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Washington Post Fact-Checker on the VP Debate

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
10

Glenn Kessler is the fact-checker for The Washington Post. He is the best in the business. The only thing he does is fact-checking.

He wrote:

In the vice-presidential debate Tuesday night, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) proved he could match his running mate on the falsehood meter, though with a bit more verve and polish. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) misled on occasion, such as claiming Republicans supported a “registry for pregnancies.”

Here is a roundup of 21 claims that caught our attention, the majority by Vance. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.

“Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets, thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.”

— Vance

This is false. Vance appears to be conflating two things as he answered a question on Iran’s attack on Israel.

Iran’s crude oil production rose to 3.3 million barrels a day as of August, which is an increase since the end of the Trump administration but still lower than in 2018. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iran’s oil production in 2020 was just under 2 million barrels a day. The pandemic sent oil production and sales plummeting around the globe. Iran’s production in 2020 was the lowest in almost 40 years, the EIA said.

But experts say that even if Trump had been reelected, he would have had trouble keeping sanctions from eroding. In particular, China has become adept at evading U.S. sanctions by arranging for many buyers of Iranian oil to be small, semi-independent refineries known as “teapots.” Such entities accounted for about one-fifth of China’s worldwide oil imports, according to Reuters. “With their small size and limited business operations, teapots are hard to uncover and not exposed to the U.S. financial system,” according to a report by the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran.

“When Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”

— Walz

This is largely accurate. Iran attacked a U.S. drone in 2019, but Trump did not hit back. He lost his nerve at the last minute, according to various news accounts. Then Iran attacked a U.S. military base in 2020 after Trump ordered the drone killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 3, 2020. No one was killed, though more than 100 service members suffered from traumatic brain injuries.

Walz calls out Trump’s withdrawal from Iran nuclear deal

During the Oct. 1 vice-presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz (D) reminded Americans that former president Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. (Video: CBS News)

Trump initially bragged about the fact that no one was killed, but it emerged that a U.S. contractor suffered a serious eye injury and 110 troops had traumatic brain injuries while sheltering in place, with 35 being sent to Germany and the United States for treatment. Yet Trump has continued to say they suffered only from headaches — as he did again just hours before the debate.

“When was the last time that an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out? The only answer is during the four years that Donald Trump was president.”

— Vance

Vance could have given a shout-out to Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on Tuesday.

Jimmy Carter, president from 1977 to 1981, not only never formally declared war or sought authorization to use force from Congress during his presidency, but military records show not a single soldier died in hostile action during his presidency. Eight military personnel died during the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, but the military deems those as nonhostile deaths. (A helicopter collided with an aircraft.) A marine and an Army soldier were also killed when a mob burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

At least 65 active-duty troops died in hostile action during Trump’s presidency, the records show, as he ramped up commitments in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State terrorist group while also launching airstrikes on Syria as punishment for a chemical weapons attack. Trump also escalated hostilities with Iran, including the killing of Soleimani. Trump said at the time the strike was carried out in accordance with the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of 2001.

“We’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”

— Vance

This is false. The United States in 2024 ranked 17th in the world for environmental health, according to the authoritative Environmental Performance Index, a project of Yale and Columbia Universities. It ranked 27th for air quality and 9th for water and sanitation.

“What have Kamala Harris policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world.”

— Vance

This is false. Vance has previously earned Four Pinocchios for this claim, but he keeps saying it. Harris cast the deciding vote for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to foster green manufacturing jobs in the United States. The evidence shows that it’s working.

Vance’s theory, once expressed in an opinion article, is that by shifting the auto industry toward electric vehicles, the United States is going to send significant amounts of money and jobs to China. But this claim ignores what is actually in the IRA. The law was intended to help the United States catch up with China before Beijing completely takes over the EV market. The Chinese government has given huge subsidies to the EV industry in a quest to dominate it.

So the law included provisions to make sure more of the supply chain is produced in the United States, such as a consumer tax credit for EVs. The Treasury Department wrote regulations that make it harder for vehicles to qualify for the full federal EV tax credit of $7,500 if key components are sourced from China, with a grace period for some rare materials like graphite. As part of the IRA, final assembly of EV models must occur in North America to be eligible. In May, the administration also imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs.

Vance also ignores that many provisions in the IRA have sparked a manufacturing boom in the United States — designed to counter China’s dominance in the green-energy arena. Besides EVs, the bill included tax incentives intended to spur manufacturing of solar modules, wind turbines, inverters, EV batteries and power storage, and the extraction and refining of critical minerals.

In the first year after passage of the IRA, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, 280 clean-energy projects were announced across 44 states, representing $282 billion of investment that would create 175,000 jobs. “What we found was that — so far at least — the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” the report said.

“As you ask about family separation right now in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked. Some of them hopefully are at homes with their families. Some of them have been used as drug-trafficking mules.”

— Vance

This is false. Vance is referencing a number that applies to unaccompanied children who crossed the border and were placed with a sponsor, including during the last two years of Trump’s administration. An August Homeland Security inspector general report, which tracked data from October 2018 to September 2023, said 320,000 children were never given a date to appear in immigration court or missed an appearance, providing “no assurance” that the children were not vulnerable to trafficking. About one-quarter of the cases took place under Trump. The report recommended creating an automated system, rather than a manual one, which Homeland Security said it would implement.

Until this report was issued, Trump had been using a much lower figure of 88,000 “lost children,” but this was a different metric. As part of Health and Human Services Department protocol, case managers are supposed to try three times to check on the status of a child between 30 and 37 days after release to a sponsor, preferably by having a conversation with the child in addition to the sponsor. In 2023, the New York Times calculated that in 2020-2021, 85,000 children could not be reached.

But it’s not a legal requirement for HHS to make the calls — and it’s not required that children or the sponsor answer. Trump administration officials made that point when they came under fire from Democrats for supposedly losing track of children.

Applying the same metrics to the first three years of Trump’s term, when about 160,000 unaccompanied children were referred to HHS, we estimated that 54,000 children could not be reached. Comparable figures for the Biden-Harris administration, through last month, would be 400,000 referred and 135,000 not reached.

“Donald Trump had four years. He had four years to do this. And he promised you, America, how easy it would be. ‘I’ll build you a big, beautiful wall, and Mexico will pay for it.’ Less than 2 percent of that wall got built, and Mexico didn’t pay a dime.”

