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The New Republic: Where Trump Goes, Chaos Follows

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
9

Alex Shepherd of The New Republic wrote an outstanding article about the linkage between Trump and violence. He threatens it, he encourages it, he revels in his threats. He likes to play the role of the tough guy. I recall a clip from one of his campaigns where he was portrayed at a wrestling match beating up a cartoon figure labeled CNN. I recall him at one of his rallies encouraging the crowd to beat up any infiltrators and he would pay the court costs. I remember the cruel taunts that he directed at others, including Paul Pelosi. He is a bully and he wants to be feared.

Yet when yet another gunman was captured before shooting at him, Trump was quick to blame Harris and Walz, who have repeatedly called for unity.

Shepherd writes:

Three hours before a would-be assassin was spotted hiding in the bushes of his golf course in West Palm Beach, Donald Trump posted, in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social, his wildly unprofitable social network. At roughly the same time, his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, was touring the Sunday shows to proudly admit that he and Trump were knowingly spreading racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, in service of an even bigger lie—that immigrants pose an existential threat to the country itself.

It was a banner day for the Trump campaign: a feud with the country’s most popular pop star, a vile lie about a vulnerable population, yet another close call with an attempted assassin. But it also felt oddly familiar, bordering on routine—especially given how the former president and his allies reacted to the golf course scare. There were no fleeting calls for “unity” or hollow promises to turn down the temperature; instead, they were quick to blame their political opponents.

In a speech on Monday, Vance noted that the two attempts on Trump’s life were “pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric or somebody is going to get hurt.” He further argued on X that the captured suspect, Ryan Routh, was inspired by the Harris campaign’s insistence that Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump, meanwhile, said his opponents’ inflammatory rhetoric was endangering him, and that “these are people who want to destroy this country.”

“It is called the enemy from within,” Trump continued. “They are the real threat.” If that wasn’t subtle enough, his campaign then released a lengthy list of people it blamed, without evidence, for inspiring Routh, including Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, as well as Representative Nancy Pelosi, Representative Adam Schiff, and even Walz’s wife, Gwen.

It would be foolish to blame any politician for either assassination attempt; both Routh and Thomas Crooks, the deceased Pennsylvania shooter, were mentally troubled and politically confused. But it’s important to acknowledge a simple and obvious truth: No one in this country has done more to sow division, create chaos, and, yes, encourage violence over the past decade than Trump. It was only a matter of time before that boomeranged on him.

Criticisms of Trump that rightfully note that he is a threat to the future of American democracy are hardly incitement to violence. They are recognition of the fact that Trump has used and will continue to use any means at his disposal to gain and hold onto power. His own paranoia and deluded ravings about his political enemies, meanwhile, have created a combustible climate—one made more dangerous by the lax gun laws that Trump and his allies have embraced.

These are people who egg on violence against their enemies at every turn. As The New York Times’ Peter Baker put it on Monday, Trump has “long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed.” Let’s not forget that he also directed his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol and allegedly expressed support for hanging his vice president, Mike Pence.

And then, Trump cries victim when he finds himself in the crosshairs. But increasingly, it seems, Americans aren’t buying it. For the last two months, the Trump campaign has whined incessantly about the fact that the country quickly moved on following the first attempt on his life, in mid-July. They’re right about that; his near-death experience was out of the news within a few days, and Trump received no noticeable bump in the polls. The incident is now an afterthought in the election—it’s almost as if it never happened at all. The second assassination plot, meanwhile, barely registered on NFL Sunday.

The country has moved on because it has grown accustomed to the chaos that Trump effortlessly generates. It has moved on because Trump himself moved on almost immediately. The Trump that stood onstage at the Republican National Convention, rambling about his grievances for almost two hours, was not changed by his recent brush with death in the slightest. He was, if anything, even morederanged and vengeful. And since then, he has said that Kamala Harris is a “fascist,” Walz wants to force young children to have gender reassignment surgeries, and that Haitian immigrants who are in the country legally are pet-eating criminals intent on murdering downtrodden Rust Belt whites.

Years before Trump’s political career began, the British photographer Platon found himself shooting Trump in the boardroom where he fired people on The Apprentice, the show where he played an idealized version of himself—wealthy, important, competent. Platon tried to connect with his subject. “Let’s be human together,” he said to Trump. “There’s always an air of tension and controversy about the things you say and do in public. I’m sure it’s intentional on your part but it feels to me like you’re in the middle of an emotional storm. I can’t live with that anxiety all the time. As a fellow human being, I’d like to know how you weather the storm.”

Trump calmly looked back at him and responded: “I am the storm.”

Trump is one of the least self-aware people in American political history—maybe in history, period. But this was an eerily prophetic statement. For eight years, Trump has been the storm. He unleashed dark forces in our society—making America more violent, more menacing, more chaotic—and rode them to the height of power. Now, he’s trying to do it all over again. But that’s the thing about storms, no matter their origin. Sometimes there’s no escaping them.

Categories Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump

David Dayen: Trump Doesn’t Understand Basic Economics

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
13

David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, explains how little Trump understands economics or industrial policy. Strange that a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance would be economically illiterate. Maybe he was a DEI admit.

Dayen writes:

When Donald Trump is in the room, the truth takes a night off.

Only in this Republican Party can stories about Haitians eating pets leap from 4chan to the presidential debate stage in two days. As Rick Perlstein noted today, when you have religious conviction animating your movement, trivialities like verifying claims are sidelined. As long as something fits into the worldview, it doesn’t need to be true. For all the talk about the damage of young girls being addicted to their cellphones and steps needing to be taken to wean them off, nights like Tuesday remind us that the real damage of internet addiction is occurring among old right-wing men who believe everything put in front of them.

About Kamala Harris’s strategy: The expression du jour is that Harris “baited” Trump into looking insane in front of the public, but I don’t think there was a chance that she would throw out the bait and not reel anything in. This wasn’t a fair fight. This was like the late 19th century, when the servants of some industrialist would stock the lake with hungry fish. The Harris campaign ran an ad on Fox News making fun of Trump about crowd sizes, did everything but fly a giant banner over Trump’s car reading, “We’re going to make fun of you about crowd sizes,” then made fun of him about crowd sizes, and Trump still got angry. Yes, the debate team knew who they’re dealing with, because the subject in question has the emotional self-control of a toddler.

