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.
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.
For those of who have watched Trump over many decades and seen him as a rich playboy who hangs out in nightclubs with a different woman on his arm every time, for those of us who know him as a publicity-seeker who used to call the tabloids and pretend to be his own PR agent hawking tips about his latest exploit, for those who remember him as a crony of Roy Cohn, the elevation to Saint of the Republican Party is incomprehensible. For those of us who watched the insurrection on January 6, the GOP adulation of Trump is baffling.
Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, attended the Republican Convention in Milwaukee and reported:
MILWAUKEE — I came to the American Heartland to cover a political convention, but all I found was a tent revival, Brother Trump’s Traveling Salvation Show.
The Republican National Convention took just minutes after Monday’s opening gavel to officially nominate its Dear Leader for the third and probably not the last time. The roll call, once the highlight of past conventions, is now an empty ritual. A party platform that was probably written on a Mar-a-Lago cocktail napkin was rammed though with no dissent. RNC schedulersquickly liberated all four nights for the only real purpose they had here in Wisconsin.
The undulating white hats that staked a claim for Texas; the buttoned-down accountants under their ill-fitting, newly purchased red MAGA hats; and the tightly-wound blonde women in their adult cheerleading outfits — all of them populated the crowded floor of the Fiserv Forum wearing a badge that read “Delegate,” but they were only extras in the ultimate reality show. They mildly whooped for the transphobic jokes and Second Amendment bravado of faceless GOP Congressional candidates but by 8 p.m. Central most were sucked by a cosmic force toward the back corner of the floor, iPhones aloft to capture a moment of political transubstantiation.
It reaches fever pitch as the Village People’s gay disco anthem “Y.M.C.A.” floods the massive basketball arena, with images of the Leader’s goofball dancing on a big screen. A house band segues into The Romantics’ “What I Like About You” as he finally enters the long tunnel and climbs to his seat, white bandage covering the stigmata of his right ear, which bled from Butler, Pa. to Milwaukee for the salvation of America and this delirious throng.
In the minutes that follow, vanquished rivals like Nikki Haley or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plead for mercy by pledging their undying fealty. The faithful thank their God for intervening Saturday to save Trump and save America. Eventually, the speeches all start sounding like a riff on The Manchurian Candidate: “Donald J. Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
But the camera is drawn, like a moth to flame, to Trump — head-cocked, absorbing the adulation, probably hoping the TV talking heads are speculating wildly about this obviously changed man. Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for — unity — and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown.
“It seems that our party is really getting unified quite well,” Daniel Bobay, an ex-Californian who retired near Sulphur Springs, Texas, and was attending his first RNC as an alternate delegate, told me inside the Fiserv Forum. It was a variation of a quote I heard again and again and again. Bobay said he hopes the Trump shooting will reduce overheated rhetoric — but only from the media, and not especially from Republicans. “That’s always been the message,” he said with a slight chuckle, referring to tough talk on immigration. “You can’t only build half the wall, or deport only half the people.”
Like any cult, the real mysticism in Milwaukee was the things that went unsaid. I never thought I’d see a four-day national celebration of a presidential candidate who just 45 days earlier had been convicted on 34 felony charges, stemming from his efforts to win the 2016 election by paying off the porn star who would later testify she had sex with him.
Any need to “tone it down” or “lower the national temperature” after Saturday’s shooting in Butler doesn’t undo the fact that all of those disqualifying things have happened. But here’s the other thing: Nobody at the RNC was really toning it down or lowering the temperature. Instead, it was like a weeklong heat dome of baseless accusation settled over eastern Wisconsin.
The harsh tone was set early on Monday, when Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson welcomed the faithful to his home state by declaring “the Democrat agenda, their policies, are a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people.” Johnson then claimed that “the wrong speech” had been stuck into the teleprompter.
Really? In that case, the teleprompter guy must have brought all the wrong speeches. Because if there was some kind of memo about a new GOP message of peace, love, and understanding, it was not widely circulated. As I looked on from the upper deck Tuesday night, I heard a string of “everyday Americans” present a nonstop saga of murder, rape, and drug-related deaths. I wasn’t sure at times if I was watching the RNC or if Comcast had reactivated FEARnet. While some of the crimes were committed by undocumented migrants and others they sought to blame on liberal prosecutors, these truly awful, heartbreaking incidents were always tied back to President Joe Biden.
