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John Thompson Reviews Max Boot’s New Book, “Reagan”

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2024 //
25

John Thompson an an historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma. Here he reviews Max Boot’s new book, Reagan. He wrote this review for this blog.

He writes:

In 2018, Max Boot recounted “his extraordinary journey from lifelong Republican to vehement Trump opponent.” Although Boot once idolized Ronald Reagan, his Reagan: His Life and Legend tells the story how Reagan planted the seeds of “Trumpism.” Boot concluded that “Reagan was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realize–or that I realized before starting this book project more than a decade ago.” But, even when retelling Reagan’s success stories, such as working with Gorbachev, Boot exposes his weaknesses, such as those that could have led to nuclear war.

Boot starts with the way Reagan’s rhetoric and falsehoods led to Trumpism. For instance, his advertising for General Electric led to a “convergence of conservatism in the 1950s.” Boot recalls a number of Reagan’s statements that were “all false,” and how they helped “inure the Republican Party to ‘fake news.’” 

First, Reagan’s false mythology about preventing a communist takeover of Hollywood contributed to his political rise, as he “avoided becoming tarred with the excesses of McCarthyism,” even though he “served as an FBI informant and an arbiter of the blacklist.”

Moreover, Reagan called John F. Kennedy a “fellow traveler.” He also said America was adopting “temporary totalitarian measures” such as social services and federal regulation, and “we have ten years … to win or lose –by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”

But, Boot adds that the press wouldn’t call him out for lying, supposedly because he was sincere in believing his falsehoods. As his spokesman, Larry Speakes, said with a shrug, when asked about Reagan’s repeated lies, “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”

Similarly, Reagan’s allies remained silent about what they really believed about him. After visiting Reagan in the White House, Margaret Thatcher “pointed to her head and said, “There’s nothing there.”  Thatcher later criticized his war in Grenada, saying, “The Americans are worse than the Soviets.” President Nixon called Reagan a “man of limited mental capacity” and Henry Kissinger said he was “a pretty decent guy” with “negligible” brains.

Reagan said similar things about his allies, for instance, he defended Nixon’s staff that drove Watergate because they were “not criminals at heart.”

However, Reagan’s spin and lies also had more disgusting components, which were not adequately exposed. When he launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba County, where the band played “Dixie,” his aide acknowledged that, in every election, “race played a role.” There is evidence that, privately, Reagan “shared the rightwing view of (Martin Luther) King as a dangerous subversive.” And, as Tom Wicker, the New York Times journalist, said, Reagan moved racial politics “from a lack of interest in fighting racial discrimination to an active promotion of it.”  

And when opposing the anti-apartheid movement, Reagan said that South Africa had already “eliminated the segregation we once had in our own country.”

By the end of his campaign, Reagan’s advisers used President Carter’s stolen debate briefing books to prepare him for his famous victory, using the words, “There you go again.” But Boot concludes, “What has gotten lost – both at the time and subsequently was that Carter was right on the facts and Reagan was wrong”

Then, in regard to efforts to prevent an “October Surprise,” Boot concludes that “credible evidence” later emerged that his campaign reached out to delay a hostage release.

Boot explains that when Reagan took office, plenty of his staff were incompetent and/or wanted to dismantle government. He also had adult conservatives in the room who sometimes succeeded in convincing Reagan to back away from the most outrageous policy proposals. Even so, “Few if any presidents have ever been so totally isolated even from their most senior cabinet members.”  

In his first pivotal policy battle, over cutting taxes for the rich to reduce rampant inflation and unemployment, Reagan lacked curiosity and knowledge about economic facts. He once asked Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, who took the lead in fighting inflation, “Why do we need the Federal Reserve?”

After his detailed account of the ignorance Reagan showed when passing his economic plan, Boot concluded that his administration “reached its high water mark in 1981 with its massive Economic Recovery Tax Act.” 

But, “Now the nation would have to reckon with its consequences.”

Those consequences included inflation over 9%, and unemployment over 10%; the loss of 1.9 million jobs; a 45% cut in school lunch funding; 45% of jobless persons not receiving unemployment insurance; a 1983 budget deficit of $200 billion; and shrinking the middle class, increasing profits for the rich, and increasing suffering for the poor. Long-term effects included an increase in the death gap between lower and higher income persons of 570%; and by 2020, an inequality gap was wider that those of almost any developed nation.

The same pattern held for Reagan’s foreign affairs decision-making. Boot explained that Reagan apparently believed that he ordered the invasion of Grenada (which was based on falsehoods) because “he had acted as an instrument of God.” Reagan also quoted a U.S. pilot who noted that Grenada produced nutmeg, an ingredient in eggnog. The “Russians were trying to steal Christmas,” the pilot insisted. “We stopped them.” 

