Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 111
April 5, 2024
April 5, 2024
Today offered yet more evidence that Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ supply-side economics in favor of investing in ordinary Americans is paying off with high growth, low unemployment, and strong wages.
Today’s jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor for the month of March showed higher job growth than analysts anticipated. Instead of the 214,000 jobs expected, the U.S. added 303,000. The government also revised its estimate of job growth in January and February upward by a combined number of 22,000. President Joe Biden noted that this report meant that the administration had created more than 15 million jobs since he took office.
The unemployment rate was also good, dropping slightly to 3.8% in March. According to economist Steven Rattner of Morning Joe, the United States has now had 26 consecutive months—more than two years—of unemployment under 4%, the longest stretch of unemployment that low since the late 1960s.
Rattner pointed out that immigrants have helped to push U.S. growth since the pandemic by adding millions of new workers to the labor market. As native-born workers have aged into retirement, immigrants have taken their places and “been essential to America’s post-COVID labor market recovery.”
Heather Long of the Washington Post added that wage growth has been 4.1% in the past year, which is well above the 3.2% inflation rate.
“My plan is growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all Americans, and giving the middle class a fair shot,” Biden said in response to the new jobs report. That system, which resurrects the economy the United States enjoyed between 1933 and 1981, has been a roaring success.
Biden was in Baltimore, Maryland, today, where he flew over the remains of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, spoke with the response teams there, and met with the families of those who died when the bridge fell. Apparently trying to demonstrate that government can be both efficient and effective, the administration has emphasized speed and competence in its response to the bridge collapse of March 26, 2024.
Kayla Tausche of CNN reported today that the U.S. Coast Guard was onsite within minutes of the collapse, and that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was working the phone as soon as he heard. He had spoken with Maryland governor Wes Moore, Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott, and White House chief of staff Jeff Zients by 5:00 a.m. Biden was briefed early that morning, before he began to reach out to state and local leaders.
Baltimore County executive Johnny Olszewski told Tausche: “[Biden] demonstrated a clear understanding of the importance of the port, had a real empathy for myself and all the individuals impacted…. And he was unequivocal that he was going to do whatever he can, legally and within his power to expedite a response.”
The collapse of the bridge not only affected traffic around Baltimore, but also shut the Port of Baltimore. For 13 years, that port has led the nation in carrying cars and light trucks, as well as tractors and cranes, handling more than 847,000 vehicles in 2023. In that same year, the port handled more than 444,000 passengers and $80 billion worth of foreign cargo. The damage to the port is of national significance.
Less than four hours after it received an official request for funding for repairs on March 29, the Department of Transportation authorized funds to begin to address immediate needs, which officials say is a record. The Army Corps of Engineers says it expects to restore a narrow navigation channel for use by the end of April and to have the port reopened fully by the end of May. Until then, the federal government is improving the infrastructure at nearby Sparrows Point to enable it to handle more ships.
But the Republican Party remains committed to the idea that the government must be kept small and that private enterprise must be privileged over public investments. Today, the far-right House Freedom Caucus announced that it would not consider funding the bridge repairs until foreign shipping companies had paid in all they owe (Biden has called for funding the bridge immediately rather than waiting for insurance funds, which will come much later).
They also say that they want the repairs to come out of money Congress has appropriated for other initiatives they dislike, that any new funds must be fully offset by other cuts, and that “burdensome regulations” such as labor agreements must be waived “to avoid all unnecessary delays and costs.”
They are also demanding that Biden reverse the administration’s “pause on approvals of liquified natural gas export terminals” before Congress will consider any funding for the bridge reconstruction. In January, under pressure from climate activists, Biden paused the construction of such terminals. Liquid natural gas is a valuable export, but it is also made up primarily of methane, a greenhouse gas significantly worse for the planet than carbon dioxide. Oil and gas interests are strongly in favor of developing the liquid natural gas industry while ignoring its effects on climate change.
