Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 102
May 23, 2024
May 22, 2024
May 22, 2024
Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) called out his Republican colleagues on the floor of the House today for offering “stunts instead of solutions, extremism over bipartisanship.” It’s a shame, he said, because the Republicans’ narrow majority “could have given us a chance to work together in a bipartisan way.” Instead, Republicans have caved to their most extreme members, who have been “skipping their real jobs to take day trips up to New York to try to undermine Donald Trump's criminal trial.”
McGovern suggested that perhaps they were trying “to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he's been elected” and “is on trial for covering up hush money payments to a porn star for political gain not to mention three other criminal felony prosecutions.”
Representative Jerry Carl (R-AL), the temporary chair at the time, rebuked McGovern, who noted that the fact that the former president is in a court of law is the truth. Just last week, McGovern pointed out, a Republican member of the House was not admonished when he complained about “the former president of the United States being hauled into court day after day with a sham trial.”
Carl reminded McGovern that members “must avoid personalities in debates.”
McGovern replied: “[A]t some point, it's time for this body to recognize that there is no precedent for this situation. We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we're being prevented from even acknowledging it. These are not alternative facts. These are real facts. A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. He's also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He's also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court. And yet, in this Republican-controlled house, it's okay to talk about the trial, but you have to call it a sham.”
Representative Erin Houchin (R-IN) demanded McGovern’s words be stricken from the record. The chair agreed to do so, saying that “it is a breach of order to refer to the candidate in terms personally offensive, whether by actually accusing or merely insulting.” Republicans banned McGovern from speaking on the floor for the rest of the day. McGovern observed: “You can only talk about the trial on the House Floor if you're using it to defend Donald Trump.”
It was curious timing for extremists to silence a Massachusetts lawmaker.
In 1836, Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a resolution to table, or put aside without action or discussion, all petitions relating to slavery. Repeatedly thereafter, former president John Quincy Adams, now representing Massachusetts in the House, rose to read a petition and was silenced. But the First Amendment protects the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—King George III had pointedly rejected the colonists’ 1775 Olive Branch Petition trying to avoid war, and the framers of the new government wanted to be clear that people had a right to be heard—and people in the North increasingly understood the silencing of those who were determined to stop debate over slavery as an attack on their constitutional rights.
The House got rid of the “gag rule” in 1844, but just twelve years later, on May 22, 1856—exactly 168 years ago today—South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner criticized southern enslavers, particularly Brooks’s relative South Carolina senator Andrew Butler.
The gist of Sumner’s speech was that a small minority of men were trying to impose their will on the majority of the American people by forcing enslavement on the territory of Kansas, much as enslavers like Butler forced themselves on the women they enslaved. Sumner’s speech was insulting, but beating him into a welter of blood while he sat at his Senate desk for representing his constituents suggested that enslavers would tolerate no dissent.
Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Julie Tate tonight broke the story in the New York Times that the upside-down U.S. flag associated with the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only anti-American flag Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito displayed. In at least July and September 2023, over his beach house in New Jersey there flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag like the one carried by January 6 rioters. This banner is also known as the “Pine Tree flag,” but it is not the same one currently under consideration to become Maine’s state flag.
This flag represents the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Ishaan Jhaveri of Columbia University’s Tow Center in the Graduate School of Journalism explained in 2021, in the days of the American Revolution, the flag “was meant to symbolize the right of armed revolution in the face of tyranny.”
But in 2013 the flag was the symbol of a group working to put Christians into public office to create a government based on their ideology. In 2015, those trying to stop the Supreme Court from legalizing gay marriage flew the flag; in 2016, supporters of the militias that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge did so, too. In 2017 the flag was behind Trump when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and in 2020, those opposed to Covid shutdowns carried it.
More recently, the January 6 rioters carried it, and so have neo-Nazis. It is the same flag that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) displays outside of his congressional office. Scholar of religion Bradley Onishi noted: “It’s a flag symbolizing Christian revolution. It’s used by extremists.”
These extremists appear to have turned to Trump, who is, as McGovern pointed out, facing 88 felony counts and is currently on trial for paying off a sex partner in order to prevent voters from hearing about their encounter and then violating the law to hide the payments, because they believe he will crash through the laws and bureaucracy that are designed to protect the democratic institutions that would stop them from seizing power.
And now it turns out that a flag representing 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 has been flying over the home of Justice Alito, who is supposed to be defending the United States Constitution impartially. Alito wrote the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Election columnist Laura Bassett of The Cut wrote: “The [A]lito flag story does not teach me anything new about his politics but it does reveal how confident he is that nobody can do anything about him.”