And, according to Boot, Reagan’s opposition to Cuba could have gone nuclear. Secretary of State Al Haig said about Cuba, “Just give me the word and I’ll turn that f____ island into a parking lot.” But, fortunately, some of his aides settled Reagan down.

And the same behaviors, when Reagan ratcheted up Cold War paranoia, “could have resulted in a nuclear war that neither side wanted.” During his years-long negotiations with Gorbachev, Reagan was sometimes restrained by his professional staff, but sometimes not. And often his absurd beliefs kept reappearing. 

Mostly due to Gorbachev’s efforts, an arms reduction treaty was eventually passed. But Boot reminds us that in 1986, “Reagan and Gorbachev nearly agreed to a ten-year plan for total nuclear disarmament, but Reagan wouldn’t abide limits on U.S. outer-space defenses.” Because Reagan had faith in that missile defense system, which other participants knew was impossible and dangerous, he “scotched the deal with Gorbachev over them.” So, now “the United States and Russia collectively possess more than ten thousand nuclear warheads. And, despite Trump’s promises to build ‘a great Iron Dome over our country,’ satellite defenses against nuclear attacks remain unviable.”

By the way, Reagan’s few sources included the 1939 movie “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” and, perhaps, a movie he was in, “Murder in the Air” (1940). 

And Reagan’s baseless beliefs also drove his commitments to mass murderers in Central American. He supported the “psychopath” in El Salvador behind the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero because he was a favorite of the racist Sen. Jesse Helms.

Reagan’s support for the Contras grew out of a plan to “1. Take the War to Nicaragua. 2. Start killing Cubans.” 

And this post doesn’t have room to recount the downing of two airlines, costing 579 lives, during chaos spread by the Reagan administration. Neither is there time to appropriately cover the punch line he told over an open microphone,   “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Even before Reagan’s dementia took control, his mental acuity was in severe decline, and he apparently forgot that he was briefed on the arms for hostages deal with Iran. Boot reports, in 1987, the Iran/Contras investigations’ “harsh conclusions” were that Reagan knew about the arms for hostages deal, but it wasn’t proven that he knew about the funding of the contras;  “Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh concluded that Reagan had known about the diversion of funds, … but he could never prove it.” 

Even so, the Reagan spin on the investigation was that it was “the lynching that failed”

During this time when Reagan was increasingly disoriented, his administration was burdened by the Housing and Urban Development ( HUD) scandal; the banking and the savings and loans collapses which were due to his deregulation; and the AIDS epidemic, which Reagan ignored, even though his administration did not. Boot then concluded, “It is damning with faint praise to say that Reagan’s record on AIDS was not as bad as it could have been.”

I believe, the same could be said in terms of most, if not all, of Reagan’s “successes.” 

Boot’s conclusions include: 

While Reagan exaggerated the credit he deserved for the economic recovery, he ducked the blame for the recession.

Even if he read more than Trump and even if “he uttered fewer falsehoods than Trump,” Reagan’s “Often-shocking ignorance of public policy,” and his “repeated false statements” paved the way for Trump. 

Reagan “mishandled a pandemic, just as Trump did”

Like Trump, Reagan “catered to white bigotry.”

Reagan “empowered Christian Nationalism” and a “growing white backlash”

Reagan “helped hollow out the middle class, thereby creating the conditions for Trump’s populist movement.” 

But, there is more to worry about. Trump’s first term was similar to Reagan’s two terms, in that Trump’s aides sometimes managed to thwart or redirect his ambitions. A second Trump term would likely be more dangerous, and with fewer or no reasonable aides to settle him down. 

Categories Accountability, History, Trump

Media Matters: A Definitive Guide to Project 2025

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2024 //
7

Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.

But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.

He knew.

It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.

For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Civil Rights, Democracy, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Funding, Trump, Unions

Timothy Snyder on Trump’s Hitlerian Month

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
13

Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University, expresses his alarm about Trump’s turn toward fascistic rhetoric in this post. Trump knows how to excite his base by repeating conspiracy theories and blaming the Jews if anything he wants goes wrong. Snyder does not invoke the reference to Hitler lightly. He knows European history.

He writes:

Trump just had quite a Hitlerian month.

But before broaching the subject of Trump and Hitler I have to say a with a word about the American taboo on “comparisons.” 

Anyone who refers to Trump’s Hitlerian moments will be condemned for “comparison.”  Somehow that “comparison” rather than Trump’s deeds becomes the problem.  The outrage one feels about the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s is transferred from the person who resembles the criminal to the person who points out the resemblance.  

