Jeff Tiedrich proposes in his blog that President Biden should operate a “pardon factory” to protect everyone who has been threatened by Trump or Kash Patel.
One of the features of democracy is an assumption that parties will contend for power, accept their win or loss graciously, then prepare for next time. There will always be the next election to try again.
The threats by Trump and his toadies to prosecute his critics disrupts the comity on which a democratic system depends.
Trump thinks of his critics as “enemies,” not critics. He has made clear repeatedly that he will use his power as President to prosecute, imprison, and crush his enemies.
He said recently that the members of the January 6 Commission “should be in jail.” Why? Is it normal or acceptable that a mob summoned by the President descends on the U.S. Capitol as they meet to certify the election, smash through the windows and doors, beat up police officers, and rampage through the building? What was criminal? The summoning of the mob? The actions of the mob? Or the investigation of the events of the day?
Biden, writes Tiedrich, should issue pre-emptive pardons to all those whose lives and freedom might be endangered by Trump, Kash Patel, or Pam Bondi.
The next four years will be a trial for our democracy. Will the norms and institutions survive the reign of this bitter, vindictive old man?
The New York Times reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s’s lawyer Aaron Siri has repeatedly sued to block vaccines and mandates. Siri is now advising Kennedy as he selects high-level personnel for the Department of Heslth and Human Services. Kennedy’s reliance on Siri demonstrates that his opposition to vaccines has not waned and will animate his actions should he be confirmed.
The story begins:
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions….
At the Trump transition headquarters in Florida, Mr. Siri has joined Mr. Kennedy in questioning and choosing candidates for top health positions, according to someone who observed the interactions but insisted on anonymity to disclose private conversations. They have asked candidates about their views of vaccines, the person said.
Are Kennedy and Siri determined to exclude those who understand the value of vaccines? No doubt.
“I love Aaron Siri,” Mr. Kennedy said in a clip played on a recent episode of a podcast hosted by Del Bigtree, who is Mr. Kennedy’s former campaign communications director and the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, which describes itself as a “medical freedom” nonprofit. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”
Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Siri insists he does not want to take vaccines away from anyone who wants them. “You want to get the vaccine — it’s America, a free country.” he told Arizona legislators last year after laying out his concerns about the vaccines for polio and other illnesses.
The Times notes that Siri has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw approval of the polio vaccine as well as the vaccine for Hepatitis B.
Let me reiterate: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerous crackpot. His beliefs kill.
Peter Greene writes about the contradiction at the heart of Trump’s education goals. On the one hand, Trump says he will eliminate the Department of Education and turn federal funding over to the states, to use as they wish. At the same time, he says that he will punish schools if they persist in teaching liberal ideas that Trump dislikes, like diversity, equity and inclusion, or if they are insufficiently patriotic.
How will he punish schools if the federal funding has been relinquished to the states?
Greene writes:
It has been on the conservative To Do list for decades, and the incoming administration keeps insisting that this time it’s really going to happen. But will it? Over the weekend, Trump’s Ten Principles for Education video from Agenda 47 was circulating on line as a new “announcement” or “confirmation” of his education policy, despite the fact that the video was posted in September of 2023.
The list of goals may or may not be current, but it underlines a basic contradiction at the heart of Trump’s education plans. The various goals can be boiled down to two overall objectives:
1) To end all federal involvement and oversight of local schools.
2) To exert tight federal control over local schools
Trump has promised that schools will not teach “political indoctrination,” that they will teach students to “love their country,” that there will be school prayer, that students will “have access to” project-based learning, and that schools will expel students who harm teachers or other students.
He has also proposed stripping money from colleges and universities that indoctrinate students and using the money to set up a free of charge “world class education” system.
Above all, he has promised that he “will be closing up” the Department of Education. Of course, he said that in 2016 with control of both houses of Congress and it did not happen.
Are there obstacles? The Department of Education distributes over $18 billion to help support schools that educate high-poverty populations, providing benefits like extra staff to supplement reading instruction. The Project 2025 plan is to turn this into a block grant to be given to the states to use as they wish, then zeroed out. Every state in the country would feel that pinch; states that decide to use the money for some other purpose entirely, such as funding school vouchers, will feel the pinch much sooner. The department also handles over $15 billion in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding, which helps cover the costs of special education; Project 2025 also calls for turning it into an unregulated block grant to states with no strings attached, meaning that parents would have to lobby their state government for special ed funding.
