something reassuring—and, yes, peaceful—in experiencing a collective witnessing of this catastrophe and in seeing the transformation of an apocalypse into a splendid site of community gathering. Hiroshima is certainly a reminder that we live in a world imperiled by nuclear arsenals and that we have yet to fully address that danger—and that human cruelty can be excessive and that the total annihilation of human civilization remains a possibility. But the city’s commemoration of the tragedy has a beautiful side. And so far, no nightmares.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in a new and expanded paperback edition.

How Paul Manafort Tried to Make Money With a Project Supposedly Tied to the Chinese Regime

In March, the politerati were atwitter over what appeared major news: Longtime political operator, lobbyist, wheeler-dealer, and (pardoned) felon Paul Manafort was in talks to join Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. This seemed an odd move, given all of Manafort’s schemings over the years. A more recent Manafort business venture—unknown to the public—raises further questions about him and his attempt to return to the Trump fold. According to documents obtained by Mother Jones—including a memo written by Manafort—two years ago, Manafort was trying to orchestrate a $250 million deal to create a streaming service in China in a project that he asserted was blessed by the Chinese government and that was partnering with a Chinese telecommunications firm sanctioned by the US government. 

On Friday morning, the Washington Post, which obtained the same documents, broke the news of Manafort’s involvement in this endeavor. 

Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016—until Trump dumped him after allegations emerged that Manafort had pocketed $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments a few years earlier from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. (His lawyer denied he had received this money.) Two years later, as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, Manafort was found guilty of and pleaded guilty to assorted financial crimes related to his consulting work in Ukraine, including bank fraud and conspiring to defraud the United States. He was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison and sent off to the hoosegow. (He was released to home confinement during the Covid pandemic.) In 2020, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee declared Manafort a “grave counterintelligence threat,” revealing that during the 2016 race he had repeatedly passed Trump campaign inside information to a former business associate who was a “Russian intelligence officer” and a “Kremlin agent.” In his final weeks in the White House, Trump pardoned Manafort. 

In the years since Trump cleaned his slate, Manafort has mostly maintained a low public profile. During part of that stretch, he privately endeavored to facilitate a huge deal in China. Emails and memos show that in May 2022 Manafort was working with a privately-held Hong Kong-based company called Standard Huaxia Limited to set up a new streaming company in China dubbed Doorways. Manafort and his colleagues were looking to raise an initial $25 million for the project that Manafort noted was seeking $250 million. 

A memo written (according to its meta-data) by Manafort described Doorways as a firm that would distribute in China “several kinds of content covering the entire spectrum of intangible products related to culture, including music, television and film entertainment, news and education.” You can read the full document below.

This memo stated the “Chinese Govt has agreed to endorse and support the development of Doorways in a variety of ways with the plan to take the company public within 18 months from launch,” and it maintained, “Doorways will be the first [joint venture] Chinese-American company to be involved in ownership and operation of a major internet vehicle in China.” 

As Manafort put it in this memo, this enterprise was historic and would circumvent China’s traditional animosity to such internet titans as Google, WhatsApp, and YouTube: “This deal has been created, authorized and supported at the highest levels of the Chinese govt.” He noted that Doorways was advantageously positioned due to the “history of the principal’s involvement with [the] very top of Chinese leadership.” He did not identify this principle. He added, “China felt time was ripe to open doors to western technology in [joint venture] that serves their domestic consumer market needs.” 

Manafort made it seem this was a killer deal. “Doorways,” he wrote, “has exclusive and primary right to distribute specific western and domestic entertainment, music and educational content over internet from a complex set of agreements…at levels above SOEs”—a reference to state-owned enterprises. This suggested the project was well-wired at the upper ranks of the Chinese regime.

Manafort claimed in the memo that there was already in place an agreement with China Mobile, China’s largest wireless carrier. He noted that China Mobile had agreed to bundle Doorways into its service for a dollar a month, which “guarantees instant massive market penetration from day 1.” He added that the China Mobile contract “is finalized and ready to be signed.” Manafort estimated Doorways could rake in $2.9 billion dollar during its first year.

