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Democracy: Trump Is an Insurrectionist. The Supreme Court Gave Him a Pass.

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2024 //
106

Following a vigorous debate on the blog about the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Colorado‘a disqualification of Trump from the ballot, our reader Democracy reviews the article in The Atlantic by Laurence Tribe and Michael Luttig. (It is available on The Atlantic website for a free trial.)

Democracy writes:

I don’t know who titled the piece by Luttig and Tribe in The Atlantic, but I thought it was both brilliant and accurate. The title:

“Supreme Betrayal”

These are some of the most compelling passages in the article:

“What ought to have been, as a matter of the Constitution’s design and purpose, the climax of the struggle for the survival of America’s democracy and the rule of law instead turned out to be its nadir, delivered by a Court unwilling to perform its duty to interpret the Constitution as written. Desperate to assuage the growing sense that it is but a political instrument, the Court instead cemented that image into history. It did so at what could be the most perilous constitutional and political moment in our country’s history, when the nation and the Constitution needed the Court most—to adjudicate not the politics of law, but the law of the politics that is poisoning the lifeblood of America.”

Bam!

“As the extraordinary array of amicus briefs filed in Trump v. Anderson made clear, the voluminous historical scholarship exploring the origins of the disqualification clause and its intended operation left no genuine doubt that the Colorado Supreme Court got it exactly right in its decision explaining why the former president was ineligible to ‘hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,’ certainly including the presidency.

The Colorado Supreme Court entered into some extensive fact-finding in declaring Trump an insurrectionist. None of those facts has been questioned, even at the Supreme Court, where the justices just tiptoed around the factual issues and pretended they didn’t exist. Oh, but they did:

https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2021/01/07/front-pages-capture-chaos-riots-us-capitol/6577931002/

Back to Luttig and Tribe, and the three “liberal” justices:

“For Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—who wrote a separate concurrence that in parts read more like a dissent—we can only surmise that any discomfort they felt was outweighed by the extra-constitutional allure of going along with the other justices on the decision’s bottom line and thus enabling the nation’s electorate to work its will, rather than the Constitution’s. Those three justices took the opportunity to distance themselves from at least part of what the Court’s majority did by criticizing its ‘attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.’ Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson convincingly dispatched as ‘inadequately supported as they are gratuitous’ the majority’s unnecessary holdings that only Congress can enforce the disqualification clause and that Congress’s implementing legislation must satisfy the majority’s made-up insistence upon ‘congruence and proportionality.’ Those three justices left in tatters much that all the other justices, with the exception of Amy Coney Barrett, wrote about the operation of the disqualification clause against federal officeholders, making plain that the majority’s ‘musings’ simply cannot be reconciled with the Fourteenth Amendment’s language, structure, and history.”

Luttig and Tribe note clearly that there were two “majorities” in this case. There was the 9-0 majority, that some commenters here cling to, and there was the 5-4 majority that went w-a-y too far in insulating Trump from disqualification even though he IS an insurrectionist. And that 9-0 majority? Luttig and Tribe state that the step “that all nine justices took represents a constitutionally unforgivable departure from the fundamental truth of our republic that ‘no man is above the law.’ ”

And that Colorado decision?

“… the week-long trial by the Colorado state court, which had indisputable jurisdiction to consider the matter, undoubtedly more than satisfied the constitutional requirements for disqualifying the former president under Section 3. At that trial, he was afforded every opportunity to defend himself against the charge that he had personally ‘engaged’ in an ‘insurrection or rebellion’ against the Constitution. Not a single justice suggested that the process was less than what the former president was due. That trial ended in a finding by ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that he had not only engaged in that insurrection but had orchestrated the entire months-long effort to obstruct the joint session’s official proceeding, preventing the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history. Not a single justice suggested that a more stringent standard of proof was required or that the courts below applied an insufficiently rigorous definition of insurrection. No justice suggested that the First Amendment or anything else in the Constitution shielded the former president from the reach of Section 3.”

And yet they shielded him.

