CNN reviewed the claims made at the Republican Conventuon and pointed out lies. Too bad CNN didn’t do this during the Presidential debate, but inexplicably both sides agreed to that condition.
Archives for category: Republicans
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, brings us up to date with the latest shenanigans of Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters. Recently, he mandated that the Bible be taught in the state’s classrooms. Now Walters has appointed a list of rightwing luminaries to rewrite the state’s social studies curriculum. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Walters proves that it can.
John Thompson writes:
KOSU’s Beth Wallace reports that the Executive Review Committee assembled by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters features prominent conservatives, including Dennis Prager of PragerU, David Barton of the Christian Nationalist organization, Wallbuilders, and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.” She then reminds readers that, “The Heritage Foundation is the think tank behind Project 2025, a movement that proposes to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.”
More information was provided to NBC’s Tyler Kingkade and Marissa Parra during their interview with Walters about his plans for transforming school curriculums. They reported that “Oklahoma educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.” Ryan Walters said that those teachers would “face the same consequences as one who refuses to teach about the Civil War. The punishment could include revocation of their teaching license.”
Moreover, Walters expressed confidence “that his order will survive legal challenges because of the Justices then-President Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court.” And if Trump is elected, “it will help us move the ball forward, even more so than this.”
Until recently, Dennis Prager was the best known rightwinger selected for Walters’ committee. The Hill’s Lexi Lonas explained that Prager’s so-called education group “focused on teaching conservative principles. The conservative platform has been made its way into multiple states, with videos such as ‘Was the Civil War About Slavery?’ and ‘The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party.’”
National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty referred to another committee member, David Barton, in a very different way, as “the most important Evangelist You’ve Never Heard Of.” Hagerty explained that Barton collected 100,000 documents and, “He says they prove that the Founding Fathers were deeply religious men who built America on Christian ideas — something you never learn in school.” Barton argued that the Constitution isn’t a secular document because it “is laced with biblical quotations.”
However, NPR “looked up every citation Barton said was from the Bible, but not one of them checked out.” The Constitution had “no mention of God or religion except to prohibit a religious test for office.” Then Hagerty quoted, “John Fea, chairman of the history department at evangelical Messiah College,” who said, “Barton is peddling a distorted history that appeals to conservative believers.”
Hagerty also fact-checked Barton’s claim that President Thomas Jefferson “who owned nearly 200 slaves — was a civil rights visionary,” and he had plans that “would’ve ended slavery really early on,” and “they would have gone much more toward civil rights.” Barton said that Virginia law “prohibited Jefferson from freeing his slaves during his lifetime.” When that statement was shown to be false, Barton said that, “Jefferson could not afford to free his slaves.”
So, David Barton and Dennis Prager clearly aren’t qualified to recommend history curriculums, but the most dangerous member of the committee is Kevin Roberts, who is a driving force in the Christian Nationalist Project 2025, which is a detailed game plan for a Trump administration for dismantling the federal government’s administrative institutions. It seems obvious that his goal for the Oklahoma Executive Review Committee is to dismantle public education.
The Washington Post reports that Roberts recently said of Project 2025, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts told the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that “he views Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’” Garcia-Navarro said that Project 2025 was:
A transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power.
Roberts has praised Hungary’s authoritarian, Christian Nationalist Viktor Orban, adding that “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” He’s also said that he wants to “destroy the administrative state,” and defeat “the secret Communist movement in America.”
And since he is serving on Walters’ committee for rewriting history, it is noteworthy that Roberts said that Joe McCarthy “largely got things right.”
When asked if he believes that President Biden won the 2020 election, Roberts replied, “No.”
And that brings us to the reason why Rex Huppke writes in the Oklahoman:
Project 2025 is a governing blueprint designed by a collection of former Trump administration officials who seem to have looked at Hitler’s path to power in 1930s Germany and thought, ‘Cool!’
Huppke refers to Project 2025, as “a painstakingly detailed and hellishly authoritarian plan for a second Trump presidency.” He notes that “according to The Heritage Foundation itself,” Trump “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations.”
I would just add that the leader of Project 2025, and his allies, clearly see Ryan Walters’ Executive Review Committee as one part of their plan.
