Since Governor Ron DeSantis was re-elected, he has been using the powers of his office to punish anyone who dares to criticize him. He fired an elected state prosecutor. He has harassed Disney, the state’s largest employer, for daring to oppose his “Don’t Say Gay” law. He has taken over the state’s only progressive college and handed it over to far-right zealots. He has banned the teaching of honest history, most especially Black history. Under his control, the state Department of Education censors textbooks that include facts he doesn’t like. Under his direction, the state board of education is whittling away the tenure and academic freedom of professors. He is replacing competent college presidents of public colleges and universities with his cronies. During the height of the pandemic, he banned any mandates for masks or vaccines. Now he is going after the elected superintendent of Leon County schools.
We have never before seen, at least in our lifetimes, a state attempt to enact fascism, day by day, week by week. I refuse to accept DeSantis’ dictatorial ways as normal. They are not normal. He personally gerrymandered the state, eliminating three of four Black members of Congress. The list of his anti-democratic actions should alarm everyone. He should turn all of us anti-fascist. The “Greatest Generation” fought a world war to defeat fascism. We must not ignore what is happening or normalize it, as the media does when they discuss DeSantis’ presidential aspirations. All I can do is shine a light. It’s up to the voters in Florida and in the GOP primaries to reject this wannabe Mussolini.
Florida officials are threatening to revoke the teaching license of a school superintendent who criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis, accusing the educator of violating several statutes and DeSantis directives and allowing his “personal political views” to guide his leadership.
Such a revocation by the state Department of Education could allow DeSantis to remove Leon County Superintendent Rocky Hanna from his elected office. The Republican governor did that last year to an elected Democratic prosecutor in the Tampa Bay area who disagreed with his positions limiting abortion and medical care for transgender teens and indicated he might not enforce new laws in those areas.
Disney also sued DeSantis this week, saying he targeted its Orlando theme parks for retribution after it criticized the governor’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law that then banned the discussion of sexuality and gender in early grades, but has since been expanded.
Hanna has publicly opposed that law, once defied the governor’s order that barred any mandate that students wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, and criticized a DeSantis-backed bill that recently passed that will pay for students to attend private school. The Leon County district, with about 30,000 students, covers Tallahassee, the state capital, and its suburbs.
“It’s a sad day for democracy in Florida, and the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, when a state agency with unlimited power and resources, can target a local elected official in such a biased fashion,” Hanna said in a statement sent to The Associated Press and other media Thursday. A Democrat then running as an independent, Hanna was elected to a second four-year term in 2020 with 60% of the vote. He plans to run for reelection next year and does not need a teacher’s license to hold the job.
“This investigation has nothing to do with these spurious allegations, but rather everything to do with attempting to silence myself and anyone else who speaks up for teachers and our public schools in a way that does not fit the political narrative of those in power,” Hanna said.
He said the investigation was spurred by a single complaint from a leader of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a conservative education group, requesting his removal.
This is one of the most disturbing articles I have read in recent memory. A prosperous county in Michigan elected a slate of evangelical rightwing fanatics to run their local government. The new majority replaced a conservative Republican board that was known for fiscal responsibility and moderate politics. The spark that lit the rebellion was a mask mandate for children during the pandemic.
WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.
In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.
The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.
As the session entered its fourth hour, Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said.
And so began a new era for Ottawa County. Across America, county governments provided services so essential that they were often an afterthought. Their employees paved roads, built parks, collected taxes and maintained property records. In an era when Americans had never seemed more divided and distrustful, county governments, at their best, helped define what remains of the common good.
Ottawa County stood out for a different reason. It was becoming a case study in what happens when one of the building blocks of American democracy is consumed by ideological battles over race, religion and American history.
Rhodea’s resolution continued on for 20 “whereases,” connecting the current motto to a broader effort that she said aimed to “divide people by race,” reduce their “personal agency,” and teach them to “hate America and doubt the goodness of her people.”
Her proposed alternative, she said, sought to unite county residents around America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity and capitalism.’”
She flipped to her resolution’s final page and leaned closer to the mic. “Now, therefore, let it be resolved that the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners establishes a new county vision statement and motto of ‘Where Freedom Rings.’”
The commission’s lone Democrat gazed out in disbelief. A few seats away, the commission’s new chair savored the moment. “There’s just some really beautiful language in this,” he said, before calling for a vote on the resolution. It passed easily. A cheer went up in the room, which on this morning was about three-fourths full, but in the coming weeks it would be packed with so many angry people calling each other “fascists,” “communists,” “Christian nationalists” and “racists” that the county would have to open an overflow room down the hall.