One of the proposed plants affected by the pause would have been the largest in the U.S. It is planned for Louisiana, the home state of House speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson has already tried to tie funding for Ukraine to lifting the pause on liquid natural gas export terminals, and the White House refused. Now, apparently, extremist Republicans are trying the same gambit with repairs to the Francis Scott Key Bridge and access to one of the nation’s most important ports, although slowing repairs at that key juncture will directly affect many of their constituents.
Indeed, despite the solid demonstration that government support for ordinary Americans is the best way to build the economy, Republicans continue to maintain that the way to promote economic growth is to concentrate money among a few men at the top of the economic ladder. The idea is that those few people will invest their money more efficiently than the government can, and that the businesses they create will employ more and more workers. To that end, Republicans since 1981 have focused on tax cuts and deregulation in order to give those they see as job creators a free hand.
That system, so-called “supply-side economics,” has never actually worked, but it has become an article of faith for Republicans. It is a system that is popular with the very wealthy, and Biden called that out today in a video he recorded with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
In the video, the two men comment on a video clip in which former president Trump, speaking at a private event, promises wealthy donors another tax cut. Biden says: “That’s everything you need to know about Donald Trump. When he thinks the cameras aren’t on, he tells his rich friends, ‘We’re gonna give you tax cuts.’”
Sanders chimes in: “Can anybody in America imagine that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality—billionaires are doing phenomenally well—that he’s going to give them huge tax breaks? And then at the same time, he’s going to cut Social Security, Medicare, and programs that our kids need….”
“That makes me mad as hell, quite frankly,” Biden says. “There are 1,000 billionaires in…this country. They pay an average of 8.2% [in] federal taxes. So…we have a plan: Asking his good buddies to begin to pay their fair share.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/politics/joe-biden-baltimore-visit
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/politics/joe-biden-baltimore-visit
https://www.wsj.com/finance/baltimore-bridge-economic-impact-0514d05a
https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/04/04/goal-restore-access-port-baltimore-end-of-may/
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/02/why-bidens-pause-on-new-lng-export-terminals-is-a-bfd/
https://www.transportenvironment.org/challenges/ships/liquefied-natural-gas-lng/
Twitter (X):
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April 4, 2024
April 4, 2024
Seventy-five years ago today, on April 4, 1949, representatives from twelve countries in Europe and North America—Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States—signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. This defensive security alliance has been a key institution for world stability since World War II.
In the wake of that war, the U.S. and its allies recognized the crucial importance of peacetime alliances to deter future wars. To stop the spread of communism across war-torn Europe, the United States backed a massive financial investment into rebuilding Europe. President Harry S. Truman signed the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, into law on April 3, 1948.
Quickly, though, it appeared that economic recovery would not be enough to protect a democratic Europe. The expansion of Soviet-style communism prompted officials to consider a pact that would enlist the United States to stand behind the security of Western Europe. Crucially, though, they wanted it to stand outside the United Nations, where the Soviet Union could exercise veto power. The outcome was the NATO alliance.
NATO guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.
Over the years, the alliance has expanded to include 32 countries. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all former satellites of the USSR, joined NATO over the protests of Russia, which was falling under the control of oligarchs who opposed western democracy. More countries near Russia joined NATO in the 2000s, and Finland and Sweden have joined in the past year—Finland a year ago today, in fact.
When NATO formed, the main concern of the countries backing it was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.
In 1949, when he signed the treaty, President Truman called the pact a positive influence for peace. That peace was, first of all, among the nations signing the agreement. They were, he said, agreeing “to abide by the peaceful principles of the United Nations, to maintain friendly relations and economic cooperation with one another, to consult together whenever the territory or independence of any of them is threatened, and to come to the aid of any one of them who may be attacked.” If such an agreement had been in place “in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today,” he said, “I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two world wars.”
