Archives for category: Extremism

We have all wondered about Trump’s remarkable ability to dodge accountability for his scandals. He promoted an insurrection that sent a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. The mob pummeled law enforcement officers. People died. Trump escaped accountability. He escaped impeachment. Twice. He brought home boxes of highly confidential documents that belonged in the National Archives. A friendly judge whom he appointed threw out the case.

Trump has escaped accountability all his life. Tomorrow, Election Day, is the last chance to hold him accountable. Will he hoodwink the American public again?

Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote about Trump’s lifelong escape act. He is the Harry Houdini of politics.

Baker wrote:

When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward.

Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”

In all the different ways that Mr. Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking. He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived. He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.

His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says “they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.

His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Mr. Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable. Any one of those scandals by itself would typically have been enough to derail another politician. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first bid for the presidency collapsed when he lifted some words from another politician’s speech. George W. Bush came close to losing after the last-minute revelation of a long-ago drunken-driving arrest. Hillary Rodham Clinton fell short at least in part because of an F.B.I. investigation into emails that led to no charges.

Not Mr. Trump. He has moved from one furor to the next without any of them sinking into the body politic enough to end his career. The unrelenting pace of scandals may in its own way help him by keeping any single one of them from dominating the national conversation and eroding his standing with his base of supporters.

He even turned that mug shot into a marketing tool, selling T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and even beverage coolers with the image and the slogan, “NEVER SURRENDER.” And victory next month may yet help him escape the biggest threat of all — potentially prison.

Nonetheless, the full record stands out.

Making and Losing Money

Mr. Trump got an early start learning how to cut corners. As a high school student at New York Military Academy, he knowingly borrowed a friend’s dress jacket with a dozen medals attached to wear for his yearbook photo, in effect appropriating medals that he did not win himself, according to a new book, “Lucky Loser,” by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig of The New York Times.

He likewise cheated to get into college, according to his estranged niece, Mary L. Trump. The future president paid a friend to take the SAT for him, Ms. Trump asserted in her own book, earning a score that later helped him transfer to Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, a credential he has boasted about ever since. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump has denied this, and the widow of a man with the name cited by Ms. Trump as the test-taking friend said that she was confident her husband did no such thing.)

After graduating from Pennsylvania in 1968, however, the former military academy cadet had no interest in serving in the real military and risked being sent to fight in Vietnam. He managed to avoid the draft with a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels — a diagnosis that evidently was obtained as a favor from a podiatrist in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump. Two daughters of the podiatrist, who died in 2007, have said that he often told them about saving the younger Mr. Trump from Vietnam as a courtesy to his landlord.

Freed from military obligations, Mr. Trump went into the family business, helping run his father’s empire of rental apartment buildings in the outer boroughs. Even in those early days, he came under suspicion of misconduct. In 1973, the Justice Department sued the Trump family company for racial discrimination in renting apartments. Applications from Black applicants were marked C for “colored.” Mr. Trump fought the matter in court but ultimately agreed to a settlement that the Justice Department at the time called “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”

His business career vaulted him to fame, and he had notable successes, perhaps most prominently the rehabilitation of the Commodore Hotel and the construction of Trump Tower. But he often reached further than he was able to deliver. His record in business was pockmarked with plenty of failures.

The Trump Shuttle airline? Failure. His dreams of building a Television City in Manhattan? Failure. A United States Football League franchise? Failure. The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump’s Castle Casino Resort, Trump Mortgage, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Steaks, GoTrump.com? All failures.

His most spectacular flameouts came in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City, where he overextended himself building or buying three casinos that ultimately cannibalized each other’s clientele as he failed to keep up with enormous debt payments. He filed bankruptcy for the Taj Mahal in 1991 and then for the other two casinos in 1992. He also filed bankruptcy in 1992 for the Plaza Hotel.

Even after recovering from that debacle, Mr. Trump failed again. His casino company filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again in 2009, for his sixth trip into that process. In his various bankruptcies, he was compelled to sell assets, and creditors were forced to write off some of his debt. But Mr. Trump has boasted that he still made money in Atlantic City even after leaving a trail of losses for nearly everyone else involved, including workers who lost jobs.

Mr. Trump played the game along the edge, and sometimes over the line, of propriety. To grease his path, he would hire a governor’s son or a federal prosecutor’s brother. Along the way, he was investigated time and time again. Federal, state and local authorities looked into his ties with the Mafia, found violations of money laundering laws and penalized him for skirting stock trade rules.

At one point when Mr. Trump was strapped for cash to make an interest payment, his father sent a lawyer to one of the son’s casinos to buy $3.5 million in chips without placing a bet. New Jersey’s casino regulators imposed a $65,000 fine for what amounted to an illegal loan.

But Mr. Trump makes a point of not admitting misdeeds or mistakes. Even his failures he portrays as triumphs. “I made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” he once said, “and I’m very proud of it.”

‘When You’re a Star’

For years, Mr. Trump’s personal life was full of scandal, too, enough to make him a frequent topic of the gossip columns of the era. He did not mind. There was almost no headline too scandalous for him. “There’s no bad press unless you’re a pedophile,” he said in front of his campaign manager later in life.

After marrying the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova in 1977 and fathering three children, Mr. Trump began carrying on an affair with a younger model, Marla Maples. He and Ivana fought out their divorce battle in the news media, at one point making the tabloid front pages 11 days running. He even maneuvered The New York Post into running a banner headline “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had”supposedly describing Ms. Maples’s assessment of their bedroom life.

While living with Ms. Maples, he boasted of infidelity to a reporter during a call when, bizarrely, he impersonated a spokesman for himself and insisted that Mr. Trump had “three other girlfriends” in addition to the woman sharing his home. He and Ms. Maples later married anyway and had a daughter before divorcing, too.

He met Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model, and married her in 2005. But he was not always faithful to her either, according to other women. Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, claimed to have had a tryst with Mr. Trump in 2006, four months after Melania Trump gave birth to his fifth child.

Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, said she had a 10-month fling with Mr. Trump around the same time. Michael D. Cohen, then Mr. Trump’s lawyer and self-described fixer, arranged for six-figure payments to be made to both Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal in 2016 to ensure their silence before the presidential election, hush-money that would later come back to haunt Mr. Trump.

His view of women and his belief in his right to pursue them with impunity ultimately was put on display before that election anyway. The now-famous “Access Hollywood” tapeposted by The Washington Post weeks before the final balloting revealed his belief that he could “do anything” with women because he was famous. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

While he later dismissed that as mere “locker room banter,” Mr. Trump has been a one-man #MeToo magnet, accused by two dozen or so women of sexual misconduct that goes well beyond banter. One said he grabbed her breasts and tried to run his hand up her skirton an airplane. Another said he kissed her while she worked for him, and at least two others said he groped them at the U.S. Open. Perhaps most famously, E. Jean Carroll, a writer, said he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s.

He has consistently denied all charges, suggesting that all of these women, one after the other, simply made it up. “Every woman lied,” he said in 2016. In a couple of instances, he has dismissed the allegations, not by saying that he would never do such a thing but by saying that he would never do such a thing with those particular accusers because of their looks. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said last month about one of them.

In the only time one of these allegations made it to a verdict in court, a New York jury last year did not establish that he raped Ms. Carroll but did unanimously find that he sexually abused and defamed her and ordered him to pay her $5 million. Another jury earlier this year found that he continued to defame her and ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million. He is appealing both judgments.

Avoiding Taxes

No president in American history has been wealthier than Mr. Trump. And no president in the modern era, at least, paid less in federal income taxes in their first year living in the White House.

Tax documents obtained by The Times in 2020 showed that Mr. Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he originally ran for president, and only $750 again in 2017, the first year of his presidency. In fact, in 11 of the 18 years examined by The Times, Mr. Trump paid no income taxes to the federal government whatsoever.

Mr. Trump and his accountants have proved to be master manipulators of the tax code, bending it to benefit him in ways that would usually be damaging to a politician. The self-proclaimed billionaire, currently estimated to be worth $5.5 billion by Forbes magazine, managed year after year to pay less in income taxes than at least half of American taxpayers through creative bookkeeping if not more questionable tactics.

