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Associated Press: What Trump Promised to Do on Day One

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2024 //
9

Throughout the campaign, Trump issued threats and promises of what he would do on Day One. Elections have consequences.

The AP assembled his to-do list for Day One. It will be a very busy day.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump has said he wouldn’t be a dictator — “except for Day 1.” According to his own statements, he’s got a lot to do on that first day in the White House.

His list includes starting up the mass deportation of migrants, rolling back Biden administration policies on education, reshaping the federal government by firing potentially thousands of federal employees he believes are secretly working against him, and pardoning people who were arrested for their role in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” he said of his Day 1 plans.

When he took office in 2017, he had a long list, too, including immediately renegotiating trade deals, deporting migrants and putting in place measures to root out government corruption. Those things didn’t happen all at once.

Here’s a look at what Trump has said he will do in his second term and whether he can do it the moment he steps into the White House:

Make most of his criminal cases go away, at least the federal ones

Trump has said that “within two seconds” of taking office that he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has been prosecuting two federal cases against him. Smith is already evaluating how to wind down the cases because of long-standing Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted.

Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential electionand illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Trump cannot pardon himself when it comes to his state conviction in New York in a hush money case, but he could seek to leverage his status as president-elect in an effort to set aside or expunge his felony conviction and stave off a potential prison sentence.

A case in Georgia, where Trump was charged with election interference, will likely be the only criminal case left standing. It would probably be put on hold until at least 2029, at the end of his presidential term. The Georgia prosecutor on the case just won reelection.

Pardon supporters who attacked the Capitol

More than 1,500 people have been charged since a mob of Trump supporters spun up by the outgoing president attacked the Capitol almost nearly four years ago.

Trump launched his general election campaign in March by not merely trying to rewrite the history of that riot, but positioning the violent siege and failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House. As part of that, he called the rioters “unbelievable patriots” and promised to help them “the first day we get into office.”

As president, Trump can pardon anyone convicted in federal court, District of Columbia Superior Court or in a military court-martial. He can stop the continued prosecution of rioters by telling his attorney general to stand down.

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said on his social media platform in March when announcing the promise. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”

Dismantle the ‘deep state’ of government workers

Trump could begin the process of stripping tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections, so they could be more easily fired.

He wants to do two things: drastically reduce the federal workforce, which he has long said is an unnecessary drain, and to “totally obliterate the deep state” — perceived enemies who, he believes, are hiding in government jobs.

Within the government, there are hundreds of politically appointed professionals who come and go with administrations. There also are tens of thousands of “career” officials, who work under Democratic and Republican presidents. They are considered apolitical workers whose expertise and experience help keep the government functioning, particularly through transitions.

Trump wants the ability to convert some of those career people into political jobs, making them easier to dismiss and replace with loyalists. He would try to accomplish that by reviving a 2020 executive orderknown as “Schedule F.” The idea behind the order was to strip job protections from federal workers and create a new class of political employees. It could affect roughly 50,000 of 2.2 million civilian federal employees.

Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded the order when he took office in January 2021. But Congress failed to pass a bill protecting federal employees. The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s chief human resources agency, finalized a rule last spring against reclassifying workers, so Trump might have to spend months — or even years — unwinding it.

Trump has said he has a particular focus on “corrupt bureaucrats who have weaponized our justice system” and “corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”

Beyond the firings, Trump wants to crack down on government officials who leak to reporters. He also wants to require that federal employees pass a new civil service test.

Impose tariffs on imported goods, especially those from China

Trump promised throughout the campaign to impose tariffs on imported goods, particularly those from China. He argued that such import taxes would keep manufacturing jobs in the United States, shrink the federal deficit and help lower food prices. He also cast them as central to his national security agenda.

“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump said during a September rally in Flint, Michigan.

The size of his pledged tariffs varied. He proposed at least a 10% across-the-board tariff on imported goods, a 60% import tax on goods from China and a 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico — if not more.

Trump would likely not need Congress to impose these tariffs, as was clear in 2018, when he imposed them on steel and aluminum imports without going through lawmakers by citing Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. That law, according to the Congressional Research Service, gives a president the power to adjust tariffs on imports that could affect U.S. national security, an argument Trump has made.

