What is Project 2025? The conservative road map is raising a lot of eyebrows, on both sides of the aisle.
Katie Balevic – July 6, 2024
Project 2025 is a road map for the next Republican president.
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, authored the plan.
It calls for eliminating the Education Department, among some other surprising things.
Well before the disastrous presidential debate during which President Joe Biden may have handed the keys to the White House back to former President Donald Trump, conservative thinkers were assembling a game plan.
In January 2023, The Heritage Foundation began promoting Project 2025, a 922-page “playbook” assembled with input from dozens of other conservative organizations to guide the next Republican administration.
“The time is short, and conservatives need a plan,” reads the website for the right-wing presidential transition plan. “The project will create a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.”
Some of Project 2025’s priorities include:
Slashing employment in the federal government and muzzling “woke propaganda at every level of government”
Eliminating the Department of Education and its “woke-dominated system of public schools”
Prohibiting the FBI from fighting misinformation and disinformation
Ending the “war on fossil fuels” and allowing further development on Native American lands
Ending active FBI investigations that are “contrary to the national interest”
The plan is so extreme that even Trump has distanced himself from it, writing on Truth Social this week that he knows “nothing about Project 2025.”
“I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them,” Trump wrote.
A spokesperson from Project 2025 told Business Insider that the playbook “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
“We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president. But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement,” the spokesperson said.
Heritage faces blowback after ‘bloodless’ revolution comment
Emily Brooks – July 6,2024
The Heritage Foundation and its president, Kevin Roberts, are facing blowback in the wake of his comment about an ongoing second American revolution that will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
President Biden’s campaign jumped on the comment, with a spokesperson saying it shows that former President Trump’s allies are “dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.” Commentators ranging from former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) to MSNBC hosts and guests reacted with alarm.
And in the wake of the comment, though without mentioning it, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 — an initiative led by the conservative think tank that aims to provide a conservative policy blueprint for the next Republican administration and that has also ignited political firestorms.
Heritage and Roberts, though, are standing by the comment, dismissing the criticism as being in bad faith.
“Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats. These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box,” Robers said Wednesday in a post on the social platform X, continuing to describe the threat he sees and warning that “the Left may not allow a peaceful transfer of power.”
Heritage itself repeated the “bloodless” comment in a separate post on X alongside a compilation video of Democrats, commentators and public figures making controversial comments about unrest and protests.
“The Second American Revolution will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” the Heritage post said. “Unfortunately, they have a well established record of instigating the opposite.”
Roberts made his original comment Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast — hosted that day by former Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), since Bannon reported to prison for his contempt of Congress sentence the day before — when discussing the Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents have presumptive immunity for official actions. The decision handed a win to Trump as he fights indictments over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
“The left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily, is because our side is winning,” Roberts said. “And so I come full circle on this response, and just want to encourage you with some substance. That we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
For the Biden campaign, the comments were an opportunity to advance one of its core messages: that Trump is a threat to democracy.
“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a statement. “On January 6, they proudly stormed our Capitol to overturn an election Donald Trump lost fair and square – something not even the Confederacy was able to accomplish – now they are dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”
Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman who is critical of Trump and has endorsed Biden, wondered about the implications of if the left did not “allow” a “bloodless” revolution.
“And if they dont? What if Americans decide they prefer to hash out differences as the constitution calls for, vis a vis politics, then what? Spell it out. If you can win politically then what?” Kinzinger said in a post on X.
And MSNBC host Joe Scarborough responded directly to Roberts’s quip about anchors on the network.
“First of all, Kev, I’m not losing my mind,” Scarborough began, later saying, “You’re the one talking about revolution. Why are you so angry, Kevin? Why are you losing your mind? America’s great. We’re strong militarily, we’re strong economically, we’re strong culturally … This whole idea that we need a new revolution — I mean, I know it is great fundraising, but it’s just B.S.”
The outrage about the comment builds on heightened attention on the leading conservative think tank and its advocacy group as it leads dozens of conservative organizations in Project 2025, which aims to compile policy proposals for the next right-wing administration.
Democrats and Biden’s campaign have repeatedly pointed to Project 2025 when warning about policies a Trump administration would enact if he wins in November, noting that former Trump administration officials have ties to it.
But in a signal that the project could have too many political liabilities for Trump’s electoral prospects, the former president said in a post on his Truth Social website Friday that he “know[s] nothing about Project 2025″ and has “no idea who is behind it.”
“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them,” Trump said.
Neither Trump nor his campaign said the “bloodless” comment from Roberts impacted his statement, but Trump’s move to distance himself from the Heritage-led project further highlights the ideological controversies that the conservative think tank has embraced under Roberts’s leadership.
