For Some Young People, a College Degree Is Not Worth the Debt
Emily Withnall – January 14, 2024
Soleil Revell, who dropped out of college after losing a scholarship, sits at a restaurant in Albuquerque, N.M., on Jan. 9, 2024. (Adria Malcolm/The New York Times)
When Alex, my elder child, who identifies as nonbinary, was ready to apply for college in 2022, I felt ill-equipped to help them navigate the process. I was raised in a low-income household and had been unprepared to figure out how to make my own college experience affordable.
I have been a single parent for 17 years. I have never earned enough income to have to make payments on my student loans, which total $81,000 for two degrees. I assumed I would carry the debt to my grave.
Alex is neurodivergent — their brain processes differently than what is considered to be typical for a majority of people — so we looked for schools that centered hands-on learning, where they would have a better chance of succeeding. We landed on the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The application of the Western Undergraduate Exchange — an agreement among various public colleges in the West — reduced the annual out-of-state tuition costs to $13,000 from $29,000. But even after financial aid was applied, the remaining cost of attendance came to $15,500 per year.
Alex’s financial aid package included $5,500 in federal student loans — the maximum that freshmen can take out. The rest was designated to me in the form of Parent PLUS loans, which allows parents to borrow money directly from the federal government. I was floored. After filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, my expected family contribution was zero. How could the school and the loan carrier know I didn’t have money and still approve me for a debt of $40,000 over four years?
By researching Parent PLUS loans, I learned that the parent alone carries the debt, there are fewer forgiveness options than other federal student loans, and the loans carry a current interest rate of 8.05%. There was no way I could sign. I’m a renter, and until two years ago, I didn’t have a retirement account. So instead of taking out Parent PLUS loans, I secured a private loan with a much lower interest rate through my credit union. Although I had to co-sign, Alex was designated the primary borrower.
Alex understood that this was the only option to pay for college, but as they struggled to adjust to college life in the years following the start of the pandemic, the debt began to weigh on them. This led them to drop out of college after two trimesters.
Although they have $7,000 in loans to pay off from their short stint, Alex knew the implications of accumulating even more debt over the course of four years. I did my best to alleviate their worries, but my own student loan debt wasn’t reassuring. Alex believed that even with a minimum wage job, they could pay off their debt and continue to support themself with jobs that didn’t require a degree.
Alex is not alone in this belief. Because of the combined costs of tuition and living expenses, some young people have opted to delay, drop out of or forgo attending college altogether to avoid student debt that could hang over them for decades. A recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit provider of educational reporting, showed that freshman enrollment declined by 3.6% last fall, reversing recent gains. In addition, the share of students who left college without a degree rose to 40.4 million as of July 2021.
Although Americans are questioning the value of college, research shows that people with college degrees typically earn nearly 75% more than those without them. Jobs that require a degree also often come with a range of benefits: flexible schedules, paid time off and sick and parental leave.
But there is no clear path toward those benefits.
Michele Shepard, senior director of college affordability at the Institute for College Access & Success, said that while she still has faith in the value of a college degree, obtaining one is becoming increasingly inaccessible.
“If you just look at the amount of college costs that are covered by Pell Grants, it used to cover about 80% of the average cost of a four-year degree in the late 1970s, and now it covers 25%,” Shepard said.
Burned Out
For much of her life, Soleil Revell’s mother, Reina Fernandez, was a single parent working multiple jobs while raising her children on a tight budget. When it came time for Revell to go to college, a small university in her hometown in New Mexico was the most affordable option. The state offers a scholarship that covers tuition and is available to in-state residents enrolling in college right after high school who meet certain criteria. Revell took advantage of this option by going to New Mexico Highlands University and living at home to save money.
But when the pandemic hit, trying to keep up with online classes and the pressures of family life became too difficult for her. Revell lost her scholarship after her grade-point average dipped, which left her owing $2,700 to the school. She dropped out after a year and a half and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2021, where she now waits tables full time and has a part-time job creating social media posts for a car dealership. She said that, given the loss of the scholarship, she would have accumulated $20,000 in debt if she had stayed in school.
“I was really driven to go to school in the beginning, but after I took a break, I kind of lost that drive,” Revell, 23, said. “My mom told me not to take a break because it’s going to be a lot harder to go back, but I was just really burned out.”
In addition to her bills, Revell has some medical debt. She has recently learned that a friend’s employer is considering removing a degree requirement for potential new hires, so she plans to apply. It’s a work-from-home job that pays more than her current role. Revell said a remote position would allow her to pick up more social media gigs.
Her plan is to save enough to cover the costs of rent and tuition so that when she returns to school, she can do so without going into debt. She hopes to study psychology at the University of New Mexico.
Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, says it can be difficult for students to go back to college later if they’ve dropped out.
“For adults, it’s really clear that going back to college has a lot to do with unemployment,” Baum said. “But when the economy is strong, when employment is strong, then you just get a job.”
A Military Alternative
Maria Han, 20, has just entered the third year of her contract with the U.S. Navy. Because of an unstable home life, she moved in with a classmate when she was 16. While in high school, Han was enrolled in an accelerated program that would have helped her earn an entry-level nursing degree by the time she graduated from high school in 2021. But because she was estranged from her parents, she did not have the resources to cover the $1,500 in fees for the program.
Instead, she took interest in joining the Navy as an option to pay for college when recruiters came to her school. Han is stationed in O‘ahu, Hawaii, after spending two years training to become a fire controlman. She said that, through the Navy, she has multiple options to complete a college degree or receive training in a trade. One option is to have the full cost of college attendance covered by extending her contract for five additional years. Another is to complete her current contract, which runs through 2027, and have tuition costs covered by the GI Bill of Rights when her time is up.
At this point, Han doesn’t think she’ll extend her contract. “I feel like the schooling part of the Navy kind of gave me a false picture of what was going to actually happen,” she said. “Then I went on my boat that I’m on right now, and it was a big reality check. Like, it’s just a little bit more scary than I thought it was going to be.”
For Han, confinement on the ship paired with limited connectivity to friends back home and a steep learning curve even after basic training made the transition more challenging than she expected.
Still, Han said she doesn’t know what she would have done without the Navy and that there are a lot of other people on her boat who feel the same. “Some people were homeless, and they joined the Navy, and it gave them an opportunity to start their life again,” Han said.
Challenges and Opportunities
There are few options for people who don’t have sufficient income, savings or financial aid to pay for college, said Laura Perna, an expert on college affordability, access and success at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “You can borrow what’s available to borrow, or you can work more hours for pay, and both of those have different types of consequences,” she said.
While attending community college is often touted as the easiest, most affordable choice for those who can’t pay higher prices to go elsewhere, it is not always a solution, especially in places where there are no local options. In addition, some four-year institutions do not accept credits from community college classes.
Perna believes free tuition programs are an important step toward reconsidering education costs and who is responsible for paying them.
“State governments have a role in funding public higher education through appropriations and financial aid,” Perna said. “The federal government has a role, especially through the Pell Grant. Government should have a role if you know there are so many public benefits of higher education, in addition to those ways that individual participants benefit. And so I think I’m hopeful that we can have some kind of rethinking on this. Because higher education matters.”
Alex, my older child, is 20 now, and they work in ecological monitoring earning $15 an hour. It’s a field they are interested in, and they see some limited paths toward career advancement. But they don’t see a clear path to financial security.
Part of this, no doubt, comes from them watching me continue to struggle financially even after earning a master’s degree. In Alex’s view, if they’re going to be living paycheck to paycheck because of the debt they’ll need to pay off from obtaining a degree, they would rather avoid the debt and earn what they can without a degree.
They understand that this route will still leave them living with fewer means, but they prefer it to the one that comes with the financial and mental weight of enormous student loan debt.
After so many years of watching me struggle, Alex finally had the opportunity to witness some relief: In December, my loans were finally forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. I don’t know if the program will last or if Alex will ever need it, but I hope it’s one of many solutions that could help make college more accessible for everyone.
Biden has forgiven billions in student loans, but his allies say voters aren’t giving him enough credit
Gabe Gutierrez and Ghael Fobes – January 14, 2024
Kent Nishimura
WASHINGTON — More than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s ambitious program to erase $430 billion in student loan debt, the White House has been rolling out smaller, more targeted relief programs that it says have now canceled $132 billion in debt for more than 3.6 million Americans.
At the time of the court’s decision, it appeared that Biden wasn’t going to be make good on one of the biggest promises he made to young voters, who helped propel him into the White House. But as he’s gone about doing the same work more slowly, he seems to be getting little credit from those same voters.
On Friday, the administration said that it’s fast-tracking a key provision of the Saving on a Valuable Education plan — known as SAVE — that was scheduled to take effect this summer. Starting next month, borrowers enrolled in SAVE who took out less than $12,000 in loans and have been paying them back for at least 10 years will get their remaining debt canceled right away. With each additional $1,000 of debt, the window for forgiveness increases by a year. For example, a student who took out $13,000 in loans will now have their debt wiped out if they’ve been paying it back for 11 years, or in 12 years for those who borrowed $14,000 — and so on.
Separately, eligible borrowers don’t need to wait 10 years to get some financial benefit from the SAVE plan, which has a more generous formula for calculating income-based repayments than previous government programs. Most low-income borrowers will pay less. For example, a borrower making $38,000 a year with $25,000 in public student loans would see their payment drop from $134 to $43 a month, according to the Department of Education.
The White House said almost seven million borrowers have signed up for SAVE.
“I won’t back down from using every tool at our disposal to get student loan borrowers the relief they need to reach their dreams,” Biden said in a written statement.
Democrats are trying to motivate younger voters ahead of crucial months of the 2024 presidential campaign. According to an NBC News poll in November, Republican front-runner Donald Trump holds a slight advantage within the margin of error in the survey among voters ages 18 to 34 (46% to 42%) — a reversal from past election results and past NBC News polls.
Biden initially announced his broad student debt relief forgiveness plan in 2022, ahead of the midterm elections. The Supreme Court struck it down the following summer, ruling that a president doesn’t have the authority for such a broad policy under the law.
Since then, the White House has used other tools that no president had ever used to this extent. For example, using anti-fraud and consumer protection regulations, the administration has forgiven $22.5 billion for more than 1.3 million borrowers who claim they were cheated by their schools or that their schools closed.
The administration is now ramping up efforts to communicate that to voters. In South Carolina, some Democratic voters that NBC News spoke with said they were disappointed with the Biden administration — and cited what they perceived as a lack of results on student loan debt forgiveness as one of the reasons.
“I feel like my generation, we were promised that student loans would be erased and that hasn’t happened,” said Nashonda Hunter, 41. “We see how much aid that we’re sending over to foreign countries, and there are so many Americans that are suffering.”
That comment, while anecdotal, reveals some of the challenges that the Biden campaign is facing: ensuring that voters give the president credit for policies he has focused on.
Some Biden staffers have been frustrated that the president’s efforts on student debt relief haven’t gotten more attention. Acknowledging that, last week Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., introduced Biden at Mother Emanuel AME Church and highlighted the administration’s efforts to revamp loan assistance program for public workers such as teachers, police officers, firefighters and federal and state employees.
“But for some strange reason,” Clyburn said, “we don’t see reports about that.”
Diane Stuckey Bruce, who works at South Carolina State University, said she’d been paying off student loans since 2002 and never missed a payment. But the debt was crushing — and didn’t allow her to buy a home.
Then, in late 2021, she said she had her entire remaining student loan debt — $263,585.35 — forgiven through the program known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF).
“I’ll never forget that day for the rest of my life,” she said, calling it a game changer. “It was the biggest blessing I have ever received.”
The White House has touted that it receives notes from constituents thankful for the loan relief.
“I actually sat and cried,” one writer who was worried they’d have to refinance their home to pay off the debt. “I am so relieved and my heart overflows with gratitude.”