One after another, judges and juries found against Mr. Trump, branding him a fraudster, a sexual abuser and, through his real estate firm, a tax cheat. The two verdicts on behalf of E. Jean Carroll have left him on the hook for nearly $100 million including interest. The tax fraud conviction of the Trump Organization made him the first president to head a criminal company.

According to a Times investigation in 2018, Mr. Trump and his siblings took a real estate empire from his father that banks a few years later would value at nearly $900 million and, through favorable appraisals, paid taxes on it as if it were worth just $57 million. Buildings given by Fred Trump to his children were valued low by the Trump family for tax purposes and high for other purposes, turning a potential $10 million tax bill into a charge of just over $700,000, The Times reported.

He has even gotten the Internal Revenue Service to send him large amounts of cash. By declaring large losses on paper at least, he collected more than $90 million in local, state and federal refunds. Even Mr. Trump was astonished. “He could not believe how stupid the government was for giving ‘someone like him’ that much money back,” Mr. Cohen, his former lawyer, recalled in congressional testimony.

Mr. Trump constantly found ways of getting around paying taxes. At one point, an invoice padding scheme allowed Mr. Trump’s family to sell supplies to itself to get out of gift taxes. At another point, he shifted ownership of a failed Chicago tower to another partnership that he also owned to try to claim additional losses for tax purposes, according to an I.R.S. inquiry, a double-dipping scheme that effectively allowed him to claim the same losses twice.

Unlike every other modern president, Mr. Trump refused to voluntarily release his tax forms, going all the way to the Supreme Court in an ultimately futile effort to shield them from public view. But he has made no apology for avoiding taxes where he can. “That makes me smart,” he famously said in 2016.

The tax forms that did eventually become public highlighted the disparity between his public claims of business conquests and his private claims of business setbacks. In the same year that he published “The Art of the Deal,” his iconic best seller promoting himself as a masterful business mogul, his core businesses reported $45 million in losses on his tax returns.

Mr. Trump relied heavily on his father’s fortune to assemble his own. While he likes to say that he parlayed a $1 million loan from his father into his own empire, the Times investigation in 2018 found that his father had begun giving him $200,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars starting at age 3 and that over the course of his career he received $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate business. (Mr. Trump disputes this.)

The future president was not content to exploit his own inheritance. He got into a legal battle with his own niece and nephew, who accused him of cheating them out of their share of Fred Trump’s estate. Mary Trump and her brother Fred Trump III, the children of Donald’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., argued that they were originally supposed to split a 20 percent share of their grandfather’s estate, worth millions, upon his death. Instead, under a revised will, the two were each offered a one-time payment of $200,000.

When they sued, the future president retaliated by cutting his niece and nephew out of the family’s medical insurance fund at a time when the younger Fred Trump was using it to pay for care for his severely ill infant son. “I was angry because they sued,” Donald Trump later explained to The Times. Fred and Mary eventually settled, but were embittered that their uncle would betray them in what seemed like a bid to find cash to pay his debts.

“He was willing to squeeze his own niece and nephew and manipulate his father’s wishes, all to try and stop his own creditors from collecting the money he legally owed them,” Fred Trump wrote in “All in the Family,” a memoir published in July. “If that meant screwing his late brother — well, so be it. If it meant raiding the inheritance of his brother’s two children — well, OK.”

Mr. Trump’s relatives were not the only ones who considered themselves bilked. Over the years, so did contractors, bankers, business partners, customers and competitors, among others. By the time he first ran for president in 2016, he had been involved in 4,095 lawsuits, according to a count by USA Today, although in many of them he was the plaintiff.

Not counting personal injury lawsuits, which are common for many businesses, Mr. Trump or his firms were the defendants in at least 1,026 of those cases, accused of not paying taxes, not paying overtime, not paying companies he had hired, not paying back golf club fees that were to be refunded and not abiding by contracts. He won many of those fights but lost or settled others.

His educational and philanthropic enterprises were also seen as shams. Just after he was elected president in 2016, Mr. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to studentsof his defunct Trump University who accused him of defrauding them. Two years later, New York state authorities found “a shocking pattern of illegality” at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”

And in 2022, one of his tax schemes came unraveled when the Trump Organization, a family-owned business that he controlled, was convicted in criminal court of 17 countsof tax fraud, a scheme to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records for doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. The company was given the maximum fine of $1.6 million.

Pursuit and Punishment

Scandal followed him to the White House, so much so that he called it “the cloud” and complained that it was getting in the way of governing.

The most consuming scandal of his time in office stemmed from the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia sought to tip the contest to Mr. Trump, the newly sworn-in president refused to believe that and took any inquiry into the matter as an attack on his legitimacy.

Along the way, he escalated the matter by firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director leading the investigation into whether his campaign had any ties with the Russians, and then told visiting Russian officials the very next day that doing so had “taken off” what he called “great pressure.” Actually, it did not. Instead, it led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel.

After nearly two years of investigating, Mr. Mueller concluded that the Russians did interfere on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and he uncovered a stunning array of contacts between people in the president’s orbit and Russian figures. But Mr. Mueller reported that he did not establish any illegal coordination between Russia and the campaign and that “the evidence was not sufficient to charge” anyone with criminal conspiracy.

At the same time, he outlined more than 10 instances where Mr. Trump might have committed obstruction of justice by trying to thwart the investigation — including the dismissal of Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller said he did not decide if charges were warranted because Justice Department policy precluded prosecution of a sitting president. Mr. Trump insisted this amounted to “total exoneration,”although Mr. Mueller explicitly said he was not exonerating the president.

The investigation and media attention on what he called “the Russia hoax” embittered Mr. Trump, and during his four years in the White House he expanded the use of government power to target perceived enemies in ways not seen since Watergate. While other presidents shied away from giving the impression that they were wielding the authority of their office for political vengeance, Mr. Trump was open about going after his adversaries.

Time and again, he publicly pressed his attorneys general — first Jeff Sessions and then William P. Barr — to prosecute Democrats or government officials who angered him. At various times, he called for the prosecution of Mr. Biden, Ms. Clinton and former President Barack Obama and lashed out when advisers resisted.

He grew particularly obsessed with prosecuting certain people, like former Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Trump was fixated on the former top diplomat for talking with the Iranians with whom Mr. Kerry had negotiated a nuclear agreement from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States. In meeting after meeting, Mr. Trump repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to charge Mr. Kerry, according to a memoir by John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.

Mr. Bolton’s memoir was another example of Mr. Trump pushing the bounds of the presidency to punish someone. Angered that Mr. Bolton had criticized him, Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department to block his former aide from publishing his book. The decision to go to court to squelch a memoir prior to publication after it had been initially cleared for classified information by a career official was seen as so beyond the pale that the assistant attorney general who filed the suit on White House orders, Jody Hunt, immediately resigned.

Mr. Trump tried to put so many people who irritated him in the cross hairs of the legal system that it is hard to maintain a thorough list. He wanted prosecutors to investigate Mr. Comey as well as Andrew G. McCabe, his acting successor, and other F.B.I. officials who participated in the Russia investigation, including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

The president was so determined to revoke security clearances for John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, who both criticized him on television, that his chief of staff John F. Kelly estimated that Mr. Trump raised the matter between 50 and 75 times.

He also sought to use his power to help specific companies he favored and penalize those that angered him. He told aides to instruct the Justice Department to block the merger of Time Warner with AT&T, which would include the CNN network, one of the biggest thorns in his side. The Justice Department unsuccessfully sought to stop the merger in court, although officials insisted they acted on their own initiative, not at the behest of the White House.

Mr. Trump also tried to penalize Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, another media irritant, by pressing for increases in U.S. postal rates for the company and by blocking a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.

But he monetized the presidency for himself, as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. Critics took him to court charging him with violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution barring the acceptance of gifts from “any king, prince, or foreign state,” although the Supreme Court threw out legal challenges.