Luttig and Tribe conclude with this:

“Our highest court dramatically and dangerously betrayed its obligation to enforce what once was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy. The Supreme Court has now rendered that safety net a dead letter, effectively rescinding it as if it had never been enacted.”

I’m curious. Is there anyone commenting on this blog who genuinely believes that Trump is NOT an insurrectionist?

Categories Accountability, Elections, Justice, Trump

Laurence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig: The Supreme Court Should Not Have Ignored the Constitution

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2024 //
67

Laurence H. Tribe, the eminent professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School (Democrat), and Judge Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge (Republican), co-authored a lengthy article in The Atlantic, condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the Colorado Supreme Court, which removed Trump from the 2024 ballot.

It seemed, after the Court’s decision, that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendnent had been excised from the Constitution. But just yesterday the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a New Mexico man who was convicted for taking part in the January 6 insurrection.

Couy Griffin was convicted for his role as a member of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Because he previously served as a member of the Otero County board of commissioners, the courts in New Mexico said he was ineligible to hold office ever again. Griffin was a founder of Cowboys for Trump and an outspoken purveyor of lies about election fraud.

The Supreme Court concluded that states could disqualify persons from attempting to hold state offices, but Congress had to enact legislation to implement the disqualification of federal officials.

Since Congress is unlikely to muster a majority of both Houses—or 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster—oath-breaking insurrectionists will not be barred from seeking or holding federal offices.

One good thing: the Griffin decision implicitly agreed that the mob action of January 6 was an insurrection.

Last week, before the Griffin decision, Tribe and Littig wrote in The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.

In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the controversy before it, the Court was disappointingly unanimous in permitting oath-breaking insurrectionists, including former President Donald Trump, to return to power. In doing so, all nine justices denied “We the People” the very power that those who wrote and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment presciently secured to us to save the republic from future insurrectionists—reflecting a lesson hard-learned from the devastation wrought by the Civil War.

For a century and a half before the Court’s decision, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy, promising to automatically disqualify from public office all oath-breaking insurrectionists against the Constitution, deeming them too dangerous to entrust with power unless supermajorities of both houses of Congress formally remove their disability. This provision has been mistakenly described by some as “undemocratic” because it limits who may be elected to particular positions of power. But disqualification is not what is antidemocratic; rather, it is the insurrection that is antidemocratic, as the Constitution emphatically tells us.

In any event, all qualifications for office set by the Constitution limit who may be elected to particular positions of power. And no other of these disqualifications requires congressional legislation to become operative, as the Court now insists this one does. To be sure, the other qualifications—age, residence, natural-born citizenship—appear outside the Fourteenth Amendment, whose fifth section specifically makes congressional action to enforce its provisions available. But no such action is needed to enforce the rights secured to individuals by Section 1 of the same amendment, so deeming congressional action necessary to enforce Section 3 creates a constitutional anomaly in this case that the majority could not and did not explain. For that matter, no other provision of the other two Reconstruction amendments requires congressional enforcement either. As the concurring justices explained, the majority “simply [created] a special rule for the insurrection disability in Section 3.”

To read the rest of this brilliant article, open the link or subscribe to The Atlantic.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Trump

Michael Tomasky: Bloodbath-Gate, Trump-Style

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2024 //
20

Michael Tomasky writes for The New Republic. He understands that when Trump goes off-script, as he often does, he becomes incoherent. But whenever he can’t read the teleprompter, he goes to stream-of-consciousness and whatever he says is difficult to decipher. That’s because he tends not to speak in complete sentences and forgets what he was talking about. Trump is obsessed with doom and gloom. If he’s elected, America will be great again, but if he is not elected, the country will continue to be a “third-world country,” a cesspool of despair, a failed state. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, spoke of America as “a city on a hill,” “morning in America,” not a country trapped in “carnage.” Reagan tried to lift spirits. Trump aims to encourage desperation and fear. Trump’s dystopian perspective is always there. He can’t hide it.