China Mobile, though, had come under fire in the United States for its supposed ties to the Chinese military. In January 2021, the Trump administration issued an executive order banning American investment in Chinese firms believed to be associated with the People’s Liberation Army. Subsequently, China Mobile was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. In March 2022, the Federal Communications designated the US subsidiary of China Mobile a national security threat. 

In the memo, Manafort pointed out that investment money was necessary to “finalize the last mile to launch.” The minimum need was $3 million to $5 million, he wrote, stating that Doorways was “currently finalizing” a $25 million investment “with commitments” for an additional $250 million. 

Manafort’s memo does not specify which Chinese officials or agencies were supposedly involved in this venture. In an email sent to a potential investor brought in by Manafort, Michael McCutcheon, the vice president of Standard Huaxia,  stated that the Doorways project was associated with a “Television Series on Corruption,” which would be a “partnership with the Central Government.” 

In an interview with Mother Jones, McCutcheon noted that the Doorways project has been under way since 2018 and that while it has not come to fruition, “we’re still working on it.” He confirmed his company was working with high-level Chinese officials. He added, “We’re very close to being successful.” He said that Manafort’s involvement was “limited to introducing parties in the United States”—that is, lining up investors. (One businessman whom Manafort put in touch with Standard Huaxia was quite interested, McCutcheon remarked, but he died.) According to McCutcheon, Manafort had “no involvement in our relationships in China.” Asked how Manafort hooked up with the Doorways venture, McCutcheon said, “I don’t know.” He also said he didn’t know whether Manafort had succeeded in bringing in any investors. 

In an email to the Washington Post, Manafort said he was “not involved with China” and has “had nothing to do with China, including Chinese businesses, government, individuals, or anything else.” He acknowledged that he “was asked to make introductions to U.S. studios and potential U.S. partners in the venture.”

McCutcheon told the Post that the unidentified “principal” with ties to the Chinese government referenced in Manafort’s memo was Frederick Tayton Dencer, a California businessman who had worked on commercial deals in China. Dencer, according to the newspaper, was extradited from Mexico and arrested in Los Angeles in 2012 after allegedly jumping bail on fraud and other charges related to a case in Alabama that was eventually dismissed. McCutcheon also noted that China Mobile was no longer part of the Doorways project. 

It’s notable that a former Trump adviser—who says he was in touch with the Trump crew during the 2020 election and who might again be in Trump’s inner circle—was looking to pocket a large amount of money through a deal involving the Chinese regime. While pursuing this China venture, Manafort had a book in the works that would be published in August 2022. It was an account of his travails and a celebration of Trump. In its pages, he hailed Trump’s rhetorical assaults on the “swamp” and Trump’s so-called “America First” stance which often entails slamming China. Manafort derided elites. He decried Joe Biden’s son Hunter for his business activity related to China. He wrote nothing about his moves to enrich himself via a venture in cahoots with the Chinese government. 

Here’s the Manafort document:

                    DOORWAYS – NEW STREAMING COMPANY IN CHINA

BUSINESS – Doorways will distribute several kinds of content covering the entire spectrum of intangible products related to culture, including music, television and film entertainment, news and educationChinese Govt has agreed to endorse and support the development of Doorways in a variety of ways with the plan to take the company public within 18 months from launchDoorways will be the first JV Chinese-American company to be involved in ownership and operation of a major internet vehicle in china.In past China has protected itself against Google, WhatsApp and Youtube. This deal has been created, authorized and supported at the highest levels of Chinese govtBasis for unique position of DoorwaysHistory of principal’s involvement with very top of Chinese leadershipChina felt time was ripe to open door to western technology in JV that serves their domestic consumer market needsChina views entertainment, music and education as key to their future to educate populationDoorways has exclusive and primary right to distribute specific western and domestic entertainment, music and educational content over internet from a complex set of agreements with the National Security Group, Film and tv broadcast Group and others at levels above SOEsHave agreement with China Mobile for bundling of subscribers in year 1 who will pay USD1 DOLLAR per phone per month paid to Doorways but billed as part of the monthly subscription into new phones by China Mobile- guarantees instant massive market penetration from day 1First year post launch revenue total to Doorways will be USD 2.9B with EBITA of USD1.9BApp is ready for launch now. Totally testedEntertainment is ready for launch nowChina Mobile contract is finalized and ready to be signedDoorways can be in market place within 60 days from closing of financing with revenue flow from China Mobile in first month of operationCapital is needed to finalize last mile to launchMinimum needed to do launch is between USD 3-5MDoorways is currently finalizing a SUD25M investment with commitments to fund additional USD250M which could be signed in next 45 daysGetting USD3-5M quickly will allow ability to negotiate a better deal with NY investment bank and initiate launch processThis capital will get approximately 3% of equity based on the $250m valuationHave financials and projections backing up all assumptions

 

The GOP’s Grand Plan: Minority Rule

It’s been said so often it’s almost become a cliché: Donald Trump poses a threat to American democracy. But his authoritarian impulses and hate-encouraging demagoguery are far from the only peril for the nation. Conservatives and Republicans for years have been striving on multiple fronts to weaken democracy by suppressing voter rights and pushing for other measures—such as gerrymandering and placing election boards under partisan control—that undermine majority rule.

No journalist has been a better chronicler of this nefarious crusade than Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones. Berman, a longtime colleague of mine, has a new book out this coming week that covers the many schemes and plots waged by the right wing to subvert democratic institutions and skew elections in the favor of Republicans: Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. The goal is simple: to amass political power for the GOP, as the party faces demographic shifts that will relegate it to minority status. To achieve this end, the Republican Party and its allies within the conservative movement are rigging the system.

With this valuable and important book, Berman exposes all the skullduggery and shenanigans of the right that endanger democracy. A few days ago, Berman and I chatted about his efforts to shine a light on the GOP war on America.

In the  first issue  of this newsletter, I wrote that Republicans were pushing for “political apartheid”—that is, minority rule. In your new book, you write that “the central threat now facing American democracy is minority rule.” As many of us know, from the start, there have been institutional features of our constitutional system that bolster minority rule. Then there are measures that Republicans have been trying to implement in recent years to deepen minority rule. Can you give us a rundown on both?

There’s this framework that dates to the founders, who, despite their revolutionary rhetoric, didn’t want to create institutions that were all that democratic. A lot of institutions created by the founders were meant to constrain democracy. Even as they’ve been democratized, you have a situation in which someone can win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College. And each state gets the same number of senators. Wyoming has dramatically more representation in the Senate than California, which violates the principle of one person/one vote. And the Supreme Court is a product of these two skewed institutions. You also did not have voting rights for all. All of these anti-democratic measures were built into the system. Then you have new forms of anti-democratic tactics—like voter suppression and gerrymandering—that are layered on top of this anti-democratic foundation to entrench the power of a conservative white minority.

You write that the founders put “a ticking time bomb” into our democracy. What do you mean by that?

They created institutions that allowed a minority of the population to control a majority of political power. That idea is directly at odds with the idea that a democracy should be based on the consent of the governed, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence. This is deeply destabilizing because every four years, for example, with the Electoral College, the majority can vote one way, and the minority can vote the other way and still manage to take power. These things are becoming increasingly explosive because in Donald Trump you have an authoritarian leader trying to take advantage of them.

In terms of the ticking time bomb metaphor, you mentioned how the small rural states have disproportionate power. That might have made sense at the time when the largest of the 13 original states was only so much bigger than the smallest. But as we’ve grown as a nation, the disparity has become gigantic. Eventually, you’ll have a handful of small states having so much more power than the more populous states.  