This cynical position opposing “comparisons” exploits the emotional logic of exceptionalism.  Americans are innocent and good (we would like to believe).  We are not (we take for granted) like the Germans between the world wars.  We would never (we imagine) tolerate the stereotypes German Nazis invoked.  We have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. 

Since we are so innocent and good, since we know everything, it just cannot be true — so runs the emotional logic — that a leading American politician does Hitlerian things.  And since we are so pure and wise, we never have to specify what it was that we have learned from the past.  Indeed, our our goodness is so profound that we must express it by attacking the people who recall history. 

And so, in the name of our capacity to remember great evil, we make it impossible to actually remember great evil.  A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator.  Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.”  Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.

I hope that the irony of all of this is clear: the idea that “comparison” is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism.  In this strange way, outrage about “comparison” reinforces fascist ideas about purity and politics.  We should hate the dissenters.  We should ignore whatever casts doubt on our sense of national virtue.  We should never reflect.

Democracy, of course, depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past.  The past is our only mirror, which is why fascists want to shatter it.  In fascist Russia, for example, it is a criminal offense to say the wrong things about the Second World War.  The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere.  That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers. 

“Never again” is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.

Before we think about this past month, we also have to consider the past four years.  This entire election unfolds amidst a big lie.  It was Hitler’s advice to tell a lie so big that your followers would never believe that you would deceive them on such a scale.  Trump followed that advice in November 2020.  His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies.  It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally.  It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.

This year we have seen that explicit Nazi ideas are tolerated in the Trump milieu.  The vice-presidential candidate shares a platform with Holocaust deniers, and defends Holocaust denial as free speech.  This is a fallacy people should see through: yes, the First Amendment allows Nazis to speak, but it does not ennoble Nazi speech.  The fact that people say fascist things in a country with freedom of speech is how we know that they are fascists — and that, if they themselves comes to power, they will end freedom of speech and all other freedoms.

Which brings us to North Carolina and to the gubernatorial candidate Trump once called the country’s hottest politician.  No one is denying that Mark Robinson has the right under the First Amendment to call himself a Nazi or to praise Mein Kampf.  The question is what we do about this.  Trump will not intervene here because he believes that Robinson is more likely to win than a substitute candidate would be.  Consider that for a moment: for Trump, the reason not to distance himself a self-avowed Nazi is that he hopes that the self-avowed Nazi will win an election, take office, and hold power. 

This is not surprising.  Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign.  Its main theme in September was inspired by a lady in Springfield, Ohio, who lost her cat and then found it again.  For J.D. Vance, who knew what happened, this became the basis for the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals.  For Donald Trump, that became a reason to promise that Haitians in Springfield would be deported.  He had found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the “them” in his politics of us-and-them.

It is fascist to start a political campaign from the choice of an enemy (this is the definition of politics by the most talented Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt).  It is fascist to replace reason with emotion, to tell big lies (“create stories,” as Vance says) that appeal to a sense of vulnerability and exploit a feeling of difference.  The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done. 

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants.  About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression.  Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people….

In international politics, the key moment concerns Ukraine and its head of state.  Since February 2022, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, has been rightly understood and admired as a symbol of physical and political courage.  When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens’kyi would (and should) flee.  Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country.  He has since visited the front every few weeks. 

This is how Trump characterized Zelens’kyi in September, echoing comments that he has made before: “Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $100 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth.”  Trump seems threatened by Zelens’kyi.  As Trump has made clear numerous times, his first and only impulse is to give Putin what Putin wants.  The idea of taking risks to defend freedom from the Russian dictator is well beyond the pinprick-sized black hole that is Trump’s moral universe. 

And of course the claim itself is false.  The number is too big.  And the money does not go to Zelens’kyi himself, obviously.  That Zelens’kyi does personally profit is a favorite idea of Vance, who repeats Russian propaganda to this effect.  The money does not even, for the most part, go to the Ukrainian government.  Most of the military aid does to American companies who build new weapons for American stockpiles.  We then send old weapons to Ukraine, to which we assign a dollar value.

The essential thing, though, is the antisemitic trope Trump chose to express himself.  It goes like this.  Jews are cowards.  Jews never fight wars.  Jews stay away from the front.  Jews only cause wars that make other people suffer.  And then Jews make vast amounts of money from those wars.  Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish.  And thus “the greatest salesman on earth” for Trump.  And the corrupt owner of “yachts” for Vance.  A war profiteer, as in the antisemitic stereotype, not a courageous commander, as in reality. 

Indeed, most of what Trump says about Zelens’kyi, Ukraine, and and the war itself makes sense only within the antisemitic stereotype.  Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself.  He never recalls Russian war crimes.  He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right.  He certainly never admits that Zelens’kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage.  The war, for Trump, is just a scam — a Jewish scam. 

