We first heard the term “destroy the administrative state” when Steve Bannon used it in 2015 and 2016. Bannon, a close advisor to Trump, viewed the federal government as a danger to life and liberty. Now, Trump supporters echo that language, and it still sounds bizarre. They may be relying on Social Security and Medicare, they may be drinking clean water and breathing fresh air thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they may enjoy daily safety and security thanks to federal regulations, but they are prepared to toss all of it overboard.
They want to get the administrative state out of our lives, except that they don’t. They want the state to control women’s bodies, to limit parental rights to seek medical care for their children, and to control what we can read and what entertainment we can see. They want frozen embryos and fetuses in utero to be declared children, with all the rights of personhood. They want women and girls to be forced to give birth, even if their pregnancy was caused by rape or uncest, even if it endangers the woman’s life, even if the fetus has fatal deficiencies.
No organization has been more influential than the Heritage Foundation in stoking hostility to the Federal government. This venerable D.C. think tank is now planning the second Trump administration.
Here is another link. The section on the federal role in education starts on page 351.
Trump’s allies believe that his ambitious goals in his first term were stymied by career bureaucrats. So they recommend that his first act must be to reorganize the civil service, removing job protections from civil servants, enabling Trump to replace civil servants with Trump loyalists. It’s worth remembering that the civil service was created to eliminate the “spoils system,” the routine practice of filling government jobs with political cronies. Every president currently has thousands of political jobs to fill, but the core functions of government are staffed by experienced civil servants who serve regardless of the party in power.
The Heritage plan would enhance the powers of the President. Every government agency would be staffed by his loyalists. The Justice Department would no longer enjoy a measure of independence; instead it would serve the President. If he wanted to use it to persecute his political enemies, he could. He could carry out his pledges to jail Hillary Clinton and the Biden family. His Justice Department, led by a Trump attorney (Jeff Clark? Robert Hur? Alina Habba?) would follow proper procedures, arrest Trump’s enemies, and charge them with something or other.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.
“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking….
The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.
There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
As Politico described it, the Project 2025 plan is the product of numerous rightwing groups that are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy— Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Haley kept it close: independent voters made up 22 percent of the electorate and she won them 62-37. South Carolina is an open primary, so this was a case of independents showing up to vote against Trump in a meaningless contest. That’s bad news for him.
Among people who thought the economy was either “good” (Haley +73) or “not so good” (Haley +1) Haley fought Trump to better than a draw.
This matters because Biden’s theory of the case is that the economy is good and people are going to recognize that. If Biden can even get voters to “ehhh, the economy is not so good,” suddenly voters are much less receptive to Trump.
Haley beat Trump by +9 with voters with a college degree. That’s expected, but still a point of weakness.
Not expected: Among married Republicans Trump was only +3. In recent elections, married voters have been a huge area of strength for Republicans—Trump was +7 among marrieds in 2020. South Carolina shows us that half of a core Republican bloc is turning out to vote against Trump even when his opponent has no chance of winning. Not great for him.
But it keeps getting worse: Nearly a third of the voters said that Trump isn’t fit to serve as president and Haley won them by Saddam Hussein numbers.
Last data point, which is something I’ve been fixated on since I did The Focus Group a couple weeks ago: Among voters who believe that Trump lost in 2020, his numbers are ghastly.
Important to note: 36 percent of the electorate said that yes, Biden won fair and square. And with those people, Haley was +64.¹
I am growing convinced that forcing Trump to claim that he actually won in 2016—and belaboring that point over and over and over again—is a key to victory in 2024. When people see Trump lying about something they know isn’t true, it pits him against them, makes the relationship between Trump and the voter adversarial. The voters say, “Wait a minute, this guy is trying to scam me.”
And Trump is trapped because he’s so committed to the Big Lie that he can’t back down from it now.
Dan Rather analyzed Trump’s primary wins and spots signs that he is vulnerable because his well-defined base is limited. Due to his extremism, he is not able to have a big tent that would attract independents and even dissident Democrats. Even more telling is that Trump is not unifying the Republican Party. As soon as Trump won the South Carolina, he proclaimed that he had never seen the Republican Party more united. As Rather explains, that’s not really true.
