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Dan Rather: Trump’s Electoral Weakness Is Showing

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2024 //
4

Dan Rather analyzed Trump’s primary wins and spots signs that he is vulnerable because his well-defined base is limited. Due to his extremism, he is not able to have a big tent that would attract independents and even dissident Democrats. Even more telling is that Trump is not unifying the Republican Party. As soon as Trump won the South Carolina, he proclaimed that he had never seen the Republican Party more united. As Rather explains, that’s not really true.

He writes:

NBC’s “Meet The Press” this morning characterized Donald Trump’s South Carolina primary victory as “delivering a crushing blow to [Nikki] Haley in her home state on Saturday, trouncing her by 20 points with nearly 60 percent of the vote. The former president dominated nearly every key group.”

While he did indeed win handily, a deep dive into the numbers provides some interesting context. 

The part of the story missing from many news reports is that Trump is slipping from his 2020 numbers. His support is strongest among his MAGA base, which pollsters put at no more than 33% of the electorate. Clearly, he will need more than MAGA to win the White House again. 

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary with 96.2% of the vote. Trump, who is essentially an incumbent up against a novice at running for national office, could not muster even 60% of his party’s vote. Exit polls from Saturday night should have GOP leaders nervous. 

The makeup of South Carolina’s Republican voters does not mirror the country. They are heavily weighted with hard-right “conservatives,” older, white, male, evangelical election deniers. Trump won overwhelmingly among them. But Haley won among independents, moderates, and those who care about foreign policy. And that’s the crux of it.

To win the presidency again, Trump will need to bring all Republicans into the tent. Gallop estimates that 41% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Then it gets really tough. He has to convince a large number of independents and Democrats to vote for him. But how?

  • Not by favoring a 16-week national abortion ban 
  • Not by threatening to pull out of NATO
  • Not by defunding Ukraine and supporting Putin’s invasion
  • Not by promising “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his political opponents 
  • Not by refusing to accept the results of elections he’s lost
  • Not by promising to be a dictator on day one of his second term

Not by saying things like: “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me.”

Trump is winning primaries while underperforming. Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Obama and current host of “Pod Save America,” writes: “You cannot win the White House with the coalition that Trump is getting in these primaries. He must expand his coalition, persuade people who aren’t already on board and get beyond the Big Lie-believing MAGA base. Through three primary contests, Trump has gained no ground.”

Polls also indicate a majority of voters in swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he’s convicted of a crime. That could happen as soon as April or May. 

As Axios writes: “If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.” Fortunately, it is not. America is a rich tapestry of heritages, races, and creeds. Immigrants have long been one of our strengths.

But the likely GOP nominee continues to feed fears about immigration using language tailored to his MAGA base. “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country,” Trump said Saturday at CPAC, a conference of extreme-right Trump supporters.

“No, Mr. Trump, they’re not,” is the answer of many Americans. There is strong public opinion that what is tearing our country apart is the divisiveness and rancor that comes from Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media machine.

The mainstream press may begin to offer more of this context and perspective as we get deeper into the presidential campaign. One of the things Steady was created to do was offer reasoned context and perspective to news stories. This writing is an example.

Trump remains a real and present threat to win the presidency again in November. But that is not assured. Not nearly, as a deep analysis of early primary results indicates.

There is still a long way to go and many rivers to cross for both major candidates.

Categories Biden, Bigotry, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Lies, Republicans, Scandals, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: About That Georgia Election Fraud…

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2024 //
43

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, which was founded by Republican Never Trumpers. It is one of the most engaging websites I read. This post is newsworthy, since so many Trumpers were citing Dinesh D’Souza’s book about election fraud.

Last writes:

Last August we talked about True the Vote, the group whose “data” on election fraud in Georgia constituted a large part of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules.

Let me refresh your memory:

True the Vote is a Texas-based group which filed a complaint with the Georgia State Election Board alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Georgia State Election Board (the SEB) investigated this complaint and found no fraud. So it asked True the Vote to share its evidence. True the Vote declined and instead said—whoopsie!—they’d like to just take the complaint back.

