Archives for category: Elections

A few days ago, the New York Times published an article that claimed that Trump is actually a political moderate—not an extremist— whose successes were attributable to the negotiating skills and insight that he learned as a successful businessman. The article was written by Matthew Schmitz, founder and editor of Compact, an online magazine, and a contributing editor to The American Conservative. The title of the article was “The Secret of Trump’s Success Isn’t Authoritarianism.”

At first, I thought the article was satire since Trump has recently been using Hitleresque language, referring to his enemies as “vermin” and warning that the current wave of migrants was “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even Mike Godwin, the guy who coined “Godwin’s Law” —about invoking an analogy with Hitler as a cheap rhetorical trick— said in an interview with Politico that “Trump is actively seeking to evoke the parallel” by his choice of language.

But then I wondered if the Times’ opinion page was responding to an article by James Bennett in The Economist, who was fired as the editor of the editorial pages for running a controversial article by conservative Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. Bennett complained that the Times’ staff was scornful of conservatives and had become increasingly illiberal and intolerant of hearing from the other side.

Maybe the decision to publish Schmitz’s article was a response to Bennett’s critique.

For me, I can think of a long list of reasons why Trump is no moderate. Here are a few: How is it “moderate” to incite a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol as it was voting to certify the results of an election he lost? What kind of “moderate” would devote four years to denying that he lost an election? What kind of “moderate” would undermine the most democratic of our institutions: the elections? As for Mr. Schmitz, it is indeed ironic that he ends his defense of Trump’s “moderation” with an appeal to the free and fair electoral process that Trump has belittled and besmirched. In Trump’s telling, every election is “rigged” unless he wins.

Judge for yourself.

If the presidential election were held today, Donald Trump could very well win it. Polling from several organizations shows him gaining ground on Joe Biden, winningfive of six swing states and drawing the support of about 20 percent of Black and roughly 40 percent of Hispanic voters in those states.

For some liberal observers, Mr. Trump’s resilience confirms that many Americans aren’t wedded to democracy and are tempted by extreme ideologies. Hillary Clinton has described Mr. Trump as a “threat” to democracy, and Mr. Biden has called him “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”

In a different spirit, some on the right also take Mr. Trump’s success as a sign that Americans are open to more radical forms of politics. After Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin crowed that the American people had “started the revolution” against political liberalism itself. Richard Spencer declaredhimself and his fellow white nationalists “the new Trumpian vanguard.”

But both sides consistently misread Mr. Trump’s success. He isn’t edging ahead of Mr. Biden in swing states because Americans are eager to submit to authoritarianism, and he isn’t attracting the backing of significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters because they support white supremacy. His success is not a sign that America is prepared to embrace the ideas of the extreme right. Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s wild rhetoric, indifference to protocol and willingness to challenge expertise have been profoundly unsettling to people of both political parties. His term in office was frequently chaotic, and the chaos seemed to culminate in the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. In the current presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Mr. Biden; he continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen and that America does not have “much of a democracy right now”; his fondness for incendiary language has not abated.

But it is worth remembering that during his presidency, Mr. Trump’s often intemperate rhetoric and erratic behavior ended up accompanying a host of moderate policies. On matters ranging from health care and entitlements to foreign policy and trade, Mr. Trump routinely rejected the most unpopular ideas of both political parties. Voters seem to have noticed this reality: When asked whether Mr. Trump was too conservative, not conservative enough or “not too far either way,” 57 percent of voters in a recent poll picked “not too far either way.” Only 27 percent of voters regarded him as too conservative.

Such characterizations may baffle Mr. Trump’s detractors. But even his most provocative comments since leaving the White House — that he would be a “dictator” for the first day of his second term; that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves to be executed for “a treasonous act” — likely matter less to many voters than how he governed while in office. Inured to his braggadocio, they see him now as he was then: less an ideological warrior than a flexible-minded businessman who favors negotiation and compromise.

This understanding of Mr. Trump, more than any other factor, may explain why so many voters have stuck with him, and why, a year from now, we may be looking ahead to a second Trump administration.

Mr. Trump’s moderation can be easy to miss, because he is not a stylistic centrist — the sort who calls for bipartisan budget-cutting and a return to civility. His moderation is closer to that of Richard Nixon, who combined a combative personality and pronounced resentments with a nose for political reality and a willingness to negotiate with his ideological opposites. Mr. Nixon, an ardent anti-Communist, displayed his pragmatism most memorably by going to China. But his pragmatic nature was evident also in his acceptance of the New Deal order, which many conservatives continue to reject.

Likewise with Mr. Trump. Start with his stance on health care, which defies Democratic and Republican positions alike. When asked in 2015 whether he supported universal health care, he said, “Everybody’s got to be covered” and “The government’s going to pay for it.” In office, he proposed an alternative to Obamacare that conservative congressmen denouncedas a “Republican welfare entitlement.” Last month, when he again attacked Obamacare, he emphasized that he didn’t want to “terminate” the program but rather “replace it with much better health care.”

Mr. Trump’s views on Medicare and Social Security have a similar middle-of-the-road quality. “He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time,” the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan complained last year. “It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that.” In the current Republican primary race, Mr. Trump has attacked Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, as a “wheelchair-over-the-cliff kind of guy,” citing votes that Mr. DeSantis cast as a congressman for proposals to replace Medicare with vouchers for private insurance and to raise the eligibility age for Social Security.

On trade, Mr. Trump broke with the free-market orthodoxy popular among Democratic and Republican elites — but out of favor with much of Middle America. Accusing China of unfair trade practices, he placed tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. Mr. Biden has maintained these tariffs, lending Mr. Trump’s act bipartisan legitimacy. Mr. Trump also pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement supported by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s economic record is now his main selling point in 2024. Voters may regard his businessman’s instincts as preferable to the formal training of economists, especially in the face of inflationary pressures that many economists understated.

On foreign policy Mr. Trump displayed a prudence and a willingness to negotiate that was at odds with the strident post-Sept. 11 tendencies of both parties. In 2019, for example, he defied hawks such as Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, and John Bolton, his national security adviser, by calling off a planned missile strike in response to Iran’s destruction of a U.S. drone. Mr. Trump argued that an attack that could kill 150 people wasn’t “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

Among Democrats and Republicans alike, the imperative of condemning adversaries as war criminals and terrorists has increasingly overtaken the conventional art of diplomacy. Mr. Trump, with his love of deal-making, has attempted to buck this trend. In July he rejected calls to prosecute Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, warning that politicians who endorsed this effort increased the risk of escalation by making it “impossible to negotiate peace.”

On social issues, Mr. Trump has also positioned himself as a kind of moderate. Though he championed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has charged Democrats with supporting laws that make it legal to “rip the baby out of the womb” in the ninth month of pregnancy, he has also broken with abortion opponents. After Mr. DeSantis signed Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks, Mr. Trump called the move “a terrible mistake.” Mr. Trump’s critics on the right often accuse him of being insufficiently committed to conservative social views. That may be true — but it is hardly an electoral liability. By criticizing both late-term abortions and the most comprehensive restrictions on access, Mr. Trump has managed to reflect the muddled views held by much of the electorate.

Consider, too, controversies over gender and sexuality. Mr. Trump did not hesitate to approve limits on transgender people in the military. But no one mistakes him for a Bible-believing evangelical or Midwestern moralist. His irreverent demeanor and promises to “protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens” are a reminder that life in New York’s real-estate and media worlds taught him a rough form of tolerance, however politically incorrect he may be. (Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was pointing to this reality in 2016 when he accused Mr. Trump of embodying “New York values.”) In this way, Mr. Trump represents a conservatism that has come to terms with the fact of diversity, even as it resists the left’s understanding of everything “diversity” should mean.

People on both sides of the political aisle, overlooking Mr. Trump’s moderation, have assumed incorrectly that his rise has been powered by appeals to fringe ideologies. The presidential campaign of Mr. DeSantis offers a vivid example of this mistake.

The campaign has boasted of Mr. DeSantis’s uncompromising conservatism and sought to deploy the quasi-ironic aesthetic radicalism of the online right. One video it created this year criticized Mr. Trump for promising to protect L.G.B.T.Q. people, and bragged that Mr. DeSantis had signed “extreme” and “draconian” laws. Another video made by a campaign aide superimposed a sonnenrad, a symbol associated with neo-Nazis, over Mr. DeSantis’s face. Mr. DeSantis’s subsequent slide in the polls reflects a host of factors, including his reserved personality, but his dead-on-arrival attempt to channel the energy of the online right suggests that its “meme magic” isn’t the reason for Mr. Trump’s success.