Most notably, Mr. Trump sought to use his office to strong-arm another country to deliver dirt on Mr. Biden, a political rival. The president suspended military aid to Ukraine and leaned on its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favor” by announcing an investigation into supposed corruption involving Mr. Biden and other Democrats.

For that, the House ultimately impeached Mr. Trump for abuse of power on a largely party-line vote, making him only the third president ever to be charged with high crimes, although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction.

Mr. Trump made prolific use of his presidential pardon power to help friends and political allies — and particularly figures who he might have had reason to fear would turn against him by talking with prosecutors if faced with prison time. Critics argued that dangling pardons amounted to an attempt to obstruct investigators.

Among others, Mr. Trump gave pardons or commutations to Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chairman; Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist; Roger J. Stone Jr., his friend and political adviser, all of whom had been in the cross hairs of prosecutors looking at Mr. Trump. In the final weeks of his presidency, he also used his clemency power to help convicted felons who paid people close to him to lobby for them.

Mr. Trump’s presidency ended in violence as a result of his concerted effort to overturn the 2020 election that he lost so that he could hold onto power despite the will of the voters. He filed dozens of lawsuits and pressured state officials, members of Congress, the Justice Department and his own vice president to help reverse his defeat, something no president has ever done before. And when the crowd of supporters he told to march on Congress stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the finalization of Mr. Trump’s defeat, he sat in the White House watching on television without trying to stop it for 187 minutes.

The House impeached him again as a result, accusing him of inciting the riot, with 10 Republicans joining Democrats. Never before had a president been impeached a second time. The Senate ultimately acquitted him again, but this time seven Republicans voted for conviction and several others said they voted no only because he was already out of office by the time of the trial.

‘The Real Verdict’

The explosive finale of the Trump presidency did not bring an end to the Trump scandals. On the contrary, it opened a new and unprecedented chapter in the epic and still-unresolved struggles between the 45th president and the American law enforcement system.

In the months after he departed the White House, authorities in Washington, New York, Georgia, Florida and Michigan opened investigations that ultimately led them to Mr. Trump. Civil lawsuits also mounted. Mr. Trump became a target or defendant in so many courthouses that his post-presidency has become a full-employment act for defense attorneys.

A separate civil lawsuit brought by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, went to the heart of Mr. Trump’s self-image as a tycoon of Olympian proportions. Mr. Trump’s practice of valuing properties according to his needs came back to bite him when a judge found him liable for sweeping business fraud, ruling that he illegally inflated his net worth in securing loans. The judge not only hit him with penalties that could top $450 million, he also barred Mr. Trump from leading any business in his original home state for three years. Mr. Trump is appealing.

While that judgment in itself was a first in presidential history, it barely seemed to register compared with the criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump. In what was then a stunning move, the F.B.I. conducted a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to find classified documents that Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House and then refused to give back even when subpoenaed. That, too, was a first.

And then came what might have once been unthinkable — criminal charges against a former president. Mr. Trump was indicted not once, not twice, not three times but four times. While other presidents like Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton were not without their own scandals, none of them were ever charged with felonies.

The first indictment centered on those hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, charged Mr. Trump with falsifying business records to cover up the affair and the payments. The second indictment came in federal court in Florida where the special counsel Jack Smith charged Mr. Trump with mishandling classified documents and obstructing authorities trying to retrieve them.

The third and fourth indictments both stemmed from Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost. Mr. Smith brought an election interference case against him in federal court in Washington, while Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a racketeering case against Mr. Trump for trying to switch Georgia’s electoral votes. The Michigan attorney general, for her part, named Mr. Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in her own election case. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and blamed Democrats for coming after him for partisan reasons.

The drumbeat of hearings and appeals and procedural fights that have followed may have numbed the shock value, but these cases will stand out in those future history books. He has gone to trial on only one of the four indictments so far, Mr. Bragg’s hush-money case, and the jury unanimously found him guilty of 34 felony counts. Sentencing has been pushed off until after the election.

The other three cases are in various states of limbo in part because of aggressive and successful defense moves by Mr. Trump’s lawyers aimed at delaying or undercutting the charges against him. The Georgia case was sidetracked by revelations that Ms. Willis had a personal relationship with the prosecutor she chose to manage the case.

The Florida case was thrown out in July by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, not because she found Mr. Trump innocent but because she considered Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel to be procedurally improper, a decision that stunned legal experts. Mr. Smith is appealing, and the charges could be reinstated.

The federal election case was thrown off track for months by Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had immunity as president. The Supreme Court largely accepted the argument, ruling for the first time in history that presidents have substantial immunity for crimes related to official acts. Now Judge Tanya S. Chutkan must determine whether Mr. Trump’s actions in trying to overturn the election to hold onto power constituted official acts, a process that could stretch out for months.

In the end, she may not get a chance. If Mr. Trump is elected next month, he could pull the plug on the federal prosecutions, and even the state cases in New York and Georgia may be frozen while he is in office again. He knows that, and he is counting on it. As he said earlier this year, “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people.”

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Scandals, Trump

The New York Times Endorses Kamala Harris

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2024 //

The New York Times editorial board published its endorsement of Kamala Harris on September 30. Its editorial says plainly that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency. Since the editorial appeared, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post announced that they would not endorse anyone in this crucial election. Thank you to The Times for speaking up against a showman who has promised to destroy our democracy and who has behaved like a carnival barker during the campaign. These are dangerous times. We need a thoughtful intelligent President. We need Kamala Harris.

The editorial is titled “The Only Patriotic Choice for President”: :

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debatewith Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instancesduring his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him. No other vice president in modern history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness. And his chief of staff. And his defense secretary. And his national security advisers. And his education secretary. And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom, Harris, Kamala, Trump

New York Times: Donald Trump, Nonstop Liar

By dianeravitch

November 3, 2024 //

Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote a devastating article about Donald Trump’s long history as a liar. No both-sides here. No sane-washing. His followers believe him, no matter how egregious the lie. He even lies about how many floors are in the Trump buildings.

Baker writes:

It took just two minutes for former President Donald J. Trump to utter his first lie of the evening, claiming once again that the 2020 election had been stolen.

By four minutes into the televised interview on Thursday night, he was claiming that this time around “we’re leading by a lot” in the polls, setting up another false claim of a stolen election should he lose on Tuesday.

By five minutes into the program, he had turned to assailing his successor’s record in office and was claiming that in the last few years the country had experienced “the worst inflation we’ve ever had.”

None of that was true. And that was just the first 300 seconds. For the rest of the evening, Mr. Trump spouted one statement after another that was fanciful, misleading, distorted or wildly false. He rewrote history. He claimed accomplishments that he did not accomplish. He cited statistics at odds with the record. He described things that did not happen and denied things that did.

Public appearances by Mr. Trump throughout this year’s campaign have been an Alice-in-Wonderland trip through the political looking glass, a journey into an alternate reality often belied by actual reality. At its most fundamental, it boils down to this: America was paradise on earth when he was in charge, and now it’s a dystopian hellscape. Nuance, subtlety, precision and ambiguity play no role in the version that Mr. Trump promotes with relentless repetition. And it is a version that has found traction with tens of millions of supporters.

Truth is not always an abundant resource in the White House under any president, but never has the Oval Office been occupied by someone so detached from verifiable facts. Mr. Trump’s four years in power were a nonstop treadmill for fact-checkers trying to catch up with the latest. His four years since leaving arguably have posed an even bigger challenge as he descended further into conspiracy theories, particularly around election integrity.

Since leaving the White House, Mr. Trump for the first time has been held accountable in court for deception. He was convicted of 34 felonies for falsifying business records to cover up hush money to an adult film actor. He was found liable in a civil lawsuit for lying to banks about the value of his properties. He was found liable in separate lawsuits for lying about a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her.

None of that, however, has moved his base of supporters, many of whom accept his argument that the indictments and impeachments and lawsuits and judgments and conviction are part of a wide-ranging plot by partisan Democrats, the “deep state” and a supposedly corrupt news media who are out to get him.

