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Trump Doubles Down on his Racist Remarks about Kamala

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
14

After telling the National Association of Black Journalists that Kamala Harris “turned black” and that she used to portray herself as Indian, Trump was roundly criticized for raising the issue of her race. Kamala is the daughter of an India-born scientist and a Jamaica-born father who is an economist. She has never denied her biracial heritage.

Yet Trump released a photo of Kamala with her mother’s family, who are Indian, hoping to prove that she only recently “turned black.” This is ridiculous. Kamala went to a black university and joined a black sorority.

Some Republicans thought his attack on Kamala was embarrassing but he’s still the party’s candidate, and they still support the convicted felon.

The New York Daily News reported:

Former President Trump on Thursday posted a photograph of Vice President Kamala Harris wearing an Indian sari as he continued to push false racially charged claims that the Democratic presidential candidate isn’t really Black.A day after accusing Harris of only recently claiming Black heritage, Trump leaned into the controversy by sharing the photo of Harris wearing traditional Indian attire alongside her mother and maternal relatives.

“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago!  Trump wrote on his social media site. “Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,”

The message came as Trump and his campaign showed no signs of backing away from the firestorm controversy he launched during a contentious 35-minute sparring match with reporters at the National Association of Black

Trump’s campaign posted a headline depicting Harris as the “first Indian-American senator” elected from California as he addressed a rally in Pennsylvania.J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, praised Trump for having the courage to respond honestly to tough questions and slammed Harris as a “chameleon.”

Harris’ father is a Black immigrant from Jamaica and she has always proudly claimed both Black and South Asian heritage. She attended Howard University, a historically Black college, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority.

Like most mixed-race people, Harris says there is nothing to be ashamed of about having roots in more than one culture or continent.

Moderate Republicans Thursday distanced themselves from Trump’s gibe as pundits branded the statement as an unforced error that could fuel Democratic political momentum.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu joined Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in trashing Trump for the divisive and untrue claim.

“The path to victory in November is not won through character attacks or personal insults,” Sununu tweeted Thursday.

Haha, expecting Trump to abandon character attacks and personal insults is far-fetched. What else would he talk about? Policy? But he never read the briefing books and knows nothing about policy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Elections, Ethics, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Racism

Robert Hubbell: The Gifts That Joe Biden Has Given Us

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
19

As I watched the arrival of the three hostages last night, I saw Joe Biden do two quiet deeds, both revealing his character. After he had finished welcoming the hostages and their families, he ascended the steps of the airplane with no fanfare. The rightwing attack machine would no doubt create a video about Biden “wandering away” mindlessly, as they did at the G7 summit, when he walked away from the global leaders to talk to a parachutist (the attack video showed him wandering away and clipped off his conversation with the parachutist—presenting him as a deluded old man). Last night, he entered the hostages’ airplane to thank the flight crew and the security officials who had accompanied the hostages from the moment of their release in Turkey to Andrews Air Base in Maryland.

After he returned to the hostages and their families, he sought out Paul Whelan, who had spent almost six years in Russian captivity. Biden chatted for a minute, then took off his American flag pin and pinned it on Whelan’s jacket. The quiet gestures of a decent man. Could you imagine Trump being quiet and decent? I can’t.

Robert Hubbell writes about Joe Biden’s gifts to his country:

Over his half-century of public service, Joe Biden bestowed many gifts on America. True, like every politician with a fifty-year record, he has made his share of mistakes. But when it mattered most, Joe Biden stepped into the breach to defend democracy and provide hope to America when it flagged.

He stepped up to challenge Trump in 2020 because he believed he could save America from the horrors of a second Trump term. He was right. That was a gift.

Over the next four years, he restored decency, compassion, and fairness to the governance of a great nation. That was a gift.

He proposed and passed sweeping legislation that made historic investments in fighting climate change, protecting the environment, ending child poverty, rebuilding our infrastructure, and bringing chip manufacturing back to America’s shores. That was a gift.

He restored the broken relationships between America and its allies. He was able to do so because our allies recognized that he was a good and decent man whose word could be trusted. That was a gift.

