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Jim Hightower: The GOP Plans to Eliminate Federal Programs to Mitigate Climate Change

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2023 //
6

Jim Hightower, an outspoken liberal voice in Texas, posts a warning about the Republicans’ strategy to wipe out environmental regulations if they regain the presidency in 2025. Despite the climate disasters occurring all over the world and in every corner of this nation, the GOP puts greed over survival.

Hightower writes:

When your political opponents push extremist public policies that would be disastrous for America, should you wring your hands in dread… or applaud?

Consider “Project 2025,” put together by former Trump officials and the Koch brothers’ network of billionaire plutocrats. Their strategy is to win the presidency next year by demonizing all environmental protections and promising to halt all national efforts to cope with the obvious crises of climate change. Their proposals include repealing regulations that curb fossil fuel pollution, terminating our nation’s transition to renewable energy, shutting down all environmental protection agencies, encouraging more oil and gas drilling and use, and promoting the deadly delusion that global warming is not a real problem.

Moreover, they intend to implement Project 2025 in the first 180 days of a right-wing Republican’s presidential term – obviously anticipating that Donald Trump will be that president. “We are not tinkering at the edges,” brags a far-out right-wing group that instigated the scheme, “We are writing a battle plan and we are marshalling our forces.” They’ve already drawn up a list of agencies and policies they’ll begin eliminating on Day One, and they’ve readied a list of some 20,000 right-wing henchmen to put on the federal payroll immediately to enforce their plan.

If this sounds ludicrous, it is. But it’s actually happening, for the Republican Party has decided to be ludicrous. As the director of Project 2025 told the New York Times, “[This is] where the conservative movement sits at this time.”

Maybe, but it damn sure won’t sit well with the American people, who’re presently suffering the hellish ravages of our rapidly overheating climate. Indeed, here’s a great chance for Democrats to demonstrate their bipartisan spirit by doing all they can to publicize the Republicans’ let-it-burn global warming policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Deregulation, Environment, Koch Brothers, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Thom Hartmann’s Debate Prep: Biden’s Accomplishments in Three Years

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
44

The Republican debates, starting tonight, will attack President Biden relentlessly. Thom Hartmann has compiled a list of Biden’s accomplishments to counter the lies and exaggerations of Republican contenders for the nomination.

He writes:

The first Republican debate of the 2024 election cycle is tonight, and while all the drama seems focused on whether or not anybody beyond Chris Christie will take a serious swing at Trump, odds are most of the evening’s time will be devoted to trashing President Joe Biden.

So, to help keep you sane through all the lies and BS — and the fog you may be in by the end of the debate if your drinking game involved the word “woke” — here’s a quick summary* of the things that Biden has accomplished (with a little help from Democrats in Congress) in his first two-and-a-half years in office.

First of all, Joe Biden has restored trust, confidence, and faith in the honesty, credibility, and integrity of America. He doesn’t suck up to dictators like Trump did, and doesn’t lie to Americans or our allies. He’s restored independence to the Department of Justice and funding and support to regulatory agencies like the EPA.

Over united Republican opposition, the Biden administration has succeeded in lowering most Americans’ cost of living. The Inflation Reduction Act has reduced inflation to a full point lower than it was when Reagan was running his “Morning in America” ads in 1984 (unemployment is several points lower, too!).

Because of that law, for the first time, Medicare is able to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs: a month’s supply of insulin for seniors is capped at $35, Medicare beneficiaries pay $0 out of pocket for recommended adult vaccines, and seniors’ out of pocket expenses at the pharmacy will be capped at $2,000 a year.

America has just completed the strongest two years of job growth in the history of our country. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office — including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and a record number of small businesses have started since Biden took office. Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have near record low unemployment rates and people with disabilities are experiencing record low unemployment.

We’re experiencing a boom in manufacturing and the construction of manufacturing facilities like we haven’t seen since before the Reagan Revolution began offshoring American factories and jobs. Companies have invested more than $300 billion in good jobs, many of them unionized, as America’s technical capabilities sharpen along with this job growth.

Biden has expanded services available to our veterans (after Trump cut them), including 31 new clinical sites and a comprehensive program to help the estimated 5 million veterans who, like President Biden’s son Beau, have been exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of their service to our country.

President Biden brought together Democrats and Republicans to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major piece of gun safety legislation in three decades. The law will save lives by:

— requiring young people ages 18 to 21 to undergo enhanced background checks; 
—narrowing the “boyfriend loophole” to keep guns out of the hands of convicted dating partners;
— funding crisis interventions, including extreme risk protection orders (“red flag”) laws; 
— making significant investments to address the mental health crisis in America, including in our schools; 
— clarifying who needs to register as a federally licensed gun dealer and run background checks before selling a single weapon; 
— and making gun trafficking and straw purchases distinct federal crimes.

Over ten years ago, President Biden announced his support for marriage equality, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. government official to do so. Building on his longstanding support and generations of civil rights advocacy, President Biden signed historic bipartisan legislation protecting marriage for same-sex and interracial couples.

And the President took historic steps to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, including reversing the discriminatory ban on transgender servicemembers in the military, strengthening non-discrimination protections in health care, housing, education, and employment, and ensuring that transgender Americans can access government support and services.

Biden has put a more diverse group of people on the federal judiciary than any president in history. Sixty-six percent of his nominees have been women and 65 percent were people of color, including the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

After Putin declared war on democracy and launched a terrorist invasion of Ukraine, targeting civilians and using rape as a weapon of war, President Biden has brought the world together to stand up to a fascist autocracy and defend Europe’s largest democracy.

Following Trump’s humiliating groveling before Putin and attacks on NATO, the European Union, and our democratic allies around the world, President Biden has rebuilt the American alliances that have, in some cases, stood for over two centuries. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and China appears to be re-thinking their belligerent attitude toward Taiwan after last week’s meeting and agreements between the leaders of the US, South Korea, and Japan.

After Trump unilaterally closed all but one of our air bases in Afghanistan to maliciously make his successor’s job more difficult, the Biden administration ended the war in Afghanistan that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had lied us into. He’s also decapitated the leadership of ISIS and El Qaeda.

Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted American women’s right to abortion (and multiple Republicans are now trying to ban birth control), President Biden has stood up for women’s healthcare rights. He’s signed several Executive Orders to protect access to reproductive healthcare (including for our military). When 19 Republican state attorneys general demanded the healthcare records of women who’ve sought abortions in more than thirty states, Biden signed an Executive Order strengthening patient privacy.

The Biden administration rolled out a plan to cut as much as $20,000 from the debt carried by America’s student borrowers (student debt of these proportions, the direct result of the Reagan Revolution, does not exist in any other nation on Earth). When a Republican lawsuit before the Supreme Court blocked his efforts, he announced a plan to provide millions of borrowers with more affordable monthly student loan payments through changes to income-driven repayment plans.

