Mary Trump, Donald’s estranged niece, asks an important question: Why did the U.S. Army decide not to bring charges against Donald Trump for law-breaking? He knew that it was illegal to bring cameras into Arlington National Cemetery; he knew it was illegal to stage a campaign event there. When the aide on duty reminded his crew not to break the law, they shoved her aside and ridiculed her. I assume the Department of the Army is acting out of self-interest. Those who made the decision know that if Trump is re-elected, he will wreak vengeance on them.
Donald Trump and his minions were warned against politicizing a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. They did it anyway, violating self-evident norms and the law: military cemeteries cannot be used to stage partisan political events. When it became clear that Donald’s staff was going to ignore this prohibition, an employee at the cemetery sought to restrict photography in accordance with federal regulations.
Arlington is “the final resting place of more than 400,000 U.S. troops, veterans and family members. Donald was there to mark the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the evacuation of Afghanistan,” an anniversary he did not see fit to commemorate in 2023 or 2022.
Cemetery staff had made it clear ahead of time that official photography was not allowed in Section 60, where veterans of recent wars are buried. When the employee sought to reinforce the guidelines, she was, according to a report released by the Army, “abruptly pushed aside” by people in Donald’s entourage. The last part should surprise no one. Donald is a foppish, chubby overlord who relies on the unquestioning thuggery of the conscienceless jackals who comprise his inner circle and staff who exist to make him look tough. For him, “toughness” means being an unrepentant asshole; people in his orbit simply follow his lead.
Arlington National Cemetery is run by the Army. The woman who tried to make sure the guidelines, and the law, were followed by Donald’s team, is employed by the Army. After the altercation with members of Donald’s staff, she filed a report. It’s understandable that she does not want to press charges—after all, she remains unidentified because of concerns for her safety—but why won’t the Army? What exactly is gained by allowing this act of desecration to go unpunished? And, by the way, engaging in the kind of behavior Donald and his campaign staff engaged in isn’t simply indecent, it’s illegal. So why is the convicted felon allowed to commit more crimes with impunity?
But let’s summon the will to be shocked, shall we? Let’s be shocked that the former Commander-in Chief is such a despicable narcissist that every interaction he has with service members is simply a means simultaneously to steal their honor while denigrating them.
Is this the worst thing Donald’s ever done? Not by a long-shot. But the combination of selfishness, thuggery, menace, and his willingness to bring the entire weight of his power to bear on a private American citizen is a pretty good encapsulation of everything that is wrong with and disqualifying about him.
It’s time for corporate media to catch up and refuse to let this one go.
After Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency in 1974, his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him to unite the country and end “the nation’s long national nightmare.”
Just a few weeks ago, the question seemed almost preposterous: What should happen to the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump if he is defeated in November? Today, it might be premature to imagine a President Kamala Harris grappling with whether to allow the cases against Trump to go forward or whether, before or after any convictions, to grant him a pardon. But this is a discussion worth launching now, in part because, as the prospect of a Harris victory comes into focus, there could be a “long national nightmare” impulse to put all things Trump in the rearview mirror. Under more ordinary circumstances, in more ordinary times, my sympathies would tend toward such calls for national reconciliation, the sentiments that animated Gerald Ford, 50 years ago next month, to pardon Richard M. Nixon.
In pardoning Nixon, Ford invoked the continued suffering of Nixon and his family, along with Nixon’s years of public service, but said his decision was driven by the need for national healing.
In retrospect, that decision looks wise and selfless. But it’s not the right template for thinking about Trump. Harris should allow special counsel Jack Smith to proceed with his prosecutions against the former president, or what’s left of them after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. If Trump is convicted and the conviction is upheld, Harris should not use her power to pardon Trump or commute his sentence.
Why? What’s the difference between Ford and Nixon then and Harris and Trump in a not-so-theoretical future?
First is the matter of consequences for bad acts, something that Trump has magically managed to avoid for most of his 78 years. Short-circuiting his prosecutions or upending his convictions would be the maddening capstone to a life of evading responsibility for wrongdoing.
A sitting president can’t be prosecuted, under long-standing Justice Department policy, so the findings by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that Trump might have committed 10 acts of obstruction of justice went nowhere. The House of Representatives voted twice to impeach Trump, but the Senate failed to convict — the second time largely because Republican senators (and Trump’s own lawyers) pointed to the prospect of criminal prosecution for efforts to interfere with the election results. Then the Supreme Court carved out a broad sphere of immunity for Trump, jeopardizing at least part of Smith’s prosecution.
When it comes to Trump, accountability is a can endlessly kicked down the road. That’s not in the interest of justice — and it sets a bad precedent for future presidents. We can hope that it doesn’t take the threat of criminal consequences to dissuade presidents from wrongdoing, but rules and laws without consequences are meaningless. And the charges against Trump — that he plotted to overturn election results and obstructed justice to improperly retain classified documents — involve serious misconduct that calls out for enforcement.