What’s more interesting to me is the cul-de-sac that Trump has stumbled into on tariffs, which now comprise his entire economic policy. It’s indicative of this wall that has been built, not to keep out migrants from Mexico, but to keep out reality.

In 2016, Trump had a rationale for imposing tariffs. He thought cheap Chinese goods entering the country unmolested was hurting the industrial base and causing factories to close. He imposed them to revitalize those left-behind areas, rebuild those factories, lower the trade deficit, and make America great again. And they were not placed across the board outside of China; the tariffs other countries felt were sector-specific.

Somewhere along the way, an aide must have idly read half a page to Trump from Karl Rove’s book about William McKinley, and now tariffs are to him what tax cuts are to every other Republican: a cure for every ailment. (It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.) Trump’s incoherent-sounding answer at the Economic Club of New York last week about child care was merely Trump seeing tariffs as bringing in enough cash to handle the problem. The way he thinks about this is the way a gangster used to think about protection money: Trump will get rich (oh, and sure, the country will too) by sticking up other countries.

There’s been a lot of dumb talk about tariffs lately, but they aren’t totally outlandish. That’s why, as Trump said in his only somewhat accurate comeback, Biden has kept a lot of the Chinese tariffs on. Lori Wallach and the Rethink Trade crew have a good primer on the purpose of tariffs. They are a trade enforcement tool for critical industries where countries have an economic and national-security imperative to compete. They are attempts to induce that competition fairly. And they are completely justified along those lines.

But that’s only if you combine them with other tools to allow for industrial expansion, like investing in manufacturing sectors or using export controls on certain technologies. The Biden administration has done this, and even added new, targeted tariffs on the same sectors where manufacturing is being encouraged. Because they are using tariffs in the manner in which they should be used, manufacturing construction in critical industries is soaring faster than any time in the last 30 years, private investment has been leveraged manyfold, clean-energy jobs in the U.S. are rising at twice the rate of other jobs, and the expected market share for U.S. semiconductors is now expected to grow after decades in the wilderness.

You’d have to know about this going in, but Harris actually alluded to it a bit when she talked about Trump “selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military.” That was a reversal of Trump’s initial flirtation with export controls. She also highlighted the increase of 800,000 manufacturing jobs, which is frankly a low number, since practically all the factories boosted by the Inflation Reduction Act are still being completed and have yet to bring on production workers.

(I would add that the one area where the Biden administration eased up on including trade enforcement tariffs in its strategy, by delaying for two years solar component penalties, is an area where Chinese dominance is continuing. The suspension of a silicon cell factory in Colorado is the direct result of this failure to use the entire toolbox. The cross-pressure from the solar installation lobby, a trade group that includes the very Chinese companies dominating production, has been very damaging for administration strategy.)

Tariffs are imposed on wholesale prices, becoming part of the input cost. They are not a direct tax added to retail prices, and they are often absorbed into profit margins. But if you’re setting tariffs on everything, from every nation, including goods that have no substitute production in the U.S., then you are likely to get higher prices as a result, because there’s nothing stopping the retailer from passing on that input cost. You can use across-the-board tariffs as a trade enforcement tool to win policy concessions from other countries, but only if you’re willing to take them off if the concessions are won.

None of this is even reckoned with by Trump anymore. If it were, he’d have to admit that his tariffs failed to bring back industrial capacity. So instead, he’s gone deep into his mind and decided that tariffs are just a cheat code that allows you to cut other taxes and fund every need the government has. That means you can’t ever take them off, if they’re your main revenue source.

Thinking about tariffs as revenue is innumerate. Trump had to pay back out almost as much additional tariff revenue that he brought in to help struggling exporters, particularly in agriculture, caught up in his trade war. Tariffs cannot replace the income tax, and fund child care and other priorities, as a mathematical matter. But worse than that, the revenue on across-the-board tariffs, where no industry will rise to pick up the production and higher prices will result, will simply come from working families. Like any sales tax, it’s going to be regressive on those who spend a higher proportion of their income on basic necessities.

By contrast, the Biden strategy shows that industrial expansion and targeted tariffs can coexist with stable inflation, which as of today is down to 2.5 percent over the last year.

The Trump position on tariffs is indicative of the brain-poisoning of an entire party that has left policy construction behind in favor of Reddit rumors. In a fact-free zone, words are mashed together to the point of incoherence, and promises can be big and bold without a thought of whether they’re true and correct.

Do debates matter? They were enough to push one old politician out of the race a couple of months ago. Today, the Republican Party, which once called itself “the party of personal responsibility” is touting internet polls that their minions stormed, and blaming debate moderators for jumping in to say there’s no evidence of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Republicans have gone beyond any of the rational thoughts that would involve reassessing any of their choices over the last decade.

Whether debates matter for the purposes of collecting votes will not be revealed until November. What I know is that Donald Trump’s success depends entirely on whether he’s convinced enough Americans in swing states to be as ignorant as he is.

Categories Economics, Economy, Elections, Stupid, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: Trump Was an Anti-Union, Anti-Worker President

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
85

Michael Hiltzik writes about business for The Los Angeles Times. In this column, he reviews Trump’s record on issues involving working people and unions. Although he is now positioning himself as a friend of workers, Hiltzik demonstrates that his record shows otherwise.

It is exceedingly odd that the Teamsters Union refused to endorse either candidate. One is a friend to organized labor; the other is hostile to unions. The difference between Trump and Harris is stark. What’s with the Teamsters? Be it noted that the Black Caucus of the Teamsters broke ranks and endorsed Harris, as did a Teamsters local in Chicago. West Coast teamsters also endorsed Harris. Other locals may follow those defections. But the crucial locals are in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Hiltzik wrote:

Donald Trump, in his determined effort to claim the mantle of friend of the working man and woman, unveiled a proposal the other day to make overtime pay tax-exempt. 