President Biden has said he would not compromise on raising the debt ceiling but lately he has sent mixed signals. If the debt ceiling is not raised, the United States would be forced to default on its bonds for the first time in history. Congress raised the debt ceiling three times during Trump’s term in office. Congressional Republicans passed a budget that allows increases for defense and border security but requires steep cuts in everything else. Trump, the titular leader of the Republican Party, said at his New Hampshire town hall, that the U.S. should default on its debt, even though most economists predict that a default would likely precipitate a deep recession, with global consequences. Trump once called himself “the king of debt,” so he has no fear of the consequences, which would hurt Biden in 2024.
For months, President Biden had a consistent line on the debt ceiling: He would accept only a clean increase, without conditions. This was the lesson from the Obama administration, it was thought, learned at great expense when President Obama tried to negotiate with Tea Party Republicans in 2011 to get a grand bargain to cut the deficit. The result was the budget “sequester,” which badly eroded the federal government and elongated the agonizingly slow economic recovery. That’s why Obama stood his ground in 2013, and Republicans—eventually—backed down, getting essentially nothing out of the eventual debt ceiling increase.
But now all that is out the window. With the June 1 X-date approaching, the Washington media clamoring for Biden to cave, and administration officials working themselves into an anxious fit over potential executive actions to nullify the ceiling, it seems President Dark Brandon is returning to be old Conciliatory Joe. The man himself telegraphed this in a speech in New York last week that was designed to hammer Republicans over the debt ceiling, saying “we should be cutting spending and lowering the deficit without a needless crisis, in a responsible way.”
Reuters and Politico report that the White House is preparing to offer concessions in the form of cutting discretionary spending to the level of fiscal year 2022, and then capping the rate of increase at 1 percent per year for an indeterminate period, maybe two years. There would be other parts to the compromise, including rescinding some COVID aid and some bargain on permitting reform, but as far as spending, the discretionary caps would be the major piece.
This is a disastrous move. Politically, it reinforces the precedent that Republicans can extract concessions through legislative terrorism, and by signaling weakness and timidity in the Democratic leadership, it will further enable GOP extremism. If Republicans control either chamber of Congress next time the ceiling is hit—a high likelihood given how bad the Senate map is in 2024—then they’re virtually certain to take the debt ceiling hostage again.
But the practical consequences will also be terrible. We don’t know the details yet, but returning to fiscal year 2022 budget levels would mean an immediate cut of about 13 percent to every government agency and program (thanks to an unusually large spending increase in 2023 to account for economic growth, high inflation, and a few additional programs). If defense and border cops are exempted, then the cut will be perhaps 22 percent.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, solicited estimates from various government departments on what that 22 percent cut would mean. They told her that just for starters, 60,000 people would not be able to attend college; 200,000 children would get kicked off Head Start; 100,000 families would lose child care; and 1.2 million people would be removed from WIC nutrition assistance.
One hundred twenty-five air traffic control towers would be shut down, affecting one-third of airports, and no doubt worsening the chronic snarls in American air travel. Rail safety inspections would be cut back by 11,000 work days, meaning 30,000 miles of track going uninspected. (More dangerous chemical spills, here we come!) Some 640,000 families would lose rental assistance, and 430,000 more would be evicted from Section 8 housing. And even all that isn’t the whole list of carnage.
Now, Republicans have not suggested an across-the-board cut, and it’s certainly possible that some of the above priorities would be spared. But that would only make the cuts to the programs that don’t get such treatment worse, because appropriators would need to hit that overall cap number.
Incidentally, this illustrates well the utter stupidity of Republican budget politics. Instead of drawing up a list of priorities, calculating how to fund them, and then writing a budget plan to fit—they neither know nor care about any of that stuff—they just demand arbitrary and escalating cuts to everything that isn’t the troops or border police, because that’s what right-wing media says is the most conservative thing to do.
Needless to say, there’s no indication of any revenue increases being discussed to offset this pain. Anti-tax Republicans wouldn’t like that, and in this hostage situation, you mustn’t anger the guys (and it’s mostly guys) with the guns.
There may well be macroeconomic effects from this deal as well. These cuts would suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of an economy that is already plainly softening, thanks to high interest rates and instability in the banking system. A ton of austerity might just be the thing that tips America into a recession during an election year, with Biden, a willing negotiator in this process, on the ballot.
Finally, it’s not at all clear that House Republicans will actually accept this partial ransom. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy just barely managed to pass his current debt ceiling hostage note by giving the far right everything it asked for (and then only because two Democrats were absent from the chamber). Sure enough, several members told PoliticoFriday that they want the spending cap to last ten years instead of two, at a minimum. As I was writing this, others also told Politico they want harsh border controls as well.