Tomasky wrote:

Saturday afternoon, at yet another poorly attended rally in Ohio, Donald Trump spoke these shocking words: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country, that will be the least of it.”

As is always the case with a man who only finishes about every seventh sentence that he embarks upon, it’s hard on one level to make sense of what he said. In this short clip, you can see that he’s holding forth on the subject of cars and automobile factories. On Sunday, many outlets reported the “bloodbath” line without much in the way of context, which had MAGA world howling on X (f.k.a. Twitter).

CNN’s reporting added more context. Here’s the fuller quote from the CNN story: “We’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”

It does seem that, in that half-finished sentence, he was briefly heading in the direction of saying, “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole auto industry.” If he’d said that and stopped there, I’d agree that his words were being taken badly out of context.

Notably, he didn’t stop there. What made him say “that’s gonna be the least of it”? Where was he going, in that mildewed brain of his? He stopped himself mid-sentence. Why? Based on what he went on to say, it’s a reasonable guess that he stopped himself because the words that were about to come out of his mouth, “auto industry,” just weren’t big enough—weren’t aggressive enough. So he had to amplify it and make it more threatening. The auto-industry bloodbath, he said twice, will be the least of it. It will be a bloodbath “for the country.”

Still, maybe he only meant an economic bloodbath. In fact, that’s just typical Trump bluster—built as usual on lies. The Biden economy as we all know reeled from inflation in 2022 and 2023, and that overwhelmed the narrative. Beyond that, the 289,000 jobs gained per month during Biden’s term is the highest for any president in modern history. And I could offer similar huzzahs with respect to wages and GDP.

To drill down to the auto industry, it’s doing far better during Biden’s tenure than it did during Trump’s. In the first place, the auto industry under Trump lost jobs, but here we need to provide the fuller context that those losses came after the pandemic.

Nevertheless, even if we don’t count the pandemic against Trump, the Biden-era numbers easily top the Trump-era numbers. Trump’s pre-pandemic tally saw auto and parts manufacturing employment go up by 27,900. Under Biden, those two categories have gained 127,800 jobs.

Moreover, it shouldn’t go unmentioned that slapping hefty tariffs on certain imports might make for a great applause line at a rally. But outside of the sugar high that comes from that, they pave the way for retaliatory tariffs that hurt U.S. consumers. The U.S.-China Business Council, that well-known outpost of Marxist vermin, estimated in a 2021 study that Trump’s trade policies cost nearly 250,000 American jobs.

So much for the economic bloodbath if he’s not elected. But now let’s cut to the chase.

It is true that many outlets Sunday yanked the “bloodbath” remark out of context. But this is also true: Trump is the king of no context. He speaks in constant half-utterances, uncompleted thoughts, sentences constructed like straw huts in hurricane zones (“Nobody’s been treated like Trump, in terms of badly”), and even facial expressions and grunts…

So: Did Trump call for a bloodbath if he loses? No. However: Did Trump stop himself mid-sentence to broaden his indictment and deliberately use a phrase—not once but two times, for emphasis—that is ambiguous, open to dark interpretation? He most certainly did.

And having done that, he will now, at some future rally, get a little closer to just saying it. And then a little closer, and then a little closer still. By October—still probably without Trump ever saying it outright—the message will have been clearly communicated that any scenario that ends with Trump as the loser, even a clear-cut one that isn’t close enough to dispute, will be one in which the shedding of blood to water the tree of liberty will be necessary…

So let’s not exaggerate what Trump said Saturday. But let’s be clear—it wasn’t just car talk.

Categories Elections, Trump

George Conway: What Did Trump Mean When He Said “Bloodbath”?

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2024 //
32

There was some back-and-forth on the blog today about what Trump meant when he referred to a “bloodbath” in a campaign speech.

George Conway 3rd has a wonderful twitter feed. He is a great explainer of Trump.

He tweeted today about the confusion surrounding Trump’s use of the term “bloodbath.” Did he mean that there would be a bloodbath if Biden won? Or did he refer to a financial bloodbath if his plan to slap 100% tariffs on foreign cars was not enacted?