With NATO, Truman said, “we hope to create a shield against aggression and the fear of aggression—a bulwark which will permit us to get on with the real business of government and society, the business of achieving a fuller and happier life for all our citizens.”
NATO countries agreed to stand together to withstand aggression from outside the pact. Truman emphasized the difference between the NATO countries and the authoritarian system against which the alliance stood. The NATO countries could stand together without being identical. “There are different kinds of governmental and economic systems, just as there are different languages and different cultures. But these differences present no real obstacle to the voluntary association of free nations devoted to the common cause of peace,” he said. “[I]t is possible for nations to achieve unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit, in other respects, the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable.”
The experience of the United States “in creating one nation out of…the peoples of many lands” proved that this idea could work, Truman said. “This method of organizing diverse peoples and cultures is in direct contrast to the method of the police state, which attempts to achieve unity by imposing the same beliefs and the same rule of force on everyone.”
The NATO countries did not believe that war was inevitable, Truman said. “Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny. They can choose slavery or freedom—war or peace. I have no doubt which they will choose. The treaty we are signing here today is evidence of the path they will follow. If there is anything certain today, if there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.”
For many decades, the stability of NATO made it seem secure. When he was in office, though, former president Trump told aides he didn’t care about NATO, and he has vowed to take the U.S. out of the organization in a second term.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is also pressuring NATO. According to the Institute for the Study of War, on March 31, Russian prosecutor general Igor Krasnov said that Russia would continue to assert what it says is its right to enforce Russian laws “on officials of NATO and post-Soviet states for their actions taken within the territory of their own countries where Russian courts have no jurisdiction.” This effort contradicts international law, but the ISW assesses that the Kremlin is trying to deny the sovereignty of those states and that its attempts to enforce Russian laws on their territory “are part of Russian efforts to set informational conditions justifying possible Russian escalations against NATO states in the future.”
Today, President Joe Biden celebrated the success of NATO’s seventy-five years of history and noted that it is up to the current generation of Americans to protect the pact and to build on it. “We must remember that the sacred commitment we make to our Allies—to defend every inch of NATO territory—makes us safer too, and gives the United States a bulwark of security unrivaled by any other nation in the world. And like our predecessors, we must ask ourselves what can we do—what must we do—to create a more peaceful future.”
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Notes:
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/nato
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52044.htm
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-occasion-the-signing-the-north-atlantic-treaty
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-31-2024
April 3, 2024
April 3, 2024
The election of 2000 was back in the news this week, when Nate Cohn of the New York Times reminded readers of his newsletter, using a map by data strategist and consultant Matthew C. Isbell, that the unusual butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County that year siphoned off at least 2,000 votes intended for Democratic candidate Al Gore to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.
Those 2,000 votes were enough to decide the election, “all things being equal,” Cohn wrote. But of course, they weren’t equal: in 1998 a purge of the Florida voter rolls had disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters, making them ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected.
That ballot and that purge gave Republican candidate George W. Bush the electoral votes from Florida, putting him into the White House although he had lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes.
Revisiting the 2000 election reminds us that manipulating the vote through voter suppression or the mechanics of an election in even small ways can undermine the will of the people.
A poll out today from the Associated Press/NORC showed that the vast majority of Americans agree about the importance of the fundamental principles of our democracy. Ninety-eight percent of Americans think the right to vote is extremely important, very important, or somewhat important. Only 2% think it is “not too important.” The split was similar with regard to “the right of everyone to equal protection under the law”: 98% of those polled thought it was extremely, very, or somewhat important, while only 2% thought it was not too important.
Recent election results suggest that voters don’t support the extremism of the current Republican Party. In local elections in the St. Louis, Missouri, area on Tuesday, voters rejected all 13 right-wing candidates for school boards, and in Enid, Oklahoma, voters recalled a city council member who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and had ties to white supremacist groups.