“People who work overtime are among the hardest-working citizens of our country, and for too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them,” he told a rally in Tucson. 

Let’s be blunt about something here: Anyone who buys Trump’s pose about this is the mark in a con game. Trump’s claim that no one in Washington has been looking out for overtime workers was never as true as it was during the Trump administration, which slashed overtime protections for more than 8.2 million workers. 

Trump’s Department of Labor was a black hole for worker rights. The agency abandoned an Obama administration policy that would have favored more than 4.2 million workers. The Biden administration restored the Obama rule and went further. 

And that was just on overtime. As president, observed economic commentator Pedro Nicolaci da Costa in 2019, Trump pursued “the most hostile anti-labor agenda of any modern president.”

Before exploring Trump’s manipulation of overtime regulations, let’s examine his overall record on workers’ rights.

In 2019, Trump appointed as his Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The new labor secretary had made his career as a corporate lawyer fighting pro-worker policies. In 2012, the Wall Street Journal had labeled him one of the financial industry’s “go-to guys for challenging financial regulations.”

Scalia had helped Walmart overturn a Maryland law mandating minimum contributions by big employers for workers’ healthcare, defended SeaWorld against workplace safety charges after a park trainer was killed by an orca (he lost that case), and had written extensively against a federal regulation expanding ergonomic safety requirements. 

He had written that the latter rule, proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “would require businesses to slow the pace of production, hire more workers, increase rest periods and redesign workstations or even entire operations.”

No legitimate candidate for secretary of Labor would have regarded that policy as a bad thing, but Scalia condemned it in print as “the most costly and intrusive regulation in [OSHA’s] history.”

Scalia’s predecessor as secretary, Alexander Acosta, had gone to Congress to oppose measures to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 to $15 in steps. It shouldn’t need mentioning that this was an extraordinary position for a secretary of Labor to take. 

(Acosta, it may be remembered, lost his job after revelations about his role in soft-pedaling sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein produced a political uproar.)

Trump remade the National Labor Relations Board along the same lines. In a key move, his NLRB scrapped the effort under Obama to expand the definition of “joint employer,” which would have made big franchisers such as McDonald’s jointly liable with their franchisees for violations of employees’ wage and hour rights. 

The Trump NLRB’s proposed definition would narrow the joint-employer standard “to the point at which many workers would find it nearly impossible to bring all firms with the power to influence their wages and working conditions to the bargaining table,” according to the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute.

Put it all together, and Trump had turned the Department of Labor into the “Dept. of Employer Rights,” I wrote.

Now to the overtime rules. As my colleague James Rainey reported Sunday, Trump’s proposal to make overtime pay tax-exempt was part of a passel of purported tax cuts for the working class, including tax exemptions for tips and Social Security benefits, all of which economists saw as “gimmicks” and “shams.”

In 2016, Obama had raised the ceiling making salaried workers eligible for time-and-a-half overtime — that is, working hours exceeding 40 hours per week — to $47,476 in annual wages, up from $23,660. The ceiling would be adjusted regularly to overall wage growth. Hourly workers typically get overtime after 40 hours, but salaried workers receive overtime pay if their wages are below the ceiling. 

The Obama administration’s idea was to narrow the practice of low-wage employers to designate workers as “managers” to exempt them from the OT rule while paying them an hourly wage. (That’s why fast-food restaurants are always suspiciously loaded with “general managers, assistant managers, night managers, managers for opening and closing and delivery,” as former New York prosecutor Terri Gerstein observed in 2019.)

It was estimated that the new rule would give 4.2 million workers new overtime protection.

The Obama rule was blocked by a federal judge in Texas. When Trump came into office, his Labor Department refused to defend the rule in court. Instead, the agency proposed a new rule reducing the wage ceiling to only $35,568. That was nearly $20,000 below the level that would have been reached by the Obama rule, as it was adjusted for wage inflation. The Trump rule was not indexed.

Some 8.2 million workers who would have gained OT protection under Obama were left behind by the Trump rule, Heidi Shierholz of the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute calculated. They would be deprived of a combined $1.4 billion in pay annually.

The 8.2 million workers left behind, Shierholz estimated, included “4.2 million women, 3.0 million people of color, 4.7 million workers without a college degree, and 2.7 million parents of children under the age of 18.”

The Biden administration restored the Obama rule, and then some. The new rule set the ceiling at $844 per week, or $43,888 for a full-time hourly worker, as of July 1. 

On Jan. 1, the salary ceiling will rise to $1,128 per week, or $58,656 annually. After that, it will be indexed every three years. The new rule will benefit an estimated 4.3 million workers, more than half of whom are women and about one-fifth workers of color. 

Among the largest groups of affected workers, EPI estimates, are those in healthcare and social services.

Whether Trump has sat down to map out a pro-worker policy is doubtful in the extreme — it’s not a concern he has ever displayed in the past. He appears to have blurted out the overtime policy as part of what the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole aptly describes as “the surreal bricolageof his rally speeches.”

But a clue can be found in “Project 2025,” a road map for a second Trump term drafted by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. (Trump claims to have nothing to do with this 900-page tome, but no one really believes him.)

Project 2025 would shrink overtime coverage materially. It advocates cutting the compensation subject to time-and-a-half to salary only, excluding pay for such benefits as healthcare, retirement, education, child care or paid meals. Under existing law, the only compensation that can be excluded from the calculation is pay for expenses a worker pays on the employer’s behalf, discretionary bonuses, gifts on special occasions, and vacation and sick pay.

The Project also advocates indexing the ceiling once ever five years rather than three years, which would slow its rate of growth, and index the ceiling to consumer inflation, which tends to grow slower than wage inflation, the current index. 

The Project also advocates allowing employers to calculate overtime hours over two or four weeks rather than weekly, which would allow them to require workers to put in more than 40 hours some weeks and make it up in others. That sounds like an open invitation to employer manipulation of work schedules.

Trump’s record on worker rights is clear as day. Do you really think he’ll be looking out for the men and women in the rank and file? 