At his rallies, Mr. Trump’s fans tell reporters that they recognize that he may not always have the details just right or that he’s exaggerating to make a point. But in what they consider a buttoned-down, overly sensitive, “woke” world, they find his willingness to confront the establishment bracingly honest in its own way. His certainty is appealing even if his facts are off.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but he and his allies have dismissed the notion that professional fact-checkers are neutral arbiters and have waged battle this fall against fact-checking as a practice during interviews and in his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr. Trump has tried to turn the tables by calling Ms. Harris the dishonest one. “This one lies so much,” he said last week. But the public trusts her more than him. While 49 percent of Americans surveyed recently by Gallup called Ms. Harris honest and trustworthy, 41 percent said the same of Mr. Trump.

As it happens, time has not changed that assessment. In fact, that number is the same as it was in 2020 and slightly higher than the 38 percent who trusted Mr. Trump in 2016. Even fewer Americans considered Hillary Clinton honest that year, while more Americans considered Joseph R. Biden Jr. trustworthy in 2020. The candidate seen as honest by more people won both times.

But dishonesty is not necessarily punished politically in the way it once was. Since Mr. Trump’s arrival on the presidential stage nine years ago, he has spun so many falsehoods so intensely that he has forced others to deal with what an aide once called “alternative facts.” While his adversaries sputter with indignation, his allies accept his assertions and amplify them in the national conversation.

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“No one in American politics has ever lied on this scale,” said Bill Adair, a Duke University professor and author of “Beyond the Big Lie,”published this fall. “His impact is not just in the volume and repetition of lies that he tells but also in the way that he has affected the culture of the Republican Party. He has made it more acceptable to lie, and that’s clear when you listen to debate on the House floor and you hear his lies get repeated, or you watch Fox and you hear his lies get repeated.”

Antagonism to Truth

For generations, Mr. Trump has propelled himself to success in business and politics through an endless string of fabrications. He has lied about his net worth, about the height of his buildings, about the ratings of his reality television show, about the origins of America’s first Black president, about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, about migrants eating pet cats and dogs, even about whether he has visited Gaza.

This was not political at first. It was a modus operandi from the early days when he took over his father’s real estate business. His origin story itself is suffused in mythology. He likes to say that he got his start as a developer with just a $1 million loan from his father, but in fact, his father’s empire provided about $413 million when all the payments are adjusted for inflation, according to a 2018 investigation by The New York Times.

Even when the facts about his own family were inconvenient, he simply switched them. He used to say that his grandfather came from Sweden when in fact he came from Germany. He has said that his father came from Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx.

When a reporter noted in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that his grandfather died during the influenza outbreak of 1918-19, Mr. Trump denied it. “Nope, he didn’t die of that,” Mr. Trump insisted. “He died of pneumonia. He went to Alaska and he died of pneumonia.” In fact, his grandfather died 17 years after leaving Alaska.

Some of these may be facts that he simply got wrong, either because he was misinformed or forgetful. But as he strove to make a name for himself as a builder of monumental Manhattan skyscrapers, he embarked on a systematic campaign of embellishment. He wanted every building to be the biggest even if that required stretching the truth. Trump Tower, his pride and joy, is listed at 68 floors even though it is only 58.

That was not a one-off. He has done basically the same with seven other Manhattan buildings. Trump SoHo, a condominium building, had only 43 floors but elevators that listed 46. Trump International Hotel and Tower was listed as a 44-story building under the previous owner but 52 under Mr. Trump even though it did not get any taller. He billed Trump World Tower as the “tallest residential tower in the world” at 90 stories and 900 feet although it was actually 70 stories and 843 feet. “I chose 90 because I thought it was a good number,” he once told The Times.

Mr. Trump likewise exaggerated his own fortune, lobbying the journalists at Forbes magazine to inflate his worth in order to get a better ranking on its richest people list. He even pretended to be someone else, inventing a fake public relations person alternately named John Barron or John Miller so he could call reporters and praise “Mr. Trump” or make false claims.

In his first memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump explained this away as “truthful hyperbole,” a phrase that resonates to this day. But Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, said he himself came up with that language as he struggled with how to write a book that he knew was full of dubious assertions.

“I was always trying to figure out how can I say something that is close enough to believable that I can live with myself while also not pretending more than that,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “‘Truthful hyperbole’ was in lieu of saying, ‘You just lied.’”

He said he rationalized it by assuming that “this doesn’t matter very much” since Mr. Trump was “not going to have an impact on the world.” But what Mr. Schwartz said he discovered about Mr. Trump has had much more impact than he ever imagined. “He has an aversion and antagonism to the truth,” he said. “He has utter disregard for the truth except to twist it as a weapon.”

Facts That Are Not

Mr. Trump’s first campaign was built on a lie. For years, he falsely claimed that President Barack Obama might have actually been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for office. According to his now-estranged lawyer, Mr. Trump even lied about his own pursuit of the matter by announcing that he had sent private investigators to Mr. Obama’s birthplace of Hawaii when in fact he had not.

In transforming himself from a celebrity builder into a presidential candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump revised his past. He claimed to have presciently warned the country about Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, neither of which was true. He falsely claimed to hold the record for the most appearances on the cover of Time magazine, although the real record-holder remains Richard M. Nixon.

When attention turned to Russia, which was trying to intervene in the election on his behalf, Mr. Trump went from boasting that he knew President Vladimir V. Putin to denying that he ever met him. He said he had no business in Russia even though one of his fixers was secretly reaching out to Mr. Putin’s staff as part of an effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

His administration began with a dispute about truth as he insisted that his inaugural crowd size was bigger than Mr. Obama’s had been and claimed that he actually won the 2016 popular vote, which he had actually lost by three million, because of phantom illegal votes. He asserted incorrectly that the United States was on the verge of war with North Korea when he came into office and that the American military had run out of all ammunition.

Every day he seemed to be throwing out “facts” that were not. He complained about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, even though the United States had a trade surplus with its neighbor. He declared that the United States had never won a case at the World Trade Organization until he came along, even though it had won 90 percent of its cases.

He claimed credit for passing a veterans benefit law that was actually signed by Mr. Obama and said he was defending protections for pre-existing conditions while supporting a lawsuit that would have thrown out those protections. He complained when the pandemic hit that Mr. Obama had left him with no ventilators when in fact there were 16,660 in the stockpile.

Some of his false statements were especially inflammatory and absurd. More than once, he suggested that Joe Scarborough of MSNBC had committed murder. He circulated claims that bin Laden was not actually shot dead during the famous raid in Pakistan and that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden had the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed.

Then there were the quirky claims he constantly made no matter how farcical they sounded. Windmills cause cancer (and lately, he has said, are killing whales). A hurricane was set to hit Alabama even though meteorologists said it would not. To prove his point, he took a Sharpie to a weather mapand adjusted the projected path of the storm. And one of the most implausible assertions came when he said, “I do not watch much television,” a surprise to aides who saw the TV set on for as much as eight hours a day.

By the time Mr. Trump left office, his self-described summary of his record was stronger on superlatives than precision. He had built the greatest economy in history, he was the most popular Republican president in history, he did more for Black Americans than any president except possibly Abraham Lincoln, he passed the largest tax cut in history, Mexico was paying for the border wall and China was paying the tariffs he imposed.

None of that was true either. The economy was good but not the best ever. Multiple Republican presidents were more popular among Republicans at their peak than Mr. Trump was. Any number of presidents had a stronger claim to helping Black Americansthan he did, such as Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed landmark civil rights, voting and fair housing legislation. Johnson also passed a bigger tax cut as a share of the economy than Mr. Trump did, as did Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan and Mr. Obama. Mexico never paid for the wall. Consumers paid the tariffs in the form of increased prices.

The fact-checkers at The Washington Post tabulated it all, cataloging 30,573 false or misleading statements over the course of his four-year presidency. That comes to an average of 21 every day he was in office.