And that, of course, is why he thinks he can end it right away: he thinks he can just shoulder the Jew aside and deal with his fascist “friend” Putin, who for him is the “genius” in this situation, and who must be allowed to win.  Despite the evidence, Trump says that Russia always wins wars, dismissing both history (regular Russian losses such as the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War) and the actual events of the ongoing Russian invasion, in which Ukraine has taken back half the territory it lost and driven the Russian fleet from the Black Sea.  Russia is counting on Trump.  They need him in power to win their war, and they know it. 

It need hardly be said that if Trump throws American power on the Russian side, the “deal” that follows will not end the war.  It will only mean that Russia is able to kill more Ukrainians faster.  Trump will then claim that the deal itself was beautiful and perfect — and try to change the subject from the slaughter he brought about through his antisemitic hubris and admiration of Russian fascism.

And, of course, Snyder explains, Trump has warned Jewish groups that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jews. Anti-Semitism will be Trump’s legacy.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies, Trump

Former FBI Agent: What Trump Says About Guns, Crime, and Drugs Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
9

Retired FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi writes on the MSNBC website about the internal dangers to America. It’s not from immigrants, who are typically more law-abiding than the native-born, but from Neo-Nazi gangs.

He writes:

The federal indictment of 68 defendants accused of being members of (or being associated) with a criminal gang driven by race-based hate followed an investigation that led to the seizure of Nazi paraphernalia, including Adolf Hitler posters, and 97 pounds of fentanyl, federal officials said Wednesday. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, who announced the charges, called it one of the “largest takedowns in the history of the Department of Justice against a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, violent extremist organization.”

That announcement landing in the final weeks of a presidential election prompts us to contrast the facts of our crime problem with the fiction that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, would have us believe.

The dismantlement of the group that called itself the Peckerwoods, a San Fernando Valley arm of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood white supremacy organization, came in the form of charges for allegedracketeering, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking and financial fraud. If convicted as charged, some members, who adorn themselves with tattoos of swastikas and other hate symbols, could face life behind bars. The group was so heavily armed and so violent that the FBI deployed its elite Hostage Rescue Team from Quantico, Virginia, to support the arrests. According to the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, the Peckerwoods, a derogatory name historically used against white people, “has as its mission to plan attacks against racial, ethnic, religious minorities.”

Agents seized an arsenal of illegal guns, “bomb-making components” and dozens of kilograms of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, according to law enforcement officials.

The details of this multifaceted investigation reveal a significant component of America’s crime problem: hardened, U.S.-born criminals who traffic in the drugs, guns and violence plaguing our country. This contrasts with the fact-free fearmongering fabrications being sold to MAGA believers. It’s not that minorities don’t commit crimes; nor is that migrants never murder or rape. But Trump and Vance want voters to believe our gun, drug and violence problems are being driven by migrants when the opposite is true…

During the vice presidential debate, Vance claimed the vast majority of illegal guns used in crimes here come from Mexican cartels. The truth is quite different; it’s the U.S. that’s arming Mexican cartels. We have detailed data demonstrating the extent to which American weapons are fueling the violence in Mexico, right down to the make and model of the guns found at crime scenes across the border.

Please open the link to read more about crime statistics and Trump-Vance’s hateful and phony war against immigrants.

Categories Cruelty, Data, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Guns, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Revealed: Trump Sent COVID Tests to Putin in 2020. Best Buddies!

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
16

During the height of the pandemic, President Trump sent COVID test kits to his good friend Vladimir Putin. So says a new book by Bob Woodward. Since Trump has been out of office, he has spoken to Putin at least seven times, Woodward says.

The Washington Post reports:

As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.

Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.

Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”

Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.

The book does not describe what the two men purportedly discussed, and it quotes a Trump campaign official casting doubt on the supposed contact. But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.

These interactions between Trump and the authoritarian leader of a country at war with an American ally form the basis of Woodward’s conclusion that Trump is worse than Richard M. Nixon, whose presidency was undone by the Watergate scandal exposed a half-century ago by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein.

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward writes in the book, “War,” which is set to be released Oct. 15.

Woodward concludes that Trump is unfit for office while Biden exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership.”

The book also covers Biden’s decision making in relation to the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Categories Trump

Rick Hess: Don’t Worry So Much About Trump 2.0 and Education

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
15

Rick Hess is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C. that is underwritten in part by the billionaire DeVos family. I have always had very pleasant and rewarding exchanges with Rick, who is a very amiable guy. He often tries to stake out a middle ground on controversial issues, as he does here. He argues that he doesn’t know what Trump will do on education, if re-elected, and neither does anyone else. But he concludes that Trump is unikely to do anything radical in the way of defunding education programs or dismantling the Department. So, don’t believe what he says and disregard Project 2025.