There is indeed a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom. Lori Rozsa of the Washington Post today noted that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is rewriting the history of the summer of 1964, made famous as Black and white organizers fanned out in Mississippi to register Black Americans to vote, by launching his own, new “Freedom Summer.” From May 27 through September 2, bridges in the state are prohibited from displaying rainbow colors for Pride Month in June, orange for National Gun Awareness Month, or yellow for Women’s Equality Day. The only colors they can display are red, white, and blue.
“Thanks to the leadership of Gov[ernor] Ron DeSantis,” Florida Department of Transportation secretary Jared Perdue wrote on X, “Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”
—
Notes:
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/treasures_of_congress/text/page10_text.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/us/justice-alito-flag-appeal-to-heaven.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/samuel-alito-flag
https://www2.cbn.com/news/us/it-aint-over-christians-appeal-heaven
https://www.c-span.org/video/?535829-2/house-session
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/21/florida-bridges-rainbow-lights-pride/
(X):
jamiedupree/status/1793338056516268359
RepMcGovern/status/1793343445924303246
RepMcGovern/status/1793344405031768245
jimsciutto/status/1793306858133848490
TaylorMatthewD/status/1770931922123854237
BradleyOnishi/status/1793388033569591391
May 21, 2024*
Trump’s lawyers rested their defense of the former president today, putting an end to the testimony we will hear in the case. Trump did not testify.
Trump's refusal to take the stand encapsulates the MAGA approach to politics. Since the 2020 presidential election, he and his surrogates have made repeated accusations and statements about how the system is rigged against them and alleged there is evidence that proves them right.
Crucially, they make those arguments only in front of television cameras or on podcasts and radio. They refuse to make them under oath in a court of law, where there are penalties for lying.
After the 2020 presidential election, for example, lawyer Sidney Powell insisted to media outlets that voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden. When Dominion Voting Systems sued her for defamation, her lawyers defended her by saying: “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” “[R]easonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process,” they said.
Similarly, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani insisted that Georgia election officials Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye (Shaye) Moss were changing votes from Trump to Biden. When they sued him for defamation, he conceded that “to the extent the statements were statements of fact…, such…statements were false.” When a jury awarded Freeman and Moss more than $148 million in damages, Giuliani filed for bankruptcy and continued to defame them.
Freeman and Moss sued him again, asking a court to stop him. Today, in a settlement in bankruptcy court, Giuliani "agreed to never again accuse either [Ruby] Freeman or [Shaye] Moss of engaging in any wrongdoing in connection with the 2020 election,” according to the women’s lawyers.
Like his colleagues who advanced lies to shape a narrative, Trump insisted that he would testify in his own defense. “I’m testifying,” he said before the trial. “I tell the truth, I mean, all I can do is tell the truth. And the truth is that there is no case.”
Then he tried to weasel out of that promise by saying the gag order put in place to stop him from attacking witnesses or members of the court and their families prevented him from testifying. “I’m not allowed to testify, because this judge, who’s totally conflicted, has me under an unconstitutional gag order,” he told reporters. Judge Juan Merchan corrected him, clarifying that Trump had the “absolute” right to testify and that the gag order “does not prohibit you from taking the stand and it does not limit or minimize what you can say.”
Nonetheless, true to form, Trump declined to testify despite all his protestations. Instead, he has argued his case in front of the television cameras. “I had nothing to do with it,” he said yesterday. “A bookkeeper put it down as a legal expense. This is why I’m here, because we called it a legal expense, a payment to a lawyer.”
Dan Froomkin of Press Watch noted that juries cannot consider in any manner the fact that a defendant doesn’t testify. “But the court of public opinion is under no such obligation,” he wrote. “And, notably, it is the court of public opinion that is voting in November.”
The court of public opinion weighed in on the man who pioneered the practice of telling repeated lies to the cameras and then moving onto the next lie before journalists can fact-check the first. That man was Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI), who as a mediocre freshman senator in 1950, during the Cold War, needed an issue for reelection. On February 12, 1950, at a meeting gathered to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed there were 205 members of the Communist Party working in Democratic president Harry S. Truman’s State Department.
By the next day, the number had dropped to 57, and the numbers bounced around after that, but it didn’t really matter. McCarthy insisted that Truman was protecting Communists, and he ramped up his claims that there were Communists in government after voters put Republican Dwight Eisenhower into office. McCarthy’s investigation of the State Department enabled him to bully witnesses, spread innuendo, and destroy careers.