‘Lost by a Whisker’

By the time Mr. Trump left office, he had finally come up with a lie that was so profound, so consequential that it drove a cleavage through American society. Americans might not have cared all that much whether he told the truth about his businesses or his policies; many wrote that off as so much bluster. But now they were forced to take sides on the biggest lie of all, his insistence that he won the 2020 election.

No evidence ever emerged suggesting fraud or wrongdoing on a level that would have changed the outcome in a single state, much less flip the multiple states that would have been required to tilt the Electoral College in his direction. But Mr. Trump said it happened and he said it so often and so intensely that elected officials, political candidates, civic leaders, party figures and even everyday citizens were compelled to declare: Did they believe in the system or did they believe Mr. Trump?

That schism has come to define the country in the past four years and is at the heart of the election wrapping up on Tuesday. The outcome may be reasonably read as a verdict on Mr. Trump’s version of reality. If he wins, he will take it as vindication and has promised to use the next four years seeking “retribution” against those who refused to go along with his false claim. If he loses, his opponents will see it as validation of democracy even as they brace for what will surely be another claim of a stolen election and many Americans may not trust the result.

The question many analysts debate is whether Mr. Trump knows that his account of the 2020 outcome is false or has convinced himself because he simply cannot accept the idea of defeat. Investigations and interviews have made clear that Mr. Trump was told repeatedly that the fraud claims were untrue — not just by his opponents but by his own advisers and appointees. Yet he kept broadcasting them anyway.

Among the people who told Mr. Trump in the weeks after the election that he had lost or that there was no evidence of widespread fraud were his own vice president, Mike Pence; his attorney general, William P. Barr; Mr. Barr’s acting replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen; multiple other Justice Department officials; Department of Homeland Security officials; Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and his colleague Eric Herschmann; and Kellyanne Conway, his onetime counselor.

Bill Stepien, the president’s own campaign manager, told him on election night he should not claim victory and later said there was little chance he could still win. Matt Morgan and Alex Cannon, both lawyers for the campaign, told Mr. Pence or his staff that there was not enough evidence of wrongdoing that would change the results. Republican governors and other state officials told him the same. And two firms hired by Mr. Trump’s own campaign to find election fraud came back empty-handed.

Mr. Trump refused to respect any of their evaluations and said he knew the election was stolen because of his own observations. “You know who I listen to?” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last year. “Myself. I saw what happened.”

But even Mr. Trump may not be listening to Mr. Trump quite as much. On a few occasions in recent months, he has acknowledged that he “lost by a whisker,” only to quickly retreat and say, no, he did not. Was that the mask finally slipping? “I did that sarcastically,” he explained during his debate with Ms. Harris.

Whether he truly believes he won four years ago or not, he has persuaded many Americans. A full 33 percent of registered voters, including 66 percent of Trump supporters, agree with his false claims that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win in 2020, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll last month.

Creating Stories

The former president’s campaign in 2024 has once again pushed the boundaries of truth. He has once again distorted and twisted and even invented facts to suit the narrative he has sought to convey.

The most memorable was his claim that illegal Haitian migrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” never mind that the Haitians there are in the country legally, and both town officials and the Republican governor debunked the claims.

Beyond providing endless fodder for comedians and social media users, the incident offered an important insight into truth-telling in the Trump era. After Mr. Trump endured much mockery without backing down, his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, said that it did not matter whether the tale was actually true or not because it was perfectly acceptable “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

That was not the only story Mr. Trump created when it came to illegal immigration. He has oversimplified and magnified data to inaccurately suggest that Ms. Harris has “lost” 325,000 migrant children, many of them supposedly dead or trafficked, while misleadingly accusing her and Mr. Biden of setting loose 13,000 migrant murderers. Moreover, Mr. Trump repeatedly asserts that migrant criminals “are conquering areas of our country” as if they were an occupying army, despite denials from local and state officials.

Some of the most striking falsehoods of late were Mr. Trump’s unfounded assertions about the federal response to Hurricane Helene. Among other things, he said that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia could not reach Mr. Biden when in fact the two had already spoken. He also claimed that the administration was not helping Republican areas when in fact Republican officials on the ground praised the federal response.

And he said that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants,” which was not true. Even weeks later, when these claims have been disproved, Mr. Trump still repeats them at rallies and public appearances.

Some of his statements have been head-spinning whoppers, like the claim that F.B.I. agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida were prepared to kill him, that hydrogen cars just explode and that Ms. Harris only recently “became a Black person.”

He repeatedly says, untruthfully, that Democratic abortion rights supporters favor killing babies after birth and are so extreme on climate change that “they don’t want windows” on buildings and “they don’t want cows” in the fields.

He ascribes sentiments to his opponents that are more like his own, such as asserting that Ms. Harris has portrayed “everyone who isn’t voting for her as an evil and even subhuman person.” Actually, it was Mr. Trump who called liberals who oppose him “vermin” and said some migrants were “not people” and were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

His rigor on statistics remains as lacking as ever. On Friday, he called the latest monthly employment statistics “the worst jobs report in the history of our country” when in fact it was simply the worst jobs report since the Trump administration, not even counting the pandemic.

Some of his claims may simply be mistakes or bad numbers. But the sheer volume is breathtaking. A Times analysis of a typical Trump rally and a typical Harris rally found 64 false or misleading statements in his compared with six in hers.

Some of his statements are drawn from right-wing media without any evident effort to confirm them. Lately, Mr. Trump has flatly asserted that Ms. Harris lied about working at McDonald’s one summer during college without providing any evidence.

And he continues to boast that his own successes are greater than anyone’s while any setbacks are the fault of conspirators. During a rally on Thursday, he even claimed that he could win the bluest of blue states in an honest contest. “If God came down just for one day to be the vote counter, I would win in California,” he said. Mr. Trump lost California by 4.3 million votes in 2016 and five million votes in 2020. Even divine intervention would not have changed that.

Alternative Reality

Later that night, Mr. Trump went onstage in Arizona for that interview where he repeated claims about the 2020 election and inflation. He was questioned by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who in an excerpt from a new documentary released a few hours earlier described once being “physically mauled” by an unseen demon while sleeping.

During their conversation, Mr. Trump made a variety of over-the-top claims about immigration and stated that Democrats were practically forcing people to have gender transition surgery. “If you just say, ‘Well, I’m thinking about it,’ they throw you onto an operating table,” he said.

He again falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq invasion (“I said don’t go in”). He accused his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, of wanting “to go to war with Russia” over a downed American drone when he meant Iran. He boasted that “I killed Nord Stream 2,” a Russian energy pipeline that he sanctioned but did not kill. And he asserted that he had been “exonerated fully” in the Russia election investigation even though the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III explicitly said his report “does not exonerate him.”

Mr. Trump described an elaborate alternate reality about the bipartisan congressional committee that investigated his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, including his well-worn and flatly untrue claim that it got rid of all of the evidence it collected because it discovered it was wrong to blame Mr. Trump for the attack and was embarrassed.

“Everything’s been destroyed,” he said.

In fact, the evidence is still available online.

Linda Qiu and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting from Washington.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

Categories Character, Elections, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Trump Says RFK Jr. Will Oversee Public Health

By dianeravitch

November 2, 2024 //

Now here is another Trump promise that should keep us up at night: He has said that RFK Jr. will have a large role in his administration, overseeing the appointees in the areas that interest him: public health and food.

Melody Schreiber writes in The New Republic:

In June 2019, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited Samoa with his anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, meeting with local anti-vaxxers and government officials at a time when the country’s measles vaccine was under attack. Prominent anti-vax voices, including CHD, blamed the vaccine for two infant deaths the prior year, even after the true reason was discovered. Amid the swirling misinformation, vaccine rates plummeted from 60–70 percent to 31 percent.

A few months after RFK Jr.’s visit, measles swept through the freshly vulnerable Pacific island nation, killing 83 Samoans—mostly children. Kennedy doubled down, writing to the Samoan prime minister to questionwhether a “defective vaccine” was responsible for the outbreak. Even two years later, in 2021, Kennedy called a Samoan anti-vaxxer who had reportedly discouraged people from getting vaccinated during the 2019 crisis a “medical freedom hero.” Kennedy has also insisted for years, against all available scientific evidence, that vaccines cause autism, blaming them for a “holocaust” in the United States.

