If you are old enough to remember a different America, an America of neighborhood shops, of local bakeries, butchers, drugstores (with a soda fountain), shoe stores, bookstores, and dress shops, you may have wondered why most of them have been replaced by national chain stores and anonymous strip malls. Now we see even neighborhood public schools replaced by national charter chains, some even operated by for-profit corporations. Thom Hartmann explains the roots of this change in his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. He is releasing the book a chapter at a time on his blog, which should whet our appetite to buy and read the book. This chapter describes the legal ploy that resulted in crushing local enterprise and creating billionaires.
He writes:
Robert Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court.
In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law.
In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.
Neither of those phrases exists in any antitrust law, at least in Bork’s context. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court embraced Bork’s notion that the sole metric by which to judge monopolistic behavior should be prices that consumers pay, rather than the ability of businesses to compete or the political power that a corporation may amass.
When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, bringing with him Bork’s free market philosophy and a crew from the Chicago School, he ordered the Federal Trade Commission to effectively stop enforcing antitrust laws even within the feeble guidelines that the Supreme Court had written into law in GTE Sylvania.
The result was an explosion of mergers-and-acquisitions activity that continues to this day, as industry after industry concentrated down to two, three, four, or five major players who function as cartels. (A brilliant blow-by-blow cataloging of that decade is found in Barry C. Lynn’s book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.)
Bork’s reasoning—that antitrust law should defend only the consumer (through low prices), and not workers, society, democracy, or local communities—has become such conventional wisdom that in the 2014 Supreme Court case of FTC v. Actavis, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a virtual word-for-word parroting of Bork: “The point of antitrust law is to encourage competitive markets to promote consumer welfare.”
Barak Orbach, professor of law at the University of Arizona, is one of a small number of scholars today who are genuine experts in the field of antitrust law. In a 2014 paper published by the American Bar Association, he wondered if Bork knew he was lying when he wrote that the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act intended to reduce prices to advance “consumer welfare,” instead of protecting the competitiveness of small and local businesses, and the independence of government at all levels.
His conclusion, in “Was the ‘Crisis in Antitrust’ a Trojan Horse?” was that Bork was probably just blinded by ideology and had never bothered to go back and read the Congressional Record, which, he noted, says nothing of the kind.74
While Bork wrote that “the policy the courts were intended [by the Sherman Antitrust Act] to apply is the maximization of wealth or consumer want satisfaction,” Orbach said, “Members of Congress . . . were determined to take action against the trusts to stop wealth transfers from the public.” So much for that: today the Walton (Walmart) family is the richest in America and one of the richest in the world. They’re worth more than $100 billion, having squirreled away more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans. And they spend prodigiously on right-wing political causes, from the national to the local.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is now wealthier than any Walton; with a registered net worth of $112 billion, he is the richest single person in the world. Bezos is so rich that when he divorced his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, she received 19.7 million shares of Amazon worth $36.8 billion. She instantly became the world’s third-richest woman, and Jeff Bezos remained the world’s wealthiest man.75 While local newspapers are shutting down or being gobbled up all over the country, Bezos personally purchased the 140-year-old Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. Now Bezos, like the Walton family, can use his sub- stantial wealth to obtain political ends that protect his wealth and allow Amazon to continue to grow.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly analyzes the current moment.
She writes:
Behind the horse race–type coverage of the contest for presidential nominations, a major realignment is underway in United States politics. The Republican Party is dying as Trump and his supporters take it over, but there is a larger story behind that crash. This moment looks much like the other times in our history when a formerly stable two-party system has fallen apart and Americans reevaluated what they want out of their government.
Trump’s takeover of the party has been clear at the state level, where during his term he worked to install loyalists in leadership positions. From there, they have pushed the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and have continued to advance his claims to power.
The growing radicalism of the party has also been clear in Congress, where Trump loyalists refuse to permit legislation that does not reflect their demands and where, after they threw House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of office—dumping a speaker midterm for the first time in history—Trump lieutenant Jim Jordan (R-OH) threatened holdouts to vote him in as speaker. Jordan failed, but the speaker Republican representatives did choose, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is himself a Trump loyalist, just one who had made fewer enemies than Jordan.