— Walz

The percentage is exaggerated. About 458 miles of a border barrier was built during Trump’s presidency, but most of it (373 miles) was replacement for existing primary or secondary barriers that were dilapidated or outdated, according to a Jan. 22, 2021, report by Customs and Border Protection. About 52 miles was new primary wall, and 33 miles was new secondary wall. Trump had promised to build 1,000 miles of barrier, so even taking the lower numbers gets Trump 8.5 percent.

Mexico did not pay for the barrier Trump erected along the southern border; American taxpayers did. The Trump administration directed $16.4 billion in funding to barrier construction along the southern border. About $10 billion was repurposed from Defense Department projects over the objections of Congress.

“We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country.”

— Vance

This claim lacks context. Under Biden, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics, overall drug seizures have dropped, especially for marijuana, but until this year increased substantially for fentanyl — the drug most responsible for overdose deaths. Both the decrease in marijuana seizures and the increase in fentanyl seizures reflect trends that started under Trump.

As president, Trump often touted how much seizures of drugs at the southern border had increased on his watch. This is an imperfect metric. It could mean that law enforcement is doing a better job. But more seizures also might indicate that the drug flow has increased and that law enforcement is missing even more.

The amount of fentanyl seized at the border increased under Biden and Trump, though so far, the amount jumped by a larger percentage under Trump, CBP statistics show. In Trump’s four fiscal years, the number of pounds increased 586 percent, compared with 462 percent in the first three fiscal years under Biden.

The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials increased from almost 4,800 pounds in fiscal 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal 2023. There were about 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before Trump took office.

“Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed. You’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed. You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

— Vance

It’s false to say “illegal immigrants.” In Springfield, where the city’s website says there are “12,000 to 15,000” immigrants, most of the new arrivals are from Haiti. But Vance is wrong to call them “illegal.” They are in the U.S. legally under temporary protected status (TPS), a program created in 1990 that provides deportation relief and work permits.

Vance blames ‘illegal’ Springfield migrant community

On Oct. 1, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) alleged that “illegal” migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were burdening the local economy. (Video: CBS News)

Conservatives argue that Biden has expanded TPS and thus is providing a legal pathway for people who otherwise would be undocumented. But there is no question the Haitians are in the United States legally.

The New York Times reported that “Michelle Lee-Hall, executive director of Springfield’s housing authority, said that the affordability problem in Springfield had been aggravated by landlords pivoting to Haitians who were willing to pay higher rent.”

“So there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand that is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years.”

— Vance

This is wrong. Vance suggested that the Springfield Haitians used an app for new arrivals at the border to claim asylum. As noted, the Haitians arrived through the TPS program.

Separately, there is a humanitarian parole program for citizens of four countries in the hemisphere — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — which requires a passport and a link with a U.S.-based sponsor. But that also does not involve the app.

Walz repeats the misstatement. After saying he misspoke about when he arrived in China in 1989 on a teaching assignment, Walz says it again. Minnesota Public Radio reported this week that Walz did not arrive in China until August. But the protests in Tiananmen Square were ended by the Chinese military on June 3-4, making it impossible for him to be there “during the democracy protests.”

Vance is being disingenuous here. He backed a law that would impose a nationwide limit of 15 weeks for when women could get an abortion — which would overturn the laws of many liberal states. In 2022, Vance said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” Moreover, last year, he urged the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old federal law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. The Biden administration has not invoked the law, but a more conservative one could, thus limiting abortion rights even without any new laws.

“He [Trump] gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top guys.”

— Walz

This is exaggerated. When both the Joint Tax Committee and the Tax Policy Center looked at the impact of the 2017 tax bill, they concluded that most people would experience an overall reduction in taxes. The Tax Policy Center found that 80.4 percent of all taxpayers would have a tax cut, compared with about 5 percent experiencing a tax increase. In the middle quintile, 91 percent would get a tax cut, averaging about $1,090, with 7.3 percent facing a tax increase averaging about $910.

In fact, Harris has pledged to keep intact tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 when the tax cut expires in 2026. That would reduce revenue by $1.35 trillion, further confirming that not just the “top guys” got a tax cut.

“And what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25 percent, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60 percent.”

— Vance

The housing figure is mostly false. Median sale prices of homes have risen from $355,000 in the first quarter of 2021 to $412,300 in the second quarter of 2024. That’s a gain of 16 percent. It’s also a decline of about 2 percent from a high reached the fourth quarter of 2022.

Another measure — the consumer price index for housing — shows an increase of about 22 percent since January 2021.

It’s also a bit much to say Harris is responsible. The Federal Reserve Bank pinned much of the blame for the rise in home prices on the pandemic. But there are other factors, such as seniors staying in their homes, reducing supply, and real estate investors snapping up fixer-uppers for rental and resale.

The consumer price index for food shows an increase of 22 percent since January 2021. But, again, the pandemic played a role — as did factors beyond an administration’s control. In 48 states, nearly 101 million “wild aquatic birds, commercial poultry and backyard or hobbyist flocks” have been infected with bird flu since January 2022, according to the CDC. That has sent the price of eggs soaring.

“It [the tax bill] was passed in 2017, and you saw an American economic boom unlike we’ve seen in a generation in this country.”

— Vance

This is false. The tax cut was not responsible for a once-in-a-generation “American economic boom.” Trump inherited a growing economy from Barack Obama, which the tax cut may have extended a bit, but it was already running out of steam when the pandemic struck in 2020. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, manufacturing went into a mild recession.

Bill Clinton was president only 16 years before Trump. The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, under Clinton, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively.

“Donald Trump was the guy who created the largest trade deficit in American history with China.”

— Walz

This is true. The U.S. trade deficit with China hit a peak 0f $377.7 billion in 2018, when Trump was president. In 2023, it was $252 billion, the lowest in 14 years, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“All I said on this is, I got there this summer and misspoke on this. So I will just — that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China, during the democracy protests, went in. And from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

— Walz

“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies. It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.”

— Walz

This is false. Project 2025 does not say this. (Project 2025 is not an official campaign document. It’s a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page manifesto filled with detailed conservative proposals that is popularly labeled Project 2025. But there are definitely Trump connections.)