From their perspective, this makes perfect sense. If Biden is too weak-willed to stare down Republicans like Obama did in 2013, and too chicken to mint the coin or invoke the 14th Amendment, why not demand more concessions while he’s on the ropes? Heck, why not demand the entire ransom, including work requirements for Medicaid and gutting the Inflation Reduction Act?
Two years of capped spending is bad enough. But it might end up being even worse.
The Florida legislature passed a law, which Governor DeSantis signed, exempting records of his travel from the state’s robust public disclosure laws. The law is retroactive so no one can get information about where the governor and other public officials have traveled in the past. The justification is that the governor needs secrecy for security but this does not explain why travels in the past will be hidden from the press and taxpayers.
The Governor’s travels are paid for with taxpayer money, but the taxpayer has no right to know how much was spent and for what purpose.
DeSantis continues to build his authoritarian record, which all can see, unlike his travel record.
In Texas, people with strongly held conservative Christian beliefs wanted to send their dollars to a cellphone service that shared their values. Before long, such a company came into being, and it’s now selling mobile service to customers across the state. The money generated has been used to win control of four school boards.
NBC reported:
DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.
“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”
Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”
“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.
It was a moment of celebration for an upstart company whose leaders say they are on a mission from God to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government — especially in public schools. To carry out that calling, the Grapevine-based company this year created a political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, and gave it more than $600,000 to spend on nonpartisan school board races in the Fort Worth suburbs.
This spring, the PAC blanketed the communities of Southlake, Keller, Grapevine and Mansfield with thousands of political mailers warning that sitting school board members were endangering students with critical race theory and other “woke” ideologies. Patriot Mobile presented its candidates as patriots who would “keep political agendas out of the classroom.”
Their candidates won every race, and nearly four months later, those Patriot Mobile-backed school boards have begun to deliver results.
The Keller Independent School District made national headlines this month after the school board passed a new policy that led the district to abruptly pull more than 40 previously challenged library books off shelves for further review, including a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as well as several LGBTQ-themed novels.
In the neighboring city of Southlake, Patriot Mobile donated framed posters that read “In God We Trust” to the Carroll Independent School District during a special presentation before the school board. Under a new Texas law, the district is now required to display the posters prominently in each of its school buildings. Afterward, Patriot Mobile celebrated the donation in a blog post titled “Putting God Back Into Our Schools.”
And this week at a tense, eight-hour school board meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District’s board of trustees voted 4-3 to implement a far-reaching set of policies that restrict how teachers can discuss race and gender. The new policies also limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary students to use bathrooms and pronouns that correspond with their genders. And the board made it easier for parents to ban library books dealing with sexuality.
To protest the changes, some parents came to the meeting wearing T-shirts with the school district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD.”
“They bought four school boards, and now they’re pulling the strings,” said Rachel Wall, the mother of a Grapevine-Colleyville student and vice president of the Texas Bipartisan Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting school board candidates who do not have partisan agendas. “I’m a Christian by faith, but if I wanted my son to be in a religious school, I would pay for him to go to a private school….”
Initially, Patriot Mobile’s founders said their goal was to support groups and politicians who promised to oppose abortion, defend religious freedom, protect gun rights and support the military.
After the 2016 presidential election, the company’s branding shifted further to the right and embraced Trump’s style of politics. One of Patriot Mobile’s most famous advertisements includes the slogan “Making Wireless Great Again,” alongside an image of Trump’s face photoshopped onto a tanned, muscled body holding a machine gun….
Patriot Mobile has also aligned itself in recent years with political and religious leaders who promote a once-fringe strand of Christian theology that experts say has grown more popular on the right in recent years. Dominionism, sometimes referred to as the Seven Mountains Mandate, is the belief that Christians are called on to dominate the seven key “mountains” of American life, including business, media, government and education.
John Fea, a professor of American history at the private, Christian Messiah University in Pennsylvania, has spent years studying Seven Mountains theology. Fea said the idea that Christians are called on to assert biblical values across all aspects of American society has been around for decades on the right, but “largely on the fringe.”
Trump’s election changed that.
“It fits very well with the ‘Make America Great Again’ mantra,” Fea said. “‘Make America Great Again’ to them means, ‘Make America Christian Again,’ restore America to its Christian roots.”
What next? Will every religion set up its own cell service? Why?
The stories about payments and gifts from rightwing billionaire Harlan Crow to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas continue to escalate. The revelations began with ProPublica’s report that Crow had given luxurious vacations to Thomas and his wife. Then ProPublica reported that Crow bought the house where Justice Thomas’ elderly mother lives, rent free. Crow paid the private school tuition of Thomas’s grandnephew. The stories of the billionaires’ beneficence to this one Justice continue to roll out. Justice Thomas’ wife, a rightwing political activist, also received large fees from other sources who have cases before the Court.
