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Why Biden Shouldn’t Run for Reelection—According to Biden Himself

The New Republic

Why Biden Shouldn’t Run for Reelection—According to Biden Himself

Rob Anderson – November 14, 2023

When Joe Biden was deciding in late 2018 whether to run for president, he reached out to his network of would-be supporters with a pithy, pragmatic ask. “If you can persuade me there is somebody better who can win, I’m happy not to do it,” he said, according to The New York Times. It turned out there wasn’t somebody better to take on President Trump—or at least, Biden wasn’t persuaded that there was—and a few months later he officially threw his hat into the ring.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Biden, already a twice-failed presidential candidate, had been openly weighing another run for years. In a 2017 speech at Colgate University, he said he regretted “not being president” and that he could have beaten Trump. “I had a lot of data,” Biden said. “I was fairly confident that if I was the Democratic Party nominee, I had a better-than-even chance of being president.” And in January 2019, he said, bluntly, “I don’t see the candidate who can clearly do what has to be done to win.”

Within the next three months, though, the Democratic field ballooned with myriad compelling, experienced candidates, most of whom were far younger and more representative of the party’s diverse coalition. Did Biden, then 76 years old, really still believe he was the best hope to stop Trump? It seemed he did, based on a simple calculus. He had the blue-collar bona fides to win over working-class whites in the Midwest, high support among African American voters, thanks in part to his close relationship with the most popular Democratic president of the modern era, and a folksy charm to win over suburban soccer moms. And the polls agreed.

But Biden’s decision to jump into the race wasn’t just strategic; it was moral. As the candidate best positioned to beat Trump, he owed it to the American people to run. “We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” he said in his April announcement video. “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”

It was a sound—and winning, it turned out—argument. But if you apply the logic of Biden’s 2020 campaign to today’s presidential race, the conclusion is decidedly different, albeit equally clear: He should not be running for reelection.

First, the idea that Biden is uniquely qualified to unify the factions in the Democratic Party, let alone the nation as a whole, no longer holds true. Black voters are as alienated from the Democrats as they have been in decades. Blue-collar voters are defecting en masse. Suburban voters have turned on him too. And after years of commanding the spotlight himself, Biden can no longer bask in the glow of the now-distant Obama years. Today, his approval ratings are on par with Trump’s and Jimmy Carter’s at this point in their presidencies. Even more troubling, they dip below those of George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Lydon Johnson. Things didn’t turn out well for any of them. Why would Biden be any different?

He’s not. Biden has lost all of his advantages in battleground states, trailing Trump in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. A recent Times/Siena poll showed that among registered voters in those five states plus Wisconsin—all of which Biden carried in 2020—he trails Trump by four points (which is barely within the margin of error). His campaign argues that polls always look bad for incumbents at this stage and that it’s easy to overblow an outlier poll here and there. But the Times/Siena poll wasn’t an outlier. Polling data aggregators have consistently shown Trump beating Biden for over two months now.

Democrats looking for a calm, nuanced explanation for why these polls shouldn’t be troubling will have to look elsewhere than the president, who said on Thursday he simply doesn’t believe he’s trailing in battleground states. Even the Biden of 2018 wouldn’t buy that.

It’s true that a lot could change between now and next November. The Biden optimists often note that Trump could become a convicted felon, but it’s not at all clear whether that would actually hurt Trump in the election. Inflation has eased, but prices are expected to remain high—perhaps for good. Russia’s war in Ukraine is at a stalemate, and one can only guess how much worse the conflict in the Middle East will get.

As much as political commentators like to disdain them for it, Americans ultimately pick their presidents on a feeling. The candidate who wins is the one who best recognizes the national mood and taps into it. After years of Bill Clinton’s slipperiness, the idea of grabbing a beer with George W. Bush sounded a lot better than chilling with the sweater-vested Al Gore and kite-surfing John Kerry. Barack Obama made the electorate feel hopeful after years of wars and recession. And in the end, Donald Trump tapped into a powerful feeling of resentment.

In 2020, voters turned to Biden because he promised competence and normalcy after the chaos and negativity that Trump had wrought. There’s no doubt that Biden delivered on that front—and even passed some historic legislation—but ultimately many Americans are still racked by despair and pessimism. In 2024, just like they have in the past, Americans will pull the lever, wisely or not, for whichever candidate they feel will most likely shake us out of our current malaise just to get us someplace different, for better or for worse.

Seen through this lens, the answer to the question that baffles some pundits—why is Biden so unpopular?—seems fairly obvious. The antidote to a world enmeshed in wars, a leaden economy, and an environmental catastrophe is not a mumble-prone 80-year-old incumbent. There’s no tactful way to say it: We want to face the apocalypse with Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore, not Weekend at Bernie’s.