“I hold Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — the border czar, what a joke — and every Democrat who supports open borders, responsible for the death of my son,” a Southern California mom named Anne Fundner, who lost her 15-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose, told the delegates. Fundner burst into tears while the crowd erupted in chants of “Joe must go!” It was a moment which, like so many at the RNC, turned only emotional dials, without context about any link between Biden’s actual policies — or Trump’s, for that matter — and the calamity that befell Fundner’s son.
And look, no one expects convention goers to mount the RNC podium and admit that Biden’s border policies — which refugee advocates say are too strict and too similar to what Trump did — and his recent curbs on asylum have brought southern border crossings to their lowest levels of the 2020s, But did anyone expect that emotional dog-whistle speeches like Fundner’s would be greeted with delegates waving pre-made placards, “Stop Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”
Did they bring “the wrong signs,” just like Johnson brought “the wrong speech”? Or is this how the Republican Party lowers the temperature, even as it commits a type of stochastic terrorism by describing the most awful rapes and murders and telling America: Biden did this? Their version of “tone it down” is…”bloodbath”? Seriously? And yet when I walked around the inner bowels of the Fiserv Forum, RNC delegates swore that only Democrats are responsible for violent rhetoric.
“The level of violent rhetoric on the left has been escalating for years — they’re awful,” Bob Witsenhausen, the GOP county chair of Santa Fe, N.M., an alternate delegate wearing a red MAGA hat autographed by Laura Loomer, told me. He insisted that the “bloodbath” signs were OK because they address undocumented migrants — but he claimed Biden is “trying to label every MAGA Republican as a domestic terrorist.” He slammed Black Lives Matter but when I asked about the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, he replied with debunked tales about undercover FBI and “antifa” infiltrators. “Jan. 6 was a set up. Anybody who has their eyes open can see that.”
But paranoia strikes deep. Big-time Republicans here in Milwaukee like Donald Trump Jr. and the veep pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, both said in interviews that “they” had tried to kill the GOP nominee in Butler County. Wait, I thought the GOP absolutely hates “preferred pronouns.” Why are they calling a 20-year-old registered Republican male “they”? What’s more outrageous — that Republicans only want the rhetoric cooled off toward them? Or that the elite media is letting them get away with it?
The bubble of disinformation walled off in downtown Milwaukee from the rest of America by a maze of concrete barriers could be suffocating at times. I kept wondering one thing: What would the great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson have made of all of this? How long before he started seeing hideous green lizards crawling from underneath the MAGA hats of these rhinestone cowboys, before the numbing conformity revealed the psychedelic terror of the grim American future that crawls just underneath the surface?
But even if everything they said here about Biden and his porous border were actually true, there still wouldn’t be enough illicit pharmaceuticals to satisfy the Hunter S. Thompson of 1972, or to make sense of this Republican Kool-Aid acid test. Besides, America needs less hallucination and more clarity.
The 2024 RNC is indeed all about unity, but only the creepiest and most cultist kinds. I saw unity of fear, in a party of ritual humiliation where dissenters like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney are tossed down the memory hole. I saw the unity of people professing their love of community and a so-called “real America” that looks like the floor of the Fiserv Forum, overwhelmingly white, with any “different” folks pushed down the escalators.
We should be worried about the far right’s Project 2025, but we should be horrified by what we’re seeing right now in 2024, right here in the all-American city of Milwaukee. The cult of personality around Donald Trump is already creating its own reality, starting with his campaign’s refusal to release any medical information about his treatment or prognosis after Saturday’s shooting.
Monday’s shock cancellation of MSNBC’s Morning Joe proved that Big Media can be cowed from asking any tough questions that might pierce this bubble. The mostly desolate city blocks here — with cops on bicycles and helicopters and in large gaggles of officers on street corners — feel like a sneak peek at what Trump has in store for Democratic-run cities if he wins in November.
On Tuesday afternoon, five members of the RNC’s massive security force — imported from Columbus, Ohio, patrolling in a unfamiliar neighborhood one mile away from the Fiserv Forum — confronted a 43-year-old homeless man wielding a knife in an apparent altercation and killed him. The incident is still under investigation, but it felt like an opening volley of a Trump presidency that promises to send law enforcement and even troops into cities like Milwaukee, to round up the homeless or knock on the doors of undocumented migrants.
