Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 63
November 25, 2024
November 25, 2024
Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”
“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.
Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.”
He noted that more than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created over the last four years and that “our investments are making America a leader in clean energy and semiconductor technologies that will protect our economic and national security, while expanding opportunities in red states and blue states.”
In a White House memo, White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian wrote: “The progress we've made...represents only a fraction of the full impact of this agenda. If future Administrations continue to implement at the pace we have, people across the country will enjoy the benefits of safer water, cleaner air, faster internet, and smoother commutes.”
But the incoming Trump administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, Trump’s team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations.
The argument behind this approach to the economy is that concentrating wealth in the hands of investors will spur more investment, while creating an environment that’s “friendly” to business will create jobs. Jack Brook of the Associated Press reported that earlier this month, the state of Louisiana illustrated what this policy looks like to ordinary people when it cut income taxes to a flat 3% rate, reducing revenue by about $1.3 billion. They made up that revenue by increasing the sales tax to 5%, thus shifting the burden of taxation to lower- and middle-class families. “Louisiana just became a much more attractive place to do business,” Louisiana economic development secretary Susan Bourgeois told Brook.
It is becoming clear what Trump’s economic policy will look like at the national level. Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments.
As activist Melanie D’Arrigo put it on Bluesky: “‘Secret donations’ are bribes. The hundreds of millions he received from Elon Musk and other billionaires are also bribes. There’s a reason Donald Trump isn’t signing ethics pledges.” Indeed, after his first term, the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington concluded that “there is absolutely no doubt that Trump tried at every turn to use the presidency to benefit his bottom line,” and noted that those who spent money at Trump’s properties often received favorable policy decisions from the administration.
During the campaign, Trump promised to fight for ordinary Americans, but many of Trump’s picks to fill offices in his administration are notable for their extreme wealth. His pick for treasury secretary is billionaire Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive who invested money for philanthropist George Soros for more than ten years. To head the Commerce Department, Trump has tapped billionaire Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald.
Trump’s choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, and his choice for Interior Secretary, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, are both billionaires. And then there are the two men Trump tapped for his Department of Government Efficiency. Former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy is worth around a billion dollars, but Elon Musk is usually at the top of the list of the richest people in the world. He’s worth about $332.6 billion.
Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report today estimated the worth of Trump’s current roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number does not include Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find. In comparison, Mannweiler notes, the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million.
Economist Robert Reich noted yesterday that the wealth of America’s 815 billionaires grew by nearly $280 billion after Trump’s reelection, and the president-elect is promising to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025. Now, after all their complaints about the budget deficits under Biden as he invested in the country, Republicans are, according to Andrew Duehren of the New York Times, considering rejiggering the government’s accounting so that extending the tax cuts, which will create about $4 trillion in deficits, shows up as not costing anything.
Deregulation, too, is on the agenda. It’s a cause close to the heart of Elon Musk, who frequently complains that unnecessary regulations are making it impossible for visionary entrepreneurs to develop the technological sector as quickly and efficiently as they could otherwise.
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Susan Pulliam, Emily Glazer, and Becky Peterson noted that although Musk says his goal is to “protect life on Earth,” his companies “show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again.” The authors report that Tesla’s facility in Fremont, California, has received “more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California,” 112 of them. Federal regulators recently fined SpaceX for dumping about 262,000 gallons of wastewater into protected wetlands in Texas. Tesla, too, has dumped contaminated water into public sewer systems.
One staffer for environmental compliance told the Environmental Protection Agency that ““Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls.”
People who have worked with Musk “for years” told Pulliam, Glazer, and Peterson that they expect Musk will try to cut environmental regulations, especially the ones that affect his companies. After Trump announced that he was creating DOGE and putting Musk in charge of it, Musk posted: “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
Musk’s companies have brought in at least $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the past decade, and his companies have been targeted in at least 20 government investigations recently. Eric Lipton, David A. Fahrenthold, Aaron Krolik, and Kristen Grind of the New York Times note that Trump’s victory and his appointment of Musk to an oversight role in the government “essentially give[s] the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.”
