Jess Piper lives on a farm in Missouri, and she is a proud Democrat. In this post, she describes how the state has been taken over by Christian nationalists who don’t believe in separation of church and state. Senator Josh Hawley, as she shows, recently declared that he was a Christian nationalist. She has confronted state leaders, and they uniformly told her to move to another state. She describes a State Senator who holds prayer sessions in his government offices. And Jess reminds us that the guys who wrote the Constitution were not Christian nationalists. The First Amendment bars a government establishment of any religion and protects the free exercise of religion. If they had wanted a Christian state, they would have said so.
Archives for the month of: July, 2024
They say that converts are even more zealous than those who have been born into a religion. Jay Kuo thinks that’s the case with JD Vance. Having started as a harsh critic of Trump, he is now an extreme MAGAt. He is more Catholic than the Pope. A bad analogy, since Trump has no religion.
Kuo writes that Vance is so polarizing that he won’t attract independents, moderates, or women.
JD Vance represents the extremes of the MAGA GOP. On nearly every issue, Vance is about as wretched and radical as he could be without morphing into Marjorie Taylor Greene. How’s that for an image?
On the nifty side, this same extremism means the GOP ticket will create greater unease among moderate and independent voters looking for a cooling off of our politics and an end to chaos, fear and rising violence. Indeed, JD Vance is likely to turn up the national heat further at a moment when most voters want it turned down. And that spells trouble for the ticket.
As nasty as they come
It’s difficult to imagine a more radical VP choice than JD Vance when it comes to the most divisive issues facing America and already splintering the GOP. In earlier pieces, I discussed how the GOP is currently wedged on several major issues, with stakes driven deep into its side over abortion, January 6th, and traitorous support for Putin.
I would now add to that list the poisonous effect of Project 2025, which could peel off moderates and independents afraid of a fascist takeover.
On each of these wedges, Vance not only stands on the wrong side, but himself is a chief driver of the wedges.
Vance is an anti-abortion zealot who supports a national ban. Even on the question of exceptions, Vance is unyielding. For example, when asked in an interview whether people should have a right to get an abortion if they were victims of rape or incest, he belittled the trauma, said that society shouldn’t view a pregnancy or birth resulting from rape or incest as an “inconvenience.” He argued that when it came to such exceptions, “two wrongs don’t make a right”—meaning that while it was “wrong” to inflict rape or incest upon a girl or woman, it would be a second “wrong” to permit the abortion.
Over January 6 and the 2020 election, Vance is also a staunch election denier and has refused to unequivocally state that he will accept the results of the 2024 election. Instead, in an interview on CNN, he qualified his acceptance, saying that the results must be “free and fair”—suggesting ahead of time and without basis that they will not be. Further, in an interview with ABC News in February, Vance maintained that he would have halted the certification of the election on January 6. “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said. Former Rep. Liz Cheney blasted Vance for this, tweeting, “JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t – overturn an election and illegally seize power.”
Vance is also a Putin apologist of the most extreme kind. If given power, Vance would grant Putin a free hand in Europe and leave allies like Ukraine without critical U.S. aid. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vance amazingly treated it with a shrug. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” Vance said. Since his election, he has become one of the most vocal critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine and led a campaign in the Senate to block a $60 billion aid package. He has urged Ukraine to stop all offensive maneuvers against Russia and negotiate a settlement quickly (thereby ceding much territory) because, in his view, victory isn’t feasible.
Finally, Vance would implement Project 2025 and replace thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists. In a podcast interview, Vance said that an incoming Trump administration should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop Trump, Vance said, he should simply ignore the law. “You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” Vance declared. This worldview and plan aligns squarely with Project 2025, which calls for the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA loyalists, as well as its theory of the unfettered power of the unitary executive.
The nifty silver lining
These positions held by Vance—and there are many other radical ones—are admittedly extreme and terrifying. But the good news is that extreme and terrifying positions have led to electoral losses by the GOP. Voters, including all-important swing state moderates, have been consistently unwilling to support them since 2022….
Finally, at age 39, Vance is inexperienced, with just two years in the Senate. Measured against Kamala Harris, Vance is green and untested. That could be on full display in their debate next month, the terms of which are still being negotiated. As a vocal champion of women’s reproductive rights and an experienced prosecutor, Harris will have an opportunity to paint Vance into a corner over his extremism.
Indeed, the contrast between an under-qualified white male MAGA radical and a seasoned minority woman defender of democracy and liberty could hardly be clearer. Trump may have thought he was making a smart bet, hoping to pull in more of his base voters in the midwestern swing states. But those people aren’t going to show up in greater numbers just because Vance is on the ticket. Trump already had those voters.
Heather Cox Richardson skillfully deconstructs the symbolism and iconography of the last night of the Republican Convention. Her insightful review makes me happy that I didn’t watch. She touches on widespread speculation that Trump was hit at the Pennsylvania rally not by a bullet but by a shattered piece of plastic from the teleprompter.
She writes:
Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a candidate of “unity.”
This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump’s acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the evening played out.
Since Saturday’s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been a medical review of Trump’s injuries, although he has said he was injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media appears simply to be letting it go on Trump’s say-so, something that adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden differently.
Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting last Saturday’s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, “it can only be a bullet.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again.
With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he would bring the country together. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” he said. “We rise together. Or we fall apart…. 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. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”
But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes, making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep.
He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going up (it’s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we’ve ever had (it’s around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple people’s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this “imaginary”), and so on. Dale called it “a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.”