To be sure, Mr. Trump has had contacts with members of the bizarre right-wing fringe, most famously in a dinner last year to which the performer Kanye West (now known as Ye) brought Nick Fuentes, an outspoken racist and antisemite. But Mr. Trump differs in significant ways from the extremists with whom he is sometimes identified. For example, he has pushed for criminal justice reform, signing the First Step Act — a bipartisan measure denounced by Mr. DeSantis as a “jailbreak bill” — and explicitly promoting it as part of his outreach to Black Americans.

More recently, Mr. Trump shared on social media the results of a Reuters investigationthat found he was the only living American president who wasn’t descended from slaveholders. (“I hope that every African American in our country is reading this right now,” he wrote. “Remember!”) In the eyes of some conservative critics, Mr. Trump had lent credence to the case for reparations. It is well known that the left objects to Mr. Trump’s record on race, but — more quietly — so does the right. This underappreciated fact may help to explain why Mr. Trump has increased his support among Black voters.

How does one square Mr. Trump’s moderation with his frequent rhetorical excesses? In his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” he offers a clue. He describes his approach to negotiation with a story about preventing a bank from foreclosing on a widow’s farm. When Mr. Trump’s initial pleas are ignored, he threatens to accuse the bank of causing the suicide of the widow’s late husband. Faced with this unpleasant prospect, the bank relents. Mr. Trump observes, “Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.” Whether or not this story is perfectly factual, it illustrates what Mr. Trump aspires to be: a canny negotiator whose outrageous statements help to achieve reasonable settlements.

Of course, Mr. Trump has not been moderate at every moment or on every issue. Looking ahead to a second term, he and his policy team promise to use the U.S. military to attack drug cartels in Mexico and overhaul civil-service rules to allow him to aggressively reshape the federal bureaucracy. His vow to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” Mr. Biden should prompt a more serious consideration of the arguments some have made that special prosecutors are inconsistent with our legal traditions.

Claims from Trump campaign officials that some of the most ambitious of these proposals are “purely speculative” and “merely suggestions” may be an attempt to obscure the full extent of Mr. Trump’s ambitions. Or perhaps those proposals reflect his longstanding negotiating strategy of talking big before making more modest deals. A second Trump term may indeed be more radical and less pragmatic than the first; it’s a possibility voters can’t dismiss, but also one that his first term gives them reason to discount.

Immigration is the issue on which the promise and limits of Mr. Trump’s form of moderation will be put to the test. He now pledges a more comprehensive and effective crackdown on illegal immigrants than he achieved in his first term, including the construction of detention camps. According to a recent survey, 53 percent of registered voters trust Mr. Trump more than Mr. Biden on immigration, with only 41 percent preferring Mr. Biden.

Perhaps that disparity reflects a lack of knowledge about the extent of Mr. Trump’s plans. Or it may indicate widespread dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs. In October, staff members from Customs and Border Protection interactedwith more than 240,000 people who attempted to enter the United States along the southern border, and between October 2022 and September of this year, 169 people whose names matched those on the terrorist watch list were arrested while trying to cross.

Indeed, it is easy to overstate how radical Mr. Trump’s record is on immigration. Mr. Biden kept in place Title 42, a Covid-era measure that Mr. Trump had used to speed deportations, and expanded its use before ending it this year. In 2021, Mr. Biden declared that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution,” but he has nonetheless extended Mr. Trump’s signature policy. Alejandro Mayorkas, Mr. Biden’s homeland security secretary, acknowledged in October “an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers” so as to “prevent unlawful entries.” Even Mr. Trump’s promise to construct detention camps is not entirely at odds with current policy: This fall, the Biden administration reopened two camps to house minors who have crossed the border.

It is also worth considering that many voters may not consider Mr. Trump’s excesses to be as unusual as his opponents do. They may regard the events of Jan. 6, for example, as comparable to the violence that occurred after the death of George Floyd (when protests outside the White House resulted in the injury of more than 60 Secret Service agents and more than 50members of the U.S. Park Police). They may regard Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results as not altogether unlike Mrs. Clinton’s statement that she “would not” rule out questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election over claims of Russian collusion. Whether or not such equivalences are warranted, they are available to voters who remain angry that Mr. Trump’s opponents, including elected officials, challenged the legitimacy of his presidency even before he first took office — and seem no less committed to the project today.

The idea that Mr. Trump poses an existential threat to democracy is now closely intertwined with taking certain extraordinary legal steps against him. Though the legal merits of the four criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump vary, their political effect, given their timing and Mr. Trump’s continued popularity, is the same: They imply that defending democracy requires burdening, shutting up or even jailing one of the two highest-polling candidates. This is also true of lawsuits filed in several states arguing that Mr. Trump is ineligible to hold office.

If support for Mr. Trump really did indicate an incipient radicalism in the American electorate, such legal actions would be more understandable. Their political costs, however grave, would be easier to justify. But even those who think that some of the indictments of Mr. Trump are well grounded might conclude that the costs of prosecution, given the possible appearance of a partisan motive, are too high — that they pose the sort of threat to democratic norms that they purport to guard against.

For those sincerely concerned to preserve our democratic traditions, there is no need to take such drastic measures. As disruptive as Mr. Trump can be, his success testifies to American voters’ desire for moderation and skepticism of extremist ideologies. In November, Americans may well decide that they again prefer Joe Biden to Donald Trump. But if the United States really is a democracy, they will be permitted to make that choice freely.

Categories Character, Elections, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Why Democrats Should Make a Border Deal: Call the GOP Bluff

By dianeravitch

December 19, 2023 //

Thom Hartmann writes here that Democrats should make a deal with Republicans on immigration. Call their bluff. They have been using the issue for years while refusing to negotiate. The GOP has refused to make a deal until now so they can demagogue it. Make the deal. Pay the ransom.

He explains:

It may be time for Democrats to engage in some good-old-fashioned backroom dealmaking. If they do it right, they can strip Republicans of one of their most potent electoral issues while setting the stage for true reform of what has become a true American crisis.

Russian President Putin has ordered Donald Trump to sabotage US aid to Ukraine, and Trump has passed the word along to Republicans that anybody who doesn’t go along with the two of them will face a primary challenger.

Trump just doubled down on it this weekend in New Hampshire, praising Putin up one side and down the other while quoting Orbán and Hitler that immigration by nonwhite people “poisons the blood” of a nation.

In an attempt to appease Trump and Putin, Republicans in the Senate claim they’re putting together a “security” deal to send foreign and military aid to Ukraine and Israel while also “securing” our southern border from immigrants and asylum seekers.

Democrats first dismissed the proposed “deal” as bad-faith bargaining, pointing out that Republicans were demanding “poison pill” radical changes to our asylum and immigration policies and border security without being willing to engage in any sort of discussion about actual reform of our broken systems.

And broken they are. The last successful attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCAor Simpson–Mazzoli), happened in 1986. Ever since then, Republicans have opposed or obstructed every good-faith effort by Democrats to come up with a bipartisan solution to the crisis on our southern border. And, yes, it is a crisis.

Republicans don’t want a solution because having a border crisis involving brown-skinned people works out really well for them, as it has for rightwing governments all across the world.

Viktor Orbán rose to power as Hungary’s “soft fascism” dictator by pointing to the brown-skinned Syrian refugees who were fleeing Putin’s bombing of that country and promising to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border to keep them out; it’s a promise he has kept.

Across the rest of Europe, rightwing parties are doing as Trump and Orbán did and pointing to brown-skinned immigrants as the largest and most immediate threat to the “blood and soil” of their nations. They include the neofascist Brothers of Italy (which now runs that country) and the Lega party, the Swiss People’s Party(Switzerland’s largest), the Finns Party in Finland, the National Rally (formerly the National Front) in the Netherlands, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the United Kingdom Independence Party in the UK, and the Freedom Party in Austria.

In an apparent homage to Ron DeSantis’ shipping asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard and New York, Russian President Putin has been sending brown-skinned immigrants to the Finnish border in such numbers that the Finns have been forced to close all the border crossings they share with Russia (an 832-mile-long stretch).

Russia is apparently now playing the role of human traffickers, helping these refugees from Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen find unmonitored places along the border where they can sneak across, correctly believing that a flood of refugees will politically upset Finland and help out the pro-Putin rightwing parties there.

