Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 101
May 28, 2024
May 28, 2024
The defense and the prosecution today made their closing statements in the New York criminal case against Trump for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. The payment was intended to stop her account of her sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the days before the 2016 election, when the Trump campaign was already reeling from the Access Hollywood tape showing Trump boasting of sexual assault.
The Biden-Harris campaign showed up at the trial today with veteran actor Robert DeNiro and former police officers Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, who protected the U.S. Capitol and members of Congress from rioters on January 6, 2021. In words seemingly calculated to get under Trump’s skin, DeNiro said, “We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot,” and called him a coward.
When Robert Costa of CBS News asked campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler why they had shown up at the trial, Tyler answered: “Because you all are here. You’ve been incessantly covering this day in and day out, and we want to remind the American people ahead of the…first debate on June 27 of the unique, persistent, and growing threat that Donald Trump poses to the American people and to our democracy. So since you all are here, we’re here communicating that message.”
Yesterday, in remarks at Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Memorial Day, President Joe Biden honored “the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who’ve given their lives for this nation. Each one…a link in the chain of honor stretching back to our founding days. Each one bound by common commitment—not to a place, not to a person, not to a President, but to an idea unlike any idea in human history: the idea of the United States of America.”
“[F]reedom has never been guaranteed,” Biden said. “Every generation has to earn it; fight for it; defend it in battle between autocracy and democracy, between the greed of a few and the rights of many…. And just as our fallen heroes have kept the ultimate faith with our country and our democracy, we must keep faith with them,” he said.
His speech at Arlington echoed the message he delivered to this year’s graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he urged the graduates to hold fast to their oaths. “On your very first day at West Point, you raised your right hands and took an oath—not to a political party, not to a president, but to the Constitution of the United States of America—against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said to applause. Soldiers “have given their lives for that Constitution. They have fought to defend the freedoms that it protects: the right to vote, the right to worship, the right to raise your voice in protest. They have saved and sacrificed to ensure, as President Lincoln said, a ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.’”
“[N]othing is guaranteed about our democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it, to choose it,” he said. “Now, it’s your turn.” Biden spent more than an hour saluting and shaking the hand of each graduate.
In contrast, Trump ushered in Memorial Day with a post on his social media company, saying: “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.” He then continued to attack E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, before turning to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the civil case of Trump and the Trump Organization falsifying documents, and Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the current criminal case in New York.
The message behind this extraordinary post was twofold: Trump can think of nothing but himself…and he appears to be terrified.
On Saturday, May 25, Trump had an experience quite different from his usual reception at rallies of hand-picked supporters. He was resoundingly booed at the national convention of the Libertarian Party in Washington, D.C., where Secret Service agents confiscated squeaky rubber chickens before his speech. Attendees jeered Trump’s order, “You have to combine with us,” even when he reminded them of his libertarian credentials—tax cuts and defunding of federal equality programs—and promised to pardon the January 6 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol.
Trump also promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.
Libertarians want Ulbricht released because they support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices and they see Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach. Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for drug dealers, making his promise to pardon Ulbricht an illustration of just how badly he thinks he needs the support of Libertarian voters. But they refused to endorse him.
Trump appeared angry, and on Sunday, as Greg Sargent reported in The New Republic, he reposted a video of a man raging at MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. In it, the man says that when Trump is reelected: “He’ll get rid of all you f*cking liberals. You liberals are gone when he f*cking wins. You f*cking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you f*cking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the f*ck out of here, you scumbag.”
Trump’s elevation of this video, Sargent notes, is a dangerous escalation of his already violent rhetoric, and yet it has gotten very little media attention.
Last November, Matt Gertz of Media Matters reported that ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News provided 18 times more coverage of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment at a fundraising event that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” than they provided of Trump’s November 2023 promise to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned the “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” language. The ratio for the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers was 29:1.