Journalist James Fallows posted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I’ve heard over the years, this was overall the worst.” Statistician Nate Silver’s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began with “It’s a weird but a pretty good speech,” then posted “Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.” Shortly after, came: “Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: “This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who’s been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it’s really wearing thin.”
The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal Lecter—who he might think was real—as it always has been, was to present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a “unity” message because “Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.”
For years, observers have noted that Trump’s approach to politics is patterned on the “kayfabe” at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing must be fake, they played along with the illusion.
But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life insults—the more outrageous the better—and real-life events. Decoding what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves fans. This “neokayfabe,” Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”
Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, “turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul.”
Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when he chose McMahon’s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration during his presidency.
Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan, and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all participated.
“So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags…. Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!” Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the convention, he painted a portrait of Trump’s presidency, and of the United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the performance and one must vanquish the other.
Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past, but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: “It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore.” But the Allied soldiers in World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism. The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States, and the communist Soviet Union.
It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn’t know even the most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers today.
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If, like me, you were puzzled by the term “kayfabe,” you will enjoy this article written by Abraham Josephine Reisman, which appeared in the New York Times (no paywall).
Edward Strickler Jr. reviews Project 2025 to see what another Trump administration offers rural Americans. The short answer: Nothing.
Project 2025 has been so much in the news lately that former President Donald Trump had to respond to the right-wing policy proposals, which the Heritage Foundation put together in hopes of implementation under another Trump presidency.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
In a familiar rhetorical pattern, Trump says two contradictory things at the same time: Parts of Project 2025 are “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and “anything they do I wish them luck.”
Well, there is a third contradictory thing: “I know nothing about it.”
But anyone reading through the nearly 1,000 pages of Project 2025 might easily be two-minded, or three-minded, about it. It is vast and dense.
Nevertheless, there is a predominant theme threaded throughout: Federal government must be downsized, decentralized, and disempowered as much as possible, as rapidly as possible, just as soon as conservatives gain control the federal government. And embedded within this theme is a prominent second thread: that the enemy – variously named “that institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars,” “LGBT advocates,” “the pursuit of racial parity,” “racial and gender ideologies,” etc. — must be vanquished.
You may see different patterns, but this is what I discerned. Readers should look for themselves. Find the chapter(s) that matter to you. You may choose from sections titled “Taking the Reins of Government,” “The Common Defense,” “The General Welfare,” “The Economy,” and “Independent Regulatory Agencies,” with each major federal government agency discussed. I spent a couple days reading through the 1,000 pages to glean what is being proposed to support healthy rural populations and thriving rural communities. Not very much.
In fact, the entire subsection “Rural Health” (Chapter 14, Department of Health and Human Services, at p. 449) is shorter than the subsection on “Wild Horses and Burros” (Chapter 16, Department of the Interior, at p. 528). Empathy for the four-footed ungulates is conveyed by discussion of their “iconic presence” described as “not a new issue … not just a western issue- it is an American issue.” We two-footed humans rate similar patriotic rhetoric – “seeking space for one’s family and cultivating the land are valued goals that are deeply rooted in America’s fabric” – but the paltry few policy proposals – less than one page out of nearly 1,000 – are insulting.
For example, to increase the supply of health care providers by reducing regulatory burdens on “volunteers wishing to provide temporary, charitable services across state lines,” and to encourage “less expensive alternatives to hospitals and telehealth independent of expensive air ambulances,” Challenge me if I am wrong, but these proposals explicitly, in writing, advise that rural communities can, at best, expect “second class,” maybe just “third class,” treatment from Project 2025 Conservative elites. But at least Project 2025 doesn’t advise “humane disposal” for sick rural folks as it does for the horses and burros.
Open the link to learn more about the GOP’s indifference to rural voters.
A few readers asked for more information about the men who spent two years building a handmade boat. Here they are.
I subscribed to Jay Kuo’s blog, The Status Kuo, and I hope he will forgive me for quoting today’s post at length. Jay is a multi-talented man. This is his Linked In profile:
I am the CEO and founder of The Social Edge, a social media and digital publishing company based in New York City.
I am also a composer/lyricist/playwright. My show Allegiance–a story of love, loss and heroism during the Japanese American internment, starring George Takei and Lea Salonga–opened in the fall of 2015 and had its LA premiere in 2018. Tokyo Premiere in March 2021. London January 2022.
I am a two-time Tony winning Broadway co-producer (Hadestown, The Inheritance)
My background is in law. I am an appellate litigator admitted to practice in California, the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here is Jay’s report on Trump’s Acceptance speech, which I’m glad I missed:
Someone didn’t have the cajones to tell Trump not to write his own speech and to stay on script. The result was an embarrassing end to the entire Republican National Convention.
Trump began as expected, leaning into his new-found martyrdom and sporting a bandaged ear. Many MAGA faithful decided to wear bandages, too, as a symbol of fealty because “they aren’t sheep.”
Then it got weird. Trump veered off into la-la land with references to Hannibal Lecter, 2020 election denialism, praise for authoritarians like Viktor Orbán, and (checks notes) how he could stop wars with a single telephone call.
“This is the first good thing that’s happened to Democrats in the last three weeks,” observed David Axelrod, with a characteristic backhanded slap to his own party. “This really reminded everyone why Donald Trump is fundamentally unpopular outside this room.”
Pundits watching in real time were scathing. Because it’s Schadenfriday, I pulled together some of the commentary for your consumption, organized into basic buckets of why his speech sucked.