Today, Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes, and Kate Sullivan of CNN reported that Trump’s lawyers have conducted an investigation into whether top Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn has been selling access to Trump. Payments for his promotion of candidates for administration positions or access to administration officials were as much as $100,000 a month. The lawyers recommended that the Trump team should jettison Epshteyn, but it has apparently decided not to.
“I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” Epshteyn said in a statement to CNN. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from Making America Great Again.”
Today, special prosecutor Jack Smith moved to drop both federal cases against Trump: the federal election case for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and the case concerning Trump’s retention of highly classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump had said he would break the usual norms around special counsels when he returns to office—Biden retained the special counsel investigating his son, Hunter—and fire Smith.
But Smith pointed to the position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted as a reason for the cases’ dismissal. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” he wrote. “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed.” Smith left open the possibility that the charges could be brought again in the future after Trump leaves office.
Trump’s approach to the cases was to delay and delay and delay in hopes voters would return him to the White House, and it appears his strategy worked. As democracy lawyer Marc Elias wrote: “Justice delayed was justice denied.”
—
Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/25/biden-agenda-trump-manufacturing
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-refuses-disclose-funding-transition-165029331.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/24/us/politics/donald-trump-2024-campaign-transition.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/23/us/politics/trump-tax-cuts-republicans-deficit.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/25/business/ceos-react-bessent-trump-treasury-pick/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/22/scott-bessent-trump-treasury
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-tesla-environment-1263cd60
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/25/politics/trump-special-counsel-jack-smith/index.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca11.87822/gov.uscourts.ca11.87822.79.0_1.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-federal-agencies-contracts.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/us/politics/boris-epshteyn-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/rockbridge-trump-vance-wiles.html
X:
rbreich/status/1860760328369308082
Bluesky:
darrigomelanie.bsky.social/post/3lbrmqmu4nc2g
November 24, 2024
Since the night of the November 5, election, Trump and his allies have insisted that he won what Trump called “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” But as the numbers have continued to come in, it’s clear that such a declaration is both an attempt to encourage donations— fundraising emails refer to Trump’s “LANDSLIDE VICTORY”—and an attempt to create the illusion of power to push his agenda.
The reality is that Trump’s margin over Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris will likely end up around 1.5 points. According to James M. Lindsay, writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, it is the fifth smallest since 1900, which covers 32 presidential races. Exit polls showed that Trump’s favorability rating was just 48% and that more voters chose someone other than Trump. And, as Lindsay points out, Trump fell 4 million votes short of President Joe Biden in 2020.
Political science professor Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, told Peter Baker of the New York Times: “If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition” On the other hand, she added, “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”
Trump’s allies are indeed setting out to do big things, and they are big things that are unpopular.
Trump ran away from Project 2025 during the campaign because it was so unpopular. He denied he knew anything about it, calling it “ridiculous and abysmal,” and on September 16 the leader of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, said there were “Absolutely zero. No connection. Zero” ties between the team and Project 2025. Now, though, Trump has done an about-face and has said he will nominate at least five people associated with Project 2025 to his administration.
Those nominees include Russell Vought, one of the project's key authors, who calls for dramatically increasing the powers of the president; Tom Homan, who as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) oversaw the separation of children from their parents; John Ratcliffe, whom the Senate refused in 2019 to confirm as Director of National Intelligence because he had no experience in intelligence; Brendan Carr, whom Trump wants to put at the head of the Federal Communications Commission and who is already trying to silence critics by warning he will punish broadcasters who Trump feels have been unfair to him; and Stephen Miller, the fervently anti-immigrant ideologue.
Project 2025 calls for the creation of an extraordinarily strong president who will gut the civil service and replace its nonpartisan officials with those who are loyal to the president. It calls for filling the military and the Department of Justice with those loyal to the president. And then, the project plans that with his new power, the president will impose Christian nationalism on the United States of America, ending immigration, and curtailing rights for LGBTQ+ individuals as well as women and racial and ethnic minorities.