Second, Trump is no Nixon, and I don’t mean this in a good way. Nixon’s wrongdoing was egregious, and criminal. But he did not pose a threat to democracy on the same level as Trump, with his incessant claims of a system rigged against him, of elections stolen and politically motivated prosecutions. Nixon left office under political pressure, but, still, he left office.
Nixon cannot accurately be called repentant, but in accepting the pardon he acknowledged “my own mistakes and misjudgments,” adding, “No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency — a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.” It is impossible to imagine anything approaching this degree of contrition from Trump. Those who accept no responsibility deserve no mercy. Those who continually incite discord should not receive a pass in the name of calming the turmoil.
Third, about that turmoil: Times have changed since Ford pardoned Nixon. The country has grown angrier and more divided. Ford openly worried about this in his day, warning that if he allowed a criminal case to proceed, “ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.”
Back then, for all the fury generated by the pardon, it was a reasonable judgment that it would calm the waters overall. Today, I wonder whether that would happen. If Harris were to order the prosecutions dropped or grant a pardon, would that have the same salutary effect as Ford envisioned in 1974? Polarization has edged into antipathy, not mere disagreement but vehement disdain for the other side. Political tribalism reigns; it takes precedence over the national interest. It is hard to imagine an act by Harris toward Trump that would magically alter this ugly reality.
So, my advice for former prosecutor and possible president Harris is to let Smith do his job and the criminal justice system work its will. She can decide down the road about a pardon, but she should be wary of taking the lessons of a half-century ago as a road map for what is best for the nation today.
Arizona is truly the Wild West of privatization. Its voucher program started small and grew fast. Parents and teachers organized a state referendum on vouchers in 2018, and the voters overwhelmingly rejected their expansion, by 65-35%.
But the Republican legislature ignored the public smack down and opened the nation’s first universal voucher program. Anyone can get a voucher, even if they are rich, even if they have never attended a public school.
The Arizona State Board of Education on Monday struck down a parent’s appeal to use state school voucher money to finance three dune buggy purchases.
The parent sought reimbursement for the recreational vehicles through the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, citing her children’s need for interactive learning. Since 2022, the school voucher program has allowed any child in Arizona to receive public money to pay for education expenses such as private school tuition, supplies, tutoring and supplemental materials.
The board’s near-unanimous decision broke from an appeal hearing officer’s recommendation this spring that the family should be reimbursed. Several board members suggested the purchases were needlessly extravagant, even under the broad statute governing the ESA voucher program.
Board member Jennifer Clark, who cast the sole dissenting vote, said the board had voted in line with the hearing officer’s recommendation in every voucher appeal case since she joined in 2022. She said the board should defer to the officer.
The family can appeal the board’s decision, said Board President Daniel Corr.
“Regardless of your feelings on ESA — and I think they range along a spectrum — at some point, I think the question of reasonableness comes to mind,” Corr said. “And this particular purchase, purchases, exceeds my definition of reasonableness.”
The Arizona Department of Education first denied the parent’s request for reimbursement in December. The parent appealed, according to board meeting agenda materials, and then the department “mistakenly approved” her reimbursement request in January.
The department suspended the family’s school voucher accounts in March and requested repayment for the dune buggies. The parent appealed again to the Education Board and described the department’s handling of her case as “crass incompetence.”
“Telling us months later that we have to pay back something that was approved by the department has to be illegal in 50 states and a few territories,” she wrote in the appeal.
The department testified during the May hearing that the dune buggies “are not primarily education items, are disallowed by the ESA Parent Handbook, and are not items funded in a public-school setting,” according to the board agenda materials. Textbooks and supplemental materials, such as dune buggies, must be tied to a curriculum for a purchase to be justified under the voucher program, according to the department.
This interpretation was affirmed by the Attorney General’s Office in a July 1 letter alleging the department had allowed expenditures not supported by curriculum and directing the department to stop approving those expenses.
The parent later provided a curriculum plan that was “narrowly tailored” with help from an occupational therapist, according to agenda materials. The therapist testified during the hearing that the students engaged more effectively with learning materials that involved physical interaction, such as dune buggies, which allowed them “to engage in movement before returning to more traditional learning environments.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson weaves together the events of the past few days and demonstrates the submission of the Republican Party to one angry man. At the Republican National Convention, the party’s elders were notably absent. No Bush or Cheney; no Romney. Trump put his daughter-in-law, Lara, in charge of the Republican National Committee. It’s the Trump party now, and he controls all its levers of power. Note below that he hasn’t stopped hawking merchandise, even in the middle of his campaign. If you can open a tweet, this is an example of Trump turning his campaign into a money-maker for himself.
She writes:
…Trump began the day by posting an advertisement for the fourth “series of Trump digital trading cards,” or NFTs (which are unique digital tokens) featuring heroic images of Trump. People who buy 15 or more of them—at $99 apiece—get a physical trading card as well. Trump said that the physical card has a piece of the suit he wore at the presidential debate, and Trump promises to sign five of them, randomly. Up to 25 people who buy $25,750 worth of the cards with cryptocurrency will be invited to a gala next month at his Jupiter, Florida, golf club.