Conway tweeted the following:

There’s some commentary on here saying we should disregard Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks last night because he was talking about potential harms to the auto industry.

That is misguided. 1/x

Trump may well have been referring to a “bloodbath” in that industry. He’s sufficiently incoherent that, as is so often the case with him, it’s hard to tell one way or the other what exactly he’s talking about at any given moment. 2/x

I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or the danger he and his rhetoric pose. 3/x

What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil. 4/x

It’s a classic trait and technique of authoritarian demagogues. He catastrophizes everything to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them willing to do his bidding. 5/x

That’s dangerous all around because he’s encouraging them to believe that conditions are so bad or will become so bad, and that the political opposition is so awful, that anything is justified—including law-breaking and violence—to prevent those conditions and to destroy the opposition. 6/x

And so it doesn’t matter what he’s specifically referring to at the moment. He could be talking about trans people in public bathrooms or the state of the auto industry or the border—it doesn’t matter. 7/x

He’s a dangerous psychopath, and after more than eight years of watching his sick behavior, we must not give him the benefit of the doubt. 8/8 (end).

Categories Elections, Trump

The Myth of an “Immigrant Crime Wave”

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2024 //
48

Republicans have followed their cult leader Trump in raising alarms about an “immigrant crime wave.” Which, of course, is Biden’s fault.

But as Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria explain at their blog “Popular Information,” these claims are not true. In fact, the crime rate is lower among undocumented immigrants than it is among American citizens.

They write:

Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states. 

In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts. 

The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year. 

Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states. 

The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966. 

Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign. 

Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”

On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.

Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona. 

Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”

Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false. 

The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status. 

Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]

Categories Biden, Bigotry, Data, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Trump Predicts a “Bloodbath” if He Loses, Refers to Immigrants as “Not People,” “Animals”

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2024 //
35

Donald Trump is unhinged. He is running in desperation to stay out of prison. His desperation leads him to be insulting and vulgar towards anyone who stands in his way.

The New York Times reported on his latest speech, in Ohio:

Former President Donald J. Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.

With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.

The dark view resurfaced throughout his speech. While discussing the U.S. economy and its auto industry, Mr. Trump promised to place tariffs on cars manufactured abroad if he won in November. He added: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”

For nearly 90 minutes outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Mr. Trump delivered a discursive speech, replete with attacks and caustic rhetoric. He noted several times that he was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.

The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.

If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”

Mr. Trump also stoked fears about the influx of migrants coming into the United States at the southern border. As he did during his successful campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump used incendiary and dehumanizing language to cast many migrants as threats to American citizens.

He asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”

Categories Elections, Immigration, Trump

Mary Trump: The Hilarity of the Robert Hur Hearing

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2024 //
33

I watched clips of yesterday’s hearings about the report of Robert Hur, who was selected by Merrick Garland to be Special Counsel to investigate Biden and documents found in his home and offices. The big takeaway from his voluminous report was that he considered Biden’s memory to be weak and that a jury would treat him as a kindly old man with a poor memory.

Republicans wanted to use the hearings to demonstrate that Biden is senile. Democrats wanted to use the hearings to show that Trump has a worse memory than Biden and that—unlike Biden— he willfully retained top-secret documents and refused to return them.

Hur resigned from the Department of Justice the day before the hearing and hired a Trump insider to represent him.

Mary Trump includes in her post the video introduced by Eric Swalwell. It shows Trump in numerous gaffes, memory lapses, and moments of incoherence. Trump later claimed all the clips were generated by AI.

Not included is the question posed by Eric Swalwell that was shown last night on Laurence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show. Swallwell read the transcript of Hur’s interview and quoted it. At one point, the transcript says, Hur observed that Biden had “a photographic memory” of the layout of his home. Not a sign of a poor memory. Apparently the transcript portrayed Biden differently than Hur’s report.