Somehow I’m not assuaged.

Hess writes in Education Next:

This summer, musing on the Republican National Convention, I noted that the GOP has been fundamentally remade since 2016—a point deemed self-evident by right-leaning pundits (MAGA and Never-Trump alike) but that seems insufficiently appreciated by a whole lot of other observers.

This has yielded a lot of certainty in education circles as to what would happen under a Trump 2.0, much of which I find pretty dubious. I’ve done interviews with reporters who seem to take it as given that Trump would slash Title I, IDEA, and Pell Grants. One write-up after another has emphatically declared that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook is the blueprint for Trump 2.0. There’s a remarkable confidence that Trump’s administration would embrace budget-cutting, small-government, Mike Pence–Betsy DeVos conservatism, only far more aggressively than the last go-round.

Now, might they be right? Sure. But it’s not the way to bet. I want to take a moment to explain why.

For starters, keep in mind that Trump has never been a conservative in any traditional sense. He’s a showman, reality TV star, and longtime Democrat who stumbled into the presidency. In 2016, as the newbie in a party dominated by Tea Party and Reaganite conservatives, he was obligated to name Mike Pence VP and issue a list of Federalist Society–vetted Supreme Court nominees. Today, Trump is no longer so constrained: he is the Republican Party. Traditional conservatives—from Dick Cheney to Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan—have been purged. Trump’s VP pick is now J.D. Vance, a former Never-Trumper who subsequently bent the knee. Trump has thrown the pro-life wing of the GOP coalition under the bus, torn up a half-century of Republican foreign policy, and dumped those who advised him on judges last time.

The shift is only partly about Trump being unfettered. It’s also about the remaking of the Republican coalition. Republicans have bled socially moderate, fiscally conservative college grads while gaining working-class voters who kind of like New Deal/Great Society-type spending. Pence was a Reaganite, a small-government conservative who wanted to cut programs and reduce spending. Vance is a NatCon, an economic populist who greeted the news that Liz Cheney would be voting for Harris by denouncing the former member of the House Republican leadership as someone who gets “rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die.” Where Reaganite conservatives talked about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare, Trump has promised he won’t touch them. This is decidedly not the Romney-Ryan Republican Party.

So, while it seems to elude much of the education commentariat, it should be regarded as an open question as to whether Trump 2.0 would actually commit to much budget-cutting or shrinking of the bureaucracy when it comes to education. Indeed, when asked about child care, Trump recently offered a word salad suggesting that his proposed tariffs would help fund a major expansion of federal programs. Last year, he pitched a federally-funded “American Academy,” which would open new vistas for Washington’s role in providing higher education. Trump has obviously promised aggressive action on key cultural hot points—from defunding anti-Semitic colleges to busting the higher-ed accreditation cartel—and such moves, while obviously right-leaning, imply a need for a robust federal presence.

As National Review’s Andy McCarthy observed in his debate postmortem last week, “Because he’s an opportunist with some conservative leanings, rather than a conservative in search of opportunities to advance the cause, Trump often can’t decide whether to deride Harris’s cynical policy shifts or try to get to her left.” Even in Trump’s first term, when he had an experienced team of small-government true believers, there was little cutting and a whole lot of deficit spending. Recall that it was Trump who supported the first big tranche of unconditional pandemic aid for schools, initiated the hugely expensive student loan pause, and spent his first term watching spending climb on programs he’d promised to cut.

Now, some readers may protest: “Yeah, but Trump told Elon Musk we should abolish the Department of Education, and Heritage’s Project 2025 calls for cutting education spending!” Fair points. Trump has made a slew of contradictory promises, and neither the GOP platform nor his track record offer much clarity as to what should be believed. After all, even as Trump was saying he’d like to abolish the Department, he was emphatically denouncing Project 2025 (written by first-term staff who may not be welcome back in a Trump 2.0) and insisting he hasn’t read it.

What’s the bottom line? The truth is that no one really knows how a Trump 2.0 would go. I’ll keep this simple: anyone who claims to know . . . doesn’t. It’s not clear who is advising Trump on education, who (other than his kids) would inhabit his inner circle, how much sway Vance will have, or who would make key calls on staffing. That said, it seems to me that there are three scenarios for a Trump 2.0 when it comes to education. Here they are, from least likely to most likely.