Still, while the debt forgiveness programs have been popular on the political left, many Republicans have come out strongly against them and praised the Supreme Court for striking down the administration’s wide-ranging debt forgiveness plan, arguing that it was unfair for people who paid off their debts to have their tax dollars used to subsidize others who didn’t. GOP presidential candidates sounded off on the issue last year.
“Why should a truck driver have to pay for somebody that got a degree in zombie studies?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at an Iowa event in August. “It doesn’t make sense.”
On Friday, Republican members slammed the White House and the Department of Education for the new debt forgiveness plan that they argue is too expensive.
“President Biden is downright desperate to buy votes before the election — so much so that he green-lights the Department of Education to dump even more kerosene on an already raging student debt fire,” said the Republican chair of the House Education Committee, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, after Friday’s announcement. “It’s clear that the Biden administration needs a good old-fashioned dose of fiscal common sense — all it knows how to do is spend like a drunken sailor.”
‘This to Him Is the Grand Finale’: Donald Trump’s 50-Year Mission to Discredit the Justice System
The former president is in unparalleled legal peril, but he has mastered the ability to grind down the legal system to his advantage. It’s already changing our democracy.
By Michael Kruse – January 12, 2023
Michael Kruse, senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.
POLITICO illustration by Emily Scherer/Photos by Getty Images, iStock
NEW YORK — What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan in November had never happened. Not in the preceding almost two and a half centuries of the history of the United States. Donald Trump was on the witness stand. It was not unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence just because it was a former president, although that was totally true. It was unprecedented because the power dynamic of the courtroom had been upended — the defendant was not on defense, the most vulnerable person in the room was the most dominant person in the room, and the people nominally in charge could do little about it.
It was unprecedented, too, because over the course of four or so hours Trump savaged the judge, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the case and the trial — savaged the system itself. He called the attorney general “a political hack.” He called the judge “very hostile.” He called the trial “crazy” and the court “a fraud” and the case “a disgrace.” He told the prosecutor he should be “ashamed” of himself. The judge all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to “control” him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” But he didn’t, because he couldn’t, and audible from the city’s streets were the steady sounds of sirens and that felt absolutely apt.
“Are you done?” the prosecutor said.
“Done,” Trump said.
He was nowhere close to done. Trump’s testimony if anything was but a taste. (In fact, he said many of the same things in the same courtroom on Thursday.) This country has never seen and therefore is utterly unprepared for what it’s about to endure in the wrenching weeks and months ahead — active challenges based on post-Civil War constitutional amendments to bar insurrectionists from the ballot; existentially important questions about presidential immunity almost certainly to be decided by a U.S. Supreme Court the citizenry has seldom trusted less; and a candidate running for the White House while facing four separate criminal indictments alleging 91 felonies, among them, of course, charges that he tried to overturn an election he lost and overthrow the democracy he swore to defend. And while many found Trump’s conduct in court in New York shocking, it is in fact for Trump not shocking at all. For Trump, it is less an aberration than an extension, an escalation — a culmination. Trump has never been in precisely this position, and the level of the threat that he faces is inarguably new, but it’s just as true, too, that nobody has been preparing for this as long as he has himself.
Former President Donald Trump, flanked by his attorneys, waits to take the witness stand at New York Supreme Court on Nov. 6, 2023, in New York City. | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP
Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite. For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims. Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business — it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare.
“He doesn’t see the legal system as a means of obtaining justice for all,” Jim Zirin, the author of Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits, told me. He sees it rather as a “tool,” said Ian Bassin, a former White House lawyer in the administration of Barack Obama and the current executive director of Protect Democracy, “in his quest to command attention and ultimately power.” But it’s not merely any tool. It’s his most potent tactic and fundamental to any and all successes he’s had. “There’s probably no single person in America,” said Eric Swalwell, the Democratic member of Congress from California and a former prosecutor and Trump impeachment manager, “who is more, I would say, knowledgeable and experienced in our legal system — as both a plaintiff and as a defendant — than Donald Trump.”
Many have been confounded by the legal system’s inability to constrain Trump, by his ability to escape at least thus far any legal accounting for behavior that even some leaders of his own party excoriated — and why that reckoning might never come. To understand this requires seeing Trump in a new mode — not as a businessman-turned-celebrity-turned-politician, or as a nationalist populist demagogue, or as the epochal leader of a right-wing movement, but rather as a legal combatant. “This is not a political rally — this is a courtroom,” the judge admonished him at one point in November in New York. It was only in the most technical sense correct. Just as he had upended the norms inside the New York courtroom, Trump has altered the very way we view the justice system as a whole. This is not something he began to do once he won elected office. It has been a lifelong project.
Starting in 1973, when the federal government sued him and his father for racist rental practices in the apartments they owned, Trump learned from the notorious Roy Cohn, then searched for another Roy Cohn — then finally became his own Roy Cohn. He’s exploited as loopholes the legal system’s bedrock tenets, eyeing its very integrity as simultaneously its intrinsic vulnerability — the near sacrosanct honoring of the rights of the defendant, the deliberation that due process demands, the constant constitutional balancing act that relies on shared good faith as much as fixed, written rules. He has routinely turned what’s obviously peril into what’s effectively fuel, taking long rosters of losses and willing them into something like wins — if not in a court of law, then in that of public opinion. It has worked, and it continues to work. Trump, after all, was at one of his weakest points politically until the first of his four arraignments last spring. Ever since, his legal jeopardy and his political viability have done little but go up, together. Deny, delay and attack, always play the victim, never stop undermining the system: Trump has taken the Cohn playbook to reaches not even Cohn could have foreseen — fusing his legal efforts with his business interests, lawyers as important to him as loan officers, and now he’s done the same with politics. He’s not fighting the system, it seems sometimes, so much as he’s using it. He’s fundraising off of it. He’s consolidating support because of it. He’s far and away the most likely Republican nominee, polls consistently show. He’s the odds-on favorite to be the president again.
As Trump was on the witness stand on Nov. 6, Judge Arthur Engoron (bottom) all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to “control” him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” | Spencer Platt/Getty Images; Pool photo by Brendan McDermid
“He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appellate judge and one of the founders of the recently formed Society for the Rule of Law. “And this to him,” Luttig told me, “is the grand finale.”
The 2024 presidential election, in the estimation of Paul Rosenzweig, a senior counsel during the investigation of President Bill Clinton and an assistant deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security in the administration of George W. Bush, isn’t a referendum on Joe Biden. It isn’t even a referendum, he said, on Donald Trump. “This election,” he told me, “is a referendum on the rule of law.”
More unnerving, though, than even that is an idea that has coursed through my conversations over these past several months: That referendum might already be over. Democracy’s on the ballot, many have taken to saying — Biden just said it last week — but democracy, and democratic institutions, as political scientist Brian Klaas put it to me, “can’t function properly if only part of the country believes in them.” And it’s possible that some critical portion of the population does not, or will not, no matter what happens between now and next November, believe in the verdicts or other outcomes rendered by those institutions. What if Trump is convicted? What if he’s not? What if he’s not convicted and then gets elected? What if he is and wins anyway? More disquieting than what might be on the ballot, it turns out, is actually what might not.
“Our democracy rests on a foundation of trust — trust in elections, trust in institutions,” Bassin said. “And you know what scares me the most about Trump? It’s not the sledgehammer he’s taken to the structure of our national house,” he told me. “It’s the termites he’s unleashed into the foundation.”
Trump (left) stands with his father, Fred Trump, in Brooklyn in 1973. That year, the federal government sued Trump and his father for racist rental practices in the apartments they owned. | Barton Silverman/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
‘Attack, attack, attack — no matter what the merits are’
The United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc., filed by the Department of Justice on October 15, 1973, put a 27-year-old Donald Trump for the first time on the front page of the New York Times. He also used it to introduce himself to a man who was already an infamous rogue — Cohn becoming because of this case Trump’s most indispensable mentor.
Cohn, “clearly one of God’s most imperfect vessels” but “one of the most extraordinary, demonized, and misunderstood figures of 20th-century American politics,” Steve Bannon wrote in the 2023 Skyhorse Publishing reprint of Nicholas von Hoffman’s biography, “is more relevant today than when the book was originally published in 1988.” Bannon’s not wrong. And that’s because of Trump and what Trump has become. Pre-Trump, though, and before Cohn was disbarred and died in 1986 from complications from AIDS, Cohn was in post-World War II America a particular sort of poisonous force — the top attorney and aide to red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s who then in the ’60s and ’70s turned his ill repute into a career as “ a legal executioner” for celebrities, executives and mob bosses. He didn’t pay his bills. He didn’t pay his taxes. He was shameless and remorseless and “ famous among lawyers for winning cases by delays, evasions and lies.” He was indicted four times, for bribery and conspiracy, for extortion and blackmail, for stock-swindling and obstruction of justice and filing false reports — and never once convicted. He was, to the people who knew him and watched him with some combination of wonder and disgust, “a bully,” “a scoundrel” and “as politically incorrect as they come.” Trump was transfixed.
Top: People sit outside Trump Village, a two-building apartment complex, in Brooklyn in 1973. Bottom: Donald and Fred Trump visit a tenant in one of their Brooklyn apartment buildings in Brooklyn in 1973. | Barton Silverman/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
And the federal race case was Trump’s first tutorial. “He went to court,” as Trump would put it, “and I went with him.” Cohn said the Department of Justice had “no facts to support the charges” that were “barebones” and “without foundation.” Cohn accused the feds of going after the Trumps’ organization because it was “one of the largest in the field.” He accused them of a “smear” that caused “damage” that was “never going to be completely undone.” Cohn filed a countersuit for a stunning $100 million that a judge tossed out as “frivolous” but not before it generated headlines and attention for a young Trump spoiling for a publicized fight. He accused a young female prosecutor of staging a “Gestapo-like investigation” with “undercover agents” wiretapping Trump offices and “marching around” like “storm troopers banging on the doors” — all charges the judge was forced to take the time to dismiss. And Cohn delayed, and delayed and delayed, frustrating for years a series of government attorneys who in court briefs repeatedly bemoaned Cohn’s “noncompliance” and “dilatory tactics” and “blithe disregard.” The director of the Open Housing Center of the New York Urban League worried that Cohn on behalf of Trump was, in spite of the evidence, actually “winning.”
Trump, with Roy Cohn beside him, speaks during a news conference where they announced a lawsuit against the National Football League in 1984. | Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
They weren’t. At least not officially. Because the DOJ got Trump and his father to sign a consent decree promising they would comply with the Fair Housing Act and create preferential vacancies and pay for ads for those vacancies and hire and promote minorities and self-report their progress. The agency called the agreement “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.” But Trump? He called it a win. He had been allowed to sign the decree without copping to guilt, and if that wasn’t quite a triumph, it also wasn’t in any real way a defeat. “Did Trump get nailed? No,” Cohn’s cousin, David Lloyd Marcus, told me. “He basically got out of it.” Trump had siphoned from Cohn lasting lessons. “He learned that the evidence can be irrelevant,” Zirin told me. He learned that “the law doesn’t matter, the government’s mission doesn’t matter,” Marcus told me. He learned “that you could use the law to sort of bend circumstances to your will,” former Trump attorney Ty Cobb told me. “Attack, attack, attack — no matter what the merits are — fuck the merits — attack, attack, attack,” longtime New York attorney Marty London told me. “That was Roy Cohn’s methodology that was adopted by Donald Trump.”
More than anything, though, Cohn had shown Trump not simply how to turn a loss into a win but how to turn a case on its head — how, in other words, to take the United States v. Trump and make it Trump versus the United States.