Seemingly aware of the growing backlash to their policies, MAGA Republicans are backing away from them, at least in public. Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for making it harder to ban books after a few activists systematically challenged dozens of books in districts where they had no children in the schools—although he blamed teachers, administrators, and “the news media” for creating a “hoax.”
Today, lawyers for the state of Texas told a federal appeals court that state legislators might have gone “too far” with their immigration law that made it a state crime to enter Texas illegally and allowed state judges to order immigrants to be deported. (Mexico had flatly refused to accept deported immigrants from other countries under this new law.) Nonetheless, Arizona legislators have passed a similar bill—that Democratic governor Katie Hobbs refuses to sign into law—and are considering another measure that would allow landowners to threaten or shoot people who cross their property to get into the U.S.
Indeed, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party seem less inclined to moderate their stances than either to pollute popular opinion or to prevent their opponents from voting.
While Trump is hedging about his stance on abortion—after bragging repeatedly that he was the person responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade—MAGA Republicans have made their unpopular abortion stance even stronger.
Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported today that the hospital at the center of the decision by the Alabama state supreme court that embryos used for in vitro fertilization have the same rights and protections as children has ended its IVF services. And on Monday, Florida’s supreme court, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis packed with extremists, upheld a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and allowed a new six-week abortion ban—before most women know they’re pregnant—to go into effect in 30 days.
In the past, people seeking abortions had gravitated to Florida because its constitution upheld the right to privacy, which protected abortion. But now the Florida Supreme Court has decided the constitution does not protect the right to abortion. Caroline Kitchener explained in the Washington Post that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year accessed abortion services in Florida. This ban will make it nearly impossible to get an abortion in the American South.
Anya Cook, who in 2022 nearly died after she was denied an abortion under Florida’s 15-week ban, gave Kitchener a message for Florida women experiencing pregnancy complications: “Run,” she said. “Run, because you have no help here.”
Extremist Republicans have managed to put their policies into place not by winning a majority and passing laws through Congress, but by creating cases that they then take to sympathetic judges. This system, known as “judge shopping,” has so perverted lawmaking that on March 12 the Judicial Conference, the body that makes policy for federal courts, announced a new rule that any lawsuit seeking to overturn statewide or national policies would be randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges.
On March 29, the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas, where many such cases are filed, told Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not adhere to the new rules.
Rather than moderating their stances, extremist Republicans are doubling down on their attempt to create dirt on the president. With their impeachment effort against President Joe Biden in embarrassing ruins, House Republicans are casting around for another issue to hurt the Democrats before the 2024 election.
Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that in the last month, House Republican Committee chairs have sent almost 50 oversight requests to a variety of departments and agencies. Haberkorn noted that there is “significant political pressure on the party to produce results after months of promising it would uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors involving Biden.”
But it is Trump, not Biden, who is in the news for questionable behavior. In The Guardian today, Hugo Lowell reported that Trump’s social media company was kept afloat in 2022 “by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.”
There is more trouble for the social media company in the news today, as two of its investors pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading scheme involving the company’s stock. They admitted they had secret, inside information about the merger between Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition Corporation and had used that insider information to make profitable trades.
Meanwhile, Trump is suing Truth Social’s founders to force them out of leadership and make them give up their shares in the company. His is a countersuit to their lawsuit accusing him of trying to dilute the company’s stock.
Of more immediate concern for Trump, Judge Juan Merchan denied yet another attempt by Trump—his eighth, according to prosecutors—to delay his election interference trial. The trial is scheduled to begin April 15.
Finally, in an illustration of extremists aiming not to moderate their stances but to impose the will of the minority on the majority, Republicans are putting in place rules to make it easier for individuals to challenge voters, removing them from the voter rolls before the 2024 election.
Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted today that states and local governments have regular programs to keep voter registration accurate, while right-wing activists are operating on a different agenda. In one 70,000-person town in Michigan, a single activist challenged more than a thousand voters, Elias reported, and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, right-wing activists have already challenged 16,000 voters and intend to challenge another 10,000.
