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Never-Trumpers Respond to the New Political Scene

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2024 //
112

Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, a site founded by Never Trump Republicans, explains how he sees the new situation, the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris as the likely nominee:

The Democratic party is healthy. The Republican party is not.

Our greatest living president. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

1. Seven Lessons

(1) The Democratic party is a healthy institution.

On the night of June 27, the various power centers within the Democratic party began a difficult conversation: Was Joe Biden still capable of running a vigorous campaign?

Over three weeks the party reached a diffuse—if not unanimous—consensus: He was not. This consensus was the product of all levels of the party: Elder statesmen such as Nancy Pelosi, elected Democrats analyzing their own future prospects, donors making decisions about spending, and the main body of public opinion among Democratic voters.

Once this consensus was reached, the various power centers began a dialogue with the party’s leader, President Biden. The party expressed its choice. Biden pushed back. The party took up the question again and, after due consideration, held firm.

Joe Biden then stepped aside for the good of the nation.

This is how healthy institutions are supposed to work…

2. The process which elevated Kamala Harris was sensible.

The Democratic party made another institutional decision in parallel with the Biden question: It vetted Kamala Harris.

This subroutine executed in the background, but it was active. Democratic voters began to consider her as the nominee and polling showed that they were comfortable with her. Party elders evaluated her fitness. Donors and elected Democrats took her measure. The fact that no anti-Harris groundswell—or even boomlet—emerged is proof that the party decided that Harris was an acceptable nominee.

After Biden blessed Harris on Sunday afternoon, the party coalesced around her in much the way it did Biden after the New Hampshire primary in 2020.

The Democratic party will enter the election more unified than it had been pre-debate.

3. Kamala Harris can run as an insurgent, but with the advantages of an incumbent.

The largest advantage of incumbency is that a candidate does not have to take base-pleasing positions during a primary campaign that can hurt him during a general election.

Because of the extraordinary nature of her ascendence, Harris possesses this advantage. She will carry nearly every advantage of incumbency and yet she can credibly position herself as this election’s change agent.

4. Trump is holding the age bomb.

The Trump campaign spent two years creating a political bomb concerning old age. They assumed that they could plant this bomb at the feet of Joe Biden.

Trump is now the one holding the age bomb. He is not only a full generation older than Harris—everything about him looks geriatric by comparison. From his gait to his bronzed-over pallor; from the way he rambles and gets lost in sentences to his inability to keep facts straight.

Every split screen now makes Trump look old and decrepit by comparison. 

5. There was enormous pent-up demand among Democrats for a younger leader.

In the first 24 hours, Kamala Harris raised over $100 million from small-dollar donors.

Sit with that for a moment. $100 million.

That’s more money than any Democrat has ever raised in a single day. It’s twice as much as Trump raised following his felony conviction. If this doesn’t snap your head back, it should.

Because it’s as good a proxy as you’ll find for excitement.

It will be several days until we have polling with a more detailed view of Harris’s support from Democratic voters, but it is already clear that she will perform much better than Biden has within her party.

Here’s my advice: You should be open to the idea that Harris could ride a wave of excitement and passion that absolutely no one was seeing until Biden stepped aside. I’m talking Obama ‘08-levels of energy.

It’s not a given. But it’s in the realm of the possible. Keep your eyes peeled for it.

6. The Republican party is a failed state.

At the debate, Donald Trump also demonstrated (again) that he is unfit for office. He rambled and lied incoherently. He is a convicted felon. A jury found him guilty of sexual assault. He has said he wants to be a “dictator” and that he wants to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. He selected as his running mate a man who advised disobeying orders from the Supreme Court and forcing a constitutional crisis.

Until last week there was nothing stopping the Republican party from forcing Trump off the ticket. The party elders and elected officials could have demanded that Trump step aside. Republican voters could have said that they had no confidence in his ability to govern. Donors could have closed their wallets.

But the plain fact is that not one single Republican called on Trump to step aside.

Not one.

Why? Because the various precincts of the Republican party understand that they hold no power—at all—over Trump. They could not ask him to withdraw from the race. Even broaching the subject would be grounds for excommunication from the party.

The Democratic party is a functioning institution, with checks and balances; constituencies and power structures. Like any institution, it is amorphous and its decision making is mostly organic.

The Republican party is an autocracy where the only thing that matters is the will of the leader. All power flows through him. All decisions are made by him. There are no competing power centers—only vassal states overseen by his noblemen.