The radicalization of the House conference has led 21 members of the party who gravitate toward actual lawmaking to announce they are not running for reelection. Many of them are from safe Republican districts, meaning they will almost certainly be replaced by radicals.
The Senate has tended to hang back from this radicalization, but in a dramatic illustration of Trump’s takeover of the party, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today announced he would step down from his leadership position in November. McConnell is the leading symbol of the pre-Trump party, a man whose determination to cut taxes and regulation led him to manipulate the rules of the Senate and silence warnings that Russian disinformation was polluting the 2016 campaign so long as it meant keeping a Democrat out of the White House and Republicans in control of the Senate.
The extremist House Freedom Caucus promptly tweeted: “Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine). No need to wait till November…Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.”
Trump has also taken control of the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself. On Monday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel announced that she is resigning on March 8. Trump picked McDaniel himself in 2016 but has come to blame her both for the party’s continued underperformance since 2016 and for its current lack of money.
Now Trump has made it clear he wants even closer loyalists at the top of the party, including his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. She has suggested she is open to using RNC money exclusively for Trump. This might be what has prompted the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity to pull support from Nikki Haley in order to invest in downballot races.
But the party that is consolidating around Trump is alienating a majority of Americans. It has abandoned the principles that the party embraced from 1980 until 2016. In that era, Republicans called for a government that cut taxes and regulations with the idea that consolidating wealth at the top of the economy would enable businessmen to invest far more effectively in new development than they could if the government interfered, and the economy would boom. They also embraced global leadership through the expansion of capitalism and a strong military to protect it.
Under Trump, though, the party has turned away from global leadership to the idea that strong countries can do what they like to their neighbors, and from small government to big government that imposes religious rules. Far from protecting equality before the law, Republican-dominated states have discriminated against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. And, of course, the party is catering to Trump’s authoritarian plans. Neo-nazis attended the Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago.
But these changes are not popular. Tuesday’s Michigan primary revealed the story we had already seen in the Republican presidential primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Trump won all those contests, but by significantly less than polls had predicted. He has also been dogged by the strength of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. With Trump essentially running as an incumbent, he should be showing the sort of strength Biden is showing—with challengers garnering only a few percentage points—but even among the fervent Republicans who tend to turn out for primaries, Trump’s support is soft.
It seems that the same policies that attract Trump’s base are turning other voters against him. Republican leadership, for example, is far out of step with the American people on abortion rights—69% of Americans want the right to abortion put into law—and that gulf has only widened over the Alabama Supreme Court decision endangering in vitro fertilization by saying that embryos have the same rights as children from the moment of conception. That decision created such an outcry that Republicans felt obliged to claim they supported IVF. But push came to shove today when Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to protect IVF that Republicans had previously rejected and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) killed it again.
The party has also tied itself to a deeply problematic leader. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different cases—two state, two federal—but the recently-decided civil case in which he, the Trump Organization, his older sons, and two associates were found liable for fraud is presenting a more immediate threat to Trump’s political career.
Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million; he owes the state of New York $454 million, with interest accruing at more than $100,000 a day. Trump had 30 days from the time the judgments were filed to produce the money or a bond for it. Today he asked the court for permission to post only $100 million rather than the full amount in the New York case, as required by law, because he would have to sell property at fire-sale prices to come up with the money.
In addition to making it clear to donors that their investment in his campaign now might end up in the hands of lawyers or the victorious plaintiffs, the admission that Trump does not have the money he has claimed punctures the image at the heart of his political success: that of a billionaire businessman.
Judge Anil C. Singh rejected Trump’s request but did stay the prohibition on Trump’s getting loans from New York banks, potentially allowing him to get the money he needs.
As Trump’s invincible image cracks with this admission, as well as with the increased coverage of his wild statements, others are starting to push back on him and his loyalists. President Biden’s son Hunter Biden testified behind closed doors to members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees today, after their previous key witness turned out to be working with Russian operatives and got indicted for lying.