While Red states still put people in prison for years for possessing a single marijuana cigarette, President Biden pardoned allAmericans who’ve ever been convicted of a federal pot offense. He’s more recently initiated a multi-agency review of the drug’s Schedule 1 status, with an eye to decriminalizing it nationwide.

After centuries of police violence against Black people and other minorities, Biden signed a landmark executive order on safe, effective, and accountable policing that mandated federal reforms such as banning chokeholds, restricting no-knock entries, creating a national police accountability database, and restricting the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

Through over a hundred executive actions and the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden has finally put America on course to cut our emissions in half by 2030 and to get to net-zero by 2050. He also protected more lands and waters in his first year than any President since John F. Kennedy.

While Republicans continue to strip people off Red state Medicaid rolls in their pursuit of cruelty, Biden expanded the Affordable Care Act. Millions can now find healthcare for $10 a month or less, and most Americans will see an Obamacare saving of an average of $800 a year.

Since he took office, there has been a combined 50 percent increase in enrollment in states that use HealthCare.gov and the nation’s uninsured rate is historically low at 8 percent. Over 16 million Americans signed up for quality, affordable health coverage, the highest number ever produced in an Obamacare open enrollment period.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of President Biden has been re-aligning the Democratic Party with its progressive base. Biden worked hand-in-hand with Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders to put forward a sweeping progressive agenda involving an investment of over $5 trillion in America and American working people.

Although united opposition from Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats (including Manchin, Sinema, and the “corporate problem solvers”) forced him to cut the program back, it is still revolutionary given the past 40 years of bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism. 

Reversing the anti-organized-labor trend started by Reagan that continued through the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, President Biden has aggressively promoted unions and unionization as essential to the future of working people in America.

President Biden also worked with and helped Nancy Pelosi pass through the House the For The People Act, which would have rolled back much of Citizens United and ended most Republican voter suppression by asserting Americans’ absolute right to vote. Had he not been betrayed by Manchin and Sinema, it would now be law.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (founded by Bernie) has gone from the handful of members (fewer than 10) it was when I did fundraisers for them more than a decade ago to being one of the strongest and largest in Congress (104 members right now). While this isn’t Biden’s doing and much credit goes to its members, Biden is the first Democratic president since LBJ to fully embrace progressives in Congress and fast-track their legislation. 

Biden has also:

— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Advanced cutting-edge research on cancer and other diseases through the ARPA-H initiative
— Signed legislation to put more cops on the beat and invest in community policing
— Signed the Electoral Count Act, which takes long overdue steps to protect the integrity of our elections
— Lowered the cost of hearing aids by making them available over the counter
— Created more manufacturing jobs in 2022 than in any single year in nearly 30 years
— Signed an Executive Order to encourage competition across industries
— Took action to lower energy costs for families
— Lowered seniors’ health care expenses, including by capping out of pocket expenses on prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 per year, ensuring that people enrolled in Medicare will not pay more than $35 for a month’s supply of insulin, and recipients will receive free vaccines
— Accelerated adoption of electric vehicles by reducing costs for families, jumpstarted the first national EV charging network, and made historic investments into EV batteries and materials
— Rejoined the Paris Agreement on day one to reassert the United States’ global leadership to combat the climate crisis
— Jumpstarted the American offshore wind industry and convened the nation’s first federal-state offshore wind partnership
— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Lowered the deficit with the single largest annual reduction in American history
— Secured commitments from 20 leading internet providers to increase speeds and cut prices
— Signed legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act
— Awarded the most ever federal contracting dollars to small businesses and disadvantaged small businesses
— Reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years
— Appointed a record number of women and people of color to serve in his Administration
— Hosted the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years and released a National Strategy to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities by 2030
— Awarded more than $1 billion to initiate cleanup and clear the backlog of 49 previously unfunded Superfund sites, over $250 million to clean up hundreds of contaminated brownfield sites, and $725 million for abandoned mine lands
— Restored protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments and designated Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument to conserve our lands and waters, honor our nation’s veterans, protect Tribal cultural resources, and support jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy
— Signed an Executive Order on Improving Public Safety and Criminal Justice for Native Americans and Addressing the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People
— Invested historic funding for Tribal governments and Native communities, and
— Mailed over 740 million free COVID-19 tests directly to tens of millions of Americans

Below are a set of handy memes you can copy and paste into social media if any of these accomplishments resonate with you or you want to back up claims you’re making online. Just right-click and choose to save, copy, or download them: they’re copyright free. 

Here’s to a fascinating (and, no doubt, infuriating) debate!

OPEN THE LINK TO SEE HARTMANN’S MEMES.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Funding, Health, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Texas: Big Government Seizes Power from Municipalities

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
4

Something weird has happened to the Republican Party. It used to favor local control. Not any more. Now Republicans think it okay to seize control of school districts instead of helping them with resources, as happened in Michigan, Ohio and Texas. And Texas just passed a law called “the Death Star” that allows the state to cancel local laws. No more local control in Texas!

Why have Republicans doubled down on suppressing the vote, gerrymandering legislatures to crush opposition, and undermining democracy whenever possible?

Gus Bova of The Texas Observer has the story here:

On November 3, 2020, as America watched the first results of a fateful presidential contest roll in, voters in a North Texas suburb struck a blow for workers’ rights. Euless residents approved a proposition limiting some large companies’ ability to force employees to work overtime if they didn’t want to.

The “fair workweek” initiative, comparable to measures passed recently in a handful of other cities, was led in Euless by employees of LSG Sky Chefs, an airline catering giant and meal-supplier for American Airlines. These workers, unionized with Unite Here, said they were being overwhelmed with mandatory overtime hours, often announced at the last minute, as American Airlines, headquartered near the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth airport, sought to dramatically increase flight volume.

“You can have a wife and children, and yet every day you are forced to stay at work, and you have no time to even go back and sit and relax and play and take care of children,” said Samuel Tandankwa, a Sky Chefs driver and Unite Here member, recalling the conditions in 2019 and leading up to the COVID pandemic.

Despite getting voters’ approval, the initiative faced legal troubles from the first. Some city officials doubted it could be enforced. Sky Chefs told the Texas Observer it didn’t apply to them since they maintain a national contract with Unite Here. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already written a letter stating the policy would violate a state law that bans cities from setting minimum wages. Nevertheless, Tandankwa told the Observer in July that since the campaign, the company actually has turned away from using mandatory overtime, freeing up workers to meet family obligations, and neither he nor local worker advocates want to lose the ordinance.

But Euless’ overtime measure is among the local ordinances that will be vaporized by Texas’ House Bill 2127, dubbed the “Death Star” bill by critics, which was signed by GOP Governor Greg Abbott last month and takes effect in September. It’s causing uproar around the state, as city officials, workers, and others try to figure out what parts of municipal law and regulation the bill will nullify.