One of the Republicans read the dictionary definition of senile and asked Hur if he believed Biden was senile. Hur did not.

The question I kept wondering was why Merrick Garland thought that it was a good idea to select a trusted Trump appointee to investigate Biden.

Categories Bias, Democrats, Elections, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Contrast Biden and Trump As They Campaign

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
20

This brief news clip provides a sharp contrast between Biden and Trump.

Biden talks about substance and issues. Trump mocks Biden’s stutter. We are reminded of the event in 2016 when Trump ridiculed a journalist with a disability.

Categories Biden, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Politics, Trump

Jay Kuo: Katie Britt’s Disgusting Lie about Border Security

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2024 //
33

Blogger Jay Kuo provides context and detail for Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s lie about a woman who was sex-trafficked in Mexico twenty years ago, which Senator Britt blamed on Biden. Kuo does not mention the irony of pinning sex crimes on President Biden when her own party’s nominee was convicted of sexual assault and accused of sexual assault by another twenty women. Trump just posted a bond of $100 million for the woman whom he sexually assaulted and repeatedly defamed.

Jay Kuo writes:

By now you’ve probably heard the news: Sen. Katie Britt’s rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union was not just a painfully bad theatrical performance, one worthy of an SNL cold open by none other than Scarlett Johansson. It also contained at its core a bold-faced lie: that a sex trafficking victim, who was raped repeatedly at age 12, had met with Sen. Britt and was a stark example of Biden’s failed border policies.

The lie was surfaced quickly by freelance journalist Jonathan Katz, a reporter with “years of experience as an Associated Press foreign correspondent in Haiti and Mexico, where he covered things that would make Katie Britt cry real tears,” according to reporting by AL.com. Katz quickly proved that the sexual trafficking and rapes referenced by Senator Britt took place 20 years ago—during the George W. Bush administration. They also took place not in the United States, as Britt had all but declared, but rather in Mexico, and far from the border.

It took a bit of asking from folks online why mainstream media had not picked up such an important story, but in a report finally published on Saturday, the Washington Post was able to confirm the gist of Katz’s reporting. The woman whose story was relayed by Sen. Britt before the entire nation was Karla Jacinto Romero, according to a confirmation by Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director. 

Romero is a sexual trafficking victims’ rights advocate. Her story is widely known. In fact, she testified before Congress in 2015 about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008—again, back when George W. Bush was president. Yet Sen. Britt took that story and made it one about the border, which it most certainly was not.

In today’s piece, I’ll focus on three things: 

  • A breakdown of the dangerous deception perpetrated by Sen. Britt, following the analysis of Katz and the Washington Post;
  • The moral depravity it takes not just to lie this way but to actually exploit the story of a sexual trafficking victim for political gain; and
  • The deep irony at the heart of Sen. Britt’s emotional plea that we pay attention to stories like the one she told America.

Sen. Britt willfully scammed the American public

It’s hard to forget the moment when Sen. Britt first brought up the story of a woman who, at the age of 12, had been repeatedly raped by cartels. Here were her words on Thursday night before a national audience of millions, fake emotion crackling in her voice:

We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

After Sen. Britt was called out for connecting this story somehow to President Biden, reporters began asking her office to confirm a few things. Even with some pressing, her communications director insisted in a written statement that the “story Senator Britt told was 100% correct.” 

That’s why we need to unpack the rhetorical jujitsu Sen. Britt deployed to achieve this deception.

As the Washington Post observed, the story above unfolds in five parts.

• She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.

• Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.

• At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”

• She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”

• She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

And yet, Biden, the border and the cartels had nothing to do with Romero. According to her testimony, cited by the Post, after her mother threw her out of the house, a pimp took advantage of her, and she spent four years in a brothel, escaping at age 16. 

Nor was Romero ever trafficked across the border to the U.S. Instead, she was the victim of sexual tourism, with “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.” That is horrifying in its own way, but decidedly not about the border.