In 1790, the country’s largest state, Virginia, had 12 times the population of the smallest state, Delaware. Today, California, the largest state, has 67 times the population of the country’s smallest state by population, Wyoming. Conservatives love to quote the founders and say this is what they intended. But the architect of the Constitution, James Madison, hated the idea that every state got two Senate seats. He said it was going to allow a trifling minority to control the Senate. That’s what’s been happening. By 2040, roughly 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators. That means that 30 percent of America is going to elect 70 senators. The Senate, based on how it is set up, guarantees minority rule.

One thing that caught my attention in the book is that just a very small cadre of right-wing activists are orchestrating this assault on democracy.

This crystallized after the 2010 election, when Republicans flipped the legislatures in key swing states, and then they gerrymandered to maintain power for the next decade and beyond. There was a small circle of anti-democratic activists who predated Trump and who radicalized the Republican Party before Trump, and they wanted the Republican Party to be defined by restricting voting rights and extreme gerrymandering. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was the tipping point where Republicans saw the changing demographics of the country working against them. And they said, we need to do something to make sure that these changing demographics don’t yield a new political majority and drive our party, a largely white party, into extinction. I think that’s what pushed the Republican Party into a more anti-democratic direction.

“The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was the tipping point where Republicans saw the changing demographics of the country working against them.”

What are the most egregious and outrageous anti-democracy laws and rules that have been recently enacted or that are in the works?

God, there’s so many. The Texas legislature last year passed a law that gave the GOP secretary of state the power to take over elections only in one county in the state—in Harris County, one of the most Democratic counties in the state, which includes Houston. They said, we’re only going after this one county. North Carolina Republicans passed a law that took away the ability of the state’s Democratic governor to appoint a majority of the members of county election boards. These boards decide things like early voting. They could decide that instead of 20 early voting sites, there will only be one in a huge urban county. They also took the power to certify elections away from those boards and gave it to the Republican-controlled legislature. If they don’t like the fact that Joe Biden wins the state, they could try to overturn that result. Voter suppression has always been there for Republicans, but now they’re layering elections administration on top of voter suppression. They’re trying to suppress votes on the front end. But if that doesn’t work, they’re going to do it on the back end.

Let’s turn to voter ID laws and let me be a devil’s advocate. For many, it may sound reasonable that people should have to show official ID when they vote—a driver’s license or some other government-issued ID—like you need to get on a plane. What’s the problem with these laws?

It seems reasonable. But if you dig deeper on the numbers, it impacts some communities more than others based on how the laws are written and implemented. For example, there’s a law in Texas that allows you to vote with a gun permit, but not a student ID. That clearly seems targeted at some people more than others. Alabama passed a voter ID law, and it closed DMV offices in the majority of the counties where the majority of the Black population lives. So the place where you would go to get the ID no longer exists in these counties.

“This isn’t just about requiring a form of identification. This is about changing all sorts of voting systems that appear to benefit one party over the other.”

For 90 percent of the public, voter ID is not a big issue. But for the 10 percent of the public that may not for one reason or another have this ID, it can be burdensome. And then you need underlying documents like a birth certificate to get that ID. That requires money and time. Texas closed a third of DMV offices after they passed a voter ID law. Some people have to travel 200 miles or more just to get to a local DMV.

Republicans make it seem like it’s all about voter ID. But there are other things they’re trying to do. They’re attempting to cut early voting. They’re trying to eliminate Election Day registration, purge people from the voting rolls, and close polling places. This isn’t just about requiring a form of identification. This is about changing all sorts of voting systems that appear to benefit one party over the other.

Are President Joe Biden and the Democrats doing enough to identify and counter these threats to democracy?