The bill’s sweeping, alleged purpose is stated in its opening sections: “returning sovereign regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong.” However, closer examination suggests that the legislation’s real intent is both narrower and potentially more profound than just upending city ordinance-making powers. First, it is a laser beam aimed at a small group of progressive ordinances improving worker and tenant protections—local victories won through hard-fought campaigns over the course of more than a decade. Second, and more importantly, it’s a bid to permanently hamstring municipal democracy in Texas, especially in its big blue cities. Cities are where most Texans live; they are increasingly liberal, their populations often majority nonwhite, and they are the level of government most responsive to ordinary citizens. In essence, the Legislature decided there was too much Democracy afoot in Texas, so it did something about it.

“To me, that’s the will of the people being taken away,” said Tevita Uhatafe, a Euless resident who works for American Airlines and is also a vice president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “We voted for it … and here we are, we’re going to get it taken away because people who claim to hate big government are acting just like [it].”

“There is no precedent for what they did this time,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “It was not a measured response to a given policy that corporate interests didn’t like; it was a wholesale transfer of power from cities to politicians in Austin.”

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Texas

Thom Hartmann: Has the GOP Become a Party of Hate and Trolls?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
29

Thom Hartmann, journalist and blogger, describes the loathsome identity of the Republican Party. It was once a sensibly Conservative Party that believed in local control and minimal government. It boasted leaders like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Howard Baker, Leverett Saltonstall, and Margaret Chase Smith.

What does the GOP believe today, other than cutting taxes for the richest?

Today, the GOP leaders peddle lies and conspiracy theories. On social media, they take turns smearing Biden (“the Biden crime family”) and retailing any charges they stumble across on the internet. I am appalled whoever I read any Tweet (X) posted by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, or other current GOP leaders.

You will not hear from any of them a hint of bipartisanship. It’s all hate, hate, hate. They call their opposition whatever names come to mind: socialists, Communists, radical left, fascists. Their words have no substantive meaning. They are intended to spread hate and fear.

Hartman explains why they stoke hate: They have no substantive ideas to improve people’s lives.

Hartmann writes:

So, Donald Trump says that if Judge Tanya Chutkan orders him not to reveal details of the prosecution’s case before they can be presented to a jury, including the names, addresses, and testimony of witnesses against him, he’s going to do it anyway and challenge the court.

And there’s little reason to believe he won’t do it: he’ll take what he’s asserting as his First Amendment right to troll and threaten witnesses against him all the way to the Supreme Court he packed with three rightwing crackpots. If nothing else, it may buy him enough time to get elected president and pardon himself before he’s convicted.

In this, Trump has raised vicious social media trolling into a form of electoral performance art. He’s become our troll-in-chief.

America has been under the sway of rightwing trolls before. When I was a child in the 1950s, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting an active witch-hunt for “communists” in the federal government. This was the era when Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for, in part, declaring himself a “New Deal Democrat” and standing up to the witch hunters, as characterized in the new movie about his making the bomb.

McCarthy destroyed the lives of thousands of people, and many were imprisoned because of his efforts. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates his victims at over 10,000. He — and his right hand man, Roy Cohn (who went on to be Trump’s mentor) — were classic trolls in the worst sense of the word.

Some of McCarthy’s efforts live to this day, including his insistence throughout the Army-McCarthy hearings on never saying “Democratic Party” but, instead, always saying, “Democrat Party.”

Similarly, McCarthy echoed the John Birch Society’s (JBS) argument that America is not a democracy but a republic, an argument that James Madison made — and then refuted — when he was trying to sell the US Constitution. McCarthy’s and the JBS’s apparent rationale was that “democracy” sounds too much like Democratic while “republic” evokes good feelings for the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller, who would become Gerald Ford’s Vice President, got a dose of this with the John Birch Society-pushed Goldwater sweep of the Republican Party at their 1964 convention.

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” he said over boos and chants, “any doctrinaire, militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher (pause for ‘republic not democracy!’ chants set off by his attacking the John Birch Society)…”

Today’s trolling, however, has gone beyond the fringes defined in that era by the JBS, Cohn, and the occasional McCarthyite wannabee. It’s become the core, the essential identity, of the post-Trump GOP.

From “rolling coal” trucks blowing poisonous smoke at Prius and EV drivers, to “Free helicopter rides for liberals” tee shirts invoking Pinochet’s murders, to hate groups and militia members showing up at school board meetings, today’s Republican Party has fully embraced hate and trolling.

“Owning the libs” is the main online sport of many Republicans today, as you can see by following the social media feeds or reading the hate mail of any high-profile progressives or Democrats.

In large part that’s because Republicans don’t have anything else to present to Americans as a positive national governing agenda.

Please open the link to read the rest of this excellent post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

The Notorious John Eastman Explains Why He Plotted a Coup

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
25

Laura K. Field writes about John Eastman, once a prominent lawyer, who advised Trump and his team about how to overturn the 2020 election. Her post appears at The Bulwark, a place created by Republican Never Trumpers. Eastman is involved in disbarment proceedings for his role in the failed coup.

FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS NOW, since he was revealed in September 2021 to be the author of the notorious “coup memos,” John Eastman has been walking a bizarre legal and political tightrope.

On the one hand, we have the man who filed a legal claim on behalf of President Donald Trump in Texas in December 2020 seeking to invalidate millions of votes. The man who was invited to join Trump’s unofficial legal team later that month, where he wrote the two elaborate memos delineating various paths that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence could take to delay or overturn the election count. Who tried in person to persuade Pence that, at the very least, he had the authority to delay the vote count; who spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6th, repeating conspiratorial lies about election fraud; whose emails that same day reveal that during the siege of the Capitol that he blamed Pence for not acting as he had advised; who was caught on video (by an undercover activist) boastingabout working to overturn the election; who lost his academic appointments in the aftermath of these events; whom a federal judge concluded had “more likely than not” broken the law; who may soon be disbarred in the state of California; and who is so worried about being indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith that he has requested a postponement of those disbarment proceedings.

On the other hand we have a man who has tried to distance himself from his own memos, at one point calling himself “the white knight here, talking [Trump] down from the more aggressive position” in advance of January 6th. This other Eastman has consistently maintained that his recommendations to Pence and Trump were narrow, sensible, and moderate. That he had merely recommended “hitting pause” on the vote count on January 6th, so that the relevant election controversies could be adjudicated by the states. That to follow the other paths articulated in his memos would have been reckless.

The gulf between these two Eastmans—the eager-to-act conspiratorial Eastman and the reticent lawyerly one—shrunk a bit last week, with the release of the third and final installment of an Eastman interview with the Claremont Institute’s main financial backer, chairman of the board, and gonzo anti-woke warrior, Thomas D. Klingenstein. In this interview, Eastman comes close to saying that his own electoral shenanigans and legal wrangling have been a sideshow. In sentiments reminiscent of Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” essay and subsequent writing, Eastman makes it clear—without fully dropping his lawyerly persona—that for him, the deeper reason for standing by Trump through his January 6th saga was that he thinks Democrats are destroying the country.