Heather Cox Richardson points out that the Republican Party has been captured by its most extreme members, who hope to roll back the laws to enshrine the power of white men. At the same time that they vote against Biden’s legislation, they take credit for what it does for their states. She watched Biden’s rally in Detroit and was impressed, as was I, by his slashing critique of Trump and his vision for the future.
She writes:
Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI) said yesterday that if Trump wins reelection, the U.S. should work its way back to 1960, before “the angry feminist movement…took the purpose out of the man’s life.” Grothman said that President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty was actually a “war on marriage,” in a communist attempt to hand control of children over to the government.
Grothman was waxing nostalgic for a fantasy past when laws and society discriminated against women, who could not get credit cards in their own name until 1974—meaning that, among other things, they could not build credit scores to borrow money on their own—and who were forced into dependence on men. The 1960 date Grothman chose was notable in another way, too: it was before the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act with which Congress tried to make the racial equality promised in the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment and the voting rights promised in the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment become real.
At stake in Grothman’s erasure of the last sixty years is the equality of women and minorities to the white men who previously exercised virtually complete control of American society. That equality translates into a struggle over the nature of the American government. Since the 1870s, during the reconstruction of the American government after the Civil War, white reactionaries insisted that opening the vote to anyone but white men would result in socialism.
Their argument was that poor voters—by which they meant Black men—would elect leaders who would promise them roads and schools and hospitals, and so on. Those public benefits could be paid for only with tax levies, and since white men held most of the property in the country in those days, they insisted such benefits amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to undeserving Black Americans, even though poor white people would benefit from those public works as much as or more than Black people did.
This argument resurfaced after World War II as an argument against Black and Brown voting and, in the 1970s, against the electoral power of “women’s libbers,” that is, women who called for the federal government to protect the rights of women equally to those of men. Beginning in 1980, when Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan called for rolling back the government regulations and social safety net that underpinned society, a gap appeared in voting behavior. Women, especially Black women, tended to back the Democrats, while men moved toward Republican candidates. Increasingly, Republican leaders used racist and sexist tropes to undermine the active government whose business regulations they hated.
For the radical extremists who have taken over the Republican Party, getting rid of the modern government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights is now gospel as they try to replace it with Christian nationalism. But that active government remains popular.
That popularity was reflected today as Republicans continued to take credit for laws passed by Democrats to maintain or expand an active government. In Tennessee, Republican Governor Bill Lee boasted that the state had “secured historic funding to modernize Memphis infrastructure with the single-largest transportation investment in state history.” All the Republicans in the Tennessee delegation opposed the measure, leaving Democratic representative Steve Cohen to provide the state’s only yes vote. Indeed, Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn posted on social media that “Americans do not want [Biden’s] ‘socialist Build Back Broke’ plan.”
In Alabama, Senator Tommy Tuberville boasted about a bridge project funded by a $550 million Department of Transportation grant, writing: “Since I took office, I have been working to secure funding for the Mobile bridge and get this project underway.” But as Representative Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, pointed out, Tuberville voted against the bill that provided the money.
Like Governor Lee and Senator Blackburn, Tuberville knows such government policies are enormously popular and so takes credit for them, even while voting against them.
Union workers also historically have supported a government that regulates business and provides a social safety net and infrastructure investment, but those workers turned to Reagan in 1980 and have tended to make their home in the Republican Party ever since. Now they appear to be shifting back.
Today the president of the 600,000-member International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers urged Biden to stay in the race, writing: “For the first time in decades, we have an Administration that has leveled the playing field for workers trying to organize. The IAM is one of the fastest growing unions in the labor movement because we have a President who goes toe to toe with corporations on behalf of working people.”
Union president Brian Bryant noted that Biden “saved hundreds of thousands of our members’ jobs” and thanked him for “strengthen[ing] the Buy American regulations that have helped to create millions of jobs, including nearly 800,000 in manufacturing.” Bryant also credited Biden with helping to save 83 pension plans that covered more than a million workers and retirees. Bryant noted that “[i]n the IAM, we value seniority.”