McCarthy loved attention and headlines. He kept them by concocting ever grander lies. His hearings produced little evidence of Communists in government, but newspapers found they had to reprint his false accusations—they were news, after all—and by the time they could issue corrections, the storyline had moved on.
Finally, in fall 1953, McCarthy accused Eisenhower’s beloved U.S. Army of harboring “subversives.” In early 1954 the Army turned the tables, charging that McCarthy had pressured army officers to give a friend favorable treatment. This time, unlike McCarthy’s congressional investigations, which were behind closed doors and spread to the media on McCarthy’s terms, the Army-McCarthy hearings were televised.
The chief counsel for the Army, Joseph Nye Welch, repeatedly demanded that McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn provide to the U.S. Attorney General the names of the 130 “subversives” they claimed were in defense plants. Unable to do so, McCarthy pivoted to accusing one of Welch’s young associates of being a Communist.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch asked. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Up to 20 million people watched on their televisions as McCarthy was finally facing real lawyers and oaths in a congressional hearing about his accusations that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. Army. And when they saw him for what he was—a vicious, lying bully—most of them turned against him. His popularity plummeted, reporters ignored him, and the Senate “condemned” him in December 1954. When he died two and a half years later, Democrat William Proxmire, who won his seat, told voters that McCarthy was “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”
But McCarthy’s serial lying had shown how to dominate politics with an unceasing string of lies.
There is a direct line from McCarthy to Trump in the person of Roy Cohn, who became a New York power broker after his years with McCarthy, helped the Trump Organization when the federal government sued it for racial discrimination, and mentored Trump as he rose to fame in New York. That relationship is chronicled in the new biopic about Trump, The Apprentice, now debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. Trump’s campaign spokesperson said that the Trump campaign will be filing a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
There is perhaps even a more direct line from McCarthy to Trump today than the one Cohn provides. After the trial today, Trump noted that the Department of Justice had “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!” In an email with a subject line “They were authorized to shoot me—I nearly escaped death,” the Trump campaign said: “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger…. But here’s the one thing they don’t know: WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) exaggerated the story further: “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres[ident] Trump and gave the green light…. What are Republicans going to do about it?”
The truth, as former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted, is that there was nothing special about the order for Trump’s search warrant. “[E]very FBI operations order contains a reminder of FBI deadly force policy. Even for a search warrant. Deadly force is always authorized if the required threat presents itself,” Figliuzzi wrote.
MAGA lies have become part of the Russian state narrative. Following the 2020 presidential election, the Fox News Channel had to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems after its personalities repeated MAGA lies on air. Less than a week later, popular host Tucker Carlson, who pushed those lies, left the channel and launched his own show on X. Today, news broke that Russian TV has been dubbing Carlson’s show into Russian and rebroadcasting it on state TV.
*Edited on the morning of May 22 to correct the date to May 21. Sorry about that.
—
Notes:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23887430-us-district-court-for-the-district-of-columbia
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/freeman-moss-giuliani-verdict/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/21/giuliani-georgia-defamation-agreement/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/18/giuliani-defamation-lawsuit-georgia/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/politics/fact-check-trump-testify-hush-money-trial/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-apprentice-cannes-83958ff061a475a203424e8b9916ada1
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-news-media-tucker-carlson-part-ways-2023-04-24/
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4677767-tucker-carlson-russian-tv-without-permission/
https://newrepublic.com/post/181782/tucker-carlson-show-russian-tv-kremlin-stooge
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/roy-cohn-donald-trump-trial-b2548168.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/this-day-in-politics-april-20-1966-117125
X:
RonFilipkowski/status/1793041566589653491
RpsAgainstTrump/status/1792937695020208221
simonateba/status/1792574224655069521
FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1793052687900049735
MattGertz/status/1793057217467302175
May 22, 2024
Trump’s lawyers rested their defense of the former president today, putting an end to the testimony we will hear in the case. Trump did not testify.
Trump's refusal to take the stand encapsulates the MAGA approach to politics. Since the 2020 presidential election, he and his surrogates have made repeated accusations and statements about how the system is rigged against them and alleged there is evidence that proves them right.
Crucially, they make those arguments only in front of television cameras or on podcasts and radio. They refuse to make them under oath in a court of law, where there are penalties for lying.
After the 2020 presidential election, for example, lawyer Sidney Powell insisted to media outlets that voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden. When Dominion Voting Systems sued her for defamation, her lawyers defended her by saying: “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” “[R]easonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process,” they said.