A spokesperson for Project 2025 posted on X that the coalition “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
A conservative leading the pro-Trump Project 2025 suggests there will be a new American Revolution
Ali Swenson – July 3, 2024
FILE – Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks at the National Religious Broadcasters convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center Feb. 22, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. Roberts, the leader of a conservative think tank planning for a massive overhaul of the federal government says we are in the midst of “a second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” (AP Photo/George Walker IV, File)More
NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back.”
Democrats are “apoplectic right now” because the right is winning, Roberts told former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, one of the podcast’s guest hosts as Bannon is serving a four-month prison term. “And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts’ remarks shed light on how a group that promises to have significant influence over a possible second term for former President Donald Trump is thinking about this moment in American politics. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading Project 2025, a sweeping road map for a new GOP administration that includes plans for dismantling aspects of the federal government and ousting thousands of civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists who will carry out a hard-right agenda without complaint.
His call for revolution and vague reference to violence also unnerved some Democrats who interpreted it as threatening.
“This is chilling,” former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson wrote on the social platform X. “Their idea of a second American Revolution is to undo the first one.”
James Singer, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, pointed to this week’s Fourth of July holiday in an emailed statement.
“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Singer said, adding that Trump and his allies are ”dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”
Roberts, whose name Bannon recently floated to The New York Times as a potential chief of staff option for Trump, also said on the podcast that Republicans should be encouraged by the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling.
He said Monday’s decision — which gives presidents broad immunity from prosecution — is “vital” to ensure a president won’t have to “second guess, triple guess every decision they’re making in their official capacity.”
In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Roberts reiterated his comments from the podcast, saying Americans “are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats.”
“These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s the Left that has a long history of violence, so it’s up to them to allow a peaceful transfer of power.”
Roberts pointed to the protests after the killing of George Floyd by police in 2020, some of which erupted into crime, vandalism and violence. Democrats, in turn, have accused their Republican counterparts of violence, using the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot in which Trump supporters tried to forcibly overturn his loss to President Joe Biden.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said Roberts’ comments about a “second American Revolution” are “a bit terrifying but also elucidating.” The 1,000-page Project 2025 playbook calls for far-reaching changes in government, including rolling back protections for the LGBTQ community and infusing Christianity more deeply into society.
“Roberts, the Heritage Foundation, and its allies in Project 2025 want to reorder American society and fundamentally change it,” Beirich said. “He’s said the quiet part out loud.”
Trump seeks to disavow ‘Project 2025’ despite ties to conservative group
Nathan Layne – July 5,2024
Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a campaign event in ChesapeakeHouse Freedom Caucus and others hold a press conference regarding federal government spending, in Washington
(Reuters) – Former President Donald Trump tried to distance himself on Friday from a conservative group’s sweeping plans for the next Republican presidency, days after its leader claimed a second American Revolution was underway that would “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The Republican presidential candidate renounced any connection with Project 2025, a plan Democrats have been attacking to highlight what they say is Trump’s extreme policy agenda for a second term should he beat President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election.
Many people involved in the project lead by the Heritage Foundation, America’s top conservative think tank, worked in the Trump White House and would likely help fill out his administration if he wins in November.
But Trump said on his Truth Social platform he had nothing to do with the plan.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” he wrote.
“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying,” he continued, adding some of their assertions were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Trump’s post came three days after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ comments on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast about a second American Revolution. Democrats and others criticized what they viewed as a veiled threat of violence.
In a statement provided by a Project 2025 spokesperson on Friday, Roberts repeated his claim that Americans were carrying out a revolution “to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats” and said it was the political left that had a history of political violence.
The spokesperson said that while Project 2025 provided recommendations for the next Republican president, it would be up to Trump, should he win, to decide whether to implement them.
Trump’s move to create distance with Project 2025 could in part reflect an effort to moderate his message in the final months of the race, especially with Biden’s campaign faltering after the Democratic candidate’s June 27 debate, said James Wallner, a political science professor at Clemson University.
“Trump is basically now seeking to appeal to a broader audience,” Wallner said.
The Biden campaign has stepped up its efforts to tie Trump’s campaign to Project 2025.
“Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump’s second term that should scare the hell out of the American people,” campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement.
The 900-page blueprint calls for drastic reform of the federal government, including a gutting of some federal agencies and a vast expansion of presidential power. Trump’s statements and policy positions suggest he is aligned with some but not all of the project’s agenda.
The plans have been drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in coordination with a collection of other like-minded groups.
A number of people who worked on Project 2025 have close ties to the former president. Russ Vought, who was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and is heading up a key committee at the Republican National Convention, authored one of the project’s chapters.
Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump who is widely expected to be tapped for a top job in a second Trump administration, heads up a legal group on Project 2025’s advisory board.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Chris Reese)
There Is Apparently No Accountability — Ever — for Donald Trump
By Frank Bruni – July 4, 2024
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
Credit…Ben Wiseman
We tell children — or at least we used to — that actions have consequences. What goes around comes around. Watch your behavior. You’ll answer for it someday.
Donald Trump is the living, lying contradiction of that.
He answers for nothing. He’s accountable to no one.
You thought that changed with a Manhattan jury’s verdict five weeks ago? With “guilty” on all 34 counts? How adorable. That only bound most of his supporters even closer to him. Only amplified the theatrical ardor with which Republican politicians pledged their devotion. Only increased donations to his presidential campaign.
The House of Representatives impeached him twice, but a cabal of collaborators in the Senate chose tribalism over justice and made it all go away. They said that it was up to others to decide if he’d committed crimes, up to others to punish him for those. It was up to them to get re-elected.
The voters repudiated Trump, but he simply pretended it hadn’t happened. He invented dark conspiracies and embroidered wild fantasies to turn defeat — by seven million votes, no less — into supposed victory. Into full-blown martyrdom. He cried “rigged,” he cried “stolen,” he stood by as a mob stormed the Capitol and stood mute as it chanted for his vice president to be hanged. For that ethical savagery the members of his political party lined up dutifully behind him once again. David Koresh never knew loyalty like this.
Trump schemed to steal the election himself. Prosecutors rightly charged him for that. But he has lawyers upon lawyers. He has gall atop gall. He has Fox News, Newsmax, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon. He has that rogue Supreme Court stacked in his favor, thanks to his and Mitch McConnell’s brazen stacking of it. Its justices have kicked the can so far down the road that it has tumbled into a different galaxy, a different cosmos, one where there’s no moral gravity, where transgressions vanish and worries disappear with the abracadabra of executive privilege.
Trump’s unpopularity with most voters should be a much bigger obstacle for him and a much bigger opportunity for Democrats than it is. Time worked in his favor, as it has so often in the past. It stiffened his political rival’s gait. Weakened his political rival’s voice. President Biden can’t answer Trump’s outrages with optimal passion, ideal precision, laser-guided disdain. He’s Trump’s better in decency, many times over. He’s Trump’s lesser in lung power, and in an age of invective, that matters.
Creditors left in the lurch. Accomplices left holding the bag. (Here’s looking at you, Rudy Giuliani.) Spurned associates. Appeals and delays and delays and appeals. Attorney General Letitia James of New York won her fraud case against Trump, but it doesn’t seem to have hobbled him at all. It’s seldom even mentioned anymore. E. Jean Carroll won her sexual abuse and defamation case. He swaggered (and slandered) on.
Trump has made a career of evasion. No, he has made a legend of it. And while there’s a kind of smarts and a sort of skill in that, it owes more to luck than to brilliance. It owes the most to the perverse freedom that comes with a total lack of conscience — with the readiness to stoke people’s darkest fears and cruelest impulses, to shrug at the damage done, to bilk charities, to run a sham university, to tell little lies, to tell big ones, to place self-promotion and self-preservation so far above everything else that they’re not so much his guiding values as his only ones.
All of that has gone around. When exactly is it coming around?
Perhaps we owe children a new adage, as oversimplified as the ones with which I began but no less true: The shameless shall inherit the earth, while the blameless grapple with the mess they make of it.
The Long Trump Tease
The wait for Donald Trump’s announcement of a running mate will apparently continue into next week.
Let’s not pretend for a second that this is a normal process.
I don’t mean Trump’s hyping of the suspense, as if he’s engaged in some reality-show reveal. I mean this: Whoever is willing to be considered has made that decision despite Trump’s attempt after the 2020 election to get Mike Pence, his vice president the first time around, to ignore the will of American voters and violate the Constitution. Despite Trump’s reported equanimity with calls for Pence’s execution. That bespeaks not only a perilously high tolerance for risk but also a rapacity for power at odds with responsibly wielding it. Which is to say that the reputed finalists for the Republican vice presidential nomination complement Trump beautifully.
But the argument for many of them ends there. J.D. Vance? His singular mix of contemptuousness and smarm should be patented — and then promptly outlawed. Doug Burgum? Proof that plutocrats can be as dull as the rest of us. Tim Scott? An unctuous blur. Tom Cotton? He scares small children and many forest animals.
Keep an eye on Marco Rubio. Sure, he’d have to resign his Senate seat and establish a primary residence somewhere other than Florida to join the ticket, but that’s nothing compared to stepping into Pence’s old cement shoes. And while it took Rubio a while, he has now traveled — now completed — the modern Republican arc from being appalled by Trump to being in thrall to him.