Project 2025 was unpopular when people learned about it.
And then there is the threat of dramatic cuts to the U.S. government, suggested by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, headed by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are calling for cuts of $2 trillion to the items in the national budget that provide a safety net for ordinary Americans at the same time that Trump is promising additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Musk, meanwhile, is posturing as if he is the actual president, threatening on Saturday, for example: “Those who break the law will be arrested and that includes mayors.”
On Meet the Press today, current representative and senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) reacted to the “dictator talk,” with which Trump is threatening his political opponents, pointing out that "[t]he American people…voted on the basis of the economy—they wanted change to the economy—they weren’t voting for dictatorship. So I think he is going to misread his mandate if that’s what he thinks voters chose him for.”
That Trump and his team are trying desperately to portray a marginal victory as a landslide in order to put an extremist unpopular agenda into place suggests another dynamic at work.
For all Trump’s claims of power, he is a 78-year-old man who is declining mentally and who neither commands a majority of voters nor has shown signs of being able to transfer his voters to a leader in waiting.
Trump’s team deployed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance to the Senate to drum up votes for the confirmation of Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. But Vance has only been in the Senate since 2022 and is not noticeably popular. He—and therefore Trump—was unable to find the votes the wildly unqualified Gaetz needed for confirmation, forcing him to withdraw his name from consideration.
The next day, Gaetz began to advertise on Cameo, an app that allows patrons to commission a personalized video for fans, asking a minimum of $550.00 for a recording. Gaetz went from United States representative to Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general to making videos for Cameo in a little over a week.
It is a truism in studying politics that it’s far more important to follow power than it is to follow people. Right now, there is a lot of power sloshing around in Washington, D.C.
Trump is trying to convince the country that he has scooped up all that power. But in fact, he has won reelection by less than 50% of the vote, and his vice president is not popular. The policies Trump is embracing are so unpopular that he himself ran away from them when he was campaigning. And now he has proposed filling his administration with a number of highly unqualified figures who, knowing the only reason they have been elevated is that they are loyal to Trump, will go along with his worst instincts. With that baggage, it is not clear he will be able to cement enough power to bring his plans to life.
If power remains loose, it could get scooped up by cabinet officials, as it was during a similarly chaotic period in the 1920s. In that era, voters elected to the presidency former newspaperman and Republican backbencher Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who promised to return the country to “normalcy” after eight years of the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the nation’s engagement in World War I. That election really was a landslide, with Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, winning more than 60% of the popular vote in 1920.
But Harding was badly out of his depth in the presidency and spent his time with cronies playing bridge and drinking upstairs at the White House—despite Prohibition—while corrupt members of his administration grabbed all they could.
With such a void in the executive branch, power could have flowed to Congress. But after twenty years of opposing first Theodore Roosevelt, and then William Howard Taft, and then Woodrow Wilson, Congress had become adept at opposing presidents but had split into factions that made it unable to transition to using power, rather than opposing its use.
And so power in that era flowed to members of Harding’s Cabinet, primarily to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who put into place a fervently pro-business government that continued after Harding’s untimely death into the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, who made little effort to recover the power Harding had abandoned. After Hoover became president and their system fell to ruin in the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took their lost power and used it to create a new type of government.
In this moment, Trump’s people are working hard to convince Americans that they have gathered up all the power in Washington, D.C., but that power is actually still sloshing around. Trump is trying to force through the Senate a number of unqualified and dangerous nominees for high-level positions, threatening Republican senators that if they don’t bow to him, Elon Musk will fund primary challengers, or suggesting he will push them into recess so he can appoint his nominees without their constitutionally-mandated advice and consent.
But Trump and his people do not, in fact, have a mandate. Trump is old and weak, and power is up for grabs. It is possible that MAGA Republicans will, in the end, force Republican senators into their camp, permitting Trump and his cronies to do whatever they wish.