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fake News, Trump, Unions

Robert Reich: The GOP Voted Against Protecting IVF

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
2

You may recall that Trump said during his debate with VP Harris that he would be a champion for IVF. He said he would not only protect I F but require insurance companies to cover the cost.

He forgot to tell his Senate allies.

They voted down a bill to protect IVF.

The vote on Tuesday was 51 in favor and 44 opposed, with Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joining with Democrats in support. Sen. JD Vance didn’t vote.  Without 60 votes to break a filibuster, the bill was dead.

IVF is In Vitro Fertilization, which enables many families to have children. It’s miraculous and there’s no reason to ban it.

Robert Reich tweeted a list of some of the GOP senators who voted NO:

All nine Republican senators running for reelection just voted against the Right to IVF Act:

John Barrasso
Marsha Blackburn
Kevin Cramer
Ted Cruz
Deb Fischer
Josh Hawley
Pete Ricketts
Rick Scott
Roger Wicker

(JD Vance missed today’s vote)

So much for the party of “freedom.”

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Parents, Republicans

Trump Spoke in Nassau County, New York, Tonight. More Lies

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2024 //
13

New York is considered a Democratic state but Trump came to speak at a rally at the Nassau Colisum in suburban Nassau County. Whether he helped his campaign remains to be seen, but he hopes to bolster Republicans trying to retain their seats in the House. Although Trump accused Harris and Walz for campaign rhetoric that unleashed violence against him, his statements about them were far more inflammatory than anything they said about him.

The local newspaper, The Patch, reported:

UNIONDALE, NY — A confident Donald Trump took to the stage at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum Wednesday before a sea of red — supporters that met him with cheers, including chants of “USA, USA.”

It was his first presidential campaign rally since an assassination attempt was foiled by the Secret Service at a golf course in West Palm Beach in Florida on Sunday.

Trump had been playing a round of golf at Trump International Golf Club, when a man poked a rifle through the bushes. He was not injured in the attempt.

“We have got to get our media back here,” he told cheering supporters before attacking his team’s Democratic opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, saying that the lies have to stop and that they would turn America into a dictatorship. 

“They’re doing things in politics that have never been done before in the history of our country, and worst of all, with their open borders and bad elections, they have made us into a Third World nation, something which nobody thought was even possible,” he said. “Americans deserve a campaign based on the issues.”

Trump quickly moved into addressing the apparent attempt on his life over the weekend, saying that “God has spared his life,” not once but twice.

The first attempt on Trump’s life was over the summer.

“And there are those that say he did it because Trump is going to turn this state around,” he said of his alleged assailant. “He’s going to turn this country around. He’s going to make America great again, and we are going to bring religion back to our country.”

Less than a few minutes into his speech, he claimed the Teamsters gave him their endorsement. 

Hours before, the union’s leadership said it would not issue any endorsements, according to a statement on it’s website. In a statement, the union said it was due to strong political divides and few comments from candidates.

“These encounters with death have not broken my will,” he said. “They have really given me a much bigger and stronger mission. They’ve only hardened by resolve to use my time on earth to make America great again for all Americans to put America first and to put America first.”

Questions for readers:

Is it not an inflammatory lie to say that Harris and Walz would turn the U.S. into a “dictatorship”? What does he mean? It is he, not they, who has pledged to fire civil servants by the thousands and replace them with political loyalists. It is he, not they, who promised to prosecute anyone who opposed him and jail them. That is the definition of a dictatorship.

What are Harris and Walz doing “that have never been done before in the history of our country”?

When did Harris or Walz say they favored “open borders” other than never?

What does it mean to say they support “bad elections”? Like elections where every registered voter gets to cast a ballot? It is Republican officials who want to kick people off the voting rolls; that would be a “bad election.”

How can Trump “bring back religion” when he has none?

Trump spewed a Gish gallop, where the lies came out like a fire hose.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, New York, Trump, Walz, Tim

Jay Kuo: Trump Has “Jumped the Shark” in His Desperation

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2024 //
20

Jay Kuo writes a delightful and informative blog called “The Status Kuo.” In his latest, he explains the origin of the phrase “jumping the shark,” which was new to me. He went on to show that Trump had grown so desperate as his polls declined that he had “jumped the shark.”

He writes:

Photo courtesy of ABC

Toward the end of the fifth year of the popular TV series Happy Days, the writers had The Fonz put on water skis and jump over a live shark. Everyone watching at the time had the same question: What the hell are they doing?

Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Dayshas now jumped the shark, too.

In today’s piece, I’ll discuss three recent examples that demonstrate this phenomenon and signal that the draw of Trump’s show may be near its end. These examples are about as different as they can be, but they all point to the same conclusion: Trump’s sway over the American public is fading.

A chestnut of a blood libel conspiracy that could fall flat

During the recent presidential debate, the ex-president amplified a gutter internet rumor about Haitian immigrants eating the dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio. Even after being fact-checked live during the debate and later by reporters, Trump and Vance continued to double down on this sick and false claim. 

Trump refused to condemn bomb threats called in on Springfield buildings during the aftermath of his statements, making clear that he was perfectly okay with the chaos that he himself had created.

And on Sunday Vance gave a disaster class of an interview when he admitted to “creating stories” in an effort to draw the media’s attention to the problem of immigration while CNN’s Dana Bash brutally fact-checked him.

The confession was telling. Per Vance, the whole point of the made-up stories was to frighten enough voters (and therefore the media) into focusing on the immigrant question, even if that means demonizing an entire community of innocent residents, who by the way are there entirely legally. The Trump campaign will do whatever it takes to get the country talking about immigrants instead of Trump’s many crimes, his record on abortion, his poor debate performance, his declining mental acuity, and poll after bad poll.

Further, it is clear they intend to leverage the MAGA mob and a statistically predictable number of crazies to do their dirty work. But this kind of stochastic terror is hardly new ground for Trump. 

He did it when he came down the escalator and called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists—rhetoric that fueled hate and led to the El Paso Wal-Mart massacre. 

He did it again when he targeted the AAPI community during Covid by labeling it the “China Virus,” causing a sixfold increase in anti-AAPI hate crimes in America, followed by a deadly shooting spree in Atlanta at a Korean-owned spa.