For the Love of Sentences
Credit…Samuel Corum for The New York Times
In The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser reflected on a micro-tussle toward the end of last Thursday night’s presidential debate: “Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?” (Thanks to Mike Greenwald of Melville, N.Y., for nominating this.)
In The Connecticut Post, Colin McEnroe pondered the president’s proper course: “I’m guardedly a ‘replace him’ guy. Some of you may recall that in 2019, I compared Biden to a Subaru with 310,000 miles on the odometer. ‘America has gotten a lot of use out of Joe Biden, and now it’s time to leave him by the side of the road, unscrew the plates, and walk away,’ I wrote. I was wrong … ish. He turned out to have deeper treads and more left in his tank than I had supposed. But Thursday night was 90 minutes of the ‘check engine’ light flashing desperately in the darkness.” (Holly Franquet, Fairfield, Conn.)
In The Times, Maureen Dowd acknowledged Biden’s gracious response to her tough coverage of him over the years: “He was so un-vengeful, I doubted he was Irish.” (Nancy Jackson, Taos, N.M., and Peter J. Geisser, Cranston, R.I., among others)
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan evaluated Americans’ attitudes toward NATO over time (and worked in a reference to a recent movie directed by and starring Jerry Seinfeld): “From age to age, a new generation of supporters must be rallied, and that is becoming the 13th labor of Hercules. If the thudding disappointment of ‘Unfrosted’ taught us anything, it’s that young people hate boomer nostalgia. And NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances.” (Richard Reams, San Antonio)
To return to The Times, Rory Smith explained the hubbub in Britain over the soccer commentator Gary Lineker’s uncharacteristically negative appraisal of England’s performance in the Euro2024 tournament: “To the public, Lineker is supposed to be the embodiment of neutrality. Hearing him be so scathing is akin to seeing David Attenborough pummel a dolphin.” (Ian Wallace, Wilmington, Del.)
Margaret Lyons appraised a beloved television show. “‘The Bear’ has an arms-length relationship to sex and romance, and that was one of its zestiest calling cards in Season 1: plenty of knifing, but no forking or spooning,” she wrote. (Jonathan Gerard, Durham, N.C., and Lee Burdette Williams, Mystic, Conn., among others)
And Margaret Renkl connected her concerns about fireworks to her concerns about America: “The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be ‘American’ to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?” (George Fero Jr., Chicago)
On a Personal Note
Credit…Getty Images
A reader wrote to me a few weeks ago to describe her recent vision loss and to ask for my advice — based on my own, somewhat similar situation — about how best to cope. She’d both read and listened to my memoir on the topic, “The Beauty of Dusk,” but she wondered if I had more to say.
I guess I do, if only because three years have passed since I finished that book. I’ve had additional experiences and reflections.
By her account, her eyesight is much more gravely diminished than mine, raising questions about the work she can and cannot continue to do. I’m hugely blessed — while I need to pace myself carefully and devote extra time and effort to tasks that I once accomplished with relative ease, my professional life remains much the same. So I offer the following observations humbly, knowing that some of them may have wide application and some not.
I cut myself more slack than I used to. I forgive myself for small mistakes (typos related to the sporadic blurring of my vision), medium-size hiccups (the occasional need to request a deadline extension) and what can feel like discourtesy (emails unanswered and invitations declined because of the limits of my focus and energy).
And I resolve, as best as possible, to see that permission as its own kind of gift. Throwing off the yoke of perfectionism or its lesser kinfolk can be liberating. It doesn’t compensate for loss, but it helps enormously with the adjustment to it. There are people who slow down voluntarily; I’ve slowed down involuntarily. That still leaves me in a place not wholly unlike theirs.
Also? I let myself get mad — at judiciously staggered intervals, in rigidly contained increments. I pounded my desk just the other day because the words on my screen began to shimmy and the words on the printouts that I’d made in case that happened were doing their own ugly dance. That necessitated a half-hour break that I didn’t think I could afford. Not fair!
So I seethed, not for a few seconds but for several long minutes, rationalizing that I couldn’t make more productive use of the time and then realizing that this was productive use of the time. It was a warranted exhalation of frustration, a worthwhile release of pressure. I was a laptop shutting down and rebooting. I was a drain being unclogged.
And then I was OK, or at least OK enough for a new keystroke, and then a keystroke after that. One foot in front of the other. It’s the strategy for any journey, slow or fast, long or short.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer.
Patriotism did not bring my grandfather to the Army recruiter’s office in 1956. Poverty did. A youth spent picking cotton and working odd jobs to help feed his family meant that he was a good way from graduating from high school as his 18th birthday approached. He wanted a better life for himself and saw the Army as a way to make it happen.
He ended up staying three years beyond his initial three-year commitment. A sepia-toned photograph of him in his uniform still hangs proudly in his bedroom in Huntsville, Ala.