Instead the document calls for better statistical tracking of abortions across the country. Claiming that liberal states have become “sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the report says the Department of Health and Human Services “should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”

Walz’s state already does, leading a Heritage Foundation official to ask whether Walz is a “miscarriage monitor” after Harris made a similar claim in her debate with Trump.

“I never supported a national ban. I did during when I was running for Senate in 2020 to talk about setting some minimum national standard.”

— Vance

“The gross majority, close to 90 percent in some of the statistics I’ve seen, of the gun violence in this country is committed with illegally obtained firearms.”

— Vance

This is wrong. Vance made this comment during a discussion on mass shootings at schools. In a 2022 study, the National Institute of Justice, a research unit of the Justice Department, found that of the known mass shooting cases, the vast majority of shooters — 77 percent — bought at least some of their weapons legally. Illegal purchases were made by 13 percent of those committing mass shootings.

“Prescription drugs fell in 2018 for the first time in a very long time.”

— Vance

Vance overstates what happened to the consumer price index for prescription drugs. It fell by 0.6 percent for the 12 months ending in December 2018, the first time in 46 years. But there are other 12-month periods with index declines, including one as recently as 2013. Prices rose 3 percent in the 12-month period ending in December 2019 and then kept rising after that — until the pandemic. Then, the index fell almost every month of 2021, the first year of Biden’s presidency.

“But when Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health-care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

— Vance

This is false. Trump consistently tried to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, either through legislation or regulation, and he acted in a highly partisan manner. In fact, when campaigning in 2020, he falsely bragged that he had in effect killed the ACA by eliminating, in his tax bill that passed with no Democratic votes, a mandate to purchase health insurance.

Then, with the mandate effectively gone, GOP state attorneys general argued that Congress meant to have an Affordable Care Act with an individual mandate or not at all. Trump’s Justice Department, in a brief signed by Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, agreed that “the entire ACA … must fall.”

Nearly 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions could have been denied coverage by insurers or charged prohibitively high prices as a result, and Trump had no plan to replace ACA provisions such as coverage for preexisting conditions. Then Attorney General William P. Barr, according to CNN, tried to get the White House to back off from pursuing a full rollback of the Affordable Care Act but was unsuccessful. The Supreme Court, in 2021, dismissed the case.

The Trump administration also issued rules that promote the use of low-quality, short-term plans that were prohibited under Obamacare. These plans typically didn’t have the same protections for people with existing health conditions, allowing insurance companies to deny coverage or charge higher prices. (A number of states, mainly Democratic-leaning, acted to prohibit or limit these Trump plans.)

Finally, Trump threw his support behind House and Senate bills that would have allowed states to seek waivers and consider a person’s health status when writing policies in the individual market. The theory was that removing sicker people from the markets and allowing policies with skimpier options would result in lower overall premiums.

But the Congressional Budget Office concludedthat states that took advantage of these provisions could, perversely, blow up their insurance markets, leaving people with preexisting conditions with spiraling costs. About one-sixth of the U.S. population was estimated to live in states that would face this problem.

“Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said. Remember he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.”

— Vance

This is a whitewash of Trump’s actions.Trump encouraged a crowd of supporters to appear on Jan. 6, 2021, and then condemned his vice president when Mike Pence refused to halt the ceremonial counting of electoral votes. When the crowd attacked the Capitol, as documented in the House select committee report on the Jan. 6 attack and other reporting, Trump was reluctant to take action to calm the situation, even as his staff pleaded with him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. Trump’s tweets were so inadequate, in the view of staff members, that many resolved to resign. Even his children Ivanka and Donald Jr. found the tweets to be inappropriate. Nearly three hours passed before Trump finally told the rioters to “go home.”

Vance did not mention that, in a break with tradition, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration.

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Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

What Trump Said Yesterday

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
22

On the blog called “Public Notice,” Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky wrote about Trump’s unhinged speech yesterday. He is angry and incoherent every time he speaks, so the media doesn’t find his rants to be newsworthy. As the authors point out, the media would jump all over Biden for the factual errors that Trump commits (yesterday, he confused the dictator of North Korea with the president of Iran); but Trump gets a pass because his errors, lies, and hatred are routine.

Rupar and Berlatsky write:

The vice presidential debate will be a main topic of political conversation today, but far more important (and disturbing) things happened before it took place.

This isn’t to say the debate wasn’t memorable. There were at least a couple exchanges that stood out. One came when JD Vance got upset about a moderator interjecting to fact-check racist lies he used to smear his own constituents….

But these moments pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.

Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.

Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term.

Trump spews and spews some more

Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.

His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.” 

The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)

Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) 

Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.” (Watch below.)

But all of this was just warning up to a scene during the Milwaukee event that would’ve ended anyone else’s presidential campaign.

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Trump mocks troops injured in the line of duty

That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.” 

After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran. (Watch below.)

Somehow, it got worse. Trump went on to characterize the Iranian attack as “a very nice thing” because Iran didn’t escalate further, which he suggested was the result of his toughness. Again, Trump praised Iran for a “nice” attack which seriously injured more than 100 US soldiers. (Walz highlighted these remarks from Trump during Tuesday’s debate, saying “when Iranian missiles did fall near US troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”)

Trump’s self-aggrandizing, confused, pompous, cynical, cruel, insulting lies are not surprising. Again, he has even pushed this particular lie before. He’s also made misleading statements to erase or distract from the fact that soldiers died in Afghanistan during his presidency. He’s called soldiers who die in combat “suckers” and “losers.”

It’s manifestly clear that Trump thinks that soldiers killed or injured on his watch are an inconvenience. He mocks their sacrifice, mocks their injuries, and praises regimes that target them.

This post at Public Notice was followed by this one, written by Stephen Robinson. It sums up a vivid portrait of Trump as an addled old man.


Trump’s ignorance, callousness, and lies are not new. But what is novel is the way they all seem to have been slowed down these days so that he seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego. He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.
The remarks Trump gave in Milwaukee before he took questions from reporters were remarkably low energy by his standards. Check out the below clip of Trump praising his catastrophic covid response in a horse rasp, continually looking down to check his notes, repeating the same phrases of self-praise, getting stuck in a loop on pet words or slogans (“Wuhan … Wuhan … ”), telling subdued and meandering lies with no rhythm or applause lines. And indeed, there is no applause; the MAGA faithful are silent, wooed into a tedious fascist stupor.