Clinton’s statement was consistent with polling, and she added that the rest of Trump’s supporters were “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” She said: “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Sargent noted that news stories require context and that Trump’s elevation of the violent video should be placed alongside his many threats to prosecute his enemies. While there is often concern over disrespect toward right-wing voters, Sargent writes, there has been very little attention to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s posting of “a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans ‘done’ and ‘gone’ if he is elected.”
Scott MacFarlane of CBS News reported yesterday that Republicans have ignored a law passed in March 2022 requiring the placement of a small plaque honoring police officers who protected the U.S. Capitol and the lawmakers and staffers there on January 6, 2021. It was supposed to be in place by March 2023 but has not gone up. A spokesperson for House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says his office is working on it. Kayla Tausche of CNN reported today that three of the police officers at the Capitol that day—Sergeant Aquilino Gonell and Officer Harry Dunn, both retired, and Officer Daniel Hodges, who is still with the Washington, D.C., metropolitan police—will be traveling to swing states for the Biden campaign to tell voters that Trump threatens Americans’ fundamental rights.
Finally, today, Melinda French Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced $1 billion in new spending over the next two years “for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.” Only 2% of charitable giving in the U.S. goes to these organizations, she wrote the New York Times, and “[f]or too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women's rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.”
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Notes:
https://newrepublic.com/article/181973/trump-media-attacks-media-dangerous-turn
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-fails-to-install-plaque-honoring-jan-6-police-officers/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/politics/biden-campaign-january-6-officers/index.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722qy5dzlgo
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4305566-trump-doubles-down-death-penalty-for-drug-dealers/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4687060-donald-trump-squeaky-chicken-libertarian-controversy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/opinion/melinda-french-gates-reproductive-rights.html
The Dworkin ReportDe Niro and Jan 6 Heroes Unload on Trump Outside NY TrialRobert De Niro just showed up outside the New York City courthouse, where Trump is facing 34 felony counts. Rightwing lunatics are already trying to start conspiracy theories lying and saying that thi…Read more18 hours ago · 765 likes · 132 comments · Scott DworkinX:
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May 27, 2024
May 27, 2024
The White House hosted a three-day state visit for President William Ruto and First Lady Rachel Ruto of Kenya beginning on May 23, 2024. The visit marks the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Kenya and is the first state visit for an African leader since President John Kufuor of Ghana visited in 2008.
The Biden administration has worked to develop ties to African nations, whose people are leery of the United States not only because of what Biden called the “original sin” of colonists importing enslaved Africans to North American shores, but also because while the Soviet Union tended to support the movements when African nations began to throw off colonial rule, the U.S. tended to support right-wing reaction. More recently, during the Trump years the United States withdrew from engagement with what the former president allegedly called “sh*thole countries.”
In contrast, officials from the Biden administration have noted the importance of the people of Africa to the future of the global community. Currently, the median age on the continent is 19, and experts estimate that by 2050, one in four people on Earth will live on the African continent.
Saying that Africans must have control over their own countries and their own future, U.S. officials backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20 (G-20), welcoming the organization’s 55 member states to the intergovernmental forum that focuses on global issues, and pledged more than $55 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent, where they have emphasized partnership with African countries for economic development rather than a competition with China and Russia for resource extraction.
In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia to emphasize the connections between Africa and North America, focus on the importance of democracy as Russian disinformation in Africa is driving pro-Russian and anti-U.S. sentiment, and announce U.S. investment in the continent as well as calling for more.
But in July 2023, those efforts appeared to take a step back when a military coup in Niger deposed elected president Mohamed Bazoum. A few months later, the ruling junta asked the forces of former colonial power France to leave the country and turned to Russia’s Wagner group for security. In March, U.S. diplomats and military officials expressed concern about the increasing presence of Russia in Niger, and a few days later, officials told close to 1,000 U.S. troops stationed in the country to leave as well. Russian troops moved into a military base the U.S. has been using.
The U.S. says its troops will leave by mid-September and has pledged to continue negotiations. Niger was a key ally in the U.S. antiterrorism efforts against armed forces allied with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Neighboring Chad has also asked the 100 U.S. troops in the country to leave.