What have we learned? The Supreme Court is not subject to any explicit code of ethics. Chief Justice John Roberts (whose wife has been paid millions as a headhunter for law firms that appear before the High Court) has refused to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Boston Globe noted that the Clarence Thomas affair is unprecedented in its scope, so much so that it has had a profound effect on public respect for the Court.
As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faces a growing number of revelations that have raised intense scrutiny over his ethical practices, legal experts say the high court has found itself in unprecedented territory, its credibility in the eyes of the public rapidly eroding.
The slew of disclosures about Thomas, the most recent of which came Thursday, demonstrate a need for institutional reform and the revision of ethics rules, experts said.
“The revelations showcase how both wealthy and narrow interests cultivate their own relationships with justices with life tenure with the capacity to entrench or undermine policies for generations,” Robert Tsai, a professor at Boston University School of Law, said in an e-mail….
As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faces a growing number of revelations that have raised intense scrutiny over his ethical practices, legal experts say the high court has found itself in unprecedented territory, its credibility in the eyes of the public rapidly eroding.
The slew of disclosures about Thomas, the most recent of which came Thursday, demonstrate a need for institutional reform and the revision of ethics rules, experts said.
“The revelations showcase how both wealthy and narrow interests cultivate their own relationships with justices with life tenure with the capacity to entrench or undermine policies for generations,” Robert Tsai, a professor at Boston University School of Law, said in an e-mail.
Democrats are outraged and want accountability and reform. Republican sensors have closed ranks and insist that it’s up to the Court to reform itself. Fat chance.
Mark Paoletta defended Thomas, a friend of his, in a statement Thursday, arguing that, while Thomas was helping a “child in need,” Thomas was not required to report the tuition because his grandnephew was not technically his “dependent.”
But Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law, said that defense was invalid and that the payments “certainly had to be recorded on his disclosure statements.”
“The gift was to Thomas himself because Thomas had legal responsibility for his nephew’s education,” Gillers said. “He didn’t adopt the great-nephew, but he did become a legal guardian of the nephew and took on the responsibility to support the nephew, including education. The money relieves Thomas of having to pay.”
The report about Leo also poses “serious concern,” Gillers said. “The idea that a person can turn on the spigot, generate substantial income to the spouse of a justice, should be troublesome to the court and to the country.”
As outrageous as the Thomas revelations are, there is no chance that the Supreme Court will reform itself—or that a closely divided Congress will act. That is, unless Chief Justice John Roberts decides that he doesn’t want “the Roberts Court” to go down in history as the Court without ethical standards, unwilling to reform itself, indifferent to the collapse of public respect for the Court. If he has any sense of honor or shame, he might act.
Even if the Justices agree to stop taking gifts and money from interested parties, the Court still has the problem that it can’t solve: it is packed with five rightwing ideologues, three chosen by the Federalist Society, who used Trump as their willing dummy. Their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, after swearing under oath that they would not, will be a permanent scar on the Suprene Court.
Charlie Sykes is a lead writer for the Never Trumper website “The Bulwark.” He watched CNN’s “town hall” with Donald Trump and shared his reactions. He was disgusted. I did not watch. I gather he called E. Jean Carroll, the woman who won a civil case against Trump the day before the New Hampshire town hall, a “wack job.” I wonder if she will sue him again.
Sykes wrote:
Critics had worried that giving the indicted, twice-impeached, coup-plotting, chronically lying sexual predator an unedited, live television forum might turn out badly.
The reality, however, was far ghastlier: a sh*tshow for the ages, and a moment that captured the thorough degradation of both our politics and the media. “It was a f**king nightmare,” remarked one savvy observer, “and it was programmed to BE a f**king nightmare.”
Trump was, of course, thrilled.
For her part, Kaitlan Collins was poised, prepared, and determined, but she never stood a chance. She raised all of the key questions and tried (not always successfully) to ask followups.
But Trump just rolled over her with a torrent of invective, jibes, and bullsh*t. The fact-checkers were reduced to asterisks. “He declared war on the truth,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper said afterward. “And I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”
Where to start?
Trump called a black law enforcement officer a “thug.”
He repeated baseless conspiracy theories about 2020.
He lied about losing the 2020 election. (CNN’s Oliver Darcy tweeted: “I’ve lost count of how many times Trump has lied about the election. Collins keeps fact-checking him, but he keeps lying.”)
He lied about calling for “terminating” the Constitution so he could be returned to power.
He lied about his role on January 6th.
He suggested that he would pardon many of the January 6th insurrectionists.
He insisted again that Mike Pence should have overturned the election.
He claimed that residents of the Chinatown neighborhood in Washington, D.C., “did not speak English as part of an allegation that Biden stored boxes there after his vice presidency because he had nefarious ties to Beijing.”