Cuts and repurposing of these funds will be felt immediately in classrooms across the country, particularly those that serve poor students and students with special needs. That kind of readily felt, easily understood impact is likely to fuel pushback in Congress, and it’s Congress that has the actual power to eliminate the department.
Beyond the resistance to changing major funding for states and the challenge of trying to move the trillion-plus-dollar funding system for higher education, the Trump administration would also face the question of how to exert control over school districts without a federal lever to push.
Previous administrations have used Title I funding as leverage to coax compliance from school districts. In 2013, Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan threatened to withhold Title I funds if a California failed to adopt an “acceptable” standardized testing program. In 2020, Trump himself threatened to cut off funding to schools that did not re-open their buildings. And on the campaign trail this year, Trump vowed that he would defund schools that require vaccines. That will be hard to do if the federal government has given all control of funds to the states.
The Department of Education has limited power, but the temptation to use it seems hard to resist. Nobody wanted the department gone more than Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, who was notably reluctant to use any power of her office. But by 2018, frustrated with Congressional inaction on the Higher Education Act, DeVos announced a plan to impose regulations on her own. In 2020, she imitated Duncan by requiring states to compete for relief money by implementing some of her preferred policies.
Too many folks on the Trump team have ideas about policies they want to enforce on American schools, and without a Department of Education that has control of a major funding stream, they’d have little hope of achieving their goals. Perhaps those who dream of dismantling the department will prevail, but they will still have to get past Congress. No matter how things fall out, some of Team Trump’s goals for education will not be realized.
Timothy Snyder is the conscience of America. He has written books on tyranny, on democracy, and on the history of Europe. He cares passionately about the survival of democracy.
Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn’t always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It’s Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.
This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump’s choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.
Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths.
She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.
That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).
Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime’s air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty.
In June 2015, as a congresswoman from Hawai’i, Gabbard visited Syria. During her stay, she was introduced to girls who had been burned from head to toe by a regime air strike. Her reaction to the situation, according to her translator, was to try to persuade the girls that they had been injured not by Syrian forces, but by the resistance. But this was impossible. Only Syria (at the time of her visit) and Russia (beginning weeks later) were flying planes and dropping bombs.
Either Gabbard was catastrophically uninformed about the most basic elements of the theater of war she was visiting, or she was consciously spreading disinformation. Those are the two possibilities. The first is disqualifying; the second is worse.
And if she was spreading disinformation consciously, she was also doing so with a pathological ruthlessness. Anyone who would lie to the child victims of an air strike to their burned faces would lie to anyone about anything. In January 2017, she visited Syria again, this time to speak to Assad. She began thereafter to deny that his regime had used chemical weapons on its own people. That was a very big lie.
In Washington, in speeches in Congress, Gabbard showed an uncanny ability to turn almost any issue into a justification for defending the Assad regime. In 2016, concern for Christians in Syria was a pretext to defend the Assad regime. In 2017, she presented worries about terrorism as a reason to defend of the Assad regime. In 2018, the anniversary of 9/11 was her prompt for defending the Assad regime. In 2019, she found her way from the genocide of Armenians a century earlier to the need to defend the Assad regime. She even worked hard to segue from the lack of affordable housing in Hawai’i to the need to defend the Assad regime. Gabbard’s support of Assad was so well known that her colleagues, Republican and Democratic alike, were worriedthat she would reveal the identity of a Syrian photographer brought to Congress to testify about Assad’s atrocities.