Trump has the discipline of a five year old
Earlier in the week, I conveyed my skepticism that Trump could ever recast himself and avoid being the petty, vindictive man he truly is, even after nearly being killed by a lone shooter. His speech last night proved this prediction correct.
Right after he got through talking about the shooting—a beginning that was carefully scripted and in fairness he pulled off fairly well—there was “a jarring tone shift” per Washington Post editorial board member Shadi Hamid. “It almost seems schizophrenic,” he observed.
That’s because Trump’s brain is actually not okay. The media underreports this, but it was on full display last night.
In reverting to his standard campaign speech—a hodge-podge of political grievance, personal attacks, meandering stories, and truly bizarre references—Trump forgot he had a national television audience before him, speaking instead to the MAGA faithful who already know this weird and disquieting speech well.
Even the New York Times, which has been stanning for Trump in its headlines by calling him “muscular” and referring to the “coronation” he would receive on Thursday, conceded that Trump has a “challenge with discipline.” That’s a candidate for understatement of the year. After the scripted part was over, the Times reporters agreed that Trump “could not resist falling back into the kind of rambling, unscripted diatribe that has long been his signature style.”
“Trump has reverted to factory settings,” noted Jim Geragthy, who is the senior political editor of the National Review and not exactly a liberal. “Biden is watching this in Delaware and saying to Jill, ‘See? I’m not that bad!’” he joked.
Unity is for suckers and losers
“Trump the unifier” is a laughable idea. It stands in contrast to everything we know about the man, who has done more to divide this country than any single person since the Civil War.
And certainly in the speech last night, there was none of the unity Trump had promised. The Times headline read, “Trump Struggles To Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage,’” noting,
He derided former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy.” Less than four years removed from office, he said America was already a “nation in decline.” He waxed hyperbolic about the immigration crisis, calling it “the greatest invasion in history” and compared undocumented migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Those in CNN’s focus group in Michigan agreed. “I gave his speech a D,” said one undecided voter. “He started out great, but then he went into mistruths and grievances and attacks. It just totally contradicted itself in terms of what he wanted to achieve with unity.” (CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale counted no less than 22 false claims in the speech.)
As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reported, the “initially subdued manner and calls for unity didn’t match the content of an often divisive speech.” In addition to the moments the Times recounted above, Blake observed that Trump also called for the firing of the head of the United Auto Workers, called a Democratic senator a “total lightweight,” and cited the “China virus.”
When that phrase popped up, it was like we time traveled to 2020…
We know that Trump thrives on division and chaos. And he couldn’t even manage to stick to a prepared speech after promising unity just four days ago.
Long, winding, and boring
Historians take note: This was the longest presidential nomination acceptance speech since they began timing these things. It clocked in at 93 minutes.
”[H]e hasn’t given any speeches for nearly a week, and he has a lot of pent-up words that he is releasing now,” observed Washington Post opinion columnist Charles Lane rather dryly.
Notably absent from his speech, as the Biden Campaign pointed out, were any references to Project 2025, how he has harmed American women by getting Roe v. Wade overturned, or his promise to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists.
There was also no organization to his words, which is indicative of Trump’s management style. He not only rambled but circled fully back to things he already said earlier, like trashing on electric vehicles. His speeches are “like lazy Susans,” remarked Washington Post contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru.
Near the 90 minute mark, Alexandra Petri, whose work in McSweeney’s I adore, quipped, ”When I agreed to do this live blog, I did not realize I was signing the best years of my life away.” She compared it to the movie Up. “The first 10 minutes had emotion and were unlike anything I’d seen. The remaining 70 minutes were just an angry man roving wildly at large for unclear reasons.”
The only possible good news for Trump is that people probably stopped watching it after the first 45 minutes. But the folks in the convention hall, who normally get to start leaving a Trump rally early, were stuck listening to him as the speech stretched past midnight Eastern time.
Even pollster and analyst Nate Silver, who has been particularly hard upon President Biden for not dropping out of the race, went through all the stages of Trump fatigue in real time, first calling it a weird but pretty good speech, then calling it boring AF, then fully retracting and rescinding this earlier statement, saying “it seems both parties are trying to throw this election…”
“Is… is it over?” asked Jim Geraghty. “Quick, someone release the balloons, before he starts talking again!”
The speech was so bad that Ana Navarro had a strong message for Democrats who soured on Biden after his poor debate performance:
“If this clinically-insane Trump speech does not get Democrats out of their defeatist doldrums, and focused and energized around electing their nominee—instead of tearing him down—I don’t know what will.”
The paper tiger
On Monday I observed that an orange tiger like Trump can’t change his stripes, the attempt on his life notwithstanding. But I also called him a paper tiger for a reason: He isn’t invincible, scary or dominating at all. He’s an old man operating on autopilot, full of piss and vinegar and entirely unlikeable.
No matter what Democrats are going through presently and who the party’s nominee ultimately is, the Donald Trump that was up there on the most important night of his future political career is someone the majority of voters would resoundingly reject, just as they did in 2020. We need to understand that and then lean into it hard. Make this election about him, and we win it.
Yeah, we can beat this guy.
Glenn Kessler is the fact-checker for the Washington Post. In this column, he identifies misstatements and lies in Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention.
He wrote:
Former president Donald Trump’s 92-minute speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination on the final night of his party’s national convention rambled, often incoherently, through a hit parade of his favorite falsehoods, many of them ad-libbed instead of drawn from his prepared remarks. Here are 34 claims that caught our attention, in the order in which he made them. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events.