It would be nice to think that such displays of grotesque ignorance, hatred, authoritarianism, and contempt for the country, for injured service members, and indeed for his own voters, would lead everyone to conclude, en masse, that Trump is disgustingly, massively, inarguably unfit to hold any office of public trust, much less president. But as we know, partisanship, racism, and institutional failures, from the media to the courts to the Justice Department, may allow Trump to win in November.

If he does, he will sit in the Oval Office. But his decrepit campaign performances suggest he will be even less capable of pretending to be anything other than a declining bigot than he was the first time around. And who’s likely to pick up the slack?

Well, as historian Kevin Kruse says, if Trump succumbs to ill health, or just sinks into his natural state of sloth and indifference, the president, de jure or de facto, would be JD Vance, “a deeply unpopular weirdo with virtually no experience, someone who won his first election less than two years ago and even then only because he’s the puppet of an insane billionaire.”

Yesterday was yet another reminder that the Republican ticket is a hideous and embarrassing blight on the American experiment and the American character. Yet, Trump continues to slump towards power, with Vance smirking and smugly lying alongside him. We’ve got about a month before we as a country either rebuke them or follow them into derp, hate, and despair.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Politics, Trump

The New Republic: Trump’s Plan for the Economy Would Cause Massive Damage

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
13

Writing in The New Republic, Paige Oamek warns that Trump’s economic plans would wreak havoc on the economy.

Donald Trump says he has a plan for the economy, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. 

According to independent nonprofit nonpartisan researchers, Trump’s policies on tariffs, deportations, and the Federal Reserve would, if put in action, seriously hike inflation, wipe out jobs, and slow U.S. production and economic growth. 

In even the most generous modeling, inflation would reach 6 percent by 2026 and consumer prices would balloon 20 percent by 2028. 

According to an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economicspublished Thursday, the devastating effects on the economy could last through 2040. 

Trump promises to carry out “mass deportations” if elected president. Doing so could “cause a large inflationary impulse and a significant loss of employment (particularly in manufacturing and agriculture) in the US economy,” the researchers found. The deportation plan on its own would provide no economic benefit to Americans. 

Warwick McKibbin, a senior fellow and co-author of the study, told CNN that the institute estimates that deporting undocumented workers would cause a pandemic-like “shock,” especially in the agriculture industry. 

“Can you imagine taking 16 percent out of the labor force in agriculture?” McKibbin said, who noted the ripple effects would include rising cost of food or even permanent loss of supply. 

Trump’s isolationist approach to the economy through deportations and tariffs on U.S. imports would hurt the American people most. “We find that ironically, despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” wrote the authors. 

Of course, the Trump team denied the findings, with Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes telling CNN the exact opposite: “Trump policies will fuel growth, drive down inflation, inspire American manufacturing, all while protecting the working men and women of our nation from lopsided policies tilted in favor of other countries.”

Categories Economy, Elections, Extremism, Trump

Mercedes Schneider: Project 2025: Politicking for Jesus

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
9

Mercedes Schneider is a high school teacher in Louisiana who holds a doctorate in statistics and research methodology. It’s no secret that she is also a devout Christian who takes her faith seriously, so seriously that she doesn’t try to impose it on anyone else. As a veteran teacher, she writes with authority and keen intellect about education.

The following essay by Schneider was posted by the Network for Public Education. To read the full essay, please open the link.

Teacher and scholar Mercedes Schneider takes a look at Project 2025. Reposted with permission.

Schneider writes:

Project 2025 identifies itself as “The Presidential Transition Project,” further described as “an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country”:

The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.

The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure.  It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.

Though the 900+-page document is clearly meant for “the next conservative President,” former president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has publicly attempted to distance himself from the far-right, Heritage-Foundation-steeped governing plan.

In the opening pages of the document, numerous contributors include in their bio sketches connection to the Trump administration. So there’s that.

But one issue that has my attention is that the July 17, 2024, Intercept reports that “Conservative Groups Are Quietly Scurrying Away from Project 2025”:

THE MORE PEOPLE learn about it, the more unpopular and politically toxic Project 2025 has proven to be. This has led the Trump and Vance campaign to attempt to distance itself from the effort. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller now says he had “zero involvement with Project 2025,” despite appearing in a promotional video. And just today, The Intercept discovered two more conservative groups that have quietly bowed out from the controversial 900-page manifesto — including a national anti-abortion organization.

Miller’s group, America First Legal Foundation, was one of the first organizations to jump ship from the Project 2025 advisory board. Last week, America First Legal asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board webpage. The organization was part of Project 2025 since at least June 2022, when the Heritage Foundation first announced the advisory board’s formation.

America First Legal staff were deeply involved in writing and editing the Project 2025 playbook. Its vice president and general counsel, Gene Hamilton, drafted an entire chapter about the Justice Department, which proposes launching a “campaign” to criminalize mailing abortion pills. In a footnote, Hamilton thanked “the staff at America First Legal Foundation,” who he wrote deserved “special mention for their assistance while juggling other responsibilities.” …

America First Legal did not respond to questions about why it asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board despite its prior participation.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, were among the more than 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 website as part of its advisory board. By Wednesday, Americans United for Life and the Mackinac Center had vanished.

Both organizations were relatively recent additions to the Project 2025 coalition. The Heritage Foundation announced they had joined in February 2024, several months after the massive playbook was released.

Neither organization would elaborate as to why it had joined the Project 2025 board in the first place or why it was exiting it now.

The distancing of conservative groups from a plan that has clearly been brought into the public eye reminds me of the 2011 exposure of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) by the nonprofit watchdog, Common Cause, and subsequent corporate member exodus.

Seems like far-right conservatives have a history of not really wanting the public aware of those conservative plans and schemes.

It should come as no surprise that ALEC is a Project 2025 advisory board member:

Project 2025 is the conservative, American white Evangelical Christian plan for operating government. Below is a “note” from Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 director, Paul Dans:

Let me offer some excerpts. Not many, for it does not take much reading to realize that the Project 2025 overarching goal is to force all of America into a white Evangelical Christian mold.

A smidge from Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts’, foreword:

PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics-the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatu- ral ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are
the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives-and
the life of the nation— is the family. Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of Ameri- can poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve-but can’t-are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and
prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents.
If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion. Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using gov- ernment alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies
to accomplish this existential task. Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government
power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family. Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice-a goal all conservatives and con- servative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds. The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.