He refused to back Ukraine against Russia.
He lashed out at Collins as “nasty woman” — and the audience CHEERED.
But this was hardly the worst of it. Actually, not even close.
The day after a federal jury found that the ex-president had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, Trump turned the episode into a joke, mocking and insulting his victim.
The former president then turned Collins’ other questions about Carroll into his version of a comedy routine, cracking up the audience CNN assembled of New Hampshire Republicans and effectively independent voters. At many points, Trump appeared to repeat the same rhetoric that led to Carroll’s suit in the first place…
Trump went on to suggest that Carroll, who vividly recounted her allegation on the witness stand, was overly promiscuous.
The CNN audience loved it.
“What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky panky in a dressing room? I don’t know if she was married then or not. I feel sorry for you John Johnson,” Trump said to a chorus of laughter.
It was a shocking moment, even for veterans of Trump-era politics.
But that was the moment we knew.
**
Even the folks at CNN seemed to recognize how bad it was. “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Oliver Darcy, the network’s senior media reporter wrote in CNN’s Reliable Sourcesnewsletter. “It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump’s unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage.”
But let’s be clear about this: last night was not Kaitlan Collins’s fault. The decision to amplify Trump’s firehose of disinformation on live television doomed the whole thing from start. As Mehdi Hasan writes today, the “ridiculous town hall format and an audience seemingly recruited ‘from the Mar-a-Lago parking lot’, put its own anchor in a position to fail.”
Her bosses at CNN should have known that, but they made it clear last night that they had learned nothing. Or simply didn’t care.
Increasingly, Chris Licht is to CNN what Elon Musk is to Twitter.
The network’s defenses for all of this are bullsh*t on the surface. Of course, CNN needs to “cover” and report on the frontrunning GOP candidate. He’s news.
But this was not journalism we saw on CNN last night: this was entertainment programming, the kind of reality television show that did so much to foist Trump onto the body politic. He owned last night’s format.
In a different format, Collins could have performed a flagrant act of journalism. She could have done an in-depth taped interview with the former president, the sort that Jonathan Swan has done. She could have been given the chance to ask detailed follow-up questions, like Mehdi Hasan might do. CNN could have edited the responses, rather than simply air one lie after another.
We knew who Trump was of course. But last night showed us who we are and what’s about to happen. This is the GOP frontrunner.
He is still the star who can do anything. And it will get worse.
“Listen,” wrote author Jared Yates Sexton, “if this town hall is any indication, and I think it is, the Trump Campaign of 2024 is going to be infinitely more disturbing and upsetting. I’ve spent a lot of time studying this man and his movement. I’m stunned by the depths here. This is . . . awful.”
Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did. It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.
One might hope that Trump’s loss in New York would lead him to slink away in shame, but we now live in post-shame America. Instead, Trump will sit for a town hall on CNN tonight, where he will field questions as if he is a normal person running for office instead of a sexual abuser who incited sedition and violence against the government he is once again seeking to control.
Trump, of course, has the self-awareness of a traffic cone, and he is seemingly incapable of remorse. But CNN’s decision to move ahead with the event, as if nothing has happened, is disappointing. A more defensible position would have been to scrap the town-hall format and tell Trump that he is still invited to sit, one-on-one, with a CNN reporter. To present him to voters as just another candidate, however, is the very definition of normalizing his behavior.
A thread: As I said before, this was an impossible stage. But there were a few key moments where CNN could have taken back the con from Trump, even tho his cavalcade of lies made it very difficult and the audience was gamed in his favor. Here’s my quick thoughts as an interviewer.
In no particular order, you need to top Trump early and often, despite accusations of being unfair. For example, the obvious Nasty Woman retort would have been: “And a jury just yesterday unanimously called you a sexual predator. So here we are. Do you want to keep going here, because to quote Captain America, ‘I can do this all day.’” Make sure you can do it all day. (I can.)…
The Trump loving audience would jar anyone and it is easy to let it get to you. But it is also an opportunity to win some over, which is especially powerful if you are in someone’s home base. You only need one.
So, when the crowd started snickering about E. Jean Carroll, for example, I would have stopped the interview cold, told Trump politely to sit still for a second, walked over to a man and a woman in the crowd who laughed and said: “Do you have a daughter? I do. She’s just three.”
Then, in the kindest tone possible, ask them if they said they did have a daughter or sister or wife, if they thought a man forcibly touching a woman’s genitals was actually funny, because I could not imagine they would since they did not look cruel. In any case, I would have interacted with the crowd a lot more, as most tend to fold when you pull individuals away from the mob. People don’t like to be found when they are acting badly and are usually embarrassed….