For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for Ukraine. The atrocities perpetrated by Russians in Syria were repeated in Ukraine. In 2021, the largest donor to Gabbard’s PAC was an apologist for Putin. When the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of the following year, Gabbard, a consumer of Russian propaganda, was immediately ready as a channel for the Russian line, including obvious Russian disinformation. Again and again, over and over, her public statements were strikingly similar to Putin’s,
Amidst the farrago of lies that Russia used to justify its full-scale invasion invasion was the completely bogus claim that Ukraine was site of American biolabs that were testing which infections would be most harmful to Slavs (and thus Russians). This lie originates in Russia and was spread by Russian media, along with some Chinese and Syrian echo chambers, and with a set of western helpers — one of whom was Tulsi Gabbard. She also urged, “in the spirit of Aloha,” that Ukraine react to the invasion by surrendering its sovereignty to Russia. She later justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by the notion, common in Moscow, that Russia was the victim of American attempts to overthrow Putin. She was specifically thankedby Russian state media for defending Russian war propaganda.
To be sure, the wars and the regions are complex. Even if Assad falls, as now looks increasingly likely, Syria will be a mess, with unsavory and dangerous people in power. There is, of course, room for disagreement about American foreign policy, including with respect to Assad and Putin and their twinned atrocities. That can all be taken for granted, and provides no excuse whatever for Gabbard’s very unusual behavior. It is strange, to say the least, that Gabbard says nothing about these regimes that they have not first said about themselves, and that she uses her platform to spread their own very specific disinformation.
One feature of disinformation is that it is factually incorrect: and so the very least (or most?) that can be said about Gabbard is that she is consistently wrong on matters of the greatest moral and political significance. But the other element of disinformation is that it is consciously and maliciously designed to confuse. These memes (biolabs!) are tested and perfected before they are released. Disinformation is the opposite of an innocent mistake: it is concocted to make rational reflection and sensible policy difficult. Disinformation, in other words, is a weapon that one regime tries to spread within another society or — in the dream of a hostile spy chief — within another society’s intelligence service. That is part of what Gabbard offers America’s enemies, and it is bad enough, because it means that systems meant to protect Americans instead put them in danger. It goes without saying that American allies would be unable to cooperate with the United States, and that patriotic intelligence officers would resign in droves. Informers around the world would cease their work. The US government would be cut off from the world.
As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role — she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical — Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a “Russian agent” and as “girlfriend,” with good reason.
Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.)
Gabbard is just as qualified to operate on your brain as she is to operate the national intelligence services. Would you let her? She clearly wants to take up the knife. Whose idea, one wonders, was that?
Imagine, because it is true, that the day will soon come when we name the person who will operate the national intelligence services. To be sure, like our own minds, the intelligence services of the United States haven’t always performed well. There have been mistakes, and manipulation, and downright evil. But there has also been learning, and some recent, impressive showings, as in the precise and public prediction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Intelligence services are a central part of government. Just as a brain might need surgery, American intelligence needs reform. But it does not need to be butchered for the pleasure of enemies.
Truth is stranger than fiction, once again. Trump announced that his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law would be his advisor on Middle Eastern affairs. Trump described him as a successful businessman, a billionaire, a man of great importance.
But the New York Times revealed today that Massad Boulos is not a billionaire. He may not even be a millionaire. He seems like a nice guy, but he didn’t bother to correct Trump when the big guy promoted the myth that Tiffany’s father-in-law was a major mogul, a tycoon. He is not.
The Times reported:
President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East adviser, Massad Boulos, has enjoyed a reputation as a billionaire mogul at the helm of a business that bears his family name.
Mr. Boulos has been profiled as a tycoon by the world’s media, telling a reporter in October that his company is worth billions. Mr. Trump called him a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.”
The president-elect even lavished what may be his highest praise: a “dealmaker.”
In fact, records show that Mr. Boulos has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. The company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show.
There is no indication in corporate documents that Mr. Boulos, a Lebanese-American whose son is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Tiffany, is a man of significant wealth as a result of his businesses. The truck dealership is valued at about $865,000 at its current share price. Mr. Boulos’s stake, according to securities filings, is worth $1.53.
In fact, as the Times put it, Mr. Boulos is “a small-time truck salesman.” Doubtless he is a “dealmaker,” as he agrees with customers on the price of the truck he is selling.
As for Boulos Enterprises, the company that has been called his family business in The Financial Times and elsewhere, a company officer there said it is owned by an unrelated Boulos family.