“We’re being invaded by Mexico,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina this month. Speaking about the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump said: “I’m going to inform her on Day 1 or sooner that if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25% tariff on everything they send into the United States of America.”

Roll back protections for transgender students

Trump said during the campaign that he would roll back Biden administration action seeking to protect transgender students from discrimination in schools on the first day of his new administration.

Opposition to transgender rights was central to the Trump campaign’s closing argument. His campaign ran an ad in the final days of the race against Vice President Kamala Harris in which a narrator said: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The Biden administration announced new Title XI protections in April that made clear treating transgender students differently from their classmates is discrimination. Trump responded by saying he would roll back those changes, pledging to do some on the first day of his new administration and specifically noting he has the power to act without Congress.

“We’re going to end it on Day 1,” Trump said in May. “Don’t forget, that was done as an order from the president. That came down as an executive order. And we’re going to change it — on Day 1 it’s going to be changed.”

It is unlikely Trump will stop there.

Speaking at a Wisconsin rally in June, Trump said “on Day 1″ he would “sign a new executive order” that would cut federal money for any school “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.”

While it is likely that any of these actions would end up in court, as Biden’s change to Title XI has. Trump does have considerable power through executive orders to implement these promises.

Drill, drill, drill

Trump is looking to reverse climate policies aimed at reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

With an executive order on Day 1, he can roll back environmental protections, halt wind projects, scuttle the Biden administration’s targets that encourage the switch to electric cars and abolish standards for companies to become more environmentally friendly.

He has pledged to increase production of U.S. fossil fuels, promising to “drill, drill, drill,” when he gets into office on Day 1 and seeking to open the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, which he claims would lower energy costs.

Settle the war between Russia and Ukraine 

Trump has repeatedly said he could settle the war between Russia and Ukraine in one day. 

When asked to respond to the claim, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said “the Ukrainian crisis cannot be solved in one day.”

Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News after Trump was declared the winner of the election that Trump would now be able to “negotiate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.” She later said, “It includes, on Day 1, bringing Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end this war.”

Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago. Trump, who makes no secret of his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, has criticized the Biden administration for giving money to Ukraine to fight the war.

At a CNN town hall in May 2023, Trump said: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours.” He said that would happen after he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin.

Begin mass deportations of migrants in the US

Speaking last month at his Madison Square Garden rally in New York, Trump said: “On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”

Trump can direct his administration to begin the effort the minute he arrives in office, but it’s much more complicated to actually deport the nearly 11 million people who are believed to be in the United States illegally. That would require a huge, trained law enforcement force, massive detention facilities, airplanes to move people and nations willing to accept them. 

Trump has said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act. That rarely used 1798 law allows the president to deport anyone who is not an American citizen and is from a country with which there is a “declared war” or a threatened or attempted “invasion or predatory incursion.”

He has spoken about deploying the National Guard, which can be activated on orders from a governor. Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser, said sympathetic Republican governors could send troops to nearby states that refuse to participate.

Asked about the cost of his plan, he told NBC News: “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Trump

Tass: Putin Believes Trump Owes Him for His Victory

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2024 //
50

As you recall, I wrote here that I believe that Putin rigged our election. I don’t know how but the best hacking leaves no tracks. But “no evidence” is not evidence. No one is investigating.

But there is more.

A woman named Julia Davis translates Russian media and posts what the Russian press reports.

Tass, the main Russian newspaper, wrote this on November 11:

Trump to rely on forces that brought him to power — Russian presidential aide

Nikolay Patrushev agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration”

MOSCOW, November 11. /TASS/. In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can diverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

TAGS

Foreign policy

Categories Accountability, Elections, Evil, Lies, Trump

ProPublica: Voters in Three States Rejected Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2024 //
8

It remains a fact that vouchers have never won a state referendum. Typically, voters reject vouchers by large margins. Yet Republicans continue to push them. This election, three states that voted for Trump defeated vouchers.