One group boasted that their system “can and will change elections in America forever.”
Rather like the election of 2000.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/upshot/florida-2000-gore-ballot.html
https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm
https://www.advocate.com/politics/school-board-elections-st-louis-conservatives-lose
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/politics/texas-sb4-immigration-5th-circuit
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/03/house-gop-impeachment-biden-00150266
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/02/florida-supreme-court-abortion-access/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/kacsmaryk-judge-shopping-ignore-schumer
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/03/trump-media-es-family-trust-2022-loans
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/business/trump-truth-social-insider-trading
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/trump-media-sued-over-dwac-merger-share-dilution.html
https://www.theoaklandpress.com/2024/03/18/voter-rolls-targeted-in-run-up-to-november-election/
April 2, 2024
April 2, 2024
Almost six months have passed since President Joe Biden asked Congress to appropriate money for Ukraine in a national security supplemental bill. At first, House Republicans said they would not pass such a bill without border security. Then, when a bipartisan group of senators actually produced a border security provision for the national security bill, they killed it, under orders from former president Trump.
In February the Senate passed the national security supplemental bill with aid for Ukraine without the border measures by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) cheered its passage, saying: “The national security bill passed by the Senate is of profound importance to America’s security.”
The measure would pass in the House by a bipartisan vote, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to take it up, acting in concert with Trump.
On March 24, on Washington Week, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum said: “Trump has decided that he doesn’t want money to go to Ukraine… It's really an extraordinary moment; we have an out-of-power ex-president who is in effect dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind.”
On Thursday, March 28, Beth Reinhard, Jon Swaine, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that Richard Grenell, an extremist who served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, has been traveling around the world to meet with far-right foreign leaders, “acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.”
Grenell, the authors say, is openly laying the groundwork for a president who will make common cause with authoritarian leaders and destroy partnerships with democratic allies. Trump has referred to Grenell as “my envoy,” and the Trump camp has suggested he is a frontrunner to become secretary of state if Trump is reelected in 2024.
Applebaum was right: it is extraordinary that we have a former president who is now out of power running his own foreign policy.
For most of U.S. history, there was an understanding that factionalism stopped at the water’s edge. Partisans might fight tooth and nail within the U.S., but they presented a united front to the rest of the world. That understanding was strong enough that it was not for nearly a half century that we had definitive proof that in 1968 Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon had launched a secret effort to thwart incumbent president Lyndon Baines Johnson’s peace initiative to end the Vietnam War; Nixon had tried very hard to hide it.
But the era of hiding attempts to undermine foreign policy ended in 2015, when 47 Republican senators openly warned Iranian officials that they would destroy any agreement Iran made with then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, over nuclear weapons as soon as a Republican regained the White House. At the time it sparked a firestorm, although the senators involved could argue that they, too, should be considered the voice of the government.
It was apparently a short step from the idea that it was acceptable to undermine foreign policy decisions made by a Democratic president to the idea that it was acceptable to work with foreign operatives to change foreign policy. In late 2016, Trump’s then national security advisor Michael Flynn talked to Russian foreign minister Sergey Kislyak about relieving Russia of U.S. sanctions. Now, eight years later, Trump is conducting his own foreign policy, and it runs dead against what the administration, the Pentagon, and a majority of senators and representatives think is best for the nation.
Likely expecting help from foreign countries, Trump is weakening the nation internationally to gain power at home. In that, he is retracing the steps of George Logan, who in 1798 as a private citizen set off for France to urge French officials to court popular American opinion in order to help throw George Washington’s party out of power and put Thomas Jefferson’s party in.
Congress recognized that inviting foreign countries to interfere on behalf of one candidate or another would turn the United States into a vassal state, and when Logan arrived back on U.S. shores, he discovered that Congress had passed a 1799 law we now know as the Logan Act, making his actions a crime.