For my grandfather, military life was not without challenges. He recalls that he and other Black soldiers were consistently addressed as “boys” until he stood up to his commanding officer and told him that there were nothing but men in their unit. After this tense and even dangerous exchange, the officer addressed them respectfully — a small triumph that my grandfather never forgot.
I asked him why he continued on and he replied, “I guess I loved America more than I thought. I definitely liked it more than Russia.”
The military was the first integrated space he encountered. “We served together, marched together, slept in the same barracks and learned to respect each other,” he said. During his six years of service, he finished high school and took extra classes. He returned to civilian life equipped with certifications to be a fireman, a merchant seaman and a bookkeeper. But in Alabama in the 1960s no one would hire him to do any of those things. His first job was as a janitor.
My grandfather’s feelings about America are by turns fond and critical. He loved his unit and the moments when the white men he served with treated him as an equal. He also laments those times when he wasn’t, especially in the civilian years that followed. Now, at age 86, he gets animated talking about how he never got to be a fireman.
His story embodies America’s great contradiction of being both a land of opportunity and one that hinders it at too many turns.
To my children, he is almost a mythic figure who climbed out of American history books. Despite all that he became — he opened his own music store in the 1990s — he cannot help but think he could have been even more.
He is my kids’ connection to a past they do not quite understand.
My children are not the only ones who do not know what to do with my grandfather’s story or his complex form of patriotism that holds tight to affection despite a deep sense of betrayal.
In this country we have come to see patriotism as a positive account of our history that treads lightly upon the nation’s sins. The Fourth of July in particular is a time to wrap ourselves in the flag, grill some meat and run through a playlist of songs with lyrics lauding Americana. Talking about slavery, Jim Crow, economic exploitation and what happened to Black soldiers after they finished their service ruins the vibes.
It costs nothing to sing along to “God Bless America.” It requires much more to believe in a place that has failed you.
As an African American who speaks on anti-Black racism, I often hear the refrain, “If you hate America so much, you should leave.” But I don’t recount my grandfather’s story because I hate America. I tell it because to omit stories like his would only hinder us from becoming a better country. On the other side of honesty is the possibility of change. For me, telling the truth is the most hopeful form of patriotism.
Too often we worry that if we tell our children about our complex and sometimes dark history, their response will be debilitating shame. But instead of lying to our youth, we can give them a task that demands the best of them. We can call upon them to close the often-gaping chasm between our ideals and practices. This is the gift the past offers us, a chance to flee old evils and pursue new goods.
It is not enough to imagine ourselves riding down the road with Paul Revere shouting warnings about redcoats or nestled on the boats preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy. We must note that the liberty Revere helped win was for some Americans, not all. We must recognize that the African Americans who risked their lives on that beach in France returned to a racially segregated country in which they were the targets of lynching.
This year, my mother’s side of the family will host a reunion on July 4 weekend. We will grill and set off fireworks like everyone else. We might even listen to Marvin Gaye’s or Whitney Houston’s rendition of the national anthem while we wait for the meat to finish cooking.
There will also be criticism of this country, especially since it’s an election season. That will not be all we have to say. We’ll talk about the long journey of my family from the plantation to the present freedoms we enjoy. That story contains its own mix of tragedy and triumph. We’ll speak of my grandfather’s service along with that of his father and two of his uncles, all three of which fought in World War II. In my generation, a cousin also served.
These emotions of love, pride and regret can reside in the same heart. It is the truest form of patriotism, a love that isn’t complacent, one that demands more than crumbs from justice’s table.
Whenever a politician cites “Judeo-Christian values,” I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling.
Last month brought two flagrant instances. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws that formalize precepts of the Christian nationalist movement — in the words of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (A.D. 2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”
On June 19, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a practice struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1980. A rich endorsement came via Donald Trump, who crowed, “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”
One week later, Landry’s fellow Christian soldier Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, announced plans to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools. Walters said learning the Bible is necessary to having “an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”
Either way, for both Trump and true believers, it hardly matters that the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from the state, not to have the state impose a religion. (So much for originalism.) Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit.
Not only have such moves been declared unconstitutional (“I can’t wait to be sued,” Landry said), but they are also exclusionary and offensive to many.
Despite what the Christian nationalist movement would have you believe, America was not founded as a Christian nation. Nor is it one today. In a pluralistic country, neither the Bible nor Judeo-Christian values are universal, including in the two heavily Christian Southern states in which these laws were passed.
In Louisiana, for example, 2 percent of residents are adherents of other faiths — including Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Thirteen percent are religious nones, including 4 percent who are atheist or agnostic. In Oklahoma, a similar percentage follow non-Christian religions, and an even larger portion — 18 percent — adhere to no religion.