The Democratic Party has become more aggressive about countering these threats to democracy, but the Democrats are not as pro-democracy as the Republicans are anti-democracy. There’s still asymmetric warfare going on. After the 2020 election, Republicans in every state legislature they controlled passed legislation to make it harder to vote. Democrats didn’t pass any legislation to protect voting rights. That was largely because two people on the Democratic side blocked it: Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. And Joe Biden was slow in embracing the cause of changing the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. But Democrats have been more aggressive recently. Biden has made the preservation of democracy the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign. He’s tried to elevate this issue and often has been mocked for it, with a lot of pundits saying people don’t care about democracy. That clearly is not true based on how they voted in recent elections.

There’s a line that conservatives like to push: America is not a democracy, it’s a republic. You hear this repeatedly. Explain what they mean by this, and why they’re wrong.

You hear it from Republican Sen. Mike Lee and John Eastman, and all these people who were behind the insurrection, and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell—that America was never set up to be a democracy and was always supposed to be a republic. And that justifies them violating majority rule and pushing anti-democratic measures. I traced this idea back to the John Birch Society.

These were far-right kooks who believed that 70 percent of Americans were communists in 1959. They thought that there was a communist conspiracy that included President Dwight Eisenhower and that there were Russian weather machines.  

And you couldn’t put fluoride in the water because it would poison you. They were influential in the ’50s and early ’60s. The John Birch Society pushed this idea that we were a republic not a democracy because that was their way to oppose the civil rights movement and the granting of new rights to formally disenfranchised communities. The founders didn’t want a direct democracy, like in ancient Greece, because they thought that direct democracy led to mob rule. But they wanted to create a representative democracy, in which you would have representatives who they believed would be wiser and more thoughtful and more careful and who would represent the views of their constituencies. The representative democracy the founders set up was very flawed. But the point is, they didn’t say we’re not a democracy. They said clearly that we’re a representative democracy. And it’s the representative part that is always missed by the people who say we’re not a democracy. But they invoke this mantra to justify all sorts of anti-democratic tactics.

Some right-wingers have recently even talked about getting rid of the direct election of US senators.

Yes, and there’s a Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina saying women shouldn’t be able to vote. Trump created this climate with the insurrection and the effort to overturn the election, so anything goes now. What can you do that’s worse than try to overturn the election? If that becomes normalized, it’s a free-for-all in terms of anti-democratic action.  

We used to think that making it harder for some people to vote was outrageous. But compare that to attacking the Capitol…

That’s what’s been so disturbing about the work I’m doing. I started as a journalist writing about barriers to the ballot box, and you’re talking about a few thousand people being prevented from voting. Then Trump shows up and tries to throw out 10 million votes in the 2020 election. When you think about it, the level of anti-democratic actions we have seen is way beyond what any of us could have imagined a few years ago.

What are your biggest worries for the 2024 election?

That the anti-democratic movement that was unsuccessful in 2020 will be successful in 2024. They are now more strategic, and they are now being helped by a political system that advantages more conservative and more rural areas as opposed to more urban, more diverse, and more progressive areas. I’m concerned about the toxic combination of an undemocratic political system and an authoritarian leader who wants to take advantage of that political system. I wonder whether our institutions will hold again. Are we a democracy if we’re only relying on one party to uphold democracy? That seems a dangerous situation. What if the only party that will uphold democracy becomes unpopular for any number of reasons?

“Are we a democracy if we’re only relying on one party to uphold democracy? That seems a dangerous situation.”

A lot of people feel like we dodged a bullet in 2020. But the gun is being reloaded right now. The effort to overturn the election in 2020 was disorganized. The anti-democratic movement is now more organized. It has a leadership and marching orders and people at all levels. If they want to stage an insurrection, they could stage a much more organized insurrection the second time around.

Finally, you and I shared a small office a long time ago in Washington, DC, when we both worked for the Nation. Any stories about that you want to tell?