“When we handed over a stock market that was substantially higher than just prior to covid coming in, did a great job, never got credit for that.”
Trump as president frequently touted the rise of stock prices during his presidency. The S&P 500 index gained about 70 percent during his first term. But it has gone up 50 percent under Biden. Moreover, the record under Barack Obama beat both men.
“The biggest tax cuts ever.”
This is one of Trump’s favorite falsehoods. Trump’s tax cut amounted to nearly 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning it was far smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP.
Trump’s tax cut is the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century — and even smaller than two tax cuts passed under President Barack Obama. Trump’s tax cut was heavily tilted toward the wealthy and corporations.
“The biggest regulation cuts ever.”
Trump’s claim of the most or biggest regulation cuts cannot be easily verified and appears to be false. There is no reliable metric on which to judge this claim — or to compare him with previous presidents. Many experts say the most significant regulatory changes in U.S. history were the deregulation of the airline, rail and trucking industries during the Carter administration, which are estimated to provide consumers with $70 billion in annual benefits. A detailed November 2020 report by the Penn Program on Regulation concluded that “without exception, each major claim we have uncovered by the President or other White House official about regulation turns out to be exaggerated, misleading, or downright untrue.” The report said that the Trump administration had not reduced the overall number of pages from the regulatory code book and that it completed far more regulatory actions than deregulatory ones once the full data set was examined.
“‘Right to Try’ was a big deal. We got Right to Try. They were trying to get that for 52 years.”
Right to Try wasn’t a protracted battle — the idea emerged in 2013. (Trump often falsely claims it was a 45-year or 50-year battle, or as he did here, 52 years.) The initiative allowed for the use of experimental drugs, not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as a last resort for those unable to participate in clinical testing who have also exhausted all other treatment options. The FDA had already approved 99 percent of requests for access to unapproved drugs, but supporters thought these policies too restrictive.
“We have an inflation crisis that is making life unaffordable, ravaging the incomes of working and low-income families, and crushing, just simply crushing, our people like never before.”
The monthly inflation headlines are often about the year-over-year inflation rate, as measured by changes in the consumer price index. Inflation reached a high of 9 percent in June 2022. Annualized inflation has dropped significantly since then. The year-over-year figure in June was 3.0 percent.
Inflation initially spiked because of pandemic-related shocks — increased consumer demand as the pandemic eased and an inability to meet this demand because of supply chain issues, as companies had reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Indeed, inflation rose around the world — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe.
Wage growth lagged inflation initially in Biden’s term, but it has since caught up. Wages have risen 19.4 percent, compared to cumulative inflation of 19.2 percent. That’s basically treading water, but it’s not as dire as Trump claims.
“I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately, bring down interest rates, and lower the cost of energy. We will drill, baby, drill.”
Trump has proposed a number of the policies that economists consider to be inflationary, such as a proposal for across-the-board tariffs. (Trump has thrown out a figure of 10 percent, but his staff has said the actual number has not been determined.) Trump has also suggested he would impose a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods. While Trump frequently claims tariffs are paid by countries, that’s wrong; the cost of the tariffs generally are passed onto consumers, so it is a form of tax.
The Federal Reserve sets interest rates and Biden has respected its independence, even as it kept interest rates high to keep inflation in check. Cutting interest rates too rapidly could spark inflation.
The Wall Street Journal, in its quarterly survey of forecasters this month, reported “most economists believe inflation, deficits and interest rates would be higher during a second Trump administration than if Biden remains in the White House.”
It also defies economic logic to claim that higher oil production will bring prices down. Domestic oil production and natural gas production are already at record highs under Biden.
“By doing that, we will lead a large-scale decline in prices. Prices will start to come down. Energy raised it.”
Continuing this theme, Trump jumps the shark to claim the solution to inflation is to expand domestic oil production. Energy costs are volatile, and so many economists prefer to focus on what is known as “core inflation” — the price of goods and services excluding energy and food. That’s because energy, like food, is a staple, and demand doesn’t change much no matter the price. People generally need to keep driving cars and eating food. Oil and gas, along with some food products like pork, are also commodities and trade on exchanges, making prices subject to speculation depending on weather, wars and other unforeseen events. Egg prices, in fact, spiked as much as 230 percent in January 2023 because of the bird flu.
“We’ll start paying off debt and start lowering taxes even further.”
Trump often has magical thinking about the national debt. When he first ran for president, Trump confidently claimed that he could eliminate the national debt — then $19 trillion — in just eight years through better trade deals. We gave him Four Pinocchios. He walked back the pledge, saying he would reduce a percentage of the debt. That didn’t happen. Instead, under Trump, the debt climbed to $27.8 trillion from not quite $20 trillion, a gain of $7.9 trillion. (More than half of the debt under Trump came in the last 10 months of his term because of the pandemic.)
Running again for president, Trump now claims the debt would be reduced by money generated by oil and natural gas reserves in the ground. But most of the money is earned by oil producers, not the federal government. The federal government might own some of the land and earn leasing fees. Such fees on U.S. federal lands, federal waters and Native American lands amounted to about $20 billion in fiscal 2022,according to CRFB. The government also earns fees from taxes on sales, with a substantial portion already dedicated to transportation projects. All told, the federal government earns about $100 billion a year from fees and taxes on fossil fuel, according to a 2022 report from Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research group.