The Trump Parc East building, which was formerly known as 100 Central Park South, is seen in New York City in 2016. | Frank Franklin II/AP
‘Suddenly you are being sued. It gives you a headache’
If the ’70s were a training ground, the ’80s were a proving ground. And if Cohn was a weapon —“a weapon for me,” as Trump told the writer Ken Auletta — so, too, was the law and the legal system itself. Lawsuits were as central as public relations or loans from banks to the building of Trump’s business and the burnishing of his brand. And he came to understand during the decade of the ’80s that he didn’t have to play defense. He could just start on offense.
Trump bought the 15-story apartment building at the prime location of 100 Central Park South in 1981. He wanted to turn it into a fancier condominium. He just needed the mostly rent-controlled tenants to get out, and he quickly began legal proceedings to try to make that happen, filing with the city applications for permits for eviction and demolition. He sued one tenant for not paying his rent even though he had. He also got the company he had hired to run the building to cut back on services, like security, hot water and heat. At one point he made a plainly disingenuous offer to the city to house free of charge some of the area’s homeless in the building’s few vacant units. “I just want to help with the homeless problem,” he told the Times. He put tin on the windows of the empty apartments to make the whole building look shabby. One of the tenants told the Times, it felt like they were “living under a state of siege.”
So the tenants pooled money to hire attorneys to sue back. And judges sided with the tenants, not him, and so did state and city agencies, ruling that Trump had initiated “spurious” and “unwarranted litigation” that added up to “an unrelenting, systematic and illegal campaign” to “force tenants from their housing accommodations at the earliest possible time.” By 1985, Trump had built Trump Tower, opened two casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and been on the cover of GQ. But Central Park South? This, as New York magazine put it on its cover, was “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story” — “a fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” The tenants had had it. “This merchant, this gambler, this Atlantic City man-whore,” one of them told a reporter for a British magazine. “He wants to be Jesus. He wants to be Hitler. He wants to be the most powerful thing in the world.”
Stymied, Trump in December of that year filed, of all things, a $105 million racketeering suit — in effect accusing the tenants’ attorneys and state and city agencies of conspiring against him in a criminal enterprise. He shared the details with the New York Post before he even filed the papers in court.
Trump, shown above in 1986, wanted to turn 100 Central Park South into a fancier condominium after buying it in 1981. He just needed the mostly rent-controlled tenants to get out. | Mario Suriani/AP; Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
“He had a temper tantrum,” Rick Fischbein, one of the attorneys for the tenants, told me recently. “He sued the firm. He brought a RICO action,” said David Rozenholc, another one of the attorneys for the tenants, “to try to get leverage.” It was “frivolous” and “absurd,” Rozenholc told me. But still: “You are an attorney representing a client, and suddenly you are being sued. It gives you a headache, it gives you a problem, it gives you an issue — you have to deal with it, you have to hire a lawyer …”
That lawyer was Marty London. “We attacked the claim on the merits, and quickly,” London told me. And time was of the essence, he explained, in large part because the firm’s bank account had been frozen because of the size of Trump’s claim. Any undue delay would accrue to the benefit of Trump and to the detriment of the defendants — and the judges seemed to understand. “It took a month to get it dismissed,” London recalled, and the appeal was similarly fast-tracked. “Further pleading would merely waste the time and resources of the litigants as well as divert scarce judicial resources,” an appellate judge concluded, denying Trump’s motion to replead “with prejudice.”
“Trump saw that the way to beat these people, these tenants, it was not on the merits, because there were no merits,” London told me. “So what you do is attack the lawyer,” he said. “You make the lawyer so afraid of Trump that he quits. That’s what he tried to do.”
But the lawyers did not quit. London even got a judge to order Trump to pay Fischbein’s firm $700,000 in fees, including London’s costs in the RICO case. Fischbein hung on the wall of his office a framed copy of Trump’s check along with a blue-T-shirt with a boast: “ I was sued by Donald Trump for $105 million.”
“He lost,” Fischbein told me last month.
Eventually, though, Trump turned 100 Central Park South into a condo called Trump Parc East. “His public position now,” Wayne Barrett would write in his book about Trump published in 1992, “was that the tenant battle had delayed his project just long enough for him to benefit from the boom in the market. So he announced that he had made money from the protracted conflict.” The upshot in The Art of the Deal: “All’s well that ends well.” A legal loss, Trump reasoned, didn’t have to be a loss overall.
A portrait of Donald Trump hangs inside Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1995. | Ron Galella via Getty Images
‘He uses the legal system to tire people out’
Trump was in deep financial distress in the early ’90s. The arc of his life could have been irrevocably altered — and that of the nation, it turns out — had he been truly brought low by his debts, and had a passel of people with power made different decisions. That image he sought to convey, that brand he wanted to burnish — money maestro, billionaire business boss — in this window of time might have been tarnished forever. “Survive ‘til ’95,” Trump liked to say. He did it with family money. He did it through bankruptcy. He did it by turning his casinos into public money — a lifeline that was “the general public” in “middle America” trusting Trump and buying literal stock called DJT. He did it by turning Mar-a-Lago into a private club — and a lawsuit into a golf course. And he did that by opening up a whole new legal front in Florida — in Palm Beach.
“He sued the county,” former county commissioner Karen Marcus told me, “over airport noise.”
It was June of ’95. This had been a Trump pet peeve for years — almost ever since he had bought Mar-a-Lago 10 years before. But now he actually filed a suit for $75 million in damages because one of the flight paths for Palm Beach International Airport took low-flying planes directly over Mar-a-Lago. “Mar-a-Lago can no longer be enjoyed for its original purposes of relaxation, entertaining and everyday living,” the suit said. The next week, county commissioners sued him back, hiring a law firm for $190 an hour. “I think it’s ridiculous Mr. Trump has taken on the taxpayers of Palm Beach County,” commission chairman Ken Foster said at the time, “thinking his pockets are deeper than ours.” It’s exactly what he was thinking.
Top: A plane flies over Mar-a-Lago in 1999. Bottom: (Left to right) Businessman Alfons Schmitt, Trump, and golf course architect Jim Fazio at the Trump International Golf Club groundbreaking ceremony in Palm Beach in 1997. | Art Seitz/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; Davidoff Studios/Getty Images
“I first met Trump in the late ’80s,” former Palm Beach town councilman and mayor Jack McDonald told me. “And for all those years,” he said, “the strategy’s been quite clear.”
“He uses the legal system,” said Alan (no relation to Karen) Marcus, a Trump publicist at the time, “to tire people out.”
“He thinks the lawsuit will be easier for him to bear than his opponent,” a person in Palm Beach familiar with Trump who requested anonymity to speak candidly told me recently. “He doesn’t think he’s going to win necessarily,” this person continued. “He thinks that he’ll spend more money than the other side will, including municipalities, even Palm Beach, and that all of those expenses are much more wearing on government officials than they are on Donald Trump.”
And he was right.
By November ’95, the county’s attorneys told the county commission the Trump airport suit was going to cost the county perhaps more than $1 million. By April of ’96, the county’s attorneys and Trump’s attorneys were talking about a settlement. By September, it was official: Trump agreed to drop the suit. In return he got the right to lease at $438,000 a year — for at least 30 years, and up to 75 — 214 acres of untouched scrub land by the very same airport so he could build the golf course that is now Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. To boot, the county promised to keep the planes from flying directly over Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s attorney called it “a win-win.” Plenty of people in Palm Beach had feelings that were decidedly more mixed. “I realize you’re settling a lawsuit, but you’re giving up the use of that land for 75 years,” former county commissioner Bill Medlen told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel at the time. Said the Palm Beach Post’s editorial board: “Rather than getting him out of their hair, they have gotten themselves into a 30-year lease with the litigious Mr. Trump.”
Indeed, for the litigious Mr. Trump, a Palm Beach coda came a decade later. In 2006, he put up in front of Mar-a-Lago an American flag that was so big it was against town code — 15 by 25 feet of the Stars and Stripes mounted atop an 80-foot pole. It was bait. The town took it. The fine was $1,250 a day. Trump sued — for $25 million — arguing his giant flag was constitutionally protected speech. “No American should have to get a permit to fly the flag,” he crowed in interviews. Eventually, of course, Trump and the town settled — he made the flag a little smaller, the town waived the fines — but for Trump it was another legal draw that was in all other ways nothing but a win.
A large 15-by-25-foot American flag flies over Mar-a-Lago in October 2006. | Alyssa Schukar/The Palm Beach Post via AP
“It was a success for him in terms of how he was viewed across America,” McDonald, who was the mayor of at the time, told me. “Because that all of a sudden,” said McDonald, who was once a member of Mar-a-Lago but not anymore and told me he’s never voted for Trump, “made him this great American patriot.”
“I think he learned right on this little island a lot of the techniques that he used to become president,” said Laurence Leamer, the author of a book about Trump, Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach. “Trump came down here just not giving a damn, pushing and pushing, pushing the town, pushing the law.”
According to Tim O’Brien, who came out with a book about Trump in 2005 and and was sued because of it, Trump sued him because of the brand — “to create it, maintain it, and cast it forever in amber.” | Peter Kramer/Getty Images
‘The Rosetta Stone of Donald Trump’s hallucinations’
By the time of the Palm Beach flag flap, any ’90s taint was gone, the overwhelming initial success of “The Apprentice” having reintroduced Trump to much of the country not as a hokey, aging emblem of the high-flying, go-go ’80s but as a still preeminent and ubiquitous tycoon — as a billionaire. The brand was somehow intact, and now again on the rise, and it needed to be protected at all costs.
So he sued Tim O’Brien.
“This book,” O’Brien told the Palm Beach Post when TrumpNation came out in the fall of 2005, “is about how a cartoon character became one of the most famous businessmen in America.”
Plenty of things in the book were unflattering. O’Brien quoted Trump, for instance, saying he had been “bored” when Marla Maples was walking down the aisle at the second of his three weddings. He pegged the Trump Organization as “a teeny operation.” And Trump told the author some things that stood out then and stand out even more now. “If you don’t win, you can’t get away with it,” Trump said. “And I win, I win, I always win …” He also said he considered crying a sign of “weakness” and as an example brought up mob boss John Gotti — the “Teflon Don.” Gotti, Trump told O’Brien, “went through years of trials. He sat with a stone face. He said: ‘Fuck you.’”
None of that, though, is why Trump sued O’Brien. He sued O’Brien essentially because of two sentences that cut straight to the core of the brand.
“Three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances, people who had worked closely with him for years,” O’Brien wrote, “told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. By anyone’s standards this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought he was remotely close to being a billionaire.”
Tim O’Brien, shown above in 2017. After O’Brien’s book came out, Trump in the press described him as “a third-rate writer,” a “loser” and “a whack job.” | Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Donald J. Trump v. Timothy L. O’Brien was in some sense a direct extension of Trump versus the other Trumps — Jules and Eddie Trump — from the suit back in the ’80s.
Those Trumps’ use of their own name, Roy Cohn wrote in court papers in December of 1984, “can only be viewed as a poorly veiled attempt at trading on the good will, reputation and financial credibility of” his client. Their use of the corporate name of the Trump Group, Cohn concluded, was therefore “untenable.” It was a bold claim not least because Jules and Eddie Trump, South African emigrants, were big businessmen themselves — by some measures bigger, in fact, than Donald Trump. One of the main reasons Donald Trump even knew of Jules and Eddie Trump, after all, was that the other Trumps had just bid to buy a drugstore chain for $360 million. The other Trumps’ attorneys’ response was basically bafflement at the notion of “barring the defendants from using their family name.” The legal back-and-forth nonetheless went on for five years.
The other Trumps’ attorneys during their deposition of Trump in not so many words tried to make the case that Trump was a serial legal scourge. They peppered him with questions about the number of times he’d been deposed.