Today, Joe Biden’s gift of renewed international alliances resulted in the freedom of three American citizens wrongfully detained by Russia. The exchange would not have happened except for the relationship of trust and goodwill between President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The German Chancellor agreed to release a Russian assassin held in a German prison. In agreeing to the deal, Chancellor Scholz told Biden, “For you, I will do this.” See WaPo, Inside the deal that led to a blockbuster prisoner swap between U.S., Russia. (This article is accessible to all.)

The complex deal involved 24 detainees and 7 countries—the most complicated prisoner swap between the US and Russia in history. President Biden continued to work his relationships with foreign leaders to close the deal until the very moment he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Joe Biden’s selfless efforts were a gift.

The complex deal could not have happened without Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or the cooperation of six US allies. Vice President Kamala Harris played an active role in the negotiations, including private meetings with the Slovenian Prime Minister and German Chancellor at the annual Munich security conference.

The complexity of the deal is beyond the comprehension or attention span of Donald Trump—who boasted that he could secure the release of US detainees from Russia without giving any concessions to Putin. After Joe Biden finished his press conference announcing the deal, a reporter shouted a question about Trump’s boast that “that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange.”

Biden stopped, returned to the lectern, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” See embedded video, here.

Within an hour of completing negotiations for the swap, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Thirty-minutes later, he endorsed Kamala Harris for president. At a time when party leaders and podcast pundits were calling for “mini-primaries” and an “open convention,” Joe Biden had the wisdom and foresight to realize that Democrats needed unity and certainty.

Kamala Harris had earned Joe Biden’s endorsement, and he gave it promptly and enthusiastically. Forty-eight hours later, Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. That was Joe Biden’s final gift—a seamless transition that has allowed Democrats to overtake Trump in less than two weeks. Kamala Harris deserves great credit for that result, but so, too, does Joe Biden for his selfless actions, wisdom, and political foresight.

Categories Biden, Character, Elections

Slate: Silicon Valley Loves J.D.Vance

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
12

Nitish Pahwa writes in Slate about Silicon Valley’s devotion to J.D. Vance, although women are not so happy in light of Vance’s misogyny.

Pahwa writes:

Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.

In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, “a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.”

Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. “Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,” Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him “an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.” (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted “when the Twin Towers came down,” even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)

It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-“woke,” pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted “effective accelerationists” are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of “Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,” while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for “a Bestie adjacent as the VP.” (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)

Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-“multiculturalism” bookwith Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.

The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with Slate as “more of a bubble than D.C.” and New York, full of Richie Riches with “no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.” In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also “hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.” Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the “optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country” had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.

Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a “friend and big fan” of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.

It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the “hillbillies” he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibilityagain two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.

Categories Elections, Gender, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Belligerent Response to Black Journalists

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
14

Yesterday, former President Trump spoke to the National Association of Black Journalists and made a fool of himself. He was, as usual, angry and belligerent. He sneered at the journalists who questioned him. He called himself the best President for black Americans since Abraham Lincoln. And he questioned whether Kamala Harris was really black. He said she was Indian and only in recent years had “turned black.” This was of course ridiculous. Harris has never hidden the fact that her mother was from India (a research scientist) and her father was Jamaican (an economist). At age 18, she chose to enroll at Howard University, an HBCU, and joined a black women’s sorority. She is black and Indian, a fact unknown to Trump, and she did not recently, as he put it, “turn black.”

Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, from a Harris campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta reporter Tariro Mzezewa noted that the crowd of 10,000 people “was ecstatic. There was chanting, cheering, singing, and dancing for hours in the lead-up to and throughout the event,” Mzezewa wrote today in Slate. 

Mzezewa reported that rapper Megan Thee Stallion told the audience “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” before performing her hit “Body.” Georgia Democratic politicians showed up in force: voting rights advocate and former state representative Stacey Abrams, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, state Democratic Party chair Representative  Nikema Williams, and Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens. 

“What you’re seeing is very real,” Mzezewa wrote, and she quoted an attendee who said: “it’s nice to witness history, but getting to be a part of it from the ground up is a whole other level.” Certainly, the grassroots enthusiasm for Harris’s presidential candidacy is palpable. More and more self-identified groups are launching fundraising calls for Harris; yesterday the Latter-day Saints for Harris—Mormons—announced that they, too, are “putting [their] shoulders to the wheel!” Today the executive board of the United Auto Workers also endorsed Harris.