At times, it seemed like just another Trump rally. Even down to the moment where Trump turns the crowd against the press, as he did when he called Collins a “nasty person” to her face. (To her credit, she didn’t flinch.)
The event was a disaster for the reason that all of Trump’s live events are problematic: It’s much easier to spew lies on live television than it is for anyone to push back against them. Live coverage privileges the liar, no matter how nimble the interviewer.
But it all happened because CNN wanted a show. And they sure got one. No one should pretend it was some kind of public service.
Throughout the 70-minute town hall, Trump refused to accept reality. When Collins tried to fact-check him, Trump just spoke over her and repeated his falsehoods. When she tried to correct Trump about his election lies, noting that Trump and his supporters lost more than 60 court cases, Trump simply kept lying.
“They found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes,” Trump falsely claimed.
Collins repeatedly tried to rectify the record, but Trump just kept forging ahead. When he said the “government cameras” showed “people going to 28 different voting booths”—something that never happened—Collins tried to correct him to no avail.
Halfway through the town hall, CNN staffers were acknowledging the event was a disaster for the truth.
“This is so bad,” one of CNN’s on-air personalities told The Daily Beast before the first commercial break. “I was cautiously optimistic despite the criticism… it is awful. It’s a Trump infomercial. We’re going to get crushed.”
“One of the worst hours I’ve ever seen on our air,” another CNN staffer told The Daily Beast.
By the end of the night, the reviews were abysmal. The words “disaster” and “disgrace” were plastered all over Twitter….
Even network talent and talking heads participating on CNN panels following the event seemed shell-shocked. And sources inside the network confided their deep regrets.
“It was a complete disaster,” one CNN employee told Playbook, arguing that the format — specifically, stacking the audience with Trump supporters who cheered his lies — was a “strategic error.”
“It made it seem like CNN was endorsing that behavior,” the employee said. “Incredibly disappointing.”
Dan Rather has had an illustrious career as a journalist. He is now blogging at Steady. He was annoyed that CNN gave Donald Trump a platform to repeat his lies, to bulldoze the interviewer, and to play his usual demagogic role. After Trump was elected in 2016, CNN was widely criticized for giving Trump so much air time, more than any other network or cable station did. CNN sometimes covered his rallies live and at length, a courtesy not extended to other candidates. By some estimates, CNN gave Trump $2 billion of free on-air time.
He writes:
Donald Trump is a liar. He is a bigot, a misogynist, and a deadbeat. He has just been found by a jury to be a sexual abuser. He faces multiple other serious criminal investigations. He spurred a violent insurrection. He has repeatedly demonstrated complete disdain for the foundations of American democracy. The list of traits that makes this man unfit for the presidency fills pages.
And yet despite these debased qualities, or maybe (depressingly) because of them, he is immensely popular with many Americans. They cheer on his worst impulses. They bask in his hatred. They are fueled by the danger he poses to this nation. They have propelled him once again to be the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination.
And although many Americans don’t want to believe it, at this moment, he is a real threat to return to the presidency.
Among other things, Trump is and always has been a performer, and performers, no matter how vile their message, crave and thrive in the spotlight.
Last night, CNN gave Trump not only a spotlight, but a platform and a rabid crowd of cheering supporters. He made the most of it, as chiling and distressing as that might be.
Those who have made up their minds on Trump — those who love him and hate him — undoubtedly found plenty of justification for their opinions watching, ignoring, or doom scrolling his performance.
But what about the casual observer, the disaffected, the persuadable? Trump knows how to command a stage. He knows how to go on the attack. And the format CNN gift-wrapped for him allowed him to score a mark.
There is a school of thought that Trump is so toxic that the more America sees of him, the less they like him. And there were moments last night that could easily be plugged into effective attack ads against him. But what we should have learned from 2016 and the years that followed is that people as shameless as Trump do not measure their success by metrics of civility. It’s about demonstrating primal dominance, and that instinct delivered him the presidency once before. And even though he lost reelection, he remade American politics in ways with which we are still contending.
Trump played the part CNN surely knew he would play. What did they hope to get from normalizing this demeaning and dangerous demagogue? Ratings? Relevance? A tack to the mythic “middle” in line with new ownership and direction? Trying to become some new version of Fox News? Is any of this worth endangering the health and security of our country?
When CNN announced that they would give Donald Trump more than an hour of free prime time for a “town hall” (more like a town maul), it was clear what was going to happen.
Trump would lie, and bully, and insult, and lie, and lie, and lie some more. That is who he is. It is who he has always been.
There is no moderating a discussion with Trump. It is nearly impossible to engage in dialogue by asking probing follow-up questions. Because he will just ignore them. And lie and lie and lie. And this is especially true when he has an audience that seemed hand-picked to double as a campaign rally — hooting and hollering with approval the more he launched into his mendacious invective.