“I really don’t know,” he said. It “unfortunately” was “a part of doing business.” Trump grew testy the longer this line of query lasted. He called their questions “ridiculous.” He complained they were “trying to harass me.”
The other Trumps’ attorneys astutely went back to the beginning. They brought up the DOJ’s case from 1973. Trump bristled. “We acknowledged no wrongdoing,” he said before quickly attacking the inference of racism that hung in the air. “Your clients come from South Africa,” he said, “so don’t tell me about it.”
It was a split decision in the end. A judge concluded that “the name ‘Trump’ is well-recognized in the New York real estate development community, but the court does not think this is the same as being ‘unique.’” Trump did, however, successfully petition the Patent and Trademark Office, which ruled the other Trumps could keep using the name the Trump Group but could not keep the Trump Group trademark. The other Trumps had spent $250,000 in legal fees, because they could, but still: “It was very costly,” Jules Trump would tell the Miami Herald, “and a huge waste of time.” Not for Donald Trump. In his mind, the name was the brand, and the brand belonged to him.
Trump sued fellow New York businessmen Eddie (left) and Jules Trump in the 1980s because they had the same last name.The legal back-and-forth nonetheless went on for five years. | Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images; Monica Schipper/Getty Images
Now, though, in 2005, here was O’Brien’s book. “The thrust of the book,” the suit stated, “is that Trump is an unskilled and dissembling businessman” — his attorneys saying Trump was worth at least $2.7 billion, seeking $5 billion in damages and calling the book “defamatory,” “malicious” and “egregiously false.” Trump went on the offensive in the press as well, describing O’Brien as “a third-rate writer,” a “loser” and “a whack job.”
A judge at first ruled that O’Brien had to reveal his sources, those three people “with direct knowledge” of Trump’s finances — but O’Brien’s lawyers won a series of appeals based on the broad protections for reporters provided by the nation’s libel laws. “The libel laws are very bad,” Trump told the New York Post in 2009. Those laws in essence said O’Brien had to have demonstrated “actual malice” and a “reckless disregard” for the truth in reporting what he did, and an appeals court finally in 2011 reaffirmed “no triable issue as to the existence of actual malice.”
“That case never had a chance of success,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer of a lawyer at the time, told me. “His hope was that he could intimidate O’Brien,” he said. It was also, Cohen added, a threat of sorts meant for other reporters — “a warning shot,” he said.
But that’s not really why Trump sued O’Brien, O’Brien told me when I told him what Cohen had said. It was all about the brand, O’Brien said, just as it’s always been — “to create it, maintain it, and cast it forever in amber.”
“And his deposition was an eternal embarrassment,” O’Brien added. “That deposition is the Rosetta Stone of Donald Trump’s hallucinations, about how he runs his business, how much money he has, how he values things, and who he is in this world.”
“Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” Trump was asked.
“When you’re making a public statement, you want to put the most positive — you want to say it the most positive way possible,” he said.
“I’m no different from a politician running for office.”
Trump signs copies of his audio business course — produced by Trump University — called “How to Build a Fortune”, in 2006 in New York City. | Louis Lanzano/AP
‘The Roy Cohn stuff is still really ingrained in him’
Trump University, Donald Trump had announced in 2005, was going to be “Ivy League-quality” with “world-class faculty” ready to “teach you better than the best business school.” What it ended up being, according to “students” and staff, was “a joke” and “a lie.” So some of them sued him. Customers filed class-action suits starting in 2010. And then the attorney general of New York filed a sweeping $40-million civil suit in 2013, charging that thousands of people paid up to $35,000 for what in the main was a sham, leaving them with scant lessons of any value but mired in mountains of debt and regret. “Trump University,” Eric Schneiderman said, “with Donald Trump’s knowledge and participation, relied on Trump’s name recognition and celebrity status to take advantage of consumers who believed in the Trump brand.”
Trump was on defense again — reminiscent in this respect of the DOJ case from a full 40 years before. And even without Cohn in his corner, of course, Trump went to work in time-tested ways. “The Roy Cohn stuff is still really ingrained in him,” said Ty Cobb, the former Trump attorney. “I have thoughts about Roy Cohn,” longtime politically connected New York P.R. man George Arzt said, “almost every time I see Donald Trump.”
Trump’s new Cohn?
It wasn’t Michael Cohen, and it wasn’t anybody else, said Lawrence Douglas, an Amherst College professor who’s written extensively about Trump and the law.
“It’s Donald Trump.”
The big difference, though, was that Trump now was much more squarely playing politics, too. He had talked about running for president in the late ’80s. He had launched a brief third-party bid in 2000. But by this point he was considering more seriously a run for the White House. He spent a lot of 2011 stoking the racist “birtherism” lie that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and therefore was not a legitimate commander in chief. He thought hard about running in 2012, and though he didn’t, his endorsement meant something in the GOP. And he had his eye on 2016 — and the damning, mounting legal problems stemming from his for-profit “school” were a problem.
“No one, no matter how rich or famous they are, has a right to scam hardworking New Yorkers. Anyone who does should expect to be held accountable,” Schneiderman told the New York Daily News. Trump is “going to have to face justice,” he said on CNBC. “And he doesn’t like doing that.”
What Trump University ended up being, according to “students” and staff, was “a joke” and “a lie.” | Gregory Bull/AP
Trump attacked Schneiderman personally, calling him “a lightweight” and “a sleazebag” and countersuing for (a familiar) $100 million. He hit him legally, calling the suit “incompetent.” And he attacked Schneiderman politically — the suit, he said, was “thug politics.”
Trump had made to Schneiderman in 2010 a $12,500 donation. “He was very unhappy because he wanted me to do much more than that,” Trump said on Fox News. “He wanted me to introduce him to a lot of my friends, my big business friends. I didn’t have time for it. He came up to my office. And, in fact, I actually gave him a contribution before he was elected. I think he was down in the polls. But it was never enough for him.”
“By the way,” Trump told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” on ABC, “he meets with President Obama on Thursday evening in Syracuse. He meets with him. On Saturday at 1 o’clock, he files a suit. So I’m gonna ask you …”
“So you’re saying President Obama is behind this?”
He didn’t answer. He just repeated himself. “He’s been looking into this thing for two years. He brings a lawsuit on Saturday afternoon, right after he meets with President Obama …”
Two and a half years later, obviously, Trump was at the very center of American politics, and the Trump University suits were not only still active but getting closer and closer to going to trial. And Trump was railing away not on TV talk shows but at packed rallies as the would-be Republican nominee. At a rally in Arkansas in late February of 2016, he attacked one of the class-action plaintiffs, mispronouncing her name and calling her a “horrible witness.” He attacked the attorney general for “doing a terrible job.” And he attacked one of the judges, whom he called “very hostile,” referring, too, to his Hispanic heritage in a plain, race-baiting dig.
Copies of “How To Build Wealth,” a series of nine audio business courses created by Trump University, lie on display at a Barnes & Noble store in New York City in 2005. | Scott Gries/Getty Images
“But I believe I can turn it around,” Trump told the crowd, “just to show you how dishonest these people are.” And the crowd cheered. And then Trump won on Super Tuesday, and then the party’s nomination, and then the November election. And then the president-elect settled with the attorney general and the class-action plaintiffs, agreeing to pay an aggregate $25 million.
That Trump would win the White House on a populist platform while preying on poor people — it’s a paradox that confounds his critics. “He has these people that are drawn to him because of his charisma and this image that he projects, and then the people that loved him the most, he actually hurt the most,” Tristan Snell, the lead prosecutor in the attorney general’s case, told me. “That’s the thing that people don’t get about this — still to this day — and it’s been replicated with the people who support him politically now.”
Snell has a book due out later this month. It’s called Taking Down Trump.
“There is still understandably a great deal of mixed feeling, of cautious optimism and bitter pessimism, on the question of whether justice will one day come for Donald Trump — or whether justice in America still exists all. It is perhaps the most important question,” Snell writes. “The answer to that question may well determine much of our collective fate.
“If the greatest malefactors are, in effect, untouchable, beyond the reach of the law, subject to a different set of rules — or no rules at all,” he continues, “then we will likely slip into a spiral from which we may never recover.”
A vendor moves his cart, which includes a flag that reads “THE RULES HAVE CHANGED,” outside a Trump rally on Dec. 19, 2023, in Waterloo, Iowa | Charlie Neibergall/AP
‘He’s pushing the system to the breaking point’
“Waterloo,” said Donald Trump.
“We cover all corners of your great state. You know that,” he said at the start of his rally late last month in this small city in eastern Iowa. “And they said, ‘What about Waterloo?’ I said, ‘We gotta get to Waterloo.’”
In spite of the potentially inauspicious name of the site of this event, Iowa, it seems, will not be Trump’s end. He enters Monday as maybe the biggest Republican favorite in the history of the state’s caucuses. At Trump’s rallies these days the most notable addition to the standard red MAGA hats and the vulgar Biden signs and the “Macho Man” soundtrack are the mug-shot shirts — with Trump’s glowering face on the front coupled with his message of “NEVER SURRENDER.”
At this particular convention center, I met a 55-year-old “semi-retired” independent contractor from Evansville, Indiana, who was attending his 86th Trump rally. “I’ll still vote for him if he’s in a prison cell,” Mike Boatman told me. “They can bring the Oval Office desk right inside of the prison cell.” I met a 27-year-old Muslim from the suburbs of Chicago who is training to be a police officer and was wearing a red hat. He asked that I not name him because his immigrant father detests Trump and didn’t know he was here. “My faith in the justice system, because of the indictments,” he said, “is at an all-time low.” I met a couple from nearby Charles City. Trust the justice system? “Why the fuck would I?” said Jeannie Waddingham, 53. But Trump? “I do,” she said.
“This is the lawfare by the Democrats to take him out, and people see that as unjust,” said Mike Davis of the Trump-supporting Article III Project. “No way” Trump would be looking like the runaway nominee, Davis told me, if not for the indictments.
And that’s because people don’t trust the system. They trust Trump. And that’s because Trump’s told them to — for 50 years. He started doing this in the ’70s, teaming with Cohn and accusing the government of “Gestapo-like” tactics and “smears.” He kept doing it in the ’80s, always playing the victim of Central Park South, claiming people were out to get him and using the courts to do it. “Trump,” Trump told the Times, “is not going to be harassed.” He did it in Palm Beach, and he did it when he sued O’Brien, and he did it with Trump U., and he only escalated the efforts once he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and especially after he lost to Biden in 2020. He sends to supporters email after email every day asking for money for his campaign by attacking “Crooked Joe” and “the Radical Democrats” and “villainous forces” and “crooks” and “thugs” and “fools” and “their phony charges” and “this vicious witch hunt” and their “SHAM TRIALS.” Nothing is on the level, and the institutions can’t be trusted, and the system can’t be trusted, he has insidiously hammered home, and so he is free, he suggests, to go after the people he says have gone after him. It is, as George Conway said at the opening gathering of the Society for the Rule of Law in early November in Washington, “an infectious disease that is affecting the entire body politic.”
“He has made himself the arbiter of fairness,” Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime New York Democratic strategist who has watched Trump work for decades, told me, “for those who feel that they have been unfairly put upon.”
“He is wearing our institutions down to their nubs,” lawyer and legal analyst Danielle McLauglin told me, “and the judicial system, the system of justice, I think, is particularly vulnerable to him.”
“He’s pushing the system to the breaking point,” Ian Bassin told me.
“He’s poisoned the well,” Brian Klaas told me.
“It’s of surpassing importance what happens,” Judge Luttig told me, “but that still doesn’t change the fact that he’s already laid waste to our democracy and to our elections and to the rule of law.”