ProPublica reported on the public’s rejection of vouchers:

In 2018, Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. On the ballot that year was a measure that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest ones — to receive taxpayer money to send their kids to private, typically religious schools.

Arizonans voted no, and it wasn’t close. Even in a right-leaning state, with powerful Republican leaders supporting the initiative, the vote against it was 65% to 35%.

Coming into this week’s election, Donald Trump and Republicans had hoped to reverse that sort of popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher ballot measures in several states.

But despite Trump’s big win in the presidential race, vouchers were again soundly rejected by significant majorities of Americans. In Kentucky, a ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private schooling was defeated roughly 65% to 35% — the same margin as in Arizona in 2018 and the inverse of the margin by which Trump won Kentucky. In Nebraska, nearly all 93 counties voted to repeal an existing voucher program; even its reddest county, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. And in Colorado, voters defeated an effort to add a “right to school choice” to the state constitution, language that might have allowed parents to send their kids to private schools on the public dime.

Expansions of school vouchers, despite backing from wealthy conservatives, have never won when put to voters. Instead, they lose by margins not often seen in such a polarized country.

Candidates of both parties would be wise “to make strong public education a big part of their political platforms, because vouchers just aren’t popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers pointed to an emerging coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, that opposes these sweeping “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t that many or any private schools around.)

Yet voucher efforts have been more successful when they aren’t put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen stateshave enacted or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs, which provide taxpayer money even to affluent families who were already able to afford private school.

That includes Arizona, where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute teamed up with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP majority in the Legislature to enact the very same “universal” education savings account initiative that had been so soundly repudiated by voters just a few years before.

Another way that Republican governors and interest groups have circumvented the popular will on this issue is by identifying anti-voucher members of their own party and supporting pro-voucher candidates who challenge those members in primary elections. This way, they can build legislative majorities to enact voucher laws no matter what conservative voters want.

In Iowa, several Republicans were standing in the way of a major new voucher program as of 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped push them out of office — despite their being incumbents in her own party — for the purposes of securing a majority to pass the measure.

A similar dynamic has developed in Tennessee and in a dramatic way in Texas, the ultimate prize for voucher advocates. There, pro-voucher candidates for the state Legislature won enough seats this Tuesday to pass a voucher program during the legislative session that starts in January, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said.

The day after the election, Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, framed the result as a resounding signal that Texans have now shown a “tidal wave of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. But in reality, the issue was conspicuously missing from the campaigns of many of the new Republicans whom he helped win, amid polling numbers that showed Texans hold complicated views on school choice. (A University of Houston poll taken this summer found that two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, but that an equal number also believe that vouchers funnel money away from “already struggling public schools.”)

In the half dozen competitive Texas legislative races targeted in this election by Abbott and the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, backed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Republican candidates did not make vouchers a central plank of their platforms. Most left the issue off of their campaign websites, instead listing stances like “Standing with Public Schools” and “Increased Funding for Local Schools.”

Corpus Christi-area Republican Denise Villalobos pledged on her website that if elected she would “fight for increased funding for our teachers and local schools”; she did not emphasize her pro-voucher views. At least one ad paid for by the American Federation for Children’s affiliated PAC attacked her opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr., not for his opposition to vouchers but for what it claimed were his “progressive open-border policies that flood our communities with violent crime and fentanyl.” (Villalobos defeated Ortiz by 10 points.)

Matthew Wilson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said that this strategy reflects a belief among voucher advocates that compared to the border and culture wars, vouchers are not in fact a “slam-dunk winning issue.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s results in the presidential election, NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said thatDemocrats had overlooked school choice as a policy that might be popular among working-class people, including Latinos, in places like Texas. But the concrete results of ballot initiatives around the nation show that it is in fact Trump, DeVos and other voucher proponents who are out of step with the American people on this particular issue.

They continue to advocate for vouchers, though, for multiple reasons: a sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that the free market and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public ones, and a long-term goal of more religious education in this country.

And they know that popular sentiment can be and has been overridden by the efforts of powerful governors and moneyed interest groups, said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center who recently published a history of billionaire-led voucher efforts nationwide.

The Supreme Court could also aid the voucher movement in coming years, he said.