Hunter Biden began the day with a scathing statement saying unequivocally that he had never involved his father in his business dealings and that all the evidence the committee had compiled proved that. In their “partisan political pursuit,” he said, they had “trafficked in innuendo, distortion, and sensationalism—all the while ignoring the clear and convincing evidence staring you in the face. You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies about my father because there isn’t any.”
After an hour, Democratic committee members described to the press what was going on in the hearing room. They reported that the Republicans’ case had fallen apart entirely and that Biden had had a “very understandable, coherent business explanation for every single thing that they asked for.” While former president Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself more than 440 times during a deposition in his fraud trial, Biden did not take the Fifth at all.
The discrediting of the Republicans continued later. When Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) tried to recycle the discredited claim that “$20 million flowed through” to then–vice president Biden, CNN host Boris Sanchez fact-checked him and said, “I’m not going to let you say things that aren’t true.”
That willingness to push back on the Republicans suggests a new political moment in which Americans, as they have done before when one of the two parties devolved into minority rule, wake up to the reality that the system has been hijacked and begin to reclaim their government.
But can they prevail over the extremists MAGA Republicans have stowed into critical positions in the government? Tonight the Supreme Court, stacked with Trump appointees, announced that rather than let the decision of a lower court stay in place, it would take up the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That decision means a significant delay in Trump’s trial for that attempt.
“This is a momentous decision, just to hear this case,” conservative judge Michael Luttig told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC. “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case…. Under the constitutional laws of the United States, there has never been an argument that a former president is immune from prosecution for crimes that he committed while in office.”
I am a native Texan. I was born and raised in Houston. I attended Houston public schools from kindergarten until my high school graduation. The public schools of Texas gave me a strong foundation, and I will always be grateful to my teachers and my schools.
The public schools in Texas will be harmed by vouchers. Yet Governor Greg Abbott is demanding that the Legislature endorse vouchers, so that the public will subsidize every student who goes to private and religious schools. No wonder he campaigned for vouchers by visiting private and religious schools.
Some Republican legislators know that vouchers will hurt their public schools.
Governor Abbott has spent millions of dollars to defeat those brave Republican legislators who oppose vouchers.
The primary is March 5.
Funded by oil and gas billionaires and by Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire, Abbott has tried and repeatedly failed to pass a voucher bill. He failed because these Republican legislators stood up for their communities and their public schools.
These legislators know their local teachers. They are friends and neighbors. The legislators know they are hard-working dedicated teachers. They teach the children; they don’t “indoctrinate” them, as Governor Abbott falsely claims. Many have taught in the same schools for decades, raising up the children in the way they should go.
The teachers are underpaid, and the school buildings need upgrades. But the Governor won’t put another penny into paying teachers and funding public schools unless he gets his vouchers.
In every state that has vouchers, most of them are used by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are nothing more than a public subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools.
Voucher schools are free to discriminate and are excused from all accountability.
These heroic and principled legislators deserve your thanks and your vote on March 5:
Steve Allison, District 121, San Antonio
Ernest Bailes, District 18, Shepherd
Keith Bell, District 4, Forney;
DeWayne Burns, District 58, Cleburne;
Travis Clardy, District 11, Nacogdoches
Drew Darby, District 72, San Angelo
Jay Dean, District 7, Longview
Charlie Geren, District 99, Fort Worth
Justin Holland, District 33, Rockwall
Ken King, District 88, Canadian
John Kuempel, District 44, Seguin
Stan Lambert, District 71, Abilene
Glenn Rogers, District 60, Mineral Wells
Hugh Shine, District 55, Temple
Reggie Smith, District 62, Sherman
Gary VanDeaver, District 1, New Boston
For their courage in defending their community schools, their teachers, their parents, and their students, I place them on the blog’s Honor Roll.