At last night’s event, Vice President Harris noted that Trump has pulled out of the September debate to which he had previously agreed. “Here’s the funny thing about that,” she said. “He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” After hitting the campaign’s refrain that marks MAGA Republican behavior as “weird,” she added to applause: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump did not say it to her face, but today he unloaded spectacularly on three Black female interviewers at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago.

When ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott began the interview by quoting a number of his racist statements about Black Americans and asking why, given that history, Black voters should trust him, he lost it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he began. “You don’t even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.” 

He went on to try to dominate Scott, listing the policies he claimed to have put into place, and to attack the people who organized the event before saying, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer….  And for you to start off a question and answer period…in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace.”   

As the session began, so it continued, with Trump questioning Harris’s Black identity—while also mispronouncing her name—and warning the attendees that they need “to stop people from invading our country that are…taking Black jobs.” NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor told MSNBC that during the interview, “people were stunned, people were gasping, there were some people who were shouting back at him saying ‘That’s a lie!’” Attendees laughed and jeered at Trump throughout the 37-minute session; his handlers made him leave early. 

Scott accurately summed up Trump’s long history of racism, but lately he has been advertising it. In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham aired last night, Trump said that Harris would be “like a play toy” for world leaders. “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why,” he said to the camera, “but a lot of people understand it.”

It is unlikely that his insults and naked racism will appeal to anyone but his base, making his performance, as Jessica Tarlov put it on the Fox News Channel, “a complete, absolute dumpster fire.” It is possible that Trump has lost the ability to read a room and reassure his audience that he’s a good bet. But it is also possible that Trump cannot bear to see the enthusiasm building behind Harris, not only because of its electoral meaning, but also because it reveals how small his own following is and how much people loathe him.  

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who produces wonderful video threads of important events, “put together an 11-minute supercut of Trump angrily self-immolating at the NABJ before his handlers pulled him from the stage.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo analyzed Trump’s meltdown in Chicago this way: “I think we’re getting the first view of imploding Donald Trump as he realizes that what was his for the taking ten days ago is slipping away and he’s likely to go to prison rather than the White House. He [is] being dominated and humiliated by Harris and he’s losing it.” His post after the interview, in which he boasted “[t]he questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” seemed an attempt to reassert his old pattern of simply declaring things to be true that…aren’t. 

Indeed, one of Trump’s answers to the journalists in Chicago revealed that he cares only about getting elected, rather than governing. It also suggested that his camp is trying to reassure him that his pick of Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate will not hurt their chances, even as more and more videos of Vance attacking women become public and as he is historically bad in front of television cameras.

Vance has only 18 months of experience in elected office, making him one of the least qualified candidates for vice president in U.S. history. When asked if Vance would be ready “on day one,” to assume the duties of the presidency if necessary, Trump answered a different question altogether, revealing what is uppermost in his mind. “I’ve always had great respect for him…but…historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion…and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential thing. Virtually never has it mattered…. Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”   

The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s performance by saying: “The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people…. Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” while “Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.” 

It urged Trump again to “stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10.”

Trump’s petulant fury at the Black journalists today suggests just how dangerous it would be to put him in control of the nation’s law enforcement and military capabilities a second time. We were given a glimpse of how eager he was to turn those capabilities against American citizens in his first term when the Department of Justice today released the report of the department’s inspector general concerning the Trump administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020.

The authors of the report emphasized that they were unable to compel the testimony of officials including then–attorney general William Barr, his chief of staff William Levi, FBI deputy director David Bowdich, and FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge Timothy Slater. 

But what they were able to put together even without their information was that, although the protests were largely peaceful, Trump was desperate to get 2,000 federal officers into the area around the White House on June 1, 2020, to increase federal control of the city. To the frustration of the people in charge of the agencies, he could not articulate a mission, only that he wanted 2,000 people around him. With only about 90 officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service on hand early on the morning of June 1, Barr told a conference call with Justice Department leadership that  Trump wanted “max strength” on the streets, and to “dominate the streets.” 

Trump then echoed that language in a call with the nation’s governors, saying, “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re [going to] walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But you’re going to have total domination.”