The press will have to figure out how to cover Trump as he stomps his way toward renomination. Liars should not be given open mics in formats where they can filibuster falsehoods unchallenged. Edit what he says with context. Do not sugarcoat how untrue many of his rantings are.
America rejected Trump in 2020. He is further weakened by the court cases he faces. But he remains a potent force. He will get his message out. Let us hope the press will analyze it, not amplify it.
The future of not only American journalism, but of America itself, will be shaped by how Trump is covered going forward.
Goyal begins by explaining why Brandon Johnson beat Paul Vallas in the Chicago mayoral election. He highlighted Vallas’ destructive record as a school privatizer in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities.
He writes:
A key critic of this scheme was Helen Gym, founder of Parents United for Public Education, who lamented the violence of underfunded, understaffed schools that were falling apart and mold-ridden and argued that children’s pronounced social and emotional needs were not served by zero-tolerance punishment. “We have policies to suspend, arrest, punish, and potentially imprison our children,” she wrote in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook in 2007, “but we can’t have a policy for reduced class size or textbooks or open libraries in our schools.… So what’s really violent here?”
Today, Gym is one of the leading candidates for mayor of Philadelphia and hoping to join a new class of progressive urban mayors: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. (Disclosure: I have known Gym for several years through organizing and policy work, and she is discussed in my forthcoming book about Philadelphia, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.)
A zigzag line can be drawn from social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, teachers’ strikes, and Sanders’s presidential campaigns to the rise of these mayors. Together, with the backing of organized labor, they have an opportunity to reverse austerity, invest in public goods, reimagine and strengthen public safety, and save lives in American metropolises.
The next mayor of Philadelphia, the poorest large city in the country, will face daunting challenges: joblessness; poverty; gun violence; inequitable, unsafepublicschools; an opioid epidemic; and substandard, unaffordable housing. The past three years have been the deadliest in the history of the city, with some 500 killings annually—the highest per capita homicide rate among large US cities. Recently, the school district announcedthat 100 students have already been shot, including 20 killed, this year. A recent survey found that two-thirds of residents said Philadelphia is on the wrong track and identified crime as their top issue.
With election day next week, the first independent public poll shows a dead heat between the top five candidates. There’s ShopRite oligarch and chauvinist Jeff Brown, who owns a chain of supermarkets and was recently accused by the city’s ethics board of violating campaign finance law for colluding with an affiliated super PAC and a nonprofit. Real estate mogul and former city councilman Allan Domb is largely self-funded to the tune of more than $7 million. Former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart is running as a pro-charter technocrat, in the style of former mayors John Street and Michael Nutter, who have both endorsed her. Former city councilwoman and lobbyist Cherelle Parker, who backs stop-and-frisk policing, rounds out the top tier.
Like Brandon Johnson, Gym is a former public-school teacher and came of age organizing against the market-based urban school reform project. Pick virtually any social justice fight in the city since the 1990s: the closures and privatization of public schools, budget cuts, school funding lawsuits, the eviction crisis, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, and the abuse scandal at the reformatory Glen Mills Schools, and one will find that Gym, who served as a city councilwoman for six years, was on the picket line, getting arrested for civil disobedience, building coalitions, testifying at or organizing hearings, or drafting and passing legislation.
As mayor, she pledges to advance an agenda that would “restore the village to our city.” Her policy platform is, naturally, centered on education, and she calls for turning every school into a community school with wraparound and trauma-informed supports; providing after-school and summer programming in schools, recreation centers, and libraries; modernizing school infrastructure; creating playgrounds for every school; and expanding youth employment. Not only will these investments improve educational outcomes, but research indicates that they will alsoreducecrimeand other social dislocations. Gym released a comprehensive anti-violence plan that would invest in mental health crisis response units, violence interrupters, an improved 911 response system, more detectives to improve homicide clearance rates, and other ideas. She and Johnson share a recognition that the hackneyed tactic of simply hiring more cops cannot slow the bloodshed. Gym and several candidates are also pushing for place-based interventions, such as cleaning up vacant lots, rehabilitating abandoned houses, and improving street lighting, all of which have beenfound to cut down on crime.
Recently, hundreds of youth engaged in raucous flash mobs and violent skirmishes in downtown Chicago and Philadelphia. Immediately, there were calls to impose a curfew, despite little to no data validating the efficacy of the measure. Mayor-elect Johnson condemned the unrest while acknowledging that we should not “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” In Philadelphia, it was telling that Gym was the only mayoral candidate to firmly oppose the new ban on unaccompanied minors after 2 PM at the Fashion District shopping mall. “We cannot criminalize young people,” she said. “There is nothing for young people to do. We actually have to go out and create some of these things for young people to go to.”