On this side of the Atlantic, the issue of the browning of America has been panicking white supremacists since the Reagan administration, when the change to our immigration laws in 1965 with the Hart-Cellar Act — which ended racial immigration quotas going back to 1921 that were designed to keep America white — was becoming obvious.

In 1960, 84 percent of all immigrants to the US were white, as the 1921 law required. By 2017, only 13.2 percent of immigrants were white.

Should it then surprise anybody that the white supremacists who make up the base of the GOP flipped out about immigration? Or that Republican politicians would know this and hammer it at every opportunity, while refusing to participate in any real solutions because the “border crisis” works to their political advantage?

This is, after all, foundational to the “great replacement theory” that Trump, Alex Jones, David Duke, and multiple Republican politicians have been endorsing ever since “very fine people” were chanting “Jews will not replace us [with Black or Hispanic people]” in Charlottesville.

Republican rhetoric on the issue has become so predictable that Richard Haas, normally a reasonable voice on foreign policy issues, had to be corrected on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show yesterday when he said that Democrats favor an “open border policy.”

In fact, it’s Libertarians who believe all countries should have open borders, or that more immigrants coming to America is a good thing because it increases the supply of low-wage labor that businesses so love. Rand Paul, for example, has sponsored legislation that would increase immigration to the US.

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from inviting as many people as possible to come to America, by proclaiming that our border is “wide open” because, they say, of Democratic Party policies.

While no elected Democrat I can find has ever called for “open borders,” Republicans keep saying that Democrats are for open borders and that they’ve gotten their way and the southern border is now wide open.

Thus, while it’s true that two factors have driven a lot of migration over the past few decades (climate change wiping out farmland, and political dysfunction and gangs caused by the Reagan administration illegally devastating the governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), the main driver of would-be immigrants and refugees today is the Republican Party itself.

Lacking any actual, substantive economic issues to run on, the GOP has decided to fall back on a familiar ploy: scare white people that brown people are coming for them and/or their jobs. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, I remember well how the GOP’s pitch to white people was that Black people wanted “our” jobs; now it’s brown people from south of the border.

Trump did this in the most crude, vulgar, and racist way possible from his first entrance into the Republican primary through the end of his presidency and to this day. It frightened enough white voters that it got him into office once, and the GOP is hoping they can repeat that trick in 2024.

In doing so, they’re playing with fire. Their lies about American policies are causing refugees to put their lives and their families in danger.

The truth is that Joe Biden never “opened” our southern border. “Open borders” have never been his policy or the Democratic Party’s policy or, indeed, the policy of any elected Democrat or Democratic strategist in post-1921 American history.

Everybody understands and agrees that for a country to function it must regulate immigration, and its borders must have a reasonable level of integrity. Everybody. But you’d never know that from watching Fox “News” or listening to rightwing podcasts or hate radio whenever there is a Democrat in the White House.

Republicans are playing a very dangerous game here. By loudly proclaiming their lie that Biden has “opened” the southern border and is “welcoming” immigrants and refugees “with open arms,” they are creating the very problem they’re pointing to.

Just google “open border” and “congressman,” “congresswoman,” or “senator” and you’ll get a list of Republican politicians too long to print. These are the quotes that coyotes — human smugglers — print out and distribute to desperate people in Central and South America as advertisements to get people to trade their lives’ savings for transportation to the Rio Grande.

At the top of that list, of course, you’ll find the most contemptible Republican demagogues:

— Ted Cruz wants everybody south of our border to know that the “Biden Open Border Policy [is] A Very Craven Political Decision”;
— Rick Scott wants everybody to know that “Americans Don’t Want [Biden’s] Open Borders”;
— Marco Rubio says there’s “Nothing Compassionate About Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Rand Paul is so extreme he tells us Senator Rubio “is the one for an open border”;
— Josh Hawley says “Biden’s Open Border Policy Has Created a Moral Crisis”;
— Tom Cotton “Insists the Border is Wide Open”;
— Ron Johnson wants the world to know that “Our National Security is at Risk Because Democrats have Turned Border Security into a Partisan Issue”;
— Marjorie Taylor Greene “BLASTS Open Border Hypocrites”;
— Mo Brooks opposes “Socialist Democrats’ Open Border Policies for Helping Kill Americans”;
— Lauren Boebert says the “Root Cause” of the open border crisis “is in the White House”;
— Matt Gaetz “revealed a complex and deceitful agenda by Joe Biden’s Democrat administration to evade our Southern Border law enforcement”;
— Gym Jordan says “Biden’s Deliberate Support of Illegal Immigration Could Lead to Impeachment”;
— Kevin McCarthy says the Biden Administration has “Utterly Failed” to secure the “open border”;
— Elise Stefanik proclaims “Biden’s Open Border Policies have been a Complete Disaster.”
— Tom Cole’s website features “Biden’s Open Border America”;
— Bob Goode brags about introducing legislation named the “Close Biden’s Open Border Act”;
— John Rose “Calls Out Biden’s Open Border Policies”;
— Paul Gosar claims Biden is “Destroying America with His Open Border Policies”;
— Roger Williams complains about the “Democrats’ Open Border Problem”;
— Tom Cole wants the world to know that Biden’s “open border policies have given the green light to migrants and bad actors from around the world…”;
— Gus Bilirakis “Denounces Dangerous Open Border Policies on the House Floor”;

The list goes on and on, and these messages have spread all across Central and South America, just as Republicans hoped they would, driven by human smugglers following the profit motive.

Based on an intentional GOP lie.

And the small percentage of migrants who actually get through our border and survive the trek across deadly deserts provide more cheap labor for Republicans’ big donors’ factories and construction sites, along with more brown-skinned people they can demonize as “replacing” white Americans on Fox “News.” Win-win for the GOP.

The hypocrisy is obvious: if Republicans were really worried that immigrants were diluting the labor pool and driving down wages (their main non-racist argument), they’d be pushing for an E-Verify kind of mandatory citizenship-confirmation system like most other countries have.

Instead, they refuse to even consider such legislation that would help us regulate our labor markets and discourage purely economically-motivated immigrants in favor of true refugees.

In the 1920s, the US began regulating immigration and similarly put into place laws regulating who could hire people to legally work in this country and who couldn’t.

I lived and worked in Germany for a year, and it took me months to get a work-permit from that government to do so. I worked in Australia, too, and the process of getting that work-permit took a couple of months.

In both cases, it was my employers who were most worried about my successfully getting the work permits and did most of the work to make it happen. There’s an important reason for that.

The way that most countries prevent undocumented immigrants from disrupting their economies and causing cheap labor competition with their citizens is by putting employers in jail when they hire people who don’t have the right to work in that country.

We used to do this in the United States.

Because there was so much demand for low-wage immigrant labor in the food belt of California during harvest season, President Dwight Eisenhower experimented with a program in the 1950s that granted season-long passes to workers from Mexico.

Millions took him up on it, but his Bracero program failed because employers controlled the permits, and far too many used that control to threaten people who objected to having their wages stolen or refused to tolerate physical or sexual abuse.

A similar dynamic is at work today.

Employers and even neighbors extract free labor or other favors of all sorts from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here end up afraid to call the police when they’re the victims of, or witnesses to crimes.

Everybody loses except the GOP and the employers they’re in bed with, who get a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses.

The tragedy is in the lives of the desperate people who listened to these Republican lies and got robbed, raped, or even killed trying to make it here.

They pack all their belongings into a single backpack, bid tearful goodbyes to friends and family, and begin a grueling journey facing dangers of death, kidnapping, rape, and violence. They are fathers, mothers, and children.

Quite literally taking their lives in their hands because they believed cynical, unfeeling, uncaring, sociopathic Republican politicians who are lying for political gain.

That said (and speaking as the grandson of immigrants), there is a limit to how much immigration a nation, region, state, or city can withstand before things start to break down.

Southern Republican governors are shipping their newly-arrived immigrants into New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other Blue cities to force Democrats to confront the proportions of the problem we have today because of all these GOP proclamations that the border is “wide open.”

And it’s working. New York’s Mayor Adams has said that the influx of immigrants is “destroying” his city; dozens of other Blue cities across America are straining under the load, particularly as winter is here and our broken immigration system denies these new asylum seekers work permits.

So perhaps it’s time for Democrats to turn the tables on the GOP and take this topic off the table until after November’s election. Go along with their demands to “close” the border, stop admitting refugees and immigrants, and fund a deportation system for those people who’ve not yet been processed.