“Had that been Milwaukee PD, that man would be alive right now,” a neighborhood resident, David Porter, told the Huffington Post. “I know that because they know him.” You could argue that the homeless man, Samuel Sharpe, from the wrong side of the concrete barriers, is the first victim of a Trump restoration. And as the cult of Donald Trump swoons and sways toward November with little resistance, you can probably guarantee he won’t be the last.
Dan Rather is gobsmacked by the short memories of the delegates at the RNC. How could they have wiped their memories of the insurrection of January 6? How could they take pride in nominating a convicted felon? How could they opine for the Trump economy when Biden’s economy has been so successful? How could they endorse a man who still insists that he won in 2020 without a scintilla of evidence? Sore loser.
At their convention in Milwaukee, Republicans see themselves as celebrating what they are convinced is going to be not only a win in November, but an overwhelming one. Among delegates and others on the convention floor and around the hall, there is much chatter about an “avalanche” building.
This, as they have nominated for president a man who tried to overthrow our government.
Their hope is that a majority of voters will simply forget all Donald Trump has done to help himself and hurt this country. That strikes many Americans as falling in the narrow space between revolting and appalling.
And my goodness, the lies are flying fast and furious at the Republican fantasy convention. This glitzed-up affair is full of speeches that don’t even come close to the truth. Here’s how bad it is: Some major news organizations (although unfortunately not all) are fact-checking the speeches live, calling out the lies in real time.
But it’s more than that. Republicans must believe Americans are in a mood to forgive and forget. To forgive the insurrection of January 6 and forget the fact that the former president kept top-secret documents strewn about Mar-a-Lago like last month’s junk mail, among many other indiscretions.
How much airtime and how many column inches will be devoted this week to what the previous president has done to harm our democracy? My guess is almost none. Instead there will be a celebration, one devoid of context. It will be an anointing without proper perspective and analysis. And there will be misleading speech after misleading speech.
Tip of the Stetson to The Washington Post and The New York Times, whose fact-checkers are calling out a myriad of false claims. MSNBC is doing the same in real time. CNN is airing a fact-checking segment after the convention coverage. Unsurprisingly, Fox “News” is airing live speeches unchallenged and unchecked.
So far, the speeches have been riddled with stunning yet emphatically stated lies. Trump, the liar-in-chief, is getting a run for his money in the telling of tales. Over two days, the Post’s fact-checkers have found that convention speakers have made false claims about border crossings, gas prices, fentanyl, tax cuts, Vice President Kamala Harris, peace during Trump’s presidency, voting by migrants, energy independence, the relative wealth of young Americans, and Easter Sunday.
The lies and misinformation are meant to rile and to scare. Texas Senator Ted Cruz actually said this out loud from the convention podium: “Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
And then there’s the old chestnut, election denialism. According to the Post, 62 convention speakers have previously questioned President Biden’s 2020 election win.
Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have capitulated, forgiving Trump for his miserable and untruthful treatment of them when they were running against him. They both gave speeches endorsing him on Tuesday night.
And don’t forget House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the Republican Party is “the law and order team,” as it nominates a convicted felon.
It is no secret that the political nominating conventions lost their significance decades ago. Today, they are nothing more than hour upon hour of campaign advertising, which makes them a great place to court undecided voters. This MAGA convention will be hard-pressed to appeal to middle-of-the-roaders. Republicans can no longer claim to be the party of Lincoln or even of Reagan. It is wholly the party of Trump and his MAGA extremist followers. Their newly anointed vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, is even more extreme on issues like gun control and abortion than Trump.
Vance and the convention speakers are talking some about America’s need for unity, and that’s good, if they actually mean it. But after only two days, they seem to have abandoned the calls for unity and reverted back to the MAGA talking points. Against the backdrop of Republicans celebrating in Milwaukee, let’s hope that most of the rest of the country gives itself a gut check on Trump’s record and the reality of what his victory in November would mean.
Thom Hartmann explains here the importance of one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent cases, in which the extremist majority overturned what is known as “the Chevron Deference.” When I first read about this decision, it sounded bad—it basically strips federal agencies of their regulatory powers—but I didn’t realize how bad this decision was the future of the nation until I read Hartmann’s article. He summarized the decision in this way: “The billionaires and polluters who bribed SCOTUS Republicans just legalized poisoning our children and grandchildren.”