Meanwhile, in the year since her trip to Africa, Vice President Harris has focused on digital inclusion in Africa, recognizing that the spread of digital technology has the potential to promote economic opportunity and gender equality and to create jobs, as well as open new markets for U.S. exports. Last week, she announced that the African Development Bank Group and Mastercard have launched the Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy Alliance (MADE), which is working with public and private investors to provide digital access for 100 million individuals and businesses in Africa over the next ten years, focusing first on agriculture and women.
Kenya’s President Ruto won election in 2022, promising voters that he would champion the “hustlers,” the young workers piecing together an income informally. U.S. ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman, former chief executive officer of eBay and Hewlett-Packard and unsuccessful 2010 Republican candidate for governor of California, has supported this idea of economic development. Focusing on “commercial diplomacy,” she has worked with Ruto to encourage business investment in Kenya.
At a state luncheon with President Ruto last week, Harris reiterated her belief “that African ideas and innovations will have a significant impact on the future of the entire world—a belief driven in part by the extraordinary creativity, dynamism, and energy of young African leaders” and by the continent’s young demographic. She reiterated the need to “revise and upgrade the U.S.-Africa narrative, which is long overdue; and to bring fresh focus to the innovation and ingenuity that is so prevalent across the continent of Africa.” She warned: “Any leader that ignores the continent of Africa is doing so at their own peril.”
While Kenya’s main economic sectors are agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism, it is also a technology hub, and Harris called out its “Silicon Savannah,” a technology ecosystem that produced the cellphone-based money transfer system M-PESA, as well as startups making biodegradable plastics, creating drinking water from humidity, and so on.
Ruto thanked Harris and Biden “for helping us reshape, reengineer, and write a new narrative for our continent.” Africans “are going to write our own story,” Ruto said, adding that the narrative of “this continent of conflict, trouble, disease, poverty” is “not the story of Africa.” “Africa is a continent of tremendous opportunity,” he said, “the largest reserves of energy—renewable energy resources; 60 percent of the world’s arable, uncultivated land; 30 percent of…global mineral wealth, including those that are necessary for energy transition; the youngest continent, which will produce 40 percent of the world’s…workforce by 2050 and where a quarter of the world’s population will be living, providing the world’s biggest single market. In short,” he said, “Africa is a rich continent and a continent of opportunity.”
In a conversation with Vice President Harris and Ambassador Whitman, President Ruto said that the young population of Africa is “tech hungry” and that technology “is the instrument that we can use to leapfrog Africa from where we are to…catch up with the rest of the world.” The digital space, he said, is the space that will create the greatest output from young people and women. To that end, he said, Kenya is investing 30% of its annual budget in education, training, knowledge, and skills.
As part of his reach for global leadership, Ruto has put Kenya at the front of an initiative backed by the United Nations for a multinational security intervention in Haiti, where officials have asked for help restoring order against about 200 armed gangs in the country, coalitions of which control about 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 exacerbated political instability in Haiti by creating a power vacuum, while weapons flowing into the country, primarily from straw purchases in the U.S., fed violence. Last year, then–prime minister Ariel Henry had pleaded with the United Nations Security Council to bolster Haitian security forces and combat the gangs.
The U.S. declined to lead the effort or to provide troops, although it, along with Canada and France, is funding the mission. On Thursday, Biden explained that “for the United States to deploy forces in the hemisphere just raises all kinds of questions that can be easily misrepresented about what we’re trying to do…. So we set out to find…a partner or partners who would lead the effort that we would participate in.” Kenya stepped up, although Kenyan opposition leaders, lawyers, and human rights groups are fiercely opposed to deploying Kenyans to the Caribbean nation.
The Haitian gangs oppose the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS), which is supposed to consist of 2,500 troops, 1,000 of whom are Kenyans. The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Chad, and Jamaica have officially notified the United Nations secretary-general of their intent to send personnel to the mission. Other nations have said they will support the mission, but as of May 20 had not yet sent official notifications. The MSS was supposed to arrive by May 23, but a base for it in Port-au-Prince is not yet fully equipped. Experts also told Caitlin Hu of CNN that Haitian authorities have not done enough to explain to local people how the mission will work, and Haitian police say what is most necessary is more support for local police.