7. Harris is an underdog.

One of the reasons the last three weeks have been so difficult is because Democrats were not choosing between a “good” outcome and a “bad” outcome. 

Those sorts of choices are easy.

Instead, Democrats were tasked with deciding between least-bad options. Humans rebel against the idea of “least-bad.” When faced with choices, we want to believe that at least one of them is “good.”

When the first real Harris-vs.-Trump polling comes out next week we’ll see how big of a hole she’s in. But unlike Biden, Harris has the ability to spend the next three months on offense, all day, every day. If she can deliver the goods, she has a puncher’s chance.

2. In Praise of Biden

A slight push-back against those who believe Biden took too long to step aside:

It was three and a half weeks from the debate to Biden pulling out. That’s it.

Joe Biden is the president, but he’s also just a man. Coming to a decision like this one—an unprecedented decision—is hard. There’s a lot to weigh and there’s a tremendous responsibility to get it right.

My own view is that Biden made the call basically as quickly as possible. He couldn’t have done it the week of the NATO summit. Then Trump was shot in the ear. Then there was the Republican convention. To my mind, Biden’s timing on this was optimal, actually.

Nothing about Joe Biden’s presidency was inevitable. Not his candidacy. Not his victory over Trump. Not his withdrawal from reelection.

At nearly every turn, Biden did the right thing for America.

His legacy is assured. He will be remembered as one of the great modern presidents.

I said this last night and I’ll say it again. History had its eye on Joe Biden, and he met the moment. He did his part. Now it’s up to Kamala Harris and us to do ours.

This is the moment. Live it with us.

Categories Biden, Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, History, Hope, Republicans, Trump

Dean Obeidiallah: Trump’s Worst Nightmare

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2024 //
38

Dean Obeidallah blogs at “The Dean’s Report.” Here he describes Kamala Harris’s secret weapon. She terrifies Donald Trump. Can’t wait to see them debate. Trump will probably cancel.

Nothing triggers Donald Trump (and MAGA) more than strong Black women. Period. Black women are at the intersection of the racism and sexism that so fuels Trump and his MAGA movement.

We’ve seen this for years with Trump’s demonization of visible Black female leaders from repeatedly calling Rep. Maxine Waters “low IQ” to vile attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar including calling for her to “go back” to where she came from and worse. And in 2020, after Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate, Trump lashed out by playing on the angry Black women trope by calling her a “mad woman,” “so angry” and even a “monster.”

But now with President Biden stepping aside and the Democratic party rallying around Harris, Trump will for be the first time called to go head-to-head with Harris—and he must be petrified.   Harris is the manifestation of all that scares Trump: She is a powerful, successful, smart Black woman.

Harris is also a former prosecutor who was elected in 2004 as District Attorney for San Francisco and in 2010 she was victorious statewide when she won the race to be Attorney General for the State of California. The contrast between prosecutor Harris and convicted felon Trump is perfect. And Harris has been the administration’s point person on reproductive freedom, which again is a powerful contrast to Trump who has bragged, “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade.”

Trump knows Harris could beat him. We all saw how Trump’s frail ego reacted when Biden beat him in 2020—he attempted a coup and incited the Jan 6 terrorist attack.  The prospect of now losing to a Black woman has to shake Trump to the core—as does the prospect of ending up in prison.

That means we can expect Trump, his right-wing allies in Congress and the media to smear Harris non-stop with lies and bigotry. Mika Brzezinski shared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that, “I’ve heard from inside Republican circles and right-wing media that the hate campaign against Kamala Harris has begun.”

In reality, though, the racist right wing smears of Harris began two weeks ago when GOP member of Congress Chip Roy, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and a NY Post columnist Charles Gasparino all labeled Harris a “DEI” hire meaning she only got her job because of diversity mandates, not because she earned it. Gorka—while on national TV–even despicably referred to Harris as “colored.”

Gasparino went even further to say if Biden ended up stepping down as President, then, “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.”

To the white right, it doesn’t matter that Harris has been a public servant for more than 20 years, winning election after election from DA, to California AG to the US Senate, where she distinguished herself with her service on the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.  And of course, winning the 2020 election as VP.

Let’s be clear: Calling a person of color a DEI hire is what racism looks like.  It springs from the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people, hence, we can only achieve success and visible positions with the help of a program. (I was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)

When these people say “DEI hire,” in reality they are speaking in coded language to other bigots as the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, who is Black, explained earlier this year.  Scott, who some on the right have called a “DEI hire,” declared, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” adding bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” Mayor Johnson later gloriously trolled the bigots, saying on MSNBC that “DEI,” actually means “duly elected incumbent.”