In 1904, O. Henry coined the phrase “banana republic” to describe a country where the government supports big business for the exclusive benefit of the morbidly rich. A government of, by, and for what that generation called the “fatcats” or the “robber barons.”
The banana republic-ication of America just kicked into high gear, and, curiously, there’s been a virtual mainstream media blackout about it.
Here’s how it’s happening.
When Steve Bannon was in the Trump White House, he declared one of their goals was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” That same type of language also appears in Project 2025.
Now, fewer than two weeks ago, the six Republicans on the Supreme Court began that process by kneecapping the ability of regulatory agencies to protect the American people from out-of-control polluters, rip-off banks and insurance companies, Big Pharma, and hundreds of other industries and massive corporations that put profits above humans.
They did it by blowing up the Chevron Deference. It’s part of their long-term commitment to turning America into a billionaire- and corporate-run banana republic with an autocrat as president.
The case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ends the power of most regulatory agencies that are so hated by America’s most exploitative industries and the rightwing billionaires they’ve made.
As Senators Whitehouse, Hirono, Feinstein, and Warren noted:
“This case is the product of a decades-long effort by pro-corporate interests to eviscerate the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, to the detriment of the American people.”
So, how did the Supreme Court put the EPA and other regulatory agencies functionally out of business?
It has to do with something called the Chevron deference, a policy established by the Court decades ago to protect just such agencies.
Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):
1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.
2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit airborne pollutants, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak or pour poisons into our atmosphere, waters, etc.
3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.
4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the deadly emissions begin to drop.
This is how it worked, for example, with regard to CO2 until June of last year, a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established the Chevron deference to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.
Functionally, this process dates back to 1887, when Congress established America’s first regulatory agency — the Interstate Commerce Commission — to prevent railroads from ripping off shippers and passengers.
It was nailed into law and doctrine with the Chevron deference, articulated by the Supreme Court in 1984, reflecting a century-and-a-half of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence. It says that once a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior, they then have the legal authority to regulate and the courts should “defer” to the agency (thus the “deference” in the doctrine that emerged from the ruling when Chevron tried to negate an EPA ruling in 1984).
Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.
Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch (the son of Reagan’s EPA Administrator, Anne Gorsuch, who resigned in disgrace after trying to destroy the agency — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision, taking the first big bite out of the Chevron deference.
Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2” but instead let the EPA itself determine what pollutants are dangerous to America and the planet, the agency lacks that power to regulate CO2. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision two years ago.
The coal, oil, and natural gas industries have been popping champagne corks for two years now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet and the violence of our weather.
In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others) that brought that case and then brought this year’s Loper v Raimondo.
And, of course, there’s Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but, since being wined and dined by rightwing billionaires, in 2020 wrote:
“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”
Giving us a clue to how this went down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 in West Virginia; all 3 Democratic appointees opposed the decision.
“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change…yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency…the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must now be done by Congress and the courts rather than administrative regulatory agencies.
As if Congress and the courts had the time and staff.
As if they was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings.
As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action — or those billionaires wouldn’t lavish more gifts on Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh even if it did.
Republicans on the Supreme Court succeeded in dancing to the tune of the billionaire’s fossil fuel network in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.
In the Loper v Raimondo case, however, the Court explicitly expanded that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every decision by every regulatory agency established since the last decades of the 19th century.
They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress or the courts themselves.
A Congress where arcane rules and gerrymandering have given Republicans the ability to block pretty much any legislation their billionaire patrons pay them to block. And courts filled with lawyers who never set foot in a science classroom.
So now, starting just hours after the Loper Bright ruling, those industries and companies that have chafed under rules and regulations protecting us are on the march. They hope to rule the new banana republic the GOP envisions for us.
So far in the past two weeks, federal courts have stripped over 4 million Texas workers (and soon to be all Americans) of Department of Labor rules requiring overtime payments. It happened hours after the SCOTUS ruling, specifically referencing that ruling.