It is also possible that Republican senators will themselves take back for Congress the power that has lately concentrated in presidents, check the most dangerous and unpopular of Trump’s plans, and begin the process of restoring the balance of the three branches of government.
—
Notes:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/transition-2025-did-trump-win-unprecedented-and-powerful-mandate
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/us/politics/trump-election-landslide.html
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/nov/14/in-context-tom-homans-comments-that-fam/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/matt-gaetz-on-cameo-platform-rcna181565
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vances-failed-first-test-fuels-doubts-about-white-house-power/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/21/matt-gaetz-withdraws-ag-nomination
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/20/trump-project-2025-second-administration/
X:
elonmusk/status/1860425033450975678
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lbpdhkn5722f
November 23, 2024
November 23, 2024
Picnic tables of tourists eating lobsters and clams have given way to lobstermen hauling their gear. Soon we’ll be locked down in snow and ice, and then it will all melt and it will be time to mend and paint and launch and do it all again.
Each season has its own character, and last week Buddy caught autumn’s odd juxtaposition of extravagance and simplicity in the glow of a November sunset over the rigid lines of a working dock.
Let’s enjoy a quiet night off.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Picture by Buddy Poland.]
November 22, 2024
November 22, 2024
“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.”
It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.
That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.
When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.
So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.
The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business would prevent a man from making all the money he might otherwise; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.
That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”
But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”
The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”
After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”
Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.”
In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled.
As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway.
Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”
“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”
—
Notes:
https://www.discoverlbj.org/item/ctjd-19631122
Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
November 21, 2024
November 21, 2024
Today, former Florida representative Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for the office of attorney general. He did so shortly after CNN told him that they were going to report that the House Ethics Committee had been told there were witnesses to yet another sexual encounter between Gaetz and a minor in 2017. There was already evidence that he had sent more than $10,000 to two women who later testified in sexual misconduct investigations. The notes explaining the payments said things like: “Love you,” “Being my friend,” “Being awesome,’ and “flight + extra 4 u.”
Trump transition spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told Will Steakin of ABC News that discussions of Gaetz’s payments “are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.”
Gaetz’s withdrawal turns attention to Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. As host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, Hegseth has no relevant experience to run a crucial United States government department, let alone one that oversees close to 3 million personnel and a budget of more than $800 billion.
According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy.
Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”
Like Gaetz, Hegseth is facing stories about sexual assault. Yesterday, officials in Monterey, California, released a police report detailing a 2017 sexual assault complaint against Hegseth. The report recounts chilling details of a drunk Hegseth blocking a California woman from leaving a hotel room and then sexually assaulting her. A nurse reported the alleged assault after the woman underwent a rape exam. Hegseth says the encounter was consensual, but he paid the woman a settlement in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement. He was never charged.
Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, is also short on experience in the field of the department she has been tapped to oversee. She once incorrectly claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she was trying to get a seat on the Connecticut Board of Education and is known primarily for her work building World Wrestling Entertainment. And she, too, has been entangled in a sex abuse scandal. In October, five men filed a lawsuit claiming that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were aware that former ringside announcer Melvin Phillips was assaulting “ring boys” who were as young as 13.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition said of McMahon’s misrepresented credentials: “These types of politically motivated attacks are the new normal for nominees ready to enact President Trump’s mandate for common sense that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported two weeks ago.”
But Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence makes McMahon look like a prize. As military scholar Tom Nichols points out in The Atlantic, former representative TulsI Gabbard is “stunningly unqualified” to oversee all of America’s intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency. Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security.
Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent.
And then there is Trump’s tapping of Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no training in medicine or public health and, in addition to being a prominent critic of the vaccines that have dramatically curtailed disease and death in the U.S., is an outspoken critic of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.
That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.
But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”
“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump's proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”
But that destruction of the United States is so far still aspirational. The constant references to Trump’s supposed “mandate” are misleading. He did not win 50% of the vote, meaning that more voters chose someone other than Trump in the 2024 election than voted for him, and even many of his voters appear to have misunderstood his policies.