The law reads: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
Trump’s interference in our foreign policy is weakening Ukraine, which desperately needs equipment to fight off Russia’s invasion. It is also warning partners and allies that they cannot rely on the United States, thus serving Russian president Vladimir Putin’s goal of fracturing the alliance standing against Russian aggression.
Today, Lara Seligman, Stuart Lau, and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that officials at the meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) foreign ministers in Brussels on Thursday are expected to discuss moving the Ukraine Defense Contact Group from U.S. to NATO control. The Ukraine Defense Contact Group is an organization of 56 nations brought together in the early days of the conflict by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and then–Joint Chiefs chair General Mark Milley to coordinate supplying Ukraine.
Members are concerned about maintaining aid to Ukraine in case of a second Trump presidency.
Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon and NATO official, told the Politico reporters: “There’s a feeling among, not the whole group but a part of the NATO group, that thinks it is better to institutionalize the process just in case of a Trump re-election. And that’s something that the U.S. is going to have to get used to hearing, because that is a fear, and a legitimate one.”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/28/richard-grenell-trump-envoy-serbia-guatemala/
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-ukraine-israel-budget-3762a0bdf00653e3c8a38175d3c3d3cb
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/953
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/01/austin-defense-meetings-weapons-ukraine-00089946
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April 1, 2024
April 1, 2024
On Tuesday, March 26, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s election interference case, put Trump under a gag order to stop his attacks on court staff, prosecutors, jurors, and witnesses. On Wednesday, Trump renewed his attacks on the judge and the judge’s daughter. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton took the unusual step of talking publicly about what threats of violence meant to the rule of law. Walton, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, told Kaitlan Collins of CNN that threats, especially threats to a judge’s family, undermine the ability of judges to carry out their duties.
“I think it’s important in order to preserve our democracy that we maintain the rule of law,” Walton said. “And the rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are, in fact, enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse.”
On Friday, former president Trump shared on social media a video of a truck with a decal showing President Joe Biden tied up and seemingly in the bed of the truck, in a position suggesting he was being kidnapped.
A threat of violence has always been part of Trump’s political performance. In 2016 he urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, and they did. They also turned on people who weren’t protesters. Political scientists Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers studied the effects of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric against marginalized Americans and found that counties where Trump held rallies had a significant increase in hate incidents in the month after that rally.
Trump’s stoking of violence became an embrace when he declared there were “very fine people, on both sides,” after protesters stood up against racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups when they met in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they shouted Nazi slogans and left 19 people injured and one protester, Heather Heyer, dead.
In October 2020, Trump refused to denounce the far-right Proud Boys organization, instead telling its members to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys turned out for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, where they helped to lead those rioters fired up by Trump’s speech at The Ellipse, where he told them: “You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump’s appeals to violence have gotten even more overt since the events of January 6.
And yet, on Meet the Press yesterday, Kristen Welker seemed to suggest that there is a general problem in U.S. politics when she described Trump’s attacks on Judge Merchan as “a reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”
But are the American people deeply divided? Or have Trump and his MAGA supporters driven the Republican Party off the rails?
One of the major issues of the 2024 election—perhaps THE major issue—is reproductive rights. But Americans are not really divided on that issue: on Friday, a new Axios-Ipsos poll found that 81% of Americans agree that “abortion issues should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government.” That number includes 65% of Republicans, as well as 82% of Independents and 97% of Democrats. The idea that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor was the language of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, overturned in 2022 with the help of the three extremist justices appointed by Trump.
Last week, the Congressional Management Foundation, which works with Congress to make it more efficient and accountable, released its study of the state of Congress in 2023. It found that senior congressional staffers overwhelmingly think that Congress is not functioning “as a democratic legislature should.” Eighty percent of them think it is not “an effective forum for debate on questions of public concern.”