The United States had a budget deficit almost four times as high — $383 billion — just in the first two months of fiscal 2024 (which began Oct. 1), showing the folly of Trump’s logic.
“People don’t realize I brought taxes way down, way, way down. And yet we took in more revenues the following year than we did when the tax rate was much higher.”
This is poppycock. Before the pandemic, government revenue under Trump was always supposed to go up year after year, despite the tax cut. That’s because the tax cut merely slowed the growth of revenue; it did not reduce it. As predicted by congressional budget analysts, revenue went way down from what had been anticipated before Congress approved Trump’s tax cut, which (along with higher spending) was the reason the federal budget deficit soared despite a good economy — when ordinarily that would mean a reduced budget deficit.
“I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was president and the war caused by the attack on Israel, which would have never happened if I was president.”
There is no evidence that the invasion of Ukraine or the Hamas attack on Israel would not have happened if Trump had been president. In fact, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Trump called Russian president Vladimir Putin a “genius” and “very savvy” for advancing on Ukraine.
“You got to say, that’s pretty savvy,” Trump said on a conservative talk radio show of Putin’s decision to declare certain breakaway regions in Ukraine as independent. “And you know what the response was from Biden? There was no response. They didn’t have one for that. No, it’s very sad. Very sad.” “This is genius,” Trump said. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine … Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”
Trump, in his speech, suggested that Iran funded the attack by Hamas but a link has not been established.
“They were ready to make a deal. Iran was going to make a deal with us.”
There is no evidence this is the case. Trump has sometimes claimed that Iran personally warned him they would attack a U.S. base and deliberately miss it. In reality, a vague warning without a target was given to the Iraqi president — and most of the missiles hit the base. No one was killed, but that was more a result of a well-planned evacuation than Iranian targeting. Despite no fatalities, many soldiers suffered serious brain injuries.
“They [Democrats] used covid to cheat [in the election] and [we’re] never going to let it happen again.”
More than sixty lawsuits were filed over the 2020 election, but not a single court identified fraud.
“Now Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon, which would have never happened.”
Trump pulled out of an international nuclear agreement restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions that had been negotiated over many years. European allies rejected Trump’s efforts to dismantle the deal and Iran ramped up its nuclear efforts. Biden tried to resurrect the deal, but could not bring Iran back to the negotiating table.
“Just a few short years ago under my presidency, we had the most secure border [in the history of our country].”
Annual apprehensions at the southwest border totaled 310,531 in fiscal year 2017, which included part of the Obama administration, and that was the lowest since 1971. But then the numbers spiked in Trump’s term, reaching 859,501 in fiscal year 2019, the highest since 2009. Apprehensions plunged in April 2020 because of lockdowns at the start of the pandemic.
“We had the greatest economy in the history of the world”
One of Trump’s favorite falsehoods is that he created the greatest economy in U.S. history, but he amps it here to encompass the whole world. That’s ridiculous.
Before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered businesses and sent unemployment soaring, the president could certainly brag about the state of the economy in his first three years as president. But he ran into trouble when he made a play for the history books to say it was the best economy ever.
By just about any important measure, the economy under Trump did not do as well as it did under Presidents Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton. The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively. Yet even that period paled in comparison with the 1950s and 1960s. Growth between 1962 and 1966 ranged from 4.4 percent to 6.6 percent. In postwar 1950 and 1951, it was 8.7 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
The unemployment rate reached a low of 3.5 percent under Trump, but for several months in 2023, the unemployment rate under Biden fell to as low as 3.4 percent. The unemployment rate dipped as low as 2.5 percent in 1953.
“We had no inflation.”
There was inflation under Trump — about 1.9 percent a year. That was pretty good but it was 1.4 percent a year under Obama.
“We’ve suffered the worst inflation we’ve ever had.”
Inflation under Biden has been the highest in four decades, but 9 percent is not the worst in history. It was 18 percent in 1946, more than 12 percent in 1974, more than 13 percent in 1979 and 12.5 percent in 1980. Many other years were at or near 9 percent.
“Our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. And by the way, you know who’s taking the jobs? The jobs that are created, 107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”
Trump falsely says that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs from U.S. citizens. Employment for the native-born population has increased by more than 7.2 million under Biden, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (We start from February 2021, the first full month that reflects employment under Biden.)
Meanwhile, employment of foreign-born workers increased about 5 million from February 2021 through June, BLS says. The agency says this figure includes more than just undocumented immigrants; it also includes legally admitted immigrants, refugees and temporary residents such as students and temporary workers.
“Under this administration, groceries are up 57 percent, gasoline is up 60 and 70 percent. Mortgage rates have quadrupled.”
These numbers are inflated. Food prices overall have risen 21.4 percent since Biden took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data that measures inflation for dairy products, meats, and fruits and vegetables.
As for gasoline, the price of crude oil was unusually low when Trump was in office because the coronavirus pandemic flattened economies around the world. After mass vaccination helped reopen many economies, demand increased again. But supply was lacking because oil producers decreased their production levels.
The retail price of gasoline was $2.64 a gallon in January 2021 when Trump left office. The price of regular gasoline now averages $3.52 a gallon, according to AAA. That’s an increase of 33 percent. (On an inflation-adjusted basis, gasoline now is slightly higher than the average of $3.20 over the last 106 years.)
As for mortgage rates, that is the result of Federal Reserve policy designed to tamp down inflation. But they did not quadruple. The average 30-year rate was 2.96 percent in 2021and now is about 7 percent.
“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country by far. We are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy.”