Similarly, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani insisted that Georgia election officials Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye (Shaye) Moss were changing votes from Trump to Biden. When they sued him for defamation, he conceded that “to the extent the statements were statements of fact…, such…statements were false.” When a jury awarded Freeman and Moss more than $148 million in damages, Giuliani filed for bankruptcy and continued to defame them.
Freeman and Moss sued him again, asking a court to stop him. Today, in a settlement in bankruptcy court, Giuliani "agreed to never again accuse either [Ruby] Freeman or [Shaye] Moss of engaging in any wrongdoing in connection with the 2020 election,” according to the women’s lawyers.
Like his colleagues who advanced lies to shape a narrative, Trump insisted that he would testify in his own defense. “I’m testifying,” he said before the trial. “I tell the truth, I mean, all I can do is tell the truth. And the truth is that there is no case.”
Then he tried to weasel out of that promise by saying the gag order put in place to stop him from attacking witnesses or members of the court and their families prevented him from testifying. “I’m not allowed to testify, because this judge, who’s totally conflicted, has me under an unconstitutional gag order,” he told reporters. Judge Juan Merchan corrected him, clarifying that Trump had the “absolute” right to testify and that the gag order “does not prohibit you from taking the stand and it does not limit or minimize what you can say.”
Nonetheless, true to form, Trump declined to testify despite all his protestations. Instead, he has argued his case in front of the television cameras. “I had nothing to do with it,” he said yesterday. “A bookkeeper put it down as a legal expense. This is why I’m here, because we called it a legal expense, a payment to a lawyer.”
Dan Froomkin of Press Watch noted that juries cannot consider in any manner the fact that a defendant doesn’t testify. “But the court of public opinion is under no such obligation,” he wrote. “And, notably, it is the court of public opinion that is voting in November.”
The court of public opinion weighed in on the man who pioneered the practice of telling repeated lies to the cameras and then moving onto the next lie before journalists can fact-check the first. That man was Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI), who as a mediocre freshman senator in 1950, during the Cold War, needed an issue for reelection. On February 12, 1950, at a meeting gathered to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed there were 205 members of the Communist Party working in Democratic president Harry S. Truman’s State Department.
By the next day, the number had dropped to 57, and the numbers bounced around after that, but it didn’t really matter. McCarthy insisted that Truman was protecting Communists, and he ramped up his claims that there were Communists in government after voters put Republican Dwight Eisenhower into office. McCarthy’s investigation of the State Department enabled him to bully witnesses, spread innuendo, and destroy careers.
McCarthy loved attention and headlines. He kept them by concocting ever grander lies. His hearings produced little evidence of Communists in government, but newspapers found they had to reprint his false accusations—they were news, after all—and by the time they could issue corrections, the storyline had moved on.
Finally, in fall 1953, McCarthy accused Eisenhower’s beloved U.S. Army of harboring “subversives.” In early 1954 the Army turned the tables, charging that McCarthy had pressured army officers to give a friend favorable treatment. This time, unlike McCarthy’s congressional investigations, which were behind closed doors and spread to the media on McCarthy’s terms, the Army-McCarthy hearings were televised.
The chief counsel for the Army, Joseph Nye Welch, repeatedly demanded that McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn provide to the U.S. Attorney General the names of the 130 “subversives” they claimed were in defense plants. Unable to do so, McCarthy pivoted to accusing one of Welch’s young associates of being a Communist.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch asked. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Up to 20 million people watched on their televisions as McCarthy was finally facing real lawyers and oaths in a congressional hearing about his accusations that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. Army. And when they saw him for what he was—a vicious, lying bully—most of them turned against him. His popularity plummeted, reporters ignored him, and the Senate “condemned” him in December 1954. When he died two and a half years later, Democrat William Proxmire, who won his seat, told voters that McCarthy was “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”
But McCarthy’s serial lying had shown how to dominate politics with an unceasing string of lies.
There is a direct line from McCarthy to Trump in the person of Roy Cohn, who became a New York power broker after his years with McCarthy, helped the Trump Organization when the federal government sued it for racial discrimination, and mentored Trump as he rose to fame in New York. That relationship is chronicled in the new biopic about Trump, The Apprentice, now debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. Trump campaign spokesperson said that the Trump campaign will be filing a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
There is perhaps even a more direct line from McCarthy to Trump today than the one Cohn provides. After the trial today, Trump noted that the Department of Justice had “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!” In an email with a subject line “They were authorized to shoot me—I nearly escaped death,” the Trump campaign said: “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger…. But here’s the one thing they don’t know: WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) exaggerated the story further: “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres[ident] Trump and gave the green light…. What are Republicans going to do about it?”