He writes:
NBC’s “Meet The Press” this morning characterized Donald Trump’s South Carolina primary victory as “delivering a crushing blow to [Nikki] Haley in her home state on Saturday, trouncing her by 20 points with nearly 60 percent of the vote. The former president dominated nearly every key group.”
While he did indeed win handily, a deep dive into the numbers provides some interesting context.
The part of the story missing from many news reports is that Trump is slipping from his 2020 numbers. His support is strongest among his MAGA base, which pollsters put at no more than 33% of the electorate. Clearly, he will need more than MAGA to win the White House again.
President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary with 96.2% of the vote. Trump, who is essentially an incumbent up against a novice at running for national office, could not muster even 60% of his party’s vote. Exit polls from Saturday night should have GOP leaders nervous.
The makeup of South Carolina’s Republican voters does not mirror the country. They are heavily weighted with hard-right “conservatives,” older, white, male, evangelical election deniers. Trump won overwhelmingly among them. But Haley won among independents, moderates, and those who care about foreign policy. And that’s the crux of it.
To win the presidency again, Trump will need to bring all Republicans into the tent. Gallop estimates that 41% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Then it gets really tough. He has to convince a large number of independents and Democrats to vote for him. But how?
Not by favoring a 16-week national abortion ban
Not by threatening to pull out of NATO
Not by defunding Ukraine and supporting Putin’s invasion
Not by promising “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his political opponents
Not by refusing to accept the results of elections he’s lost
Not by promising to be a dictator on day one of his second term
Not by saying things like: “These are the stakes of this election. Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me.”
Trump is winning primaries while underperforming. Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Obama and current host of “Pod Save America,” writes: “You cannot win the White House with the coalition that Trump is getting in these primaries. He must expand his coalition, persuade people who aren’t already on board and get beyond the Big Lie-believing MAGA base. Through three primary contests, Trump has gained no ground.”
Polls also indicate a majority of voters in swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he’s convicted of a crime. That could happen as soon as April or May.
As Axios writes: “If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.” Fortunately, it is not. America is a rich tapestry of heritages, races, and creeds. Immigrants have long been one of our strengths.
But the likely GOP nominee continues to feed fears about immigration using language tailored to his MAGA base. “They’re coming from Asia, they’re coming from the Middle East, coming from all over the world, coming from Africa, and we’re not going to stand for it … They’re destroying our country,” Trump said Saturday at CPAC, a conference of extreme-right Trump supporters.
“No, Mr. Trump, they’re not,” is the answer of many Americans. There is strong public opinion that what is tearing our country apart is the divisiveness and rancor that comes from Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media machine.
The mainstream press may begin to offer more of this context and perspective as we get deeper into the presidential campaign. One of the things Steady was created to do was offer reasoned context and perspective to news stories. This writing is an example.
Trump remains a real and present threat to win the presidency again in November. But that is not assured. Not nearly, as a deep analysis of early primary results indicates.
There is still a long way to go and many rivers to cross for both major candidates.
Thom Hartmann connects the dots: the Republican Party is now controlled by Vladimir Putin. The Republicans do only what is in the interest of Putin. His goal, as it was in 2016 and 2020, is to get Trump elected. Trump is subservient to Putin. Trump wants to block American aid to Putin. So does House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called a two-week recess as Ukrainian forces are running out of ammunition. How do you define GOP these days? Guardians of Putin? Goons of Putin? Other ideas?
Thom Hartmann
There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy.
Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.
Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off US aid to Ukraine.
The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”
Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who’d been feeding this phony info to “Gym” Jordan and James “Gomer Pyle” Comer is now in jail.
Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the US political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending US aid to the democracy they’ve brutally attacked.
And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda.
Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it’s becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump.
I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it weren’t for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He’d burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino.
As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policymagazine:
“By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.”