LAST WEEK, I WROTE about the first and second parts of Eastman’s interview with Klingenstein. In the first, they trot through a long list of disproven allegations of 2020 election fraud. The second is about January 6th and the question of Pence’s legal authority to delay or overturn the election.

Now comes the concluding installment, which begins by focusing on the question of prudence: Given all the complex considerations involved in the 2020 election, was it prudent for Eastman and Trump to pursue the course of action that they did?

The interview is full of odd claims and intriguing revelations. For example, at one point Eastman says that in his considerations of prudence he did not take into account the possibility of mob violence, because he was working in “a different department,” that “Trump himself had authorized the call-up of 20,000 members of the National Guard for January 6th” (not true), and that Eastman just assumed that “those things were handled.”

Eastman also suggests in this segment that he believed there was a “fair prospect” that he would have been able to win “a majority of the [Supreme] Court” in support of Pence’s right “merely to delay,” or at least to get the Court not to touch the issue as nonjusticiable.

But the interview really gets disturbing in its last ten or so minutes, when it turns to the question of Eastman’s deepest motives. Why was it so important to Eastman to see Trump re-elected? Klingenstein suggests that the “biggest” factor motivating Eastman “is the current circumstances in the country, the political and social condition.”

Eastman agrees. After some discussion about how the legal situation surrounding the 2020 election was different from the legal situation in two other close elections, those of 1960 and 2000, Eastman makes clear that the more important distinction he sees among those three elections is that “the stakes” in 2020 were higher—that they were literally life or death:

Certainly not in 1960, but also not in 2000, were the stakes about the very existential threat that the country is under as great as they are.

We’re not talking about, you know, handing over to John Kennedy, instead of Richard Nixon, who’s gonna deal with the Cold War. We’re talking about whether we are going to, as a nation, completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, which is what the modern left wing which is in control of the Democrat party believes—that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated.

This is an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world. That’s the stakes.

Obviously, when the stakes are this high, you do whatever you can to fight back. As Anton put it about the 2016 election, you “charge the cockpit or you die.” So when the opportunity came along to be part of a challenge to the normal election processes, Eastman was eager to join the fight.

The interview does not, it seems to me, involve a moment where Eastman fully “comes clean” about trying to overthrow a legitimate election (as Josh Marshall has suggested). Rather, what Eastman does is zoom in and out between what we might call the deeper cause of his actions—his belief, entirely consonant with Anton’s original “Flight 93 Election” bullshit, that liberals and the left pose an existential threat to the country and are traitors to the country’s founding principles—and the immediate rationale or pretext for his behavior, which is the premise of the stolen election.

In the very next part of the interview, Eastman zooms out:

Trump seems to understand that [i.e., the stakes] in a way a lot of Republican establishment types in Washington don’t, and it’s a reason he gets so much support in the hinterland and the ‘flyover country.’ People are fed up with folks, you know, get-along-go-along while the country is being destroyed.

And then Eastman zooms back in to argue that these high stakes justified his involvement in Trump’s post-election machinations:

And so I think the stakes are much bigger, and that means a stolen election that thwarts the will of the people trying to correct course, and get back on a path that understands the significance and the nobility of America and the American experiment is really at stake and we ought to fight for it.

Eastman and Klingenstein seem almost to suggest that stolen elections are a dime a dozen in American history, but only in this instance was it worth the fight.

At this point in the interview, Eastman all but drops the façade, and zooms out all the way. When asked by Klingenstein once again whether he maybe would have made a different prudential calculation in 1960 or 2020, Eastman says yes, “I may have come to a different conclusion.” Then he proceeds to explain:

Look, our founders lay this case out. The prudential judgment they make in the Declaration of Independence is the same one. There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that says, you know, a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable—or tolerable, while they remain tolerable—but at some point the abuses have become so intolerable that it is not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.

So that’s the question. Have the abuses and the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back.

This is an extraordinary thing to admit. For one thing, by the time you’re appealing to the Declaration of Independence in that way you are in effect admitting that you were trying to overthrow your government.

It may be obvious but it’s worth saying this out loud: Violence is implicit in this line of argument. Lincoln understood this when he spoke of Americans’ “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” their own government. The men and women who charged the Capitol understood this. Eastman and Klingenstein, sitting in their suits and ties in an elegant study lined with books, may deny having violent intentions, may even abjure the use of force, but implicit in their rhetoric in this interview and elsewhere (Klingenstein’s website: “The essential thing is for Republicans to understand we are in a war and then act accordingly”) is a justification for violence.

AS THE INTERVIEW CONCLUDES, Eastman goes on to maintain, again, that supposed Democratic election-stealing played a part in his prudential calculation. But he says plainly enough throughout that the more fundamental motive concerned the basic state of the country and his political and philosophical disagreements with Democrats. A few minutes after his appeal to the Declaration, Eastman will claim that Democratic efforts to destroy the country have accelerated rapidly—“it’s been an exponential increase in the last few years”—and as an example he quotes the culture wars: “You’re gonna let 50-year-old-men naked into teenage girls’ showers at public pools, or drag queens doing story hours to 6-year-olds.”

Of course. The trans people and drag queens left Eastman no choice. The Democrats made him do it.

The Klingenstein-Eastman interview is, in the main, situated squarely in the muck of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and obtuse speculative reasoning about the vice president’s proper role in the congressional counting of Electoral College votes. In this third installment, however, as Eastman goes on about Democratic bogeymen and the higher “stakes” of the 2020 election, it becomes quite clear that, at some point, for these men and in this fight, anything goes. Pretexts and premises be damned.

Given the overall sham quality of Eastman and Trump’s political and legal arguments to date, it seems quite likely that they both reached that point a long time ago. At this point the two men have gone all in. Nothing’s going to stop them now.

Except, maybe, in Eastman’s case at least, the American courts and rule of law.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Republicans, Scandals, Trump

Maureen Dowd: Trump Is a Sore Loser and a Fool

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
31

Maureen Dowd is a regular columnist for the New York Times. Here she reviews Trump’s ongoing coup. Dowd refers to Trump at the end of the article as an Amadán. Carol Burris, who is of Irish origin, sent the following explanation: “She calls him amadán at the end, which in Irish is a fool. But the full terminology, “amadán dubh,” comes from Irish folklore and refers to the “dark fool” or “dark fairy.” Amadán Dubh is a trickster fairy found in Irish folklore, and is the ‘bringer of madness and oblivion.’ That he is.”

Maureen Dowd wrote:

WASHINGTON — The man who tried to overthrow the government he was running was held Thursday by the government he tried to overthrow, a few blocks from where the attempted overthrow took place and a stone’s throw from the White House he yearns to return to, to protect himself from the government he tried to overthrow.