The vitriol and bigotry that will be directed at Harris over the next 100 plus days until the Nov 5 election will likely far eclipse what we’ve seen to date. It will likely be worse than what was directed at Barack Obama given Harris is a woman. 

These expected smears are designed to both delegitimize Harris as well as excite Trump’s bigoted, primarily white base. As Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, said in 2020 in response to Trump’s calling Harris “angry,” “nasty” and a “monster,” these attacks are intended to undermine Harris as a leader and as a person. Cooper explained, “White supremacy is lazy and unoriginal and doesn’t feel the need to ascribe humanity to Black women.”

And Kelly Dittmar, with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in 2020 addressed the politics of Trump’s smears of Harris, saying, Trump is “speaking to a contingent of voters, particularly white male voters, who support him and who are key to his base.” She added, “We know from multiple studies done on the last election that their levels of both sexism and racial resentment were actually pretty strong indicators of their support for Trump.”

Trump never made a person a bigot. He only emboldens bigots to feel comfortable being the worst version of themselves. That means we can expect to see an ugliness over the next 100 days that will be revolting. 

But we have the power to win this election. And by doing so, these right-wing bigots now calling Harris a “DEI hire” and other racist names–come January 20, 2025– will be forced to watch America call her, “Madame President.”

Categories Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Gender

George Conway Sets Up “Anti-Psychopath PAC”

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2024 //
45

George Conway, ex-husband of Trump senior advisor KellyAnne, has created a website and group to call out Trump. It’s called “Anti-Psychopath PAC.”

Its first action was to create billboards on a mobile truck that circled the GOP convention in Milwaukee with a sign that said “Thanks for nominating a felon.”

It takes an insider to tell the truth. Conway is one of my personal heroes. He despises Trump, he loves Corgis.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Insane, Trump

Jared Kushner Agrees to Build an Anti-NATO Memorial in Serbia

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2024 //
11

Many questions have been raised about the $2 billion that the Saudis gave Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to invest in profitable deals. Now we know about one of them, thanks to veteran journalist Michael Isikoff, writing at SpyTalk.

After weathering criticism over its reliance on a gusher of Saudi cash, Jared Kushner’s investment fund made its first big splash last month when it announced it had signed a $500 million deal with the Serbian government to develop a high end real estate project in downtown Belgrade on the site of a bombed down army building destroyed during the 1999 Kosovo war.

But the fine print of the deal includes a commitment that seems destined to stir up even more international controversy: a pledge by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to construct a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”— an allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees a quarter century ago in response to its relentless campaign of repression and savage massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. 

Among those exercised over the Kushner deal is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the war. 

While he has no objection to a U.S. firm investing in Serbia, the planned revisionist memorial—officially proclaiming America’s adversary in the war to have been a victim of  “aggression”— “is worse than a reversal” of U.S. policies in the region, said Clark in an interview with SpyTalk. “It’s a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.” 

Just as concerning as the whitewashing of Serbian war crimes, Clark said, is the just announced deal between Kushner’s firm and the Serbian government of Aleksander Vučić, a pro-Russian hardliner who once served as minister of information in Milosevic’s government. The memorial project needs to be viewed in a wider geopolitical context: It serves the Kremlin’s core interests in undermining NATO at a time the alliance is engaged in resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“This is part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO,” Clark said. “It’s Russian imperial pushback…Should Kushner participate in this? Of course he should not.”

Neither Kushner nor representatives of his Miami-based firm responded to requests for comment. But the remarks by Clark are likely to draw further attention to a project that has generated strong  criticism from Serbian opposition leaders as well as questions about potential conflicts of interest if Kushner’s father in law, Donald Trump (for whom he is once again raising money) is elected president in November.

Kushner’s partner in the deal is Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s Ambassador to Germany and who hopes to become Trump’s Secretary of State in a new administration.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, International, Trump

Greg Olear: Do You Know Who Introduced Trump at the GOP Convention?

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2024 //
7

Over many years, a custom has developed: the person chosen to run for President by a major political party is introduced by someone whose is prestigious, someone who represents the party’s unity and its traditions. It is a choice that is carefully deliberated to represent symbols of continuity and success.

Who introduced Trump in Milwaukee?

An aging professional wrestler.

Is the symbolism strength or fakery? Or does it suggest that Trump’s self-concept is dated, obsolete, three decades behind the times?

Greg Olear ponders the question here.