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was always destined for the final, lowest kind of take: blood libel.

We have to rewind over a thousand years to understand this canard. The blood libel conspiracy during medieval times falsely alleged that Jews were reenacting the crucifixion of Christ and required human blood for the making of matzo bread. Baseless but dangerous claims against Jews in England ultimately alleged they had actually killed a child as part of ritual sacrifice. This rumor spread and was amplified by politicians of the times, leading to widespread violence, mass executions and pogroms.

Trump and Vance’s false claims have led to a modern day version of this, where scary “others” are devouring the beloved family members, in this case pets, of the local residents. And it has had its intended effect. Schools and hospitals in Springfield are now closed due to threats of mass shootings and bombings. Immigrants are afraid to go outside and are keeping their children at home. Vehicles of Haitian immigrants have been vandalized and hit with acid. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP continue their call for “mass deportations,” even of legal immigrants, in what is essentially a call for ethnic cleansing.

Trump is now planning an appearance in Springfield to drive home his false narrative, but this could backfire. To put it in television terms, the attention Trump hopes to draw has been overshadowed by the reckless stunt he pulled in an attempt to juice his ratings.

Trump has jumped the shark.

It is worth noting that Trump’s initial statement was initially met with derisive laughter and disbelief, not just from the left but from most of the center of the country. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted, a poll of voters showed that independents disbelieved the claim by a factor of two to one, and five times as many independents are sure that it’s false as those who believe it’s true.

And according to a recent Data for Progress poll, huge majorities of voters of all persuasions believe that Trump’s statements about immigrants eating pets is a weird thing to say.

Trump’s ploy might well result in the worst of all outcomes for him and his campaign: the American public collectively shaking their heads at him with contempt over his racist targeting of a whole community and entirely unmoved by his upping the ante.

Collective yawn

As evidence that Trump has overplayed his hand in what we hope is his final season, it appears there was a second attempted assassination, this time by someone who was caught by authoritieswith an AK-47 a few hundred yards down the golf course where Trump was playing on Sunday. The only shots fired were by the Secret Service.

(To those on the right questioning how the would-be assailant could have possibly known where to find Trump, it was at his golf course. That’s where he always is.)

Note that the second would-be assassin is, like the first, also a white male. He is not an immigrant, a Haitian or a drag queen. He’s a gun enthusiast who voted for Trump in 2016 but soured on him by 2020, and whose social media indicates he is a vaccine conspiracy theorist while supporting a Haley/Ramaswamy GOP ticket. Not exactly a stable individual.

The first time Trump was shot at, there was a collective gasp from the public and an outpouring of condemnation of political violence. This time feels different. Once again, the perpetrator, however unstable is a statistically predictable outgrowth of the very toxic political environment that Trump himself created. Like his second indictment, this second attempt feels like more of the same, with Trump himself to blame for much of it. 

It didn’t help that Trump squandered whatever political capital he might have had from the first attempt by brandishing his absurd ear bandage, later taken up as a symbol of fealty by the MAGA faithful because they’re not at all in a cult.

A second attempt on Trump’s life is therefore hardly shocking to anyone who understands the kinds of chaotic forces Trump himself has unleashed. It seems only Donald Trump could manage to make us all numb to the idea of two attempts on a candidate’s life in this election season. If we were in the writers’ room, the notion quickly would be shot down as an overreach. 

In my best Miranda Priestly voice, “Another Trump assassin? Groundbreaking.”

Swift vengeance

One final indication that Trump has overreached and overplayed his hand: that Taylor Swift thing.

Right after that disastrous debate for Trump ended, the coup de grâce came from pop megastar Taylor Swift, who posted on her Instagram to her 284 million fans that she had watched the debate, done her research and would be voting for Harris/Walz. She encouraged folks to register to vote and do their own research into the election.

That endorsement led to some 400,000 visits to vote.gov and what appears to be a big surge in voter registration nationally. As Tom Bonier of TargetSmart observed, there was a “400% or 500% increase” in voter registration, meaning somewhere between 9,000-10,000 people per hour. “It’s really unlike anything I’ve seen,” Bonier said. 

In a race where key battleground states may be won by a few thousand votes, this spike in voter registration among Swifties was terrible news for Trump. That’s apparently why he then went and did the worst possible thing in response. Over the weekend, an enraged Trump tweeted in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” 

If you know anything about Swift’s fan base, this declaration of war was a terrible idea. It will only force more Swift fans to direct action and even greater involvement in the election, because nothing gets them riled up like their idol being attacked.

Perhaps in the back of his mind Trump intended to sow terror again by turning his MAGA faithful against Swift. After all, her concerts in Vienna were canceled due to actual planned terrorist attacks—something her fans are still in keen pain over. But if Trump believes creating online hate and stirring up further threats against Swift will cause her or her fans to back down, he has badly miscalculated.

Once again, in his desperation, he has gone a step too far. 

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Hoax, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: Trump and Vance Are Wrong About Tariffs: They Raise Consumer Prices and Inflation!

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2024 //
24

Michael Hiltzik is the Pulititzer Prize-winning business columnist for The Los Angeles Times. In this column, he explained that Trump and Vance are wrong to claim that tariffs will produce vast new revenues for the U.S. Treasury. Hiltzik shows that Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

He writes:

Despite strong evidence that the average voter in the presidential election doesn’t care a hoot about international trade policy, Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been promising to step up Trump’s tariff war with China.

As usual, they’re backing their promise with lies and other humbug.

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country,” Trump asserted at an Aug. 19 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for example. “That’s the way it is, whether you like it or not. A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No, no, no. It’s a tax on a foreign country.”

Questioned during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Aug. 25 about the effect of Trump’s tariffs on ordinary households — and economists’ conclusion that consumers pay the price — Vance asserted that “economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs.”

They’re wrong on both counts.

In truth, there’s no detectable disagreement among economists. In two polls conducted by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, panels of economists unanimously agreed that American households would pay the price for Trump’s tariffs.