In a suit challenging the Louisiana law, Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted that among the state’s approximately 680,000 students, many do not practice any religion at all. In response, Landry called on his followers to “stand up for Judeo-Christian values.”
While most of the Ten Commandments involve universal principles, and moral precepts can be found in the Bible, not everyone draws ethical guidelines from religion. And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god. That is decidedly not true for all Americans. Some atheists and secular humanists embrace the ideal put forth by Felix Adler, the founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, of deed before creed — that how we act is far more important than what we profess to believe.
Politicians, many of whom regularly flout Adler’s ideal, rarely bother to include nonbelievers — those of us who are not what politicians refer to as people of faith — in their supposedly inclusive rhetoric. This is where leaders of both parties, with their public prayers and displays of religiosity, typically alienate people like me whose principles do not stem from belief in a god. Barack Obama was an exception in including people “with no faith at all,” though I would have preferred a more elegant phrasing. Many of us rationalists do have faith, but it’s in science or humanity, as disappointing as humanity can be.
When it comes to the Ten Commandments, four of the 10 (three if you’re Catholic) concern a specific form of worship with a specific god. I’m on board with a rule against killing, for instance, but somehow this god has given a lot of killing a pass in his name.
And there’s a lot to explain in the Bible itself if you believe it’s a holy book — like its acceptance of slavery.
For me, the Bible’s primary interest is in its historical and literary influence, a work whose stories and metaphors have permeated literature. But it’s also one that, throughout history, has inspired and abetted many of the world’s most violent and deadly wars.
In their drive to foist their religious beliefs on others or to prove their conservative Christian bona fides, Republicans are leaning harder into exclusionary territory. Prominent and mainstream Republicans increasingly support the tenets of the Christian nationalist movement, which often embeds antisemitism and anti-Muslim views into its creed. And it is probably no coincidence that this is occurring as many Christians are fleeing their religion — many, no doubt, because of the hypocrisy and intolerance they’ve witnessed.
In ordinary times, all this would be quickly swatted away by the courts. Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has demonstrated that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to freedom of religion — and yes, that must include freedom from religion — those justices are willing to put their own faith above all else.
This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of all, regardless of their beliefs.
The scheme Trump and his allies cooked up in 2020 involved enlisting the Justice Department to give their lies about widespread election fraud an official patina. Then-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark drafted a letter to send to several states, including Georgia, that would falsely claim that “various irregularities” existed that cast those states’ election results into doubt. Had it been sent, the letter would have encouraged those state legislatures to convene special sessions to “investigate” and potentially send to Congress slates flipping the states’ Electoral College votes to Trump.
When the acting attorney general refused to send the letter, Trump threatened to fire him and replace him with Clark. He yielded only when a slew of top Justice Department officials promised to resign in protest. Apparently, though, according to the Supreme Court, there was nothing about that chain of events that falls outside the scope of the president’s “official acts.” As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 opinion, “The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”
The line seems innocuous compared to some of the other more dumbfounding statements within the decision, but the problem is that it’s written as though there was nothing wrong about the content of those discussions. A few paragraphs later, Roberts clarifies that sentence’s importance in explaining why the pressure campaign against Justice Department officials can’t be used to as part of the federal case against Trump:
Putting those two ideas together effectively signs off on ending the last 50 years of Justice Department independence. The way then-President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, used and abused the DOJ and other law enforcement bodies to shield Nixon’s allies and harass his enemies was one of the most damaging revelations of Watergate. Following Nixon’s resignation and Mitchell’s eventual prosecution and conviction, subsequent attorneys general have all strived to keep the White House at arm’s length from the day-to-day decisions regarding investigations.
But there were few legislative reforms that safeguarded the Justice Department from being used as a political tool — it has almost entirely been the work of norms and precedents that have cut across administrations. Even Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn issued a memo at the beginning of his term laying out the firewall between the White House staff and the Justice Department. It’s a standard that Trump’s allies, including Clark, have railed against, making no bones about the fact that, if given the chance, they intend to tear it down entirely.
If that happens, there will be little to prevent Trump from launching his promised revenge campaign against his enemies. Given the leeway Roberts has granted for the president to order even “sham” investigations, anyone could be subject to arbitrary probes, prompting unnecessary (and expensive) legal defenses and social stigma. It’s not absurd to imagine this resulting in the arrest and detention on made-up charges for anyone on the long list of people who’ve earned Trump’s ire.
Conversely, this ruling also seems on its face to allow a president to order an investigation to end for any reason. Under Roberts’ test, there would be no means for a court to assess, for example, whether Trump’s corruptly ordering that a GOP megadonor be beyond Justice Department scrutiny was a criminal violation of the law. Instead, the court’s conservatives have chosen to write this opinion from a worldview that assumes every “official act” taken by the president within his authority is legal and constitutional.