The SEB explained that that’s not how it works with sworn statements and subpoenaed the extensive evidence that True the Vote claimed in its complaint to have.1 The whole thing devolved into litigation that bore a striking resemblance to George Costanza’s attempt to convince his dead fiancée’s parents that he owned a house in the Hamptons.

Anyway, this week the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke the news that True the Vote finally gave up and told the judge in the case that they don’t have any of the so-called evidence, or data, or names, or identities—or any of those other fancy legal whosywhatsits:

True the Vote said in a recent court filing that it doesn’t know the identity of its own anonymous source who told a story of a “ballot trafficking” scheme allegedly organized by a network of unnamed groups paying $10 per ballot delivered.

True the Vote also told the court it doesn’t have documents about illegal ballot collection, the name of its purported informant or confidentiality agreements it previously said existed.

You can read True the Vote’s filing here. It’s wild. But the cajones on these guys! In a non-court-filed public statement, True the Vote went on to say that while they don’t have any of this stuff they said they had, they know that the Georgia Election Board could come up with it if they really wanted:

“The [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] consequently has ready access to the underlying data, and could, we believe, reconstruct it, but it declines to do that,” True the Vote said in a statement. “At this point, it would be redundant and cost-prohibitive for True the Vote to do so on its own. It is in that sense that there is nothing more for True the Vote to provide that it has not already provided to the GBI.”

Translation: The real evidence of voter fraud isn’t in a computer. It’s in our hearts.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Georgia, Lies

Navalny’s Mother Goes to Arctic to Claim Her Son’s Body and Is Rejected

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2024 //
3

Alexei Navalny’s mother went to the penal colony in the Arctic to claim her son’s body and was lied to at every turn. The story was reported by Emma Burrows at ABC news.

For the mother of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died at age 47in an Arctic penal colony, the journey to recover her son’s body Saturday was an odyssey with no clear destination.

In the end, she didn’t get what she came for.

Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, received an official note Saturday stating that the politician had died in prison at 2:17 p.m. local time a day earlier, Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokesperson said Saturday.

Together with members of Navalny’s legal team, Lyudmila traveled to the town of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets region, some 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

It was there that Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said Friday that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and fell unconscious. When Lyudmila arrived less than 24 hours later, officials said that her son had died from “sudden death syndrome,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. He did not elaborate.

Navalny’s death removed the Russian opposition’s most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that will give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power.

Prison employees told Navalny’s mother Saturday that they did not have her son’s body. They said it had been taken to the nearby city of Salekhard, a little over an hour’s drive away, as part of a probe into his death.

When Lyudmila arrived in the town with one of Navalny’s lawyers, however, they found that the morgue was closed, Navalny’s team wrote on their Telegram channel. When the lawyer called the morgue, they were told that the politician’s body was not there either.

This time, Lyudmila headed directly to Salekhard’s Investigative Committee office. A small group of journalists watched as Lyudmila walked toward the office, dressed in a thick black coat as temperatures hovered close to minus 25 degrees centigrade (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit). Occasionally, she took the arm of one of those walking next to her as the group made their way along paths edged with thick piles of snow.

Here, she was told that the cause of her son’s death had, in fact, not yet been established, said Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh. Officials told Lyudmila that the politician’s relatives would not receive his body until they had completed additional examinations.

Initially, it seemed as if Lyudmila might head to another morgue. Instead, she returned to her hotel in the town of Labytnangi, another 30-minute drive. Navalny’s team, meanwhile, said they were still no closer to finding out where the politician’s body was being held.

“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, after Lyudmila’s visit to the Investigative Committee office. The spokesperson also said that Navalny’s team “demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately.”

Navalny, who had been serving a 19-year prison term since January 2021 after being convicted three times for extremism, has spoken several times about whether he might die while in custody.

After the last verdict, which Navalny believed to be politically motivated, he said that he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Lies

North Carolina: Vouchers for the Rich! Propaganda Wins!