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain told Netroots Nation today that “humanity is at stake” in the 2024 election. “This has everything to do with our shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our wages. Having health care. Our retirement security, and our time…. Those are the four core issues that unite the entire working-class people in a fight against the billionaire class as we saw in our contract campaign last fall when 75% of Americans supported us in that fight, for those reasons.”
“The dream and the scheme of a man like Donald Trump is that the vast majority of working-class people, who literally make our country run, will remain divided. That’s how they win. They want us to not unite in a common cause to take on the billionaire class…. They divide us by race. They divide us by gender, by who we love. They divide us by what language we speak or where we were born….”
Today, in Detroit, in a barnburner of a speech, President Joe Biden pitched his plan for the first 100 days of a second term with a Democratic Congress. He promised to restore Roe v. Wade, eliminate medical debt, raise the minimum wage, protect workers’ right to organize, ban assault weapons, and to “keep leading the world” on clean energy and addressing climate change. He also vowed to sign into law the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would end voter suppression, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect voter rights and election systems, as well as end partisan gerrymandering.
Biden forcefully contrasted his own record with Trump’s. He reminded the audience that he was the first president to walk a picket line, because “when labor does well, everybody does well.” “When Trump comes here to tell you how great he is for the auto industry, remember this: when Trump was president we lost 86,000 jobs in unions. I created 275,000 auto jobs in America. In fact, what’s been true in the auto industry is true all over America: since I became president, we created nearly 16 million new jobs nationwide, 390,000 of those jobs right here in Michigan. We’ve created 800,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide, including 24,000 in Michigan.”
Biden hammered Trump, saying “no more free passes.” He reminded that audience that Trump is a convicted criminal and that a judge had found him liable for sexual abuse. Biden quoted the judge: “Mr. Trump raped her.” Biden reminded the audience that Trump lost his license to do business in New York state and is still facing criminal charges for retaining classified documents and trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, as well as charges in Georgia for election interference. Biden said: “It’s time for us to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”
Today the European Union charged Trump donor Elon Musk’s social media company X, formerly Twitter, for failing to curb disinformation and illegal hate speech.
Also today, a judge ruled that Trump ally Rudy Giuliani is not entitled to bankruptcy protection. The judge cited Giuliani’s “lack of financial transparency” and noted that Giuliani “has engaged in self-dealing.” This decision means that election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, as well as other creditors, are free to collect what they can of the $150 million he owes them. A lawyer for the two said: “We’re pleased the Court saw through Mr. Giuliani’s games and put a stop to his abuse of the bankruptcy proceeding. We will move forward as quickly as possible to begin enforcing our judgment against him.”
Meanwhile, Trump appeared to be trying to recapture attention by teasing an unveiling of his vice presidential nominee at next week’s Republican National Convention. He compared the selection process to “a highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice,” the reality TV show in which he appeared before he became president, and which centered around firing people.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote today about two concurrent stories: on one hand, Democrats are locked in an internecine battle about their candidate; on the other, the Trump-dominated Supreme Court is shredding the balance of powers and crippling the administrative authority of the federal government.
She writes:
In this morning’s Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz observed that “much of political journalism is divorced from policy and the substance of politics.” It’s all about a horse race, he wrote, while complex questions, competing public interests, and the history of an issue get distilled to “whether it’s good or bad politically.”
Today, he noted, that horse-race coverage means that “[a]n election about whether the United States will continue its two and half century long experiment in representative democracy, where a convicted felon is running to return to the office he tried to seize through extralegal means, where the specter of a new form of fascism looms on the horizon is suddenly consumed by a political death watch for the only person at present standing between democracy and another Trump term in the White House.”
Yesterday, President Joe Biden tried to quell that political death watch by sending a letter to congressional Democrats stating that “despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.” He noted that 14 million voters in the Democratic primary chose him, rather than a challenger, adding, “It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned…. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?”
In an apparent attempt to get beyond the horse-race politics Kurtz identified and to make clear the substance of this election, Biden explained: “We have an historic record of success to run on.” He cited his administration’s creation of more than 15 million jobs, leading to historic unemployment lows; revitalization of American manufacturing; expansion of affordable health care; rebuilding the country’s infrastructure; lowering the cost of prescription drugs; providing student debt relief; and making a historic investment in combating climate change.