Kenyan news reported that the advance team of Kenyan police officers who went to Haiti to assess conditions for their deployment there will recommend a delay in deployment.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/biden-g-20-summit-politics-africa-china-04ce188209d1fac0c4f9e946825e3c2f
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/20/us-set-to-evacuate-illegal-troops-from-niger
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/politics/us-russian-forces-niger-base/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/niger-chad-us-troops-withdrawal-russia-aa852a79bac39aaa679af3663b56deaa
4/background-press-call-previewing-the-vice-presidents-trip-to-ghana-tanzania-and-zambia/
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/mar/25/harris-heads-to-africa-amid-bidens-courtship-of-co/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-64451376
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/africa-worlds-future-touring-us-090551181.html
5/fact-sheet-u-s-africa-partnership-in-promotin-peace-security-and-democratic-governance/
https://www.csis.org/analysis/prioritizing-partnerships-africa
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/21/whitman-ruto-kenya-cabinet-consideration-00159251
https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/122/487/205/7133587
https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15432.doc.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/24/haiti-kenya-security-force/
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/19/1252380146/us-troops-leave-niger
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/24/americas/haiti-gang-mss-kenya-explainer-intl/index.html
May 26, 2024
May 26, 2024
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.
For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.
When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.
Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.
When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed “Wray’s Ragged Irregulars” after their commander Colonel Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.
It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomber squadrons.
Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.
I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau’s children weren’t there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.
And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.
I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.
But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.
So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.
May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.
[Photo by Carole Green.]
May 25, 2024
May 25, 2024
While it’s not officially summer yet, the town is coming to life.
The lilacs and apple trees are blooming over the forget-me-nots, and over them all is the bright blue sky of the coming summer.
For me, though, the clearest sign of the change of seasons is that Buddy is back on the water, and sunrise photos like this are waiting for me on my phone when I get up many hours after he has headed out to haul.
Taking the night off. Will be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
May 24, 2024
May 24, 2024
On Wednesday, May 22, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who had been the candidate for anti-Trump Republicans, said she will vote for Trump. Haley ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination and maintained a steady stream of criticism of him, calling him “unstable,” “unhinged” and “a disaster…for our party.” Since she suspended her campaign in early March, she has continued to poll at around 20% of Republican primary voters.
There are two ways to look at Haley’s capitulation. It might show that Trump is so strong that he has captured the entire party and is sweeping it before him. In contrast, it might show that Trump is weak, and Haley made this concession to his voters either in hopes of stepping into his place or in a desperate move to cobble the party, whose leaders are keenly aware they are an unpopular minority in the country, together.
The Republican Party is in the midst of a civil war. The last of the establishment Republican leaders who controlled the party before 2016 are trying to wrest control of it back from Trump’s MAGA Republicans, who have taken control of the key official positions. At the same time, Trump’s MAGA voters, while a key part of the Republican base, have pushed the party so far right they have left the majority of Americans—including Republicans—far behind.
Abortion remains a major political problem for Republicans. Trump appointed the three Supreme Court justices who provided the votes to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, and he has boasted repeatedly that he ended Roe. This pleases his white evangelical base but not the majority of the American people.
According to a recent Pew poll, 63% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 36% think it should be illegal in most or all cases. But Republicans are continuing to push unpopular antiabortion legislation. On Thursday, Louisiana lawmakers approved a law classifying mifepristone and misoprostol, two drugs commonly used in abortions, as dangerous drugs—a category usually reserved for addictive medications—making it a crime to possess abortion pills without a prescription.
Louisiana prohibits abortions except to save the life of the mother or in cases in which the fetus has a condition incompatible with life. The law requires doctors to get a special license to prescribe the drugs, one of which is used for routine reproductive care as well as abortions. The state would then keep a record of those prescriptions, effectively a database to monitor women’s pregnancies and the doctors who treat them. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, is expected to sign the measure into law.