In Milwaukee on Thursday night, Donald Trump was introduced as the GOP’s nominee for president at the Republican National Convention by a once-beloved but long irrelevant professional wrestler who retired in 1993; who was kicked out of his sport’s Hall of Fame for his employment of racial slurs; who was alleged by his ex-wife to have abused her; and whose lone claim to fame for the last thirty years was to use New Right weirdo Peter Thiel’s millions to successfully sue Gawker for publishing clips of a sex tape that showed him and his friend’s wife in flagrante delicto. Presumably, Donald could have found someone more serious to task with this important and highly visible assignment, but no. Trump chose Hulk Hogan.

Hulk Hogan!

This was not Terry Bollea, the actual real human behind the stage persona, coming on stage in suit and tie to speak with the seriousness of purpose the occasion deserved. No. This was a reprise of the “Hulkster” character. He tore away his outer layer, in the manner of pro wrestling, to reveal a TRUMP/VANCE shirt beneath.


I can’t quite wrap my brain around this. I get that Trump’s base probably has fond memories of Wrestlemania. I get that the convention, and politics in general, has become a spectacle, not unlike pro wrestling, so why not tap someone accustomed to riling up large, bloodthirsty crowds. But there are only two viable candidates for president, and one of them was introduced as the nominee at the GOP’s live coronation ceremony by a has-been who became famous by defeating the Iron Sheik at Madison Square Garden in 1983 to win the WWF title. “Whatcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you!” Hogan would often ask, in his promos. What indeed?

As my friend LB says, Trump shits on what’s holy. The RNC is one more in a long list of people and things that FPOTUS has disrespected, degraded, and defecated upon these last eight years. Once again, Donald has burst like the Kool-Aid pitcher into the Holy of Holies and used it as a latrine. Having that awful ex-pro wrestler reprise his Idiocracy-esque act on that stage was an insult to all Americans. All: MAGA included. We should, all of us, take umbrage. That this grotesque spectacle took place a few days after one of Donald’s ardent supporters was gunned down at a Trump rally makes it that much worse. The tastelessness of it all. The insensitivity. The selfishness.

But then, who better to turn the mic over to Trump than the most recognizable figure in the annals of a fake sport, imbued with fake patriotism, meticulously crafting fake narratives to delight children and gullible grown-ups and separate them from their money? Trump has been involved peripherally with pro wrestling for years, and counts as his supporters Vince and Linda McMahon, who turned the fake sport into a real cash cow. Perhaps there is no more appropriate Donald avatar than Hulk Hogan, who is, in many ways, the former’s doppelgänger. Both peaked in the 80s, were involved with Wrestlemania, work with the McMahons, have a catchphrase, cultivated a fake persona, were caught on tape doing shady things, are litigious, and enjoy Peter Thiel’s munificent funding.

The difference is that Hulk Hogan is a winner. He won all those wrestling matches, and he won millions in his Gawker lawsuit. Trump never came close to winning the popular vote, the candidates he endorses all lose, and he owes the State of New York $400 million. (Whatcha gonna do when Tish James runs wild on you? Open your checkbook, is what.) The Hulkster is a winner, the Fraudster is a loser; why not steal Hogan’s fake valor?

Over the last few weeks, I have referenced the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf many times in reference to Donald, so I thought it would be instructive, for “Sunday Pages,” to go back and read the original version—or as close to the original as I could find: Fables of Æsop and Others: Translated into English. With Instructive Applications; And a Print Before Each Fable, by Samuel Croxall, D.D., Late Archdeacon of Hereford,1805.

This is an old story, one of the oldest we have. Æsop, if he existed, was born around 620 BCE, probably in Lydia; he was a slave, possibly African, who won his freedom and became an advisor to King Croesus. (Lydia, incidentally, is where the earliest attributable Greek coins were struck—the first in the Western world—during the reign of that same King Croesus.) He died in Delphi after allegedly insulting the Delphians, being falsely accused of temple theft, and thrown off the side of a cliff.

Croxall has an odd habit, perhaps because his source material was in German, of swapping out the letter “s” for the letter “f.” I have taken the liberty of using the correct letter. I have retained his Germanic-style noun capitalizations:

FAB. CLV

A Certain Shepherd’s Boy kept his Sheep upon a Common, and in Sport and Wantonness would often cry out, The Wolf! The Wolf! By this Means he several Times drew the Husbandman in an adjoining Field from their Work; who, finding themselves deluded, resolved for the Future to take no notice of his Alarm. Soon after, the Wolf came indeed. The Boy cried out in Earnest. But no Heed being given to his Cries, the Sheep are devoured by the Wolf.