“They’re not going to stop,” Cowen said, “just because voters have rejected this.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Vouchers

Trump Names Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Redesign the Federal Government; and a FOX News Host to Lead Dept of Defense

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2024 //
35

Trump announced that his $100 million donor Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would head a Department of Government Efficiency with the job of redesigning and downsizing the federal government. Did we elect Musk? Ramaswamy? Who are these guys? They say they will cut the federal budget by 1/3. Will they cut Social Security? Medicare? National defense?

Trump also announced his choice of a FOX News host to head the Departnent of Defebse, a position previously held by a four-star general.

The New York Times reported:

President-elect Donald J. Trump is turning to two of his most prominent wealthy backers, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to overhaul the federal government, saying on Tuesday that they would lead what he called the Department of Government Efficiency.

Calling it “the Manhattan Project” of this era, Mr. Trump said the department would propel “drastic change” throughout the federal bureaucracy by July 4, 2026.

“A smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement. “I am confident they will succeed!”

Mr. Musk said before the election that he would help Mr. Trump cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, but he did not elaborate on Tuesday night about how he would do that, or which parts of the government would be cut or restructured.

“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Mr. Musk said in the statement.

Among a blizzard of announcements on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump also said he would nominate Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to be his next defense secretary. In veering away from a traditional defense secretary, Mr. Trump elevated a television ally to run the Pentagon and lead 1.3 million active-duty troops.

The New York Daily News Reported:

President-elect Trump on Tuesday named Elon Musk and onetime Republican presidential wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, calling it “the Manhattan Project of our time.”

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has claimed he could slash $2 trillion from federal spending, nearly a third of what the government spends in a year. Ramaswamy, for his part, has said he wants to trigger mass layoffs at federal agencies, even going so far as to shut them down, as NBC News reported in 2023.

Despite its name, the department is not a government agency, and Trump said the pair would offer “advice and guidance” to the White House in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget, which is a government agency.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),” Trump said in a statement from his transition team Tuesday evening, calling them “two wonderful Americans” poised to help his administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies — Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Mercedes Schneider: Trump’s Plans for Education

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2024 //
24

If Trump follows through with his education proposals, if the Republican-controlled Congress lets him do it, America’s students and teachers are in for a world of hurt.

Mercedes Schneider writes here about what’s at stake. I did not copy and paste the article in full. It is excellent. I urge you to open the link.

I do not believe American education is a top concern for Donald Trump. I do believe that he could well turn it over to the likes of the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025, so long as nobody outshines him in the press and puts anything (Constitution included) ahead of loyalty to him above all else.

So, when ABC News reports that Trump’s Agenda 47 as though the Heritage Foundation has not already done most of Trump’s homework for him, well, that fashions Trump’s interest in a number of issues as though it is something more than just letting those extreme-right-leaners who really care about that stuff have at.

Now that the election is over, Trump allies are openly admitting that Project 2025 was the Trump plan all along.

One featured Project 2025-Trump issue is the proposed dismantling of the US Department of Education (USDOE), which was created during the Carter administration. Talk of getting rid of USDOE began with the Reagan administration(in other words, soon after it was created). It should come as no surprise that in 1980, the “fledgling” Heritage Foundation was in Reagan’s ear and is proud to declare as much in the opening pages of its Project 2025:

page xiii

Several decades later, USDOE still exists, and several decades later, the Heritage Foundation is still trying to kill it. 

Heritage et al. has taken great pains to outline its 900+-page wish list of ultra conservatism, including nixing USDOE. However, it would take a lot to achieve the kind of legislative unity required to dissolve a federal department that supports numerous Americans in desired and positive ways, not the least of which is via the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).

Brookings offers a concise discussion of the Project 2025 plan for education, including this “sample list” of negative consequences:

No surprise that Heritage wants school vouchers for all, a notably unpopular concept at the 2024 ballot box:

Project 2025, page 319

Of course, the key is to have legislatures jump onto the choice bandwagon and force choice onto voters whether they want it or not. But some voters do benefit from having access to publicly-subsidized private schools: Those with money. Heritage alludes to Arizona’s “expanded program… available to all families. However, in Arizona, those accessing school voucher cash tend not to be the working class but more affluent families.