This is false. According to the Energy Information Administration, the United States has proven crude oil reserves of 44 billion barrels, which would put the country in 10th place. Venezuela, with 304 billion barrels of oil reserves, is in first place, followed by Saudi Arabia (259 billion), Iran (209 billion), Canada (170 billion) and Iraq (145 billion). The United States ranks fourth in the world in natural gas reserves.
“Under the Trump administration, just three and a half years ago, we were energy independent.”
Trump claims the United States energy independent because it exported more crude and refined products than it imported. (The United States still relied on other countries for its energy needs.) The situation has not changed under Biden. In 2023, the United States imported about 8.51 million barrels per day of petroleum and exported about 10.15 million barrels per day, according to the Energy Information Administration, making the United States still a net exporter.
“This is the only administration that said we’re going to raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now.”
This is false. For five years, Biden has been consistent in saying he will not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year, which leaves about the top 2 percent of taxpayers. Biden reiterated this pledge in the budget plan he released earlier this year.
“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now.”
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a regulation designed to promote a transition to more electric vehicles — part of a worldwide trend. The European Union, for instance, has mandated the sale of only zero-emission new cars by 2035.
There is no evidence that electric vehicles will lead to the end of the auto industry. Automakers have invested billions of dollars in electric-vehicle and battery manufacturing. A reportissued by the Environmental Defense Fund in August said $93 billion of announced EV investments and nearly 85,000 in announced jobs took place in the 12 months after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. In a December research report, Goldman Sachs said that as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the United States could be self-sufficient in EV battery production — including mining, components and battery production — by 2030.
“I got rid of NAFTA, the worst trade deal ever made, and replaced it with USMCA, which is, they say, the best trade deal ever made.”
Trump falsely suggests he significantly overhauled the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) when he replaced it with USMCA. But the new agreement only made modest tweaks to NAFTA, such as modernizing trade rules in effect from 1994 to 2020, giving some wins to U.S. farmers and blue-collar workers in the auto sector. Some elements of the deal were borrowed from the Trans Pacific Partnership, the trade deal Trump scrapped at the start of his term. The U.S. International Trade Commission, which is tasked with evaluating the impact of trade agreements, calculated USMCA would have a relatively minor impact: The USMCA would raise U.S. real gross domestic product by $68.2 billion (0.35 percent) and U.S. employment by 176,000 jobs (0.12 percent).
As for NAFTA being the worst deal ever made, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in 2017 concluded that the “net overall effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest, primarily because trade with Canada and Mexico accounts for a small percentage of U.S. GDP,” though it noted that “there were worker and firm adjustment costs as the three countries adjusted to more open trade and investment among their economies.”
“If you go back 20, 25 years, they’ve stolen, going to China and Mexico, about 68 percent of our auto industry manufacturing jobs.”
It’s unclear where Trump gets this figure; as president he would claim the number was 32 percent, but his administration never produced a source. Millions of manufacturing jobs and thousands of U.S. manufacturing establishments have disappeared since NAFTA took effect in 1994, but it’s difficult to isolate how much of that was because of NAFTA and not other factors, such as automation. The studies we reviewed indicate NAFTA had a modest effect on the U.S. economy.
“They’ve just hired, as you know, 88,000 [IRS] agents to go after them even more.”
Trump made this comment after he recounted a story about a waitress complaining about being taxed on her tips. This 88,000 figure is wildly exaggerated. The IRS employees have not yet all been hired and they are not all agents.
When Congress passed a bill to provide the IRS with an additional $80 billion in funding over 10 years, that money was to be used in part to hire 86,852 full-time employees in the next decade. But many of those employees would not be enforcement “agents” but people hired to improve information technology and customer service.
Treasury officials say that because of attrition, after 10 years of increasing spending, the size of the agency will have grown only 25 to 30 percent when the hiring burst is complete. The administration’s strategic plan for the IRS estimated that an additional 1,543 full-time employees would be hired for enforcement in 2023, or about 15 percent of newly hired staff. That would grow to 7,239 in 2024, or 37 percent of new staff. Biden administration officials have pledged that enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes will concentrate on those earning more than $400,000.
“I’m going to protect Social Security and Medicare. Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare because all of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in.”
This is false. Undocumented immigrants improve the health of Social Security and Medicare by paying payroll taxes without receiving benefits. In a fact check, we calculated the figure for Social Security payments made by undocumented immigrants is now about $27 billion. For Medicare, it should be at least $6 billion, as the Medicare tax is about 23 percent of the Social Security tax.
“The other countries weren’t accepting them back. And I called up and I said, tell them that we’re not giving them economic aid anymore.”
Trump told a long story about how he convinced countries that were not accepting the deportation gang members. He specifically mentioned MS-13, a transnational gang that formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s among members of the Salvadoran community who had fled violence and civil conflict in El Salvador. But he suggested the countries would not accept these gang members until he threatened to withhold aid. In his retelling, he claimed one official called him “sir” — usually a sign that Trump is telling a fable.
In reality, the United States deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador years before Trump took office. From 2013 to 2018, such deportations totaled 550,186. In fact, the Obama administration prioritized the deportations of gang members and individuals with criminal records. Trump, upon taking office, scrapped that priority list and allowed officials to prioritize nonviolent immigration offenders over violent ones.
“They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion, indeed. And this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them. They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.”
This is fantasy. Immigration experts know of no such effort by other countries.