Those opinions held in a March 2018 poll and a May 2019 poll of panels of 43 leading academic economists. (The panels weren’t identical but did overlap; three respondents in the first poll didn’t provide answers and 11 didn’t answer or were “uncertain” in the second.)


The Harris campaign is more forthright about the cost of tariffs to the average consumer, although its specific estimates about the magnitude of the cost of tariffs Trump has proposed for the future — almost $4,000 a year on middle class households — can be questioned.

It’s proper to note, moreover, that although Harris has called the Trump tariffs a “Trump sales tax,” she doesn’t mention that the Biden administration has kept many of Trump’s tariffs in place and has moved to increase some of them.
It’s safe to say that the entire topic of tariffs is fraught with confusion and uncertainty. Here’s what you need to know.


First, the background. Trump launched a trade war, principally with China, in 2018 with a tariff of up to 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. He stepped up the war later in the year with 10% tariffs on $200 billion in goods, and added tariffs of 10% on an additional $112 billion of Chinese imports. Trump also imposed tariffs on aluminum and steel imports from numerous trade partners.


These levies amounted to a tax of some $80 billion a year on American consumers, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation recently calculated. That was tantamount to “one of the largest tax increases in decades,” the foundation said, blaming the tariffs for the loss of the equivalent of 142,000 jobs. The average household paid a price of nearly $300 a year.


Biden kept in place many of the levies on Chinese products and added some of his own, including a 100% tariff on Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles. He replaced the aluminum and steel tariffs on imports from Britain, the European Union and Japan with a tariff quota, meaning that imports up to a certain level are exempt but tariffs remain in place for higher import volumes.

Tariffs are designed to fall on finished exported goods, but those goods often aren’t what consumers buy directly. Aluminum and steel, obviously, are raw materials used by manufacturers in the importing country. Other products subjected to the Trump tariffs are parts that go into American-made cars or other finished products.


The household-level effect of tariffs also depends on what a consumer buys. Consider the effect of tariffs on washing machines imposed by Trump (and allowed to expire by Biden) and the 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles Biden announced in May.


The EV tariffs will have no effect on American buyers, in the view of economist and economic blogger Noah Smith. That’s because Chinese EVs aren’t a factor in the U.S. market: “If you’re an American, you weren’t buying a Chinese EV yesterday, and now you’re not going to buy one tomorrow either. Nothing will change for you,” Smith observes.

You might, however, be able to buy one at some point in the future. Chinese EV makers including BYD are planning to build factories in Mexico, which would allow them to circumvent the Biden tariff even if the Mexican-made vehicles are bristling with Chinese parts. Some companies may even open factories in the U.S., as BMW, Honda, Toyota and other foreign carmakers have done.

The Trump tariff on washing machines had a measurable effect on the American market, however. Chinese-made machines commanded 80% of the U.S. market in 2018. That January, Trump imposed a 20% tariff on the first 1.2 million imported washing machines per year, and 50% on the excess imports.

Economists at the Federal Reserve and University of Chicago calculated that as a result, the price of washing machines rose by about 11%, or an average of $86.

As it happens, the price of clothes dryers, which weren’t subject to a tariff, also rose, by $92. The reason evidently is that washers and dryers are generally bought as a pair; washer makers taking advantage of the reduction in foreign competition to raise prices on that appliance simply jacked up prices on the package.

Overall, manufacturers passed through more than 100% of the tariff cost to consumers, thanks to the lack of competition and the price increase on dryers. American consumers lost about $1.55 billion because of the washing machine tariffs, the authors found.

The researchers did acknowledge that manufacturing employment in the washing machine sector increased by about 1,200 in the wake of the tariff. But that worked out to a cost of about $815,000 per new job — borne, again, by consumers.

That underscores the fakery purveyed by Trump and Vance about the purported virtues of tariffs. During his “Meet the Press” appearance, Vance claimed that tariff critics overlooked the “dynamic effect when more jobs come into the country. Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer, you gain in higher wages.”

But there’s scant evidence for Vance’s claim that the tariffs pay for themselves. Certainly the economists polled by the University of Chicago didn’t think so, and the Tax Foundation found that, on balance, the Trump tariffs cost jobs.
The same conclusion was reached by economists at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Yale and Columbia, who found “large consumer losses from the trade war” Trump instigated. They added together the cost of the U.S. tariffs and those of retaliatory tariffs imposed by target countries, especially China.

That leaves the question of the role tariffs should play in overall industrial policy. They’re a tool that can be useful or warranted in specific contexts, but only if they’re carefully calibrated with other measures. Biden accompanied his continuation of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese semiconductor products, for instance, with the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provides for about $280 billion in government funding for semiconductor research and development, including $40 billion in subsidies for chip factories in the U.S.

Viewed in isolation, tariffs are disdained by liberal and conservative economists alike. David Dollar and Zhi Wang of the liberal Brookings Institution warned in 2018 that of the costs of Trump’s trade war, “some … will be borne by American consumers; [and] some by American firms that either produce in China or use intermediate products from China.”

Their conclusions were confirmed by the libertarian Cato Institute, which asserted last month that “Americans bore the brunt” of Trump’s tariffs. Among the drawbacks were “higher tax burdens and prices, loss in wages and employment, reduced consumption, decreased investment, a decline in exports, and overall aggregate welfare.”

History offers its own warnings. During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump praised the tariffs proposed by William McKinley (R-Ohio) as a member of Congress in 1888. “If you look at McKinley,” Trump told his interviewer, Mark Levin, “he was a great president. He made the country rich.”

During the years following the enactment of the “McKinley Tariff” in 1890, the U.S. suffered four recessions or “panics,” in 1890-91, 1893, 1896 and 1899-1900.

McKinley became president in 1897. By then the McKinley Tariff had been shown to be a political disaster, leading to landslide losses of 83 House seats in the midterm election of 1890 and the loss of the White House in 1892, placing both chambers of Congress and the presidency in Democratic hands.


In other words, if Trump knew history, he would abandon all this tariff talk. But he doesn’t, and he hasn’t.