Roberts attempted to give the illusion that opinion was written with anyone but Trump in mind, and in doing so, he obscured how far removed from the average president Trump is. What Roberts frames as a simple declaration of the president’s authorities under the Constitution is now poised to become Trump’s go-ahead to target the political opposition with impunity. Likewise, in granting presidents the broadest benefit of the doubt possible to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” the court has all but guaranteed that, if Trump is returned to power, he will do the exact opposite.
How a Patriotic Painting Became the Internet’s Soap Box
“Freedom of Speech,” the World War II-era painting by Norman Rockwell, has taken on a new life online.
By Charles W. McFarlane – July 3, 2024
“Freedom of Speech,” completed in 1943, is among a series of works by the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell that depicted the “four freedoms” promoted in a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech.Credit…Norman Rockwell Museum Collections; SEPS: Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis
So you have an opinion you want to share online — something you need to get off your chest. Maybe it’s about the current political climate. Maybe you want to have the final word on whether or not people should wear their shoes in the house.
If you know you have a spicy take on your hands, you might look to the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell to help you share it. Across social media, his work “Freedom of Speech” appears alongside all manner of strong opinions, from the highly serious to the absurd to the esoteric, enshrining itself into the lingua franca of the internet decades after its creator’s death.
The oil painting, which shows a man dressed in work wear standing and poised to speak amid a crowd of men in suits, is part of a series by Rockwell inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address arguing for U.S. involvement in World War II. In his remarks, the president outlined four universal freedoms that Americans should fight to guarantee for all: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
According to the internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme, the painting began showing up in posts on X, then Twitter, in 2020. It wasn’t until two years later, though, that it started spreading widely, first with a post by a user who shared the image with an opinion on shrimp-fried rice (“a shrimp did not fry that rice!”).
That the painting has become a hit online isn’t as unlikely as it may seem. Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online political subcultures, said the artwork had a natural affinity with the social media platform where it has spread.
A stated goal of X is to “give anyone the ability to speak to the crowd and to give a platform to any opinion,” Mr. Citarella said. (Elon Musk and previous chief executives of the platform have called it the “town square” of the internet.) “If one had to illustrate Twitter in an image, it would be very well encapsulated in this very painting,” he added.
But the viral life of “Freedom of Speech” long predates X debates. Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the deputy director and chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., home to the “Four Freedom” paintings, said Rockwell’s oeuvre was intended to distill and quickly spread a mass message.
“Many Americans did not register what the meaning of those freedoms truly were” and found Roosevelt’s speech abstract, Ms. Plunkett said. What Rockwell wanted to do, she continued, “was to try to envision them in a way that a large populace could understand.”
“The Four Freedoms” and Rockwell’s interpretations of them were everywhere in American life in the 1940s. They appeared on covers of The Saturday Evening Post, where Rockwell regularly published his work. The government put them on postage stamps, displayed them in an exhibition as part of its nationwide war-bond drive and printed them on posters that helped raise $133 million for the war effort.
More recently, the paintings were used as inspiration for “Imagining Freedom,” a virtual exhibition at the Rockwell museum that includes many contemporary interpretations of his work, including a piece by the artist Maurice (Pops) Peterson, who in 2015 reimagined “Freedom From Fear” for the Black Lives Matter era.
“We’ve done a fair amount of work in terms of how his imagery has been appropriated, parodied or memed,” said Rich Bradway, the digital innovation officer at the museum.
Mr. Citarella said he had noticed that the “Freedom of Speech” painting was a little bit more popular online “with people who are on the left,” as part of a small but growing trend of memes related to Roosevelt and the New Deal.
The longing for a return to an imagined golden age of liberalism comes as there is a push from some on the right to return to the racial and gender hierarchies of midcentury America. On the left, there seems to be a small effort to “reclaim some of that imagery,” Mr. Citarella said.
“There’s a real push and pull with the semiotic use of this particular image,” he said of “Freedom of Speech.”
But the painting’s effort at universality still seems to resonate with those who share it online.
“Even if you are not a middle-aged white man speaking, people use him to represent themselves,” said Kathryn Winn, the author and editor of the Substack newsletter Memeforum. “There is a neutrality to him in that he’s not making an expression or saying anything beyond ‘This is my opinion.’”
For much of his career, and long after his death, Rockwell was considered “an enemy of modern art,” a “lowly calendar artist” and “a cornball and a square,” according to Deborah Solomon, who published a biography of Rockwell in 2013. But in recent years, Rockwell’s work has fetched tens of millions at auction houses — far exceeding expectations for American paintings — and has been looked on more kindly by some critics.