Then, the report says, the administration began to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion. At 4:48 that evening, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel, who advise the president, received an email that the president was going to address the nation at 6:00 and that a proclamation invoking the Insurrection Act should be “ready for signing” before then.

Shortly after, additional officers from the Bureau of Prisons—without names on their uniforms because they do not usually wear them, if you remember the concern over those nameless uniforms—arrived at the White House. Barr was in charge of clearing the streets, and ultimately, by about 9:00 he felt things were calm enough that he advised Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act. 

But it was evidently a close thing.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Racism, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: The He-Man Woman-Haters’ Ticket

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
14

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post described Donald Trump and JD Vance as a ticket whose common bond is misogyny. They have done a first-rate job of portraying their disdain for the rights of women. Apparently, they think the role of women is to be barefoot and pregnant or in Trump’s case, willing and grateful recipients of his sexual escapades. In a recent interview on MSNBC, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota referred to Vance as “President of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club,” a reference to a 1994 comical film called The Little Rascals, where a group of pre-adolescent boys swear their eternal enmity towards women.

Rubin wrote

If you wanted to design a presidential ticket most likely to offend women voters, you would pick as the presidential nominee an adjudicated rapist, someone caught bragging about sexually assaulting women and who comes with a history of demeaning and insulting women. You would make it someone who mused about punishing women for having an abortion and who boasts about taking away women’s bodily integrity.

Then, for vice president, you would find someone who has implied women should stay in abusive relationships (he denies that’s what he meant but listen for yourself), wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to states where abortion is legal, accuses single women (“childless cat ladies”) of lacking a stake in America’s future, votes against protection for in vitro fertilization and wants higher taxes for childless people. (He later said he had not meant to offend cats.)

Well, that’s the MAGA Republican Party ticket of convicted felon and former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Trump, having normalized overtly racist speech and demonization of immigrants during his campaigns and presidency, now seems bent on making misogyny acceptable, as well.

Indeed, the MAGA movement’s anti-woman outlook relies on a whole pseudo-academic underpinning to justify relegating women to the home as baby-making machines. “Vance, along with his New Right fellow-travelers, is about to introduce voters to a more conceptual take on sexism — one which many women, and indeed many men, might find even more alarming,” Laura K. Field wrote last week for Politico. Field detailed the right-wing groups that have concocted a philosophical framework to propound “a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality”; its aim is “to roll back much of feminism’s gains.”

Their declaration for a “revival of faith, family, and fertility” comes straight from the fascism playbook, which historically has sought to domesticate women and put them under the thumb of their fathers and husbands. “Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is a throughline of authoritarianism, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals,” writes historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “In Europe and America, the century-long focus of the far right on demographic emergencies supposedly created by declines of White births and upticks in non-White immigration have created support for controls on female bodies.” She continues: “These controls are predicated on negating the personhood of women and consigning them to roles as vessels of population growth.”

From the “great replacement theory” to abortion bans, the Make America Great Again movement echoes past demographic freakouts and accompanying efforts to dominate women. As Ben-Ghiat puts it, the MAGA crew, like its intellectual ancestors, insists that for “White Christian civilization to continue, women must be deprived of reproductive rights and demeaned, disciplined, and criminalized if they resist.”

But you don’t have to rely on historians. Project 2025, which Vance has championed and many close Trump advisers put together, explicitly commits to restore the centrality of a male-headed, heterosexual family with children. (“Families composed of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”) Running through every policy recommendation, the plan gives preference to the “traditional family,” (often called “healthy family”), deeming all other family units as “unnatural.”

Please open the link to finish reading the column.

How smart is it for two men to run for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency by promising to reduce the rights of women and restore them to their traditional role as baby-makers? Some women may like their ideas but most won’t, including a significant number of Republican and independent women. Women are half the population. Women vote.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Gender, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Can’t Escape Project 2025

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
30

Ever since the general public began hearing Project 2025, the document scared those who listened. Although it was described by its authors as the agenda for Trump’s second term and it was written by veterans of the Trump administration, Trump pretended he knew nothing about it. Who wrote it? What does it say? Never heard of it.