At Trump’s December rally in Waterloo, the most notable addition to the standard merch were the mug-shot shirts — with Trump’s glowering face on the front coupled with his message of “NEVER SURRENDER.” | Scott Olson/Getty Images
“That’s really the greatest danger he poses to our democracy,” Zirin told me. “Not that there would be a Muslim ban, not that he would give tremendous tax breaks to the rich who support him, not any of the Republican plans that he associated with, and not even that he would disengage us from foreign alliances,” he said. “The greatest danger is his undermining of the rule of law.
“Trump,” as Swalwell put it to me, “is a legal terrorist.”
“We’re about to go through a great trial in this country. … We’re going to be testing the proposition that the rule of law applies to everyone and no one’s above the law,” California congressman and Senate candidate Adam Schiff told me. “It will be particularly wrenching because Trump will continue to make the false claim that he’s being politically persecuted,” said Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and an impeachment manager in Trump’s first impeachment, “and it will also give Trump the continuing opportunity to tear down the system.”
And now here in Waterloo I heard Trump say immigrants “coming from all over the world” were “destroying the blood of our country.” I heard him say he will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” I heard him say “slum areas will be demolished.” I heard him say he “will rout the ‘fake news’ media.” I heard him say he’d never even read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I heard him call the 2020 election “rigged.” I heard him call Biden “truly the worst, most incompetent and most corrupt president in the history of our country.” I heard him call Biden “crooked” — 12 times. I heard him say, “They say, ‘I’m a threat to democracy.’ No, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy.” I heard him call the FBI “the Biden FBI” and the Department of Justice “the department of injustice.” I heard him say he “will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor.” I heard him call special counsel Jack Smith “deranged.” I heard him call the documents case a “hoax.” I heard him say he “can’t get a fair trial in Washington.” I heard him say “Biden and the far-left lunatics” were “willing to violate the U.S. constitution.” I heard him say they were “weaponizing law enforcement.” I heard him call the indictments against him “a great badge of honor.” And I heard him say he had good news. “The good news is people get it. That’s why my poll numbers are so high,” he said. “I think we’d be winning by a lot, but now we’re winning by numbers that nobody can believe.” I heard the crowd roar. “This is the single biggest election in the history of our country,” Trump said. “This is going to determine whether or not we even have a country.”
And when the rally was over, I watched the people walk out into the cold, dark night, past the mug-shot merch, past the bumper stickers saying RIGGED, past the flags saying THE RULES HAVE CHANGED.
Abcarian: Really, young voters? You want to teach Democrats a lesson by letting Trump back into the White House?
Robin Abcarian – January 3, 2024
President Biden poses with Students Demand Action in Connecticut in June. In 2020, the youngest American voters were squarely in his corner. Not now, according to polls. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press)
I almost spit out my Geritol the other day when I read what one young voter in Philadelphia told NBC News about why she is disillusioned about the upcoming presidential election.
“I don’t think the presidency has too much of an effect on what happens in my day-to-day life,” said Pru Carmichael, who supported Biden in 2020 but says she will not vote for president at all this year if she has to choose between the disappointing incumbent and former President Trump.
Seriously?
Maybe she believes she will never have an unintended, unwanted pregnancy. (However, if she does, she is lucky enough to live in Pennsylvania, where abortion is still legal.)
But how can she not appreciate the profound changes the Trump presidency inflicted on this country? Had there been no President Trump, there would be no ultraconservative majority on the Supreme Court, no Dobbs decision overturning nearly half a century of reproductive rights, no outright abortion bans in 13 states and no suffering by people like Kate Cox of Texas, who was forced to seek abortion care in another state after the Texas Supreme Court said she could not abort her severely compromised fetus, who suffered a condition that was incompatible with life.
In 2020, the youngest American voters were squarely in Biden’s corner. According to exit polls, 65% of those 18 to 24 years old chose him, the largest percentage of any age group. And yet, if recent national polls are to be believed, voters up to age 34 have grown disenchanted with the president. Perhaps this is a reflection on the impatience of youth, or, worse, a fundamentally weak grasp on how government operates.
Listen to what younger voters told NBC News they’re upset about: the country’s slow pace on reversing climate change, Biden’s failure to fully cancel student loan debt, his inability to federally codify the right to abortion and, perhaps most starkly, his handling of Israel’s war against Hamas and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“I mean, he made a lot of really big promises in his campaign and virtually none of them were followed through on,” one poll respondent, Austin Kapp, 25, of Colorado, told NBC News.
He did try to codify Roe, but was unable to marshal the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Senate Republicans.
And what has Trump been doing about abortion, besides taking credit for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade? He’s urging Republicans to mislead voters: “In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion,” he told a group of Iowa supporters in September. “This issue cost us unnecessarily but dearly in the midterms.”
We now know, thanks to the horrific experience of Cox and other women who have brought suit in Texas, that the idea of an “exception” to abortion bans for cases of rape, incest, fetal anomalies or the health of the pregnant person is nothing more than a shimmering lie, a mirage to make abortion bans slightly more palatable to the majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose.
As for the Middle East crisis, even if you agree that Biden’s handling of the situation has been uneven, why would anyone think Trump, an outspoken supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would handle it better, particularly if your sympathies lie more with the Palestinians caught in the violence than the Israeli government’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack?
On the campaign trail, Trump has signaled a lack of engagement in the conflict, suggesting that he would “let this play out.” His one concrete suggestion? In an interview with Univision in November, he said that Israel needed to “do a better job of public relations, frankly, because the other side is beating them at the public relations front.”
He has also pledged to “revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.” (Muslim ban, anyone?) Does that sound like an appealing counter-message for the 70% of voters under 35 who told NBC News pollsters they disapprove of the way Biden has handled the war?
With 2024 upon us, and the first contests of the Republican presidential primaries set to take place on Jan. 15 in Iowa and on Jan. 23 in New Hampshire, barring some unforeseen development it could become clear very quickly that the much-indicted Trump is bound for the November ballot as the Republican presidential nominee.
A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released on New Year’s Day showed that Trump is out-polling Biden among groups the pollsters described as “stalwarts of the Democratic base,” that is, Hispanics and younger voters. Biden’s support among Black Americans has also slipped significantly, though he still leads Trump.
This is alarming, not catastrophic. Biden, and Democrats, have time to make their case. I remain skeptical that the Democratic base will not come home by November, particularly as Trump continues to embrace his inner dictator on the campaign trail.
“A Republican getting elected isn’t the end. It is the beginning of a much larger fight,” a 23-year-old Wisconsin Starbucks worker and union organizer who is considering withholding his vote from Biden told NBC News. “I want to show the Democratic Party as a young person that you still need to earn our vote and if you don’t, the consequences will be your career.”
Teach Democrats a lesson by electing a democracy-destroying authoritarian?
My mother used to call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The majority of Americans today are anxious; they believe their democracy is under threat.
In fact, democracies deteriorate easily. As was feared since the times of Greek philosopher Plato, they may suddenly succumb to mob rule. The people will think they have an inalienable right to manifest their opinions – which means to state out loud whatever passes through their minds. They will act accordingly, often violently. They will make questionable decisions.
Democracies may pave the way to tyrants. Self-serving leaders will appear. They will seek to rewrite national history by purging it of complexity and inconvenient truths. They will capitalize on the widespread frustration and profit from the chaotic situation.
So, one way democracies degenerate is because of cunning leaders. But democracies crumble also because of the people themselves. As an intellectual historian, I can assure you that the specter of an ignorant populace holding sway has kept many philosophers, writers and politicians awake.
The American founders were at the forefront in the battle against popular ignorance. They even concocted a plan for a national public university.
The men known as America’s Founding Fathers, likewise, were very sensitive to this issue. For them, not all voters were created equal. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton trusted the people – “the people” being, for them, white property-owning males, of course. But only if and when they had a sufficient level of literacy.
Thomas Jefferson was the most democratic-minded of the group. His vision of the new American nation entailed “a government by its citizens, in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority.”
He once gauged himself against George Washington: “The only point on which he and I ever differed in opinion,” Jefferson wrote, “was, that I had more confidence than he had in the natural integrity and discretion of the people.”
The paradox was that, for Jefferson himself, the “natural integrity” of the people needed to be cultivated: “Their minds must be improved to a certain degree.” So, while the people are potentially the “safe depositories” for a democratic nation, in reality they have to go through a training process.
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people,” he kept repeating. It was an axiom in his mind “that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction.”
Education had direct implications for democracy: “Wherever the people are well-informed,” wrote Jefferson, “they can be trusted with their own government.”
A national university
In 1787, Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia doctor and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, published an “Address to the People of the United States.”
One of his main topics was the establishment of a “federal university” in which “every thing connected with government, such as history – the law of nature and nations – the civil law – the municipal laws of our country – and the principles of commerce – would be taught by competent professors.” Rush saw this plan as essential, should an experiment in democracy be attempted.
In 1796, President George Washington gave his Eighth Annual Message to the Senate and the House of Representatives at Congress Hall in Philadelphia, seen here. He wanted to alert Congress to the ‘desirableness’ of ‘a national university.’ Montes-Bradley/iStock / Getty Images Plus
George Washington stressed the same idea. At the end of his second term as president, in December 1796, Washington delivered his Eighth Annual Message to the Senate and the House of Representatives. He wished to awaken Congress to the “desirableness” of “a national university and also a military academy” whose wings would span over as many citizens as possible.
In his message, Washington embraced bold positions: “The more homogeneous our citizens can be made,” he claimed, “the greater will be our prospect of permanent union.”
Democracy’s ‘safe depositories’
A national university homogenizing the American people would likely be ill-received today anyway. We live in an age of race, gender and sexual awareness. Ours is an era of multiculturalism, the sacrosanct acknowledgment and celebration of difference.
But Washington’s idea that the goal of public education was to make citizens somewhat more “homogeneous” is worth reconsidering.
Were President Washington alive today, I believe he would provide his recipe for the people to remain the “safe depositories” of democracy. He would insist on giving them better training in history, as both Rush and Jefferson also advised. And he would especially press for teaching deeper, more encompassing political values.
He would say that schools and universities must teach the people that in their political values they should go beyond separate identities and what makes them different.
He would trust that, armed with such a common understanding, they would foster a “permanent union” and thus save democracy.
DeSantis delivers a political smackdown as Miami teachers union struggles to survive | Opinion
The Miami Herald Editorial Board – December 25, 2023
Trashing labor unions, in particular teachers unions, has become a talking point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the presidential trail. He told California Gov. Gavin Newsom during their Fox News debate that Democrats are “owned lock, stock and barrel, by the teachers union.”
What does that look on the ground, when laws DeSantis signed singling out some types of public-sector unions start to take effect?
The results may be upwards of 30,000 school employees being left without representation to bargain for better pay and working conditions.
The state’s largest teachers union, United Teachers of Dade, is close to decertification thanks to a new law that requires unions have at least 60% of union members pay dues, the Herald reported. The law — Senate Bill 256 — was a union-busting one-two-punch that not only raised the threshold for certification from 50%, but also prohibited unions from deducting dues directly from members’ paychecks. UTD, which represents teachers in the state’s biggest school district in Miami-Dade County, has gained 800 new members, but still failed to meet the state’s stringent requirements. In November, the Herald reported union membership was at 58.4%.
‘Right to work’
The Republican anti-union spiel usually leaves out the fact that Florida, unlike many blue states, is among 26 states that have “right to work” laws. That means workers cannot be forced to join a union and pay dues as a condition of employment. In other words, teachers and school staff do not have to be part of United Teachers of Dade to benefit from the 7% to 10% pay raise the union negotiated with the school district this year,
Teacher unions became a preferred target of DeSantis during his fight to reopen schools during the pandemic and to eliminate anything he deems “woke” indoctrination in schools. The governor has gone even further by demonizing teachers, who have been muzzled on what they say about race and LGBTQ issues in the classroom.