In the ad, Trump made it a point to emphasize his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, an emphasis that dovetails with Trump’s recent promotion of an “official” cryptocurrency project. He linked to a Telegram channel run by his sons Don Jr. and Eric that, at the time, was called “The DeFiant Ones” but has been renamed “World Liberty Financial.” While there is little public information about the project, the channel has almost 50,000 subscribers.
Hawking merchandise was an odd move for a presidential candidate, and it suggested his focus is elsewhere than on the election. Also today, Trump announced that he plans to make former Democrats Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, honorary members of his transition team. Kennedy told right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he would “help pick the people who will be running the government…”
And then, this evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that “[t]wo members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself.
It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader.
But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship.
In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision.
Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.
In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
Much has been written about Trump’s controversial visit to the graves of American soldiers killed by a suicide bomber at the airport in Afghanistan as thousands of people were struggling to leave. The death of these brave soldiers was terrible and tragic. Trump decided to blame their deaths on Kamala Harris. He made common cause with some of the families and paid tribute to fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. That military cemetery has a special area, Section 60, where neither cameras nor campaign events are allowed. Both are strictly prohibited to show respect for the dead.
Trump arrived with his entourage. A young military woman, left to confront the visitors, informed them of the rules. She tried to stop them, and they pushed her aside. There was some sort of physical confrontation, and one of Trump’s group said later that the woman had “some kind of mental health episode.” Each side reported the other, and the military brass decided “case closed.” They knew that if Trump is re-elected, he would be vengeful. Trump went to the gravesites, where his photo was taken with family members. One bizarre photo showed him standing over a grave, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up sign, along with some family members.
Did he break the rules? Yes. He has always acted on the belief that the rules don’t apply to him. He is always immune from responsibility, accountability, or prosecution.
The fascist overtones from the Arlington National Cemetery incident are unmistakeable: a presidential campaign run like a gang, with enforcers shoving aside a public servant enforcing the rules and a mob of millions of supporters with a track record of doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and threatening anyone who gets in their candidate’s way, all the while being egged on by the candidate himself.
You can’t blame the cemetery official for declining to press charges rather than put herself in the line of fire for continued and unending abuse. She didn’t sign up for that. She’s already been baselessly accused by the Trump campaign of having a “mental health episode,” being “despicable” and a “disgrace,” and not deserving to have her job. That all happened within the first 48 hours of the apparent confrontation at the national shrine to fallen service members.
But what about the Army? It oversees Arlington National Cemetery and is a victim of Trump’s bullying, too, so I hesitate to blame it for its predicament. But some of the reporting suggests the staffer on the ground was effectively if inadvertently set up by higher-ups who themselves wanted to avoid a confrontation with Trump. According to the WaPo:
Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post.
Officials said they wanted to respect the wishes of grieving family members who wanted Trump there, but at the same time were wary of Trump’s record of politicizing the military. So they laid out ground rules they hoped would wall off politics from the final resting place of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.
Rather than mount a full-throated defense and take any kind of remedial action, the Army has closed the matter after the cemetery official declined to press charges. But the fecklessness doesn’t end there. This paragraph in the NYT is an all-timer for weak-kneed kowtowing to a bully:
Several Army officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential aspects of the matter, on Wednesday sought to keep the politically charged issue from escalating. But at the same time, they defended the cemetery official and pushed back on attacks from the Trump campaign, with one official saying that the woman at the cemetery was just trying to do her job.
Officials purporting to defend their person on the ground by offering some “push back” on the Trump campaign attack, but doing so anonymously while trying to keep it from “escalating.” Escalating into what? You’ve already been run over, so that leaves the only obvious conclusion: The Army itself is trying to avoid being the target of MAGA attacks. This is untenable acquiescence to bullying.
Is that really going to be the end of the story? No consequences, no new measures to enjoin Trump from doing the same thing again at Arlington or another military cemetery, no price to pay for his thuggery. It’s a familiar pattern.
The erosion of any kind of strong, unified, national, countervailing force to Trump’s public bullying and nastiness only enables and emboldens the thuggery that is central to his appeal and that he has already notoriously used on Jan. 6 to try to retain power.
If you don’t think a Trump win in November will unleash a reign of thuggery against anyone who stands in his way – not just political foes but innocent bystanders and regular folks just doing their jobs – then I don’t know what else to tell you. He’s doing it right now, he’s promised to do it if he wins, and his minions are poised and eager to follow through.
He’s not a schoolyard bully. He’s a public menace, and if he wins back the White House, he will be a public menace with vast official powers and Supreme Court-sanctioned immunity.
Donald Trump has shown the nation, once again, that he has no shame.