He’d been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find.
No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future.
He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis.
He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who’d been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.”
As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018:
“The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.”
Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia.
Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower.
Putin’s personal troll army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president.
Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook.
Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”
A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:
“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.
“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.
“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African-Americans.’ …
“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.
“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.
“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”
Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all mictotargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.
So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House.
Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States.
They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the US economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US.
They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions.
Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea.
Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words.
Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump.
— When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid?
— Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform?
— Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”?
— Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin?
— Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden?
— Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did?
Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?
Robert B. Hubbell writes a sensible blog about politics today. In this post, he eviscerates the proposal by Ezra Klein of The New York Times that Biden should step down before the Democratic National Convention and let the delegates choose a replacement.
Why should he step down? Because of his age.
Why should he stay in the race? Because he has been an excellent President, and he is the Democratic Party’s best candidate to beat Trump. Because Biden is wise and thoughtful, and Trump is neither. Because Biden respects the Constitution and Trump does not. Because Biden wants to defend democracy, and Trump does not. Because Biden understands the value of international alliances, and Trump wants to destroy them.
Hubbell writes:
Republicans and Russian trolls and bot farms will continue to spread disinformation about President Joe Biden to an eager American press and the surprisingly insecure American public. The report of special counsel Robert Hur has caused otherwise sober Democratic supporters and observers to consider a terrible proposal by Ezra Klein that Joe Biden drop out at the Democratic convention and anoint a different Democratic candidate who will begin campaigning for the presidency with three months to go and a ten-point deficit (at least). For my views on Klein’s proposal, read on!
Ezra Klein creates a small panic in the Democratic Party.
I received a steady stream of emails over the weekend asking me to comment on Klein’s proposal—something I did at length in Friday’s newsletter. (Always a puzzler when that happens; I try not to take offense.) Most of the emails commented favorably on Ezra Klein’s proposal. Others who support Biden and recognize that it would be terribly risky to switch from Biden at the last moment want to have a “respectful conversation” about the idea of Biden dropping out.
Expletive deleted! (Rhymes with “bulls-eye” and “base-hit.”)
At root, Klein’s idea credits the falsehood being promoted by Robert Hur, Trump, Fox News, and Putin’s army of bots that Joe Biden is incompetent to hold the presidency. We cannot fall for the false narrative that Joe Biden is unfit merely because he is 80 and is not the same person he was at 70 or 60 or 40 or 30.
Worse, having a ‘respectful public conversation’ about the proposal allows Republicans to change the narrative from the fascist rhetoric that Trump is spewing each day to a made-up controversy that is the functional equivalent of the “But her emails . . . ” fake controversy that the press swallowed hook, line, and sinker in 2016.
Every second people spend talking about Ezra Klein’s ridiculous idea is a second that we are not discussing Trump’s threat to abandon NATO, round up millions of immigrants, turn the FBI into a political hit squad, jail Joe Biden’s family, banrefugees from Gaza, begin “strong ideological screening of all immigrants, reboot his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority nations, and start his presidency as a “dictator for a day” (which, by the way, is the same thing as “a dictator,” because once you overthrow the Constitution to become a dictator, you cannot repair that wound.)
For example, at a rally over the weekend, Trump said the following:
I’m also going to indemnify all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the US to protect them from being destroyed by the radical left . . . Once [criminals] see things happening that they never thought would happen to them, it’ll all stop overnight.
Let’s unpack Trump’s statement. He promises that he will protect and hold harmless (i.e., indemnify) police officers who “do things” to criminals “they never thought would happen to them,” a clear reference to police brutality. Trump is proposing a jack-booted police force that uses violence “with impunity” against “criminals” who have yet to be convicted of any crimes!
Every American citizen, media outlet, and political writer—including Ezra Klein—should spend every waking minute from now until November 5, 2024 telling anyone who will listen that Trump has proposed the creation of the equivalent of the Nazi Brown Shirts—a thuggish paramilitary that used violence and intimidation to fuel Hitler’s rise to power.