Trump has repeatedly promised to weigh in on the mifepristone question but, likely aware that he cannot please both his base and voters, has not done so. On Tuesday, May 21, though, he stepped into a related problem. Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, antiabortion activists have begun to talk about contraception as abortion, with some warning that it is “unbiblical.” But in February, 80% of voters polled said that contraception was “deeply important” to them, including 72% of Republican voters. On Tuesday, Trump said he was open to regulating contraception and that his campaign would issue a policy statement on contraception “very shortly.” He later walked back his earlier comments, saying they had been misinterpreted.
On May 19 the same judge who tried to remove mifepristone from the market by rescinding the FDA approval of it, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, blocked the Biden administration from implementing a new rule that requires sellers at gun shows and online to get licenses and conduct background checks. The rule closes what’s known as the “gun show loophole.” According to the Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy, 86% of Americans want mandatory background checks for all gun purchases.
Trump himself is a problem for the party. His base is absolutely loyal, but he is a deeply problematic candidate for anyone else. As Susan Glasser outlined in the New Yorker yesterday, in the past week he chickened out of testifying in his ongoing criminal trial for paying hush money to an adult film actress to keep damaging information from voters in 2016 after insisting for weeks that he would. He talked about staying in office for a third term, ran a video promising that the United States will become a “unified Reich” when he wins reelection, and accused President Joe Biden of trying to have him assassinated. He will be 78 in a few weeks and is having trouble speaking.
In addition to his ongoing criminal trial, on Tuesday a filing unsealed in the case of Trump’s retention of classified documents showed that a federal judge, Beryl Howell, believed investigators had “strong evidence” that Trump “intended” to hide those documents from the federal government.
Also revealed were new photographs of Trump’s personal aide Walt Nauta moving document boxes before one of Trump’s lawyers arrived to review what Trump had, along with the information that once Trump realized that the men moving the boxes could be captured on Mar-a-Lago’s security cameras, he allegedly made sure they would avoid the cameras. The new details suggest that prosecutors have more evidence than has been made public.
This might explain why, as Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley of Rolling Stone reported today, Trump is pressuring Republicans to pass a law shielding presidents from prosecution in state or local courts, moving prosecutions to federal courts where a president could stop them.
Yesterday, Marilyn W. Thompson of ProPublica reported on yet another potentially harmful legal story. There were a number of discrimination and harassment complaints made against the Trump campaign in 2016 and 2020 that Trump tried to keep quiet with nondisclosure agreements. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the Trump campaign to produce a list of the complaints by May 31. Those complaints include the charge that the 2016 campaign paid women less than men and that Trump kissed a woman without her consent.
Trump’s current behavior is not likely to reassure voters.
Yesterday he wrote on social media that “Evan Gershkovich, the Reporter from The Wall Street Journal, who is being held by Russia, will be released almost immediately after the Election, but definitely before I assume Office. He will be HOME, SAFE, AND WITH HIS FAMILY. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING!”
There is no good interpretation of this post. If Trump does have that sort of leverage with Putin, why? And why not use it immediately? Is he openly signaling to Putin to ignore the Biden administration’s ongoing negotiations for Gershkovich’s release? Trevor Reed, who was arrested in Russia in 2019 when visiting his girlfriend in Moscow, noted: “As a former wrongful detainee in Russia, I would just like to remind everyone that President Trump had the ability to get myself and Paul Whelan out of Russia for years and chose not to. I would be skeptical of any claims about getting Evan Gershkovich back in a day.”
Reed was freed in 2022 as part of a prisoner swap arranged by the Biden administration.
Last night, at a rally in New York, Trump accepted the endorsement of alleged gang members, rappers Michael Williams (Sheff G) and Tegan Chambers (Sleepy Hallow). In 2023 the two men were indicted with 30 other people on 140 counts, including murder, attempted murder, illegal possession of firearms, and at least a dozen shootings. Sheff G was released from jail in April after posting a $1.5 million bond.