As Jonathan Katz noted in his now viral TikTok video about Britt’s lies, the senator had made it seem like she had met the woman “sitting by the banks of the Rio Grande, … holding her hand … getting her to tell her the story that she won’t tell anyone else.” In fact, Britt met Romero at a press conference organized by three GOP women senators, including Britt, and a Fox News reporter known for inflammatory pieces on immigration.

Sen. Britt tried to scam the entire nation by trying to spin a story from two decades ago about a child victim of sexual tourism into a story today about Biden’s failed policies, sex trafficking across the border, and cartels. For that, the Washington Post gave her four Pinocchios—its worst rating, a real whopper.

Stolen pain and fear-mongering

It takes a complete absence of a moral compass to leverage someone else’s tragic story—one she has carried for decades and made her life’s mission to tell others—into a tool for raw and cynical political gain. But that’s what Sen. Britt did, perhaps because, as the New York Times observed in its follow-up piece, “As a rhetorical device, it would be hard [to] conjure up a more powerful and resonant example.”

The Times found Romero and interviewed her directly about how she felt knowing her story was being leveraged by Britt for entirely different, political purposes. Because we as a nation owe Romero an apology for allowing our dysfunctional politics to overtake and derail her important work, I want to highlight what she told the paper:

Ms. Jacinto, who spoke with the Times Saturday from Mexico, said she had not been informed ahead of time that Ms. Britt would be discussing her in the speech and only learned about it after a video pointing out the deceptive framing of the senator’s speech was posted by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday.

“I only found out via social media,” said Ms. Jacinto, who continues to speak frequently about human trafficking and who is supported by a U.S.-based nonprofit, Reintegra, that provides educational grants to victims of sex trafficking in Latin America. “I thought it was very strange.”

She said she preferred to keep politics out of the question of human trafficking. “I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking and I don’t think it should be political,” she said. “The work I do is not a game.” 

Not a game, indeed. U.S. voters, particularly suburbanites who are looking at the question of immigration more closely now and assessing the positions of both parties, may begin to understand the extent to which the GOP is sensationalizing the issue. 

Already, the Republicans have pressed the tragic story of Georgia student Laken Riley, who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant, as far as they can, mentioning her at every opportunity and even inviting her family to meet with Trump at his recent rally in the state. The point of this is clear: The GOP now seeks to paint all migrants with the same broad unfair brush of criminality. This of course defies government statistics showing that migrants commit fewer crimes than non-migrants and that there is no evidence of the “migrant crime wave” that the Republicans and Fox have raised repeatedly. Instead, crime rates in cities where migrants have been heading are actually down, which would be an inconvenient fact for the GOP narrative if facts actually ever mattered to their base.

Republicans also appear to care far more about this one death, horrific as it is, than about the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by their other policies, from vaccine denialism to their failure to enact sensible gun restrictions. It means, simply put, that they don’t really care about Riley. They just find her death at the hands of a migrant useful.

The cynicism and hypocrisy is breathtaking.

The ultimate irony

I want to close by highlighting a glaring contradiction within Sen. Britt’s rebuttal. On the one hand, she begs us to think of victims like Romero who are suffering, she claims, from being trafficked across our border and sexually assaulted and exploited.

But the logical conclusion of that plea is that we should show more compassion in our asylum laws for women like she described. Instead, Britt supports the kinds of draconian policies that would deny legal protection to sex trafficking victims. 

As former Congressmember Tom Malinowski noted,

It’s not just that Katie Britt’s story was false (since the woman she cited was trafficked by cartels within Mexico). 

It’s that the border policy she supports would be to send victims like that back to Mexico into the hands of the cartels, with no chance to seek asylum.

The recent House election in NY-3, where the positions of the parties on immigration were tested before voters, proved that Republicans don’t automatically have a winning hand when it comes to the border. This is especially true now that the GOP has rejected the only bipartisan solution to the issue, all because Donald Trump wants to keep wielding it as a political weapon. 

It is incumbent upon the media, the public, and our Democratic leaders to call out the cheap ploys and race-baiting that Trump, Britt and the rest of the GOP deploy to rile up the public, all while doing nothing to actually fix the problem.