Trump’s threat to “indemnify” law enforcement for doing “things criminals never thought would happen to them” is not in the same universe of concern about the fake controversy over Joe Biden’s age. Every minute wasted on Joe Biden’s age is a minute not talking about Trump’s promise to unleash a violent police force on presumed-to-be-innocent-until-proven-guilty American citizens.
Many observers will say, “But Trump doesn’t really mean it. He can’t indemnify police officers from brutality.” Okay, I accept the argument: Trump is, therefore, spewing despotic fantasies that have no grounding in reality—a profound form of mental illness incompatible with being president of the U.S. And yet, sober Democrats who support Joe Biden want to waste our time asking to consider having a “respectful” conversation about Joe Biden’s age.
Those “sober Democrats” are doing Trump’s (and Putin’s) work, even if their intentions are pure and patriotic.
The flaws in the plan are too numerous to catalog, but here are a few:
Every replacement candidate (except one) starts with a 10 to 12 percentage point deficit to Trump, whereas Joe Biden is polling (at least) even with Trump. As Simon Rosenberg wrote on Sunday,
This week’s independent general election polling of registered voters finds a close, competitive race (Biden-Trump): Emerson 44-45 Economist/YouGov 44-44 Morning Consult 42-43 And a reminder that Biden led 47-45 (2 pts) in last NYTimes poll.
But in polling done in February, Gavin Newsom trails Trump by 10 points and Gretchen Whitmer trails by 12 points. (So far as I can tell, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro isn’t being polled nationally, only in Pennsylvania.)
But guess who is within striking distance of Trump (3 points)? Vice President Kamala Harris—who is never mentioned by readers who suggest that it is a good idea for Biden to step aside.
Why pass over the candidate in the strongest position (according to polls) to succeed Joe Biden in favor of candidates who sit at the bottom of a deep gravity well? I will let the readers suggesting the “Biden steps aside strategy” answer that question, but Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo describes what would happen if Biden steps aside and Kamala Harris is passed over:
I think if Biden stepped aside and then Harris was passed over, that would be like lighting a stick of dynamite at the center of the Democratic coalition.
There are no easy or obvious answers, but plenty of bad ones. Ezra Klein’s proposal pretends that none of the bad answers exist.
Finally, there are no “party bosses” to manage the Democratic Party’s selection process if Biden were to step aside. With no primary election results to guide the process, the 72-hour race on the convention floor for the nomination would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”
So, please, can we stop talking about the Ezra Klein strategy? It is a horrible idea because Joe Biden is a strong candidate who is an incumbent president with a phenomenal track record of success. He has the wisdom and experience to guide the nation through a difficult time. And he beat Donald Trump in 2020. He can do so in 2024.
The last point (even though I said “finally” above), is that it is incredibly disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands of Americans working their tails off to elect Joe Biden to suggest that their work is part of a big game of, “Just kidding, made you look!” They believe in Joe Biden and are willing to work hard for him because they believe in him. Let’s not abuse their well-placed trust in and admiration for Joe Biden.
READ NOW: Former President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson discuss 2024 strategy during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “Not only are we going to grow the majority in 2024, but with President Trump leading the charge, we are going to take back the White House too.” – Speaker Johnson Read more about their plans here: 2024wave.org/4XUtM8
While Ukrainians are running low on ammunition, the House of Representatives has not passed the authorization to supply them with more arms to defend their nation. Speaker Johnson, who is part of the extrenist Freedom Caucus, says he will not bring the bipartisan Senate bill to a vote. If enough members of both parties vote for a discharge petition, the bill would be voted on and very likely passed.
Meanwhile, Speaker Johnson is having fun with his hero.
Heather Cox Richardson brings us back to that terrible day two years ago when Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine. He expected the government to collapse within a matter of days or weeks. Yet Ukraine stands. Entire cities, such as Mariupol, have been obliterated. The inhabitants of towns such as Bucha were subjected to murders, rapes, and torture. Yet Ukraine stands. Europe supports Ukraine because they fear what Putin will do next. Will he storm Poland or Lithuania? The extreme right wing of the GOP has turned against funding Ukraine because Trump, their cult leader, is opposed. As usual, he will do thing to offend his very good friend Putin.