You knew that, of course. But hauling a camera crew to Arlington National Cemetery and exploiting the fresh graves of heroes — using them as props in his presidential campaign — was more than a violation of the cemetery’s rules; it was more, even, than a violation of federal law. It was a deeply dishonorable act by a shockingly dishonorable man.
Just because we are accustomed to this kind of behavior from Trump does not mean we should accept it. Just because he has no sense of honor or appreciation of sacrifice does not mean we have to pretend honor and sacrifice no longer exist. Just because “Trump is an awful person” is an old story does not mean we should yawn at this latest demonstration and quickly move on.
Section 60 at Arlington Cemetery is the resting place of the men and women who most recently gave what Abraham Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion” to their country. Monday was the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is nothing wrong with a former president visiting those graves to commemorate that terrible day.
There is everything wrong, though, with that former president using the occasion to generate visual fodder for his bid to return to the White House. Trump brought along a photographer and videographer from his campaign to capture images of the visit — which his campaign team knew, and he surely knew, was forbidden.
And, of course, there is everything wrong with physically shoving aside a worker at the cemetery who was doing her job and trying to enforce the rules.
“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” Arlington Cemetery officials said this week in a statement. This was made clear to Trump’s team as the visit was being planned, officials said — including the strict enforcement of the rule at Section 60, where grief and loss are still raw.
“What was abundantly clear-cut was: Section 60, no photos and no video,” a defense official told The Post.
Despite that warning, though, the Trump team brought its cameras into Section 60. When a cemetery employee tried to stop them, according to The Post, “a larger male campaign aide insisted the camera was allowed and pushed past the cemetery employee, leaving her shocked.”
No one can dismiss the incident as a misunderstanding by Trump and his aides, since their official position is that Trump is infallible. The campaign’s response, as usual, was a lie — a false and gratuitously cruel statement from spokesman Steven Cheung to NPR, which first reported the cemetery clash: “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”
The campaign promised to release footage to corroborate its version of the encounter. That turned out to be a TikTok post — a political ad — with video of Trump in Section 60. And the campaign released an image of Trump standing with family members of the fallen amid the still-fresh graves. He is shown flashing a broad smile and giving a thumbs-up.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), tried to chime in MAGA-style by attacking Vice President Kamala Harris — the surging Democratic Party presidential nominee — for any role she might have played in the Afghanistan withdrawal. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. “She can go to hell.”
For the record, at that point Harris had not yelled, or said anything at all, about the cemetery incident.
Also for the record, it was Trump who negotiated the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and forced the Afghan government to release thousands of jailed Taliban fighters in a prisoner swap. Those decisions helped make possible the Taliban’s swift return to power.
And a point of personal privilege: The ashes of my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Edward Rhodes Collins and Annie Ruth Collins, are interred at Arlington. He was a Navy veteran who came under fire in the South Pacific during World War II and later in Korea.
Arlington National Cemetery is a place of honor. Donald Trump thinks honor is for suckers and losers — and values sacrifice only if it might help him win an election. Do not become numb to his nature.
For more about Trump’s disregard for our troops, read this.
The United States Army released a statement yesterday:
“Arlington National Cemetery routinely hosts public wreath laying ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for individuals and groups who submit requests in advance. ANC conducts nearly 3,000 such public ceremonies a year without incident. Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations, and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside. Consistent with the decorum expected at ANC, this employee acted with professionalism and avoided further disruption. The incident was reported to the JBM-HH police department, but the employee subsequently decided not to press charges. Therefore, the Army considers this matter closed. This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”
We knew about RFK Jr. and his brain worm. We learned about his escapade with a dead bear cub that he found in the woods, put in his car, and dumped in Central Park as a joke. Weird. We also learned recently that he sold dope when he was a student at Harvard (The Atlantic published a story by author Kurt Andersen saying that RFK sold him cocaine and that Bobby was a heroin addict from ages 15 to 29). Last week, he teamed up with Trump, who advocated as recently as 2022 that drug dealers should be executed. Odd.
It is a violation of longstanding federal law to collect parts from the carcass of a protected marine animal if there are still “soft tissues” attached.
It becomes political intrigue if the collector was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the severed head of a possibly protected marine mammal streamed “whale juice” down the side of the family minivan three decades ago.
On Monday, the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity, a progressive environmental organization, called on federal authorities to investigate an episode, recounted by Mr. Kennedy’s daughter in a 2012 magazine article, in which she said Mr. Kennedy chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Mass., bungee-corded it to their vehicle’s roof, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, N.Y.
“It was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy, then 24, told Town & Country, in the article, which described Mr. Kennedy as someone who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons.
The story recently resurfaced, including in an entertainment publication, The Wrap, on Sunday and in a New York Post article on Monday.
In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees marine protection, Brett Hartl, the national political director for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, wrote: “There are good reasons why it is illegal for any person to collect or keep parts of any endangered species.”
“Most importantly, vital research opportunities are lost when individuals scavenge a wildlife carcass and interfere with the work of scientists. This is particularly true of marine mammals, which are some of the most difficult wildlife species in the world to study….