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2024 //
6

Thomas Mills, a blogger in North Carolina, describes the hoax of “vouchers for all” in his state. Vouchers began as a way to offer new opportunity to poor kids. But since the General Assembly removed income caps on voucher families, vouchers have become a subsidy for rich kids who never attended public schools. The Republicans who passed universal vouchers knowingly and cynically turned them into a subsidy for the wealthy, a reverse Robin Hood scheme.

Mills writes:

This week, the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program, also known as the voucher scheme, began accepting applications. House Speaker Tim Moore tweeted, “The expanded NC Opportunity Scholarship Program is now open for applications! In fact, the website was so inundated that it crashed at 12:15 am, shortly after going live. Thanks to the NC General Assembly, ALL families of K-12 students are now eligible to apply.”

When Moore says “ALL families,” he’s referring to wealthy families since the legislature eliminated the income cap for the vouchers. The site crashed because North Carolina has so many people already in private schools who now are eligible for state subsidized education. Rich folks who send their children to private schools are about to get a windfall while poor schools are going to lose funding. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.

The whole program is a scam, the epitome of a bait-and-switch. Republicans pushed through their voucher program as a way to level the playing field, offering poor families a way to send their children to private schools when public schools weren’t working for them. Now, they’re saying that families that don’t send their children to public schools shouldn’t have to pay for them. They have dropped any pretense of helping struggling families and moved straight to subsidizing rich people. According to Republicans, rich people have no community obligations.

Let’s be clear. The name “Opportunity Scholarship” is pure propaganda. There are two types of scholarships, need-based and merit-based. Giving vouchers to rich people just because they decide not to send their kids to public schools is a tax break, not a scholarship. And it’s a tax break designed for wealthy people at the expense of poor people.

Republicans are working hard to damage public schools. They fundamentally don’t believe in the responsibility of the state to provide a sound, basic education. They have cut per pupil spending, let teacher pay lag, and reduced support staff in schools. They’ve tried to dictate curriculum to indoctrinate students in a conservative philosophy, all while claiming public schools are brainwashing our kids with left wing ideas. They’ve left us with demoralized teachers and overworked staff and our children are paying the price.

Now, the state Supreme Court is about to get into the act, too. Thirty years ago, a group of students from North Carolina’s poor counties sued the state, claiming that their school systems lacked the funding to provide the quality of education that the state constitution demands. They won their suit and, since that time, the courts have reviewed funding to ensure that poor counties got the money they deserve.

However, with a new court dominated by far-right Republicans, the decision may be overturned. Chief Justice Paul Newby and his band of conservatives justices have not been shy about throwing out precedent, giving new meaning to an activist court. They will decide if the most recent allocation determined by the court will be rescinded. The GOP legislature contends that the court has no business telling the lawmakers how to spend tax dollars.

If the Republicans win, they will have essentially reinterpreted the constitution. Article 9, Section 2 of the constitution reads, “The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.” Traditionally, the court has interpreted the “uniform system” of “equal opportunities” to mean the quality of education should be as good in poor counties as it is in rich ones. The GOP would render the clause either aspirational or maybe just a suggestion, despite the word “shall.”

The assault on public education in North Carolina is unprecedented and radical. Republicans aren’t just making cuts around the edges. They are changing the way we view public schools and our collective responsibilities. They are shifting resources and increasing the burden of financial responsibility on the poor while reducing the funds from the rich, just like they did with our tax system.

Ironically, the people who suffer the most are the people who make up the GOP base. Rural counties will watch their tax dollars go to wealthy families in urban and suburban areas while their public schools will suffer from increasing lack of revenue. Of course, Republican donors will almost certainly benefit. As they say, partisanship is a helluva drug.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Lies, North Carolina, Privatization, Propaganda, Vouchers

Robert Hubbell: It’s Always About Trump

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2024 //
54

I remember the sense of relief that I experienced after the 2020 election was over: I won’t have to think about Trump anymore, worry about what he might do or say. Days go by, maybe weeks, when I don’t think about Biden. That’s called normal life.