Schneider continues:

Free the churches, imprison the librarians.

Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.

None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.

Yet here we are.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Inequality, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Republicans, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Dana Milbank: “You Weren’t Supposed to Fact-Check Me!”

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
5

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reacted quickly last night to the Vice-Presidential debate:

Half an hour into Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, JD Vance lodged a whiny protest.


“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check!”


It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a pair of other lies, in support of an even bigger lie.


There was no “rule” against fact-checking. And Vance had just told a whopper. He had alleged that, in Springfield, Ohio, “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”


There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris isn’t the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants to which Vance was referring have legal status, which Brennan had accurately pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what’s actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “the facilitation of illegal immigration” — and he kept going until the moderators shut off the candidates’ microphones.

From the sidelines, Donald Trump cheered on his running mate. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.

The up-is-down moment was all the worse because it was in response to Vance’s original libels about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield: that they were bringing crime, disease and, yes, eating the cats and dogs of the town’s residents. Vance declined to walk back that calumny during the debate, instead saying: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”


It feels entirely appropriate that CBS chose to hold the vice-presidential debate in a studio once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”


For three decades beginning in the mid-1950s, the Captain, along with Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and other friends, regaled children with fantastic stories, a Magic Drawing Board, and cartoons featuring the likes of Tom Terrific, a shape-shifting boy who lived in a tree house and could transform himself into anything he wanted by using the funnel-shaped hat that sat on his head.


But Captain Kangaroo never conjured a figure quite so outlandish as JD Vance.

This shape-shifting boy has gone from being a never-Trump author who in 2016 compared the “reprehensible” Trump to Adolf Hitler, to a venture capitalist who in 2020 said Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver,” to the junior senator from Ohio who, as Trump’s running mate in 2024, worships the ground the former president walks on.


Vance has used his own Magic Drawing Board to create a whimsical portrait of reality in this election season. He has embraced the fiction that Trump won the 2020 election. He has falsely claimed that Democrats were responsible for two assassination attempts against Trump. He has seconded Trump’s routine lies about crime, jobs, tariffs and the border. He has slandered his vice-presidential opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accusing him of “stolen valor” after Walz’s 24 years of honorable military service. And he has led the vile demonization of the Haitians in Springfield.


“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he admitted last month on CNN.


And that’s just what he did during the debate. Walz wasn’t a particularly skilled debater; he tripped over words and at one point said, “I’ve become friends with school shooters” when he was referring to the families of school-shooting victims. But even if Walz had been quicker on his feet, there wouldn’t have been a way to keep up with the fictions Vance submitted.

The senator said Harris “became the appointed border czar.” She received no such appointment.
He said “over $100 billion” of Iranian assets were unfrozen “thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.” Not so.


On abortion, he said he “never supported a national ban.” When running for the Senate two years ago, he said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”


On health care, he served up the howler of the night when he said that Trump “saved” the “collapsing” Affordable Care Act. Instead of destroying Obamacare, Vance said, “Donald Trump worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans have access to affordable care.”
In reality, of course, Trump tried his best to kill Obamacare. (John McCain famously thwarted the effort in the Senate.)


Vance capped the night by saying that Trump “peacefully” surrendered power four years ago. When Walz asked him point-blank whether Trump had lost that election, Vance would not answer.


Throughout the debate, Vance pretended that Harris was the president, referring to “Kamala Harris’s open border” and “Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record.” He claimed that “Kamala Harris let in fentanyl” and “enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country.”


And on Truth Social, Trump added still zanier claims. “Tim Walz wants to abolish ICE. … I SAVED our Country from the China Virus. … CBS is LYING AGAIN about the 2020 Election.” And best of all: “JD Vance just CRUSHED Tampon Tim with the FACTS.”


Fact check: Half true. JD Vance just crushed the facts.

In addition:

NPR fact-checked the debate in real time.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Lies, Vance, J.D.

The Vice-Presidential Debate: A Wash

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
56

The great debate between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz did not change any votes.

JD is a skilled debater, more so than Tim Walz. Both seemed to go out of their way to be civil. Neither of them attacked the other with teeth bared. They occasionally seemed to be searching for common ground.

You would need a fair amount of background knowledge to know how frequently and coolly Vance lied. He said that Trump saved Obamacare. That was a lie. In fact, Trump tried to repeal Obamacare; the party slogan was “repeal and replace.” The GOP never had a plan to put in its place. They still don’t.

Vance denied that he ever supported a national ban on abortion. That was a lie. He is on video saying just that.

Vance said for the umpteenth time that the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were there illegally; a few days ago, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine wrote an opinion article in The New York Times saying that the Haitians in Springfield were legally introduced to this country.

When asked directly about January 6, he dodged the question and said that on January 20, there was a peaceful transfer of power. He didn’t mention Trump’s refusal to concede or to attend Biden’s inauguration.

When asked whether Trump lost the 2020 election, he dodged the question and claimed that Kamala Harris had engaged in censoring people during the height of COVID (I’m not sure but I think he referred to the government’s efforts to combat COVID misinformation.)

CNN released a fact-checker’s report on the debate. According to CNN, Vance was fact-checked 15 times on his claims, while Walz was fact-checked only twice.

NPR had the best of the fact checks of the debate.

Tim Walz was flustered and failed to answer crisply when questioned about claims he made over the years about being in Hong Kong at the time of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. He answered awkwardly, then said he “misspoke.”

No one is likely to change their mind after the VP debate.

Categories Elections, Lies, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Eugene Robinson: Why Is the Presidential Election So Close?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2024 //
8

Eugene Robinson is a regular columnist for The Washington Post. He is baffled that the election is so close. He finds one demographic where Trump holds a decisive lead. This group is loyal to Trump. They think he cares about them and empathizes with them. He does care about separating them from their hard-earned cash. He does care about getting their votes. He does care about exploiting their grievances, their resentment about being left behind. It’s hard to remember what precisely he did for them during his four year term in office.

Robinson writes:

It is absolutely, completely, totally ridiculous that this election is even close. But here we are.

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

Yet polls tell us that either candidate could win. The Post’s polling average has Harris ahead by 2 percentage points nationally. The Post also finds that Harris holds leads in four of the seven crucial swing states — 3 percentage points in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, 2 points in Michigan, less than a point in Nevada — but adds a note of caution: “Every state is within a normal-sized polling error of 3.5 points and could go either way.”