According to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Trump’s loyalists have tried to shore up support for his nominees in the Senate by threatening the Republican senators: "If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”
That threat is a direct assault on the Constitution, which gives to the Senate the power to advise the president on senior appointments and requires their consent to a president’s choices, and one that also hands the U.S. government over to an international billionaire. Forcing a leader’s political party to get into line behind that leader is the first task of an authoritarian, who needs that unified support in order to attack political opponents.
But, so far, the threat hasn’t worked: it could not save Gaetz in the face of public outcry.
Almost as soon as Gaetz withdrew his name, Trump presented former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi as his replacement for the attorney general post. In March 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that the Trump Foundation illegally donated $25,000 to support Bondi at a time when she was considering joining a lawsuit against Trump University. Her office ultimately decided not to join the lawsuit.
Bondi defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, during which she was a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel. She supported Trump’s campaign to insist—falsely—that he won the 2020 presidential election. She is also a registered lobbyist for Qatar.
Meanwhile, Republican perceptions of the economy have changed abruptly. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post notes, since Trump’s election, there’s been a 16-point drop in the percentage of Republicans who say they were doing worse a year ago than they are now.
While that change is due to Trump’s election, in fact Biden’s policies continue to deliver. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters today that for the second year in a row, the average price of a Thanksgiving dinner has fallen. According to the American Farm Bureau, that price fell 5% this year, with the cost of turkey down 6%. Gasoline to travel for the holiday is also down to its lowest point in more than three years, by about 25 cents per gallon since this time last year, falling to below $3.00 a gallon in almost 30 states.
Tonight, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested that Americans should keep scorecards of the country’s economic numbers, “charting where inflation, unemployment and GDP were at the end of Biden’s term and regularly updating it with Trump’s latest numbers.” He noted that “the country is now covered with embryonic factories, businesses, economic redevelopment projects and more courtesy of Joe Biden’s CHIPS act and the Inflation Reduction Act,” and predicted that Trump will claim credit for all Biden accomplished.
Keeping track would help preserve those projects in the face of threatened Republican cuts and at the same time prevent Trump from being able to claim more credit for his administration than it has earned.
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Notes:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/gaetz-10k-venmo-payments-2-women-testified-house/story?id=116019367
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/20/mcmahon-trump-education-degree/
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/11/tulsi-gabbard-nomination-security/680649/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/pete-hegseth-books-trump/680744/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html
Thinking about...Decapitation StrikeEach of Trump's proposed appointments is a surprise. It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that. This is unlikely. He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan…Read more7 days ago · 3230 likes · 285 comments · Timothy Snyderhttps://apnews.com/article/gaetz-trump-fbi-justice-department-248b46ba0c882dd46d661568e8bd3bd7
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/politics/matt-gaetz-second-sexual-encounter-minor/index.html
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/feds-should-investigate-bondis-office/2292799/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/21/trump-biden-economy-republicans/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/my-kingdom-for-some-scorecards
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/politics/donald-trump-cabinet-fox-what-matters/index.html
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November 20, 2024
November 20, 2024
Remember how American voters so hated Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term written by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing institutions, that Trump said he had nothing to do with it, and then one of its key architects, Russell Vought, told undercover filmmakers that Trump was only running away from the project as political cover?
It appears Vought was right and the story that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 was, indeed, just political cover. Ed O’Keefe and Major Garrett of CBS News reported today that two sources close to the Trump transition team have told them that they expect Trump to name Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Vought wrote the section of Project 2025 that covers the presidency, calling for “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and identifying the OMB as the means of enforcing the president’s agenda. Vought was Trump’s OMB director during the end of his first term and tried to remove the civil service protections that have been in place since 1883 to protect federal workers from being fired for political reasons. That plan, known as Schedule F, would have affected about 88% of the federal workforce.
One of the first things Biden did when he took office was to rescind Trump’s executive order making that shift.