That vision, Biden wrote, “soundly beats” that of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, who are “siding with the wealthy and big corporations,” while the Democrats are “siding with the working people of America.” Trump and his people want another $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich, he noted, and they plan to cut Social Security and Medicare, as well as end the ability of the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to bring drug prices into line with prices in other countries. “We are the ones lowering costs for families,” he wrote, “from health care to prescription drugs to student debt to housing. We are the ones protecting Social Security and Medicare. Everything they’re proposing raises costs for most Americans—except their tax cuts which will go to the rich.”
He went on to note that the Democrats are “protecting the freedoms of Americans,” while Trump’s people are “taking them away.” He pointed to the right-wing attacks on abortion rights, IVF, contraception, and gay marriage. Biden reiterated that he will sign a law making Roe v. Wade the law of the land if the nation elects a Democratic House and Senate. Finally, he pointed out that Democrats are protecting the rule of law and democracy, while Trump is actively working to destroy both. Trump, he wrote, has proven himself “unfit ever to hold the office of President.” “My fellow Democrats,” Biden wrote, “we have the record, the vision, and the fundamental commitment to America’s freedoms and our Democracy to win.”
Hours later, the New York Times joined the tabloid New York Post in noting that visitor logs showed that Dr. Kevin Cannard, an expert on Parkinson’s disease, visited the White House eight times between July 2023 and March 2024. After pressing White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for information beyond her statements that Biden is not being, and has not been, treated for Parkinson’s and that he sees a neurologist as part of his annual physical exams, a CBS News White House reporter accused Jean-Pierre of deliberately withholding information. Jean-Pierre pointed out that “personal attacks” are not appropriate from the press corps and that the press team does its best to give the information they have. She said she took offense at the reporter’s tone.
Last night, White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor sent to Jean-Pierre a letter clarifying that the White House Medical Unit serves thousands of patients, many of whom are military personnel with neurological issues related to their service. Cannard was one of the team of specialists that annually examine the president. O’Connor’s office released the results of that examination in a letter dated February 28, he pointed out. It said, “An extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring in that there were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis, nor are there any signs of cervical myelopathy.” The president does have “peripheral neuropathy in both feet. No motor weakness was detected. He exhibits no tremor, either at rest or with activity.”
As media attention remains focused on Biden, a Supreme Court decision from last week that upends the modern American state and another that overturns the central concept of our democracy have disappeared from public discussion. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court overruled the longstanding legal precedent establishing that courts should defer to a government agency’s reasonable interpretation of a law. Instead, it said, judges themselves will decide on the legality of an agency’s actions.
In Public Notice, Lisa Needham noted that right-wing judges have already blocked Biden administration rules that protect overtime pay for workers, prohibit noncompete clauses for truckers, and prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. As right-wing plaintiffs launch suits challenging rules they dislike, she notes, we should expect to see many more federal judges “deploying junk science and personal opinions to get to their preferred conclusion while ignoring the expertise of agency employees.”
Loper Bright was a slashing blow at the federal regulations that make up the framework of today’s government, but it paled in comparison to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that stunning decision, the six right-wing justices—three of whom Trump himself appointed—declared that a president is immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his “official duties.”
This astonishing decision overturned the bedrock principle of the United States of America: that no one is above the law. But to be clear, the court did not give this power to Biden. Because it is not clear what official acts are—since no one has ever before made this distinction—it claimed for itself the right to decide what illegal behaviors are official acts and which are not. Since at least one of the justices (Samuel Alito) has flown flags demonstrating support for overthrowing Biden’s government and putting Trump back into office, and the wife of another (Clarence Thomas) worked with those trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, it seems likely that their decisions will reinforce Trump’s immunity alone.
An extraordinary effort to use the courts to set up a Trump dictatorship appears largely to have been hidden under the horse race.
And now that this scaffolding is in place, Trump’s team has begun to try to make him look more moderate than he is. On July 5, Trump claimed not to know anything about the extremist Project 2025, which calls for an authoritarian leader to impose Christian nationalism on the United States, despite the fact that his own appointees wrote it, his own political action committee advertised it as his plan, and his name appears in it 312 times.