So how is it possible that this is not a done deal? I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer, but I can throw out a few theories.

One obvious potential factor is that Harris would be the first woman to serve as president and commander in chief. It amazes me that the preceding sentence can be written in 2024 — decades after the careers of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and so many other women who have led their nations in peace and war. But, again, here we are.

Harris and her advisers have made the decision not to lean into the history-making aspects of her candidacy, which I think is wise — if only because Trump so desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.

An Associated Press poll released on Thursday found that about 4 in 10 Americans believe Harris’s gender “will hurt her chances of getting elected this fall,” which suggests the manly-men act by Trump and Vance might be having some impact. Then again, the issue of reproductive rights, along with gratuitous insults such as Vance’s “childless cat ladies” slur, might be driving enough women into Harris’s corner to offset Trump’s harvest of dudes. I find it hard to conclude that gender alone answers the question of why Harris doesn’t have a bigger lead.

Deep in the numbers, you can find other hypotheses. Trump got 74 million votes in the 2020 election. Joe Biden got 81 million — thankfully — and won the electoral vote 306-232. But Trump’s showing means he started his 2024 campaign with a big base of support, and it has remained loyal.

White voters without a college degree are a key component of Trump’s base, and two recent polls — one by the New York Timesand one by CNN — showed Harris with a huge deficit of roughly 35 points to Trump among this segment. That is worse than Biden did against Trump in 2020, when he lost this big demographic by 32 points, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Whites without a college degree make up 42 percent of the electorate — meaning that if Harris were matching Biden’s performance with this group, she would add a full point to her overall national lead.

This might suggest that Trump’s red-meat-to-the-base campaign strategy is not as crazy as it looks. His vicious demagoguery on immigration — the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example — invites working-class Whites to see their jobs and communities as under threat. That kind of tribal appeal likely does not win Trump many new voters, but it might keep some of the old ones on his side.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

The truth about the election might be simple: It is what it is. Look at the trend lines in the polling averages. Trump had a narrow but consistent lead over Biden. Soon after Harris became the candidate, the lines crossed, and she took a lead over Trump. Since taking that lead, she has not surrendered it. In fact, she has slowly expanded it.

It is possible that Harris could pull ahead decisively. But it is also quite possible that this race will still be too close to call on Election Day. And at that point, the question we face will not be theoretical, but urgently practical: With Democrats’ huge advantage in money and volunteers, will they be able to turn out their supporters in numbers big enough to overwhelm any hidden population of Republican voters that the pollsters might be missing?

The people, not the pollsters, will give that answer.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Trump

Brookings Institution: A View of Education in the Republican and Democratic Platforms

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
25

Jon Valant, head of the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution, reviewed the education sections of both parties.

He writes:

K-12 education has captured its share of headlines over the last few years. Schools—and, specifically, local school boards—became a lightning rod for anger about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the first weeks of the pandemic, Republicans accused Democratic leaders of being too slow to reopen schools. That accusation gained potency as evidence mounted that schools hadn’t been the vectors of COVID-19 transmission that experts initially feared. Sensing vulnerability, Democrats became reluctant to engage on K-12 issues, and Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin showed that Democrats wouldn’t put up much of a fight if education became a battlefield for culture war conflicts. The result was a dizzying, maddening stretch where schools were embroiled in controversies over critical race theory and transgender students’ rights when education leaders needed to focus on pandemic recovery.

Now, as memories of the pandemic recede, the politics of education are changing. Democrats are talking more about schools, emboldened by the selection of a former schoolteacher, Tim Walz, as Vice President Harris’s running mate. Republicans, for their part, have harnessed discontent with public schools into an aggressive push for private school voucher programs that threaten America’s public education systems.

The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, along with the education-related portions of Project 2025, provide a glimpse of where K-12 education might be headed.

The Democratic platform

The Democrats’ 2024 platform is light on specifics, with more attention to the current administration’s accomplishments and the would-be Harris administration’s support for some broadly defined goals (e.g., reducing chronic absenteeism). To some extent, the lack of specifics stands in contrast to both the Democrats’ 2020 platform—which, for example, pledged a tripling of Title I funds for high-needs schools—and more detailed 2024 proposals for early childhood education (e.g., free, universal pre-K) and higher education (e.g., free community college). 

The 2024 platform does contain relevant, specific ideas outside of its “Education” section. For example, Democrats propose rebates for school districts that purchase electric school buses—an idea grounded in research on the harms of students’ exposure to toxins. They also offer specific proposals to reduce gun violence (amid a scourge of school shootings) and to strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ children and students of color (frequent targets of culture war attacks).

Notably, some of the platform’s clearest statements on education describe what Democrats oppose. That includes private-school voucher plans and policies hostile to transgender youth that have become increasingly popular among Republican leaders.  

The Republican platform

Republicans’ 2024 platform is also light on policy specifics. The platform has a few ideas that have long been cornerstones of GOP education politics. That includes ending teacher tenure—an idea that would require local or state action and confront fierce opposition from teachers’ unions.

The platform has language about resisting political indoctrination in schools—while seeming to propose some indoctrination of its own. This includes proposals to “support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization” and “promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.” Along similar lines, former President Trump recently described a bewildering plan to create a credentialing body to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.”

Substantively, the most important part of the Republican education platform might be its support for universal school choice. In about a dozen states, Republicans have recently created or expanded education savings account (ESA) programs that make public funds available to pay for private school or other educational expenses. Critics of these programs—myself included—argue that they violate our basic traditions, benefit the wealthy at the expense of others, and are not well supported by research.

Project 2025

If the Republican platform is light on policy proposals, Project 2025 certainly is not.

Along with my colleagues Rachel Perera and Katharine Meyer, I recently wrote a more detailed piece that analyzes Project 2025’s education proposals. Project 2025 proposes severe cuts to the resources and protections available to the country’s poorest, most marginalized children. For example, it proposes to eliminate the Head Start program (for young children in poverty), discontinue federal Title I funding (for schools that serve low-income children), and kneecap IDEA (federal legislation that supports students with disabilities). It’s especially harsh on transgender children, with proposals aimed at reorienting civil rights enforcement around “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and stripping Title IX protections from transgender students.