But he’s back, demanding to fill up our heads with ME, ME, ME. Last week, a jury decided that Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her. Throughout the trial, he defamed her in front of the jury, assailed the judge, the prosecutors, the Carroll lawyers. He acted like the petulant child that he is, and the only question for the jury was: how much of a fine will it take to make him shut up? So far it’s working; he hasn’t defamed her since the verdict. She is prepared to sue him again if he resumes his attacks on her.

Sometime this week, the judge in another New York trial will decide how much Trump should pay the state for engaging in fraudulent business practices. The state has asked for a penalty of $370 million, along with barring the Trump Organization from doing business in New York. Trump’s lawyers chose not to have a jury trial. The decision is in the hands of the judge. What does Trump do? He berated the judge again and again, as well as the state’s attorney general, the judge’s staff, and the judicial system. In what world is it smart to insult the man who will make the decision?

Last night, PBS ran a two-and-a-half hour special called Democracy on Trial about Trump and the Insurrection. it’s worth watching. What comes through clearly is that his White House Counsel and everyone else in his circle of advisors told him he lost the election. Rudy Guiliani told him to keep fighting, as did conspiracy theorists Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn. The most fascinating piece of information in the documentary to me is that he complained that “The Apprentice” didn’t win an Emmy because the decision was rigged; he predicted before the 2016 election that the election was rigged. He never loses because the race is always rigged.

His vanity knows no bounds.

Charles Koch is keeping Nikki Haley’s campaign alive, but Republicans in South Carolina are hurrying to get aboard the Trump steamroller.

This is not normal. I remember the respectable and upright Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mitt Romney was the last gasp of that party. Where are they now? Will the Republican Party go the way of the Know-Nothings?

Robert Hubbell writes today:

Remember that time—during Trump’s presidency—when every proposed action by the US government was evaluated by a single criterion: Does the action advance Trump’s personal interests? Although Trump is not president, House Republicans are giving us a reminder of what it was like when Trump was president. The text of the proposed immigration bill has yet to be released, but House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly told his GOP colleagues on Tuesday that the bill is “dead on arrival” in the House. Why? Because Trump told him so—in order to advance Trump’s election prospects.

The situation is even more maddening than it appears at first blush. The House will likely vote on vague impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas. One of the grounds for impeachment is that Mayorkas has lost “operational control of the border”—a fact that is unassailably true because Texas is blocking federal access to portions of the border!

There are other stories that deserve attention, but immigration is the lead issue. We should know by Friday if Trump will kill an immigration compromise that has been months in the making and whether the House will impeach a Cabinet secretary for the first time in 150 years.

Categories Democracy, Lies, Trump

Oklahoma: Leader of “Libs of TikTok” Named as Library Advisor by State Education Department

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2024 //
5

Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, decided that he needed some out-of-state assistance in banning books from school libraries, so he appointed Chaya Raichik, who runs a far-right social media group, to help him.

NBC News reported:

A far-right influencer who was accused of instigating bomb threats against a school library in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last year has been named an adviser to a state library committee, the head of the state Education Department announced Tuesday.

Chaya Raichik, who runs the incendiary Libs of TikTok social media accounts and is not an Oklahoma resident, was appointed to the Education Department’s Library Media Advisory Committee.

“Chaya is on the front lines showing the world exactly what the radical left is all about — lowering standards, porn in schools, and pushing woke indoctrination on our kids,” state Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a statement. “Because of her work, families across the country know just what is going on in schools around the country.”

Raichik’s Libs of TikTok accounts have more than 3 million combined followers on X and Instagram. Its content — which is often laced with bigoted rhetoric — generally singles out LGBTQ people, drag queens and their employers, and it criticizes them for promoting diversity, inclusion and equity efforts.

In addition to last year’s scare in Tulsa, posts by the account have preceded several bomb threats to schools, libraries and hospitalsacross the country in recent years.