The truth, as former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted, is that there was nothing special about the order for Trump’s search warrant. “[E]very FBI operations order contains a reminder of FBI deadly force policy. Even for a search warrant. Deadly force is always authorized if the required threat presents itself,” Figliuzzi wrote.
MAGA lies have become part of the Russian state narrative. Following the 2020 presidential election, the Fox News Channel had to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems after its personalities repeated MAGA lies on air. Less than a week later, popular host Tucker Carlson, who pushed those lies, left the channel and launched his own show on X. Today, news broke that Russian TV has been dubbing Carlson’s show into Russian and rebroadcasting it on state TV.
—
Notes:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23887430-us-district-court-for-the-district-of-columbia
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/freeman-moss-giuliani-verdict/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/21/giuliani-georgia-defamation-agreement/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/18/giuliani-defamation-lawsuit-georgia/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/politics/fact-check-trump-testify-hush-money-trial/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-apprentice-cannes-83958ff061a475a203424e8b9916ada1
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fox-news-media-tucker-carlson-part-ways-2023-04-24/
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4677767-tucker-carlson-russian-tv-without-permission/
https://newrepublic.com/post/181782/tucker-carlson-show-russian-tv-kremlin-stooge
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/roy-cohn-donald-trump-trial-b2548168.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/this-day-in-politics-april-20-1966-117125
X:
RonFilipkowski/status/1793041566589653491
RpsAgainstTrump/status/1792937695020208221
simonateba/status/1792574224655069521
FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1793052687900049735
MattGertz/status/1793057217467302175
May 21, 2024
May 20, 2024
There is a curious dynamic at work in politics these days. Trump does not appear to be trying to court voters to his standard. If he were, he would be reaching out to Nikki Haley voters and trying to moderate his stances. Instead, he is rejecting her voters and doubling down on extreme positions. Rather than trying to appeal to swing voters, he seems to be trying to whip up his right-wing base to engage in violence on his behalf.
In Minnesota on Friday, Trump echoed fascists when he told supporters, "No matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget this is not a nation that belongs to them. This is a nation that totally belongs to you. It belongs to you. This is your home, this is your heritage."
Saturday, at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association in Dallas, Texas, Trump floated the idea that he could throw out the constitutional amendment limiting a president to two terms. “You know, FDR 16 years—almost 16 years—he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” he asked the crowd. Some yelled, “Three!”
In the same speech, Trump told attendees that the Second Amendment “is very much on the ballot” in November, and he urged gun owners to vote and to “be rebellious.” Then he told the crowd that Biden’s actions were such that if he “were a Republican, he would have been given the electric chair, they would have brought back the death penalty.”
This evening, Trump’s Instagram account posted a video of what a newspaper would look like after a 2024 MAGA win. Under the headline “WHAT’S NEXT FOR AMERICA?” were the words “INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED DRIVEN BY THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH,” a clear reference to fascism and German dictator Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
It is not clear to me how anyone can any longer deny that Trump is promising to destroy our democracy and usher in authoritarianism.
But it is also not clear that he is still a figure that any but the extremes of his base will follow to that end. Hence his emphasis on turning them to violence.
His lies have become increasingly outrageous. On Friday he told a crowd in Minnesota that he won the state by “a landslide” in 2020 even though he actually lost it by more than 7 points. At the NRA annual meeting, Trump claimed that his former physician told him he is “healthier” and “a better physical specimen” than the famously athletic former president Barack Obama. At that same event he boasted that he won 31 club golf championships; the day before, he boasted that he won 29.
Significantly, he continues to insist that the area around the courtroom is like “Fort Knox.” “There are more police than I’ve ever seen anywhere because they don’t want to have anybody come down,” he said today, “There’s not a civilian within three blocks of the courthouse.” But this is, quite simply, a lie. Virtually no one has turned out to support him. As conservative lawyer George Conway noted today, “There is virtually complete freedom of movement around that courthouse.”
Social media contributor Eddie Smith, who filmed the handful of Trump protesters in New York today, put it more colorfully. After noting that “MAGA’s not repping in New York,” he added: “Wait a minute! You guys hear that? There is a mouse pissing on a ball of cotton in China. That’s how quiet it is out here.”