Unions, like all organizations, have had very public shortcomings, such as protecting bad employees from accountability. But if we’re talking about unions that are too powerful, we cannot leave out police and firefighter unions, whose endorsements DeSantis and other Republican gladly accept. It turns out SB 256 exempted those unions — along with those representing corrections officers — from that 60% threshold requirement.
Union pushed back
In other words, the law affects organizations that have directly clashed with DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature. United Teachers of Dade was among the most vocal groups pushing back against the parental-rights law critics call “Don’t say gay,” laws that made it easier for organizations like Moms for Liberty to push schools to ban books, and DeSantis’ infamous “Stop Woke Act,” which bans instructions that some may interpret as making students feel guilty about being white. UTD President Karla Hernandez-Mats ran against DeSantis in 2022 as Charlie Crist’s running mate.
Meanwhile, groups like the Police Benevolent Association, the largest police union in the state, have been in lockstep with Republicans. In June, the PBA endorsed DeSantis for president, despite supporting Donald Trump in 2020.
Masked as a measure to hold unions accountable, SB 256 was a version of the same kind of political payback Disney received when it opposed the “Don’t say gay” law.
United Teachers of Dade will not face decertification immediately. It must now prove to the state that it has support from at least 30% of its bargaining unit. After that, the union must hold a vote seeking recertification and show at least 50% support. Next year, UTD must try again to meet that 60% threshold, the Herald reported, which could put it in a potentially never-ending cycle.
This is exactly the type of pain the new state law appears to seek to inflict. In Florida, opposition to the party in power comes with a high cost.
Revealed: House speaker did little to fight toxic ‘burn pit’ his father campaigned against
Oliver Laughland in Shreveport, Louisiana and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington – December 13, 2023
Composite: Rory Doyle, Getty Images, Rachel Woolf
Mike Johnson was a few months away from assuming elected office in late 2014 when he was confronted with an impassioned appeal by the man he would later pay tribute to in his first speech as House speaker: his father Patrick.
The elder Johnson, a former firefighter in the Louisiana city of Shreveport, had survived a near fatal industrial explosion when Mike was 12 years old, a defining event in both men’s lives. He had just joined a local community environmental group, working to fight against US government plans to burn – in the open air – over 15m pounds of toxic munitions. It had thrust Patrick and his future wife Janis Gabriel onto the frontlines of Louisiana environmental advocacy.
As authorities were on the brink of approving the “open burn”, which would have sent vast quantities of known carcinogens into the air, Patrick and Janis turned to the most influential person they knew.
Then an ambitious, rightwing constitutional lawyer, Mike Johnson would in a matter of weeks fill the vacancy for Louisiana’s eighth state legislative district – whose borders are just 20 miles from Camp Minden, a military base where the illegal munitions dump – the largest in US history – was located. A small amount of the munitions had spontaneously exploded two years before, causing a 4-mile blast radius.
The pair drove to Mike Johnson’s legal offices in the late morning, Gabriel recalled, and Patrick Johnson explained to his son the immediate environmental and health dangers the toxic dump posed, not only to residents in the immediate vicinity but to members of the Johnson family living in the region.
“His father and I went to him and said: ‘Mike you need to get involved in this, this is really important. Your family really lives at ground zero,’” Gabriel said in an interview with the Guardian. “We basically begged him to say something, to someone, somewhere.”
A terse back and forth followed, she said.
“He just wasn’t interested,” Gabriel said. “He had other things to do. He was never interested in environmental things.”
The couple left deeply disappointed.
“It just blew my mind that he wouldn’t give five minutes of his time to the effort,” she said. “He basically shut us down.”
A spokesperson for Johnson said he “disputes this characterization as described” but did not respond to an invitation to elaborate further.
Gabriel, 72, has thought about this failed appeal to Johnson repeatedly in recent months, ever since he was thrust from relative obscurity to the US house speakership in October.
A denier of climate science, Mike Johnson has spoken about how his evangelical faith has shaped his political worldview. According to a broad examination of his past statements, Johnson’s anti-climate advocacy often bears the hallmarks of a Christian fundamentalism linked to creationism.
Louisiana’s fourth congressional district, which includes Camp Minden, has long voted staunchly Republican, but many residents still hold deep concerns about pollution and the climate crisis. In a year the district experienced record heat and a number of climate related disasters, some say their representative in Washington, who is now second in line to the presidency, is fundamentally failing them.
Mike Johnson’s views on climate change became publicly apparent in 2017, just five months into his first term in the US Congress. Asked how he felt about the climate crisis by a constituent at a rowdy town hall meeting in Shreveport, Johnson launched into a critique of climate change data, saying he had also seen “the data on the other side”.
“The climate is changing, but the question is: is the climate changing because of the natural cycles of the atmosphere over the span of history, or is it changing because we drive SUVs?
“I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
Some attendees booed.
Two years later, Johnson – who has received almost $350,000 in political donations from the oil and gas industry since his election in 2016 – led the Republican Study Committee as it lobbied against progressive Democratic efforts to implement a Green New Deal. Johnson denounced the sweeping federal blueprint for climate action as a “guise to usher in the principles of socialism” and create a system of “full government control”.
In Louisiana, which is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry, the remarks were consistent with the Republican party’s support for fossil fuels.
But to experts who study the Christian fundamentalist movement of creationism, the comments revealed a worldview that falls far outside traditional Republican pro-industry norms. They see the remarks, and Johnson’s rejection of climate science, as evidence of Johnson’s adherence to young-Earth creationist beliefs, including the presumption that the Earth is just 6,000 years old.
Johnson has been closely associated with the creationist movement since 2014 – before his entry into politics – when he became a vocal supporter and lawyer for Answers in Genesis (AiG), a global fundamentalist Christian organization that built a gigantic Noah’s Ark replica and amusement park in Kentucky. Following a headline-grabbing legal battle, Johnson ultimately helped the group secure taxpayer incentives for the project.
“Creationists can just wave away all of the geologic evidence of climate change because they are convinced that all rock layers were laid down in a global flood about 4,400 years ago,” said David MacMillan, a former Christian fundamentalist who has left the movement.
MacMillan grew up attending creationist conferences, had posts published on AiG’s website, and helped raise money for the establishment of AiG’s first creationist museum near Cincinnati, earning him a spot on a donor wall and a lifetime pass to attend. Now – having left his fundamentalist views behind – he is speaking out about the dangers of science denial.
“They will tell you that hundreds of thousands of annual ice core layers are just a bunch of snow that formed while the Earth was cooling off after Noah’s flood. They believe climate scientists are sifting through meaningless noise to try and find patterns that will get them noticed and promote narratives that please the global elite who want to control us.”
What’s more, MacMillan added, most fundamentalists argue that even if the climate is changing, it should make no difference because they also expect the imminent, apocalyptic, final judgment of the world.
MacMillan, who knows Ham, said the AiG founder pioneered a technique of trying to sow doubts about science by presenting scientific consensus as merely a belief system, much like religion.
In a video interview with the Canadian psychologist and alt-right provocateur Jordan Peterson in November last year, Johnson drew directly from this creationist strategy when asked why Democrats pursue policies to address the climate crisis.
“They regard the climate agenda as part of their religion,” Johnson said. “I don’t know any other way to explain it. They pursue it with religious zeal. And they care not what type of pain these policies inflict upon the people that they are supposed to be serving because they’re not serving the people, they’re serving the planet.”
While many media reports have highlighted Johnson’s controversial relationship with Ham, MacMillan said Johnson’s close association with the group – his bio appears on its website, he has written blog posts for the group, and spoken at an AiG event in Kentucky – means Johnson would likely have had to agree to the group’s statement of faith, which includes the assertion that the Bible is “factually true” and that its authority is not limited to spiritual or redemptive themes, but also history and science.
According to the group’s website: “All persons employed by the AiG ministry in any capacity, or who serve as volunteers, should abide by and agree to our Statement of Faith and conduct themselves accordingly.”
An AiG editorial review board regularly reviews all articles, books and other materials produced or distributed by the group to make sure they are in line with AiG values and that there “is not mission drift”.
In a speech delivered at Ham’s Ark Encounter conference center last year, Johnson raised the apocalypse and Christ’s second coming.
“We are hopeful people because we know how the book ends … God wins,” he said in an address that was met with a standing ovation. “The charge is for us, it’s not yet determined. We’re going to be here until the Lord tarries, when the Lord comes back. And maybe that’s soon, because we’re seeing a lot of signs.”
Mike Johnson and his wife are due to speak at an AiG conference event in April next year, entitled: “Reclaim: overcoming the war on women for the glory of God.”
“There is no doubt that Mike Johnson demonstrated to AiG’s satisfaction that he agrees with every aspect of that statement of faith,” MacMillan said.
A short biography of Johnson is included on AiG’s contributor’s page. A review of the 267 biographies on the AiG site indicates he is one of only two elected officials to post on the fundamentalist group’s website. The other is Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state representative and the current president of the Family Research Council, a far-right evangelical lobby group. Perkins, one of Johnson’s political mentors, once said he believed floods were sent by God to punish homosexuality and regularly cites the Bible to deny solutions to the climate crisis.
When asked by the Guardian if Johnson had ever endorsed the AiG statement of faith, or if he shared Ham’s views on climate or if he believed the earth was 6,000 years old, a spokesperson said: “The Speaker is not responsible for the views of others” and did not respond to an invitation to elaborate.
AiG did not respond to specific questions about Johnson and the group’s statement of faith and instead commented on his legal work for the organization. “Mr Johnson served the ministry very effectively and professionally in the matter and Answers in Genesis was very pleased and grateful for his services,” said spokesman A Larry Ross.
Janis Gabriel pointed to Mike Johnson’s hardline faith and political pragmatism when explaining her interpretation of why he had brushed aside his father’s appeals to help with the air pollution crisis at Camp Minden.
“It speaks to those religious beliefs,” said Gabriel. “‘Don’t take care of the environment because we have a finite amount of time here and God will take care of you.’ It’s crazy.”
Gabriel, who was discussing her relationship with the House speaker for the first time publicly, said she was disclosing details of private conversations because Johnson now holds a position of immense power. She wanted to further public understanding of “what and who he is and how that will affect the job he’s doing for us.”
“That is the important conversation,” she said.
In his 2022 interview with Peterson, Mike Johnson couched his critique of those seeking climate solutions around conversations he was having with residents in his district.
“When I’m in Louisiana I try to explain to our folks, listen: ‘They have effectively replaced father God with mother Earth. . . . They believe we owe fealty to Mother Earth.”
Even as the speaker rejects concerns about the climate crisis, Louisiana’s fourth congressional district is already experiencing new extremes tied to global heating.
Louisiana, too, endured months of devastating drought, which contributed to a water crisis in the south-east, and hundreds of wildfires in America’s wettest state. The largest wildfire in Louisiana’s history occurred this year in Johnson’s district, scorching a staggering 33,000 acres and decimating the local economy. The heat and drought combined cost Louisiana’s agriculture industry $1.69bn alone this year.
The state also logged a record number of heat-related deaths over the summer, according to a spokesman for the Louisiana health department [LDH], with 69 people dying between June and September this year. This was almost double the death toll of any in the past six years, according to data released to the Guardian by LDH.
A report published this year, which examined all occupational heat related illnesses between 2010-2020 found that the highest rates of illness occurred in Louisiana’s north-west, which has some of the largest rates of poverty in the state and is entirely covered by Johnson’s district.
“Heat exposure is intensifying as the frequency, severity, and duration of extreme heat events increases due to climate change,” the government report acknowledges.
In Shreveport, six people died from extreme heat this year alone – a record year, according to Todd Thoma, who has served as coroner in the Shreveport area for 16 years. “This was an exceptional year to me,” Dr Thoma said, as he combed through each case file in his office, pointing to a combination of prolonged extreme heat, high poverty rates and power outages that contributed to the increased risks for the city’s most vulnerable residents.