In other words, Project 2025 sets its sights on the programs that serve America’s neediest students. It would essentially terminate the federal government’s long-running role in addressing inequities that arise in locally governed school systems.

Notably, many key Project 2025 proposals would require an unlikely degree of congressional cooperation. This includes some of the highest-profile proposals, such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (a vaguely defined idea that’s unlikely to materialize in its most extreme form). Still, a second Trump administration couldenact some Project 2025 proposals unilaterally. That includes rolling back civil rights protections and replacing civil servants in the U.S. Department of Education with political appointees after reinstating Schedule F.

Taking stock

It’s fair to say that Democrats’ plans for federal education policy are modest. Democrats aren’t proposing a markedly stronger role for the federal government. On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture as they offer a more “conservative” agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.

Just what those GOP plans might be—and just how radical they are—depends on whether the true Trumps X administration plan is the Republican platform, Project 2025, or some combination of the two. That remains to be seen

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democrats, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Scientific American Endorses Kamala Harris

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
18

For only the second time in its 179-year history, the prestigious magazine Scientific American issued a Presidential endorsement. It endorsed Kamala Harris. The only other endorsement in its history was four years ago for Joe Biden. The magazine cares deeply about science, climate change, health, and factual evidence. For these reasons, it opposes Trump.

The editors of Scientific American wrote:

In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.

In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. He ignores the climate crisis in favor of more pollution. He requires that federal officials show personal loyalty to him rather than upholding U.S. laws. He fills positions in federal science and other agencies with unqualified ideologues. He goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living.

Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president. That person is Kamala Harris.

Before making this endorsement, we evaluated Harris’s record as a U.S. senator and as vice president under Joe Biden, as well as policy proposals she’s made as a presidential candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, also has a record—a disastrous one. Let’s compare.

HEALTH CARE

The Biden-Harris administration shored up the popular Affordable Care Act (ACA), giving more people access to health insurance through subsidies. During Harris’s September 10 debate with Trump, she said one of her goals as president would be to expand it. Scores of studies have shown that people with insurance stay healthier and live longer because they can afford to see doctors for preventive and acute care. Harris supports expansion of Medicaid, the U.S. health-care program for low-income people. States that have expanded this program have seen health gains in their populations, whereas states that continue to restrict eligibility have not. To pay for Medicare, the health insurance program primarily for older Americans, Harris supports a tax increase on people who earn $400,000 or more a year. And the Biden-Harris administration succeeded in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which caps the costs of several expensive drugs, including insulin, for Medicare enrollees. Harris’s vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, signed into law a prohibition against excessive price hikes on generic drugs as governor of Minnesota.

When in office, Trump proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid (Congress, to its credit, refused to enact them.) He also pushed for a work requirement as a condition for Medicaid eligibility, making it harder for people to qualify for the program. As a candidate, both in 2016 and this year, he pledged to repeal the ACA, but it’s not clear what he would replace it with. When prodded during the September debate, he said, “I have concepts of a plan” but didn’t elaborate. Like Harris, however, he has voiced concern about drug prices, and in 2020 he signed an executive order designed to lower prices of drugs covered by Medicare.

The COVID pandemic has been the greatest test of the American health-care system in modern history. Harris was vice president of an administration that boosted widespread distribution of COVID vaccines and created a program for free mail-order COVID tests. Wastewater surveillance for viruses has improved, allowing public health officials to respond more quickly when levels are high. Bird flu now poses a new threat, highlighting the importance of the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.

Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease. By the end of that year about 350,000 people in the U.S. had died of COVID; the current national total is well over a million. Trump and his staff had one great success: Operation Warp Speed, which developed effective COVID vaccines extremely quickly. Remarkably, however, Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which started the COVID-vaccine research program. These steps are in line with the guidance of Project 2025, an extreme conservative blueprint for the next presidency drawn up by many former Trump staffers. He’s also talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, calling it a pork project.

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Harris is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights. During the September debate, she spoke plainly about her desire to reinstate “the protections of Roe v. Wade” and added, “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body, should not be made by the government.” She has vowed to improve access to abortion. She has defended the right to order the abortion pill mifepristone through the mail under authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, even as MAGA Republican state officials have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to revoke those rights. As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored a package of bills to reduce rising rates of maternal mortality. In August, Trump said he would vote against a ballot measure expanding access to abortions in Florida, where he lives. The current Florida “heartbeat” law makes most abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Trump appointed the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to a basic health-care procedure. He spreads misinformation about abortion—during the September debate, he said some states support abortion into the ninth month and beyond, calling it “execution after birth.” No state allows this. He also refused to answer the question of whether he would veto a federal abortion ban, saying Congress would never approve such a ban in the first place. He made no mention of an executive order and praised the Supreme Court, three justices of which he placed, for sending abortion back to states to decide. This ruling led to a patchwork of laws and entire sections of the country where abortion is dangerously limited.

GUN SAFETY

The Biden-Harris administration closed the gun-show loophole, which had allowed people to buy guns without a license. The evidence is clear that easy access to guns in the U.S. has increased the risk of suicides, murder and firearm accidents. Harris supports a program that temporarily removes guns from people deemed dangerous by a court.

Trump promised the National Rifle Association that he would get rid of all Biden-Harris gun measures. Even after Trump was injured and a supporter was killed in an attempted assassination, the former president remained silent on gun safety. His running mate, J. D. Vance, said the increased number of school shootings was an unhappy “fact of life” and the solution was stronger school security.

ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE

Harris said pointedly during the September debate that climate change was real. She would continue the responsible leadership shown by Biden, who has undertaken the most substantial climate action of any president. The Biden-Harris administration restored U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement on coping with climate change. Harris’s election would continue IRA tax credits for clean energy, as well as regulations to reduce power-plant emissions and coal use. This approach puts the country on course to spend the authorized billions of dollars for renewable energy that should cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030. The IRA also includes a commitment to broadening electric vehicle technology.

Trump has said climate change is a hoax, and he dodged the question “What would you do to fight climate change?” during the September debate. He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Under his direction the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies abandoned more than 100 environmental policies and rules, many designed to ensure clean air and water, restrict the dangers of toxic chemicals and protect wildlife. He has also tried to revoke funding for satellite-based climate-research projects.