Here’s what I remember: You watching cable news constantly, every minute of the day on the tiniest TV that I’d ever seen. You talked to Mike Isikoff 16 times a day—

We were working on a book together—

Yeah, and you didn’t like me until you realized that I liked Wilco. Your attitude was, who’s this guy [Nation editor] Katrina vanden Heuvel sent down here? What’s he doing? And then you mentioned you were going to see Wilco, and I said, “I like Wilco.” And the next day, you said, “Sorry, I don’t have an extra ticket. But, you know, next time.” The fact that I liked Wilco, The Wire, and Curb Your Enthusiasm—that was enough to endear me to you eventually.

Well, those are all very important things and I stand by my decision.

You can read a wonderful excerpt of Berman’s compelling book here.

Sen. Rick Scott Says He’s a China Hawk. But He’s Made Lots of Money With China-Related Investments

In November, ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued a press release casting himself as a fierce opponent of China. It declared, “Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, Senator Scott has introduced dozens of bills to punish Communist China for its increased military aggression, continued cyberattacks on both private companies and U.S. government agencies, unfair trade practices and stealing of data and intellectual property from American citizens and businesses.” Several months earlier, Scott, who is up for reelection this year, called on Americans to boycott products manufactured in China and to demand that US companies halt doing business there. Last year, he declared that the United States had to “Stop buying [Chinese] stuff. Stop helping them. Stop investing in China.” And he tweeted, “You don’t do business with your enemies.”

Yet contrary to the image he now eagerly projects as a fierce China hawk looking to ban business with China, Scott, a former health care executive whose firm was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud and who is worth hundreds of million of dollars, has a long record of supporting Chinese investment in the United States and personally making money off Chinese commerce. 

In 2014, while Scott was governor of Florida, his administration tried to recruit Chinese businesses to establish operations in the Sunshine State. Enterprise Florida—a partnership between the state government and local businesses—opened offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong to attract Chinese investment in Florida, and Scott dispatched the state secretary of commerce, Gary Swope, who was CEO of Enterprise Florida, to China for this occasion. A report issued by Enterprise Florida in 2020 (a year after Scott left the governor’s mansion for the Senate) noted that the outfit had positioned “Florida as an ideal business destination for Chinese companies.”

One particular venture stood out. In 2018, Scott’s administration boasted that through EF it had helped expand the operations in Florida of a Chinese solar firm called JinkoSolar. When JinkoSolar that year announced it would build a new state-of-the-art solar panel manufacturing facility in Jacksonville, Scott took credit for this and declared, “Florida’s economy is on a roll.” City and state tax incentives for the JinkoSolar plant totaled $4.2 million.

A few months later, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported the deal with this Chinese firm “could pad Scott’s vast, personal bottom line.” The paper noted that he was an investor in a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, the parent of utility giant Florida Power & Light. And NextEra had said it planned to purchase 7 million solar panels from JinkoSolar over the following four years. 

A Scott spokesperson at the time said that Scott “has never made a single decision as governor with any thought or consideration of his personal finances.” The newspaper pointed out that Scott had played a very public role in bringing JinkoSolar to Jacksonville and owned as much as $250,000 in NextEra Partners stock, with his wife holding up to $500,000 in this stock. When Scott and his wife sold their NextEra holdings in 2019, they cleared between $150,000 and $1.1 million in capital gains, according to his Senate financial disclosure report (which lists amounts in categories, not specific figures). 

Two years after selling his NextEra holdings, Scott introduced a bill called the “Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act” to prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar panels manufactured or assembled in China, specifically the Xinjiang province, which has been known as a site of forced labor camps. The following year, US Customs and Border Protection officials seized solar energy components heading to JinkoSolar and two other Chinese companies, under a new law that banned imports from China’s Xinjiang region due to concerns about slave labor at Uyghur detention camps. 

Though Scott now advocates cutting off any US investment in China, he held direct investments in Chinese stock funds in the early 2010s. For instance, according to his annual financial disclosure forms, in 2010 he held up to $328,315 in a particular Chinese fund. 