Point out how years of Republicans and rightwing media “inviting” people here with “open border rhetoric” has crashed the system. Declare a state of emergency and allocate funds to help Mexico and “sending” nations deal with people who’ve been turned away from our border. And demand comprehensive immigration reform.

The simple reality is that no nation can absorb immigrants beyond a certain threshold without producing a backlash.

Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians aren’t the only ones this argument has been used against: “racial” discrimination based on these superior/inferior theories was widespread in America against Irish, Italians, and Poles from the mid-19th through the early 20th century.

“Racially-motivated” anti-Irish violence was particularly vicious in Boston and New York after the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s drove immigration to America; in 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese made a movie about it, Gangs of New York, set in 1865.

At the moment, this issue is relatively quiet; Republicans haven’t yet gone into campaign mode. But, just as predictably as “caravans!!!” from the South appear on Fox “News” a month or two before every federal election when there’s a Democrat in the White House, the GOP will start screaming about all those brown-skinned people coming here next summer and it’ll be a deafening roar by the November election.

If the GOP’s price for aid for Ukraine is to stop the flow of immigrants into this country for year or so, I say pay the ransom.

It’ll politically neuter Republicans, get aid to our democratic allies who are under attack (although the Israel aid should be conditional on ending the bombing and embracing a two-state solution), and give a much-needed break to the Blue cities Abbott and DeSantis are trying to break.

Hold your nose and go for it, Democrats, if you can get even an objectionable deal; one that’s not completely insane. In the final analysis it’ll be best for America and for future refugees and immigrants who deserve a system that actually works and can deal with their asylum or citizenship applications in a reasonable and timely manner.

I realize that some of my progressive colleagues, both in broadcasting and in print, will immediately object. However, if you present to the American people the case that this is necessary to help save democracy around the world and ultimately here in America, and that it is a small but temporary compromise, it’s a risk worth taking.

Americans really do care about freedom and the future of this nation, of the democracy and constitution for which so many Americans have given their lives, in battle and in a thousand other ways.

Make the deal.

Categories Biden, Citizenship, Democrats, Elections, Republicans

Robert Hubbell: Two Heroes of Democracy: “They Stood Their Ground”

By dianeravitch

December 18, 2023 //

Robert Hubbell wrote about two women who refused to be intimidated by the MAGA cult: Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. Despite death threats and harassments, they stood their ground. Guiliani will appeal the verdict.

He writes:

Jury Awards Ruby Freemen and Shaye Moss $148 million in damages against Rudy Giuliani for defamation.

The damages award of $148 million against Rudy Giuliani encapsulates the madness, frustration, and perseverance that define the lives of millions of activists during the American era of The Big Lie. It is tempting to characterize Giuliani’s defamation of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss and their hard-won victory as a metaphor for Trump’s political arc over the last seven years.

But what happened to Freeman and Moss is not a metaphor. It is the cold, hard reality that slaps each of us in the face every day as we are assaulted by lies heaped upon lies. Not everyone is a direct victim of the lies like Freeman and Moss, but we are all victims, nonetheless.

The point of the lies is not (only) to injure Trump’s enemies, it is to erode trust in the system until there are no guardrails left—hoping to create chaos in which the most depraved believe they have an advantage over those still ruled by conscience, decency, and fealty to the rule of law.

Trump and his enablers tell outlandish lies because they know that media outlets will dutifully repeat the lies in headlines and news alerts, reserving tepid skepticism for paragraphs buried deep in their coverage.

Direct victims like Freeman and Moss are viewed as expendable collateral damage. Their names and addresses are shared in dark corners of the web so Trump’s followers can make threats even he dares not voice (in public).

The full weight of Trump’s malevolent organization was directed at Freeman and Moss. But they did not buckle. Two women who were motivated to help fellow Georgians vote in a free and fair election stood their ground.

Their reputations were smeared by the sitting President of the United States, the Georgia legislature, Fox News, One America Network, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and millions of users on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.

A preacher and a rap star’s publicist teamed up to urge them to falsely confess to non-existent crimes—saying it was the only way to stop the ugly death threats. The FBI’s unhelpful response was to advise them to “Move out of your homes.”Despite tens of thousands of vile threats, no one was arrested, investigated, charged with crimes, or sued for defamation.

At least not at first.

But the guardrails held. Because Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stood their ground.

Because they stood their ground, Democrats on the January 6 Committee allowed them to tell their story to the nation.

Because they stood their ground, the rap star’s publicist and the preacher were indicted in Fulton County, Georgia for “solicitation of false statements and influencing witnesses.”

Because they stood their ground, the former president was indicted for lying about the 2020 election. The indictment specifically alleged that the former president was responsible for the campaign to smear Freeman and Moss—lies that were part of his conspiracy to defraud the United States. (See indictment, ¶ 26.)

Then, Freeman and Moss sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation. He did his best to derail and delegitimize the civil claim for damages. But he failed. The guardrails held. All because Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss stood their ground.

Two women who wanted to help people vote in Georgia stood their ground against fancy lawyers and paid liars, a depraved president and corrupt legislators, and a news ecosystem determined to sell as much soap for as long as possible by repeating the baseless claims about Freeman and Moss.

Two women who stood their ground. That is all it took for the guardrails to hold.

It was not easy. Their stance took courage and faith. They suffered mightily. But they persevered. They are heroes of American democracy.

There can be nothing more hopeful than their example—and their victory—to remind us of the power within each of us to maintain the guardrails of democracy. Those who sow chaos in the hope that the most depraved among us will win by brute force are wrong.

People are drawn to those who promote conscience, decency, and fealty to the rule of law—especially during times of turbulence and distress.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss prevailed over Giuliani (and Trump) the moment they reported for work on November 3, 2020—because they joined tens of thousands of other Americans in becoming the guardrails of democracy that ensured a free and fair election.

Concluding Thoughts.

Every American who is taking action to defend democracy is like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The work may not seem glamorous. But counting ballots in Georgia on November 3, 2020, was tedious work—until it became a nation-defining moment that tipped the balance of a contested election.

We will never know which letter, text, door knock, or donation will become a tipping point. But some of them surely will. Indeed, because a tipping point always sits atop every action that preceded it, every letter, text, door knock, or donation contributes to the tipping point. Like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, you are part of the guardrails of democracy.

S

Categories Accountability, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Chicago Leaders Want to Move Away from Choice and Revive Neighborhood Schools

By dianeravitch

December 17, 2023 //

Chalkbeat reports that the Chicago school board wants to de-emphasize school choice and reinvigorate neighborhood schools. Chicago has been through a quarter-century of school choice, and leaders believe it’s time for a change.

Chalkbeat says:

Chicago school leaders want to move away from the district’s system of school choice — in which families apply to a myriad of charter, magnet, test-in, or other district-run programs — according to a resolution the Board of Education will vote on this week.

The move puts in motion Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign promise to reinvigorate Chicago Public Schools’ neighborhood schools. On the campaign trail, Johnson likened the city’s school choice system to a “Hunger Games scenario” that forces competition for resources and ultimately harms schools, particularly those where students are zoned based on their address.

District leaders’ goals include ensuring “fully-resourced neighborhood schools, prioritizing schools and communities most harmed by structural racism, past inequitable policies and disinvestment,” the resolution, which was released Tuesday, said.

The board wants to pursue that policy goal — and several others — as part of the district’s five-year strategic plan, which will be finalized this summer. In an interview with reporters on Tuesday, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, Board President Jianan Shi, and Board Vice President Elizabeth Todd-Breland declined to specify changes or say how far they want to move away from the choice system. That’s because they want to collect community feedback on how far the district should go, which would be outlined in a final five-year strategic plan this summer, they said.

The board is expected to vote Thursday on the resolution, which doesn’t create or get rid of any policies; rather, it formalizes and publicizes the district’s goals.

The district wants to “transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools,” the resolution says.

This marks the first time the board has formally stated it wants to move away from selective admissions and enrollment policies. It says the school choice system, as it exists today, “reinforces, rather than disrupts, cycles of inequity” and must be replaced with “anti-racist processes and initiatives that eliminate all forms of racial oppression.”

Some selective enrollment and magnet schools lack the diversity of the city, enrolling larger shares of white and Asian American students, while others remain largely segregated by race and class.