In Kansas on July 2nd, a federal judge ruled that Title IX “gender identity” non-discrimination protections promulgated by the Department of Education no longer apply to queer students, with the judge specifically citing and quotingLoper Bright:
“The Supreme Court recently held that [this] court ‘need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.’ Loper Bright Enter. v. Raimondo. [This] court must exercise its ‘independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires.’”
It’s been fewer than two weeks since the Court accomplished what Trump and Project 2025 publicly aspired to, but the floodgates have opened.
Dozens of other challenges to protective regulations are already in the works, including, but not limited to:
“[R]egulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), healthcare and product reimbursement, white collar enforcement and investigations, intellectual property, Federal Trade Commission and antitrust enforcement, international trade and national security regulation, public company disclosures, environmental regulation, government contracting, business transactions, and litigation….”
Thousands more will soon clog the federal courts (including the legal status of mifepristone and birth control). The six Republicans on the Supreme Court have unleashed a legal tsunami that, if not reversed by Congress or through expanding the Court, threatens to take Americans back to 1876, when morbidly rich robber barons, landlords, and employers could rip off and poison Americans with impunity.
It’s past time to stand up and speak out, and Dick Durbin’s Senate Judiciary Committee is the logical place to start with subpoeas to bare this Court’s naked corruption. If you agree, you can find Durbin’s phone numbers and addresses here and a list of the Committee’s members here.
And, of course, we must vote a straight Democratic ticket this November.
Every day that goes by without these corrupt judges being held to account by the Senate is another day closer to the end of the functional “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people,” and our final transition into a genuine, and perhaps irreversible, banana republic.
David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. His views evolved, and he is now a Never-Trumper. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where this article appeared.
Frum wrote:
When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”
Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.
Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.
It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.
Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptlyturned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.
Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.
One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.
Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.
The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.
The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subordinated to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.
Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.
But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.
Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.
On Monday, Judge Aileen “Loose” Cannon issued a mind-exploding ruling dismissing the espionage and obstruction case against Donald Trump. Her reason? The appointment of the Special Counsel was not legally authorized.
Let me first say this. Her ruling flies in the face of every legal precedent. No less than eight courts have weighed in on this question before and found to the contrary. Yet somehow Judge Cannon has defied all that legal weight and ruled against the U.S. government.
The timing of the ruling is also very suspect. Judge Cannon has been sitting on the motion to dismiss for 144 days. Yet she issued her ruling on the first day of the Republican National Convention? This smells like legal mischief. She is raising her hand for a quid pro quo appointment to a higher bench during a possible second Trump administration.
In today’s piece, I’ll walk through why Judge Cannon’s ruling is far outside of anything we have ever seen on this question. But while precedent would dictate that she should be reversed by the 11th Circuit, she could theoretically still prevail, setting up a split in the circuits for the Supreme Court to decide. And the current High Court has shown it doesn’t give a damn about decades of precedent. Indeed, that is Cannon’s likely gambit, and it is a dangerous one.
But if she loses, as is likely, she could also pay a heavy consequence: a reassignment of the case to another judge because of her clear bias for Trump.
Why she’s wrong
The language of both the Constitution and the authorizing legislation make clear that the Special Counsel is something the Executive Branch, via its Justice Department, may appoint.
Jack Smith argued that Congress vested the appointment of “inferior Officers” like the Special Counsel in 28 U.S.C. § 533(4), in which Congress authorized the Attorney General to appoint officials “to conduct such other investigations regarding official matters under the control of the Department of Justice…as may be directed by the Attorney General.”
Pretty damn clear if you ask me.
Before jumping into the legal arguments, it’s important to recognize how long and time-honored the tradition is of appointing Special Counsel to handle politically sensitive matters. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed one some 150 years ago in 1875 during the Whiskey Ring scandal, where distillers bribed Treasury officials to increase profits and evade taxes.
In the 1920s, there was a Special Counsel for the Teapot Dome scandal, where Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall became the first cabinet member ever sent to prison after he accepted bribes in exchange for petroleum leases.
The question of the Special Prosecutor’s authority in the Watergate investigation was first broached by the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Nixon. (Special Counsel was previously termed “Special Prosecutor.”) In that case, the Supreme Court unanimously signed off on the Special Prosecutor’s authority to issue a subpoena to Nixon for tapes of conversations.
Yet Judge Cannon, in her infinite wisdom, decided that U.S. v. Nixon was mere “dictum,” meaning reasoning not essential to the decision before her. She wrote that because Nixon never actually contested the Special Prosecutor’s validity, the question was not squarely before the Supreme Court.