Mr. Boulos will advise on one of the world’s most complicated and conflict-wracked regions — a region that Mr. Boulos said this week that he has not visited in years. The advisory position does not require Senate approval….
Mr. Boulos, a Christian from northern Lebanon who emigrated to Texas as a teenager, has risen in prominence since 2018, when his son Michael began dating Tiffany Trump.
This year, Massad Boulos helped Mr. Trump woo Arab-American voters, and in the fall served as a go-between for Mr. Trump and the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
In October, The Times asked him about his wealth and business dealings.
“Your company is described as a multibillion-dollar enterprise,” a reporter said. “Are you yourself a billionaire?”
Mr. Boulos said he did not like to describe himself that way, but that journalists had picked up on the label.
“It’s accurate to describe the company as a multibillion-dollar—?” the reporter followed up.
“Yeah,” Mr. Boulos replied. “It’s a big company. Long history.”
But in a subsequent interview on Tuesday, Mr. Boulos said that he had only meant to confirm that other news outlets had written — incorrectly — that he runs such a company.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa is a combat veteran. She retired from the army as a Lieutenant Colonel. She is also a sexual assault survivor. She is also hyper-conservative.
You would expect that she would have some problems with Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth has been accused of assaulting women, of public drunkenness, of mismanaging two very small conservative veterans’ group. And he opposes women in combat.
Hegseth is not the kind of guy you would expect Ernst to support.
At first, on hearing of his nomination, she expressed her doubts. But then MAGA began to apply pressure. She comes up for re-election in 2026; it’s hard to imagine anyone running to her right, but who knows?
It’s remarkable how fast you can go from guest to entree at the big MAGA buffet.
Iowa U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst certainly knows.
Last week, she committed the grave offense of being a voice of reason. She told Real Clear Politics she had not made up her mind on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to become secretary of defense.
Ernst said she didn’t plan to campaign against Hegseth and wanted to see the confirmation process unfold. How unreasonable, a senator wanting to follow the Senate process before making a final decision. She’s a pivotal vote on the Armed Services Committee, which will be handling Hegseth’s confirmation.
But then, the MAGA warning light flashed, and all hell broke loose.
Fox News showed a series of X posts aimed at Ernst.
Donald Trump Jr pointed out Ernst had voted to confirm Joe Biden’s pick for defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. He suggested Ernst may be “in the wrong political party.”
Somebody called Wall Street Mav called Ernst a “neocon.” Gasp. And suggested she face a conservative primary opponent in 2026. Right-wing radio host Steve Deace bragged he could be the one to topple Ernst in that primary. Or maybe double Arizona failure Kari Lake could return to her Iowa roots. Sure.
Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA (his turn signal blinking toward the abyss) accused Ernst of “leading the charge” against Hegseth.
Ernst is the first woman combat veteran elected to the U.S. Senate. Pete Hegseth is a Fox News personality who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s also been overserved many times. He’s vowed to quit drinking if confirmed.
A woman has accused Hegseth of sexual assault. This, alongside multiple reports of sexual misconduct and mismanagement of veterans’ groups he led.
But MAGA has decided he’s the sort of strong, rugged, take-no-prisoners guy we need to make America tough again. He’ll fix the “woke” military, whatever that means.
Hegseth said women don’t belong in combat. Ernst is a combat veteran. He’s accused of sexual assault. Ernst is a sexual assault survivor. So, Ernst was supposed embrace this guy’s nomination? Be impressed by his raw manliness? Suddenly I could use a drink.
But by Monday, after a weekend of MAGA bludgeoning, Ernst took a step back. She met again with Hegseth, was encouraged and said the allegations against him won’t count unless victims step forward.
“As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources,” Ernst said.
But after that process, will you vote for him? She didn’t really go there. But it’s likely she’ll vote to confirm.
It’s disappointing, but not unexpected. I wish she would have said, “Pete Hegseth? I wouldn’t put that guy in charge of latrines. I wouldn’t hand him the keys to the nation’s military if he was the last man on earth. And that last man thing sounds pretty good right now.”
What Ernst said last week was spot on. If this guy wants to become secretary of defense, he’s going to have to show he’s capable. That’s what the confirmation process is for. Ernst wanting to wait and see the show makes sense.