Martinez said it is painful to hear of students traveling far distances to attend school, or when parents ask if they should get their 4-year-old child tested for gifted programs. He said he can “scream as loud as I can” about all that he believes neighborhood schools can offer to families versus highly sought-after magnet or selective enrollment schools — but “it’s not going to be enough.”

“We see this as an opportunity to, again, build trust, because I want to keep calling that out — that is a huge challenge for us,” Martinez said.

The board will scrutinize charter schools carefully when they apply for renewal.

A complicating factor in the board’s action is that the board is about to make a major change from a mayoral-appointed board to an elected board.

The board’s policy priorities come less than a year before Chicago will for the first time elect school board members. State law currently says 10 members will be elected and the mayor is to appoint another 11. That shift is one reason the board is focused on getting a lot of community feedback on their vision, so new board members “understand this is the direction that the district is moving in,” Shi said.

Political shifts, such as this transition to an elected school board, could upend what the current board wants to do, said Jack Schneider, an education policy expert and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Privatization, Race, School Choice

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump and the Missing Russia Binder

By dianeravitch

December 16, 2023 //

Heather Cox Richardson reflects on the latest mystery of the chaotic Trump administration. A top-secret file is missing. It was not at Mar-a-Lago. Where did it go? Who took it? Meanwhile, in Florida, Federal Judge Aileen Cannon is slow-walking the trial about the numerous classified documents that Trump refused to relinquish to the National Archives.

She writes:

CNN reporters today pulled together evidence from a number of sources to explain how “a binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.” The missing collection of documents was ten inches thick and contained 2,700 pages of information from U.S. intelligence and that of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies about Russian efforts to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

The binder went missing in the last days of the Trump presidency and has not been recovered. Its disappearance has raised “alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed.”

Reporters Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen have pieced together the story of how in his last days in office, Trump tried to declassify most of the information in the binder in order to distribute copies to Republican members of Congress and right-wing media outlets. According to an affidavit by reporter John Solomon, who was shown a copy of the binder, the plan was to begin releasing information from it on the morning of January 20, 2021, so that it would hit the news after President Joe Biden had been sworn in.

But late on January 19, while Solomon was copying the documents, White House lawyers recalled the copies to black out, or redact, sensitive information, worrying that while most of the facts in the binder were apparently already public, the methods of collection and persons involved were not. At some point in that process, an unredacted copy of the binder disappeared.

A former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol last year that she thought Meadows took the unredacted binder with him.

Today, in statements that seemed very carefully worded, Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, told CNN: “Mr. Meadows was keenly aware of and adhered to requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong.” Terwilliger told the New York Times: “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time.”

The missing binder was not among the material the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered from Mar-a-Lago last year, and intelligence officials briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about the missing information (the CNN story does not say that the House Intelligence Committee has been briefed). In April 2021, Trump allegedly offered to let the author of a book about him see the binder, saying “I would let you look at them if you wanted…. It’s a treasure trove…it would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”

The story of yet more missing classified information highlights that Judge Aileen Cannon, who was confirmed to her position after Trump lost the 2020 election, has permitted Trump to slow down United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira, the pending criminal case in which he and two aides are accused of mishandling classified documents under the Espionage Act as well as making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Perhaps even more strongly, at a time when House Republicans have declined to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s 2022 invasion, the story serves as a reminder of the role Russia played in Trump’s 2016 election and how, during Trump’s time in office, he continued to cultivate a relationship with Russia’s authoritarian president Vladimir Putin and to turn his back on America’s traditional democratic allies, including those in NATO. (At one point, he told National Security Advisor John Bolton, “I don’t give a sh*t about NATO.”)

Indeed, Trump has suggested he would take the U.S. out of NATO if he returns to office, breaking the coalition that held first the Soviet Union and then Russia at bay since World War II. Such a betrayal would weaken all of the security alliances of the United States, according to Eastern European specialist Anne Applebaum, exposing the U.S. as an unreliable ally. As democracies ceased to work together, they would have to work with authoritarian governments, and after American political influence declined, so would the economic influence that has protected our economy. Authoritarian leaders like Putin would be the winners.

News about the missing binder also highlights just how hard Trump worked to convince his loyalists that that connection was a hoax. Although all U.S. intelligence services and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that, in fact, Russia didintervene in the election to get Trump into the White House, many Trump loyalists continue to believe Trump’s lie that such interference did not happen.

Trump’s determination to convince his followers that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax was in part an attempt to get out from under the legal implications of working with a foreign country to win an election but also, perhaps more profoundly, an attempt to make his followers believe his lies over reality. If he could make them believe him, rather than the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community and the Senate, they would be his to command.

Russia, Russia, Russia was an important precursor to the Big Lie that Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. The Big Lie has failed at every test of evidence, and yet Trump loyalists still say they believe it.

Today, former Trump ally Rudy Giuliani continued to defend the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen, even after a jury of eight Americans said he must pay the eye-popping sum of $148,169,000 to Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman for defaming them by saying they had participated in election fraud—he made that up—and for emotional distress. Freeman and Moss had asked for $24 million each.

Of that verdict, $75,000,000 was for punitive damages, illustrating that spreading Trump’s lies so that they hurt individuals comes at a whopper of a cost. Giuliani had refused to cooperate in the case, although he admitted to the truth of the underlying facts, and he had continued to attack Moss and Freeman to reporters during the trial.

Trump’s election lies that hurt companies are also costly, as the Fox News Corporation found when it settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million over the media company’s lies about the 2020 election.

Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) tried to address Trump’s attack on our democracy when this week they inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act a provision saying that no president can withdraw from NATO without approval from the Senate or from Congress as a whole.

“NATO has held strong in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said. He added that the legislation “to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security. It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”

Rubio added, “The Senate should maintain oversight on whether or not our nation withdraws from NATO. We must ensure we are protecting our national interests and protecting the security of our democratic allies.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Fraud, Trump

Politico Interviews Fiona Hill About the Stakes in Ukraine

By dianeravitch

December 14, 2023 //

You may recall watching Fiona Hill testify in the first Trump impeachment. He was impeached for withholding Congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine unless President Zelensky agreed to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Hill is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs. Maura Reynolds of POLITICO interviewed Hill about what happens if the U.S. withholds aid and Putin wins.

It was nearly two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and in recent months, the fighting appears to have ground to a stalemate. Aid from the United States has helped Ukraine get this far — but now Americans are asking, how long should they continue to support Ukraine in its war against Russia? At this point, just what are the stakes for the United States?

Since the war began, I’ve turned to Fiona Hill periodically for insight into what’s driving Russian President Vladimir Putin, and where America’s interests lie. She’s a keen observer not just of Russia and its leader, but also of American politics, having served in the White House as a top adviser to both Democrats and Republicans, including President Donald Trump. Since she left the Trump administration (and after a star turn testifying in his first impeachment), she’s become a highly sought-out voice on global affairs as well as the domestic roots of authoritarianism in countries around the world.

When we spoke this week, she made clear that the decision of whether Ukraine wins or loses is now on us — almost entirely. As Congress debates how much more money to authorize for Ukraine’s assistance amid growing Republican opposition, she says that what we are really debating is our own future. Do we want to live in the kind of world that will result if Ukraine loses?

Hill is clear about her answer. A world in which Putin chalks up a win in Ukraine is one where the U.S.’s standing in the world is diminished, where Iran and North Korea are emboldened, where China dominates the Indo-Pacific, where the Middle East becomes more unstable and where nuclear proliferation takes off, among allies as well as enemies.

“Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership,” she told me. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”

Hill sees U.S. domestic politics as the main obstacle to Ukraine’s ability to win. She has long warned, including in a book published after she left the White House, that high levels of partisanship in the United States promote authoritarianism both at home and around the world. She’s been talking to some lawmakers about Ukraine, and she’s worried that their partisanship has blinded them to the dangers the country faces if Putin gets his way.

“The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front,” she said. “People are incapable now of separating off ‘giving Biden a win’ from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.”

“In that regard,” she continued, “whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ukraine is fighting the Russian invasion on several fronts: military, financial, political. In each of those areas, is Ukraine winning, or is Russia?

We have to think about where we would have been in February of 2022. Russia’s intent was to decapitate the Ukrainian government so it could take over the country. That’s what we all anticipated. We anticipated that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy would have gone into exile, the Ukrainians would have capitulated, then there would be a very messy insurgency against the Russian forces. So if we start from that point, militarily, and we look at what’s happened over the last two years, we can actually say that Ukraine has won in terms of securing its independence, and has won by fighting Russia to a standstill.