Come on, Aileen.
It’s clear that the Supreme Court at least approved of the Special Counsel’s very existence. Otherwise, why even consider whether he could legally subpoena the President? Nixon didn’t challenge the very existence of the Special Counsel because it’s crystal clear that the Special Counsel was legally authorized, and no one on Nixon’s team even presumed to challenge the validity of the appointment.
Judge Cannon also ignored another Supreme Court precedent from 1988, Morrison v. Olson, which upheld a law called the Independent Counsel Act. Prosecutors have cited that decision over the decades to consistently argue that special counsels did not violate the separation of powers. Cannon rejected this argument, however, ruling that the statute it upheld had lapsed.
But Garland had cited four other statutes enacted by Congress—including the one discussed at the top of this section—that broadly authorized him to make Smith’s appointment. Yet Judge Cannon believes she somehow knows better than Congress about how to go about actually authorizing the appointment by statute.
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Matthew Stone of Education Week described the plans for K-12 education in a second Trump term, as they appear in Project 2025, a document written by hundreds of former Trump officials. The 44-page education section emphasizes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, distributing its functions to other agencies, converting categorical funds (like Title I for low-income children) into block grants, and rooting out “critical race theory” and any recognition of the existence of LGBT students. The document emphasizes the primacy of parental rights.
Trump has distanced himself from the document, because its recommendations are so radical, but it was prepared under the watchful eye of Kevin Roberts, president of the ultra-rightwing Heritage Foundation. Roberts is a close associate of Trump’s.
Stone wrote:
What would Donald Trump do in the realm of K-12 if voters return the former president to the White House?
He and his campaign haven’t outlined many specifics, but a recently published document that details conservative plans to completely remake the executive branch offers some possibilities. Among them:
Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.
The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.
The agenda is designed to be ready for a conservative president to implement at the start of a new administration next year, depending on the outcome of November’s election.
Project 2025 involves former Trump administration officials and other allies of the former president, as well as dozens of aligned advocacy organizations. One of those is Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based group that rose to national prominence fighting school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols and has endorsed conservative school board candidates across the country in recent years.
But because he’s released little in the way of detailed plans, Project 2025’s 44-page agenda for the U.S. Department of Education offers the clearest picture yet of the education priorities Trump could pursue in a second term, and how a second Trump administration could use the federal government to advance conservative policies like private school choice and parents’ rights that have taken root in many Republican-led states.
Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because it is so radical. But no one takes his protestations seriously.
Will Saletan describes how the GOP is not only a Trump party but is now fully isolationist. Saletan writes for The Bulwark, which is a Never Trumper site with some of the best political writing on the web. Trump’s friendship with Putin must frighten our European allies. Trump’s return will destabilize Europe and leave our allies to Putin’s tender mercies.
He writes:
THE OPENING NIGHT OF THE 2024 Republican National Convention sent a clear signal: The balance of power within the GOP has shifted. This is now an isolationist party. And if Republicans win this year’s presidential election, the first victim of this retreat from the world will be Ukraine.
The party’s base was already moving in this direction. In recent polls, most Republicans—unlike most Democrats and independents—have consistently said that the United States is giving too much support to Ukraine. The gap between the parties is enormous, with Republicans about 40 points less supportive than Democrats.
A few hours before the primetime speeches began on Monday, Donald Trump announced his running mate: Senator J.D. Vance. Trump is already well known as a Putin sympathizer and opponent of aid to Ukraine; his selection of Vance reinforces that disposition. Vance was by far the most anti-Ukraine candidate on Trump’s vice-presidential short list. As a senator, he has fought against aid to Ukraine and has made clear that he isn’t particularly interested in defending Europe. Two years ago, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vance shrugged, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
The convention’s organizers gave a coveted evening speaking slot to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ukraine’s fiercest opponent in the House. Greene doesn’t just oppose aid to Ukraine; she also parrots Russian smears against its government. In her prepared remarks, Greene denounced “globalists” and protested that “the Democrats spent over $175 billion of your tax dollars to secure Ukraine’s borders.” The delegates—not waiting for her next line, about how the money wasn’t being spent on a wall to seal the Mexican border—immediately began to boo.