For sure, very few people have read its 900+ pages. I read the section on education. Eliminate the Department of Education. Voucherize programs like Title 1, Headstart, special education funding, with no federal regulations attached to the money. Promote funding for religious and private schools. Ditch separation of church and state.

It also calls for a national ban on abortion and for eliminating the Civil Service and replacing career government employees with people loyal to Trump. It is the document that describes—department by department, agency by agency—how to destroy “the administrative state.”

There’s a saying that comes to mind: “When an authoritarian tells you what he plans to do, believe him.”

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about Trump’s clumsy efforts to distance himself from an agenda written by senior officials in his administration:

On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions. 

John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.” 

The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas. 

Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.  

That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” 

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” 

Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican. 

Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates. 

On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”

But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.

On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.” 

“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.” 

The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document. 

He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.” 

The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.” 

The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want. 

When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Trump

ProPublica: How Vouchers Almost Bankrupted Arizona

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2024 //
6

Voters in Arizona voted overwhelmingly against voucher expansion in a state referendum in 2018, but Republican Governor Doug Ducey and the Republican legislature expanded them anyway. The pro-voucher campaign was funded by Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos.

The financial blow to the state has been devastating. As in every other state, most vouchers are used by private and religious school students from affluent families.

ProPublica writes here about the voucher disaster in Arizona:

In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

As a result of all this unexpected spending, alongside some recent revenue losses, Arizona is now having to make deep cuts to a wide swath of critical state programs and projects, the pain of which will be felt by average Arizonans who may or may not have school-aged children.

Among the funding slashed: $333 million for water infrastructure projects, in a state where water scarcity will shape the future, and tens of millions of dollars for highway expansions and repairs in congested areas of one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolises — Phoenix and its suburbs. Also nixed were improvements to the air conditioning in state prisons, where temperatures can soar above 100 degrees. Arizona’s community colleges, too, are seeing their budgets cut by $54 million.

Still, Arizona-style universal school voucher programs — available to all, including the wealthiest parents — continue to sweep the nation, from Florida to Utah.

In Florida, one lawmaker pointed out last year that Arizona’s program seemed to be having a negative budgetary impact. “This is what Arizona did not anticipate,” said Florida Democratic Rep. Robin Bartleman, during a floor debate. “What is our backup plan to fill that budget hole?”

Her concern was minimized by her Republican colleagues, and Florida’s transformational voucher legislation soon passed.

Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materialsat the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”

But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.

The result is new money coming out of the state budget. After all, the public wasn’t paying for private school kids’ tuition before…

Arizona doesn’t have a comprehensive tally of how many private schoolers and homeschoolers are out there, so it remains an open question how much higher the cost of vouchers could go and therefore how much cash should be kept on hand to fund them. The director of the state’s nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee told lawmakers that “we’ve never really faced that circumstance before where you’ve got this requirement” — that anyone can get a voucher — “but it isn’t funded.”

Most importantly, said Beth Lewis, executive director of the public-school-advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, only a small amount of the new spending on private schools and homeschooling is going toward poor children, which means that already-extreme educational inequality in Arizona is being exacerbated. The state is 49th in the country in per-pupil public school funding, and as a result, year after year, district schools in lower-income areas are plagued by some of the nation’s worst staffing ratios and largest class sizes.

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on vouchers to help kids who are already going to private school keep going to private school won’t just sink the budget, Lewis said. It’s funding that’s not going to the public schools, keeping them from becoming what they could and should be.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, School Choice, Vouchers

President Joe Biden Recommends Reform of Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
41

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, President Joe Biden proposed important reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court. He recommended a term limit of 18 years and an ethics code for Justices of the Supreme Court. Public opinion of the Court is at its lowest since polling began in 1987. This may be in response to ethical and partisan scandals associated with the Court, as well as politically-motivated decisions.

During Trump’s single term, he was able to add three justices to the Court, stacking it with a 6-3 hard-right majority (thanks to the Federalist Society, its leader Leonard Leo, President Trump, and the canny Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell).

The Court first showed its radicalism by overturning Roe v. Wade, then followed with several other extremist decisions, giving the President “absolute immunity” for any crimes he commits while in office (Trump v. U.S.), sharply reducing the powers of regulatory agencies (the “Chevron Doctrine”), eroding the line between church and state (Carson v. Makin)), and more. You might reasonably wonder why President Biden didn’t push these goals sooner. As an institutionalist, he was loath to breach the separation of powers, and he knew he did not have the votes in Congress to win. Nonetheless, he is laying out important aims for the future.