Raichik did not respond to a set of questions. The Libs of TikTok account replied to a request for comment on X with a compilation of drawings seemingly from young adult novels that depict sexual encounters and asked: “Do you think this is appropriate for kids in school?”

Walters said in a statement, “Chaya Raichik and I have developed a strong working relationship to rid schools of liberal, woke values.”

In August, Union Public Schools, a school district that covers parts of Tulsa and some of its suburbs, said it received bomb threats for six consecutive days. The threats came after Raichik shared a critical video about one of its school librarians.

The video Raichik posted showed a school librarian walking next to a bookshelf, and it was captioned: “POV: teachers in your state are dropping like flies but you are still just not quite finished pushing your woke agenda at the public school.” The video replaced the librarian’s original caption, which read: “My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind — hbu??”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Oklahoma

Jamelle Bouie: If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
55

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best opinion writers at the New York Times. In addition to reading his regular columns, I subscribe to the newsletter he writes, where he shares ideas, tells you what he is reading and what he is cooking.

In this post, he wrote persuasively about why Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and should not be allowed to run for the office he defiled.

Bouie wrote:

Last month the states of Colorado and Maine moved to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In response, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the Colorado case, and he has appealed Maine’s decision.

There is a real question of whether this attempt to protect American democracy — by removing a would-be authoritarian from the ballot — is itself a threat to American democracy. Will proponents and supporters of the 14th Amendment option effectively destroy the village in order to save it?

It may seem obvious, but we should remember that Trump is not an ordinary political figure. And try as some commentators might, there is no amount of smoke one could create — through strained counterfactuals, dire warnings of a slippery slope or outright dismissal of the events that make the Trump of 2024 a figure very different from the Trump of 2020 — that can obscure or occlude this basic fact.

In 2020, President Trump went to the voting public of the United States and asked for another four years in office. By 51 percent to 47 percent, the voting public of the United States said no. More important, Trump lost the Electoral College, 306 to 232, meaning there were enough of those voters in just the right states to deny him a second term.

The people decided. And Trump said, in so many words, that he didn’t care. What followed, according to the final report of the House select committee on Jan. 6, was an effort to overturn the result of the election.

Trump, the committee wrote, “unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.” He “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.” He “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6,” the day Congress was slated to certify the election results, and “instructed them to march to the Capitol” so that they could “‘take back’ their country.’” He even sent a message on Twitter attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, knowing full well that “a violent attack on the Capitol was underway.”

In the face of this violence, Trump “refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.” He did not deploy the National Guard, nor did he “instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Trump sought and actively tried to subvert constitutional government and overturn the results of the presidential election. And what he could not do through the arcane rules and procedures of the Electoral College, he tried to do through the threat of brute force, carried out by an actual mob.

Looked at this way, the case for disqualifying Trump through the 14th Amendment is straightforward. Section 3 states that “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

As the legal scholar Mark A. Graber writes in an amicus brief submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court, “American jurists understood an insurrection against the United States to be an attempt by two or more persons for public reasons to obstruct by force or intimidation the implementation of federal law.” There was also a legal consensus at the time of the amendment’s drafting and ratification that an individual “engaged in insurrection whenever they knowingly incited, assisted or otherwise participated in an insurrection.”

We also know that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not aim or intend to exclude the president of the United States from its terms. In 1870 the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, the former Confederate governor of North Carolina. It strains credulity to think that the same Republicans would have sat silent if the Democratic Party had, in 1872, nominated a former Confederate leader for the presidency.

Under a plain reading of Section 3 — and given the evidence uncovered by the Jan. 6 committee — Trump cannot stand for the presidency of the United States or any other federal office, for that matter.

The real issue with disqualifying Trump is less constitutional than political. Disqualification, goes the argument, would bring American democracy to the breaking point.

In this line of thinking, to deny Americans their choice of presidential candidate would destroy any remaining confidence in the American political system. It would also invite Trump’s allies in the Republican Party to do the same to Democrats, weaponizing Section 3 and disqualifying candidates for any number of reasons. Disqualification would also give far more power to the courts, when the only appropriate venue for the question of Trump is the voting booth.