Like that earlier attempt, Project 2025 leans heavily on the idea that “personnel is policy,” and that idea illuminates the choices the Trump team is making. Trump has refused to sign the official documents required by the 2022 Presidential Transition Act. Those documents mandate ethics commitments and require the incoming president to disclose private donations. They also limit those donations. Without the paperwork, Trump appointees cannot start the process of getting security clearances through the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the team says it is planning to do its own vetting of its candidates instead.
Claiming they have a mandate, Trump’s people have said they are launching “a hostile takeover” of the American government “on behalf of the American people.” But as voting numbers continue to come in, Trump’s majority has fallen below 50% of voters, meaning that more voters chose someone else than chose Trump on November 5. These results are far from being in “mandate” territory.
The U.S. Constitution charges Congress with writing the laws under which the American people live, and the president with taking “care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Since 1933, Congress has created an extensive system of agencies that regulate business and provide a basic social safety net. Congress will say, for example, that the U.S. needs an agency to protect the environment (like the Environmental Protection Agency, established under Republican president Richard M. Nixon), appropriate money for it, oversee its leadership, and then trust those leaders to hire the personnel necessary to carry out its mission.
Regulations and social welfare programs and the agencies that provide them are broadly popular—think how hard it has been for members to get rid of Social Security, for example—so Congress trims at the edges rather than abolishing them. As the U.S. budget has grown, they often bear the brunt of accusations that the government spends too much, although what has really caused the budget to operate deeply in the red is the tax cuts for the wealthy put into place by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Right-wing leaders who want to continue cutting regulations and taxes are newly empowered by Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, and they are turning to a quirk of the government to enable them to work around Congress.
Since the first administration of President George Washington, agencies created by Congress have lived in the Executive Branch. If, as Vought and others argue, the president is the absolute authority in that branch, Trump can do whatever he wants with those agencies and the civil servants—the bureaucrats—who run them.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out their plans for cutting the U.S. government. Neither of them has ever held elected office, but they see that as an advantage, not a downside: “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” they write. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees.” Trump has named them to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE. Despite the “department” name, DOGE is not an official government agency—which would require ethics disclosures—but rather an advisory panel.
Their op-ed begins by redefining congressional authority to create agencies to suggest that agencies are illegitimate. “Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees,” they write, “but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.” This, they say, “imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers.”
“Thankfully,” they continue, “we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.”
While “politicians” have “abetted” an “entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy,” they write, they will work with the OMB to identify regulations that, they claim, Trump can issue an executive order to stop enforcing. “This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy,” they write. Should Trump want to cut things that Congress wants to fund, they claim that Trump will simply refuse to spend those appropriations, challenging the 1974 Impoundment Control Act that declared such withholding illegal.
Musk and Ramaswamy reiterated their support for cutting programs that are not currently authorized, although budget experts note that such a lapse is a tool to permit adjustments to programs Congress has, in fact, authorized and have also pointed out that one of the top items on that list is health care for veterans. Cuts to all these programs will naturally mean extensive cuts to the federal workforce.
“With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court,” they write, “DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action.”
They conclude by asserting that “[t]here is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud,” which is one heck of a conclusion to a blueprint for taking the power of American lawmaking from the Congress, where the Framers put it, and delivering it into the hands of an extraordinarily powerful president acting on the advice of two unelected billionaires, one of whom wasn’t born in the United States.
In the vein of getting rid of regulations, today the chief executive of Delta Air Lines said he expected the Trump administration would be a “breath of fresh air” after the Biden administration’s consumer-protection laws that he called government “overreach.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Senate has been confirming President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, with the absence of Republican senators making the confirmations easier.
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-russ-vought-office-of-management-budget/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/19/trump-transition-fbi-state-gsa/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-transition-planning-ca3a6be50d147b04b6498184e5599b1e
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/20/musk-ramaswamy-government-cuts/
https://www.businessinsider.com/vivek-ramaswamy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/20/musk-ramaswamy-government-cuts/
https://apnews.com/article/delta-airlines-trump-biden-regulation-c4393d5f763d95c8286d4069563032dc
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/politics/judges-trump-biden-missing-senators/index.html
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