Republican lawmakers are stepping in where Trump’s base followers are not. Republicans attacked as unfit for office 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server. They tried to impeach current president Biden on unfounded accusations that he took bribes from foreign countries. Now they find themselves forced to defend a man who is currently the defendant in a criminal trial that is showing that his associates acted like a criminal gang. As Tom Nichols put it today in The Atlantic, that defense is partly because they are afraid of their own voters.
Nichols also called out those “now circling Trump like the cold fragments of a destroyed planet” who “resent the people who stuck to their principles.” Those MAGA Republicans lawmakers are, like Trump, trying to gin up anger with lies. Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who went to Trump’s Manhattan trial to support him on Thursday, told Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel and later posted on social media that “[t]hey’re trying to keep cameras out of the courtroom so that the American people don’t see what’s happening.” Former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski noted in response that “New York has banned cameras in courtrooms since June 30, 1997.”
The most important of their lies, though, is that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that to protect the 2024 election, it is imperative to police the election. This is the same tactic Trump used in 2020, claiming exactly four years ago that “they send in thousands and thousands of fake ballots.”
Those lies have resulted in a huge increase in threats against those whom MAGA perceives as an enemy. Danny Hakim, Ken Bensinger, and Eileen Sullivan reported in the New York Times yesterday that last year, threats against federal judges increased 150% over 2019: 450 federal judges were targeted. Since 2018, threats to members of Congress have increased by 50%, with more than 8,000 such threats last year. More than 80% of local officials also say they have been threatened or harassed.
MAGA lawmakers refuse to say they will accept the results of the 2024 election. On Saturday, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson refused to commit to that fundamental tenet of our democracy. On Meet the Press on Sunday, Florida senator Marco Rubio also declined to say he would accept the election results. Those vying for the Republican vice presidential nomination, including North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and South Carolina senator Tim Scott, have refused to say they would accept the results.
Their tactics are working among the Republican base. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this weekend showed that only 47% of Arizona Republicans say they will accept the results of the 2024 election no matter who wins. An equal number—47%—say they will challenge the results if the other side wins. That result is not symmetrical with the Democrats: 82% of them say they will accept the results, while only 14% say they will challenge the results if their opponents win.
But people are pushing back against the MAGA narrative. On May 15 the Texas Tribune and ProPublica published a story by Jeremy Schwartz about Courtney Gore, a woman who ran for a Texas school board to combat pornography and critical race theory in the schools, only to find there wasn’t any. When she told the public, her former colleagues turned on her. “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”
Steve MacLaughlin, a meteorologist for NBC 6 News in Miami, reported on a new law Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last week that will remove references to climate change from state law. “On Thursday, we reported on NBC 6 News that the government of Florida was beginning to roll back really important climate change legislation and really important climate change language in spite of the fact that the state of Florida, over the last couple of years, has seen record heat, record flooding, record rain, record insurance rates, and the corals are dying all around the state,” MacLaughlin said. “The entire world is looking to Florida to lead in climate change, and our government is saying that climate change is no longer the priority it once was. Please keep in mind, the most powerful climate change solution is the one you already have in the palm of your hands: the right to vote. And we will never tell you who to vote for, but we will tell you this: We implore you to please do your research and know that there are candidates that believe in climate change and that there are solutions, and there are candidates that don’t.”
On May 17, former lieutenant governor of Georgia Geoffrey Duncan noted on Amanpour & Company that Trump had done less for rural voters than any other president in modern history. “At the end of the day,” he said, “we just cannot get into the business in America of electing dishonest human beings to represent us…. The world’s watching us. I’m hoping we get this right.”