Jess Piper is a Democratic activist in rural Missouri. She is a fierce advocate for rural communities and public schools. She lives on a farm where she and her husband raise hogs and chickens. She blogs, she makes videos for TikTok, she tweets, she hosts a podcast called Dirt Road Democrats and is executive director of Blue Missouri. She taught American literature for 16 years. She often writes about the absurdity of vouchers and school choice. In this post, she goes to towns in her district to gather signatures to restore abortion rights in Missouri..
I live at the tippy top of NWMO on a small 7 acre farm in a 125 year old farmhouse with a few dogs, a couple cows, a gaggle of kids and grandkids, and a miniature donkey. Everyone perks up when I mention the donkey…he’s 36 inches high and his name is Augustus.
I drive across the state often these days and I am usually headed to a small town and this week was no different—I visited Chillicothe (the home of sliced bread), Carrolton, and Marceline and you’ll never guess why. I was getting rural folks and their Bible groups to sign the petition to restore abortion rights in Missouri.
Dirt Road organizing.
Missouri is in the process of putting abortion on the ballot and I have the petition—I have to tell you it’s kind of hard to get a petition, so I was excited to get them and also overwhelmed. I have to get this out to rural folks, and it’s not as easy as it would seem.
First, there is the opposition to the petition—the Missouri Right to Life (Right to force others to gestate and deliver) has a literal snitch line to report folks accepting signatures. Now, I have no idea what they plan to do if they find us accepting signatures. I was raised to take care of myself and they shouldn’t mess with me, and I’m not the least bit intimidated, but I don’t want them to harass other rural folks who are signing quietly.
Second, folks have written off my congressional district—even some progressives who need signatures on a ballot initiative. They assume that we are too red to get enough signatures, so what’s the point, right? I’ll tell you the point: it creates excitement and solidarity in rural spaces. It acts to uplift us living in among MAGA extremists. It gives us hope.
Chillicothe was my first stop, and it is a pretty big town at over 9K folks. Chilli is also known for having a “patriot” group who have been successful in putting their extremists on the local health board — they also regularly object to school library books. Folks were on long text chains to get others to the event. I was able to gather about 30 signatures on a Tuesday at 9am.
I was directing folks to the petition and how to fill it in correctly. One woman filled it out, stood up, and started texting. She told me, “I’m reminding my Bible group to come sign.”
Wait…what?
The second place I drove was Carrolton, with a population of about 3,400. Still not tiny, but small. I sat in the basement of the library for almost 2 hours with…wait for it…a local pastor. A woman pastor. She signed the petition and then stayed the length of the signing event and visited with every single person who came in. Several folks attended her church or a neighboring church.
Are you seeing a theme here?
My last stop of the day was in Marceline, population 2,100. I sat in the fire station with a local Dem organizer and we accepted signatures a few feet from the active train crossing. I met with a local candidate running for state house and again, folks signed, stood up, texted friends and relatives and their church community, and then headed back out to their farms and rural life.
This is why I organize in rural spaces across the state. This is why I drive 5 or 6 or 10 hours to meet with rural folks. They matter—we matter.
When we cede ground because it’s too red, because it’s too evangelical, because it’s too far of a drive, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s become more red, more uncontested. When we tell rural folks that their votes and signatures don’t matter because there aren’t enough of them, they agree and stop showing up. When we say Democrats and progressives support everyone, yet fail to have a presence in rural spaces, they notice…they know it’s a lie.
We can’t win Missouri if we avoid rural parts of the state. Missouri is 1/3 rural…33% of the state is outstate.
I’m here and so are thousands of my friends. If state-level organizers will remember us, we can bring sanity back to the entire state.
Yesterday the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court decided to step in and rescue Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations, agreeing to hear his claim of broad immunity and to delay his federal trial on charges of election interference stemming from his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. But it’s much worse than that. We agree with Timothy Snyder that this is no simple stalling tactic. By taking up the question of whether a single American citizen is above the law — simply by entertaining a question that shouldn’t be — the right-wing justices are undermining the legitimacy of the Court itself, and the very notion of a nation of laws.