President Biden wrote:

This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.

But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that are self-imposed by the person occupying the Oval Office.

If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power — like we saw on Jan. 6, 2021 — there may be no legal consequences.
And that’s only the beginning.

On top of dangerous and extreme decisions that overturn settled legal precedents — including Roe v. Wade — the court is mired in a crisis of ethics. Scandals involving several justices have caused the public to question the court’s fairness and independence, which are essential to faithfully carrying out its mission of equal justice under the law. For example, undisclosed gifts to justices from individuals with interests in cases before the court, as well as conflicts of interest connected with Jan. 6 insurrectionists, raise legitimate questions about the court’s impartiality.

I served as a U.S. senator for 36 years, including as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today. I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers.

What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.

That’s why — in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions — I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.
First, I am calling for a constitutional amendment called the No One Is Above the Law Amendment. It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office. I share our Founders’ belief that the president’s power is limited, not absolute. We are a nation of laws — not of kings or dictators.

Second, we have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.

Third, I’m calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. This is common sense. The court’s current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Every other federal judge is bound by an enforceable code of conduct, and there is no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt.

All three of these reforms are supported by a majority of Americans — as well as conservative and liberal constitutional scholars. And I want to thank the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.

We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power. We can and must restore the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. We can and must strengthen the guardrails of democracy.
In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice

A Few Memorable Rants from Trump’s Speeches

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
10

Margaret Hartmann, a senior editor at New York magazine, compiled six examples (by no means definitive!) of Trump rants.

Hartmann’s article includes tweets and videos that I did not include. Open the link to read the article in full.

She writes:

Donald Trump’s rally speeches have always been a dizzying mix of fearmongering, conspiracy theories, threats against his enemies, and laments about how America is a “nation in decline.” Since Trump made Joe Biden’s decrepitude the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, even before the Democrat’s calamitous debate, you might have expected the Republican to focus on appearing more competent and presidential at his MAGA gatherings. Yet Trump’s rallies are now weirder than ever.

It’s not just that the substance of Trump’s remarks has grown more disturbing, though it certainly has (for example, he regularly celebrates the January 6 rioters and uses Nazi rhetoric to describe migrants). These days his speeches are also littered with pointless and astoundingly strange musings, like his anti-shark diatribes and tributes to a fictional serial killer.

Trump insists he isn’t incoherent; he’s just misunderstood. “The fake news will say ‘Trump is rambling,’” he declared recently in Philadelphia. “No, it’s genius what I’m doing up here, but nobody understands.”

You can be the judge of that. Here’s a running list of Trump’s most bizarre rally rants from the 2024 campaign trail.

Trump claims magnets don’t work underwater.

Trump likes to brag that he’s “like, a really smart person,” often citing his MIT professor-uncle as proof that scientific brilliance is in his genes. But it seems Uncle John forgot to cover the basics properties of magnets.

“Think of it, magnets,” Trump said at a January 2024 rally in Mason City, Iowa. “Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”

Fact check: It is not.

Trump brags about putting on pants.

Okay, so Trump isn’t smarter than a fifth-grader when it comes to magnets. But as he revealed at the same January rally in Mason City, he does dress himself like a big boy.

“First they say, ‘Sir, how do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?’” Trump mused. “And I say, ‘Well, I don’t think about it too much.’ I don’t want to think about it because if I think about it too much maybe I won’t want to do it, but I love it because we’re going to do something for this country that’s never been done before.”

Trump is so proud of his ability to put on pants that he bragged about it again at a rally in the Bronx in May.

Trump blasts Abraham Lincoln for not negotiating his way out of a Civil War.

Trump has a longstanding rivalry with Abraham Lincoln. It seems he knows this will not be received well by the public, as Lincoln is beloved, and also dead. But during a January rally in Newton, Iowa, the 45th president could not resist jabbing the 16th president for failing to prevent the Civil War via negotiation.

“So many mistakes were made” ahead of the Civil War, Trump said. “See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died. So many people died.”