Mr. Kennedy, he wrote, may have violated not only the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) and the Endangered Species Act (1973) — two seminal marine conservation laws — but also the Lacey Act of 1900, a conservation law signed by President William McKinley that prohibits the transportation of illegally gathered wildlife, dead or alive, across state lines.
The whale has now joined a baby bear, at least one emu and a worm whose deaths have been intimately associated with Mr. Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate — and environmental lawyer — who last week joined forces with former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
Well, RFK Jr. may be a former environmental activist and a prominent conspiracy theorist, but he is not an animal rights activist!
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive in Flagler County, Florida. In this brilliant article, he describes vouchers as welfare for the rich, a new kind of state socialism. He points out that vouchers are destroying public schools.
I want to acknowledge that I cribbed the article from the blog of the Network for Public Education, which you should subscribe to. It’s free, and it’s curated by the great Peter Greene. If you have a passion for public schools, sign up.
Tristam writes:
It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Paul Renner, our esteemed Speaker of the House and Flagler’s chief pork slabber, were to champion a bill entitling every citizen to take out $2,000 from their local policing budgets so they can have their own private security and call it “Police Choice.” After all, don’t we all pay taxes? Shouldn’t we have a choice how that money is spent? Don’t we free Floridians know best? Sheriff Rick Staly would be the first to tell Renner he’s out of his mind.
It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Renner, claiming that taxpayers shouldn’t have their park choices limited to Holland and Ralph Carter Park, were to champion a bill entitling every household to take out $1,000 from the parks and rec budget so they could help subsidize their Disney and Universal experiences and call it “Park Choice.” Even Renner’s chamber of commerce courtesans would tell him he’s out of his mind.
But not too many people told Renner he was out of his mind when he did exactly that to public schools: he championed a bill entitling every child in Florida to $8,000 a year to spend on private education, at the public school system’s expense, and called it “school choice.” The few who did were themselves told they’re out of their mind.
“School choice” is an orchestrated demolition of public schools and the social contract. The focus-group euphemism masks the thieving of tax dollars to subsidize private schools, transforming what was once an aspiration of fringe Christian and anti-government militants into state doctrine. “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have public schools,” the televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell said in a 1979 sermon. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be.” Falwell lived long enough to see Jeb Bush’s Florida reopen that door. Renner swung the wrecking ball.
Flagler County schools are losing close to $11 million this year to “choice,” siphoned out so 1,250 students can get their $8,000 either for private school or home school. True, not every one of these students was attending Flagler schools before, so it’s not a net loss of 1,250 students. But very few of these students were either qualifying or getting taxpayer subsidies before. Exactly 136 did in Flagler just four years ago, costing the district less than $1 million. Now anyone qualifies, including millionaire families, and every dollar going to them is a dollar diverted from public education.
That figure of 1,250 students is for the first full year of this “choice” being in effect. Coming years will only accelerate the drain on public schools, because if you have children you’d be out of your mind not to take the $8,000-per-child handout, especially since most of you aren’t paying anywhere near $8,000 in school taxes each year. The rest of us, and even more so businesses and renters, are subsidizing the swindle.
Advocates of the swindle have come up with a couple of defenses: first, that they’re taxpayers who should choose where their money is spent–the untenable argument that would then support “police choice” and “park choice,” and if you push that logic far enough, “war choice,” as in: you may spend my money on the Ukraine war but not the genocide of Palestinians. But in our social contract how our taxes are spent is not an a-la-carte option, though Boomer narcissists who can’t see past the hedge of their gated community think it should be.
Second, the advocates claim the dollars “follow the child,” as if public money going to private subsidies were new money that doesn’t affect public school budgets. It’s excellent propaganda. But it’s a double-barreled lie–double-barreled, because not only is every student lost to the public schools a loss of $8,000, but every student who was never enrolled in public school but is now getting the $8,000 compounds that loss, since these are public dollars that would have otherwise been allocated to public schools.
Incidentally, we don’t say that people receiving food stamps are on “food choice.” We don’t say that people getting Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are on “poverty choice.” When people get free money from the government, we call it welfare. Ditching the ordurous school-choice euphemism and applying the language’s proper definition–school welfare–exposes the state’s fabrications.
Facts do the rest. The welfare kings and queens this time are much richer than those on food stamps. As the Miami Herald reported Sunday, “Last school year, the average income of families who provided income data and received scholarships for a family of four was $86,000.” (To be eligible for food choice this year a family of four can’t have a household income above $62,400.)
According to Step Up for Students, the state’s arm administering school welfare, 82 percent of handouts went to students attending religious schools–madrassas–like one in Palm Coast that boasts of “raising champions for Christ” and still sports a crusader for a mascot, which is no less offensive to a few hundred million people than if it flew the Confederate or Nazi flags. Our tax dollars are subsidizing that kind of bigotry.