This week, Kennedy told supporters that if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins, he has promised Kennedy “control of the public health agencies,” including the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnik later denied that Kennedy would have a job with HHS—although, at the same time, he said Kennedy had convinced him to pull vaccines from the market. Trump himself, at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, seemed to lend credence to the idea of Kennedy leading on health: “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines,” Trump said. Trump also said on a three-hour podcast episode with Joe Rogan last week that he’s told Kennedy, “Focus on health, focus—you can do whatever you want.” It’s not clear whether such a promise would have been made in exchange for Kennedy’s political endorsement, which would be illegal.

But if Kennedy were to be put in charge of HHS, he would be leading the executive department that oversees the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. In the meantime, Kennedy is an honorary co-chair on the Trump transition team, and claims to be “deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run FDA, NIH, and CDC.”

In his own speech at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy took aim at Democrats, saying they were once “the party that wanted to protect public health, and women’s sports”—a bizarre pairing that highlights his recent pivot to attacking trans athletes and gender-affirming care. Kennedy, who ran as a Democratic and then independent presidential candidate before throwing his support behind Trump, is also spreading misinformation on chronic health issues such as obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, and autism; on Tuesday, for example, he said diabetes could be “cured with good food.” In his Sunday speech, Kennedy characterized Trump as a president who would “protect our children … and women’s sports,” as well as “end the corruption at the federal agencies—at FDA, at NIH, at CDC, and at the CIA”—a constellation of bodies rarely joined together, which he implied are conducting surveillance upon and acting against the interests of the American people.

“This unbridled assault on science and scientists, it’s highly destabilizing for the country,” Baylor College of Medicine dean Peter Hotez, author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, told me earlier this year, a few months after Kennedy announced his run. But it’s not just Kennedy—Trump and other Republicans in Congress are also leading the charge to undermine expertise and further erode public trust in the government, he said. “This is what authoritarianism is all about,” Hotez said, lamenting “the collateral damage that it’s going to do to our democracy” and pointing to the ways Stalin portrayed scientists as public enemies during the Great Purge.

Hotez sees the false claims about vaccines causing autism, which first started gaining momentum in the late 1990s, as phase one of the assault on science. When that was thoroughly debunked, anti-science activists began aligning themselves “around the banner of health freedom, medical freedom,” getting a major boost with the Covid-19 pandemic, Hotez said. “Now we’re seeing the next phase, which is not only targeting the science but targeting the scientists and portraying them as public enemies. That is both scary and worrisome.”

The past five years have seen a “substantial” drop of trust in public health and scientists, especially among Republicans, Robert Blendon, Harvard University professor emeritus of political analysis and health policy, told me. At the same time, the anti-vaccine movement—which previously was not tied to politics—swung wildly to the right. “Republicans have become incredibly distrustful of vaccines,” Blendon said. “The Republican Party after the [start of] Covid has become very anti–public health.” They lashed out against what they perceived to be government overreach, which made them receptive to questions about the safety and effectiveness of the Covid vaccines—and, soon, other vaccines as well, Blendon said. “This led to a tipping point with this enormous resentment among particularly Republican audiences that the government went way too far.”

Trump’s own short-lived support for vaccines during the measles outbreak in 2019 and Covid in 2020 seems to have been a blip; he has spouted anti-vax views since at least 2007. Although Operation Warp Speed produced highly effective Covid vaccines in record time, one of the Trump administration’s only accomplishments of the pandemic, “the Republicans don’t want to claim it,” Trump said in September. At least 17 times, Trump has pledged to defund schools mandating vaccines. While his campaign says this vow applies to Covid vaccines only, Trump doesn’t make any distinctions in his speeches, opening up the possibility of all childhood vaccines being banned—though it’s not clear how he would carry out this plan. (No states requireCovid vaccines for school attendance.)

Categories Elections, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Public Education Has Been Ignored in the Campaign, But It Is on the Ballot

By dianeravitch

November 2, 2024 //

It’s hard to notice something that is invisible, but it is indeed obvious that there has been no discussion of education in the Presidential campaign.

It’s not as if education is unimportant: education is a path to a better life and to a better society. It is the road to progress.

The differences between the two candidates are like night and day. Trump supports dismantling public education and giving out vouchers. Harris is committed to funding schools and universities.

Project 2025 displays Trump’s goals: to eliminate the Department of Education, to turn the programs it funds (Title 1, IDEA for students with disabilities) and turn them into unrestricted block grants to states, which allows states to siphon off their funding for other purposes. At the same time that the Trump apparat wants to kill the Ed Department, it wants (contradictorily) to impose mandates on schools to stop the teaching of so-called critical race theory, to censor books, and to impose rightwing ideology on the nation’s schools.

It’s too bad that the future of education never came up in either of the high-profile debates. The American people should know that Kamala Harris wants to strengthen America’s schools, colleges, and universities, and that Donald Trump wants to destroy them.

Randi Weingarten wrote an excellent article in Newsweek about the plans of each candidate.

If you can’t open it, try this link.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Ohio: Vote YES on Issue 1 to De-politicize Gerrymandering

By dianeravitch

November 2, 2024 //

Jeanne Melvin is a public education activist in Ohio. She urges Ohio voters to vote YES on issue 1. This would put a bipartisan commission in charge of redistricting instead of the Legislature. It would block the Legislature from designing their own districts to assure a supermajority. Ohio’s Republican supermajority has passed numerous bills to privatize school funding, including a universal voucher bill that enables all parents to get public funding to subsidize their private school tuition. Vouchers. Most students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private schools. Like all universal vouchers programs, Ohio’s is welfare for the wealthy.

Melvin writes:

Public Education is on the ballot across our nation.

Americans must choose between two presidential candidates whose policies, strategies, and experience relating to issues in public education are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Voters in 10 states will decide 11 statewide education-related ballot measures– the most since 2018.

Ohio voters have the opportunity to elect state school board candidates and pro-public education candidates, along with approving or renewing tax levies or bond issues from over 100 school districts in the Buckeye State.

This November, Ohio voters will also decide if politicians should be left in charge of drawing our voting maps, or if the politicians should be removed from the process in favor of a citizens commission.

According to Dr. Christina Collins, former State School Board member and current director of Honesty for Ohio Education, the lack of competitive districts brings “extreme” education policies like attempting to regulate curriculums to avoid what legislators call “critical race theory” from getting into schools, the anti-LGBTQ law keeping transgender students from playing sports in the teams that align with their gender identity, and active bills that would threaten funding and dictate the kind of materials allowed in school libraries.

As previously stated, Ohio’s gerrymandered GOP majority has brought forward some extreme education bills designed to benefit private schools and to defund and diminish public school districts. Public education advocates have responded with facts, logic, and common sense, but lawmakers and lobbyists have chosen not to listen.

Why would they listen? Gerrymandering has guaranteed a GOP supermajority, and Senate President Matt Huffman said the quiet part out loud: “We can kind of do what we want.”

Ohioans can VOTE YES on Issue 1 on or before November 5,a bipartisan effort to remove the politicians from legislative redistricting in favor of a 15-member citizens commission made up of five Republicans, five Democrats, and five independents.

For education, this would mean that instead of Ohio lawmakers focusing on culture wars and EdChoice school voucher expansion, they could focus on more important issues, such as fair school funding to help our local public school districts.

If you don’t like legislative-district maps that have been deliberately drawn to ensure that one political party has a veto-proof supermajority, VOTE YES on Issue 1.

If you don’t like unreasonable education policies, VOTE YES on Issue 1.

If you don’t like paying for other peoples’ private school choices, VOTE YES on Issue 1.

If you want to keep public tax dollars in public schools, VOTE YES on Issue 1.

That’s why I voted YES on Issue 1!