Richardson wrote:
Two years ago today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky made a passionate plea to the people of Russia, begging them to avoid war. He gave the speech in Russian, his own primary language, and, reminding Russians of their shared border and history, told them to “listen to the voice of reason”: Ukrainians want peace.
“You’ve been told I’m going to bomb Donbass,” he said. “Bomb what? The Donetsk stadium where the locals and I cheered for our team at Euro 2012? The bar where we drank when they lost? Luhansk, where my best friend’s mom lives?” Zelensky tried to make the human cost of this conflict clear. Observers lauded the speech and contrasted its statesmanship with the ramblings in which Putin had recently engaged.
And yet Zelensky’s speech stood only as a marker. Early the next day, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” involving dozens of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities before dawn. He claimed in a statement that was transparently false that he needed to defend the people in the “new republics” within Ukraine that he had recognized two days before from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for “demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.
Putin called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian invasion. He planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating, and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The operation was intended to be lightning fast.
But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded:
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
That statement echoes powerfully two years later as Ukraine continues to stand against Russia’s invasion but now quite literally needs ammunition, as MAGA Republicans in Congress are refusing to take up a $95 billion national security supplemental measure that would provide aid to Ukraine.
Instead, Republicans spent the day insisting that they do not oppose in vitro fertilization, the popular reproductive healthcare measure that the Alabama Supreme Court last Friday endangered by deciding that a fertilized human egg was a child—what they called an “extrauterine” child—and that people can be held legally responsible for destroying them. Since the decision, Alabama healthcare centers have halted their IVF programs out of fear of prosecution for their handling of embryos.
Republicans who oppose abortion have embraced the idea that life begins at conception, an argument that leads naturally to the definition of IVF embryos as children. But this presents an enormous problem for Republicans, whose antiabortion stance is already creating warning signs for 2024. Today a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) noted that 86% of the people they polled support increased, not reduced, access to IVF procedures.
The good news for the Republicans is that their frantic defense of IVF means that the media has largely stopped talking about the news of just two days ago, the fact that the man whose testimony congressional Republicans relied on to launch an impeachment process against President Joe Biden turned out to be working with Russian operatives. House leaders have quietly deleted from their House Impeachment website the Russian disinformation that previously was central to their case against Biden.
But today, as Republican House members remain on vacation, President Biden announced new sanctions against Russia, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was in Ukraine, where he challenged House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to pass the national security supplemental bill. “The weight of history is on his shoulders,” Schumer told reporters in Lviv. “If he turns his back on history, he will regret it in future years.”
“Two years,” Ukraine president Zelensky wrote today. “We are all here…. Together with representatives of Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Egypt, Estonia, the EU, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, the Holy See, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Thailand, Türkiye, the UAE, the United Kingdom, the USA, Viet Nam, as well as international organisations….”
Christian Nationalists are already preparing for their roles in a second Trump administration. It is ironic that the religious zealots cluster around one of the most non religious figures in American life. I recall an anecdote from the book by Trump’s “fixer”Michael Cohen, when a group of evangelical Christians meets with Trump and lay their hands on him, all together. When the earnest group leaves, Trump laughs with Cohen. They both know that he’s a master con man, and he conned them.
Politico writes:
An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.
Christian nationalists in America believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life. As the country has become less religious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.
CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House. Two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, said that Vought hopes his proximity and regular contact with the former president — he and Trump speak at least once a month, according to one of the people — will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term.
The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”
Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.
Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”
Two elderly men are running for President this year. One is 81, the other is 77. Both of them make verbal mistakes, confusing one name for another or mixing up dates. Most of us, regardless of our age, have done the same. We usually call our mistakes “gaffes.”
Being President of the United States is not a television game show; what matters most is not instantaneous recall, but the ability to choose seasoned staff and to make wise decisions. For a President, judgment is what matters most.