Agenda 47, the official Trump campaign website, has offered more information about how he will wield the absolute power he now claims. As Judd Legum pointed out today in Popular Information, a key author of Project 2025, Christian nationalist Russell Vought, has advanced a plan for killing any aspects of government his people dislike, and Trump has adopted that plan, vowing to cancel agencies or laws he dislikes by refusing to spend money Congress appropriates. This is known as “impoundment,” and Congress made it illegal in 1974 after President Richard Nixon used it to try to bend the government to his will. Trump says the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional because it interferes with the power of the presidency. He promised to use it to “crush the Deep State.” First on the chopping block will be the Department of Education.
The effort to make Trump sound more moderate continued yesterday, when the Republican National Committee released the party’s 2024 platform, in which it tried to fudge the issue of abortion while leaving language that supported a national abortion ban. The New York Timespublished an article reinforcing the idea that Trump is moderating, reporting: “Following Trump’s Lead, Republicans Adopt Platform That Softens Stance on Abortion.”
In the midst of this political coverage, a key story has been largely overlooked. Not only does the stock market continue to set record highs, but also, as Jim Tankersley of the New York Timesreported, the so-called left-behind counties, distressed after the collapse of manufacturing in them, have “added jobs and new businesses at their fastest pace since Bill Clinton was president.” “That turnaround,” he notes, “has shocked experts.” More than 1,000 counties, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest, that grew at less than half the national rate in terms of both people and income from 2000 to 2016, have surged. From 2016 to 2019—mostly during Trump’s administration—those rural left-behind counties, which make up about 18% of the U.S. population, added 10,000 jobs. In 2023 alone, they added 104,000.
Tankersley notes that Trump overwhelmingly won the support of voters in these counties, but their circumstances did not improve during his administration. Under Biden, they added jobs five times faster than they did under Trump. Still, voters there appear to continue to back Trump.
Now that’s a story. Are they backing Trump because they care more about culture wars than their economic security? Or are they ill informed?
Meanwhile, Republicans in the House today passed the Refrigerator Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act, prohibiting the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing energy efficiency standards for residential refrigerators, freezers, and dishwashers.
After noting that the average monthly cost of operating a dishwasher is two to four dollars, and establishing that the people pushing this measure had no idea how much a dishwasher costs, Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) said: “This bill… Congress at its worst. A bunch of people who haven’t unloaded a dishwasher ever telling the American people what dishwashers they should or should not have.”
It’s one of the great ironies of our time that Trump—a completely irreligious man—is serving the interests of the most evangelical Christians. Ban abortion? Done. End LGBT rights? Certainly. Ban contraception? Soon. Crush unions? Soon. Eliminate any climate regulations? On the way. Defund public schools? Yes. Send public money to religious schools with no accountability? Yes.
Robert Reich describes Project 2025 and demonstrates that—no matter how much he pretends otherwise—it is Trump’s blueprint for the long-sought goals of far-right extremists.
Reich writes:
“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.
This is another in a long line of Trump lies…
Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.
Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s re-elected.
Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.
There’s an old saying, “Don’t change horses in midstream.” But loud voices in the media are calling on the Democratic Party to oust their President only four months before the election.
Stuart Stevens disagrees.
Stevens worked as a strategist in many Republican state and national campaigns. In 2012, he was the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign. In 2016, he joined the Never Trump movement and was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
He recently wrote a scathing critique in The Atlantic of the Democrats who want to push President Biden out of the race because of his terrible debate performance on June 27.
He wrote:
Millions vote for a candidate, propelling him to victory. Before the voters’ decision is formally certified, people who don’t like the outcome demand that the election results be thrown out and a different candidate selected in a closed process. That was America on January 6, 2021. And now, some in the Democratic Party want to follow a similar script.
The Democratic Party held 57 primaries and caucuses; voters in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories had their say, as did Democrats abroad. Joe Biden won 87 percent of the total vote. He lost one contest, in American Samoa, to the little-known Jason Palmer. Suddenly, there are cries in the Democratic Party that, as goes a single territorial caucus, so should the nation.