Scott also made a bundle with a plastics company that teamed up with a Chinese firm to manufacture components for automotive vehicles in China. As the Miami Herald reported in 2018, Scott in 2005 used $14 million in cash to arrange the leveraged buy-out of Continental Structural Plastics, a Michigan-based firm that made parts for car and truck manufacturers. Scott led the company until he was elected governor in 2010. But by then the firm was near insolvency and racked with high debt. Scott’s successors mounted a turnaround that included a 50/50 joint venture struck in 2014 with the Qingdao Victall Railway Group in Tangshan, China. According to a press release put out at the time, the new project would operate out of a 322,000 square-foot manufacturing facility located in Tangshan and produce “composite components for the automotive, heavy truck and bus, construction and agriculture markets in China.”

In 2016, Teijin, Ltd., a Japanese conglomerate bought Continental Structural Plastics for $825 million. The Herald noted that Scott and his family owned 66.7 percent of the company when it was sold, meaning they apparently pulled in about $550 million from the sale of a firm that had partnered with a Chinese company. His net worth increased by 55 percent mainly due to this one deal. (By the way, in 2013, according to the newspaper, Scott had led a delegation of business leaders to Japan to meet with Japanese executives, and the list of Japanese firms invited to talk with the Americans included Teijin, Ltd.)

More recently, Scott and his wife, Ann Holland Scott, have held a variety of investments with Chinese connections. In 2021, according to Business Insider, they sold a massive investment in Valterra Products Holdings, a California firm that manufactures products and parts for recreational vehicles, buses, pools, spas, and other applications, and netted between $15 million and $75 million. Its product line included goods manufactured in China.

The couple reported on his 2022 financial disclosure form that their family earned at least $4 million from their holdings in Gainline Capital Partners, which owned a handful of companies, including Galaxy Universal, a footwear company, and Core Health & Fitness, a maker of fitness equipment. Both of these firms manufacture products in China. (In 2018, Core Health announced it was shifting much of its manufacturing to China.)

Scott and his wife also invested over $3.5 million in Casdin Partners, which invested in Zentera, a Chinese biopharmaceutical company; CANBridge Pharmaceuticals, a drug company based in China and the United States; and LianBio, a Chinese biotech firm. The couple owned $2 million of stock in Wireless Telecom Group, a global designer and manufacturer of advanced radio frequency and microwave components, modules, systems, and instruments that does significant sales in China. 

Scott and his wife, according to his disclosure forms, have invested millions of dollars in other financial corporations with major interests in China. In 2022, they had between $1.8 million and $3.75 million invested in funds managed by OVO Fund, a venture capital firm. One of its portfolio companies is Avaamo, an AI firm that has drawn backing from a Chinese VC firm called WI Harper. And that VC company has been funded by another Chinese VC firm, Westlake Ventures, which has been tied to the Chinese government. OVO Fund has also held investments in other firms engaged in business in China.

Mother Jones sent Scott’s office a request for comment and a list of questions regarding Scott’s specific actions and investments related to China. His communications director, McKinley Lewis, replied in an email, “Nobody has fought harder in the US Senate to combat the threats posed by Communist China than Senator Rick Scott, and he’ll be happy to put his record up against the China-loving Biden admin and the Democrats who are all pushing Biden’s pro-China agenda. You know it’s a weak hit when no legitimate outlets will take the Democrats’ oppo and they have to settle for giving it to Mother Jones.”

Lewis did not address any of the details in this article.

Scott is a tycoon with massive financial investments, and in the world of global finance and industry it is hard to avoid contact with Chinese businesses. Yet there’s no public indication that Scott, who has strived to be the Senate’s top China-basher, made efforts to steer clear of China when it came to making money. He has raised legitimate concerns about human rights and free speech in China and about China’s military intentions. But such matters did not seem to get in the way when he was trying to whip up business opportunities for Florida or when it came to managing his personal financial portfolio. He’s a China hawk whose nest egg grew in part due to the sort of China-related business activity he now seeks to ban.