Five sentences. Not much to it. What does it mean? Croxall writes:

He that is detached for being a notorious Liar besides the Ignominy and Reproach of the Thing, incurs this Mischief that he will scarce be able to get anyone to believe him again, as long as he lives. However true our Complaint may be, or how much forever it may be to our Interest to have it believed, yet if we have been frequently caught tripping before, we should hardly be able to gain Credit to what we relate afterwards. Though Mankind are generally stupid enough to be often imposed upon yet few are so senseless as to believe a notorious Liar, or to trust a Cheat upon Record. These little Shams, when found out, are sufficiently prejudicial to the Interest of every Person who practices them but when we are alarmed with imaginary Dangers and Respect of the Public, till the Cry goes quite stale and threadbare, how can it be expected we should know when to guard ourselves against real ones?

Things have changed, it appears, since 1804. Mankind are generally stupid enough, as Croxall suggests, but many believe a notorious Liar, enough to trust the Cheat upon Record with the Republican nomination. Fie!

Recent editions offer a more succinct moral: “Liars are not believed even when they speak the truth.”

Here’s the heartbreaking part: When we apply this fable to Trump and his wounded ear, we cast him as the Shepherd Boy, and us as the Husbandmen who, having been fooled too many times before, refuse to believe a word he says, even if what he says winds up being true.

But after the incident described in the fable, what becomes of the Boy and the Husbandmen? Nothing of consequence. The Husbandmen suffer a financial loss. The Shepherd’s Boy, the proto-troll from Ancient Greece, is still young, and so presumably learns his lesson—although this is an assumption; we don’t know for sure. He was likely shunned socially. Certainly he was never again trusted to protect a flock, let alone nominated to be the President of All the Sheep!

But it’s the sheep who pay the ultimate price for the Boy’s lies. That’s who the real victims are. In our Trump analogy, the sheep are the rallygoers last weekend in Butler, PA, and the dutiful MAGA who showed up at the RNC with maxi pads scotch-taped to their ears, to show solidarity with their Good Shepherd. (Maybe Trump’s bizarre infatuation with Hannibal Lecter derives from the serial killer’s famous line: “Have the lambs stopped screaming, Clarice?”)

The real moral of the Æsop fable, as applied to the current day, is this: when Trump tells a lie, Americans die. That’s what happened during the pandemic, when his mendacity cost the lives of some 300,000 of us. And that, tragically, is what came to pass last Saturday in Pennsylvania. 

Whether his ear was grazed by a bullet or cut by shattered glass, Donald is fine. He played 18 holes the next day. The sheep who flocked to see him at the rally were not so lucky. For three of them especially, the Wolf was all too real.

Categories Elections, Trump

Carol Kocivar: Democrats Vs. Trump on the Future of Public Education

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2024 //
7

Over the past decade, the Republican Party has unleashed a furious attack on public schools. The public has been inundated with absurd claims about “bad teachers,” which has diminished the number of people entering the teaching profession and driven out experienced educators. Other crazy claims: the public schools are unpatriotic, teach “critical race theory (which few teachers ever heard of), sexualize students (which may properly be attributed to the media and the Internet, not the public schools), etc.

Attacking the public schools is a central component of the privatization movement, which has used these canards to promote charters and vouchers.

Thankfully, Carol Kocivar, former president of the California State PTA and a writer, has created a template comparing Biden and Trump on the future of public schools.

She compares their budgets, their policies, and their priorities. You might want to send this to your friends and share widely. Trump would kill public schools, as his former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recommended.

Kocivar begins:

A great divide: Public education vs private

In the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, education didn’t come up even once, as EdWeek has noted. It’s an astonishing omission because the candidates have deep philosophical differences about education in America. These differences can change not only how schools are funded but how important topics are taught. At stake is what our children learn about democracy as well as about their rights and responsibilities as citizens.

This post reviews the differences between the candidates on education based on their records as well as their stated intentions. In a nutshell, Biden’s record and campaign statements point to incremental change and increased support for traditional public schools. Trump’s record and campaign statements point to reduced funding for public education along with programs to subsidize private and religious education.

Please open the link to compare the education plans of the GOP vs. the Democrats.

Categories Education Reform

Biden Leaves the Presidential Race

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2024 //
181

President Biden finally conceded to the growing crescendoes of fellow Democrats urging him to leave the race.

This is a historic and sad moment.