I worked in five presidential campaigns for Republicans and helped elect Republican senators and governors in more than half of the country. For decades, I made ads attacking the Democratic Party. But in all those years, I never saw anything as ridiculous as the push, in the aftermath of last week’s debate, to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. For many in the party, the event raised genuine concerns about the incumbent’s fitness for a new term. But a president’s record makes a better basis for judgment than a 90-minute broadcast does. Biden has a capable vice president, should he truly become unable to serve. The standard for passing over Democratic voters’ preferred nominee should be extraordinarily high—and has not been met.
The fundamental danger of Donald Trump is that he’s an autocrat who refuses to accept the will of the voters. So the proper response is to throw out millions of votes, dump the overwhelming choice, and replace him with someone selected by a handful of insiders? What will the message be: “Our usurper is better than your usurper”?
What is it about the Democratic Party that engenders this kind of self-doubt and fear? At a moment when Democrats’ instinct should mirror what Biden declared in a rally the day after the debate—“When you are knocked down, you get back up”—some in the party are seized by the urge to run, not fight. Think about how this would look: Hey, I guess Donald Trump is right; our guy isn’t fit to be president. We’ll give it another shot. Trust us, we’ll get it right eventually.
Madness.
After decades of losing the image wars as Republicans positioned themselves as the “party of strength,” Democrats are on the verge of a historic self-redefinition. When Biden traveled to Ukraine, he became the first president to visit an allied war zone not controlled by U.S. troops. A Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, defied China and visited Taiwan. A Republican Party that was once defined by Ronald Reagan demanding “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is now the beating heart of the pro–Vladimir Putin movement, led by a former president elected with the Russian dictator’s help…
Given a huge opportunity to project more self-assurance than Trump’s Republicans, these Dump Biden Democrats would ensure that their party once again slips back into the quicksand of doubt and second-guessing. No major American political party has thrown a presidential nominee overboard, so leave it up to some geniuses in the Democratic Party to hatch a scheme to make history.
What makes them believe that replacing Biden increases the chances of defeating Trump? How many times have candidates with impressive state-level records crashed and burned in a presidential race? The last time a party held on to the White House without the benefits of incumbency was 36 years ago. Recent polls show none of the fantasy replacement Democrats beating Trump. There are polls showing Biden defeating Trump. Say what you will about the Biden campaign’s organization, but four years ago it defeated an incumbent president—no easy thing.
Clearly, something was off inside the Biden campaign that allowed this debate debacle to occur, starting with the choice even to debate Trump. The Biden team easily could have insisted, as a precondition for a debate, that Trump first publicly acknowledge that he is running against a legally elected president who won a fair vote. Also, why did Biden look like an undertaker had done his makeup? But those breakdowns do not negate the substantial evidence that the Biden campaign knows how to defeat Trump. Do Democrats really want to throw that aside and reconstruct a campaign from scratch months before an existential election?
Presidential campaigns are billion-dollar businesses open to customers for a limited time. Right now, Democrats have a huge advantage over a GOP apparatus gutted by Trump in a power play that installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair of the Republican National Committee. What are the Dump Biden Democrats thinking? That Trump’s mob-boss takeover of his party gave them an unfair edge, so it’s only sporting for them to emulate him?
Trump is the candidate of chaos, uncertainty, and erratic behavior. Democrats can win a race against him by offering Americans the opposite: steady, calm, and confident leadership. Joe Biden has provided that. His record is arguably the most impressive of any first-term president since World War II. My advice to Democrats: Run on that record; don’t run from one bad debate. Show a little swagger, not timidity. Forget all this Dump Biden nonsense and seize the day. Now is the worst time to flinch. Your country needs strength. You can crush Donald Trump, but only if you fight.
Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein are lawyers and close observers of national politics. In this article, they urge us to take Trump’s threats seriously. They are not just campaign rhetoric or empty promises. He means what he says. As Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Most of the mainstream media (MSNBC is an exception) attempts to normalize Trump, as though he’s just another in a long line of conservative politicians. He is not. He is an autocrat who longs to have total control and to use that control to get vengeance for his enemies (no “loyal opposition” for him).
The first term was a warning. Trump tried in some cases to pick good people, but they didn’t last long. He won’t make the same mistake. He will demand loyalty, total loyalty. Anyone he appoints will have to agree that the election of 2020 was rigged and stolen.