Trump went on to suggest that concerns about his legacy might have prevented Lincoln from embracing the lessons of The Art of the Deal.

“Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was,” Trump said. “He would’ve been president, but he would’ve been president, and he would have been — he wouldn’t have been the Abraham Lincoln.”

Trump imitates Dread Pirate Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

In April, Trump showed off another thing he has on Lincoln: His predecessor’s Gettysburg Address did not feature a pirate impression. (As far as we know!)

After describing the Battle of Gettysburg, in which about 50,000 soldiers died, as “so beautiful in so many different ways,” Trump delivered a fake quote from Confederate general Robert E. Lee in a Captain Jack Sparrow voice:

Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice it? He’s no longer in favor. “Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.” They were fighting uphill. He said, “Wow, that was a big mistake.” He lost his big general. “Never fight uphill, me boys,” but it was too late.

Trump reveals he’d rather die by shark than by electrocution.

The chances of Donald Trump being caught on a sinking boat and forced to choose between electrocution and being devoured by a shark are fairly slim. Yet he seems to think about this dilemma quite a lot.

He debuted his shark-versus-electrocution riff during an October 2023 rally in Ottumwa, Iowa. There was no context that would have explained these remarks, other than the fact that Trump has a well-documented shark phobia and an irrational disdain for electric-powered vehicles.

No one had any idea what Trump was talking about, but that did not keep him from telling the tale again and again during rallies, or insisting in June that we’re dumb for not understanding his “smart story” about ways he might die at sea.

Trump praises ‘great man’ Hannibal Lecter.

If there’s one Trump rant that’s guaranteed to make your brain melt, it’s the one where he gushes about fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Praising the Silence of the Lambs villain is now a regular part of Trump’s stump speech, but most people only noticed in May because he went on and on about it.

Trump does sort of have a reason for bringing up Lecter: He’s invoking the movie villain to demonize migrants. But Trump’s tale is all wrong, both factually and dramaturgically. Here’s why:

• Trump says many migrants have been in mental institutions like the one shown in Silence of the Lambs, but there is no evidence that criminals and mentally ill people are flooding into the U.S.

• Trump has repeatedly said that Hannibal Lecter is a “great man’ who deserves our “congratulations” — so why keep him out of the U.S.?

• Trump seems confused about whether Hannibal Lecter is a character or the man who played him. He’s remarked, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?”

• Trump has said he loves Lecter because the actor once said “I love Donald Trump” in a TV interview. It’s unclear who he was referring to, but all the actors who have portrayed Lecter — Anthony Hopkins, Mads Mikkelsen, and Brian Cox — have said they dislike Trump.

• Trump often refers to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” but the character does not die in any of the book, TV, or film adaptations.

• By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. So this is an example of the United States unleashing its inmates on a foreign country, not the other way around….

Trump isn’t stressing about any of these details. The once-and-possibly-future president of the United States just loves yelling “Hannibal Lecter!” at his rallies, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

Even at his rambling 92-minute speech accepting the Republican nomination, he went off-script to refer to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Why? Any ideas why he is obsessed with this film creature?

  

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Trump

American Prospect: Tim Walz Is the Best Choice for Kamala’s Veep

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
20

Ten days ago, a friend suggested that Tim Walz would be Kamala Harris’s best choice for her VP. My response was: “Tim who?” I looked him up on Google, and I was intrigued. He is Governor of Minnesota. He grew up in Nebraska. He taught public school for 20 years. He believes in community schools. He believes in public schools.

Then I saw Jen Psaki interview him on MSNBC, and I became a believer. Without being asked about education, he volunteered that vouchers were a terrible idea, and he was well informed about why. He had read the research.

I was pleased to see that Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect agrees with me.

He wrote:

With Kamala Harris abruptly taking Joe Biden’s place as the next Democratic nominee for president, speculation about who will be her running mate has naturally exploded. Some reporting has the choice being narrowed down to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and perhaps Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

I am neither capable of nor interested in trying to predict which one she will pick. However, I do believe there is a better choice that fits all the apparent criteria: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

First, the other contenders have some significant downsides. As David Klion writes at The New Republic, Shapiro is one of the worst Democrats in the country on the Gaza war. He supports legal prohibitions on the BDS movement, joined in the cynical Republican dogpile on University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, repeatedly implied that all the protesters against Israel’s war are antisemites, and in general supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychotic violence for the last nine months. To be fair, Shapiro had also said that Netanyahu is “one of the worst leaders of all time” who is leading Israel in the “wrong direction.”