Speaking of the affluent and private school vouchers: Billionaire former US Ed secretary Betsy DeVos, who in 2023 could not get private school vouchers over the line in her home state of Michigan, apparently smells opportunity. 

On January 07, 2024, DeVos resigned as Trump’s US ed sec. In her resignation letter, DeVos placed the fault of January 06, 2024, chaos squarely on Trump:

In a November 07. 2024, interview with EdWeek about advice for Trump’s next Ed sec, , DeVos is fact checked as she tries to put lack of a school choice “big moment” at the feet of the Democrats. Not so, Betsy:

During Trump’s first term, DeVos’ inability to push private school choice to her liking has to be attributed in part to some Republican resistance to the idea. Heritage and any Heritage-sympathetic ed sec could well face similar issues in Trump’s second term.

I did not copy the entire article. Open the link to finish reading it.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Read, Funding, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Jamelle Bouie: Do Trump Voters Know What He Plans to Do to Them?

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2024 //
39

Jamelle Bouie writes regularly for The New York Times. I subscribed to get extra writing from him. In this one, he asks the question that has undoubtedly occurred to many people.

Bouie writes:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.

The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”

What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.

The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.

But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.

And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?

Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?

I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Health, Hoax, Trump

Robert Hubbell: The Pundits Who Blame Democrats Are Wrong

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2024 //
94

Robert Hubbell is a popular and insightful blogger who has been an inspiration during the campaign. In this post, he takes issue with the pundits who blame Democrats for Trump’s victory, specifically, those who say that Democrats abandoned the working class.

Hubbell wrote:

People continue to be in shock. Many readers report that they have withdrawn from cable news and legacy media outlets. Understandably so. Those outlets are falling over themselves to explain “why” the 2024 presidential election unfolded as it did. The only statement we can make with certainty is that whatever the political commentariat tells us in the short term will be wrong. Spectacularly so.

Don’t believe me? See Jon Stewart’s review of post-election analyses by pundits over the last two decades. See Jon Stewart’s Election Night Takeaway. Watch the entire three minutes. It will help you endure the onslaught of “hot takes” that purport to explain the election—mainly by blaming Democrats.

Before turning to the growing chorus of Democrats blaming Democrats for the loss, let’s acknowledge some good news. Voters in seven states approved state constitutional amendments to protect reproductive liberty: Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York. Newcomer Elissa Slotkin was elected as a US Senator from Michigan. US Senator Jacky Rosen was reelected in Nevada. Other races (Ruben Gallego, Bob Casey) are still open or awaiting ballot curing (more about that below).

In North Carolina, Democrats captured the offices of Governor (Josh Stein), Lieutenant Governor (Rachel Hunt), Attorney General (Jeff Jackson), and top schools official (Mo Greene). In addition, Democrats broke the GOP supermajority in the state house! (For those of you who participated in The States Project, breaking the supermajority in NC was a top priority.)

In Wisconsin, Democrats flipped ten seats in the state Assembly after the state supreme court approved new legislative district lines—setting up Democrats to take control of the state Assembly in 2026.

Blaming Democrats for losses in 2024 is not helpful, fair, or accurate

I spent much of the day drafting responses to readers who forwarded articles / posts claiming that Democratic losses in 2024 were due to the fact that they had “lost touch” or “alienated” or “failed to listen to” working class voters or male voters. I won’t link to those articles / posts. They are ubiquitous.

The notion that Democrats “failed to listen to” or “lost touch” with the middle and working classes is demonstrably wrong. Virtually every policy promoted by VP Harris was designed to help the middle class, blue-collar workers, and the working poor:

Childcare tax credits, earned income credits for the working poor, lower prescription drug prices, protecting affordable healthcare, increasing the minimum wage, protecting unions and workers’ rights, providing for in-home care for elderly and homebound, subsidizing first-time homebuyers, building affordable housing, student loan forgiveness, prosecuting price gouging, and a middle-class tax cut.