As President Biden said in his State of the Union, we can fight about fixing the border, or we can fix it. All that GOP officials like Sen. Britt offer are more lies, rank hypocrisy and fear. And those have never led to sound policies or solutions, just more division and anxiety

Categories Biden, Elections, Lies, Trump

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Why Trump Humiliates Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2024 //
17

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor at New York University who specializes in the study of authoritarian leaders. Here she writes about how Trump enjoys humiliating those he has defeated. The more he insults them, the more they grovel. Cases in point: Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham.

She writes:

Authoritarian politicians are fragile and insecure creatures, always looking over their shoulders to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter potential challengers, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand. They apply this same vicious treatment even to their most loyal collaborators, so that no one ever feels safe and thus everyone continues to act in a slavish manner. Throughout history, such leaders have never lacked a steady supply of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play this game, even to the detriment of their dignity. The Donald Trump-era GOP is the latest example.

Trump has used ritual humiliation to make the GOP his personal tool, and the list of Republicans he has mocked publicly is long. In classic autocratic tradition, the more submissive Republican elites are with Trump — supporting him through impeachments, indictments and a coup attempt that sent them running for their lives — the more he openly scorns them, losing few opportunities to cut them down.

Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight.

When Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the former GOP presidential candidate, showed up at Trump’s victory rally after a January campaign stop in New Hampshire, he might have thought he would earn points. Instead, Trump scorned him: “Did you ever think [Haley] actually supported you, Tim?” a smirking Trump said, referring to Nikki Haley’s pledge to support Trump if he becomes the GOP nominee. “And you’re the senator of her state. … You must really hate her,” Scott’s response? “I just love you,” he told Trump.

“That’s why he’s a great politician,” Trump declared with a self-satisfied smile.

Since then, Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight. “I’m far better encouraging and being excited and motivated for President Trump than I was for myself,” Scott said after voting in the South Carolina primary. And at the post-primary rally, he assured the audience that he would keep his speech short because “the longer I speak, the less you hear of him.”

Scott might seem to win the award for bowing and scraping. But his fellow senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, is giving him some stiff competition. Graham is forever paying for the sin of criticizing Trump in 2016. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed……and we will deserve it,” Grahamtweeted in May 2016; he also called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.”

Scholars use the term “hollowed out” to describe institutions that lose their independence in autocracies when they have been purged of anyone who is not loyal to the leader. But individuals who collaborate with authoritarians can end up hollowed out, too, bereft of their morals and their self-esteem. This is what has happened to Graham.

Graham is a former military lawyer and national security hawk (including on Russia), but his main cause now seems to be defending Trump, to the point of reversing his view expressed after Jan. 6 that presidential conduct is subject to American law. Since that opinion clashed with Trump’s claim that he should have presidential immunity for everything and anything he has done, including inciting an insurrection, Graham’s opinion could not stand.

Politicians who play the leader’s ritual humiliation game may think that if they show him enough public support, at the right moments, their past indiscretions will be forgotten. That is never the case. Even worse, the politician can find that he or she has become the enemy of the leader’s rabid followers, as well.

That’s the situation of Graham, booed regularly at Trump rallies by MAGA members, including in his home state, as though all of his slavish behavior to Trump has meant nothing to them. At a July rally with Trump, Graham was jeered and called a “traitor” by the crowd, prompting Trump to give him a halfhearted compliment (“he’s there when you need him”) while also promising the crowd he would get Graham “straightened up.”

And lest there be any doubts that Trump intended this display of debasement, he pulled the same move after Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Though Graham called Trump “the most qualified man to be president,” audience members booed him. The former president, playing the enlightened despot, once again assured his minions that “I love him, he’s a good man.” 

Scott may have mastered the philosophy of ritual humiliation — I am nothing, my leader is everything, and everyone should know it — but Graham’s journey provides the stuff of a morality tale.

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Categories Cruelty, Elections, Trump
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