In his own primetime address, tech investor and CEO David Sacks went further. He blamed President Biden for Russia’s invasion.
He provoked—yes, provoked—the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion. Afterward, he rejected every opportunity for peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after it broke out. . . .
Hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars have gone up in smoke. President Biden sold us this new forever war by promising it would weaken Russia and strengthen America. Well, how does that look today? Russia’s military is bigger than before, while our own stockpiles are dangerously depleted. Every day, there are new calls for escalation, and the world looks on in horror as Joe Biden’s demented policy takes us to the brink of World War III.
This speech—presumably cleared for delivery by the convention’s organizers—explicitly shifted blame from Putin to America. In effect, it excused Putin by faulting Biden for every stage of the crisis: for causing the invasion, for risking escalation, and for failing to agree to Putin’s conditions for ending the war. It’s particularly rich that Sacks said we should give up on Ukraine because our military stockpiles are depleted—after Trump, Vance, Greene, and other Republicans opposed Ukraine-aid legislation to replenish those stockpiles.
Sacks also boasted that Trump, unlike Biden, would be
a president who understands that you build the most powerful military in the world to keep America safe, not to play the world’s policeman; a president who is willing to talk to adversaries as well as friends, because that is the only way to make peace; a president who will stand up to the warmongers instead of empowering them.
“A president who is willing to talk to adversaries” was an obvious allusion to Putin. He’s the only U.S. adversary—particularly in a context where peace might have to be discussed—with whom Trump, unlike Biden, is known to be friendly.
Half an hour after that speech, Trump arrived at the convention. As the crowd cheered, he stood in a row of VIPs in front of his family. To Trump’s left stood Vance. To his right stood Rep. Byron Donalds, a consistent opponent of aid to Ukraine. And next to Donalds, basking in Trump’s glow and the delegates’ adoration, stood the most avidly pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine propagandist in right-wing media: Tucker Carlson.
This is the Republican party in 2024. Two years after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as Russia continues to kill civilians, seize land, and threaten Europe, the GOP has opened its convention with an emphatic message. To American isolationists—and to the Kremlin—the signal is: We are your party.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, brings us up to date with the latest shenanigans of Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters. Recently, he mandated that the Bible be taught in the state’s classrooms. Now Walters has appointed a list of rightwing luminaries to rewrite the state’s social studies curriculum. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Walters proves that it can.
John Thompson writes:
KOSU’s Beth Wallace reports that the Executive Review Committee assembled by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters features prominent conservatives, including Dennis Prager of PragerU, David Barton of the Christian Nationalist organization, Wallbuilders, and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.” She then reminds readers that, “The Heritage Foundation is the think tank behind Project 2025, a movement that proposes to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.”
More information was provided to NBC’s Tyler Kingkade and Marissa Parra during their interview with Walters about his plans for transforming school curriculums. They reported that “Oklahoma educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.” Ryan Walters said that those teachers would “face the same consequences as one who refuses to teach about the Civil War. The punishment could include revocation of their teaching license.”
Moreover, Walters expressed confidence “that his order will survive legal challenges because of the Justices then-President Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court.” And if Trump is elected, “it will help us move the ball forward, even more so than this.”
Until recently, Dennis Prager was the best known rightwinger selected for Walters’ committee. The Hill’s Lexi Lonas explained that Prager’s so-called education group “focused on teaching conservative principles. The conservative platform has been made its way into multiple states, with videos such as ‘Was the Civil War About Slavery?’ and ‘The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party.’”
National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty referred to another committee member, David Barton, in a very different way, as “the most important Evangelist You’ve Never Heard Of.” Hagerty explained that Barton collected 100,000 documents and, “He says they prove that the Founding Fathers were deeply religious men who built America on Christian ideas — something you never learn in school.” Barton argued that the Constitution isn’t a secular document because it “is laced with biblical quotations.”
However, NPR “looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out.” The Constitution had “no mention of God or religion except to prohibit a religious test for office.” Then Hagerty quoted, “John Fea, chairman of the history department at evangelical Messiah College,” who said, “Barton is peddling a distorted history that appeals to conservative believers.”