Trump Drains the Swamp. Trump governs as a Beltway-draining, government-cutting conservative, even after aggressively disavowing Heritage’s Project 2025, promising not to touch entitlements, and failing to downsize the federal education footprint in his first term. He goes after Title I, IDEA, and Pell, and he leans on Congress to dismantle the Department of Education. It’s doubtful he could convince centrist GOP senators like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski to go along with it, though, meaning Republicans would need a stunningly good election night in the Senate contests to put any of this in play.

Trump Seeks Retribution. Trump devotes his energy to waging his war of “retribution” on his “enemies”—going after the press, Democrats, and any RINOs who’ve earned his ire. His White House spends its time seeking to pull the U.S. out of our international commitments and launching a federally organized deportation effort as part of an aggressive immigration strategy. Amidst the maelstrom, education gets left to the White House’s domestic policy team and whoever winds up staffing the Department of Education—but little happens because of the energy consumed by the tumult and its aftermath.

Trump Puts Trump First. Trump approaches education through the same Trump-first lens as most issues. Because Trump likes things that are popular, he’ll slam colleges, gesture towards school choice, and bark at wokeness but won’t put any meaningful effort into cutting education spending or downsizing the Department. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he emulates Biden-Harris by treating education as a pandering piñata. Rather than tough-minded budget cuts, I think he’s more likely to endorse universalizing free school lunch, tripling federal spending on IDEA (for “our very beautiful children with special needs”), or making college loans interest-free à la Sen. Rubio’s new bill.

Look, I’ll be the first to concede I could well be wrong. Trump’s an impulsive creature and, should he win, it’s a guessing game who’d wind up calling the shots on education in Trump 2.0. But if I had to bet, given what we know today, I strongly suspect the feverish talk of defunding and dismantling federal education will prove little more than a fever dream.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Describes His Plans for Education

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2024 //
12

When Donald Trump appeared recently in Milwaukee, he described his plan for the future of the Department of Education. It’s not quite the same as the scenario in Project 2025, which envisions the total elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Trump imagines it as a “department” with only two employees: A Cabinet Secretary and a secretary.

The severely shrunken Department would focus solely on the three Rs and would somehow mysteriously have the power and personnel to prevent public schools across the nation from teaching anything connected to “woke.” That is, anything related to race, gender, or social justice. How this fictional Department would impose bans on curriculum when federal law prohibits any federal interference in curriculum is not explained. Actually, it’s nonsense.

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes in The New Republic about Trump’s vision for the federal role in education:

Donald Trump has fleshed out his Project 2025–inspired Department of Education plan, and it involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to a group of people with all the time in the world: parents.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd in Milwaukee Tuesday night. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’

“Not teaching woke is a big factor,” Trump continued. “We’ll have a very small staff. We can occupy that staff right in this room, actually I think this room is too large. And all they’re going to do is they’re going to see that the basics are taken care of. You know, we don’t want someone to get crazy and start teaching a language that we don’t want them to teach.”

Not only do parents already have enough on their plates without trying to run the public school system, it’s likely that Trump has a specific group of parents in mind to direct education policy.

The goals he lays out are startlingly akin to the policy points of the far-right “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty, who hosted Trump as the keynote speaker at their annual conference in September. Moms for Liberty has recently ingratiated itself significantly into national politics and was listed as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board.

In the same speech, Trump also drew attention to the amount of real estate occupied in D.C. by Department of Education buildings, plotting that the dissolution of the federal agency would allow “somebody else to move in.”

“They’re run by the state, and run by the parents, because in Washington—you know half of the buildings, such a large number, every building you pass in Washington says Department of Education,” Trump said. “You’re gonna have a lot of vacant space. Now we can have maybe somebody else move in.” 

Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education wholesale is nearly identical to Project 2025, despite his campaign spending months trying to distance itself from the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto.

Fact check: Trump exaggerated the size and physical space occupied by ED. The U.S. Department of Education is smaller than any other Cabinet department; it has 4,400 employees. It occupies a building at 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC. It rents space at 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW. it does not occupy all or most or many buildings in DC.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Heather Cox Richardson: How Trump Weaponizes His Lies

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2024 //
7

The first election in which I was fully aware of the candidates and their policies was in 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for re-electionnagainst Adlai Stevenson. I was a freshman in college but I could not vote because the minimum voting age then was 21. My first vote was cast for John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon. I was an active volunteer in that election, working in Kennedy headquarters in New York City. I have been active in every election since then.

I mention this background to point out that over a period of nearly 70 years I have never seen a candidate of either party lie as persistently, casually, and audaciously as does Donald Trump. His lying is not normal. In my lifetime, Presidential candidates strived to appear honest (even if they weren’t, they wanted to appear to be honest), thoughtful, and dignified. They did not insult or belittle their opponent. They did not curse when giving campaign speeches. Trump’s behavior is not normal. He demeans the office of the Presidency.