Donald Trump is in the dock for trying to cheat America out of a fair election and body-snatch the true electors. But the arrest of Trump does not arrest the coup.

The fact is, we’re mid-coup, not post-coup. The former president is still in the midst of his diabolical “Who will rid me of this meddlesome democracy?” plot, hoping his dark knights will gallop off to get the job done.

Trump is tied with President Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll, and if he gets back in the Oval, there will be an Oppenheimer-size narcissistic explosion, as he once more worms out of consequences and defiles democracy. His father disdained losers and Trump would rather ruin the country than admit he lost.

The Trump lawyer John Lauro made it clear they will use the trial to relitigate the 2020 election and their cockamamie claims. Trump wasn’t trying to shred the Constitution, they will posit; he was trying to save it.

“President Trump wanted to get to the truth,” Lauro told Newmax’s Greg Kelly after the arraignment, adding: “At the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or re-audit or recertify.”

In trying to debunk Jack Smith’s obstruction charges, Lauro confirmed them. Trying to halt the congressional certification is the crime.

Smith’s indictment depicts an opéra bouffe scene where “the Defendant” (Trump) and “Co-Conspirator 1” (Rudy Giuliani) spent the evening of Jan. 6 calling lawmakers attempting “to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” by sowing “knowingly false allegations of election fraud.” Trump melodramatically tweeted about his “sacred landslide election victory” being “unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”

Giuliani left a voice mail message for a Republican senator saying they needed “to object to numerous states and raise issues” to delay until the next day so they could pursue their nefarious plan in the state legislatures.

Two words in Smith’s indictment prove that the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest: “too honest.” Bullying and berating his truant sycophant, Mike Pence, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Trump told his vice president, “You’re too honest.”

The former vice president is selling “Too honest” merchandise, which, honestly, won’t endear him to the brainwashed base. Pence’s contemporaneous notes helped Smith make his case.

It’s strange to see Pence showing some nerve and coming to Smith’s aid, after all his brown-nosing and equivocating. He and Mother, who suppressed her distaste for Trump for years, were the most loyal soldiers; in return, according to an aide, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saidTrump felt Pence “deserved” to be hanged by the rioters.

Pence told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump and his advisers wanted him “essentially to overturn the election.”“It wasn’t just that they asked for a pause,” Pence said, at odds with Lauro. “The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”

Ron DeSantis, another presidential wannabe who enabled Trump for too long, acknowledged on Friday that “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.” But Trump and his henchmen were busy ratcheting up the lunacy.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump threatened on Truth Social on Friday.

On the same day and platform, he accused “the corrupt Biden DOJ” of election interference. Exquisite projection. In Trump’s warped view, it’s always the other guy who’s doing what Trump is actually doing.

Kari Lake told House Republicans to stop pursuing a Biden impeachment and just decertify the 2020 election because Biden is not “the true president.” Lake said of Trump: “This is a guy who’s already won. He won in 2016. He won even bigger in 2020. All that Jan. 6 was, was a staged riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.”

Before laughing off this absurdity, consider the finding from CNN’s new poll: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican believe Biden is an illegitimate president, with over half saying there is “solid evidence” of that.

While Trump goes for the long con, or the long coup — rap sheet be damned, it’s said that he worries this will hurt his legacy. He shouldn’t. His legacy is safe, as the most democracy-destroying, soul-crushing, self-obsessed amadán ever to occupy the Oval. Amadán, that’s Gaelic for a man who grows more foolish every day.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Pence, Republicans, Trump

Charlie Sykes: Ron DeSantis’ “Political Genius”

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2023 //
20

Charlie Sykes was a conservative pundit until Trump came along. He’s now an outspoken Never Trumper who writes at The Bulwark.

He wrote this morning about the leak of Ron DeSantis’ debate prep materials.

I had hoped today to write about anything except the Florida Governor’s flatulent, failing, fumbling campaign. That sad nag has been pummeled to death.

But you really can’t avert your eyes from this can you?

Let’s take a moment to consider the position Ron DeSantis finds himself in: He’s trailing Donald Trump by 39 points, shedding donors and voters alike. He’s reset his campaign, fired staff, and had to undergo the indignity of flying commercial. His attempts at simulating a normal human being have flopped and he’s being mercilessly trolled by Trump.

Next week’s debate in Milwaukee may be his last chance to turn this around.

As chance would have it, the debate will take place the same week that his main rival for the GOP nomination will be arrested, fingerprinted, and had his mugshot taken — after his fourth criminal indictment.

His strategy?

Defend Donald Trump.

Real Man of Political Genius.¹

On Thursday, the NYT reported on a cache of memos posted online by DeSantis’s SuperPac that are chock full of the sort of brilliant insights that helped inspire his shambolic campaign launch with Elon Musk.

As they began, so, apparently, they intend to continue.

The trove of documents provides an extraordinary glimpse into the thinking of the DeSantis operation about a debate the candidate’s advisers see as crucial.

“There are four basic must-dos,” one of the memos urges Mr. DeSantis, whom the document refers to as “GRD.”

“1. Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times. 2. State GRD’s positive vision 2-3 times. 3. Hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response. 4. Defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”

The memo advises DeSantis to say something like: “Trump isn’t here, so let’s just leave him alone. He’s too weak to defend himself here. We’re all running against him. I don’t think we want to join forces with someone on this stage who’s auditioning for a show on MSNBC.”

It also urges Desantis to deploy Trump-like nicknames like “Fake Vivek” or “Vivek the Fake.”

Really, this should go well, especially the part about telegraphing his plan to go after Christie (the most formidable debater on the stage) and the Hindu guy.

Via the Wapo:

There are two additional memos about Ramaswamy, including one outlining his positions on marijuana legalization, mask-wearing during the covid-19 pandemic and transgender people in the military. One highlights Ramaswamy’s past statements suggesting support for a “very high” inheritance tax. And it singles out his faith and his family’s roots in India.

“Ramaswamy — a Hindu who grew up visiting relatives in India and was very much ingrained in India’s caste system — supports this as a mechanism to preserve a meritocracy in America and ensure everyone starts on a level playing field,” the memo says.

**

The meta-theory behind the memo? The subject line is “RE: Orchestra pit,” which refers to the Roger Ailes’s theory “that making mistakes and choreographing attacks are more likely to garner media coverage than articulating policy positions during a televised debate.”

“You have two guys onstage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit,” Ailes once said. “Who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

So, if things aren’t going well for Florida Man, don’t be surprised if he tries to throw himself into a mosh pit of supporters. Or something.

**

My Colleague Tim Miller quite reasonably calls this “One of the most WTF leaks in memory. Makes your candidate seem like a pathetic baby and neutralizes potential attacks. Baffling.”