Trump’s Trial Marks the Return of “Individual-1”

The justice system finally caught up with Individual-1—a.k.a. Donald J. Trump. 

On the opening day of Trump’s historic trial for his porn-star-hush-money caper—no former president has ever been on trial for criminal charges—New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan had to clear up a few pending legal issues before moving to the arduous task of selecting jurors. One of those matters concerned the criminal case of onetime Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who, according to filings submitted by federal prosecutors, broke the law at the behest of a person identified as “Individual-1.”

The immediate question for Merchan was whether and how prosecutors in New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office could refer to Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea for violating election law. Cohen was nabbed for making the illegal in-kind contribution to Trump’s 2016 campaign at the center of this case: the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels to keep mum about her alleged affair with Trump. He will be a key witness for Bragg. 

Both sides have been arguing over what can and can’t be said about that guilty plea during this trial. To discredit Cohen, Trump’s lawyers want to cite Cohen’s other guilty pleas (tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress), which were unrelated to the Daniels affair. But they’d rather jurors not hear about Cohen’s plea regarding the hush-money deal because that would reinforce the idea that the payment to Daniels was a felony. To win this case, Bragg’s team must prove that Trump falsified business records—that is, recorded the $130,000 payment as a legitimate legal expense for the Trump Organization—and did so to cover up a felony. The prosecutors, naturally, want the jury to know that the federal court that tried Cohen has determined the payment was a felony violation of campaign law. Trump’s defense team is expected to contend Cohen’s payment was not an election law violation. 

The back and forth on this is a reminder of a fact often lost in all the hubbub about the Trump-Daniels case: The feds identified Trump as a co-conspirator in the crime Cohen committed.

In December 2018, lawyers in the office of the US attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a sentencing memo following Cohen’s guilty pleas. The document referred to Cohen’s arrangement of the payment to Daniels, as well as a financial deal the National Enquirer made with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, to keep her quiet about her alleged extramarital romance with Trump. Here is a passage from the memo:

During the [2016] campaign, Cohen played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories —each from women who claimed to have had an affair with Individual-1—so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election. With respect to both payments, Cohen acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election. Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.  As a result of Cohen’s actions, neither woman spoke to the press prior to the election. 

At the direction of Individual-1. That’s the key line. As other parts of the memo show, “Individual-1” was Trump. With this filing, the feds were clearly stating that Trump and Cohen were in cahoots in this criminal venture.

Yet the US attorney’s office never pursued Trump for his role in the crime. At the time of Cohen’s prosecution, Trump was president, and Justice Department policy prohibited the indictment of a sitting president. (Legal experts have long debated whether this policy ought to stand.) And by the time Trump left office, the federal investigation of the hush-money payment was moribund. In his 2022 book, Holding the Line, Geoffrey Berman, the former US attorney for the Southern District, suggested that the Trump Justice Department had tried to stifle this inquiry. (Berman did not work directly on this case). 

Once again, Trump was off the hook. Meanwhile, Cohen went to prison for a crime that Trump instructed him to commit but was not held accountable for. Now, Trump’s involvement in the hush-money payment is a central component in his own criminal case.

In the run-up to the trial, prosecutors have argued they would like to inform the jury of Cohen’s guilty plea not to suggest Trump is guilty, but to enhance Cohen’s credibility—essentially by showing that he ‘fessed up to his crime. Merchan said okay, as long as Bragg’s lawyers lay the appropriate foundation. The judge asked each side to draft instructions for the jury stating that the jurors could make no inferences about Trump’s guilt because of Cohen’s guilty plea. Obviously, the more Bragg’s attorneys can bring Cohen’s case into this one, the stronger their own argument will be—and the greater the odds that Individual-1 will not escape yet again.

From outside the Manhattan courthouse where Donald Trump made history today by becoming the first former president to face a criminal trial.pic.twitter.com/gfHaXi44os

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) April 15, 2024