As someone who came to prominence in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump appears to be channeling Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s 1980 Mariel boatlift. About 125,000 Cubans were allowed to flee to the United States in 1,700 boats — but there was a backlash when it was discovered that hundreds of refugees had been released from jails and mental health facilities.
Helen Fair, research associate at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research in Britain, which tracks the world prison population(except for a handful of countries), says the numbers keep growing. In 2013, 10.2 million people were in prison — and that had grown to 10.77 million in 2021. A preliminary estimate for February 2024, not ready to be published, indicates the population has grown even more. “In short, I would disagree with Donald Trump’s assertion,” she said.
“Meanwhile, our crime rate is going up.”
This is false. Violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharplyduring Biden’s presidency, after a surge during the pandemic. The violent crime rate is believed to be near its lowest level in 50 years.
“In Venezuela, Caracas. High crime, high crime. Caracas, Venezuela. Really a dangerous place, but not anymore. Because in Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent.”
There is no reliable data on crime in Venezuela — the government stopped publishing official data in 2015 — so it’s unclear where Trump gets this number. But it’s higher than what even the government says. In May, Venezuelan security officials announced that crime indicators had fallen by 25.1 percent compared to 2023, claiming that security forces had been successful in large-scale operations against criminal groups. Some experts believe the impossible-to-verify numbers are intended to boost the sagging popularity of the Nicolás Maduro government.
“We defeated 100 percent of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, something that was said to take five years. ‘Sir, it will take five years, sir.’ We did it in a matter of a couple of months.”
It took the United States and coalition partners more than two years to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) after Trump took office. In fact, President Barack Obama set up virtually all the structure that did the key fighting against the Islamic State under Trump, and more fighters were trained and munitions dropped under Obama than under Trump.
Under Obama, all Iraqi cities held by ISIS (with the exception of the western half of Mosul) — such as eastern Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi and Tikrit — were retaken by the end of his term, as was much of the northeastern strip of Syria along the Turkish border. The basic plan of attack in 2017 was also developed under Obama, though Trump sped up the tempo by changing the rules of engagement.
As for “100 percent,” that’s exaggerated. The loss of physical territory did not mean the group was defeated. In August 2019, the Defense Department inspector general warned: “Despite losing its territorial ‘caliphate,’ the Islamic State … solidified its insurgent capabilities in Iraq and was resurging in Syria. The reduction of U.S. forces has decreased the support available for Syrian partner forces at a time when their forces need more training and equipping to respond to the ISIS resurgence.”
“It began to unravel with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the worst humiliation in the history of our country.”
Biden essentially adhered to the timeline of withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan negotiated by Trump. The outcome might not have been much different if Trump had been reelected and was serving a second term at the time.
In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government) for U.S. forces to leave the country by May 2021. Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, President Biden decided to stick with this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months.
Trump originally celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with his original plan. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.
At a political rally on June 26, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
Trump’s tone changed after the Afghan military crumbled faster than intelligence officials predicted.
“We also left behind [in Afghanistan] $85 billion worth of military equipment.”
This is a highly inflated number for which we have previously awarded Trump Three Pinocchios. It’s not invented out of whole cloth. But it reflects all the money spent to train, equip and house the Afghan military and police — so weapons are just a part of that. U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. In 2022, CNN reported that a Defense Department report estimated that $7 billion of military equipment had been left behind.
Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker reviewed Trump’s acceptance speech and quickly discovered that there was no new Trump. Some thought, after he narrowly escaped assassination, that Trump would lower the temperature on his rhetoric. No way, she reported.
Despite promises to tone down the rhetoric, it didn’t happen.
Soon enough on Thursday night, the audience was back to its comfort zone, booing as Trump criticized “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and warned that the hated Democrats were “destroying our country,” cheering him on as he demanded the firing of union leaders and rambled about the “China virus” and the “plunder” of our nation by rapacious foreigners. The second coming of George Herbert Walker Bush this was not. All the Trump standbys were there: the supposed “invasion” at the southern border, the “caravans” and the illegal alien crime wave, the 2020 election that was stolen from him by Democrats “who used covid to cheat,” the weakness and incompetence of everyone else. The theme of the speech, of the night, of the campaign, was the same theme of Trump’s entire life, summed up in the one word that he had shouted in Pennsylvania on Saturday, before he was carried off the stage, bloodied but intact: “Fight!”
…listening to Trump talk on and on and on this Thursday evening, more than an hour and a half of strange and untruthful and incoherent freestyle rambling, it was hard to think that America was truly on the brink of reëlecting this man. He may have had a brush with death but he has not been reborn. He is the same Trump, only four years older, angrier, and far, far more incoherent than anyone who has any business being President of the United States. If Biden can’t beat him, then surely someone else can—and must.
Sarah Jaffe wrote in The American Prospect about the latest way to extract profit from consumers: surge pricing. It’s not only Uber and Lyft. It’s spreading into every corner of business.
She writes:
The internet nearly exploded this February when Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner announced that the fast-food chain intended to embrace “surge pricing,” raising the prices of a burger and a Frosty in line with customer demand.
The company had included a mention of “dynamic pricing” in its fourth-quarter earnings presentation, but clarified after the kerfuffle that the announcement of its new digital menu displays had been “misconstrued in some media reports as an intent to raise prices when demand is highest,” and said that it had “no plans to do that.” Instead, the new system would merely allow Wendy’s to “offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily.”