Only one top Iowa Republican defended her, Rep. Ashely Hinson. But Hinson also had to do her duty and say Hegseth is a “strong pick.”
Yes, I know. Ernst played her own role in creating the MAGA monster. Now she got a glimpse of what happens when it turns on you. No loyalty and genuflecting before the dear leader can save you. Toe the MAGA line, or else. This is the party of freedom.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
The “party of freedom”? Yes, you are free to agree with Trump and free to praise him.
During the campaign, Democrats continually drew attention to the radical proposals of Project 2025 as the agenda for a second Trump term. Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 and pretended to know nothing about it or anyone who wrote it. Now that he is President-elect, Project 2025 is indeed Trump’s agenda.
Someone on social media asked, “If Trump disavowed Project 2025 when campaigning, isn’t I clear that he has no “mandate” to act on it?
The LA Times reports:
Russell Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025 — a conservative blueprint for the next presidency — is no fan of the federal government that President-elect Donald Trump will soon lead.
He believes “woke” civil servants and “so-called expert authorities” wield illegitimate power to block conservative White House directives from deep within federal agencies, and wants Trump to “bend or break” that bureaucracy to his will, he wrote in the second chapter of the Project 2025 playbook.
Vought is a vocal proponent of a plan known as Schedule F, under which Trump would fire thousands of career civil servants with extensive experience in their fields and replace them with his own political loyalists, and of Christian nationalism, which would see American governance aligned with Christian teachings. Both are core tenets of Project 2025.
Throughout his campaign, Trump adamantly disavowed Project 2025, even though its policies overlapped with his and some of its authors worked in his first administration. He castigated anyone who suggested the blueprint, which polls showed was deeply unpopular among voters, represented his aims for the presidency.
But last week, the president-elect nominated Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the White House budget and its policy agenda across the federal government.
Trump called Vought, who held the same role during his first term, an “aggressive cost cutter and deregulator” who “knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government.”
The nomination was one of several Trump has made since his election that have called into question his claims on the campaign trail that Project 2025 was not his playbook and held no sway over him or his plans for a second term.
He selected Tom Homan, a Project 2025 contributor and former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative organization behind the blueprint, as his “border czar.” Trump named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner also linked to Project 2025, as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Both also served in the first Trump administration.
He also named Brendan Carr to serve on the Federal Communications Commission. Carr wrote a chapter of Project 2025 on the FCC, which regulates U.S. internet access and TV and radio networks, and has echoed Trump’s claimsthat news broadcasters have engaged in political bias against Trump.
Trump named John Ratcliffe as his pick for CIA director and Pete Hoekstra as ambassador to Canada. Both are Project 2025 contributors. It has also been reported that the Trump transition team is filling lower-level government spots using a Project 2025 database of conservative candidates.
During the campaign Trump said that he knew “nothing about” Project 2025 and that he found some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” In response to news in July that Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, was leaving his post, Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — whom the president-elect has since named his chief of staff — issued a statement saying that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Asked about Trump’s selection of several people with Project 2025 connections to serve in his administration, Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded with a statement, saying Trump “never had anything to do with Project 2025.”
“This has always been a lie pushed by the Democrats and the legacy media, but clearly the American people did not buy it because they overwhelmingly voted for President Trump to implement the promises that he made on the campaign trail,” Leavitt wrote. “All of President Trump’s cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.”
In addition to calling for much greater power in the hands of the president, Project 2025 calls for less federal intervention in certain areas — including through the elimination of the Department of Education. It calls for much stricter immigration enforcement and mass deportations — a policy priority of Trump’s as well — and rails against environmental protections, calling for the demolition of key environmental agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service.
It calls for tougher restrictions on abortion and for the federal government to collect data on women who seek an abortion, and backs a slew of measures that would strip rights from LGBTQ+ people.
For Trump’s critics, his selections make it clear that his disavowal of the conservative playbook was nothing more than a campaign ploy to pacify voters who viewed the plan as too far to the right. It’s an argument many were making before the election as well.
The Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly is shameless. They used their numbers to pass a bill that strips the newly elected Democratic Governor, State Attorney General, and State Superintendent of Schools of many of their powers.