Recently, a neuroscientist wrote about memory and aging in the New York Times and tried to clarify the issues. Charan Ranganath is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California.
Dr. Ranganath wrote:
Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, in which he declined to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified documents, also included a much-debated assessment of Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities.
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets. In fact, most of the details of our lives — the people we meet, the things we do and the places we go — will inevitably be reduced to memories that capture only a small fraction of those experiences.
It is normal to be more forgetful as you get older. Broadly speaking, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential depending on the reasons it occurred.
There is forgetting and there is Forgetting. If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.
Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting.
Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting. Calling up the date that an event occurred, like the last year of Mr. Biden’s vice presidency or the year of his son’s death, is a complex measure of memory. Remembering that an event took place is different than being able to put a date on when it happened, the latter of which is more challenging with increased age. The president very likely has many memories of both periods of his life, even though he could not immediately pull up the date in the stressful (and more immediately pressing) context of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Other “memory” issues highlighted in the media are not so much cases of forgetting as they are of difficulties in the articulation of facts and knowledge. For instance, in July 2023, Mr. Biden mistakenly stated in a speech that “we have over 100 people dead,” when he should have said, “over one million.” He has struggled with a stutter since childhood, and research suggests that managing a stutter demands prefrontal resources that would normally enable people to find the right word or at least quickly correct errors after the fact.
Americans are understandably concerned about the advanced age of the two top contenders in the coming presidential election (Mr. Biden is 81 and Donald Trump is 77), although some of these concerns are rooted in cultural stereotypes and fears around aging. The fact is that there is a huge degree of variability in cognitive aging. Age is, on average, associated with decreased memory, but studies that follow up the same person over several years have shown that, although some older adults show precipitous declines over time, other “super-agers” remain as sharp as ever.
Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about their cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.
I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job. Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal or greater importance.
Ultimately, we are due for a national conversation about what we should expect in terms of the cognitive and emotional health of our leaders.
And that should be informed by science, not politics
Heather Cox Richardson writes about the ascendancy of “the Putin wing of the Republican Party.” It’s headed, of course, by Donald Trump, who remains deferential to Putin. He continued to compare himself to Navalny, who was murdered by Putin, since he thinks of his trials as akin to Navalny’s experience.
Aid to Ukraine is stalled in the House of Representatives, where Marjorie Taylor Greene leads the opposition.
Richardson writes:
Both global and national affairs appeared to shift over the holiday weekend. Events of the past week or so highlighted the global stakes of not stopping the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In turn, those global stakes highlighted that Trump’s MAGA Republicans are strengthening Putin’s hand.
Since October, MAGA Republicans have managed to delay a national security supplemental bill that would provide additional aid to Ukraine. Although a bipartisan majority of Congress supports the measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recessed the House on Thursday without taking it up, just days after former president Trump attacked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and suggested he would urge Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to U.S. allies if they didn’t meet a guideline of spending 2% of their gross domestic product on their own military forces.
On Friday, February 16, Russian authorities murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, where he was being held on trumped-up charges, and on Saturday, Russian forces advanced into the front-line city of Avdiivka.
The Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering on international security policy, met this year in the midst of these events, from Friday, February 16, to Sunday, February 18. At Saturday’s lunch, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark made a surprise announcement. Denmark, she said, will donate all its artillery to Ukraine. She suggested other countries, too, could do more than they already have.
According to Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer of Foreign Policy, Frederiksen’s announcement “left attendees grappling with some existential questions: Are they prepared not just to help Ukraine but also to defend Europe from a possible Russian attack on a NATO country? Are democracies capable of standing up against the threat of territory-grabbing dictatorships like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s?”
Sweden today announced it will donate about $682 million in equipment and cash to Ukraine, its 15th aid package to Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion. The European Union today announced it is committing 83 million euros, or about $89 million, in humanitarian aid for those in Ukraine and Moldova affected by the war. Three weeks ago it approved $54 billion in military aid.