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Ohio, Privatization, Republicans

Sarah Longwell: An Appeal to Republicans

By dianeravitch

November 1, 2024 //

Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, and host of “The Focus Group” podcast.

In this article, she appeals to fellow Republicans to stand up and speak out about Trump. I hope her article is read by George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Lamar Alexander. They know how dangerous Trump is. They know he is destroying the Republican Party.

She writes:

I HAVE A QUESTION FOR FORMER Trump administration officials, Republican electeds (and former electeds), business leaders, and conservative writers and pundits who recognize Donald Trump for the threat he is. Actually, it’s a question for anyone on the right who knows what Trump’s re-election could mean for the country, for liberal democracy, and for the world—and, who, in the face of this threat, has decided to maintain either a posture of silence or both-sides-are-bad neutrality.

My question is this:

How are you going to feel if Trump wins on Tuesday by an extremely narrow margin?

I suspect you’ll spend the next four years holding your breath.

Because if Donald Trump does a tenth of what he has promised—pulls the United States out of NATO, abandons Ukraine and sides with Vladimir Putin, puts RFK Jr. and Elon Musk in charge of serious parts of the American government, rounds up 15 million undocumented immigrants into camps and deports them, seeks political retribution against those who opposed his candidacy—I suspect you’ll come to regret your silence when you could have made a difference.

I can see you holding up your hands to show us how clean they are. Saying, “But I said Donald Trump was a threat! I said I wouldn’t vote for him! What more do you want from me?”

And I get that. I do. The problem is that this moment demands more from all of us.

It demands clarity. And it demands your leadership.

Over the course of your career you’ve asked people to trust you. Either by voting for you, or listening to your advice, or relying on your judgment and analysis.

So why is it suddenly a bridge too far for you to tell everyone what you really believe?

I understand that this moment is hard. Trump could win. Even if he doesn’t win, coming off the sidelines could alienate you from career networks, business opportunities, or even friends and family.

But being a leader means standing up and telling the truth even when it’s hard, or costly, or scary. Especially when it’s hard, or costly, or scary.

It’s still not too late. Every day, more people are speaking out—people with reputations, and reservations, but whose consciences won’t let them sit this one out.

You shouldn’t sit this one out, either. You should not decide, after a career in leadership, that this time you’d rather just be a spectator.

Maybe you think that adding your voice wouldn’t matter to voters. After all, so few things seem to move the needle. Well, I’m here to tell you that it matters. It all matters. Every little bit. You do not know who’s listening as the moment approaches to cast their vote. You do not know who you might persuade at the eleventh hour. And you do not know what the margin will be. If this election is decided by 9,000 votes in Pennsylvania—which is absolutely a real thing that could happen—then every single input could be the tipping point.

We’re almost there. Stay with us! The Bulwark is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I can’t see the future. I don’t know if your endorsement would be the difference maker. Just like I don’t know what price you would pay for speaking out more clearly.

What I do know is this: If you abdicate the obligations of leadership in this moment and the thing you fear comes to pass, you will regret having stood down when the country needed you to stand up. You will regret it for all of your days.

MAYBE YOU ARE A RETIRED FOUR-STAR GENERAL, or cabinet secretary, or someone who took a job as a political appointee in the Trump administration and saw things that shocked your conscience. And maybe you’ve told reporters about what you saw, or written about it in a book. That’s not enough because books have a relatively small reach, and your words are mediated through paper. What’s needed is for you to look voters in the eye and give them a direct warning about what a second Trump term might mean. Especially now that you won’t be on the inside to try to protect the country from him.

Maybe you’re a former Republican president or presidential nominee. Maybe you were once the leader of the party Donald Trump has destroyed. I am sorry, but the unpleasant fact is that you cannot preserve your influence for some future GOP. This is actually the last moment in which you have a chance to influence it. Your party, every bit as much as your country, needs you. Right now.

Maybe you’ve led venerable conservative publications. You’ve acted as a thought leader. Someone shaping our political culture. But today you want to keep your hands clean by writing in Edmund Burke on your ballot or some other nonsense protest candidate—as a sign that youkept your purity. I understand this impulse. But it’s wrong. You know that if yours was the single deciding vote, you’d vote for Harris. So just say so. This isn’t an academic exercise, and it’s not about you.

Maybe you’re a billionaire to whom this country has given everything. Your wealth insulates you from the consequences of the worst-case Trump scenarios. And yet, you see Trump’s transactional nature, his willingness to provide favor if you provide obedience, and instead of standing up to Trump, you cower. This might seem like wisdom, but it’s not actual safety. There will be more demands. The only way to actually protect your business is for the rule of law to be victorious and democracy to be stable.

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FOR MONTHS, YOUR COUNTRYMEN have been waiting for you to tell them the full, unvarnished truth about the danger you believe Donald Trump presents. To tell everyday Americans the same words you say in green rooms, at dinners, and in off-the-record conversations. You haven’t gotten there yet, but you still can. Before you make your final decision, think about Liz Cheney’s warning that some day Donald Trump will be gone, but the choices we make today will be with us forever.

Choose honor. It’s the choice you’ve made again and again in your professional lives. It would be a sin to stop choosing it because of a mountebank like Donald Trump.

I want to tell you about some Republicans who are already putting themselves on the line for democracy. They don’t have security details, or staff, or budgets. They’re just regular people who voted for Trump before, but refuse to support him again. They joined Republican Voters Against Trump to get the word out to their friends and neighbors. A few of them have lost jobs. Some of them have lost family. All of them have lost friends. None of them regrets it.

They’ve put their faces on billboards across the country. They’ve appeared in millions of dollars’ worth of paid ads running in their own communities. They’ve taken part in text campaigns, spoken to the media, knocked on doors, and traveled to swing states in the hopes of making a difference.

If Kyle from Alabama, or Jackie from Michigan, or Robert from Pennsylvania, or Jim from Wyomingcan speak out, then so can the generals, politicians, and thought leaders.

THE REASON I BELIEVE THAT every little bit counts is because conservative-leaning voters say that to me all the time.

In Republican focus groups, one thing I hear again and again is that voters are open to hearing from the leaders who served under Trump, who were in the room with him. The messenger is as important as the message, and these people are ready to believe the words of a lifelong Republican or flag officer much more readily than they’ll believe a Democrat telling them the same things.

So if you’re one of the small number of people who can make a difference in this moment, the question is: What are you going to do?

Courage is contagious. And I have one last piece of advice: No one ever regrets doing the right thing.

You won’t regret it, either. So stand up and join us. It’s our last chance.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Harris, Kamala, Republicans, Trump

Ted Cruz Turns to Anti-Trans Issue to Save His Senate Seat

By dianeravitch

November 1, 2024 //

The Texas Monthly writes that Texas has all kinds of pressing needs and problems. But in the closing days of the campaign, Ted Cruz has fastened in a single issue in his battle for re-election: Hate transgender people. They threaten our daughters.

It’s not clear exactly how large the Texas trans population is, but it can’t be large enough to threaten the women of Texas or even the girls.

Cruz, with Colin Allred coming close in the home stretch, concluded that care and hate were his best messages to his constituents.

Michael Hardy of The Texas Monthly wrote:

Texans face a multitude of challenges. The border crisis. Incompetent utility regulators. Rising home and rent costs. Rural hospital closures. So naturally, as campaigning for the U.S. Senate enters its final week, incumbent Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, Dallas-area Congressman Colin Allred, are locked in a fierce battle over . . . transgender rights. Earlier this month, Cruz and an allied political action committee launched a barrage of ominous television advertisements accusing Allred of supporting “boys in girls’ sports,” “drag shows on American military bases,” “taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries” for military service members, and the use of “taxpayer funds to sterilize minors.” The ads are part of a nationwide push by Republican candidates, who have spent more than $65 million on antitrans ads since August.