That Rockwell has been entered into the internet’s canon, too, is “a great way to maintain his presence in the public consciousness,” Ms. Plunkett said. Even if “Freedom of Speech” is largely wielded with irony online, something of its original meaning seems to shine through.
People from “all sides of the political spectrum” may use the painting to express, say, their views on pineapple as a pizza topping, Ms. Winn said. “The meme shows that we value freedom of speech, even at its most stupid, and that’s what Twitter is for.”
The Supreme Court Made a ‘Monumentally Awful’ Decision
Presidential immunity never existed in America. Until now.
By Jesse Wegman – Produced by Derek Arthur
On Monday morning the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump and future presidents of the United States have immunity for official acts. “The entire idea of the American system of government and the Constitution was that the rule of law was king, the rule of law applies to everyone equally, including the president of the United States,” Jesse Wegman, a member of the editorial board, says. “The court blew all of that up.”
In this audio essay, Jesse explains what the ruling means for Trump and for the presidency in decades to come.
(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)
Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Walter Bibikow
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Jesse Wegman is a member of The Times editorial board, where he writes about the Supreme Court, law and politics.
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.Jesse Wegman
I’m Jesse Wegman. I’m a member of “The Times” editorial board, where I write about law and politics.
So on the last day of its term, the Court ruled — I think shocking many of us — that presidents are basically above the law, much to the shock of those of us who thought they weren’t. They have, essentially, absolute immunity for most of their official acts, regardless of how egregiously they violate the law in carrying them out. And they may even have immunity for some acts that are on the edge of officialness. So it’s a decision that flies in the face of more than 200 years of American history, the text of the Constitution, and, I think, everybody’s settled understanding of presidents’ liability for criminal activity.
In the immediate term, what this means is that Donald Trump will almost certainly not face prosecution for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to overturn an election that he had lost fair and square. I think the concern that the dissenters brought up was that this is not just Donald Trump but presidents going forward who will now feel, essentially, free to do whatever they want, knowing that it is going to be extraordinarily hard to hold them to account after their presidencies.
When this case first got to the court system, I think a lot of people laughed it off. It was Donald Trump bringing up yet another one of his off-the-wall, absurd legal arguments. In this case, he was saying everything that happened on January 6 and around January 6 I’m immune from prosecution for because I was the president, and I was doing my job as the president.
Just to be clear, there has never been any criminal immunity for any president in American history. This was, I thought, broadly understood. Everyone understood this. Richard Nixon understood it back in the Watergate era.
That’s why he accepted a pardon because he knew that, without the pardon, he could be criminally prosecuted. It’s why Donald Trump’s lawyers, during the second impeachment of Trump in early 2021, said, even if you vote to acquit him, don’t worry. You can still go after him in a court of law. That was the general understanding.
The court blew all of that up with its decision on Monday. And I don’t think we can overstate what a monumental, and monumentally awful, decision this was.
Look, the justices in the majority, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who styles himself as an institutionalist — and I would say this opinion is about as anti-institutional as you can get — they argued that to expose presidents to criminal prosecution would interfere with their ability to do their job with the kind of energy and boldness that we require of presidents.
This is just laughable. First of all, no president in history before Donald Trump was brought up on criminal charges. The reason for that isn’t that presidents were tiptoeing around, terrified about being brought up on criminal charges. The reason is that presidents understood their role, and they didn’t break the law the way that Donald Trump did.
For a court that loves to talk about the importance of the text of the Constitution and the history and the tradition of this country, this is about as untethered from any of those things as you could imagine. If you could characterize this court in any way, it is a court that is entirely outcome-driven.
It has no principles. It does not rule on the grounds of any principle other than what it wants to do in a given case. And what it wants to do in a given case is, suspiciously, often correlated quite closely with the interests of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote one of the two dissents from Monday’s ruling, she called it “atextual, ahistorical, and utterly indefensible.” And Sotomayor says in her dissent, “The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.”
That’s what’s so shocking about this decision, right? The American Revolution was fought specifically to get out from under the power of a king who was unaccountable, a king who literally existed above the law.
The other way to think about the stakes of this ruling and of the impact it’s going to have is on Donald Trump himself. Look at what he did in his first term. Look at how much he disregarded the courts, Congress, all of the institutions of American government, when they didn’t go his way. He delegitimized them all.
So now think about Trump basically being unleashed by a Supreme Court that has said, it is going to be almost impossible to hold you criminally to account for anything that you’ve done. This is a man who does not see the law or the rule of law as something he respects or will follow. So now consider what it will be like if and when he retakes office and knows that nothing he does is going to come back to haunt him.
He will basically be immune in every sense for his actions. It is going to be very hard to say that almost anything a president does is not done in his official capacity. And I think, because of that, you’re going to see presidents feeling emboldened to take all kinds of steps that we didn’t think that they could ever take before.