Joe Biden has been a GREAT President!

But his disastrous debate performance last month doomed his candidacy.

My personal preference: Kamala Harris for President.

For Vice President: Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Either team would be a bold, innovative statement that would bring excitement to voters. Younger voters would especially be attentive to a team that is fresh, thoughtful, well-informed and articulate. They would be well situated to confront abortion, climate change, gun control, and voting rights, all of which Republicans have attacked.

If Democrats decide to add a man to the ticket, Andy Beshear would be a great choice, as a governor in a red state. He has demonstrated his ability to get bipartisan support and he is a strong friend to public schools. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania would be a terrible choice because he supports charters and vouchers, probably because of words whispered by Jeff Yass, a multibillionaire who is the richest man in Pennsylvania and an arch-enemy of public schools even though he was educated in NYC public schools.

I’m sad to see President Biden step down. He will go down in history as one of our best presidents because of his legislative accomplishments, done with a razor-thin majority or none at all.

But I’m excited about the prospect of seeing Kamala Harris debate Trump, whose ignorance of policy is well known.

Categories Biden, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: Kamala Harris Would Be a Great Candidate

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2024 //
46

In her column in the Washington Post today, Jennifer Rubin explains why Kamala Harris is the best person to replace Biden. She is smart, experienced, tough, articulate, and ready. She is 59, and Trump—not Biden—would be the elderly person in the race. Rubin believes that if Harris passed over, the Democratic Party would be a shambles. Harris, she believes would energize the youth vote. Furthermore, she would be able to call out Trump’s lies without fumbling. The media is prepped to call out Biden’s gaffes, pauses, mistakes, stumbles; Harris speaks clearly and decisively. Furthermore, she is well-versed in the harms of the Dobbs decision and could appeal to Republican women.

Rubin writes:

As of this writing, President Biden hasn’t said he would step away from the 2024 campaign. Democrats nevertheless seem poised to move on. In multiple appearances, including TV interviews and meetings with Democratic lawmakers, Biden has not convinced them he is capable of winning the race, in large part because the race has become about him — his age, his health, his capacity. Each appearance becomes a “Perils of Pauline” moment in which supporters gird themselves for a gaffe or stumble. A race that was supposed to be about Donald Trump is now about Biden’s infirmities.

I know the feeling. I have watched Biden’s appearances with trepidation. I admire him and respect him and marvel at his accomplishments. But I worry that the press is now primed to catch any mistake he makes and blow it up, while ignoring Trump’s obsession with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and his nutty insistence that he won the 2020 election.

She cancels Trump’s only issue: Biden’s frailty. And she can shift the focus to his extremist plans.

Rubin says:

Without Biden attracting questions about his physical and mental fitness, perhaps the media might finally focus on Trump’s unhinged rants, compulsive lying and utter lack of policy knowledge.

Kamala Harris is the best candidate to oppose the Insurrectionist-in-Chief.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Politics, Trump

Project 2025, in Brief

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2024 //
14

Drew Goins, assistant editor of The Washington Post, summarized key points in Project 2025:

On Tuesday, President Biden tweeted three words: “Google Project 2025.” Google Trends saw search interest surpass even that of Taylor Swift this week.

Unfortunately for the Biden campaign, searching the term first yields the project’s own shiny homepage, complete with fireworks and flags and soaring language. So what is Project 2025 really?

In short, it’s a playbook for dramatically overhauling the federal government should Republicans win control. Technically, it comes from the Heritage Foundation and not the GOP presidential campaign, which allows Trump to claim he knows no more than the average confused Googler. “Don’t fall for it,” Catherine Rampell writes. Project 2025 and the MAGA machine are inextricable, with hundreds of Trump officials taking part in the planning.

The planning of what? Let’s take a look:

  • Project 2025 would steeply reduce Medicaid funding and remove medication abortion drugs from the market.
  • It would shutter LGBTQ+ health programs and have the government declare that heterosexual couples are the superior family structure. The term “sexual orientation” would be forbidden from federal legislation.
  • It would terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows “dreamers” to stay in the United States and would lower legal immigration limits, as well.
  • It would bring the FBI under direct control of the president and eliminate the Education Department.
  • It would stop expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy.
  • It would make pornography illegal and imprison people who make it.
  • It would officially recognize the Sabbath and infuse Judeo-Christian values throughout government.
  • And it lays out how the president could purge nonpartisan civil servants and install loyalists who would accomplish all of this.

But don’t worry: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has promised that this revolution will be “bloodless” if the left acquiesces.