But then we get into the details. Because, of course, the standstill is the main issue at hand. The Ukrainians were initially able to take back quite a lot of the territory that the Russians seized in the early phases of the invasion, but then the Russians dug in. We had all the hype around a counteroffensive this past summer, a lot of expectations built up inside and outside of Ukraine, especially here in the United States. If we look at other wars, major wars, often these much-anticipated individual battles don’t turn out the way that the planners or the fighters actually anticipate. Now we are in a scenario where having not succeeded in reaching the stated goals of the counteroffensive, we’re basically positing that Ukraine has somehow lost the entire war.

Ukraine has succeeded so far because of massive military support from European allies and other partners. So in that regard, we’ve now reached a tipping point between whether Ukraine continues to win in terms of having sufficient fighting power to stave Russia off, or whether it actually starts to lose because it doesn’t have the equipment, the heavy weaponry, the ammunition. That external support is going to be determinative.

So it’s maybe too soon to answer the question of has Ukraine won or lost militarily.

How about in the financial and diplomatic arenas?

It’s a question of whether Ukraine has enough resources, financial resources, not just to keep going on the battlefield, but also to keep the country together at home. And up until now you’re still seeing a lot of European countries stepping up. Not just you know, the United States, but definitely the EU, Japan, South Korea and others. Japan recently made an offer of additional major financial support. The Germans have said that they’ll make sure that the Ukrainian economy will continue to not just survive, but thrive, and over the longer term, they’ll help rebuild. This is still somewhat positive.

On the political side, however, we’ve got the problems of the policy battlefields on the domestic front. Ukraine has now become a domestic political issue in a whole range of countries, not just here in the United States, but in countries like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany and many more. And that’s an issue where it’s going to be very hard for Ukraine to win. Because when you get into the transactional issues of domestic politics, and you’re no longer thinking about national security, or these larger imperatives, then Ukraine dies a thousand deaths from all of the transactional efforts that domestic politicians engage in. Most political constituents, no matter the country, can’t really see beyond their own narrow interests.

So Ukraine isn’t losing yet. But depending on the domestic situation in the United States, and with its European allies, it could? It could start losing very soon?

That’s right, we’re at a pivotal point. There’s a lot of detail, but the bottom line is that we are at an inflection point, a juncture where it could very rapidly tip, in fact this month — December and January — into a losing proposition for Ukraine.

What do you think Putin sees when he’s watching the debate taking place in the United States right now?

He does see the entire battlefield of the military, financial and political arenas tipping to his benefit. Putin really thinks that he is on the winning side. We’ve just seen in the last few weeks, something that looks rather suspiciously like a preparatory victory tour [by Putin] around the Middle East, visiting the UAE and Saudi Arabia, stepping out again in “polite company,” preparing to go to other major meetings. And then the coverage in the Russian press — their commentators are crowing with glee at the predicament of the Ukrainians, clapping their hands, literally and figuratively, about the peril for Ukraine in the U.S. Congress.

One thing that we need to bear in mind here is that Putin turned for assistance to two countries that should give Americans and members of Congress pause — Iran and North Korea. Russia has had significant shortfalls of ammunition and sophisticated technology because of sanctions and other constraints. Ammunition has come from North Korea, which continues to provide Russia with all kinds of rounds for shells, and Iran has stepped up with the production of drones. Iran and North Korea both see this as a kind of international opening for them. If Russia prevails on the battlefield, you can be sure that Iran and North Korea will get benefits from this. We already see Russia shifting its position on the Iranian nuclear front, and we also see Russia making a major shift in its relationship with Israel. Putin has gone from being a major supporter of Israel, to now an opponent, and has switched from what was always very careful public rhetoric about Israel to pretty antisemitic statements. Putin never denigrated Jews in the past. On the contrary, he presented himself as a supporter of the Jewish population. This is a dramatic shift and clearly because of Iran. Now, whether Iran asked Putin to do this, I honestly can’t say, but we can all see this deepening relationship between Russia and Iran. That is a real problem for the administration and for others who are now looking at the Middle East and trying to figure out how to stop a broader war with Lebanon, with the Houthis in Yemen, and all of the Iranian proxies, because Iran and Russia have become fused together now in two conflicts.

Please open the link to finish reading the interview.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, International, Republicans

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The GOP Protects Criminals, a Sign of Authoritarianism

By dianeravitch

December 14, 2023 //

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor at New York University and an authority on fascism and dictatorship. Here, she analyzes the shocking decision by Mike Johnson, the House Spraker, to release the tapes of the January 6 insurrection with the faces of participants blurred so they can’t be identified and prosecuted. If they are releasing tapes of criminal activity, why are they blurring the faces of criminals? To protect them.

She writes:

Authoritarianism revolves around the power to commit crimes with impunity. That is why protecting and promoting criminals and turning violent and corrupt activities into patriotic and necessary actions are always priorities of authoritarian parties and governments. The statement by Speaker of House Mike Johnson (R-LA) that House Republicans will blur footage from the Jan. 6 attack to help participants avoid being brought to justice is symptomatic.

When autocratic forces triumph, the rule of law becomes rule by the lawless. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, this will be the situation in the United States.

The party took a big step forward in the process of normalizing impunity when they made the methods and philosophy of the Jan. 6 attempted coup into party dogma. A 2022 GOP resolution decreed the assault on the Capitol to be “legitimate political discourse.” This rhetorical defense provides an “intellectual” rationale for the overturning of our democracy.

Normalizing impunity also means actively shielding participants in the coup attempt from being brought to justice and discrediting democratic institutions of justice in the eyes of the public. This is what keeper of the MAGA cult Johnson sought to do with his statement. “We have to blur some faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” he said.

As with everything Johnson says and does, this declaration was meant for an audience of one. It was a loyalty performance meant to reassure Trump that the GOP will defend those who tried to save him from the awful fate of accepting democratic precedent and leaving office when he was voted out.

Johnson’s statement also sends a strong message to MAGA thugs and fanatics that the Republican party will defend them if they engage in acts of political violence going forward. And it reduces the DOJ’s actions to hold criminals accountable to “retaliation.”

Crime, and the law, have a different meaning for authoritarians and their enablers. In the amoral and transactional world of leaders such as Trump, all means are justified to get to power and stay there. So, actions that might be defined as criminal in a democracy take on a different meaning in an autocracy. Elites and foot soldiers are rewarded for engaging in corruption, lying, and violence.

Creating an environment propitious to such violence is a key element of preparing for and managing autocracy. Spouting dehumanizing and violence-inciting rhetoric is not enough: you have to give people incentives to engage in corrupt and violent acts.

The promise and reality of pardons plays a role here. MAGA loyalist Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) used the idea of a ” blanket pardon” to get people to participate in the insurrection. Trump has deployed this ever since. “If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” the former president stated at a Jan. 2022 rally. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”

As I observed in an earlier Lucid essay, illiberal leaders have long used pardons to corrupt people, discourage dissent in and outside of the party, hide their crimes, and free up the most criminal and unscrupulous elements of society for service to the party and the state.

Benito Mussolini inaugurated this strategy. In 1925, soon after he declared himself dictator, he pardoned all “political criminals,” meaning the Blackshirts whose violence had helped him come to power in 1922 and intimated and killed people ever since. Murderers, specialists in torture, and more were now available to serve in Il Duce’s new militia or take jobs in the party and the state bureaucracy.

Five years after the 1973 coup destroyed Chilean democracy, dictator Augusto Pinochet amnestied all political criminals. Tellingly, the junta pardoned not just “authors” and “accomplices” of crimes, but also “concealers” of those crimes, so that military and security service agents who had committed human rights abuses now had their service records cleansed of incriminating evidence.

In blurring the faces of those who engaged in violent actions on behalf of an autocrat, and stating that they do not want those who assaulted the Capitol to be brought to justice, Johnson and the GOP place themselves in authoritarian tradition. They are releasing the altered footage because they need to consolidate a revisionist narrative about Jan. 6 for campaign purposes.

The DOJ has the unaltered footage, and living in a democracy means evidence of actions that incriminate those who commit violence on behalf of the powerful cannot easily be destroyed. The GOP intends to cleanse the DOJ if they return to power and likely scrub all such evidence. In the meantime, they must settle for blurring the faces of those they want to use for future anti-democratic actions. “We don’t want them…to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said. This is why.