The Supreme Court is attempting to end its own life as an institution above politics. If it has been doing moving in this direction for some time, this week it came to a head.
This can only be read as a blow to democracy itself. With this stay now in place, it’s unlikely that any trial could be concluded by (and even more likely that it will be delayed entirely until after) Election Day. Of course, at that point, should Trump win re-election, the case would not move forward at all: the Justice Department would be unlikely to pursue a case against a newly elected president, and of course in his second term Trump could stop the proceedings entirely. Which, of course, is the plan.
Heather Cox Richardson put the Alabama court decision declaring embryos to be children into historical context. The Founders did not want the nation to be controlled by theocrats. They understood the importance of separating church and state. That separation was and is important for the protection of the church from the state and for the protection of the state from the church.
She writes:
The Alabama Supreme Court on February 16, 2024, decided that cells awaiting implantation for in vitro fertilization are children and that the accidental destruction of such an embryo falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In an opinion concurring with the ruling, Chief Justice Tom Parker declared that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view of the sanctity of life” and said that “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”
Payton Armstrong of media watchdog Media Matters for America reported today that on the same day the Alabama decision came down, an interview Parker did on the program of a self-proclaimed “prophet” and Q-Anon conspiracy theorist appeared. In it, Parker claimed that “God created government” and called it “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”
Parker referred to the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theory that appeared in 1975, which claims that Christians must take over the “seven mountains” of U.S. life: religion, family, education, media, entertainment, business…and government. He told his interviewer that “we’ve abandoned those Seven Mountains and they’ve been occupied by the other side.” God “is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains right now,” he said.
While Republicans are split on the decision about embryos after a number of hospitals have ended their popular IVF programs out of fear of prosecution, others, like Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley agreed that “embryos, to me, are babies.”
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) identifies himself as a Christian, has argued that the United States is a Christian nation, and has called for “biblically sanctioned government.” At a retreat of Republican leaders this weekend, as the country is grappling with both the need to support Ukraine and the need to fund the government, he tried to rally the attendees with what some called a “sermon” arguing that the Republican Party needed to save the country from its lack of morality.
As Charles Blow of the New York Times put it: “If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.”
In the United States, theocracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand.
The framers of the Constitution quite deliberately excluded religion from the U.S. Constitution. As a young man, James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had seen his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for undermining the established church in the state. He came to believe that men had a right to the free exercise of religion.
In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
In order to make sure men had the right of conscience, the framers added the First Amendment to the Constitution. It read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”
Madison was right to link religion and representative government. In the early years of the nation, Americans zealously guarded the wall between the two. They strictly limited the power of the federal government to reflect religion, refusing even to permit the government to stop delivery of the U.S. mails on Sunday out of concern that Jews and Christians did not share the same Sabbath, and the government could not choose one over the other. The Constitution, a congressional report noted, gave Congress no authority “to inquire and determine what part of time, or whether any has been set apart by the Almighty for religious exercises.”
But the Civil War marked a change. As early as the 1830s, southern white enslavers relied on religious justification for their hierarchical system that rested on white supremacy. God, they argued, had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts.
A character in an 1836 novel written by a Virginia gentleman explained to a younger man that God had given everyone a place in society. Women and Black people were at the bottom, “subordinate” to white men by design. “All women live by marriage,” he said. “It is their only duty.” Trying to make them equal was a cruelty. “For my part,” the older man said, “I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.”
The Confederacy rejected the idea of popular government, maintaining instead that a few Americans should make the rules for the majority. As historian Gaines Foster explained in his 2002 book Moral Reconstruction, which explores the nineteenth-century relationship between government and morality, it was the Confederacy, not the U.S. government, that sought to align the state with God. A nation was more than the “aggregation of individuals,” one Presbyterian minister preached, it was “a sort of person before God,” and the government must purge that nation of sins.
Confederates not only invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in their Constitution, they established as their motto “Deo vindice,” or “God will vindicate.”