It is no wonder, the Editorial Board writes, that Trump wants the official GOP platform “to be as anodyne and vague as possible.” It is anything but.

Catherine allows that Trump might not know some of the particulars of Project 2025 — “few would mistake the man for a policy wonk.” Even if so, that’s just as dangerous; Trump delegated major decisions to his underlings last time and would do so again.

The underlings who are writing Project 2025.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Funding, Republicans, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

James Fallows: Why Does the Press have a Double Standard for Trump and Biden?

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2024 //
39

James Fallows is one of the most eminent journalists in the nation, having served as editor of The Atlantic and published in every major media outlet. I was happy to discover his blog, “Breaking the News,” where great articles like this one appear.

In a ghoulish touch during his acceptance speech, Donald Trump went over to kiss the gear of Corey Comperatore, the fire fighter who was killed in the shooting attack that injured Trump. (Later reports said that this was Comperatore’s own jacket, on which he’d intentionally left his name misspelled for years.) In the opening part of the speech, Trump followed a script in discussing the shooting before moving into an ad-libbed MAGA-rally riff that evoked images of martyrdom and resurrection. (Photo Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

This post has one central point. It is that the press should give “fair and balanced” attention to what each of the major candidates is revealing about temperament, competence, and cognition, especially in their public performances.

Right now we have these opposing, imbalanced narrative cycles:

—For Joe Biden, every flub, freeze, slurred word, or physical-or-verbal misstep adds to the case against him. There’s an ever-mounting dossier, which can only grow in cumulative importance. “In another difficult moment for the President….” “Coming after his disastrous debate appearance…”

—For Donald Trump, every flub, fantasy, non-sequitur, “Sir” story, or revelation of profound ignorance dulls and blunts the case against him. “That’s just Trump.” “Are you new here? Never heard a MAGA rally speech before?” “It’s what the crowd is waiting for.” “Oh, here comes the ‘shark’ again!” There’s an ever-thickening layer of habituation, normalization, jadedness, just plain tedium. The first five times Trump tells the Hannibal Lecter story, reporters notice and write about it. The next hundred times, they’re checking their phones. 

Last night a member of the Washington Posteditorial board actually put it just this bluntly. Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now of Zeteo, asked Shadi Hamid, of the Post, about the many ludicrous and damaging claims in Trump’s convention speech, which Hamid had waved off as “just normal Trump.” Hamid chuckled and answered, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that Trump is Trump, and it’s a low bar, and that’s what we’ve got to work with.” To which Hasan replied, “Some of us are trying to raise the bar.” You can see it here. 

I’m sure that on reflection Shadi Hamid would have made the point more carefully. But his instant reaction distilled the “it’s just Trump!” framing that has prevailed through the 2024 campaign.

The obvious and unequal result: The public registers more and more about Biden’s “fitness” based on his appearances, less and less about Trump’s. 

Suppose we judged Donald Trump’s performances not on the sliding scale of “That’s just Trump” but the way we do Biden’s? That is, by comparison with the way other people who have ever run for president have sounded and behaved?

—By that standard, everyone who watched Joe Biden’s debate performance last month agreed that it was disastrous, easily the worst presentation by a major-party candidate in the history of televised debates. Not even his staunchest backers denied this reality, though many then framed it as “just a bad night.”

—By a similar real-world standard, I contend that Donald Trump’s acceptance speech two days ago should also be considered disastrous, easily the worst presentation of its type ever. I claimed as much, in a tweet, as soon as its 96-minute sprawl was done. Most GOP commentators I’ve heard or read since then have been predictably more unified and upbeat. One even claimed that the speech had “worked” because most of the audience would already have turned it off after about 30 minutes.

Maybe I’m wrong in that judgment, for which I’ll give my reasoning below. But I’m sure of the reality that the “it’s just Trump!” mindset within the press is badly distorting the public’s view of the candidates

What we should expect from the press is more stories about Trump’s fitness, to match those about Biden. Including: Why have we still heard absolutely nothing from medical authorities about the cause, nature, or consequences of his recent injury? This stonewalling is not normal, or defensible. If anything remotely comparable had happened with Biden, press demands for every forensic detail would grow more intense by the moment. (Yes, Biden is a serving president, but that’s what Trump wants to be again.)

So let’s start with this disastrous speech, in four summary points.

Why was Trump’s speech terrible?

First, it was not a “speech.” 