Then, Trump’s people claimed that 25,000 people turned out for the rally, but they requested a permit for only 3,500, and only 3,400 tickets were issued. Aerial shots suggest there were 800–1,500 people there.
MAGA voters don’t care about any of this, apparently, but non-MAGA Republicans and Independents do. And this might be behind Haley’s promise to vote for Trump. The unpopularity of the MAGA faction might allow Haley to step in if Trump crashes and burns, so long as she kowtows to Trump and his base. Or it might be calculated to try to repair the rift in hopes that the party can cobble together some kind of unity by November. As The Shallow State noted on X, Haley’s announcement showed that “Trump is fragile.”
But Haley’s statement that she will vote for Trump does not necessarily mean her voters will follow her. Deputy political director for the Biden campaign Juan Peñalosa met with Haley supporters in a prescheduled zoom call hours after Haley’s announcement. On Thursday afternoon the campaign issued a press release titled: “To Haley Voters: There’s a Home For You on Team Biden-Harris.”
MAGA Republicans know their agenda is unpopular, and they are working to seize power through voter suppression, violence, gerrymandering, and packing the legal system. But there are signs a bipartisan defense of democracy may be gathering strength.
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nikki-haley-says-she-will-vote-for-trump/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nikki-haley-announcement-2024-race-donald-trump-south-carolina/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/haley-shes-dropping-feel-kiss-ring-trump/story?id=107370200
https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-accepts-endorsement-from-indicted-gang-members
https://newrepublic.com/post/181931/maga-spin-trump-bronx-rally-size
https://blog.lime.link/visualizing-crowd-sizes/
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/23/louisiana-abortion-pill-criminal-penalties-00159735
https://time.com/6977434/birth-control-contraception-access-griswold-threat/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/us/politics/republicans-birth-control-ivf.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-republicans-pass-law-jail-1235027139/
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/05/10/maga-mike-vs-speaker-johnson-00157258
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-campaign-harassment-bullying-lawsuits
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/mar-a-lago-documents-walt-nauta-donald-trump/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/23/politics/nikki-haley-biden-trump/index.html
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May 23, 2024
It turns out that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito is not the only one flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag. Leonard Leo, the man behind the extremist takeover of the American judiciary, also flew that flag at his home on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
So now we have the Appeal to Heaven flag, which represents the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology, in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.
Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858, is often described as defining the difference between the North, based on the idea of free labor, and the South, based on enslaved labor, and the idea that one or the other must prevail.
But the speech is much more than a simple depiction of the conflict between freedom and slavery. It details a long-standing plan to destroy American democracy.
Lincoln outlined the steps that the United States had taken away from freedom toward tyranny, and noted:
“[W]hen we see a lot of framed timbers…which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house… we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”
Lincoln did not choose the names of his workmen at random. Stephen was Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who had popularized the idea that local voters should be able to decide whether their territory would permit slavery, no matter what the majority of Americans wanted; Franklin was Franklin Pierce, who had presided over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting enslavement to move into the western territories; Roger was Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, saying that Congress could not keep slavery out of the territories; and James was President James Buchanan, who urged Americans to accept the judgment of the Supreme Court. By spreading enslavement westward, that judgment would create new slave states that would work with the southern slave states to make slavery national.
Together, Lincoln said, these four workmen had constructed an edifice to support human enslavement, an edifice working against the nation’s dedication to freedom established by the Declaration of Independence. "A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” he said. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. After the 2020 census, when it was clear that a South Carolina district was becoming competitive, the Republican-dominated legislature moved the district lines to cut Black voters out and move white voters in, thereby guaranteeing Democrats would lose. Voting rights advocates sued, saying that moving around voters on the basis of race violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. A federal district court agreed.