More perniciously: When Bush started the welfare-to-school wagon he limited it to the disabled and the needy. Minorities benefited disproportionately. It was a form of segregation in reverse, like affirmative action. Renner’s scheme, like so much under Gov. Ron DeSantis, revives pre-Brown v. Board of Education segregation. By eliminating eligibility barriers, wealthier families use the subsidy as a bridge to very expensive public schools whose tuition keeps the riff raff out, even with $8,000 subsidies. A family might’ve afforded a $9,000 school but couldn’t afford a $15,000 school. So clever schools adjust their tuition just so as a barrier to undesirables and to make extra profit, thus cashing in twice over: in dollars and in whitening their own “choice” of who gets in. Et voilà. Jerry Falwell’s jolly jowly ideal realized.
Finally, to make sure the dagger cuts deeply and fatally, the state makes it mandatory for school districts to advertise school welfare on their websites. Districts like Flagler must make it as easy as possible for parents to apply for the money and get out of the district, while the state provides a detailed list of private schools to choose from, including, of course, every madrassa under the sky. State and districts could not be shouting louder: Public schools suck. Here’s $8,000. $16,000. $24,000. Now leave.
As students continue to be bribed out, public schools will be left with less money, all the responsibilities for higher standards, more challenging students, crumbling buildings and, revoltingly, school board members and superintendents in full Stockholm Syndrome mode. You hear them in board meetings not only talking about school welfare but praising it, pandering to it, the way the condemned suck up to their executioner.
There are exceptions. Our own Colleen Conklin for years has been sounding the alerts about the swindle, starting with the charter schemes. She thankfully kept a few of those out of the district, back when local school boards had a say. They no longer do. And Conklin is leaving in November. Our remaining board members love the school welfare swindle and are probably trying to figure out how to cash in with their own kids without looking like public school traitors.
But as Jerry Falwell implied, it’s a matter of time before those school board members are surplus property, like public school buildings, like buses, for that matter like teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, bus drivers and administrators, all of whom are already treated like disposable obstructions in the way of school welfare and the cult known as “parental rights.”
Most people are aware that the cost of higher education has dramatically escalated in recent years, for a variety of reasons. Some students do not enroll in college because they can’t afford it. Others graduate with crushing debt, based on student loans. It’s hard to believe that some European nations have made college either free or affordable.
President Biden has tried repeatedly to find ways to help students pay off their college debt. His most ambitious plan was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2023.
Biden devised a new plan, and yesterday the Supreme Court temporarily blocked that one today.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily blocked a new effort by President Biden to wipe out tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt.
The plan was part of the president’s piecemeal approach to forgiving debt after the Supreme Court rejected a more ambitious proposal last year that would have canceled more than $400 billion in loans. Mr. Biden has instead pursued more limited measures directed at certain types of borrowers, including people on disability and public service workers, and refined existing programs.
The decision leaves in limbo millions of borrowers enrolled in a new plan, called Saving on a Valuable Education, which ties monthly payments to household size and earnings.
The emergency application was one of two related to the program that the justices decided on Wednesday. The brief order did not give reasons, which is typical, and no public dissents were noted.
Republican-led states had filed a number of challenges to the plan, including a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, which earlier this summer issued a broad hold on the loan plan while it considers the merits of the case.
That case could soon make its way back to the justices, who indicated that they expected the lower court to act swiftly on the matter.
The Biden administration had argued the new program was authorized by a 1993 law that allowed the secretary of education to fashion “income contingent repayment” plans. The law authorizes the secretary to determine repayment schedules based on “the appropriate portion of the annual income of the borrower.”
Over the years, the secretary has invoked that law several times to relax repayment requirements. The latest plan, the subject of the Supreme Court’s order, was the most generous one.
It reduced the required payments for undergraduate loans to 5 percent from 10 percent of the borrower’s discretionary income, and it redefined discretionary income to be above 225 percent of the poverty line. People making less than that pay nothing. Loans of $12,000 or less are canceled after 10 years — down from 20 or 25 years — so long as the borrower made payments if required to do so.
The SAVE program, issued in June 2023, was challenged nine months later by the attorneys general of 11 Republican-led states, who said it was flawed in ways similar to the one the justices rejected last year. The 1993 law, they said, contemplates repayment rather than actual or effective forgiveness.
In the administration’s Supreme Court brief in response to one of the challenges, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the new plan “relies on a different statute with different language to provide a different set of borrowers with different assistance from the one-time loan forgiveness the court held invalid.”
The old plan invoked the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, often called the HEROES Act. That law, initially enacted after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
In its decision last year, the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-to-3 vote that the 2003 law did not authorize forgiving the loans at issue there. That same day, President Biden vowed to find other ways to provide debt relief.
“Today’s decision has closed one path,” Mr. Biden said. “Now we’re going to pursue another.”
The new program was based on a federal law that contemplated reduced payments based on income.
In the Eighth Circuit lawsuit, filed in Missouri, the appeals court temporarily blocked the entire SAVE plan. The Biden administration had asked the justices earlier this month to clear the way for the plan to take effect.