Eight years ago, I stood near the front of the crowd at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, listening to Donald Trump give his first acceptance speech. I thought it was dark, dystopian, and narcissistic. But it was a speech. It had a beginning, a middle section, and a conclusion. It had a theme. (That theme, unfortunately, was “everything is broken, and I alone can fix it.”) It appeared to have been “written,” and Trump appeared mainly to be saying what was set out in the text. The crowd roared when Trump gave the big, planned applause lines.

Thursday night’s speech started out that way. It had some “writerly” early segments—which you can always identify in Trump’s speeches by the way his voice and rhythm change. When he’s sounding out words from “planned” text from a teleprompter, the energy goes out of his voice, and his tone is that of a schoolboy struggling through an unfamiliar primer. Sometimes he gives a little aside of meta-commentary appreciation for a nice line he’s just read: “You know, that’s so true.”

The written part of this speech contained a “bring us together” line that died on Trump’s lips even as he said it: “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.” And his opening description of the shooting had an unmistakable “he is risen!” framing. For example, with emphasis added:

Many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was. When I rose [!], surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confusedbecause they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out. 

They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over. 

But I could see it and I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousandsof people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, “Fight, fight, fight.”

You don’t have be a Christian to recognize the Easter-weekend iconography. 

If he had stopped there, or even 10 or 15 minutes further in, this speech would have registered as something new and impressive from Trump. Comparison: in the first few minutes of his debate with Biden, Trump was controlled, calm-sounding, relatively clear, nothing like the figure who yelled ceaselessly at Biden during their first debate four years ago. He seemed on a mission to introduce a “new” Donald Trump, and in those opening exchanges he held it together. (Things changed as the debate went on.) 

That seems also to have been the intention in this speech, which in its “for release” version is said to have been 3,000 words long. That’s about half an hour of talking, “normal” for a live-TV evening speech of this sort.¹

But of course Trump did not stop there. He went on until after midnight Eastern time, through 96 minutes of talking, creating a transcript of well over 12,000 words. Simple math meant that three-quarters of the airtime was not a planned-and-written “speech” but instead a random-association playlist from Trump’s familiar MAGA rally themes.

On and on it went. Grievances. Attacks and ridicule. More grievances and slights. Fabrications. “Sir” stories. The return of Hannibal Lecter. Farcical claims about his greatness and Biden’s failures. Amazingly, no sharks. It was another MAGA rally. Should you so choose, you could read the whole thing here. 

I had to force myself to stay up and keep listening. We’d just gotten home from a long trip. Deb drifted away to do some unpacking, and was asleep by the time the speech was halfway done. Camera shots of the captive audience in Milwaukee indicated that they wished they could do the same thing.

To return to the theme of age and its toll on candidates: this was different from 2016. Then, Trump held the crowd throughout. Now, he came across as the guy in a bar you couldn’t get away from.

Second, it undercut its announced purpose, and missed its main opportunity.

Some of the pre-speech “analysis” was taken in by the “new Trump” opening section. For instance, here was a tweet just before Trump spoke, from Scott Jennings, a former aide to Mitch McConnell whom CNN now employs as an “analyst”:

In a similar vein, from a credulous Axios reporter:

For a sampling of even more gullible “new softness” reporting, I recommend this brilliant segment, from The Daily Show.

If Trump could have held things together for even 20 or 30 minutes, this was the opportunity he could have seized. Reporters love a “New [Person X]” story. The “New Nixon” back in 1968, potentially the “New Trump” now. And the venue itself is (along with presidential debates) among the tiny handful of occasions suited to a candidate’s re-introduction. 

JD Vance had tried this formula the night before, presenting himself not as a culture warrior (andmost definitely not as the person who called Trump “America’s Hitler”) but instead as just a lucky guy who grew up hard-scrabble. Bill Clinton’s well-conceived acceptance speech in 1992 introduced him as the young man from “a place called Hope.” John Kerry’s less-successful acceptance speech in 2004 began with him saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”

The point is, it’s a moment, and one that can’t be recaptured or repeated. And Trump could not control or contain himself long enough to have this moment pay off the way it could have. 

He started out preaching unity, comity, and providential guidance. But here’s the kind of thing he was saying in most of his speech:

If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States—think of it! The 10 worst!—and added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done. Only going to use the term once. ‘Biden.’ I’m not going to use the name anymore. [Cheers] Just one time. The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable. It’s unthinkable.²

Trump came alive only when on the attack. That should be as newsworthy as Biden’s stiffness when walking or his “President of Mexico” gaffes.

Categories Biden, Character, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans, Trump
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