TECHNOLOGY

The Biden-Harris administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence requires that AI-based products be safe for consumers and national security. The CHIPS and Science Act invigorates the chipmaking industry and semiconductor research while growing the workforce. A new Trump administration would undo all of this work and quickly. Under the devious and divisive Project 2025 framework, technology safeguards on AI would be overturned. AI influences our criminal justice, labor and health-care systems. As is the rightful complaint now, there would be no knowing how these programs are developed, how they are tested or whether they even work.

The 2024 U.S. ballots are also about Congress and local officials—people who make decisions that affect our communities and families. Extremist state legislators in Ohio, for instance, have given politicians the right to revoke any rule from the state health department designed to limit the spread of contagious disease. Other states have passed similar measures. In education, many states now forbid lessons about racial bias. But research has shown such lessons reduce stereotypes and do not prompt schoolchildren to view one another negatively, regardless of their race. This is the kind of science MAGA politicians ignore, and such people do not deserve our votes.

At the top of the ballot, Harris does deserve our vote. She offers us a way forward lit by rationality and respect for all. Economically, the renewable-energy projects she supports will create new jobs in rural America. Her platform also increases tax deductions for new small businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, making it easier for them to turn a profit. Trump, a convicted felon who was also found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial, offers a return to his dark fantasies and demagoguery, whether it’s denying the reality of climate change or the election results of 2020 that were confirmed by more than 60 court cases, including some that were overseen by judges whom he appointed.

One of two futures will materialize according to our choices in this election. Only one is a vote for reality and integrity. We urge you to vote for Kamala Harris.

Categories Elections, Environment, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Health, Science, Trump

Trump Is Now Selling Overpriced “Trump Watches”

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2024 //
12

Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark has performed a public service by dissecting the actual cost of the brand-new Trump watches, which Trump is advertising and selling online. The top of the line sells for $100,000, the least expensive is $499. All profits, of course, go to Trump personally, not to his campaign. Trump is cashing in on the gullibility of his cult.

Last shows in his post that the actual cost of putting together the $100,000 all-gold with inlaid diamonds watch (engraved with Trump’s name on is face) is $20,000. The actual cost of the $499 watch with Trump’s name on its face is $60.

He writes:

How much are these watches worth, really?

Let’s take the $499 version, which is a red-dial steel dive watch. It has an automatic date movement of unspecified origin. (Translation: China.) It has a mineral crystal with an aluminum bezel. The clasp does not appear to have micro-adjustments.

The internet is full of off-brand watches like this. Here’s how you build one:

Everything you need comes from China using AliExpress. First you buy a steel case and bracelet for, say, $30. Like this one.

You engrave the caseback using laser etching working off an .svg file. Maybe that costs $5. Then you buy the cheapest possible automatic movement with a date function. Here’s one for $9. Pop the movement into the case and all that’s left are ial and handset. Hands are super-cheap.

And sunburst dials—even with applied markers—are not terribly expensive, either.

The final step is actually the most expensive: You have to pay someone to machine the “TRUMP” and signature bits and glue them to the dial. This is the first truly custom step and maybe, if the manufacturer wants to spend a little more money, they’re having a fourth-party make the dials for them out of sunburst blanks.

All told we’re in the neighborhood of $60. And that’s if you’re just trying to build a single watch without bulk purchasing power.

Reminder: They’re selling it for $499.

Last determined that Trump will pocket millions of dollars from the sale of these watches.

Here is his description of the $100,000 watch:

Enough with the plebe beater watches. I want to know about the $100,000 Trump “Victory” watch!

At least these aren’t from Ali Express.

Almost the entirety of the cost for the Victory models comes in the material cost for the “solid gold” case and bracelet. Trump claims there’s 200 grams of 18K gold in each watch. If true, the spot price of gold puts that cost near $13,000.¹ That’s real money.

The tourbillon movement inside these watches also appears to be an off-the-shelf product, but at least it’s a high shelf.² If I had to bet, I’d guess the Victory uses something from Olivier Mory, who sells “Swiss Made” tourbillon movements that generally run around $3,000.

How does Mory keep costs down? “Swiss Made” is like “Broadway”—it sounds like a colloquial description, but it’s actually a legal term of art.³Swiss Made means that 60 percent of the manufacturing costs and 50 percent of the “essential manufacturing step” must occur in Switzerland. Mory sources as many parts of his movement as he can from outside Switzerland—while still maintaining his “Swiss Made” status. And he streamlines his build process so that he can assemble 1,000 movements per month while keeping half of the “essential manufacturing step” in country.⁴

I can’t speak to the cost of the diamonds because there’s no information about the total karat weight involved but they appear to be quite small, in the <1mm range. For the sake of argument let’s say that the diamonds add another $1,000.

We’re now talking about a total production cost in the neighborhood of $20,000—and possibly much less—for a watch offered at $100,000.

As a point of reference, the list price on a solid gold Rolex Submariner is $40,600. In the Submariner you get an in-house, state-of-the-art movement running at COSC spec inside a bullet-proof case. The fit and finish will be superlative. And even though you’re paying over the odds for the Rolex name, you’re getting 10x the watch for 40 percent of the price of a Trump Victory.

Did I mention that the Trump Victory can’t get wet? From the Trump website: “The Tourbillon watches are not intended for water exposure.”

Which watches does Trump own?

Last writes:

Trump is not a watch nerd, exactly, but he knows that Big Rich Guys should wear expensive gold watches. So he has a Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse ($17,500), a gold Rolex President Day-Date ($40,000), and a Vacheron Constantin Historiques Ultra-Fine ($20,000). It’s a small, understated collection and if I’m being honest, it’s impressive in its own way. These are beautiful watches from serious watchmakers and they suggest an elevated taste that I would not have expected from Trump.

The website for Trump watches includes this advisory:

Trump Watches are not designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals. TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC uses the “Trump” name, image and likeness under a paid license agreement which may be terminated or revoked according to its terms. Trump Watches are intended as collectible items for individual enjoyment only, not for investment purposes. 
The images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product.
These watches are not political and have nothing to do with any political campaign.

Panelists on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” agreed that it’s become very expensive to be a follower of Trump. The Trump Bible. The Trump commemorative coins. The Trump NFT. The Trump sneakers. Now the Trump watch.

And there is much more for sale at Trumpstore.com.

Gotta make money while there’s still time.

Profiteering off your candidacy is tawdry and undignified.

Categories Elections, For-Profit, Trump
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