A 62-year-old woman who died in June after a tornado knocked out power to her home, leaving her with no air conditioning. A 49-year-old man, found collapsed on the sidewalk just four days later. And, on 13 July, 34-year-old Ted Boykin, a father of one who was found dead inside a trailer home, with no air conditioning, that was used by Shreveport’s unhoused community.
The ambient air temperature inside was 98F, according to the coroner’s report. Boykin’s internal temperature was 107.9F.
In an interview Boykin’s sister, Sandy Boykin-Hays, said she considered her brother a victim of the climate crisis and chastised her congressman and others for a failure to accept science.
“He was let down by the system,” said Boykin-Hays. “And to them [in Washington], I’m sure they wouldn’t believe, even if it [climate change] was staring them in the face, because they’re rich. They have money. They don’t have to worry about air conditioning or where your next meal is coming from.”
Boykin-Hays, who works as a food delivery driver and volunteers with homeless outreach, was forced to take out a $3,000 loan to pay for her brother’s funeral.
“They’re ignoring the true issue because it doesn’t affect them,” she said.
In Washington, where Johnson now holds the power to bring legislation to the House floor, the speaker has not yet expressed a position on a bill introduced by California Democrat Judy Chu, to protect workers from excessive heat, despite it receiving some bipartisan support in committee.
“The denial of the climate crisis by Maga extremists like the Speaker isn’t just a danger to the health of his constituents during summer months,” said Chu. “It’s a danger to the long-term well being of future generations in America and around the world.”
Both Janis Gabriel and Patrick Johnson became board members of the Citizens Advisory Group set up to engage with the EPA over community concerns at Camp Minden, according to meeting minutes reviewed by the Guardian and interviews with two other board members.
Johnson even co-wrote, recorded and performed an original song to help the “stop the burn” efforts, which eventually helped force the EPA into a course change by approving use of a cleaner alternative to dispose of the waste throughout 2016 and 2017.
“Take a stand against the poison, protect our future children’s lives,” Patrick Johnson sings.
The former firefighter had become a national advocate for hazardous material safety after surviving a fiery explosion caused by leaking ammonia at a cold storage facility. Another firefighter died in the 1984 accident. The near-death experience, said Gabriel, changed his spiritual outlook. The couple met in 2013 when Johnson attended Gabriel’s Daoist center as a student in Shreveport to practice tai chi and qigong martial arts. The pair married in October 2016, shortly before Johnson’s death from cancer in December that year.
The elder Johnson, said Gabriel, clearly accepted climate science and was “acutely aware of the environment”. While he “certainly didn’t agree” with Mike Johnson’s “extremist stance” on Christianity, he accepted it. The pair disagreed over support for Donald Trump, Gabriel said.
Mike Johnson has described his father’s survival in the 1984 explosion as an “actual miracle” that “made me a person of very deep faith”. His campaign literature still references the accident and, in his first speech as speaker, Johnson described how his father’s near death “changed all of our life trajectories”.
But from January 2015, when he formally entered politics, Johnson appeared to display little interest in the Camp Minden issue that his father was campaigning on. It was a period described by three organizers as the start of heightened advocacy.
He was given invitations to attend citizens meetings as local campaigning ramped up, according to the board’s chairman Ron Hagar, but did not attend.
“He stayed as far away from it as possible,” said Hagar, a close friend of Patrick Johnson’s. “He had no sense of responsibility to stand up for the people he’s representing.”
A search of public records did not indicate Mike Johnson had spoken on the issue at the time although he was listed as a co-sponsor of a minor 2015 state house resolution to stop the facility from accepting further waste explosives. Photographs show Johnson was also present at a December 2015 press conference at the site, but according to a senior organizer in attendance, Johnson did not speak and the state representative is not quoted in local media.
The issue was championed by a Democratic state representative for the 10th district, which includes Minden, named Gene Reynolds. Reynolds, who is now retired, did not return multiple calls for comment.
A spokesperson for Johnson pointed to public activity cited by the Guardian and “other activities” to dispute claims he had not been involved in the matter.
Johnson’s short tenure in the state legislature was spent focused on far-right policy initiatives tied to his Biblical worldview, including introducing legislation to push back against same sex marriage, and a continued focus on his non-profit law practice, including work with Ham’s Ark Encounter.
Following her husband’s death, Gabriel moved out of state. She began to lose touch with Johnson, although the pair exchanged occasional cordial text messages.
In one May 2019 exchange, seen by the Guardian, Johnson contacted Gabriel to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. Gabriel told him she had left Shreveport permanently and moved to a different state.
“Don’t blame you one bit for staying there! Shreveport is really going downhill now and it’s sad to watch,” Johnson replied.
Gabriel then explained that her decision to leave had come on Patrick’s advice, partly due to his prediction of “worsening environmental problems”. She also told Johnson that his father would be proud of his “love and devotion and support” of his own children.
“Dad was right about the environmental problems in Shreveport. Those and other issues are mounting,” Johnson replied. But in the same message, he moved quickly to update her on his rapid rise in Congress: “I’ve been advanced in leadership in record time (currently the 10th ranked Republican!), and God continues to affirm that we are doing what He has called us to do, so that keeps us encouraged.”
My Garden Was My Refuge. Then Climate Change Came for It.
Melody Schreiber – December 11, 2023
When I first set out to report on climate change, I was convinced I knew what to do: I needed to show how climate change was going to be personal and deeply connected to our lives. People are selfish—or, put another way, strongly motivated by what affects us personally. The more intimately I could tie climate change to our well-being, I reasoned, the more driven we would be to change course.
So, eight years ago, I trundled off to the UN climate change conference known as COP21 in search of ways global warming was poised to affect our everyday lives, especially the threats to our mentalhealth and the emergence of infectious diseases. I discovered, of course, that these close connections weren’t theoretical or futuristic; our lives were already being disrupted. And I realized that people already care plenty about climate change; a majority of Americans believe climate change is a threat, and one in 10 Americans are showing signs of climate anxiety. It’s just hard to know what to do about it, and sometimes our actions seem too insignificant to make a difference. Without action, we feel helpless. The problem looms ever more immense, and we start tuning out.
In 2023, for instance, we reached temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels for a record number of days—about one-third of the year. Scientists are warning that the planet is close to crossing five tipping points, with three more on the horizon.
The news comes amid the malicious obstructionism of this year’s conference, COP28. The state oil company of the United Arab Emirates has been privy to emails to and from the COP28 office. The conference president and head of that company, Sultan Al Jaber, who has used the event to push more oil trades, said there is “no science” behind phasing out fossil fuels to stop warming. It’s not just the leaders of COP pushing a pro-hydrocarbon agenda; four times more fossil-fuel lobbyists than ever before have descended on this year’s summit.
I don’t always know anymore how to get anxious people to tune into these kinds of stories, because I struggle myself. Evidence of our rapidly changing world and the failures of our leaders to do anything about it are everywhere, all the time, and nothing I do seems to stop it. A few years ago, I started to go the other direction—to dissociate from it. It was too big to process. The problems felt too immense and thus too far removed from my life.
The summer of 2020 was a particularly low point for me. The pandemic kept us home even as racial violence brought us out to the streets; wildfires and storms battered our neighborhoods even as the Trump administration exited the landmark Paris agreement; a heated presidential election grew increasingly chaotic and nerve-wracking. But most earth-shattering for me, my youngest brother died.
I felt surrounded by death, and I wanted more life. So I started collecting plants. I knew I was probably setting myself up for failure. I’d never been able to keep a plant alive for very long. I was probably going to get attached to yet another thing only to watch it die. (Like I said: a low place.)
Even so, I signed up for a plant subscription box, like a Wine of the Month club, that would start me off with something hard to kill and teach me how to care for it. Plants arrived every month. Some of them died, but most of them lived. A friend gave me a prayer plant; another gave me an amaryllis. Plants became a way to connect with friends in a tenuous time; they gave us something happy to talk about.
I started reading about native species, and how easy they are to maintain because they are perfectly adapted to my environment. (This summer, in the midst of drought, I didn’t need water my garden once.) I planted rows of phlox, goldenrod, asters; one of the most serene and accomplished moments of my year was spent watching a hummingbird bury its head amid the flowers of a turtlehead plant.
I knew my garden wouldn’t solve the biodiversity crisis, stop overdevelopment, or save pollinators single-handedly. But I could build those pollinators a little corner, offer a little respite for them and for me. I could do this small thing imperfectly, and I could keep striving to do it better.
I was, perhaps, too successful with my new gardening hobby. Now I have dozens of native species in my front yard, and (if you’re my husband, you can stop reading now) about 150 houseplants.
I learned to frequent native plant sales and local seed swaps, instead of buying plants at commercial nurseries that frequently use powerful insecticides and contribute to the spread of invasive species and plant diseases, which can further destabilize ecosystems. I started paying attention to what was happening outside my window, focusing on first and last frosts, on temperature highs and lows, on precipitation reports. I thought hard about when to bring plants outside for summer and inside for winter; I hustled to move them when strong storms swept the Doppler.
That’s why I noticed when the new U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Hardiness Map, which I’d never heard of before I started this hobby, was updated for the first time in more than a decade. USDA hardiness zones are based on average annual minimum winter temperature and can help people figure out which plants will or won’t survive and thrive in their location.
Because I’ve been paying closer attention to the vagaries of my local weather, I wasn’t surprised to learn from the recent update that my zone has changed from 7a to 7b, meaning the winter average minimum has risen from 0 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, to 5 to 10 degrees. These changes may seem small, but they make a huge difference with plants—and pollinators—needing exact temperatures and conditions to grow. Before I got into plants, I might have assumed warmer temperatures would simply expand the number of plants I could grow in my area, but it’s not that simple, particularly if the trend continues: these changes are being accompanied, for instance, by hotter and wetter summers in the region. What will that mean for pollination, seed dispersal, growing times, or the spread of plant pathogens? What about the species needing a certain number of winter “chill hours” in order to germinate and grow?
My area isn’t alone. About half the country moved into a warmer zone with this change. It’s part of a decades-long trend of warming temperatures across the nation that could disrupt both ecosystems and agriculture.
The news brought the specter of climate change into a passion project that was supposed to serve as a refuge. I braced myself for it to feel hopeless now, too. But surprisingly, given my original fears of failure when getting into plants, this news didn’t break my spirit. I do wonder what my garden will look like in 10 or 20 or 50 years, and which species will make it through the gauntlet ahead. But at some point in the past few years, I’ve stopped worrying about killing every plant I cultivate.
Instead, this change makes me think about climate in a new way. It’s something I can feel every day. I can push my hands into the earth; I can smell the flowers blooming in the yard, even now, in December. I now understand the way a small change in temperature or frost patterns can disrupt an entire crop. Plants have connected me in practical, daily, intimate ways to the earth and its changes—giving those changes a new significance, a deeper understanding, and simultaneously grounding my experience of nature in something calming, soul-nourishing, and refreshingly distant from the hard work of processing news, analyzing policy, and taking action. Plants also open up space for any backyard gardener to have conversations about the hyper-local effects of this crisis—conversations that can drive further change.
It’s a lesson I’m clinging to as the overwhelming reality of the climate crisis splashes across headlines this week, courtesy of COP28. Now, I’m searching out the sometimes-smaller but no less important wins at the conference: a new deal for a loss and damage fund; Colombia joining a the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty; a bigger push to fund sustainable agriculture; and the possibility, though faint, of the newest agreement spelling out the end to fossil fuels. Despite the glacial pace of policy change, the steps we take in our own lives, though small and incremental, can transform our experience of the world around us. And before you know it, you have a life filled with new growth.