“This is not normal,” he says. “The whole thing just wreaks of desperation.” (Trust me, we’re going to be talking about it on today’s Bulwark podcast.)

National Review’s Noah Rothman is also baffled: “I don’t understand why DeSantis is in the race at this point if he thinks he can win the nomination by playing blocking tackle for the frontrunner. Just stop wasting everyone’s time and money.”

And I regret to tell you that even as blind squirrels eventually find the nut, the thoroughly deplorable Elise Stefanik had a good point,when she called the memo “absolute malpractice.”

“As a former debate prepper, the first and most obvious rule of debate prep is don’t leak the debate prep memo,” Stefanik wrote while sharing the story from the New York Times….

**

Exit take: Trump’s not showing up in Milwaukee next week. Last night he bleated:

.

Categories DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Trump

Bob Shepherd: Trump’s Cuckoo Coup

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2023 //
62

Bob Shepherd, our blog polymath, reviews the current status and likely future of The Former Guy.

The Next Cuckoo Coup

So, there are two kinds of Trump voters.

First, there are the Trumpanzees, true disciples of the Trump cult, some of whom show up on this blog from time to time to espouse some utterly lunatic notions from the Qanon-o-sphere: Trump won the 2020 election, Joe Biden sits atop a vast criminal empire, Hilary Clinton leads an international pedophile ring, Ukraine is run by Nazis, George Soros funds caravans of rapists and murderers who are overwhelming our borders, and so on. That’s about 60 percent of the Trump base. I say “notions” above, btw, because when a Trumpanzee talks or writes in imitation of the toddler English of the cult’s Glorious Leader, it all comes out in a geyser of crazy conspiracy theories, one after another in rapid succession, sounding very much like some bizarre political catechism from a low-budget Exorcist remake. These Trumpanzee ‘merkins think that Trump stands between them and black and brown people who hate EVERYTHING GOOD–America, Jesus, apple pie, guns. They think that Trump actually is a self-made billionaire and a Christian nationalist and that he gives a damn about them. He doesn’t.

Second, there are the Repugnican doctrinaire pragmatists who have been holding their noses since the escalator ride down to new lows in American politics. These are evangelicals, Libertarians, and other supporters of Reich-wing policies like outlawing abortion, eliminating social services for the poor, regressive taxation, building a wall to keep out immigrants, giving companies the freedom to pollute at will, enabling the assertion of a right to religious bigotry in public fora, banning books from libraries, withdrawal from international treaties and obligations, and so on, who know Trump for what he is–an amoral career criminal and conman, a seditious, dishonest, irreligious, murderous, traitorous, profoundly ignorant and stupid RICO boss who can nonetheless be counted on to sign ANY piece of Reich-wing legislation put in front of him. So, while Trump might not actually be against abortion (he vociferously supported it in the past when he was trying and failing at being a playboy), he will do whatever the Reich-wing wants because he doesn’t care about anything except adulation from his base and, of course, extracting money from Trumpanzees. So, that’s the Hold-Your-Nose-ers, the Trumpeteers, the other 40 percent of the Trumplings.

So, because of the size of the Trumpanzee cult, it appears at present (that is, ever since Ron DeSantis basically threw away his opportunity of a lifetime because he evidently has the political instincts and charm of a rabid coyotes or parasitic wasp larvae) that no one has any chance of winning the 2024 Repugnican Presidential nomination EXCEPT Trump, so most of the Nose-holder Trumplings now have two choices: they can hope against hope that The Loser will pull off another 2016 victory-by-a-hair-on-the-end-of-an-Adderall-covered-orange-schnoz OR that he will be convicted and sent to prison before the election so that someone else can run in his stead.

Meanwhile, the Orange One has been using increasingly martial rhetoric (against judges and prosecutors, no less!). Having lost the defamation case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll and having been determined in that case by a jury and judge to have committed rape, he now has been indicted on 78 felony charges, with many more in the pipeline. His choices are limited. Trump can liquidate his assets and board the Trump plane to Russia to stay under the wing of his dying handler, the kleptocratic state Mafia boss, defenestrater of dissidents, and now indicted international war criminal Tsar Vladimir Putin, or he can whip up his base to carry out an actual Civil War. We know, now, that Trump was furious that he was not allowed by his own Secret Service to go with the mob to the Capitol and fulfill his fantasy of being an actual martial leader. And we’ve known for a long, long time that he is a delusional madman. Perhaps, in extremis, he is actually starting to believe that there can be a coup, an insurrection, that can bring him to power. For even he, crazy as he is, knows that HE CANNOT WIN IN 2024. He has lost and lost and lost in the past, and he has even less support now. He wishes he could win. Then he could pardon himself and crawl back under the protection of presidential immunity. But he can’t.

So, how does this play out?

I suspect that the more moderate right-wingers, KNOWING that he will lose in 2024, are working behind the scenes right now to make sure that he is convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors before the election and thus made ineligible for the presidency. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some wealthy Repugnican donors are, even as you read this, calling up disaffected members of the former Trump team (which would be almost all of them, lol) and saying, “Let’s get this guy out of the way so we can win; cooperate with the investigations.”

Meanwhile, ex-cadet Bone Spurs is at Mar-a-lago or Bedminster fantasizing about leading a Civil War against Jack and Tanya and Alvin and Fani and the Marxists and about millions of members of the Trumpanzee Citizens’ Militia turning out to make him Glorious Leader for Life–January 6th having been a dress rehearsal, his Beer Hall Putsch, prior to the main event.

Here’s the thing: It ain’t gonna happen. The Trumpanzees have seen what happens when they actually put themselves on the line for him: he doesn’t join them, and he doesn’t save them. They go down. He goes to lunch and golf.

“I’ll call it a day,” the con man did say,
“I’m still president anyway.”
Then he farted and stood
and called it all good,
and went to his golf course to play.

What if he gave a coup and it didn’t happen?

I guess we would then have people debating whether he should be charged and prosected and sent to prison for THAT.

Categories Elections, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Ohio: Voters Reject Issue 1!

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
48

The AP reported that Issue 1 was defeated today in Ohio. with 65%+ of the vote counted, 57% of voters opposed Issue 1.

Issue 1 would have changed the vote required to change the state constitution from a simple majority of 50% + 1 to 60% + 1. The goal of the Republicans was to block a referendum in November on abortion rights.

In November, voters will decide whether to add protection of reproductive rights to the Ohio Constitution. It appears that they will, now that Issue 1 was defeated. Red state Kansas voters did the same, and voters in Kentucky and Montana rejected laws banning abortion.

Wherever the issue goes to a vote, a majority will support women’s reproductive rights. To restore the rights canceled by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, take it to the voters.

Democracy rules.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ohio, Republicans

Washington Post Asks Eight Left-Leaning Columnists About Biden

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
167

I enjoyed reading this candid conversation among left-leaning columnists at the Washington Post about Biden’s candidacy. The conversation was moderated by Chris Suellentrip, the politics opinion editor of the Post.