If Trump and the GOP have their way, as of 2025 the DOJ would be remade to serve autocratic goals, protecting criminals rather than holding them accountable.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Max Boot: The GOP Abandonment of Ukraine is Disgraceful

By dianeravitch

December 12, 2023 //

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Max Boot left the Republican Party when Trump became President. He now contributes to the Washington Post. He recently wrote that the GOP is returning to its 1930s policy of isolationism, egged on by MAGA and Trump, who never faults Putin. He is outraged that the Republicans are now blocking aid to Ukraine, using it as a chip to barter for a new border policy. Spending for Ukraine weapons is spent in the United States. More important, cutting Ukraine adrift would be a huge victory for Putin.

He writes:

It’s not often that I feel ashamed to be an American. But I was ashamed this week when the Senate refused to support a supplemental spending bill that would provide about $61 billion in urgently needed aid for Ukraine (along with $14 billion for Israel and $20 billion for border security). All of the Senate Republicans, even those who have previously supported Ukraine funding, voted to filibuster the bill. Their stated position: They won’t provide a penny for Ukraine unless Democrats agree to a sweeping, draconian overhaul of the United States’ immigration laws.

I’m sorry, that’s not how a serious political party — or a serious country — behaves during a world crisis. It’s like saying to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941: We won’t support aid to Britain as it battles the Nazis unless Democrats repeal the Social Security Act or rewrite the labor laws.

Of course, most Republicans in those days were opposed to aiding Britain: A majority of Republicans in both houses voted against the Lend-Lease Act, enacted in early 1941, which allowed the U.S. government to provide critically needed war supplies to Britain and other nations deemed “vital to the defense of the United States” without demanding payment in cash. Thank goodness that in those days both houses were controlled by Democrats — and Senate rules did not require a 60-vote supermajority to get anything done.

Most Republicans abandoned their isolationism after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The GOP commitment to internationalism was renewed after 1945 because of postwar Soviet aggression and then, after the end of the Cold War, by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But since the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Republicans have been increasingly returning to their pre-Pearl Harbor roots.

The party’s leader, former president Donald Trump, has even embraced the “America First” slogan used by the original isolationists. And, just as so many of the 1930s isolationists, such as Charles Lindbergh, were sympathetic to Nazi Germany, Trump is sympathetic to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Public opinion surveys have reflected a sharp drop-off in Republican support for Ukraine: In a Gallup poll published on Nov. 2, 62 percent of Republicans said the United States was doing too much to aid Ukraine, up from 50 percent in June.
Yet I confess that, until last week, I had remained naively hopeful that Congress would still do the right thing. After all, strong majorities in both houses had supported Ukraine funding bills in the past. Moreover, the current aid request is a pittance in the context of a $6.1 trillion federal budget (0.98 percent, to be exact), and most of the funds would be spent in the United States to support our own defense industry.

The new House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), had initially voted for Ukraine aid before turning against it, but in recent weeks he sounded much more supportive of Ukraine, saying, “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe and we understand the necessity of assisting there.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose father was a U.S. Army soldier in Europe during World War II, has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine. “Honestly, I think Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he saw we were not going to help Ukraine,” he said last month.

Yet now both leaders have taken the position that — as Johnson wrote this week — “supplemental Ukraine funding is dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws.” Good luck with that. The last time Congress enacted a major, bipartisan immigration bill was in 1986, when Reagan was in the White House. Lawmakers from both parties have been laboring for decades to craft another major bill. A decade ago, the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” thought they were close, only to have the deal fall apart. So it’s hard to take Republicans at face value when they insist on making aid to Ukraine dependent on breaking through decades of legislative logjams on immigration.

Why are they linking the two? The excuse heard from Republicans is that they can’t in good conscience support funding to defend Ukraine’s borders when our own borders are so insecure. They think that by invoking the common word “borders” they can pretend that the United States and Ukraine are in analogous situations. That would be true only if the Mexican Army were invading the southwestern United States to annex Arizona, New Mexico and Texas while announcing plans to march on Washington and destroy the United States as a sovereign country.

Needless to say, that hasn’t happened. What is happening is that millions of desperate immigrants are trying to enter the United States, legally and illegally, in pursuit of freedom and economic opportunity, just like the ancestors of most native-born Americans. The spike in undocumented immigration is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but it can hardly be said to threaten the United States’ survival in the same way the Russian invasion threatens Ukraine’s.

By linking the two issues, Republicans are engaging in a bait-and-switch that gives them an excuse to do what their base wants — abandon Ukraine — while trying to blame Democrats for “jeopardizing security around the world,” as McConnell has charged.

As Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told the New York Times: “You can’t say ‘I’m for Ukraine, but only if I get this wholly unrelated policy enacted.’ You can’t be for stopping Putin from taking over a country by force and then vote against providing Ukraine the resources to do just that.”

It is still possible that Democrats and Republicans will reach agreement on Ukraine funding. But the odds of Ukraine aid being approved look dimmer today than at any point since the Russian invasion, even as the Office of Management and Budget warns that U.S. support for Kyiv is running out: “We are out of money — and nearly out of time.”

Ukrainians will fight on regardless, and they will look for help to Europe, which has already committed twice as much funding as the United States. But, even working together, Europe and the United States have struggled to keep up with Ukraine’s need for ammunition. There is no way that Europe alone can carry the whole load, especially not when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — MAGA Republicans’ favorite foreign leader — is trying to block a $55 billion European Union aid package for Ukraine.

The United States has abandoned allies, such as South Vietnam and Afghanistan, before. But this time the costs of support are much lower (no U.S. soldiers are engaged in combat in Ukraine), and the stakes are far higher. Ukraine is fighting the largest war that Europe has seen since 1945. If it loses, Vladimir Putin may be emboldened to attack other neighboring states, such as the Baltic republics and even Poland, which are members of NATO. Other despots may be emboldened to aggression of their own, beginning with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Taiwan. And then we really will be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world — all thanks to the Republican Party returning to its isolationist roots.

Unless Congress reverses course, and soon, it could be consigning our democratic allies to slaughter — and making the world a far more dangerous place.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Funding, International, Republicans, Trump

Guiliani Trial Begins Today in Georgia

By dianeravitch

December 11, 2023 //

Rudy Guiliani admitted that he defamed two Georgia election workers by accusing them of fraudulently switching ballots. The two are mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. As a result of his repeated accusations on national television, which were repeated by Trump, calling them out by name, the pair were subjected to continual threats, harassment, and intimidation. They are suing Guiliani for a sum between $15.5 million and $43.5 million. Jury selection begins today.

The showdown between the financially strapped Giuliani and the two temporary poll workers he baselessly accused of ballot tampering in 2020 will highlight a major court battle over false claims that became central to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power and is now at the heart of two criminal cases against him.

U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell has already found Giuliani liable for more than a dozen defamatory statements against Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, who are mother and daughter, leaving a jury of eight only to decide how much he should pay in damages for violent threats and harassment the pair received. Howell previously ordered Giuliani to pay the women $230,000 in legal fees and sanctions for failing to turn over relevant information. She said those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy, and owes punitive damages.

If you want to hear the details of what happened to them, watch this clip from the Rachel Maddow show. In addition to hearing their story, you will also hear testimony from the #2 official at the Justice Department, Richard Donahue, who testified to the January 6 Commission that he met with Trump and told him that the Justice Department had investigated all his claims of election fraud and found no evidence for them.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Georgia, Justice, Lies, Trump

Robert Kagan: How to Stop Trump and Save Democracy

By dianeravitch

December 11, 2023 //

Robert Kagan wrote a gloomy essay in The Washington Post on November 30 predicting that if Trump is re-elected, he will establish a dictatorship. On December 7, he wrote another essay on how to stop Trump. The bottom line, he contends, is that Republicans must stop him. They know the danger he poses, and they alone have the credibility with Republican voters to convince them that Trump is unfit for office.

Kagan knows well that all of the other candidates for the Republican nomination (except Chris Christie) have stated that they would vote for Trump even if he is convicted of federal crimes.

But his formula to defeat Trump is to assume that Nikki Haley is best positioned to compete with Trump. He believes that the others should endorse her and that she should denounce Trump. She should make clear that Trump is unelectable because of his refusal to accept the election of 2020 and the likelihood that he will be convicted in one of his many trials.

If Republicans agree that Trump is damaged goods, he will lose a large section of his voters—not his MAGA cult, but other Republicans.