The snark, which included Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), ranged from pure outrage to questions of whether the company would also offer “surge pay” to its low-wage workforce. But it’s not like Wendy’s invented price-gouging. A quarter-century earlier, Coca-Cola’s CEO mused about equipping its vending machines with thermometers, and triggering them to raise the price of a soda on a hot day. People hated that too; we just didn’t have social media then.
Wendy’s and Coke aside, surge pricing is spreading. Since deregulation in the late 1970s, airlines have used a form of it, with flights costing more at short notice or at high-demand times of year. Now, the practice has crept into golf courses, hotel rooms, gyms, pubs, and concert venues. Amazon alters its prices every ten minutes. Like Wendy’s, brick-and-mortar retailers are moving to digital price tags, allowing them to surge at will. Consulting firms like Sauce Pricing promise automatic surge pricing at restaurants to boost revenues. A chain bowling alley called Bowlero charged $418.90for two lanes one day last year. Surge pricing “will eventually be everywhere,” the Financial Times, that chronicler of modern capitalism, said last September.
Customers tend to want to know in advance how much something will cost, and though we’re used to the cost of a gallon of gas, or even a quart of milk or a can of Coke, changing over time, those things tend not to fluctuate rapidly over the course of a day or even an hour. People make a distinction between things you need right away and things you could wait for; between luxury items, like market-price lobster at the hottest restaurant in town, and something we all know is cheap and easy, like a Wendy’s cheeseburger.
As companies gather more data available on consumer preferences, the process of algorithmically adjusting prices rapidly based on supply and demand will get easier, affecting all sorts of goods and services we’ve grown to count on. And there’s a case study in how this affects not only consumers but the workers who serve them. You encounter it every time you hit up your phone to find a way home.
IN RECENT YEARS, “SURGE PRICING” has been mostly associated with rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. It was one of Uber’s earliest sources of bad press, even back when the tech press mostly penned breathless paeans to genius founder-disruptors. Uber took advantage of dysfunctional taxi systems in cities like Washington, D.C., to win goodwill, according to Kafui Attoh, associate professor of urban studies at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and co-author of Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City.
The pricing system was justified as a way to encourage drivers to come out at peak times by offering them more money, something that a regulated taxi system could not offer. It worked, ostensibly, by some combination of three incentives: reducing demand for rides because fewer people could afford the higher price; offering drivers a higher rate if they hit the road; and getting already-working drivers to head to the high-rate zone.
But regulated taxi systems at least offered a steady price that users could count on, whereas Uber’s sudden price spikes turned a short ride home into a luxury good. Uber spokespeople would suggest that riders simply wait for prices to fall again, but anyone who’s ever been stranded at closing time or missed the last subway knows that waiting sometimes isn’t an option.
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A reader named Quickwrit summed up why “Medicare Advantage” is inferior to Medicare. Medicare is a federal program. Medicare Advantage is run for profit by private insurance companies. They make a profit by denying services.
Quickwrit writes:
WARNING TO ALL RETIREES!!! So-called “Medicare Advantage” plans TAKE YOU OUT OF FEDERAL MEDICARE and put you into A PRIVATE INSURANCE PLAN!!! So-called “Advantage” plans are aimed at privatizing all of federal Medicare for the profit of private insurance companies. Read pages 61 and 62 of your “Medicare & Me” booklet where it tells you that Medicare Advantage plans are PRIVATE insurance plans and that “each Medicare Advantage plan can charge different out-of-pocket costs and have different rules for how you get your [medical] services.” In so-called “Medicare Advantage” plans you lose your freedom to choose your own doctors and you get hit with all sorts of out-of-pocket costs and copays. And you must use the “Advantage” plan’s so-called “Preferred Provider Organization” (PPO) doctors, specialists, and hospitals. The only “advantage” in a “Medicare Advantage” plan is for the private insurance company’s profits. More and more healthcare providers are dumping so-called “Medicare Advantage” plans and preferring Medicare Supplement (“Medigap”) plans. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/10/27/hospitals-terminate-medicare-advantage-contracts-over-payments/71301991007/
Quickwrit also wrote:
$600 BILLION MEDICARE ADVANTAGE FRAUD THREATENS THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF ORIGINAL MEDICARE
A new study published in the respected JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that privatized Medicare Advantage plans have defrauded U.S. taxpayers of at least $600 BILLION in recent years and calls for the abolition of the program before the ongoing fraud kills original Medicare.
“Medicare Advantage plans have, in effect, stolen hundreds of billions from taxpayers,” points out
Dr. Adam Gaffney, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the new study, said in a statement that “Medicare Advantage is a bad deal for taxpayers.”
“Money that could be used to eliminate all copayments or shore up Medicare’s Trust Fund is instead lining insurers’ pockets,” said Gaffney. “And the private insurers keep Medicare Advantage enrollees from getting needed care by erecting bureaucratic hurdles like prior authorizations and payment denials.”
Citing data from the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the report shows that Medicare Advantage (MA) plans have overcharged the federal government to the tune of $612 billion since 2007 — $82 billion last year alone.
PRIVATE MEDICARE ADVANTAGE INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE BANKRUPTING FEDERAL MEDICARE — which is the purpose for which the Medicare Advantage program was set up in the first place, so that nonprofit government insurance would die and private for-profit insurance companies could go back to business-as-usual.
Gaffney says that the time has come to abolish Medicare Advantage plans in order to save government Medicare.
Today, seniors feel trapped in so-called “Advantage” plans: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/03/1222561870/older-americans-say-they-feel-trapped-in-medicare-advantage-plans
Diane Ravitch's blog 