The United States, in contrast, was recentering democracy during the war, and it rejected the alignment of the federal government with a religious vision. When reformers in the United States tried to change the preamble of the U.S. Constitution to read, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the sources of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Ruler among nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union,” the House Committee on the Judiciary concluded that “the Constitution of the United States does not recognize a Supreme Being.”
That defense of democracy—the will of the majority—continued to hold religious extremists at bay.
Reformers continued to try to add a Christian amendment to the Constitution, Foster explains, and in March 1896 once again got so far as the House Committee on the Judiciary. One reformer stressed that turning the Constitution into a Christian document would provide a source of authority for the government that, he implied, it lacked when it simply relied on a voting majority. A religious amendment “asks the Bible to decide moral issues in political life; not all moral questions, but simply those that have become political questions.”
Opponents recognized this attempt as a revolutionary attack that would dissolve the separation of church and state, and hand power to a religious minority. One reformer said that Congress had no right to enact laws that were not in “harmony with the justice of God” and that the voice of the people should prevail only when it was “right.” Congressmen then asked who would decide what was right, and what would happen if the majority was wrong. Would the Supreme Court turn into an interpreter of the Bible?
The committee set the proposal aside.
Now, once again, we are watching a minority trying to impose its will on the majority, with leaders like House speaker Johnson noting that “I try to do every day what my constituents want. But sometimes what your constituents want does not line up with the principles God gave us for government. And you have to have conviction enough to stand [up] to your own people….”
Dan Rather analyzed Trump’s primary wins and spots signs that he is vulnerable because his well-defined base is limited. Due to his extremism, he is not able to have a big tent that would attract independents and even dissident Democrats. Even more telling is that Trump is not unifying the Republican Party. As soon as Trump won the South Carolina, he proclaimed that he had never seen the Republican Party more united. As Rather explains, that’s not really true.
He writes:
NBC’s “Meet The Press” this morning characterized Donald Trump’s South Carolina primary victory as “delivering a crushing blow to [Nikki] Haley in her home state on Saturday, trouncing her by 20 points with nearly 60 percent of the vote. The former president dominated nearly every key group.”
While he did indeed win handily, a deep dive into the numbers provides some interesting context.
The part of the story missing from many news reports is that Trump is slipping from his 2020 numbers. His support is strongest among his MAGA base, which pollsters put at no more than 33% of the electorate. Clearly, he will need more than MAGA to win the White House again.
President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary with 96.2% of the vote. Trump, who is essentially an incumbent up against a novice at running for national office, could not muster even 60% of his party’s vote. Exit polls from Saturday night should have GOP leaders nervous.
The makeup of South Carolina’s Republican voters does not mirror the country. They are heavily weighted with hard-right “conservatives,” older, white, male, evangelical election deniers. Trump won overwhelmingly among them. But Haley won among independents, moderates, and those who care about foreign policy. And that’s the crux of it.
To win the presidency again, Trump will need to bring all Republicans into the tent. Gallop estimates that 41% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Then it gets really tough. He has to convince a large number of independents and Democrats to vote for him. But how?
Not by favoring a 16-week national abortion ban
Not by threatening to pull out of NATO
Not by defunding Ukraine and supporting Putin’s invasion
Not by promising “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his political opponents
Not by refusing to accept the results of elections he’s lost
Not by promising to be a dictator on day one of his second term
Not by saying things like: “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me.”
Trump is winning primaries while underperforming. Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Obama and current host of “Pod Save America,” writes: “You cannot win the White House with the coalition that Trump is getting in these primaries. He must expand his coalition, persuade people who aren’t already on board and get beyond the Big Lie-believing MAGA base. Through three primary contests, Trump has gained no ground.”
Polls also indicate a majority of voters in swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he’s convicted of a crime. That could happen as soon as April or May.
As Axios writes: “If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.” Fortunately, it is not. America is a rich tapestry of heritages, races, and creeds. Immigrants have long been one of our strengths.
But the likely GOP nominee continues to feed fears about immigration using language tailored to his MAGA base. “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country,” Trump said Saturday at CPAC, a conference of extreme-right Trump supporters.