Hagerty also fact-checked Barton’s claim that President Thomas Jefferson “who owned nearly 200 slaves — was a civil rights visionary,” and he had plans that “would’ve ended slavery really early on,” and “they would have gone much more toward civil rights.” Barton said that Virginia law “prohibited Jefferson from freeing his slaves during his lifetime.” When that statement was shown to be false, Barton said that, “Jefferson could not afford to free his slaves.”
So, David Barton and Dennis Prager clearly aren’t qualified to recommend history curriculums, but the most dangerous member of the committee is Kevin Roberts, who is a driving force in the Christian Nationalist Project 2025, which is a detailed game plan for a Trump administration for dismantling the federal government’s administrative institutions. It seems obvious that his goal for the Oklahoma Executive Review Committee is to dismantle public education.
The Washington Post reports that Roberts recently said of Project 2025, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts told the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that “he views Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’” Garcia-Navarro said that Project 2025 was:
A transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power.
Roberts has praised Hungary’s authoritarian, Christian Nationalist Viktor Orban, adding that “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” He’s also said that he wants to “destroy the administrative state,” and defeat “the secret Communist movement in America.”
And since he is serving on Walters’ committee for rewriting history, it is noteworthy that Roberts said that Joe McCarthy “largely got things right.”
When asked if he believes that President Biden won the 2020 election, Roberts replied, “No.”
And that brings us to the reason why Rex Huppke writes in the Oklahoman:
Project 2025 is a governing blueprint designed by a collection of former Trump administration officials who seem to have looked at Hitler’s path to power in 1930s Germany and thought, ‘Cool!’
Huppke refers to Project 2025, as “a painstakingly detailed and hellishly authoritarian plan for a second Trump presidency.” He notes that “according to The Heritage Foundation itself,” Trump “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations.”
I would just add that the leader of Project 2025, and his allies, clearly see Ryan Walters’ Executive Review Committee as one part of their plan.
The latest poll from Marist/NPR/PBS had good news for Biden and bad news for Trump: the public does not like liars. Being a liar is worse than being old. Note to Biden: Keep reminding people about Trump’s nonstop lying.
Greg Sargent writes for The New Republic:
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
A new Marist poll takes the novel step of asking registered voters which is more off-putting in an occupant of the Oval Office: dishonesty or excessive age. The results are surprising, and along with other polling along these lines, it should influence how Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s relative qualifications for the presidency are covered from here on out.
The poll asked: Which is more concerning in a president, someone who doesn’t tell the truth, or someone who might be too old to serve? The results were lopsided: By 68 to 32 percent, respondents were more concerned about the lying than the aging. Given the relentless media focus on presidential age of late, that’s simply remarkable.
While the poll doesn’t directly compare Trump and Biden on that particular question, it also finds that 52 percent of Americans say Biden has the “character to serve as president,” whereas only 43 percent say this about Trump. Fifty-six percent say Trump lacks the character to serve, which surely reflects public perceptions of Trump’s dishonesty.
The new Marist poll, by the way, also shows Biden leading Trump by 50 to 48 percent. But that’s out of sync with polling averages, so we should be cautious about that finding. Still, even if the overall poll is off by a few points, the numbers on dishonesty and age remain striking.
Trump was probably the most dishonest president in U.S. history. His lies and distortions topped 30,000 during his presidency, accordingto The Washington Post. That has continued unabated: CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tallied up over 30 lies from Trump at the recent presidential debate, while Biden’s falsehoods amounted to maybe a third of that. Critically, many of Trump’s whoppers were far more gargantuan lies—such as the claim that Democratic states execute babies—leading Dale to describe Trump’s lying as “staggering.”
Voters grasp Trump’s world-historical levels of dishonesty. This week’s Pew poll found that only 36 percent of voters view Trump as “honest.” By contrast, 48 percent view Biden that way—not good enough, clearly, but Biden’s large advantage here is especially notable given that as president, he has been subjected to a far harsher media spotlight for the last four years.
What the new Marist poll adds to this debate is the idea that voters see excessive lying as a serious problem in a president. Yet ask yourself this: How often is Trump’s lying covered that way? Trump’s dishonesty is rarely treated as a sign of his temperamental unfitness for the presidency. Biden’s age, of course, is constantly covered as an important factor in determining his fitness for the office. Biden’s age should be covered this way, to be clear. But so should Trump’s relentless lying.
Diane Ravitch's blog 