Categories Economics, Economy, Elections, Stupid, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Johaan Neem: How to Respond to a Candidate Who Threatens Political Violence and Our Constitution?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
20

Johaan Neem is a historian at Western Washington University. He recently published a thoughtful essay about the crisis of our time, the fateful election before us. Will voters return to power a man who has made known his contempt for our Constitution and for the norms of democracy? Neem likens our present dilemma to the “exclusion crisis” in England in the late 1670s and early 1680s. King Charles II sought to turn England into an absolutist state; he canceled laws passed by Parliament and oust local officials who displeased him. Neem suggests that that the U.S. is experiencing a comparable crisis when the question before us is how to resist a tyrannical government that came to power legitimately.

Neem writes:

Today, America is roiled with its own Exclusion Crisis. We too face the very real possibility that in this fall’s election a legal succession could bring to power an executive who has demonstrated his willingness to undermine our Constitution. To draw the parallel is not to propose armed resistance but to force us to reckon with the dreadful gravity of this moment: We may be about to hold an election which will render our Constitution invalid. 

We should not confuse reasonable differences between the two parties and their policies with threats to the Constitution itself. In a democratic republic, open disagreement is a sign of civic health. Regardless of one’s partisan loyalties and policy preferences, however, the evidence is clear that Donald Trump poses a threat to the republic. Like Locke before us, we must consider how to respond should an empowered political leader unknit our order.

There have been many articles and books examining Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his admiration for authoritarian leaders around the world. The largest threats he poses to the Constitution are not his policies but his efforts to undermine the rule of law by embracing violence as a political tool. Numerous high-ranking officials from the Trump Administration have made clear that, but for their resistance, as president, Trump would have undermined the Constitution during his first term. He has joked that he’ll be a dictator on the first day of his second term, but there’s nothing funny about it. If re-elected, he has promised to unleash all the force of the United States Justice Department against his political opponents, from Gen. Mark A. Milley to President Biden and Vice President Harris, and to bypass the judicial system by using military tribunals. We should take his word for it. 

Trump’s violence — his penchant for it, for inciting it, and valorizing it — should terrify us most of all. He encouraged and then celebrated the efforts of his supporters on January 6 to undermine an election and threaten the safety of America’s elected officials. At the heart of the American system is the freedom of elected legislatures. That freedom itself emerged out of conflicts between Parliament and King — and between colonial assemblies and royal governors — during the 17th and 18th centuries. The consent of the governed depends ultimately on free elections and the capability of the people’s elected representatives to deliberate the public good. Trump is committed to undermining legislative freedom. Both Republican Senator Mitt Romney and former Representative Liz Cheney have revealed that members of Congress were afraid to vote to impeach President Trump — even when they believed that he had committed impeachable offenses — because they worried that his supporters would threaten their families’ safety. When legislators are not free to deliberate and vote, the Constitution is already dead. 

Fear kills freedom. Fear is the point. 

This is an excerpt. Please open the link to finish reading the essay.

It’s strange indeed that a lifelong playboy who spent his time developing fast-buck schemes, operating casinos, and attending professional wrestling matches has the ability to intimidate and control an entire political party with threats of violence.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, History, Trump

Thoughts and Prayers for Former President Trump

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2024 //
14

It’s a sad day in America indeed. Trump’s Secret Service agents thwarted an apparent effort to assassinate him. An agent saw a man with a long gun protruding into the golf course where the former president was playing. The agent fired at the man, who dropped his weapon and fled. A witness saw the suspect fleeing, took a picture of his car and license plate, and he was captured on the highway less than an hour later.

I send my thoughts and prayers to the former President.

I also note that he has stood solidly with the National Rifle Association in opposing all forms of gun control. One wishes that he might change his mind about gun control as a result of his fortunate escape from mortal peril. And one concludes that nothing will change.

The guy who was arrested, a former roofing contractor in North Carolina, has previously been arrested for weapons violations. From what I’ve read, he appears to be erratic, disturbed, and delusional. A crackpot.

The suspect apparently never fired a shot. Luckily, he was spotted and fled before he had the chance to fire his weapon.

Something must be said about Trump’s frequent encouragement of violence by his supporters. He likes violent imagery, he talks in apocalyptic tones about what will happen to the country if he is not re-elected. He has celebrated the J6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” He has downplayed the consequences of their violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. He told them on that fateful day, “You must fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.”

Neither Trump nor JD Vance have expressed outrage when it happens to others. After the school shooting in Georgia, Vance said that school shootings are “a fact of life,” which implies that we should learn to accept them, not take meaningful steps to limit access to guns. Trump said after a school shooting in Iowa that people must “get over it” and move on.

There should be no tolerance for political violence in this country. I’d like to say “That’s not who we are,” but I can’t. It’s in the interest of every elected official to encourage unity, peace, and calm resolution of differences. It’s in the interest of every elected official to demand gun control.

The ballot, not the bullet.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Guns, Trump

No Sanewashing of Trump at The Washington Post!

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2024 //
37

The mainstream media has grappled with the dilemma of how to write about Trump ever since he became a candidate for the Presidency in 2015. He lies nonstop; he never admits his errors. He boasts nonstop; he insults his political adversaries. His vulgarities and crudeness are openly displayed at his rallies.

Most reporting about him simply ignores his lies, especially his insistence that he won the election in 2020, despite losing some 60 court cases in which his lawyers presented no credible evidence of voter fraud.

His lies have undermined public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system, which is the central mechanism of democracy. Demonizing a small and powerless group encourages hatred and even vigilantism.

Ignoring his lies is called “sanewashing.”

Dan Balz, the chief correspondent for The Washington Post, wrote the following article today, in which he truthfully describes Trump’s nonstop lying.

Former president Donald Trump has long inhabited a bizarre world of his own creation. He rewrites history — or makes it up entirely — to aggrandize himself, denigrate others and spread the basest of lies.

It keeps getting worse.

Since Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he’s spiraled ever deeper into conspiracy theories, falsehoods and grievances. He insists he is not a loser. He never lost the 2020 election, he says falsely, and he certainly didn’t lose that debate in Philadelphia. He claims victory in an event in which he spent 90 minutes chasing Harris’s barbs down every possible rabbit hole. He rarely managed to get off the defensive long enough to make a case against her — and when he did, he was barely coherent.