But these objections rest on a poor foundation. They treat Trump as an ordinary candidate and Jan. 6 as a variation on ordinary politics. But as the House select committee established, Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it were nothing of the sort. And while many Americans still contest the meaning of the attack on the Capitol, many Americans also contested, in the wake of the Civil War, the meaning of secession and rebellion. That those Americans viewed Confederate military and political leaders as heroes did not somehow delegitimize the Republican effort to keep them, as much as possible, out of formal political life.

What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election.

Trump is not simply a candidate who does not believe in the norms, values and institutions we call American democracy — although that is troubling enough. Trump is all that and a former president who used the power of his office to try to overturn constitutional government in the United States.

Is it antidemocratic to disqualify Trump from office and deny him a place on the ballot? Does it violate the spirit of democratic life to deny voters the choice of a onetime officeholder who tried, under threat of violence, to deny them their right to choose? Does it threaten the constitutional order to use the clear text of the Constitution to hold a former constitutional officer accountable for his efforts to overturn that order?

The answer is no, of course not. There is no rule that says democracies must give endless and unlimited grace to those who used the public trust to conspire, for all the world to see, against them. Voters are free to choose a Republican candidate for president; they are free to choose a Republican with Trump’s politics. But if we take the Constitution seriously, then Trump, by dint of his own actions, should be off the board.

Not that he will be. The best odds are that the Supreme Court of the United States will punt the issue of Section 3 in a way that allows Trump to run on every ballot in every state. And while it will be tempting to attribute this outcome to the ideological composition of the court — as well as the fact that Trump appointed three of its nine members — I think it will, if it happens, have as much to do with the zone of exception that exists around the former president.

If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.

Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Yes! The Supreme Court Should Disqualify Trump from Appearing on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
36

I wrote a few days ago that Trump should not be removed from the ballot even though he unequivocally plotted to overturn the election he lost and provoked an insurrection against the orderly transfer of power. I was wrong. For me, it was a close call: I wanted him to lose convincingly at the hands of the voters; I predicted he would lose by 10 million votes in 2024.

But it should not have been a close call. Trump should not be allowed to run again. He violated his oath of office. I was persuaded I was wrong by the many comments by readers on this blog, by reading the new insider books by Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson, and by continuing to read other opinions, like that of Jamelle Bouie, whose columns will follow this one today.

Trump was exactly the kind of office-holder described in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In the lower federal court in Colorado, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021, but concluded that the President of the U.S. was not an “officer” as defined in the amendment. This was a bizarre conclusion, and the Supreme Court of Colorado ruled by a vote of 4-3 that Trump should not be allowed to run for President because he did take an oath to support the Constitution, he served as the highest officer of the nation, and he did engage in an insurrection against the Constitution to which he swore an oath. It’s no more complicated than that.

The Supreme Court will review that decision.

Trump continues to tell the Big Lie. Despite the fact that he lost 60 court decisions, including decisions by judges he appointed, including two decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court; despite the fact that his own Attorney General and his White House Counsel told him he lost, he continues to lie.

Trump continues to praise the insurrectionists. He has promised to pardon all of them who were convicted and sent to prison. He calls them “patriots” even though they defiled the U.S. Capitol, the seat of our government, and threatened the lives of Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence and the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and violently attacked police officers.

The members of Congress escaped the chamber where they were counting the electoral vote only minutes before Trump’s devoted followers broke through the doors. Had they broken through only five minutes sooner, there might have been a bloodbath, a massacre of our elected representatives. Some “patriots”!

Judges should not reach a decision based on fear of Trump’s mob.

Either the Constitution means what it says or it means whatever a politically appointed group of justices decide it says in contravention of the words themselves.

Either “no man is above the law” or only one man—named Donald Trump—is above the law.

Trump betrayed Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. He betrayed his oath of office. He incited, provoked, and engaged in an insurrection against the Constitution and the government that he swore to support.

Donald Trump should be removed from the ballot.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Justice, Lies, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Mary L. Trump: Why Does “Meet the Press” Love MAGA?