What do you think?

President Biden is 80 years old and is running for a second term, more or less unopposed, in the Democratic primary. So I gathered a group of our left-leaning columnists for a conversation over email and asked: How do you feel about that?

Has Biden failed to be a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders, as he pledged to be in 2020? Should he have declared himself “one (term) and done,” like a college basketball star? Should the party have held a competitive primary instead of clearing the field, as is traditional for an incumbent president? Is the fascination with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s not-gonna-happen campaign a sign of nervousness about Biden 2024 in some portion of the Democratic primary electorate? And will you change your mind about any of these things if someone other than Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee?

Dana Milbank: If hand-wringing translated into votes, Democrats would never lose an election. I find their fretting over Biden’s age tedious — and probably exaggerated by the disinformation from the right portraying him as drooling and senile. The wandering speeches, the gaffes and the other traits people now assign to his advanced age are the same traits I observed when covering him in the 1990s.

As a Gen Xer, sure, I would have preferred if Biden had offered himself as a one-term anti-Trump savior and cleared the way for a new generation. But a competitive primary would only have turned him into Carter ’80. It’s also just as likely that a decision not to run for reelection would have had the effect of anointing Kamala D. Harris, who by virtue of being a woman of color would make it easier for Trump to foment a 2016-style backlash of racism and misogyny.

Would all this change if Trump (or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) isn’t the GOP nominee? Well, sure. I suppose if Asa Hutchinson were the nominee it wouldn’t matter as much whom the Democrats put up, because he wouldn’t pose the same existential threat to American democracy. But I’m not yet declaring victory for Hutchinson.

Jennifer Rubin: So Biden is 80. Live with it. He’s certainly sharp enough to have solidified and expanded NATO, snookered Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the debt ceiling negotiations and racked up as impressive a first-term domestic record as any incumbent in memory. If inflation is less than 3 percent and job growth is still strong on Election Day, Biden will have pulled off the near-impossible soft-landing (with Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell as his co-pilot).

Paul Waldman: Of course Biden’s age is a concern, even if at the moment it’s only a theoretical one. The presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job, and it would have to be a pretty unusual 86-year-old (the age Biden would be at the end of a second term) who could handle it. But we haven’t yet seen any evidence of age having an effect on Biden’s decision-making or his energy. There are occasions when he appears old in public — a shuffling gait, a momentary inability to find the word he’s looking for — but that’s not the same as him not being able to perform the job.

For all the talk of building a bridge to the next generation, Biden was never going to serve one term and step down. He spent half a century trying to get to the Oval Office, and he won’t leave it voluntarily.

Perry Bacon Jr.: I am not thrilled that Joe Biden is running for a second term.

His approval ratings are significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s were at this stage of their presidencies, midway through their third years in office.

They are very similar to Trump’s numbers. In polls of a potential 2024 matchup, Biden is effectively tied with Trump. Biden would be the favorite against Trump (and probably DeSantis). But that’s because of how unpopular those two Republicans are, not Biden’s political strength.

I think the driving factor here is Biden’s age. People just feel like he is too old. I personally don’t see any evidence that Americans shouldbe worried about his health or mental capacity. But I hear concerns about his age all the time from people in my life who aren’t partisan Democrats. This concern about age shows up in basically every poll.

I think an incumbent Democratic president with Biden’s record who wasn’t 80 years old would be more popular and therefore have a better chance in next year’s election. And while I don’t think just any Democrat under age 80 (or 70) who was the party’s presumptive nominee would be polling better than Biden is against Trump, I think many younger Democrats would be stronger candidates in a 2024 general election.

For example, it seems pretty clear that if Democrats could agree, without a primary, that the party’s 2024 ticket would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.) as president and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) as vice president, that would be stronger electorally than Biden-Harris. Or say, Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.). What I mean is a ticket with a White person and a person of color, a man and a woman, two people who are generally in the mainstream of the party ideologically — and no one over age 70.

But there is no magic way to skip a primary, of course!

Ruth Marcus: Riffing off of how Perry phrased it, I wish Biden did not have to run for a second term. He is too old. No, he is not the drooler of overheated GOP imaginings, but he has slowed down, obviously and measurably. And 80 is too old, period, for the demanding job of the presidency. Let the torch be passed, etc.

Except for this: Biden needs to run. He (and Democrats) are correct about that assessment. If he were to have announced that he was stepping aside, the internecine warfare that would have erupted over Harris, the heiress apparent, versus everyone else, would have torn the party apart, or risked doing so, and opened the door too wide to risk a Republican president being elected.

And not just Trump. He is the biggest, most existential risk, and the primary driver of my “Biden must run” mentality. I used to believe Trump was a singular threat, and that there would not be Trumpism without Trump. But that was wrong. The forces he has unleashed are powerful and dangerous, and exist even in his absence from the scene. From my point of view, the risk to the Supreme Court alone is enough to justify doing whatever it takes to maximize the chance of a Democrat being elected (which means: Biden, Biden, Biden).

Eugene Robinson: Look, we all wish that Biden were, say, 60 instead of 80. But is there a younger Democrat who could have beaten Donald Trump in 2020? I doubt it. And is there a younger Democrat who could beat Trump in 2024? Maybe. I like Perry’s ticket of Whitmer and Warnock. But I don’t like the idea of taking another existential gamble with our democracy. If Trump is the GOP nominee, which seems likely, this will almost surely be another close election. We don’t have landslides anymore; and no matter how queasy Republican voters might be about four more years of Trump’s insanity, we should expect most of them to support their party’s nominee. It is unwise to count on the justice system to bail the nation out. On Election Day, Biden will be 82 and Trump will be 78. The “age issue” should be de minimus.

And, not incidentally, Biden has been a highly effective president who has instituted policies, at home and abroad, that I support. A president with his record deserves a second term — and congressional majorities to go along with it.

Greg Sargent: Improbably, Biden has been the guy with enough appeal to the middle needed to both beat Trump and to pass (parts of) a historically progressive agenda (bringing Bernie Sanders into the tent) while recasting it to the electorate (including affluent suburbanites who supposedly lean right economically) as sensible moderation. Biden seems uniquely well-positioned to not just beat Trump again but also to cement a broad, center-left ideological consensus with paradigm-shifting durability.

As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., historically there have always been candidates who tap into disaffected pro-insurgent constituencies in the Democratic Party (Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, etc.). Kennedy represents a particularly ideologically heterodox and unbalanced version of this. It’s hard to imagine his support, such as it is, says anything meaningful or predictive about eventual support for Biden.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Early in the administration, I thought Biden wouldn’t seek a second term. He would find it appealing, I thought, to declare that he had achieved what he promised when he decided to run in the first place. He saved the country from a Trump second term, defended democracy, solved a bunch of big problems, restored the country’s standing abroad, notched a number of bipartisan victories and created an opening for a better kind of politics. Call it the Cincinnatus Option. He would spend the rest of his term being more praised than damned, the Republicans would have less interest in attacking him, and his popularity would go up because a lot of Americans (with their instinctive mistrust of politicians) would admire someone who could walk away from power.