He says he will take bold steps to reverse the progressive gains of the past 90 years, which he will attribute to “communists, socialists, fascists vermin, and scum”
Lithwick and Ornstein write at Slate about The dangers posed by Trump:
Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.
Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.
He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.
The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless….
We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do. We worry that every time we say “the system held” it implies that “holding” equals “winning” as opposed to barely scraping by. We worry that while Trump has armies of surrogates out there arguing that Trump is an all-powerful God proxy, the rule of law has no surrogates out there arguing for anything because nobody ever came to a rally for a Rule 11 motion. The Biden administration has largely taken the position that the felony conviction is irrelevant because it’s proof that the status quo isn’t in danger. But the reality is that Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs by mainstream journalists and commentators. What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.
“The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.
Please open the link and read the article in full.
Several articles were published calling attention to TV ads run by Republican groups that are phony. The purpose of these ads is to make Biden appear feeble and incompetent.
This article in The Washington Post showed one example. Biden was watching a parachute drop alongside other world leaders at the recent G-7 meeting. The Daily Beast shows the edited video and points out that it got lots of coverage in Murdoch-owned media.
The video shows Biden wandering away from the other leaders, apparently dazed, talking to himself. The leader of Italy tapped his shoulder and he returned to the group.
The actual video showed Biden turning away from the other dignitaries to converse with a paratrooper who was disentangling from his parachute.
But the clipped video did not include the paratrooper, making it appear that he was aimlessly talking to himself.
He was engaged with another human being, asking questions, complimenting him, typical of Biden.
This story is deeply worrisome, frightening, alarming. An avid fan of Trump initiated a recall of the elections clerk, Cindy Elgan, of Esmeralda County and two other county officials. 82% of the county’s 620 voters went for Trump. The county uses Dominion Voting machines.
The angry Trump supporter, Mary Jane Zakas, listens to rightwing media exclusively. She is certain that the election was rigged, even though Trump won more than 82% in the county. She believes the Dominion machines were programmed to steal votes. She accuses Elgan of rigging the vote. She has traversed the county collecting signatures of registered voters to recall Elgan.
Elgan is baffled. She is a Republican. She voted for Trump. She knows almost every one of the 620 voters in the sparsely setttled county. But Trump supporters think she’s part of the deep state.
They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China. They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada’s voter rolls. They blamed “undercover activists” for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs. They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to “flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.” They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand.
And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too — the most unlikely scapegoat of all. She had served as the clerk without controversy for two decades as an elected Republican, and she flew a flag at her own home that read: “Trump 2024 — Take America Back.” But lately some local Republicans had begun referring to her as “Luciferinda” or as the “clerk of the deep state cabal.” They accused her of being paid off by Dominion and skimming votes away from Trump, and even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.
When Zakas brought in a recall petition, Elgan saw the names of friends, people who knew her well but now are convinced the election was stolen from Trump, and she let it happen. The more Elgan defended the accuracy of the vote, the more Zakas was convinced that Elgan was part of the Deep State.
She [Zakas] listened to a self-proclaimed cybersecurity expert from Colorado named Mark Cook, who claimed that voting machines could be hacked with a cellphone. She heard Jim Marchant, then the Republican nominee for Nevada’s secretary of state, say that Nevada’s election officials had been “installed by a deep state cabal.” She heard local Republican leaders say Dominion machines had stolen votes, even though Fox News had agreed to pay Dominion nearly $800 million to settle a lawsuit for spreading the same lies. And most of all she continued to listen to Trump as his election denialism intensified. “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” he said during a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire last year.
Zakas came up short on the numbers who signed the recall petition. She will appeal to the courts.
Heather Cox Richardson relies on her experience and knowledge of history to debunk the demented ideas of the quacks and madmen planning for Trump’s next term in office. They believe that every change in the U.S. Constitution was part of a left wing plot, rather than a natural evolution to adapt to societal change. Please open the link to read her analysis in full.
She writes:
Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States.
When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.
Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.
Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.
There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign.
While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship.
The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing….
Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence.
A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence.
And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.
In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”
In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said.
In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it.
On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.
Diane Ravitch's blog 