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
55

Mary L. Trump is Donald’s niece, the daughter of his older brother. She is the author of the best-selling tell-all about her family and her uncle: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. She wrote this article after watching Elise Stefanik bulldoze Kristen Welner on “Meet the Press.”

Shameful… Today, Elise Stefanik used NBC’s Meet The Press as her MAGA bullhorn, and “journalist” Kristen Welker just let her get away with it. But we now have tools to fight back.Read on. 👇

Become Paying Supporter Now

I could only watch the clips in short bursts, because each was worse than the last… one of the most egregious (and dangerous) displays of journalistic incompetence I’ve ever seen.

Elise Stefanik Called Jan 6 Insurrections… What??

Elise Stefanik, an opportunistic traitor desperately angling to be Donald’s VP pick with every lie she spews, declared those convicted of January 6 crimes to be “hostages”.

”I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” Stefanik stated.

Welker’s response? Crickets. 🦗 No demand for an explanation, e.g. Who is holding them hostage? How is holding people accountable for crimes a hostage situation?

At least Welker could have shown Stefanik this chart from the NY Times:

As former GOP Comms Director Tara Stetmayer (and guest of my latest Deep Dive) put it so eloquently, “No journalist should ever allow any of these MAGAs to call Jan 6th justly-prosecuted thugs, ‘hostages’. What an affront to our rule of law.”

Planning the Next Coup

Welker asked, “Will you certify the results of the 2024 election, no matter what they show?”

Stefanik responded with obfuscation and lies about the 2020 election, before admitting she will NOT certify the election, unless – in her eyes – “it’s constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional.”

Welker pushed back briefly, citing that even two firms hired by Donald said there was NO evidence of election fraud, and Donald’s own officials said it was the most secure election in history. Two points for sanity.

But then Welker allowed Stefanik to negate it all by simply saying, “The American people understand it was not a fair election.” 

And the response from Welker? No follow up. No pushback. Just the classic dreadful tactic used by incompetent journalists… basically, ”Let’s move on.”

No, Ms. Welker. Stefanik just admitted on live television she will attempt another coup after the election if Biden wins – and she will use a string of lies to create her own “facts” to justify her treason. 

Now is NOT the time to move on. Grill Stefanik and other Republicans who continue to lie, obfuscate, and gaslight the American people. Demand evidence. Call out the lies. Force them to disprove officials and independent firms that declared 2020 the most secure election in history. 

Show your audience that the person calling these this traitors “hostages” has zero integrity. Don’t just hand her a fucking bullhorn.

But Kristen Welker will continue to give MAGA the bullhorn.

Here’s why:

Corporate Media vs Substack

Stefanik and right-wing politicians choose to be interviewed by people like Kristen Welker and Chuck Todd for a reason. 

Truth seeking is not high on the priority list for most corporate journalists who see getting clicks as their goal. Corporate media only cares about ratings. 

Insanity sells; negativity sells; and LIES sell. The more viewers these MAGA guests bring, the more ad revenue comes in… enriching both media executives and their advertisers – all at the expense of facts, justice, and American democracy. 

But now, you have an alternative.

The Substack community only serves one person – you. 

From Joyce Vance, to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, to my work here – you have a place where MAGA is called out for their lies – with facts, analysis, and powerful tools that inform your friends & family during a critical election year. 

You can count on me, for one, to do ANYTHING to get out the truth, and thus help get lying traitors like Elise Stefanik and my uncle out of power… no weekends off.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Media, Trump

Study: Trump’s Favorite COVID Remedy Was Deadly

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
62

Politico reports on a new European study of the efficacy of hydroxycholoroquine, a drug recommended to the public by President Trump at the height of the pandemic. Note: Neither he nor his family took that drug. Instead they received FDA-approved vaccinations. .

Politico EU reports:

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.

The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.

That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.

Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.

As President, Trump recommended the drug and said, “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

Categories Health, Lies, Science, Stupid, Trump
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