Heather Cox Richardson contends here that Trump’s incessant lying is not simply a sign of poor character or the defense mechanism of a spoiled man-child. As she shows, the lying has a political purpose.

She writes:

This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts. 

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian. 

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. 

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true. 

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States… encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,… [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.” 

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates. 

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation. 

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted. 

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie. 

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone. 

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.   

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk. 

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster. 

Categories Democracy, Elections, Lies, Trump

New York Times: Trump’s Rambling Speeches Reflect His Advanced Age and/or Cognitive Decline

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2024 //
10

The New York Times was recently the target of a protest by a group protesting its “sanewashing” of Trump, that is, publishing stories that made his incoherent speeches sound normal when they were not. Critics have complained that the Times published many stories about Biden’s age and his gaffes and misstatements, but overlooked Trump’s gaffes and persistent lying.

With this story by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, with the assistance of two journalists who excerpted relevant videos, the Times may have mollified the critics. The story contains excellent video clips that show Trump making incoherent statements. Unfortunately, I was unable to copy them. Each of them shows Trump saying what is quoted in the article.

The story begins:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

With Mr. Biden out, Mr. Trump, at 78, is now the oldest major party nominee for president in history and would be the oldest president ever if he wins and finishes another term at 82. A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Similarly, he uses 32 percent more negative words than positive words now, compared with 21 percent in 2016, which can be another indicator of cognitive change. And he uses swearwords 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran, a trend that could reflect what experts call disinhibition. (A study by Stat, a health care news outlet, produced similar findings.)

Mr. Trump frequently reaches to the past for his frame of reference, often to the 1980s and 1990s, when he was in his tabloid-fueled heyday. He cites fictional characters from that era like Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lip” (he meant “Silence of the Lambs”), asks “where’s Johnny Carson, bring back Johnny” (who died in 2005) and ruminates on how attractive Cary Grant was (“the most handsome man”). He asks supporters whether they remember the landing in New York of Charles Lindbergh, who actually landed in Paris and long before Mr. Trump was born.

He seems confused about modern technology, suggesting that “most people don’t have any idea what the hell a phone app is” in a country where 96 percent of people own a smartphone. If sometimes he seems stuck in the 1990s, there are moments when he pines for the 1890s, holding out that decade as the halcyon period of American history and William McKinley as his model president because of his support for tariffs.

And he heads off into rhetorical cul-de-sacs. “So we built a thing called the Panama Canal,” he told the conservative host Tucker Carlson last year. “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito, you know, malaria. We lost 35,000 people building — we lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious. They had to build under nets. It was one of the true great wonders of the world. As he said, ‘One of the nine wonders of the world.’ No, no, it was one of the seven. It just happened a little while ago. You know, he says, ‘Nine wonders of the world.’ You could make nine wonders. He would’ve been better off if he stuck with the nine and just said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s nine….’”

Mr. Trump dismisses any concerns and insists that he has passed cognitive tests. “I go for two hours without teleprompters, and if I say one word slightly out, they say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired,’” he complained at a recent rally. He calls his meandering style “the weave” and asserts that it is an intentional and “brilliant” communication strategy….

How much his rambling discourse — what some experts call tangentiality — can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate. Mr. Trump has always had a distinctive speaking style that entertained and captivated supporters even as critics called him detached from reality. Indeed, questions have been raised about Mr. Trump’s mental fitness for years.

John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, was so convinced that Mr. Trump was psychologically unbalanced that he bought a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” written by 27 mental health professionals, to try to understand his boss better. As it was, Mr. Kelly came to refer to Mr. Trump’s White House as “Crazytown….”

He does not stick to a single train of thought for long. During one 10-minute stretch in Mosinee, Wis., last month, for instance, he ping-ponged from topic to topic: Ms. Harris’s record; the virtues of the merit system; Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement; supposed corruption at the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the W.H.O.; the Covid-19 pandemic; immigration; back to the W.H.O.; China; Mr. Biden’s age; Ms. Harris again; Mr. Biden again; chronic health problems and childhood diseases; back to Mr. Kennedy; the “Biden crime family”; the president’s State of the Union address; Franklin D. Roosevelt; the 25th Amendment; the “parasitic political class”; Election Day; back to immigration; Senator Tammy Baldwin; back to immigration; energy production; back to immigration; and Ms. Baldwin again.

Some of what he says is inexplicable except to those who listen to him regularly and understand the shorthand. And he throws out assertions without any apparent regard for whether they are true or not. Lately, he has claimed that crowds Ms. Harris has drawn were not real but the creation of artificial intelligence, never mind the reporters and cameras on hand to record them.