Tonight, Sarah Matthews, who was deputy press secretary for the Trump administration, wrote: “Trump’s continued use of Nazi rhetoric is un-American and despicable. Yet too many Americans are brushing off the glaring red flags about what could happen if he returns to the White House. When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/19/trump-nra-convention-dallas
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-threat-biden/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-nra-is-weaker-than-ever-how-much-does-that-matter.html
https://time.com/6979795/trump-receives-nra-endorsement-urges-gun-owners-vote/
https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-trump-minnesota-4f7ebfe7a2e1949d38a7c9894616a985
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/us/politics/political-violence.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/05/the-maga-memory-hole/678435/
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/15/texas-granbury-isd-school-board-courtney-gore/
X:
BidenHQ/status/1791469492440072359
RonFilipkowski/status/1792195770374099083
samstein/status/1792188951920361645
HueyRey/status/1792635408506912824
mkraju/status/1792515853314904293
gtconway3d/status/1792548740525363276
eddsmitty/status/1792573721615434037
atrupar/status/1792626209118884346
BidensWins/status/1791609511435714795
BidenHQ/status/1792209690664845569
BidenHQ/status/1791946911340999113
CarlosGSmith/status/1792207611733172238
Tim_Walz/status/1791620309105119419
BidenHQ/status/1791949552469082444
AccountableGOP/status/1791661408641298808
SarahAMatthews1/status/1792760772193374274
May 20, 2024
May 19, 2024
May 19, 2024
Delivering the commencement address to the graduating seniors at Morehouse College today, President Joe Biden addressed the nation. After thanking the mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and all the people who helped the graduates get to the chairs in front of the stage, Biden recalled Morehouse’s history. The school was founded in 1867 by civil rights leader Reverend William Jefferson White with the help of two other Baptist ministers, the Reverend Richard C. Coulter and the Reverend Edmund Turney, to educate formerly enslaved men. They believed “education would be the great equalizer from slavery to freedom,” Biden said, and they created an institution that would make the term “Morehouse man” continue to stand as a symbol of excellence 157 years later.
Then Biden turned to a speech that centered on faith. Churches talk a lot about Jesus being buried on Friday and rising from the dead on Sunday, he said, “but we don’t talk enough about Saturday, when… his disciples felt all hope was lost. In our lives and the lives of the nation, we have those Saturdays—to bear witness the day before glory, seeing people’s pain and not looking away. But what work is done on Saturday to move pain to purpose? How can faith get a man, get a nation through what was to come?”
It’s a truism that anything that happens before we are born is equidistant from our personal experience, mixing the recent past and the ancient past together in a similar vaguely imagined “before” time. Most of today’s college graduates were not born until about 2002 and likely did not pay a great deal of attention to politics until about five years ago. Biden took the opportunity to explain to them what it meant to live through the 1960s.
He noted that he was the first in his family to graduate from college, paid for with loans. He fell in love, got a law degree, got married and took a job at a “fancy law firm.”
But his world changed when an assassin murdered the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King—a Morehouse man—and the segregated city of Wilmington, Delaware, erupted with fires, looting, fights, and occasional gunfire. For nine months, the National Guard patrolled the city in combat gear, “the longest stretch in any American city since the Civil War,” Biden recalled.
“Dr. King’s legacy had a profound impact on me and my generation, whether you’re Black or white,” Biden explained. He left the law firm to become first a public defender and then a county councilman, “working to change our state’s politics to embrace the cause of civil rights.”
The Democratic Party had historically championed white supremacy, but that alignment was in the process of changing as Democrats had swung behind civil rights and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Biden and his cohort hoped to turn the Delaware Democratic Party toward the new focus on civil rights, he said. In 1972, Biden ran for the Senate and won…barely, in a state Republican president Richard Nixon won with 60% of the vote.
Biden recalled how, newly elected and hiring staff in Washington, D.C., he got the call telling him that his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident and that his two sons were gravely injured. The pain of that day hit again 43 years later, he said, when his son Beau died of cancer after living for a year next to a burn pit in Iraq. And he talked of meeting First Lady Jill Biden, “who healed the family in all the broken places. Our family became my redemption,” he said.
His focus on family and community offered a strong contrast to the Republican emphasis on individualism. “On this walk of life...you come to understand that we don’t know where or what fate will bring you or when,” Biden said. “But we also know we don’t walk alone. When you’ve been a beneficiary of the compassion of your family, your friends, even strangers, you know how much the compassion matters,” he said. “I’ve learned there is no easy optimism, but by faith—by faith, we can find redemption.”
For the graduates, Biden noted, four years ago “felt like one of those Saturdays. The pandemic robbed you of so much. Some of you lost loved ones—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, who…aren’t able to be here to celebrate with you today…. You missed your high school graduation. You started college just as George Floyd was murdered and there was a reckoning on race.
“It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you.
“What is democracy if Black men are being killed in the street?
“What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave[s]…Black communities behind?
“What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?
“And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a Black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”
The crowd applauded.
Biden explained that across the Oval Office from his seat behind the Resolute Desk are busts of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy, challenging Biden: “Are we living up to what we say we are as a nation, to end racism and poverty, to deliver jobs and justice, to restore our leadership in the world?” He wears a rosary on his wrist made of Beau’s rosary as a reminder that faith asks us “to hold on to hope, to move heaven and earth to make better days.”
“[T]hat’s my commitment to you,” he said. “[T]o show you democracy, democracy, democracy is still the way.”