“No, Mr. Trump, they’re not,” is the answer of many Americans. There is strong public opinion that what is tearing our country apart is the divisiveness and rancor that comes from Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media machine.
The mainstream press may begin to offer more of this context and perspective as we get deeper into the presidential campaign. One of the things Steady was created to do was offer reasoned context and perspective to news stories. This writing is an example.
Trump remains a real and present threat to win the presidency again in November. But that is not assured. Not nearly, as a deep analysis of early primary results indicates.
There is still a long way to go and many rivers to cross for both major candidates.
John Thompson, historian in Oklahoma, chronicles the always interesting events in the Sooner State. He asks in this post about the role of the media in covering extremism and gross stupidity.
Since I wrote about the “Strange Irresponsible Behavior” of Oklahoma’s Republican extremists, I’ve been conversing with neighbors, reporters, and politicians, wrestling with the ways the press should be handling this issue. Will we look back on such weird stories as just “wacky” distractions from the legislative issues that reporters should be covering in a conventional manner? Or will these seemingly nutty narratives come to dwarf in terms of historical significance the narratives that the press typically focuses on? When, for instance, Gov. Kevin Stitt speaks out of both sides of his mouth about “a potential ‘force-on-force’ conflict between the South and the Biden Administration,” and joining other governors to “send our National Guard to help and to support the efforts of Governor Abbott,” was he implicitly supporting those who are calling for a civil war?
Shouldn’t the press follow the lead of The Independent and ask Stitt what he meant when he called “the clash between Texas authorities and the federal government a ‘powder keg of tension?’” So, should Stitt reveal what he meant when saying, “We certainly stand with Texas on the right to defend themselves.” And, surely the press should seek clarification as to what Stitt meant regarding the National Guard when saying, “I think they would be in a difficult situation: to protect their homeland or to follow what Biden’s saying,” and then promising that Oklahoma, along with other states, “would send our National Guard to help and to support the efforts of Governor Abbott.”
Fortunately, the rally for supporting Abbott didn’t attract the 700,000 or more persons that were sought, and didn’t respond to the Texas Proud Boys’ call for followers to “grab your guns” to stop “brown immigrant invaders.” But, the Washington Post explains, “Whether the rallies erupt or fizzle, extremism researchers say, the consequences will outlast the weekend.” Shouldn’t Stitt be pressured to comment on that appraisal? I certainly believe reporters need to explicitly ask whether saving our democracy must be our top priority.
Who knows? Had those questions been asked, maybe the press could have followed up by asking Stitt which side he would support if Vladimir Putin accepts Trump’s invitation to attack NATO?
A first step toward that goal would be to read Jill Lepore’s The Deadline, and wrestle with what would have happened if Dorothy Thompson hadn’t started the originally atypical coverage of Adolf Hitler, or if Edward R. Murrow hadn’t challenged Joe McCarthy. Lepore, the historian who writes for the New Yorker, further cited the “Golden Age” of the press in the 1960s and 70s which was started when David Halberstam ignored charges of liberal bias and reached “the high mark” of journalism when “interpretation replaced transmission, and adversarialism replaced deference,” even though it meant a writer could no longer “shake hands the next day with the man whom he had just written about.”
Led by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a few other institutions, the national press now focuses more on the interpretation of MAGA antics. It would be more risky for local journalists to place irrational assertions and legislative actions into a broader context, but since our democracy is in jeopardy, its time to move beyond coverage of routine bills as they move out of committee.
After a conversation on that subject, I got into my car and listened to NPR’s coverage of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl stories – which seemed to be the model for how reporters should cover rightwing absurdities. It began, “Swift’s popularity is being twisted into a threat by a contingent of far-right, Donald Trump-supporting conservatives who have started circulating conspiracy theories about the singer, the Super Bowl, and the 2024 election.” Supposedly, “the NFL had ‘RIGGED’ a Chiefs victory” so “Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”
NPR then placed this obviously false narrative in the context of Fox news, and “Jack Posobiec, who pushed the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory.” It further explained how such memes can endanger women’s health.