The administration initially estimated that the SAVE plan would cost $156 billion over 10 years, but that amount assumed that the Supreme Court would uphold the earlier plan. The real cost of the new plan, the states challenging it said, is $475 billion over 10 years. The administration says the real number is smaller, particularly as parts of the SAVE plan have not been blocked.
Thom Hartmann is a keen observer of American politics. A prolific writer, he sees issues in historical perspective. He knows that your grandfather’s Republican Party was conservative and imbued with a sense of devotion to community and tradition. Conservatives conserve, not destroy. That party today is devoted to disruption, to destroying communities and their public schools, to protecting the billionaires, and to mocking the weak. It is not your grandfather’s Republican Party.
Thom Hartmann writes:
During the 1950s, Republicans were the party that promoted labor unions, Social Security, and a top 91% income tax bracket and 70% estate tax on the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower successfully campaigned on what we’d call a progressive agenda for re-election in 1956.
During the Reagan years, Republicans embraced Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism with its free trade, opposition to unions, ending free college, and tax cuts for the fat cats. They called themselves “the party of new ideas.” They may have done more harm than good, but for most Republicans it was a good-faith effort.
Today, they’ve pretty much given up on all of that. All they have left is cruelty.
When Governor Tim Walz gave his heartwarming acceptance speech Wednesday night here at the DNC in Chicago, his son Gus was caught on camera proudly proclaiming, through tear-streaked eyes, “That’s my dad!”
The response from Trumpy Republicans was immediate: Ann Coulter wrote, “Talk about weird.” Rightwing hate jock Jay Weber posted, “Meet my son, Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.” Trumpy podcaster Mike Crispi ridiculed Walz’s “stupid crying son,” adding, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.” Another well-known podcaster on the right, Alec Lace, said, “Get that kid a tampon already.”
Compassion for a learning-disabled child is dead on the right: all they have left is cruelty.
Ronald Reagan helped shepherd through Congress the most consequential border bill in American history, and when it needed updating Oklahoma’s Republican Senator James Lankford worked with Democrats to update it in a meaningful way. Trump demanded Republicans kill the legislation, invoking the memory of his tearing over 5,500 babies away from their mothers and trafficking them into fly-by-night “adoption” schemes (around 1000 are still missing) and his demand that the border patrol shoot immigrants in the legs.
Trump’s acolytes in Congress don’t even pretend any more to have a border policy: all they have left is cruelty.
President George HW Bush worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to unwind the USSR in the hope of creating a democratic Russia. Neither expected Vladimir Putin to turn that nation into a virtual concentration camp where gays are routinely murdered, child pornography is legal (and they’ve kidnapped over 700,000 Ukrainian children), and dissenters are tortured, poisoned, and sent to brutal Siberian gulags. Donald Trump celebrates Putin, calling his invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “savvy,” handing Putin’s ambassador a western spy and top-secret information in his first month in office, and trying to abandon America’s traditional role as a moral leader in the world.
Trump’s GOP has abandoned our founding principles: all they have left is cruelty.
During the 2020 election, Trump followers tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas, threatening to kill the occupants (which they believed included Kamala Harris). A crazed Trump supporter broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Trump tweeted a picture of the bus being attacked, writing below it, “I LOVE TEXAS!” and repeatedly makes jokes about the attack on Pelosi, as if to encourage future attacks on the families of other Democratic politicians.
Not a single elected Republican (as best as I can find with a pretty thorough web search) has condemned either: all they have left is cruelty.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis turned down federal money that would have fed 2.1 million low-income children in his state; he was one of 13 Republican governors to do the same, in a nation where one in seven children — over 11 million every year — go to bed hungry.
We are literally the only developed country in the world with a massive child hunger problem because all Republicans have left is cruelty.
When President Obama succeeded in passing and signing the Affordable Care Act, it offered every state funds to expand Medicaid to give healthcare coverage to all their low-income citizens with the federal government covering 90% of the cost. To this day, ten states under Republican control have refused to accept the money, leading to millions of preventable illnesses and early deaths.
Republican states could have joined all the Blue states and every other developed country in the world by providing universal healthcare, but refuse to because all they have left is cruelty.
When a 10-year-old girl was raped and impregnated, Republicans like Congressman Jim Jordan, Governor Kristi Noem, Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Jesse Waters, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost ridiculed the claim. When the rape and pregnancy were proven and the girl fled Ohio to a state where abortion was legal to terminate the pregnancy, Indiana’s Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita promised to launch an “investigation.”
Rokita didn’t investigate the rape, however: he instead went after the physician who performed the abortion. Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.
When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, he sent a violent mob against the US Capitol. As they tried to murder the vice president and speaker of the house, covered the walls of the building with feces and defaced priceless paintings, Trump gleefully watched on live television for over three hours while refusing to call in the national guard or take any other meaningful action.