Biden pledged to “call out the poison of white supremacy” and noted that he “stood up…with George Floyd’s family to help create a country where you don’t need to have that talk with your son or grandson as they get pulled over.” The administration is investing in Black communities and reconnecting neighborhoods cut apart by highways decades ago. It has reduced Black child poverty to the lowest rate in history. It is removing lead pipes across the nation to provide clean drinking water to everyone, and investing in high-speed internet to bring all households into the modern era.
The administration is creating opportunities, Biden said, bringing “good-paying jobs…; capital to start small businesses and loans to buy homes; health insurance, [prescription] drugs, housing that’s more affordable and accessible.” Biden reminded the audience that he had joined workers on a picket line. To applause, he noted that when the Supreme Court blocked his attempt to relieve student debt, he found two other ways to do it. He noted the administration’s historic investment in historically black colleges and universities.
“We’re opening doors so you can walk into a life of generational wealth, to be providers and leaders for your families and communities. Today, record numbers of Black Americans have jobs, health insurance, and more [wealth] than ever.”
Then Biden directly addressed the student protests over the Israeli government’s strikes on Gaza. At Morehouse today, one graduate stood with his back to Biden and his fist raised during the president’s speech, and the class valedictorian, DeAngelo Jeremiah Fletcher, who spoke before the president, wore a picture of a Palestinian flag on his mortarboard and called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, at which Biden applauded.
“In a democracy, we debate and dissent about America’s role in the world,” Biden said. “I want to say this very clearly. I support peaceful, nonviolent protest. Your voices should be heard, and I promise you I hear them.”
“What’s happening in Gaza…is heartbreaking,” he said, with “[i]nnocent Palestinians caught in the middle” of a fight between Hamas and Israel. He reminded them that he has called “for an immediate ceasefire…to stop the fighting [and] bring the hostages home.” His administration has been working for a deal, as well as to get more aid into Gaza and to rebuild it. Crucially, he added, there is more at stake than “just one ceasefire.” He wants “to build a lasting, durable peace. Because the question is…: What after? What after Hamas? What happens then? What happens in Gaza? What rights do the Palestinian people have?” To applause, he said, “I’m working to make sure we finally get a two-state solution—the only solution—for two people to live in peace, security, and dignity.”
“This is one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world,” he said. “I know it angered and frustrates many of you, including my family. But most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well. Leadership is about fighting through the most intractable problems. It’s about challenging anger, frustration, and heartbreak to find a solution. It’s about doing what you believe is right, even when it’s hard and lonely. You’re all future leaders, every one of you graduating today…. You’ll face complicated, tough moments. In these moments, you’ll listen to others, but you’ll have to decide, guided by knowledge, conviction, principle, and your own moral compass.”
Turning back to the United States, Biden urged the graduates to examine “what happens to you and your family when old ghosts in new garments seize power, extremists come for the freedoms you thought belonged to you and everyone.” He noted attacks on equality in America, and that extremist forces were peddling “a fiction, a caricature [of] what being a man is about—tough talk, abusing power, bigotry. Their idea of being a man is toxic.”
“But that’s not you,” he continued. “It’s not us. You all know and demonstrate what it really means to be a man. Being a man is about the strength of respect and dignity. It’s about showing up because it’s too late if you have to ask. It’s about giving hate no safe harbor and leaving no one behind and defending freedoms. It’s about standing up to the abuse of power, whether physical, economic, or psychological.” To applause, he added: “It’s about knowing faith without works is dead.”
“The strength and wisdom of faith endures,” Biden said. “And I hope—my hope for you is—my challenge to you is that you still keep the faith so long as you can.”
“Together, we’re capable of building a democracy worthy of our dreams…a bigger, brighter future that proves the American Dream is big enough for everyone to succeed.”
“Class of 2024, four years ago, it felt probably like Saturday,” Biden concluded. “Four years later, you made it to Sunday, to commencement, to the beginning. And with faith and determination, you can push the sun above the horizon once more….”
“God bless you all,” he said. “We’re expecting a lot from you.”
—
Notes:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/morehouse-graduation-thanks-god-woke-class-2024-2024-05-19/
May 18, 2024
May 18, 2024
Spent a lovely day today with family and let the world turn without me.
Handing tonight’s letter over to my friend Peter with a photograph of his heralding the summer that is just over the horizon.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Image, “Moon, Hardwood,” by Peter Ralston]
—
Notes:
You can find Peter and his wife Terri at www.ralstongallery.com or at the gallery itself in Rockport, Maine.
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1300 followers