Biden’s support for Israel’s war has badly split the Democratic Party, and alienated key youth and minority constituencies. It is vital for Harris to at least paper over this crack (and, one hopes, actually force an end to the war should she become president). She seems to realize this, and sources close to her are leaking stories to reporters about how she would likely take a different tack on Gaza.

Picking Shapiro would immediately reopen that wound in the party coalition. Many activists would immediately start attacking her vociferously, deflating the rare moment of party goodwill and optimism that has built up.

Sen. Kelly is not so incendiary as Shapiro, but he has one massive black mark on his record: Back in 2021, he refused to support the PRO Act, a sweeping overhaul of labor law that would make it easier to organize and add some actual punishments for companies that break the law. One of the reasons so many employers routinely infringe on their workers’ rights is that when they do, the typical punishments are tiny fines or being forced to put up a sign. Even Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) supported the PRO Act. Picking Kelly would also mean Dems have to win a special election in 2026 to keep his Senate seat, while he would otherwise not be up until 2028.

Unions are not only a core Democratic Party constituency and source of campaign cash and precinct walkers, as Hamilton Nolan argues in his recent book The Hammer, they are absolutely vital for rebuilding a source of institutional ballast in the party that isn’t a handful of ultra-rich donors, and, indeed, for protecting American democracy over the long term. Kelly reversed course and endorsed the PRO Act on Wednesday, but this belated conversion makes his sincerity somewhat questionable.

Buttigieg is great on TV, but he has also never held even statewide office, and his tenure at the Department of Transportation has been marred by severe problems in both the airline industry and at Boeing. That’s not really his fault, but also probably not something Americans want to be reminded of.

Of the named contenders, Roy Cooper is perhaps best on paper. He’s a white guy from a swing state, he’s term-limited out, he’s been elected repeatedly in this otherwise Republican state that some think could swing Democratic this year with him on the ticket, and best of all, he’s got an excellent surname. However, he’s also a bit old at 67, and doesn’t have a very inspiring record—mainly he has been trampled underfoot by feral Republicans in the state legislature, who have all but abolished democracy at the legislative level with extreme gerrymandering. That’s not his fault, but it also doesn’t give him much of a record to boast of.

So let’s consider Walz. Demographically, he’s just what the party apparently thinks it needs: a straight, white, cis man from the Midwest. He’ll also be term-limited out in 2026. Though he doesn’t exactly look it, he’s also on the younger side—almost exactly the same age as Harris, as it happens. He’s also quite a good attack dog on TV.

More importantly, he’s had the best record of any recent Democratic governor. (Some might argue for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but she’s taken herself out of the veepstakes.) By way of comparison, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, blessed with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, recently canceled a congestion pricing scheme that had been in the works for decades, flushing perhaps a billion dollars down the toilet in the process. Meanwhile, Walz, with just a one-vote majority in the state Senate, has signed a legitimately sweeping set of reforms. As I detailed in a Prospect piece some time ago, these include a major expansion of labor rights (including a first-in-the-nation ban on employers compelling employees to attend anti-union meetings), a new paid family and medical leave system, protections for abortion and LGBT rights, legal recreational marijuana, restored voting rights to felons, universal free school breakfast and lunch, and more.

That reform package isn’t some kind of radical craziness far out of the Democratic mainstream. It amounts, more or less, to a state-level version of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Picking Walz would signal that Harris is serious about her plans to take another big policy swing, should Democrats win control of Congress, and likely inspire rank-and-file Dems to work even harder on her behalf.

The choice of running mate is often discussed in terms of campaign strategy—how the candidate might pander to certain regions or demographics, how the media might react, and so on. But as we are seeing right now, there is also the possibility it will be a very consequential decision. Just as Harris is taking Biden’s place in the campaign, her vice president might have to take over in turn. Tim Walz has shown he has what it takes.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Minnesota, Vouchers
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