But there is a significant difference in the parties’ perception of what’s wrong. While 61% of Republican staffers are satisfied that Congress members and staff feel safe doing their jobs, only 21% of Democratic staffers agree, and Democratic staffers are significantly more likely to fear for their and others’ safety. Women and longer-tenured staffers are more likely to be questioning whether to stay in Congress due to safety concerns. Eighty-four percent of Democratic staffers think that agreed-upon rules and codes of conduct for senators and representatives are not sufficient to “hold them accountable for their words and deeds,” while only 44% of Republicans say the same.
Republicans themselves seem split about the direction of their party. Republican staffers were far more likely than Democrats to be “questioning whether I should stay in Congress due to heated rhetoric from my party”: 59% to 16%. “The way the House is ‘functioning,’ is frustrating many members,” wrote one House Republican deputy chief of staff. “We have to placate [certain] members and in my nearly ten years of working here I have never felt more like we’re on the wrong track.”
One Republican Senate communications director blamed extremist political rhetoric for the dysfunction. “[W]ith the nation being in a self-sort mode, it is easy to never hear a dissenting opinion in many areas of the country. People in DC, who work in the Capitol, generally have a collegiate approach to each other. The American people don’t get to see that—at all. From the outside it appears to be a Royal Rumble and bloodsport. It’s reflected in the [way] people, regular citizens, now view one another.”
A Republican House staff director wrote that Congress is “a representative body and a reflection of the people writ large. When they demand something different of their leaders, their leaders will respond (or they will elect different leaders).”
Burgess Everett and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported yesterday that nearly 20 Republican lawmakers and aides have told them they would like Trump to calm down his rhetoric. They appear to think such violent commentary is unpopular and that it will hurt those running in downballot races if they have to answer for it.
It seems unlikely Trump will willingly temper his comments, since threatening violence seems to be all he has left to combat the legal cases bearing down on him. Over the course of Easter morning, he posted more than 70 times on social media, attacking his opponents and declaring himself to be “The Chosen One.”
Tonight, Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond in the New York civil fraud case. He was unable to secure a bond for the full amount of the judgment, but an appeals court lowered the amount. Posting the bond will let him appeal the judge’s decision. If he wins on appeal, he will avoid paying the judgment. If he loses, the bond is designed to guarantee that Trump will pay the entire amount the judge determined he owes to the people of New York: more than $454 million.
Trump and his campaign are short of cash, and there were glimmers last week that the public launch of his media network would produce significant money if he could only hold off judgments until he could sell the stock—six months, according to the current agreement—or use his shares as collateral for a bond. The company’s public launch raised the stock value by billions of dollars.
But this morning the company released its 2023 financial information, showing revenues of $4.1 million last year and a net loss of $58.2 million. The stock plunged about 20%, wiping out about $1 billion of the money that Trump had, on paper anyway, made. The company said it has not made any changes to the provision prohibiting early sales or using shares as collateral.
Tonight, Judge Merchan expanded the previous gag order on Trump to stop attacks on the judge’s family members. Trump has a right “to speak to the American voters freely and to defend himself publicly,” but “[i]t is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings,” Merchan wrote. “The threat is very real.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/29/politics/federal-judge-donald-trump-rebuke/index.html
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11202540/trump-violent
Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers, “The Trump Effect: How 2016 Campaign Rallies Explain Spikes in Hate,” February 3, 2022, Cambridge University Press, at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/trump-effect-how-2016-campaign-rallies-explain-spikes-in-hate/5665F542B16FC275D2761CE5ACB90A70
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/most-americans-support-access-medication-abortion
https://www.congressfoundation.org/storage/documents/CMF_Pubs/cmf_state_of_the_congress_2024.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/31/trump-gop-jan-6-00149037
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/30/congressional-staffers-survey/
https://www.law360.com/newyork-vs-trump-tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/trump-media-stock.html
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-civil-fraud-trial-feb0593a5bbd3837edc0db195554eda1
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/nyregion/trump-gag-order-juan-merchan.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/the-easter-madness-of-donald-j-trump
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial
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