Today, by a vote of 6–3, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision and signed off on the new South Carolina congressional map that dilutes Black votes. It approved the map because, it said, the gerrymander was politically, rather than racially, motivated. And, it said, “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”
From now on, as Mark Joseph Stern noted in Slate, it will be virtually impossible for Black voters to prove that lawmakers targeted their race rather than their politics when redistricting, and partisan gerrymandering has just gotten the Supreme Court’s approval (previously, as Stern noted, the court had said federal courts could not intervene even if partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution; today they said it does not violate the Constitution). Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) said: “Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision…is further affirmation that this Court has chosen to disenfranchise Black voters and rob us of our fundamental access to the ballot box. Equitable representation is the hallmark of a healthy democracy and in this case, the Supreme Court is attempting to steer the country back to a dark place in our history.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Supreme Court has no power to redraw district maps at all. As Stern noted, Thomas places the blame for what he sees as judicial overreach on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. After that decision, Thomas says, the court invented powers to remedy the problem. If Brown invited overreach, all the landmark voting decisions of the 1960s did, too.
And so, almost exactly 70 years after the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board, it appears that the framed timbers designed to reverse the expansion of minority rights are falling into place.
But in 2024, those of us eager to protect the idea of human equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence have an advantage that Lincoln’s generation did not. “James”—James Buchanan, who cheerfully backed the Dred Scott decision—is not in the White House.
Instead of sympathizing with the extremists, as Buchanan did, President Joe Biden has worked to undermine the sense of grievance that has permitted them to amass power. In the 1850s the federal government had few ways to weaken the ties of ordinary people to the state leaders who were determined to spread the institution of slavery that had made them enormously wealthy, but the modern administrative state has given Biden more options.
The administration has used the power of the federal government to begin to unwind the trickle-down economy that between 1981 and 2021 transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the U.S. to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. The result has been solid economic growth of 5.7% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023.
The unemployment rate has been at record lows of under 4% for more than two years, the strongest run since the 1960s. Inflation is not rising; it is falling and is now at 3.4%, higher than the Federal Reserve’s preferred mark of 2% but down significantly from its high of 9.1% in June 2022, just after the worst of the pandemic eased. At 4.5% growth over 2023, wage growth outpaced inflation, meaning that although prices have risen, workers have come out ahead. The S&P stock market index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
In the 1930s, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, federal investment in the impoverished South quieted much of the region’s opposition to the federal government. Limiting crops in exchange for subsidies both brought higher prices and helped to repair damaged soil, new labor regulations got children out of factories and raised workers’ pay, and the government brought electricity and health care to places private industry wouldn’t go.
Biden appears to be aiming for the same result, but he might be stymied by a news system that has many Americans not just unaware of the good economic news, but believing the opposite. Lauren Aratani of The Guardian reported earlier this week on an exclusive Harris poll showing that 56% of Americans believe incorrectly that the U.S. is in a recession. Those following the stock market are slightly more informed: 49% of them think the S&P stock market index is down for the year. Almost half of those polled—49%—think unemployment is at a 50-year high. Seventy-two percent think inflation is increasing. Fifty-eight percent of those polled blame Biden for mismanaging an economy that is in fact the strongest in the world.
Tempting as it is to blame the media for its relentless focus on bad news rather than good, a study from NBC News at the end of April showed that those who follow national newspapers and media swing heavily to Biden, while those who either don’t follow politics or get their news from YouTube and social media favor Trump or Robert Kennedy Jr.
Those sources seem unlikely to explain that Leonard, Sam, Clarence, Mike, and Donald have been swinging hammers.
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Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/we-dont-talk-about-leonard-leo-supreme-court-supermajority
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/housedivided.htm
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-807_3e04.pdf
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Alito Writes AgainHere’s the headline: Today, the Supreme Court, In a 6-3 decision split along conservative-liberal lines, reversed the lower court and approved a South Carolina congressional map that the district court previously found was an unconstitutional dilution of Black voting power. The case is…Read more11 hours ago · 849 likes · 158 comments · Joyce Vance‘
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/05/wages-outpacing-inflation
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/01/27/gdp-2021-q4-economy/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll-economy-recession-biden
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