Outgoing Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republicans overturned his veto.
The Republican power grab was embedded in a bill that shortchanged the victims of Hurricane Helene.
When will voters in North Carolina wise up and start voting for Democratic legislators? The ones they have now are not working on behalf of their constituents.
They are using their power to protect their power and perks. The public be damned! Vote them out!
The New Republic writes about how easy it will be to bribe Trump. The emoluments clause in the Constitution has been rendered meaningless–the one that says the President can’t profit from his office. In his first term, nations and lobbyists paid him off by renting luxury suites at the Trump hotel near the White House. Now the possibilities are much greater.
In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has given Trump absolute immunity for criminal acts he performs while acting as President. So we can expect to see the President selling watches, Bibles, sneakers, NFT trading cards, perfume, and whatever in nightly addresses from the Oval Office.
Imagine a Presidential press conference where Trump has commercial breaks to sell his merch!
Just one more norm to break!
The story begins:
I know what you’re thinking. How can I, a 98-pound weakling, DEREGULATE my industry or win fat GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS? But after last week’s election, there’s NEVER been a better time to BRIBE THE PRESIDENT! As a candidate, Donald Trump said that, if elected, he would put his second term UP FOR SALE! Contribute to my campaign, he told oil and gas industry representatives, and REGULATORY RELIEF IS YOURS!
But wait, you say. Aren’t there emoluments clauses in the Constitution that FORBID this? Isn’t BRIBERY of public officials AGAINST THE LAW? Not really, thanks to EXCITING NEW OPPORTUNITIES opened up by Supreme Court rulings and the Trump team’s own thrilling CULTURE OF IMPUNITY!
The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act requires major-party nominees for president to submit, before the election, a Memo of Understanding to the General Services Administration articulating an ethics policy to avoid conflicts of interest. Trump signed the MOU last time. He hasn’t submitted one this time, even though the deadline was October 1. Until he does, Trump is barred from carrying out certain transition functions. Probably he’ll sign eventually, but once he does the GSA will impose a $5,000 limit on private contributions to his transition and a disclosure requirement, neither of which is really the Trump way. Presumably Trump will tap many of the same donors who gave to him last time, including AT&T, General Electric, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, and JPMorgan Chase. Meanwhile, no dollar limits inhibit contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee, which last time included $5 millionfrom the late Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s finances are now in the hands of his widow, Miriam, whom Trump will likely tap again.
Am I saying any of these corporations or individuals extracted promises back in 2016 in exchange for their contributions? I am not. Back then they were deterred by fear of prosecution. But they have much less to fear now, because last June, in the latest of its rulings to render the federal bribery statute completely unenforceable, the Supreme Court ruled that a politician who gets paid off by the beneficiary of some past action is accepting a legal gratuity and not an illegal bribe. Less than one month after this decision (Snyder v. United States) came Trump v. United States, where the court ruled that a president couldn’t be prosecuted for any act performed as part of his official duties. The combined effect is that the highest court in the land is practically inviting you to bribe your president. You might risk offending it if you turn this fabulous offer down! The Supreme Court’s lassitude about bribery, however, bumps up against its lassitude about presidential immunity in an interesting way that I’ll discuss in a bit.
As for the emoluments clauses (two of which apply to the president; a third is for members of Congress), the Supreme Court long ago made clear it had no intention of enforcing those. In 2020 the high court declined to hear an emoluments case (Blumenthal v. Trump) brought by members of Congress, thereby upholding a lower-court ruling that Congress lacked standing. In 2021 the court dispensed with two other emoluments cases (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) v. Donald J. Trump and the District of Columbia v. Trump), both filed way back in 2017, by delaying action until five days after Joe Biden was inaugurated president and then declaring the lawsuits moot.
The high court resorted to this evasion because any ruling on the cases’ merits would have had to acknowledge that Trump, serially and flagrantly, violated the emoluments clauses both foreign (“no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust … shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”) and domestic (“The President shall … not receive … any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them”).