The American Rescue Plan pouredbillions into Philadelphia, including historic sums for public education and before-school, after-school, and summer programs. Philadelphia’s next mayor must prepare for the imminent fiscal cliffs as those Covid-19 federal relief dollars dry up in the next year or two. Pennsylvania’s regressive uniformity clause mandates flat local and state taxes, where low-income earners are effectively charged higher tax rates than the wealthiest. So the mayor will need to be creative and bold to raise new revenue—push Harrisburg for fair funding, identify and divert wasteful spending into productive programs, and crack down on corporate welfare.
If Gym is also elected, the question will be: How can Johnson and Gym wield their power to benefit working people in the face of expected relentless obstruction by corporate interests, real estate, anti-public education billionaires, and police unions? Seventy years ago, Joseph S. Clark Jr., a postwar mayor of Philadelphia, describedNew Deal/Fair Deal liberalism as “utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels.” This is the vision the next mayors of Chicago and Philadelphia should renew.
Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the LA Times. Although supposedly a business columnist, he writes about cultural topics that shape our world. In this column, he takes issue with media bias against older people. As a woman approaching her 85th birthday, I share his view. Fifty years ago, I was physically vigorous, not so much now. But I know so much more now than I did when I was 35. I dare say I’m less impetuous, less likely to be caught up in fads, less likely to be fooled. I would rather be led by a wise person than a relatively youthful fascist like DeSantis or an old liar like Trump. Age is of far less consequence than character and beliefs. (I was going to say “convictions,” but that word favors Trump, who is probably going to have at least one conviction by November 2024, an unenviable record.)
Hiltzik writes:
The cry is heard that America has become a “gerontocracy.” That’s supposed to be bad, it’s argued, because our superannuated political leadership is out of touch with the electorate and blocking younger and (theoretically) more vigorous and intellectually vibrant leaders from taking their hour upon the stage.
Earlier this year, CNN called President Biden’s age a “hot topic.” Leaving aside that news organizations such as CNN have helped make it a hot topic, the real question is whether it’s anything more than that. The answer is no….
The gerontocracy critique also threatens to deprive us of our most experienced leaders. Rather than remove poor performers from their sinecures, the current fixation on age could remove from our political and economic structures men and women who have spent decades learning about the world and offering the wisdom born of long professional experience.
The U.S. State Department, for example, requires its professional foreign service staff to retire at 65, “when they are at the height of their wisdom and knowledge,” publishing executive and author Michael Clinton observed recently, a rule he attributed to “toxic ageism.” Some corporations require their top officers to retire at 60 or 65, while most are still willing to make a professional contribution….
Claims that a political gerontocracy is somehow undermining American democracy — the theme of so much political navel-gazing— simply don’t hold water. They depend on the notion that as we grow older, our political outlooks coalesce into something at odds with the public interest. Where’s the evidence for that?
It’s widely noted that Biden and his likeliest presidential challenger, Donald Trump, would be the oldest president if either wins election in 2024. Biden would be 82 on inauguration day 2025 and Trump nearly 80. Does that tell us anything about how their administration would unfold? Obviously not.
Biden would almost certainly run on his record of creating remarkably inclusive and progressive White House policies and overseeing an economy of job growth and economic expansion in the wake of the pandemic; Trump, judging from his most recent speeches, would continue to flog personal grievances based on his groundless claims of fraud in his 2020 loss…
Some of our political leaders have notched their most outstanding achievement at an age decades later than when conventional wisdom holds that they should have retired.
The questions raised about the physical and mental capacity of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), 89, didn’t apply to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who compiled what might be the most successful record in House history by shepherding the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 at 70 and Biden’s progressive policies to enactment after the age of 80….
As for whether older politicians are out of step with the younger members of the American electorate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) didn’t seem to have much trouble connecting with youthful voters when he ran for president in the run-up to the 2016 election, at age 75.
Nor are there signs that the liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has lost the youth vote because of her age, 73. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) seemed to have little trouble getting reelected in the last election, when they were, respectively, 80 and 89….
Quite plainly, the best guides to politicians’ adequacy are their words and actual performance in office. Few reach the highest echelons of American politics without leaving a record to be examined.
Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, recently took a swipe at Biden’s age, remarking that he would be unlikely to live to the end of his next term.
Does that tell you anything about what she has to offer as an alternative? No; for that you’d have to delve into her positions on gun control (after a deadly school shooting in Nashville, she called for more metal detectors at schoolhouse doors but not more gun legislation) or abortion rights (she’s against them).
Who shows more mental acuity? Joe Biden, who occasionally stumbles over his words (apparently an artifact of his youthful stuttering)? Or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who recently called for a “national divorce,” i.e., secession by red states, at the age of 48?