There is increasing pressure, as well, to transfer Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine. On Saturday, February 17, the U.S. Justice Department, which is in charge of a task force called “KleptoCapture,” transferred $500,000 in forfeited Russian funds to Estonia for fixing Ukraine’s electrical transmission and distribution systems. Biden promised more sanctions against Russia on Friday and has again called for House Republicans to pass the national security supplemental bill.
Indeed, the real elephant in the room is the fact that MAGA Republicans in the House are refusing to commit more U.S. aid. The Institute for the Study of War, a nonprofit research organization, assessed on Sunday that “delays in Western security assistance to Ukraine are likely helping Russia launch…offensive operations along several sectors of the frontline in order to place pressure on Ukrainian forces along multiple axes.”
MAGA Republicans are refusing that aid although it is popular both in Congress and among Americans at large. A Pew study released Friday, before news of Navalny’s murder broke, showed that 74% of Americans believe the war in Ukraine is important to U.S. interests; 59% say it’s important to them personally.
House speaker Johnson condemned Putin as “a vicious dictator” over the weekend and said he was “likely directly responsible” for Navalny’s death. But on Monday he posted to Twitter a photograph of him standing alongside Trump, apparently at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club, flashing a smile and a thumbs-up sign. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has vowed to try to throw Johnson out of the speaker’s chair if he even brings Ukraine funding to the floor. Trump himself referred to Navalny’s murder on Sunday simply by calling it a “sudden death” before launching into an attack on the United States.
On Sunday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) came out and said it: the Republican Party has a “Putin wing.” She said: “The issue of this election cycle is making sure the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House.” Conservative pundit Bill Kristol agreed, in italics: “The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro–Vladimir Putin.This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.”
Russian authorities have cracked down on those expressing sorrow for the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and are refusing to hand over his body to his mother and lawyer, who flew to the penal colony north of the Arctic Circle to reclaim it, saying they need to keep the body for “chemical analysis.”
Meanwhile, a Russian who defected to Ukraine last year has been killed in Spain, and Russian authorities have arrested for “treason” a dual Russia-U.S. citizen who lives in Los Angeles as she traveled in Russia after having participated in pro-Ukraine rallies.
Putin is facing an election next month, and he may have intended the murder of Navalny to frighten other opponents and intimidate Russian voters. But it is possible it had the opposite effect.
Yesterday, Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, stepped into his place, saying: “Putin didn’t only kill Alexei Navalny as a person. He wanted to kill our hope, our freedom, our future. But the most important thing we can do for Alexei and for ourselves is to go on fighting. I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work. Continue to fight for our country. I call on you to stand alongside me. To share not only the grief and unending pain that has enveloped us and won’t let go. I also ask you to share the fury and hate for those who dared to kill our future. I speak to you in the words of Alexei, in which I believe truly: There is no shame in doing little. There is shame in doing nothing. In allowing them to scare you…. By killing Alexei, Putin has killed half of me. Half of my heart and my soul. But I have another half and it tells me that I don’t have the right to give in.”
Today she urged the European Union not to recognize the results of Russia’s March election, saying that “a president who assassinated his main political opponent cannot be legitimate by definition.”
In the U.S., there has not been any apparent move from House Republicans to come back into session to approve the national security package. Indeed, Trump appears to be strengthening his hand over the mechanics of the Republican Party, with the state parties he salted with loyalists lining up behind him, supporters in Congress killing legislation at his demand, and lawmakers who are interested in actually making laws exiting Congress out of fear or frustration.
But the apparent support of MAGA Republicans for Putin is unlikely to play well in the U.S. Today, Republican candidate for president Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, tricked the Fox News Channel into covering live what she said was a major speech, likely leading producers to think she was withdrawing. Rather than doing so, she came out swinging with an attack on Trump.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded her comments, spoken with the backdrop of the past week in everyone’s mind. Americans “deserve a real choice,” she said, “not a Soviet-style election where there’s only one candidate and he gets 99 percent of the vote.”