That still sounds pretty good to me, but it’s not what happened. The reason it didn’t is, as Greg suggested, that Biden might be the only Democrat who can sit atop the various factions of the Democratic Party and bring them together.

If you ask yourself why Democrats are united behind Biden, why only cranks are running against him, it’s because Democrats across their various divisions agree that now is not the time for ideological Armageddon, which is what would happen if Biden stepped aside. And anyone who claims that a tough primary would be good for Biden should consider history. When they were incumbents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were all weakened by primary fights (against Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan, respectively), and they all lost in the general election.

Does Biden’s age create challenges? Of course. Especially against anyone other than Trump. At the margins, Biden’s age could cost him votes, and the margins matter. My hunch is that Biden’s camp will try to find subtle ways of making his age at least a partial asset by stressing his seasoning, wisdom, experience, etc. It won’t be easy, but they have to do some of this. His camp also made a mistake by not lifting up Harris early on and trying to turn her into an asset. They have realized this and are working on doing that now. Biden’s age means more voters will be looking at her as a possible successor, and her favorability ratings need to go up.

Rubin: It’s a relief to have an empathetic, decent human being in the White House. While it is fashionable to pine for someone new and young, with our democracy still frightfully fragile and with war raging in Europe, I don’t think a younger governor or senator would be a better choice. Biden can pass the baton in 2028. Maybe with age comes some old-fashioned sense of propriety, civic virtue, common courtesy and, dare we say, dignity. I’ll take it.

Milbank: I think the Biden-is-too-old theme is itself a demonstration that we’re all forced to live in a world shaped by disinformation from the right. We’ve been hearing from Fox News since the 2020 campaign (when Biden was hidden in his “basement”) about Biden’s “cognitive decline” and his struggle to “string two sentences together.” He has been routinely described since then as “senile,” as a man with “obviously declining mental faculties” who is “a cognitive mess, and he has no idea that today is Wednesday.” During the debt ceiling fight, Kevin McCarthy offered to bring “soft food” to the White House for Biden. After the debt deal, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) marveled that “Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants.”

There’s every reason to believe this “senile” old coot will outwit his Republican opponent in ’24.

Sargent: Democrats have won or outperformed in the last three national elections. Yet we’re still constantly running down rabbit holes into debates about why Dems suck so much at politics and how Trump continues to outfox them among working-class voters.

Democratic struggles with some working-class constituencies are real, but some proportion is in order here. MAGA continues to alienate a majority of the country.

Robinson: I’ve had a couple of occasions to spend extended periods of time with Biden, including a long chat on Air Force One, and I can attest that whatever else anybody thinks about him, he’s not senile. And I’ve seen him turn a scheduled quick half-hour of meet-and-greet with supporters into an hour-plus marathon, at the end of a long day, that exhausted aides half his age.

Dionne: Without formally breaking with either Clinton or Obama, Biden has moved the party’s policymaking past the consensus that influenced those earlier administrations. His appointments have given the party’s progressive wing a strong voice in areas such as labor rights, civil rights, trade and antitrust, even as he has kept the party’s more middle-ground legislators and voters on his side — by, for example, refusing to challenge the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain inflation (even if the administration devoutly hopes it lets up on rate increases).

And the president’s economic record turns out to be very good. Inflation has come down much faster than Biden’s critics expected, and the country has so far avoided the recession many of those detractors predicted. It’s a long way between now and November 2024, but at least for now, Biden has the better of the economic argument.

The age issue is obviously one of the right’s favorite talking points, but from my own encounters, I share Gene Robinson’s view that a picture of Biden as some sort of doddering old guy is flatly wrong. Biden is especially sharp when he turns to U.S. foreign policy and makes a persuasive case that the United States is now in a much stronger position in the world, partly because it is building alliances across Asia to contain China’s power. Foreign policy won’t decide the next election, but voters who have a sense of security are more likely to support the incumbent.

But realism requires coming to terms with the age issue anyway. Like it or not, Biden’s age will be brought into play whenever he makes a miscue or garbles a sentence or stumbles or looks less forceful — even if whatever is going wrong has nothing to do with his age. Beneath the surface, the Biden forces know it’s something they have to struggle with, not because of what Fox News commentators will say but because of conversations among not particularly ideological voters over back fences and in neighborhood cafes.

Bacon: If the Democrats’ only potential options for the 2024 ticket were: 1) Nominate Biden without a real primary; 2) Conduct a primary in which Harris would likely win without any serious challenge; 3) Conduct a primary in which Harris carried the Black primary vote overwhelmingly but lost to someone with a heavily White base (say Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg), I can see why the party kind of informally opted for No. 1. After all, Harris wasn’t a great candidate in 2019, few Black voters backed Buttigieg in that primary and Biden has the electoral advantages of being White, male and the incumbent president.

But I suspect there were two other potential outcomes, if Biden had announced in January that he was not seeking a second term: 4) Harris wins against a crowded primary field and in doing so demonstrates she is a strong candidate for a general election, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016; or 5) Harris runs but another candidate (say, Whitmer) builds a broad coalition and decisively defeats her in the primary.

So I am frustrated that Democrats are running a candidate who in my view is too conciliatory and centrist in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, but also a candidate whose centrism and conciliation isn’t being rewarded by centrist/independent/swing voters with more approval and support. Biden’s age makes his reelection really dicey — something voters keep saying in poll after poll but the Democratic Party has decided to ignore.

All that said, Biden has been fairly good on policy and would be much better than any of the Republicans running. So I will be voting for him next November without any hesitation. I think he has been a better president than Clinton or Obama. He has been less centrist and cautious than I expected. He has embraced the progressive thinking that emerged from 2013 to 2020, instead of being stuck in old ways. He has appointed some great judges, most notably Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He has also been very pro-labor and more skeptical of big business than other modern presidents.

The Democratic Party has moved in a more liberal direction — and Biden moved with the party. Great.

Waldman: The good news for Democrats is that, at the moment at least, they have so much going for them heading into 2024: a strong economy, a broadly popular agenda, and an opposition committed to a hateful politics that their base seems to want, but that a majority of the electorate finds repugnant.

Finally, you have the likely nomination of Trump, who cost the GOP the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. Everything that made people choose Biden over Trump three years ago — that Biden is a decent human being with conciliatory impulses who would govern in a responsible way — is no less true today than it was then. So for all the unease among Democrats (which Perry is absolutely right about), they’re in about as good a position as they could have hoped for.

Categories Biden, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Trump
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