Trump can’t accept the widely held verdict that Harris outdid him, just like he couldn’t accept that President Joe Biden defeated him four years ago. On Friday night, during a rally in Las Vegas that was replete with baseless claims about a variety of topics, he spun up the tale that Harris was receiving the questions during the debate.

Elevating a conspiracy theory that popped up on social media, he falsely claimed she had hearing devices in her earrings, that she was being coached on what to say in real time. He did it in classic Trump style, citing unspecified hearsay as proof.

“I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in her ear,” he said. ABC News, which hosted the debate, denied these false claims, but Trump cares little for the truth. He prefers to spread lies to excuse his own poor performance and to stir up his supporters to think the game was somehow rigged. All that does is further divide the country.

He used a similar technique during the debate, notably about immigration. That night he repeated a claim that had spread on social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of local residents. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” he said.

When David Muir, one of the two ABC moderators, pointed out that the city manager in Springfield had told the network there were “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” Trump replied, “Well, I’ve seen people on television.”

As Muir tried to interject, Trump continued. “The people on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” he said. Muir responded, “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.”

Trump tried again, saying, “But, the people on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” Muir countered once more. “Again, the Springfield city manager says there is no evidence of that,” he said. “We’ll find out,” an unrepentant Trump said.

In the past few years, Springfield has experienced a large influx of Haitian immigrants, who are in the United States legally. They have filled jobs in local businesses but they also have put a strain on the city’s services and caused an uproar among some local citizens. Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), seeking to highlight the issue of immigration in the campaign, helped put the town in the spotlight after an 11-year-old boy was killed in a traffic accident caused by a Haitian migrant.

Nathan Clark, the boy’s father recently denounced those who have invoked the death of his son to score political points, calling it “reprehensible.” “To clear the air,” he said last week, “my son Aiden Clark was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.” He criticized Trump, Vance and other politicians for using the tragedy to advance their own interests. “They have spoken my son’s name and use his death for political gain,” he said. “This needs to stop now.”

The repeated false claims about the Haitian community have brought threats to the city. On Friday, two elementary schools in Springfield were evacuated because of bomb threats and a middle school closed. It was the second day in a row that schools were closed due to such threats. The Columbus Dispatch reported that one of the threats included the same debunked claims about the migrant community that have circulated on social media.

Trump continues to fuel anti-immigrant outrage. He has previously said that if elected he would order the deportation of all undocumented immigrants living in the United States, a proposal judged by experts as both impractical and legally questionable. During a Friday news conference with reporters in California, Trump said, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora, [Colorado].”

Aurora is another city Trump cites as being destroyed by illegal migration, saying that it has been overrun by Venezuelan gangs. Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican U.S. House member, said last week that such claims are “grossly exaggerated,” that the problem is limited to specific housing properties and is being dealt with by law enforcement.

That Trump has lost focus on the messages his campaign wants to highlight has been evident for weeks. There are issues that could put Harris on the defensive, if he were capable of a sustained and effective message based on facts and not falsehoods. He’s proving that he isn’t able to do that.

Most polls show that voters believe he is better able to handle the economy and inflation, issues at the top of voters’ lists of concerns. He has an advantage on immigration. Beyond that, Harris is still trying to fill out her profile for voters. In a Friday interview with Brian Taff of WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, she offered mostly general answers to some specific questions about how she would lower prices and where she differs with Biden.

In the debate, Trump tried repeatedly to put immigration front and center, but he was ineffective, in large part because of exaggerations or, as with the Springfield example, outright lies. Many Republicans who support Trump for president fear he is neither talking about what matters most to voters nor heeding the counsel of his campaign’s senior advisers.

Meanwhile, the question of who has his ear has come to the fore. Laura Loomer is an attention-seeking purveyor of racist and homophobic comments and a spreader of conspiracy theories. Recently she posted on X that if Harris, who is Black and Indian American, is elected, the White House will “smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Last week, Loomer accompanied Trump to the debate in Philadelphia and joined him the next day at ceremonies commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A year ago, she had posted on X that those attacks were “an inside job,” a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence.

Her presence at Trump’s side has alarmed many Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) recently posted on X: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning reelection. Enough.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told a reporter for HuffPost that her history “is just really toxic.” Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a committed acolyte of Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and herself a purveyor of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, called Loomer’s comment about Harris “appalling and extremely racist,” adding, “This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”

Trump, who has praised Loomer over the years, on Friday tried to duck from the criticism about her. He first claimed that he didn’t really know what she has said. Later he posted on Truth Social that he disagrees with the statements she’s made, a classic dodge on his part.

He went on to suggest that she is justified because she is “tired of watching the Radical Left Marxists and Fascists violently attack and smear me.” Apparently, no one can be too extreme if they support him — or at least they can be forgiven.

This has been Trump’s pattern from the time he first became a candidate nine years ago. If anything, he has become even less disciplined and more conspiratorial than he was back then. Few people likely to vote this fall do not already have an opinion about him, pro or con. Because the country is so closely divided and questions about Harris exist, he remains in a position to possibly win the election.

******************************************

Our nation needs a sane and reasonable immigration policy. No one favors open borders. Trump’s brand of divisiveness makes it hard to envision that he will be able to achieve bipartisan consensus on any legislation. Meanwhile Trump unleashes and politicizes racism and hatred. What grows in such a climate is violence against the targets, either by lone wolves or by mobs.

A question for political scientists and historians: how did this race-baiting, misogynist con man manage to take control of a once-great political party? Mitch McConnell could have impeached Trump after the attack on the U.S., but he assumed that Trump had disgraced himself. The U.S. Supreme Court had the opportunity to remove him from the ballot for having incited an insurrection, but dodged the decision, betraying their alleged commitment to textualism and originalism. In an article in the Atlantic, Mark Leibovich attributes the subjugation of the GOP to the spinelessness of its leaders.

What Dan Balz demonstrates is that journalists have a moral obligation to their readers to tell the truth. That’s a good start.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Trump
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