He mispronounces names and places with some regularity — “Charlottestown” instead of “Charlottesville,” “Minnianapolis” instead of “Minneapolis,” the website “Snoops”instead of “Snopes,” “Leon” Musk instead of “Elon.”

In Rome, Ga., he went on an extended riff about Mr. Biden in swim trunks on a beach. “Look, at 81 — do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have — I won’t say names because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was like, Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ Who? ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that anymore. But Cary Grant at 81 or 82 — going on 100, this guy, he’s 81 going on 100 — Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit either, and he was pretty good-looking, right?…”

He considers himself the master of nearly every subject. He said Venezuelan gangs were armed “with MK-47s,” evidently meaning AK-47s, and then added, “I know that gun very well” because “I’ve become an expert on guns.” He claims to have been named “man of the year” in Michigan, although no such prize exists.

He is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue when he noticed a buzzing insect. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we can’t take it any longer.”

But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”

Categories Elections, Extremism, Trump

Washington Post Fact-Checks Trump on Hurricane Claims

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2024 //
15

Glenn Kessler, professional fact-checker for The Washington Post, reviewed Trump’s claims about federal aid to states hit by Hurricane Helene. Trump tried to politicize the Hurricane, claiming that Biden had not acted. Trump lied.

Kessler writes:

“The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money [for hurricane relief]. … They spent it all on illegal migrants. … They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”
— Former president Donald Trump, remarks at a campaign rally in Saginaw, Mich., Oct. 3

Trump has been trying to weaponize the Hurricane Helene relief efforts, accusing the Biden administration of failing to provide adequate assistance. As part of his critique, he claims there is no money available for hurricane relief because it was spent already to handle the surge of migrants at the southern border.

“They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank,” Trump charged, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, adding in the additional falsehood that Vice President Kamala Harris wants illegal immigrants to vote for her. As we have explained many times before, this would be against the law and there is no evidence to support this claim.

Trump’s claims have been echoed by his supporters, such as billionaire Elon Musk. But Trump is completely wrong.

Even though Trump was once president, he still appears to have little clue about the appropriations process. What’s even richer is that when he was president, he did exactly what he claims Biden did — take money from FEMA’s disaster fund to fund migrant programs at the southern border.

The Facts

FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters: “We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”

He emphasized there was plenty of money to deal with the current disaster. “We are meeting the moment,” he said, adding: “We have the immediate needs right now. On a continuing resolution, we have funds, but that is not a stable source of supply, if you will.”

Congress, as part of a short-term spending bill, recently provided $20 billion to the FEMA disaster relief fund. But Mayorkas noted: “That doesn’t speak about the future and the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that these extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity, and we have to be funded for the sake of the American people. This is not a political issue.”

In other words, Trump falsely claimed that there is no money left for Hurricane Helene survivors. That’s the opposite of what Mayorkas said.

“FEMA has what it needs for immediate response and recovery efforts,” FEMA spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg said on X. “As [FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell] said, she has the full authority to spend against the President’s budget, but we’re not out of hurricane season yet so we need to keep a close eye on it. We may need to go back into immediate needs funding and we will be watching it closely.”

So how does Trump link this to migrants? A Trump campaign spokesman pointed to FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which gives grants to local governments and nonprofits to take care of undocumented immigrants. Congress boosted the budget from $360 million in fiscal year 2023 to $650 million in fiscal year 2024. The program’s 2023 annual report says it provides shelter, such as hotel/motel services, food and transportation, including plane tickets up to $700 a person.

As we said, Congress appropriated this money, just as it did the disaster fund. There’s no evidence that any money from the disaster fund was used to help migrants.

“These claims are completely false,” DHS said in a statement Thursday night. “As Secretary Mayorkas said, FEMA has the necessary resources to meet the immediate needs associated with Hurricane Helene and other disasters. The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA’s disaster-related authorities or funding streams.”

Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would. So we wondered why he would accuse Biden of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants.

It turns out that’s because he did this. In 2019, the Trump administration, in the middle of hurricane season, told Congress that it was taking $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the disaster fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers who had been forced to wait in Mexico. “The U.S. is facing a security and humanitarian crisis on the Southern border,” the administration said in its notice that it was redirecting the funds.

The monthly reports issued by the FEMA disaster fund show $38 million was plucked and given to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August that year — just before the prime storm period of September and October.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about Trump’s actions in 2019.

The Pinocchio Test

Trump falsely claims FEMA has run out of disaster money — and then falsely says that’s because money instead was spent on migrants. There is no evidence the Biden administration spent FEMA disaster money on migrants. Rather, that’s what Trump did.

He earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

Categories Elections, Environment, Lies, Trump
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