“I remember reading the polls saying that the race was within two or three points and wondering what Cruz was going to do about it,” said veteran Texan lobbyist Bill Miller, who has worked with Democratic and Republican candidates. “And then I was watching TV and Cruz’s transgender ad came on. As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s the issue they’re going to beat Allred with.’ ”

In 2023, Allred voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a Republican-backed bill that would have barred athletes assigned male at birth from participating in girls’ sports. The bill passed in the House of Representatives on a party line vote but was not taken up in the U.S. Senate. Earlier this year, Allred signed a letter opposing Republican efforts to ban drag shows on military bases and restrict gender-affirming care for transgender service members and their families. In a written statement to Texas Monthly, Allred campaign manager Paige Hutchinson said “Colin believes we must stand united against all forms of prejudice and discrimination.”

Cruz campaign spokespeople did not respond to an interview request to discuss Cruz’s strategy. The senator’s campaign website boasts that “Ted is proud to stand alongside all female athletes and will continue to fight for their right to play sports on their own terms, without fear of being forced to compete against biological men.”

At first glance, the senator’s going all in on transphobia for his closing argument might seem puzzling, given that he’s spent most of his campaign stressing immigration and jobs. A recent poll conducted by the University of Texas at Austin asked voters to name their top political issue. A plurality (18 percent) chose the economy, which was followed by immigration, inflation, democracy, and abortion. Pollster Jim Henson told me that hardly anyone cited transgender issues as their foremost concern. A national Gallup polltaken in September asked voters to evaluate the importance of 22 campaign issues. “Transgender rights” came in dead last.

So why the last-minute pivot to transgender issues? “It’s an easy way for a Republican to paint their opponent as an extremist,” Henson said. “Even if it’s not a particularly salient issue, it’s very effective in signaling to moderates that your opponent is out of the mainstream.” Last year, a UT-Austin poll found that 63 percent of Texans—including 33 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and 89 percent of Republicans—agreed that the sex listed on a person’s original birth certificate should be the only way to define gender, with just 25 percent disagreeing. (Twelve percent of respondents said they weren’t sure.) “I suspect the Cruz campaign’s internal polling is showing what the external polling shows,” Henson said, “which is that for a Republican candidate, this is a pretty good issue.”

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Texas

Trump calls Kamala and Her Team “Scum” and “Garbage”

By dianeravitch

October 31, 2024 //

Bring out the fainting couches! Biden made a comment that offended the Republican Party! Biden says he was calling the comedian who insulted Puerto Ricans “garbage,” they say he meant that every Trump supporter was “garbage.” Republicans did not accept his prompt clarification. It all depended on an apostrophe (supporters vs. supporter’s).

But the Lincoln Project helpfully assembled the many times that Trump has called other people “garbage.” He calls Kamala “low IQ,” “garbage,” and “scum.” He has also called her and other Democrats “radical left, Socialists, Marxists, fascists, and Communists.

Watch this Lincoln Project video!

We expect him to scrape the gutter for his insults.

Categories Bigotry, Extremism, Fraud, Harris, Kamala, Trump

Washington Post: Trump’s Vulgarity Drags the Nation’s Politics into the Gutter

By dianeravitch

October 30, 2024 //

I did not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post despite the fact that I was outraged by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s censorship of the editorial board, which intended to endorse Kamala Harris.

I expected that the response of the editorial board and the opinion writ were a would double down on their contempt for the insurrectionist, lying former president.

As this editorial today shows, the editorial board will not be silenced. In this editorial, it draws a straight line between democracy and civility, a character trait that Trump knows not.

Unless Bezos replaces the editorial board with MAGA types, the WaPo editorials will dole out contempt for Trump every day that remains of the campaign. The last paragraph, in particular, is a gem.

Think of it as slow-walking its endorsement of Kamala.

Democracy depends on many things: institutions, traditions, public legitimacy and, yes, a culture of civility. The peaceful transfer of power requires people to have at least a minimum degree of trust in their fellow citizens — that the stakes are not existential. In this regard, former president Donald Trump showed, in his closing argument at a raucous rally at Madison Square Garden, that whether he wins or loses on Nov. 5, he has already done severe damage to American politics by coarsening and corroding public discourse.

Seeking to limit the fallout after a rally speaker referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt lamented on Monday on Fox News: “It’s sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

Here are some of the “truths” from the other “phenomenal” speakers, none of which the Trump campaign disavowed: Businessman Grant Cardone likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” he said. David Rem, billed as a childhood friend of Mr. Trump’s, called Ms. Harris the “Antichrist” and “devil” while waving a cross onstage.

Radio host Sid Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton a son of a b—- and dropped an f-bomb as he said that all Democrats are “degenerates … lowlifes.” Rudy Giuliani, disbarred over his misconduct as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s effort to block the 2020 election results, said Ms. Harris is “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Donald Trump Jr. claimed Democrats want to “replace” Americans with immigrants.

The stand-up comedian who made that nasty crack about Puerto Rico, Tony Hinchcliffe, made other tasteless ethnic jokes about African Americans, Latinos and Jews. The Bulwark reported that Trump campaign staffers reviewed a script of Mr. Hinchcliffe’s routine in advance and asked him to excise only a line that referred to Ms. Harris as a “c—.”

Even so, a pro-Trump group funded by Elon Musk, who also spoke at Sunday’s rally, posted on X, the platform he owns, and later deleted a video that referred to Ms. Harris as the c-word. After some innuendo, the video’s narrator clarifies that they mean she’s a communist.

To be sure, Mr. Trump has been destabilizing civil discourse since even before he started his 2016 campaign: It was in 2011 that he started voicing support for the false notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Yet in the final weeks of this election, he seems to be making the normalization of incivility one of his campaign’s de facto objectives.

He opened a rally this month in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, by commenting on the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. Mr. Trump told the crowd that night that his wife, Melania, has urged him to use less foul language and that evangelical leader Franklin Graham wrote him a letter pleading the same case. His punchline is that he cannot help himself because Ms. Harris has been a “s—” vice president and everything she touches turns to “s—.” The crowd started chanting “s—” in Latrobe. A top-selling shirt outside his rallies describes Ms. Harris as a “hoe.”

True, Mr. Trump’s campaign is not only a cause of this society’s spreading incivility but a consequence of it. Moreover, norms regarding profanity follow a cultural dynamic separate from politics, and the culture is more permissive about such things than it once was. This may explain why Ms. Harris has also occasionally been using four-letter words on the stump. She swore up a storm in a Rolling Stone interview and said being vice president has made her more profane. Her running mate, Tim Walz, called Mr. Musk “a dips—” during a rally last week. Not a great example. But Mr. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and events like it are in a class by themselves, not least in their threatening tone.

When he finally took the stage on Sunday, the former president declared without irony: “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.” Then, over 80 minutes, he promised to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented immigrants, called Democrats “the enemy within” and the mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” described the United States as “an occupied country,” and predicted Nov. 5 will bring “Liberation Day.” Even without a vulgarity, it was the most offensive language of all.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Trump: The Undisputed King of Scandals: A Comprehensive Guide

‘When You’re a Star’

Avoiding Taxes

Pursuit and Punishment

‘The Real Verdict’

The New York Times Endorses Kamala Harris

New York Times: Donald Trump, Nonstop Liar

Antagonism to Truth

Facts That Are Not

‘Lost by a Whisker’

Creating Stories

Alternative Reality

Trump Says RFK Jr. Will Oversee Public Health

Public Education Has Been Ignored in the Campaign, But It Is on the Ballot

Ohio: Vote YES on Issue 1 to De-politicize Gerrymandering

Sarah Longwell: An Appeal to Republicans

Ted Cruz Turns to Anti-Trans Issue to Save His Senate Seat

Trump calls Kamala and Her Team “Scum” and “Garbage”

Washington Post: Trump’s Vulgarity Drags the Nation’s Politics into the Gutter

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‘When You’re a Star’

Avoiding Taxes

Pursuit and Punishment

‘The Real Verdict’

Antagonism to Truth

Facts That Are Not

‘Lost by a Whisker’

Creating Stories

Alternative Reality

Search All Posts

Previous posts

Recent posts

Blog Topics

Top posts

Follow blog via email

Follow blog via RSS reader

Blog Stats