There’s a rich literature on the many and varied ways Trump made mincemeat of the emoluments clauses during his first term, including tworeports by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, one on foreign emoluments and one on domestic, and an update to the foreign emoluments report by CREW. According to CREW, Trump’s businesses received $13.6 million in payments from foreign governments during his presidency, including $5.7 million from China (mostly stays at Trump hotels), nearly $4 million from the United Kingdom (tax bailouts for two money-losing Trump golf resorts in Scotland), $1.1 million from Qatar (purchase of four units in Trump World Tower in New York City plus hotel stays at the now-defunct Trump International in Washington), and $885,000 from Saudi Arabia (which since 2001 has owned the 45thfloor of Trump World Tower; the Saudis also logged many stays at the Trump International). This tally excludes a reported $10 million campaign contribution that Trump’s 2016 campaign accepted from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi. Such a contribution, if it was given, would be illegal. A Justice Department investigation of the alleged contribution was shut down by Trump Attorney General William Barr.
On the domestic front, federal and state officials spent, over just an 11-month period, more than $163,000 on rooms at the Trump International, including eight people Trump appointed ambassador and three people Trump appointed to the federal bench. Meanwhile, the Secret Service paid $1.4 million to various Trump properties in the United States so that it might carry out its duties to protect the president and his family from physical harm, at rates as much as 4.5 times the federal per diem. In some instances the Secret Service paid more than Trump charged members of the Qatari royal family. The Secret Service isn’t trying to bribe Trump, of course, but because its stays were paid from the Treasury they violated the domestic emoluments clause, which is triggered by the expenditure of government money.
Since Trump’s first term, opportunities to fill Trump’s pockets have proliferated. Truth Social is a money-losing social-media platform whose stock price is up 180 percent since late September. As I’ve noted before, Trump’s fans are much more interested in buying shares in his social-media platform than in using it, not because they can make money off it but because Trump can. Trump owns a $3.5 billion stake in the company even though he’s never invested in it and can sell that stake any time he wishes. Trump insists he isn’t selling, but more than half of Trump’s net worth of $5.9 billion is tied up in Truth Social, and he’s still burdened by hundreds of millions in debt. The presidency may be the only thing standing between Trump and personal bankruptcy. That reality makes Trump even more susceptible to payoffs of various kinds. “How much Truth Social stock do you own?” could easily become a routine question Trump poses to anybody seeking a political appointment or some other favor. If that’s established to be part of his “official duties,” no prosecutor can touch him. Maybe Trump’s new bestie Elon Musk will buy Truth Social and merge it with Twitter/X. The two platforms aren’t so different, and maybe Trump would agree to stop criticizing EVs in return.
Trump also has a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial (WLF). He doesn’t own it, and neither he nor any family member works for it or sits on its board of directors. As with Truth Social, Trump has not invested in the company. Yet Trump and his family are poised to receive as much as 75 percent of net revenues from the company. When you pay your bribe, don’t forget to make it in WLF tokens!
The Trump International Hotel opened in Washington’s Old Post Office less than two months before the 2016 election, and with Trump’s victory it established the District of Columbia as a latter-day equivalent of Pottersville in It’s A Wonderful Life. Trump paid too much for his lease on this federal building in 2012, lost a fortune on it—and then sold it at a profit in 2022 under mysterious circumstances that I puzzled over two years ago. Some of the mystery cleared up after Forbes reported that Trump lent the new owner $28 million to take it off his hands. By last summer, though, the new owners—of what was now a Waldorf Astoria hotel—had defaulted, and in August the property quietly sold for $100 million at a foreclosure auction.
Since then, Trump has licensed his name to three developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, including a Trump Tower Dubai and an Intercontinental Hotel, sparing the governments of those countries the inconvenience of traveling to the United States to shovel petrodollars down Trump’s pants. The Saudis’ LIV Golf League has already hosted six tournaments at Trump properties and will doubtless now step up the pace.