On the other hand, who knows? Maybe Swift would have led a halftime coup for Biden if the press hadn’t blown the whistle?
Seriously, why can’t all types of news outlets routinely interrogate legislative sponsors about such lies, pushing them to go on record or publicly refuse to answer questions about where did they learn about furries and the reason for wanting to use animal control to keep them out of school. Or, why the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act” should “require criminal background checks of every member of the news media;” the “licensing of journalists through the Oklahoma Corporation Commission;” the completion of a “propaganda free” training course by PragerU; and a $1 million liability insurance policy; and quarterly drug tests.
When legislators defend corporal punishment of disabled students because it’s the will of God, and requiring the teaching of creationism in classes where evolution is taught, they should have to explain the sources of their legislation, and why they think they are constitutional. Similarly, why would a legislator seek to ban “no-fault divorce,” even though the vast majority of the state’s divorces are based on that law. If every such bill would receive such scrutiny, wouldn’t the public become better prepared to vote for or against political leaders who won’t take a stand opposing the MAGA-driven divisiveness?
Or, conversely, if these bills are dismissed as merely “wacky” and allowed to spread, what will happen to the trust required for a democracy to function?
Thom Hartmann connects the dots: the Republican Party is now controlled by Vladimir Putin. The Republicans do only what is in the interest of Putin. His goal, as it was in 2016 and 2020, is to get Trump elected. Trump is subservient to Putin. Trump wants to block American aid to Putin. So does House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called a two-week recess as Ukrainian forces are running out of ammunition. How do you define GOP these days? Guardians of Putin? Goons of Putin? Other ideas?
Thom Hartmann
There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy.
Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.
Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off US aid to Ukraine.
The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”
Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who’d been feeding this phony info to “Gym” Jordan and James “Gomer Pyle” Comer is now in jail.
Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the US political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending US aid to the democracy they’ve brutally attacked.
And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda.
Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it’s becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump.
I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it weren’t for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He’d burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino.
As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policymagazine:
“By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.”
He’d been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find.
No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future.
He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis.
He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who’d been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.”
As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018:
“The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.”
Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia.
Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower.
Putin’s personal troll army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president.
Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook.
Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”
A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:
“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.
“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.
“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African-Americans.’ …
“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.
“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.
“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”
Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all mictotargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.
So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House.
Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States.
They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the US economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US.
They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions.
Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea.
Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words.
Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump.
— When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid?
— Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform?
— Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”?
— Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin?
— Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden?
— Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did?
Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?
The Network for Public Education released a report card today grading the states on their support for democratically-governed public schools. Which states rank highest in supporting their public schools? Open the report to find out.
Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Neighborhood public schools remain the first choice of the overwhelming majority of Ameri- can families. Despite their popularity, schools, which are embedded in communities and gov- erned by elected neighbors, have been the target of an unrelenting attack from the extreme right. This has resulted in some state legislatures and governors defunding and castigating public schools while funding alternative models of K-12 education.
This 2024 report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools, examines these trends, reporting on each state’s commit- ment to supporting its public schools and the children who attend them.
What We Measure
We measure the extent of privatization in each state and whether charter and voucher laws promote or discourage equity, responsibility, transparency, and accountability. We also rate them on the strength of the guardrails they place on voucher and charter systems to protect students and taxpayers from discrimination, corruption and fraud.
Recognizing that part of the anti-public school strategy is to defund public schools, we rate states on how responsibly they finance their public schools through adequate and equitable funding and by providing living wage salaries for teachers.
As the homeschool movement grows and becomes commercialized and publicly funded, homeschooling laws deserve public scrutiny. Therefore, we rate states on laws that protect children whose families homeschool.
Finally, we include a new expansive category, freedom to teach and learn, which rewards states that reject book bans, and the use of unqualified teachers, intolerance of LGBTQ stu- dents, corporal punishment, and other factors that impinge on teachers’ and students’ rights.
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