Kagan writes:

The first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now. It is obvious that candidate should be Nikki Haley and not because she’s pro-Ukraine but because she is clearly the most capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible. Yes, Ron DeSantis is likely too selfish and ambitious to drop out of the race, but if everyone else does and the remaining money and support all flow to Haley, he will quickly become irrelevant….

Trump supporters fall into roughly three categories. The great majority are completely committed to what former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman has called the “cult” of Trump. They are out of reach for Haley. Another smaller group has no problem with Trump, so long as he can beat President Biden and the Democrats next year. This faction is undoubtedly reassured by polls that say that Trump can win, so the possibility that Haley can also beat Biden is irrelevant to them. They prefer Trump, and there is no reason for them to rethink their position so long as Trump remains clearly electable. Finally, there is a small percentage of Republicans who say they will support Trump unless he is convicted; recent polls suggest these people make up roughly six percent of GOP voters in some of the key swing states…

If she is serious about trying to stop Trump, however, there is only one way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That is what will be required to win over the small percentage of Republicans who are still willing to drop Trump if he is convicted. And if Haley can begin to reel in those voters, she can begin to raise doubts in the minds of those who are supporting Trump because they think he can defeat Biden and the Democrats in November. In short, the way to beat Trump is to make him seem unelectable, and the way to make him seem unelectable is to show that he is unacceptable.

Trump will campaign on the claim that he is a victim of political persecution by the Biden asministration. If he becomes the nominee, the Republican Party will echo his claims. They will insist that the American judicial system is corrupt.

Think about that precious small percentage of Republicans who now say they would not support Trump if convicted. They are actually saying a lot more than that. These are Republicans who still regard the justice system as important and legitimate, who consider special counsel Jack Smith’s charges worthy of a jury trial and legitimate, and who for the moment think a guilty verdict, were it to come, would be legitimate. Can we count on them maintaining those views over the coming weeks and months if all they hear from Republican leaders and conservative media is that the trials are illegitimate acts of persecution? Do the people hoping to be saved by the courts think that these voters will conclude on their own that the trials are legitimate when their entire party is saying they’re not?

As Trump remakes himself into a victim of persecution, will Haley and other Republicans still insist that they will support Trump if he is the nominee? In doing so, they will be tacitly agreeing, and certainly not refuting, the claim that Biden is a dictator and Trump is being persecuted. By the time the trials get underway, that will be the standard Republican talking point. Today, it is just the most devoted Trumpers, but before long, we will see even respectable Republicans “raising questions” about the prosecutions, to the point where the entire court proceeding will be delegitimized in the eyes of the ordinary Republican voter.

What effect will that have on that small percentage of Trump supporters who now say they would drop their support if he were convicted? Those who cling to the hope that the trials will bring Trump down need to understand that the number of Republicans willing to abandon Trump because of a conviction, already small today, is going to be much smaller come spring. As the Trump narrative gains traction and becomes the baseline Republican position, Haley will become a footnote as Republicans of all stripes rally to the martyrdom of Trump…

What they need to hear right now (and for the rest of the campaign) is that they are right, that the Biden administration is not a dictatorship, that the trials are not an abuse of power, and that if Trump is convicted, justice will have been done. And they do not need to hear this from Democrats and Post columnists. They need to hear it from their fellow Republicans, from Republicans they admire. At some point, some leading Republicans are going to have to display the courage to defend the justice system even though that will put them in direct conflict with Trump and his supporters.

We probably can’t expect Haley to take the lead in making the case for Trump’s unacceptability, even though she should. But other Republicans certainly can. It is no secret what people such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) think about Trump. Romney’s biography is filled with whispered comments by leading Republicans privately indicating their fear and loathing of Trump. But today, those Republicans remain in their coward’s crouch, hoping to survive as they have the past eight years — by keeping their heads down, by waving off Trump’s threats and dictatorial behavior. Romney, who once had the courage to vote to convict Trump for trying to overthrow the government in 2021, now tells us “at some point you stop getting worried about what he says.” At this moment, Trump and his supporters are engaged in an attempt to obliterate history right before our eyes, to say that down is up and up is down, and that instead of destroying democracy Trump is saving democracy from the Biden tyranny, and that this is what the trials are about. And this is Romney’s response? The people who want to put their faith in the good judgment of Republican voters are counting on those voters to come to the right conclusion themselves while even their most respected Republican leaders are too frightened to defend the justice system against Trump. That is a lot of faith indeed.

But imagine a different scenario. Imagine that Republicans who know Trump poses a threat of dictatorship suddenly discovered their courage and began speaking out, and not just one or two but dozens of them — current and former elected officials, former high-ranking officials from the Trump and past Republican administrations. Imagine if the wing of the Republican Party that still believes in defending the Constitution identified itself that way, as “Constitutional Republicans” implacably opposed to the man who blatantly attempted to subvert the Constitution and has indicated his willingness to do so again as president.

Then the Republican primary campaign would become a struggle between those defending the Constitution and those endorsing its possible dismantlement at the hands of a dictator. That small percentage of Republicans who now say they would drop Trump if convicted would remain in play, and those now sticking with Trump because he can beat Biden might have reason to start questioning that assumption. It would not take a lot of speeches, or well-placed interviews, or appearances on Sunday shows, by the right people to change the conversation. But that, it seems to me, is the only chance Haley has of giving Trump a run for his money in the primaries.

If Haley can’t beat Trump in the primaries, he thinks she should launch a third party campaign.

Could this coalition come into being? Yes. But it will require extraordinary action by a number of important individuals. People will have to take risks and make sacrifices, but is it asking too much? The risk of standing up today will not be nearly as great as it might be after January 2025. Does McConnell really want to go down in history as the silent midwife to a dictatorship in America? Can Romney not see that it is his destiny to lead the way at this critical moment in America’s history. Did Paul Ryan sell his soul for a Fox board seat? All these people went into public service for a reason. Wasn’t it to rise to an occasion such as this? Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney shouldn’t have to fight this alone. For people such as Condoleezza Rice and James Baker and Henry Paulson Jr., what was the point of acquiring all this experience and respectability, if not to use it at this moment of national peril? Why are Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) defending Trump when they must know he is a threat to American democracy and the Constitution? Where is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the man who courageously pushed back against Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election? Where are all those officials who learned firsthand what a danger Trump was and who have occasionally said it out loud, people such as former attorney general William Barr and former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly? Where is former vice president Mike Pence, who single-handedly saved our system of government almost three years ago? Was that his last act? And for that matter, where is former president George W. Bush, who is well known to be appalled by Trump? A word from him would go a long way to emboldening others. What a service he could perform for his country.

Kagan says that stopping Trump would not take a miracle. It would take courage.

How likely is that?

He concludes:

Some readers of my last essay asked fairly: What can an ordinary citizen do? The answer is, what they always do when they really care about something, when they regard it as a matter of life and death. They become activists. They get organized. They hold peaceful and legal rallies and marches. They sign petitions. They deluge their representatives, Republican or Democrat, with calls and mail, asking them to speak up and defend the Constitution. They call out their political leaders, state and local, and give them courage to stand up as well. Americans used to do these sorts of things. Have they forgotten how? At the risk of sounding Capra-esque, if every American who fears a Trump dictatorship acted on those fears, voiced them, convinced others, influenced their elected officials, then yes, that could make a difference. Another ship is passing that can still save us. Will we swim toward it this time, or will we let it pass, as we have all the others? I am deeply pessimistic, but I could not more fervently wish to be proved wrong.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Trump

Matthew Schmitz: Trump Is a Pragmatic Moderate, Not an Extremist

Thom Hartmann: Why Democrats Should Make a Border Deal: Call the GOP Bluff

Robert Hubbell: Two Heroes of Democracy: “They Stood Their Ground”

Jury Awards Ruby Freemen and Shaye Moss $148 million in damages against Rudy Giuliani for defamation.

Concluding Thoughts.

S

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Heather Cox Richardson: Trump and the Missing Russia Binder

Politico Interviews Fiona Hill About the Stakes in Ukraine

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The GOP Protects Criminals, a Sign of Authoritarianism

Max Boot: The GOP Abandonment of Ukraine is Disgraceful

Guiliani Trial Begins Today in Georgia

Robert Kagan: How to Stop Trump and Save Democracy

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Jury Awards Ruby Freemen and Shaye Moss $148 million in damages against Rudy Giuliani for defamation.

Concluding Thoughts.

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