Five civilians and three police officers died as the result of his sending that murderous mob because all he and his GOP have left is cruelty.
This week Americans saw Democrats display compassion, care, respect, and reverence for our democracy. We saw the best of this country, hope for the future, and actual plans to improve the lives of Americans.
Last month, in sharp contrast, we watched the Republican convention and saw, instead, a cavalcade of anger, bile, grievance, hate, and, of course, cruelty.
Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.
Note to Thom:
Some things you didn’t mention.
The red states that have repealed or loosened their child labor laws so that teens can work in hazardous jobs at younger ages.
The red states that overturned local laws requiring regular water breaks for laborers working outdoors in hot weather.
The red states that are defunding their public schools.
The red states that have abolished all gun laws and allow open carry of guns without a permit.
Paul Krugman, the economist who writes a regular column for the New York Times, recently explored why Republicans oppose free lunch for students. The simple answer is that it’s just plain weird. The more complex answer is that they don’t want to create an “entitlement” for children. The irony that he does not explore is why Republicans are unwilling to pay for free lunches, yet eager to pay the tuition of students who attend religious or other private schools, regardless of their family’s income.
He writes:
You could say that Tim Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with one weird trick — that is, by using that word to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance, a categorization that went viral. In his maiden campaign speech he upgraded it a bit further to “creepy and weird as hell.” (If you think that’s over the top, have you seen Trump’s bizarre rant speculating about whether Joe Biden is going to seize back his party’s presidential nomination?)
But Walz is more than a meme-maker. He has also been an activist governor of Minnesota with a strong progressive agenda. And I’d like to focus on one key element of that agenda: requiring that public and charter schools provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students.
Perhaps not incidentally, child care has long been a signature issue for Kamala Harris, and Walz’s policies may have played a role in his selection as her running mate.
In any case, free school meals are a big deal in pure policy terms. They have also met fierce Republican opposition. And the partisan divide over feeding students tells you a lot about the difference between the parties, and why you really, really shouldn’t describe the MAGA movement as “populist.”
Now, even many conservatives generally support, or at least claim to support, the idea of cheap or free lunches for poor schoolchildren. The National School Lunch Program goes all the way back to 1946, when it passed with bipartisan support and President Harry Truman signed it into law.
Why should the government help feed kids? Part of the answer is social justice: Children don’t choose to be born into families that can’t or won’t feed them adequately, and it seems unfair that they should suffer. Part of the answer is pragmatic: Children who don’t receive adequate nutrition will grow up to be less healthy and less productive adults than those who do, hurting society as a whole. So spending on child nutrition is arguably as much an investment in the future as building roads and bridges.
There’s a strong case that in general child nutrition programs more than pay for themselves by creating a healthier, higher-earning future work force. In other words, this is one area where there really is a free lunch.
Schools, then, should feed students who might otherwise not get enough to eat. But why make free meals available to all children, rather than only to children from low-income households? There are multiple reasons, all familiar to anyone who has looked into the problems of antipoverty policy in general.
First, trying to save money by limiting which children you feed turns out to be expensive and cumbersome; it requires that school districts deal with reams of paperwork as they try to determine which children are eligible. It also imposes a burden on parents, requiring that they demonstrate their neediness.
Additionally, restricting free meals to children whose parents can prove their poverty creates a stigma that can deter students from getting aid even when they’re entitled to receive it. I know about this effect from family history: My mother, who grew up in the Depression, used to talk about her shame at not being able to afford new shoes because her parents, although just as poor as her classmates’ parents, couldn’t bring themselves to apply for government assistance.
And it’s not as if feeding children is prohibitively expensive. So if you want to make sure that children get enough to eat, having schools offer free meals to all their students, without an income test, would seem to be simple common sense.
But Republicans in general aren’t on board. The Minnesota law that Walz signed passed essentially along party lines. The people behind Project 2025, in particular, don’t approve. (Yes, despite denials, Project 2025 is a very good guide to what a second Trump administration might do.) The project’s magnum opus, “Mandate for Leadership,” whose 900 pages lays out a detailed policy agenda, singles out feeding students as something that should be reined in. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs,” it warns, as if this is self-evidently a bad thing. A bit farther down, it reads, “The U.S.D.A. should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes.” I guess being hungry isn’t a problem when school is out.
Stories like this are why my hackles rise whenever people call MAGA a populist movement. The people who will almost certainly make policy if Trump wins are as committed as ever to a right-wing economic agenda of cutting taxes on the wealthy while slashing programs that help Americans in need — including programs that help children.
In addition to being cruel, this agenda tends to be unpopular. Most Americans support providing all students with meals, regardless of their income, just as most Americans now support the Affordable Care Act, which Trump will very likely again try to destroy if returned to office.
But the American right lives in an echo chamber that normalizes views on both economic and social policy that are very much at odds with what a majority of voters want. Those extreme views often fly under the radar. But sometimes they do attract attention. And when they do, many people find them … weird.
Diane Ravitch's blog 