At the risk of spoiling the party, I must point out one potential bullkill. Josh Chafetz, professor of law at Georgetown and author of a forthcoming Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities article about the Supreme Court and political corruption, noted recently to Adam Liptak of The New York Times that the high court’s definitions of what constitute “official acts” lack consitency. In McDonnell v. United States, a 2016 bribery case involving a corrupt wingnut Virginia governor, Chief Justice John Roberts defined an official act narrowly as “a formal exercise of government power,” and on those grounds he vacated the bribery conviction. But in July’s Trump v. the United States, Roberts defined an official act broadly as anything occurring “within the outer perimeter of … official responsibility,” and on those grounds he shielded Trump from prosecution. The only logic these two definitions shared was the chief justice’s motive not to prosecute corrupt Republican politicians.
The Texas Monthly contacted 100 Republican office holders to get their view of Trump’s plans for deporting millions of immigrants. Only two responded. In Texas, one in 20 residents is an undocumented immigrant. Their absence will have a big economic impact, as will the visuals of rounding up and detaining large numbers of people.
Michael Hardy wrote:
Shortly after he is sworn into office, on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a massive deportation operation targeting the estimated 11.5 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Texas, with its 1,254-mile southern border and pro-Trump leaders, will play a central role in any such deportations. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has vowed that the administration will build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” likely on “open land in Texas near the border.” State land commissioner Dawn Buckingham recently offered the administration 1,400 acres in Starr County about 35 miles west of McAllen to build “deportation facilities.”
In their eagerness to help Trump conduct sweeping roundups of undocumented Texas workers and their families, state leaders who vociferously supported Trump’s candidacy have mostly avoided reckoning with the likely economic consequences of such roundups—including the impact on inflation, a major issue in the presidential campaign.
Earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott said he expected the president-elect to begin by deporting immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States, but he would not say who he thinks should be expelled next under the far-reaching plan. “President Trump has made perfectly clear that this is a process and you have to have a priority list,” he said. “You begin with . . . the criminals.”
But Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—around one in every twenty residents—and the vast majority are not criminals. In fact, undocumented immigrants in our state commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than legal residents, according to a National Institute of Justice analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data. Many among these 1.6 million power the state’s construction, farming, and meatpacking industries and work as housekeepers, landscape gardeners, and restaurant workers.
Deporting every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally—or even half of them—would cripple the economy. And Texas would be hit harder than most states. A recent report by the left-leaning American Immigration Council estimated that a mass-deportation campaign would reduce the national GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent—a similar hit to the one the nation took during the Great Recession. The price of groceries would skyrocket. A gallon of milk, for instance, would cost twice as much without immigrant labor, according to a 2015 estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service. Mass deportations would also punch a hole in the state budget, because undocumented Texans pay an estimated $4.9 billion in sales and payroll taxes every year,including for retirement benefits they are ineligible to collect.
Trump has argued that deporting undocumented immigrants would open up jobs for American citizens. But the percentage of citizens willing to work in industries such as landscaping and construction has declined, and economic studies suggest that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a net benefit to the economy. Reducing illegal immigration likely would, over time, result in higher wages for legal workers in industries such as construction, assuming the supply of labor were to fall faster than demand. But suddenly removing a significant percentage of undocumented workers (one recent estimate found that 23 percent of construction workers nationally don’t have legal documents) would likely cause hundreds of building projects to stall, crops to go unharvested, and cattle to stack up in feedlots.
Trump’s program would also impose social costs on communities across Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country live in mixed-status households with at least one family member who is here legally. Expelling these migrants would separate families and decimate communities across the state. “The social, family, and economic impact would be very deep,” said Rice University political scientist Tony Payan. “It doesn’t make sense from any perspective. It would be madness for the U.S. to do that.”
Some Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, have long supported mass deportation as a campaign platform while remaining vague about how such an operation would be executed and what the consequences might be for the Texas economy. In an attempt to get more specifics, Texas Monthly reached out to top Texas officials and every Republican state legislator to ask about the incoming president’s mass-deportation plan. We posed four questions:
Do you support President Trump’s plan to deport all immigrants in the country illegally?
How would you like the deportations to be carried out?
Are you concerned about the potential economic damage to the Texas construction, farming, and restaurant industries from deporting undocumented immigrants? If so, how would you remedy that damage?
Are you concerned about the family separations that will occur if all undocumented Texas are deported?
Diane Ravitch's blog 