To the extent that the Democrats speak through policies, virtually all Democratic policies seek to improve the lives of the middle class, working class, and working poor. On a policy level, the assertion Democrats “forgot” or “abandoned” the working class is wrong and corrosive.

What, then, is the source of the false notion that Democrats have “forgotten” the working class? I don’t know for certain, but I have a guess. (I invite others to weigh in; I was an English major and a securities litigation lawyer. I claim no expertise in political analysis.)

Many (not all) in the middle and working classes disagree with Democratic support for women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, equal voting rights for Black citizens, and the fight against human-caused climate change. To the extent that Democrats have parted ways with the cultural and social views of many in the working class and middle class, those groups feel “alienated” and “ignored.” 

But it is no answer to those feelings of abandonment and alienation to abandon the struggle for full equality for women, LGBTQ rights, voting rights for Black citizens, and protection of the environment.

So, yes, there is a growing gap between Democratic policies on social issues and many (not all) in the middle and working classes, especially males.

Case in point: Despite unprecedented support for unions by Biden and Harris, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters refused to endorse Kamala Harris. The only rational course of action for unions is to support Kamala Harris. Why, then, did the Teamsters refuse to do so?

My belief: A majority of Teamsters—largely male working-class voters—disagreed with Kamala Harris and Democrats on social issues, like women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, Black voting rights, and efforts to fight human-caused climate change.

So, the fiction that Democrats have “ignored” the working and middle classes is wrong on the merits. It is only on social issues at the core of the Democratic Party’s commitment to social justice that there has been a divergence of opinion.

The answer to the above conundrum is not to abandon the social justice values that are at the core of the Democratic Party but to expand the voting base that is the backbone of the party.

If anyone tells you that Democrats lost in 2024 because they “abandoned” the working class, ask them specifically how Democrats did so. Be prepared to list Kamala Harris’s policies designed to improve the lives of the working class. Ask them how extending the GOP tax cut for millionaires and corporations will benefit the working class. Ask them how the GOP plan to kill Obamacare will help the working class. Or how imposing a 10% tariff on all imported goods will help the working class.

The fiction that Democrats “abandoned” the working class is designed to set Democrats against one another. It is beginning to gain traction because gullible media is willingly spreading the lie. Don’t be seduced by the fiction. Democrats must remain loyal to their roots of social justice and dignity for all. It is the right thing to do. It is the only thing to do. Political victory without justice for all would be hollow and bitter. We are better than that.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Elections, Harris, Kamala

Michael Tomasky: The Real Reason Trump Won

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2024 //
57

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic offers his view about why Trump won. I think it was because Putin intervened with hacking. Most think it was high prices, the cost of eggs and gasoline. Some say it was because Kamala had no agenda (I disagree). Some say it was her unwillingness to detach from unpopular Biden. Some say it was Biden’s fault for not dropping out a year earlier. Tomasky disagrees.

He wrote:

Item one: It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails). But in the late 1990s, and after the internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well, along with the internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting websites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, V.C.-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beach ball and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015–16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the postdebate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote aboutat the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia, in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it too has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the op-ed page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasyland. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun.Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or News Corp will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orbán told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro–abortion rights initiative and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and TikTok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is

Categories Biden, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Media, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Why Kamala Lost

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2024 //
18

Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.

There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat. 

But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing. 

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.” 

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged. 

Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” 

White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.” 

Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic  jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist HeatherLong said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years. 

As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.

U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs. 

Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020. 

This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!” 

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Media, Trump

“Democracy”: The Corrosion of the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2024 //
56

Our reader “Democracy” posted the following comment about the Presidential election:

In April of 2012, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two of the most respected Congressional scholars in the country, published this piece in The Washington Post:

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

“‘Both sides do it’ or ‘There is plenty of blame to go around’ are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.”

“It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. ..The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.”

It has only GOTTEN MUCH WORSE since then.

It isn’t the Democrats. It’s racism, misogyny, “Christian” nationalism”, fear and hatred, all spread by Republicans, especially Trump, and by Fox, and by right-wing media, from Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk to Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, and others.

Lots of Americans are willingly receptive.

We are all going to find out in the near future just what a mistake they made.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Republicans
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