I came to gardening because I was mourning. Mourning, in a largely abstract way, the millions dead from pandemics, wildfires, storms. Mourning, in a painfully specific way, my baby brother, who was supposed to be an inextricable part of my future until the day he left it.
When we mourn, we sit with our loss. We let it weigh on us with its full heft. We examine the dearly held beliefs of how we thought these lives of ours would go, what we’d hoped to do, and we undergo a swift and shattering reorientation of those hopes and dreams. When we mourn, philosopher and author Thomas Attig writes, we “relearn” the world. Mourning is a painful and absolutely crucial process of reacting to a new reality and continuing, despite and because of that pain, to inhabit that reality.
There is a plant that reminds me of my brother: a Hoya kerrii, a vining plant with thick, heart-shaped leaves. I was nervous to acquire it—I’ve grown less precious about killing plants, but if this one were to die on my watch, it would be a pointed blow. But I screwed up my courage and posted a query in a gardening group, expecting to buy a small propagation or seedling. Instead, I ended up with a monster with thick vines as tall as I am, one of the largest plants in my collection, a plant that I instantly fell in love with because of its very wildness and abundance. Taking care of it feels like taking care of my brother; and, in the meditative time spent nurturing, it has begun to feel like he is taking care of me.
It’s a small thing, watering these plants and watching them grow leaf by leaf. But that’s how actions are. If you’d told me when I received my first plant in the mail that my collection would grow to 150, I would’ve laughed at you—and perhaps I would have failed in my new hobby, because of the pressure to do too much too fast. In the face of seemingly impossible goals, it’s hard to know where to start. So I went plant by plant, caring for whatever I had the capacity to care for.
Somehow, my desperate instinct in 2020, my Hail-Mary pass with plants, was right. Surrounding myself with life keeps death—and dread, and despair, and immobility—at bay. Plants make you stop, slow down, and care for each one. It’s an antidote to the crushing immensity of the big picture. It’s a radical act of joy.
‘His curiosity is unbounded’: What it’s like to work with David Attenborough at 97
Ellie Harrison – December 11, 2023
Friends in the Arctic: David Attenborough and Mike Gunton ((Provided))
Thirty-six years ago, when Mike Gunton joined the BBC’s Natural History Unit as a keen young producer at the start of his career, he was told that he’d be working on David Attenborough’s last-ever programme. It was The Trials of Life, a study in animal behaviour, and Attenborough, in his sixties then, thought it was time to stop. “Well, that seems hilarious now,” says Gunton. “I don’t know how many series he’s done since, but it must be 20 at least. Long may it last.”
The pair have worked together for almost four decades – Gunton is now 66 and Attenborough 97 – and their latest project is Planet Earth III, which airs its final episode tonight. Just like its two predecessors, which were broadcast in 2006 and 2016, the series has shown us spectacular stories from across the animal kingdom – from a minutes-old ostrich hatchling searching for its mother in the Namib desert to a group of courageous seals driving away great white sharks off the coast of South Africa. But a new element to the show, and one that is increasingly present in Attenborough’s other programmes, is its message: this series is all about how animals are being forced to adapt, to survive the challenges they face in a world changed by humans.
“I’ve done a lot of shows in my life,” says Gunton, “but this is definitely a really important one. It still feels like we’re getting the Planet Earth tingle, in that it’s giving us wonderful stuff about nature, but we’re also saying something about being sensitive to how heavily we tread on our planet.” Planet Earth III certainly demonstrates our negative impact on animal life (turtles on Australia’s Raine Island, for example, are dying en masse as temperatures rise). Yet it also shows how we are innovating to make things better (while the right whale was hunted to near extinction 40 years ago, a ban on commercial whaling has restored numbers to around 12,000). “It’s a very intriguing time to be observing the natural world at the moment, and it’s slightly worrying as well. But there are parts of it that make you hopeful, and that has to be reflected in the programmes.”
In some ways, a lot has changed since Gunton and Attenborough started working together. Attenborough was not a fan of drones when they first arrived on the scene. They would constantly malfunction, and he would have to do countless takes walking through a meadow or a jungle as the camera on the drone zoomed off to reveal him on location. “He’s now a convert, and he absolutely thinks the drone is the key, the breakthrough, in the perspective it can give you on what happens in nature,” says Gunton. The advances in technology have been huge over the decades. “He is astounded by the leap we have taken in the way we use robotic cameras,” Gunton adds. “We can take audiences beyond where the human eye can.”
If somebody ever asked me, ‘What are your memories of him?’, one of the top things I would say is us rolling around laughing, sometimes about the absurdity of the world and the absurdity of what we do
In other ways, nothing has changed at all. Attenborough has always had “a penchant for bird courtship” stories on his shows, and he always will. “There’s a sequence in Planet Earth III with the tragopan, which is a very strange bird that lives in China and has a very complex and bizarre courtship display,” says Gunton. “I think it’s never been filmed in the wild. And of all the things that we showed David, it was that which made his eyes light up.” And Attenborough has always been “hilarious”, says Gunton. “If somebody ever asked me, ‘What are your memories of him?’, one of the top things I would say is us rolling around laughing, sometimes about the absurdity of the world and the absurdity of what we do. He’s a brilliant raconteur.”
So is Gunton. We far-exceed our time slot on Zoom and I can tell he would happily tell stories about his and Attenborough’s adventures for hours (I hear about him sending Attenborough into battle with warrior-like termites Nigeria, and the pair of them sitting, surrounded by butterflies in Kent’s Downe Bank nature reserve). Gunton didn’t always think he would go into natural history – he initially wanted to be a social documentary filmmaker – but during his time as a zoology student at the University of Bristol, a palaeontology professor took him under his wing and he became an “obsessive” student. After going to Cambridge to do a PhD in zoology, he returned to Bristol to work at the BBC’s Natural History Unit, where he is now creative director.
Attenborough and Gunton inspecting wildlife decades ago (Provided)
He says that, over the years, Attenborough’s “curiosity has absolutely continued to be unbounded”. When Gunton visits Attenborough’s house in Richmond, “there’ll be a stack of books on the piano that he’s reading, working his way through. He’ll say, ‘Have you read this? Have you seen this?’ It’s that kind of constant scholarship. He’s so busy. It’s bonkers. He’s away at this event and that event and at some library here, and the energy is astonishing.”
He tells me a story to prove the point. During the filming of The Green Planet, which came out last year, there was a sequence where Attenborough was presenting from a rowing boat on a lake in Croatia. Gunton, three decades Attenborough’s junior, was meant to be doing most of the rowing when the cameras weren’t rolling, but Attenborough wasn’t having any of it. He jumped into the rowing seat at the first opportunity. “I’ll row. No, no, I’ll do it. I’ll do it,” Gunton remembers him insisting. “We started getting competitive because he was a rower at university [in Cambridge] and so was I. I was saying, ‘Look, come on, I’m a rower.’ He said, ‘No, we could row just as well as you row.’ So, as a 94-year-old, he basically rowed that boat about a mile, and it was a big heavy boat. Working with him in his nineties is not that hard, because he can do almost anything.”
Gunton and Attenborough become competitive in a boat in Croatia (Provided)
While Attenborough tends to go out in the field less and less these days, Gunton says his influence on the series goes far beyond his narration. “This has been his format, ever since he made Life on Earth [in 1979]. So these shows are effectively modifying or twiddling around the edges of that format, with his DNA there all the time.” Gunton says that with every shot, every storyline in the series, he’s thinking, “How is this going to be told by David?” He will bounce ideas off Attenborough, too, and seek his advice on trickier scenes.
Attenborough is the right man to ask. He has been the single biggest influence on nature programming in, well, forever. His playful storytelling has had us gripped by the antics of everything from spindly weeds in the ground to tiny sea angels in the ocean. Seeing nature in this awe-inspiring way has taught us all about the wonders of the world and the need to protect them. And many others – most recently Morgan Freeman, who presented the inferior Life on Our Planet on Netflix – have failed to replicate his magic.
Attenborough during the filming of ‘Planet Earth III’ (BBC, Mark Harrison)
The last time Attenborough properly went out on location on a series, doing hardcore expeditions, was for The Green Planet. “We went to Costa Rica and across America and to [its] deserts,” says Gunton. “And we went to just outside the Arctic Circle in Finland, and to Croatia. He loved it. Beforehand, we were talking about how many days we’d have, and we said, you know, maybe three weeks or something in total. And his daughter was there, who he works with a lot, and she said, ‘Look, you’ve got to be careful, don’t do too many days.’ And when she nipped out to go and make us a cup of tea, he turned to me and whispered, ‘Actually, let’s do another couple of days!’ That sums him up, actually. He was 94.”
Gunton struggles to envisage a future without Attenborough guiding us through the natural world. “Forty years ago, I was a new boy at the Natural History Unit,” he says. “And they said, ‘Of course, this is David’s last series, so we ought to be thinking about who’s going to take over.’ And that is something that people have been talking about ever since. I think it’s one of those things where we cross that bridge when we come to it, but at the moment, he seems to be going on six cylinders.”
He laughs as he admits he “cheekily” asked Attenborough if he’ll ever retire. Attenborough’s response? “I don’t know what that word means.”
The final episode of ‘Planet Earth III’ will air at 6.20pm on BBC One on Sunday 10 December
Chevy’s emotional holiday ad features a grandmother with Alzheimer’s engaging in reminiscence therapy. Here’s how it works.
Kaitlin Reilly – November 30, 2023
A scene from Chevy’s new holiday commercial. (Chevrolet via YouTube) (Chevrolet via YouTube)
Get your tissues out: Chevy’s new Christmas commercial is here, and it might make you weep. It will certainly teach you a bit about a therapy that may help patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions associated with dementia.
The commercial, which was created with assistance from the Alzheimer’s Association, focuses on an elderly woman suffering from the disease. In it, her granddaughter takes her on a jaunt in a 1972 Chevy Suburban, revisiting places from her youth as they listen to John Denver on an 8-track tape. As a result, the grandmother is able to recall some aspects of her life that initially had seemed lost.
It’s not just a sweet holiday story, though. As the company worked on the ad with the Alzheimer’s Association, they “talked a lot about reminiscence therapy,” Steve Majoros, Chevrolet’s head of marketing, told Ad Age.
So, what exactly is reminiscence therapy, and how does it work?
Whether or not the granddaughter in the ad is aware of it, she and her grandmother are engaging in reminiscence therapy — a kind of psychotherapy that involves helping people recall older memories using both conversation and sensory engagement, according to VeryWell Mind.
It may include listening to a song that has an important resonance — in the commercial, it’s Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders” — or it could be eating a favorite childhood dessert or even smelling the cologne of a loved one.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xnZGEUA4oBk%3Frel%3D0
Reminiscence therapy is credited to the work of Dr. Robert Butler, a psychiatrist in the field of geriatric medicine in the 1960s, and is sometimes called life review therapy. It can be a helpful tool for people living with Alzheimer’s, though it is not used only for people with that condition.
As there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, the goal of reminiscence therapy is not necessarily to help people recall memories, but instead to improve their quality of life. Those patients typically struggle with short-term memory, which can cause considerable distress, but revisiting long-term memories, which are often intact in individuals with Alzheimer’s, can help improve self-esteem and reduce anxiety. It also can help improve the individual’s relationship with the person leading this kind of therapy, often their caregiver.
In that way, the Chevy commercial offers an accurate depiction of how reminiscence therapy can work. (It’s worth noting, though, that people with Alzheimer’s may not recall short-term memories, as the ad’s grandmother does when she realizes she’s due back for Christmas dinner.)
As Majoros told Ad Age, reminiscence therapy is not intended as a “cure or a solve” for Alzheimer’s and other memory-loss conditions, but it can “enable the person going through it to feel more comfortable — and the people that are the caregivers that are surrounding them to also feel more comfortable.”