The country is once again facing more than a 1 percent chance of a second Trump term—indeed, perhaps a greater than 50 percent chance. At the top of the Democrats’ priorities should be nominating someone with an overwhelming chance to stop that from happening. That candidate is not Joe Biden.

To be sure, even if Biden were swayed by my modest proposal, dropping out of the race would cause a host of complications. The deadlines for candidates to file in several primaries have already passed. And the candidates most prepared to step into his place—Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, maybe Dean Phillips—wouldn’t be a likelier bet to beat Trump. But were Biden to drop out, it would clear the way for more promising candidates to step in: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. And as the likelihood of a second Trump presidency came into view, Democratic voters, as in the run-up to the 2020 election, would eventually flock to the candidate they felt was most likely to take down Trump.

While the strategic arguments for Biden’s candidacy have all but collapsed, the pressing moral argument he made in 2018 remains as true now as ever. If Democrats lose the White House in 2024, they won’t be turning over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to a generic Republican or even a Trump mini me like Ron DeSantis. They will most likely be handing the keys back to Trump himself. And if the Biden of 2019 is to be believed, that will fundamentally alter the character of our nation. If only the Biden of today would listen.

The Two Sides of Donald Trump Are Equally Bad

The New Republic

The Two Sides of Donald Trump Are Equally Bad

Alex Shephard – November 14, 2023

Donald Trump is talking like a Nazi again. Over the weekend, in both a speech and a subsequent social media post, he referred to his enemies as “vermin”—a favorite word of fascists and antisemites of yore—and channeled Hitler, declaring that America’s biggest enemies were domestic foes that needed to be “rooted out” and destroyed. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day,” he said. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

As if doubling down on the authoritarianism, Axios reported on Monday morning that Trump and his allies had formulated a plan to purge the federal government of ideological opponents. Trump and his allies “are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024,” wrote Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Although they note that this plan—which they’ve taken to calling “Agenda 47”—has an “authoritarian sounding” name, Allen and VandeHei (the latter of whom has harbored some authoritarian sentiments of his own), ever eager to ingratiate themselves, observe that those in charge of this plan “are smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.” For sure!

Finally, to underline the weekend of goose-stepping, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to the criticism by telling The Washington Post that those “who try to make [the] ridiculous assertion [that Trump is channeling Hitler] are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Not exactly a posture aimed at reassuring those who are alarmed by the increasingly fascistic bent of the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

The response to Trump’s “vermin” comments and the revelation of the “Agenda 47” plan have led to a deserved round of hand-wringing about Trump’s authoritarianism, the threat his political project poses to American democracy, and the media’s role in covering both. In 2016, the press failed to adequately capture the sum total of this threat, partly because Trump’s political career was seen as a doomed project and partly because it was still too abstract. Seven years later, Trump’s rhetoric is substantially darker and we’ve had plenty of hard evidence of his willingness to push past the acceptable boundaries of our democracy in his continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as well as in the Capitol riots that this rhetoric inspired.

Emphasizing Trump’s authoritarianism—and the related damage he can do to the fabric of the country—will be a necessity both for the press and for Joe Biden. Trump is rather transparently announcing his intentions to purge and weaponize the federal government against his political opponents, immunize himself against legal prosecution, and manipulate the levers of power to preserve his own for as long as possible. Given the threat of physical violence that so often accompanies his words, this is more or less open fascism. But declaiming against it will not be enough to defeat him.

“This is not normal” was a potent rallying cry during Trump’s presidency—it was arguably the defining admonition of that period. In many ways, Trump’s abnormality has only metastasized since voters evicted him from the White House. His rhetoric has grown more extreme. He is facing multiple criminal trials and will likely head into the presidential election as both his party’s nominee and as a convicted felon.

But Trump very much is a normal Republican now. That is true in many frightening ways, certainly. Trump’s political rivals have begun to echo his authoritarianism. Vivek Ramaswamy has arguably an even more insane plan to force the federal bureaucracy to submit to his will (he has suggested firing everyone whose social security number ends in an odd number). Ron DeSantis has called for shooting migrants. Nikki Haley has advocated for invading Mexico. Trump’s positions are the norm in the GOP now, and they will remain that way for the party’s foreseeable future: The GOP has, in eight years, been remade in his image.

But Trump has also become a normal Republican in the traditional sense, in that he’s more or less ended up embracing the long-standing policy positions of his GOP forebears. During his first term in office, his most important legislative accomplishment was a gigantic tax cut for corporations and the rich. Even though it is unlikely that he will staff his second-term office with the same kind of establishment figures—think Rex Tillerson and Steven Mnuchin—who briefly defined the early part of his presidency, one can rightly assume that he will continue to pursue regressive, supply-side economic policies, especially considering that this is what Republicans in Congress will want to do. The domestic agenda of a second Trump term would likely involve the greatest hits of Republican fiscal policy: tax and entitlement cuts, as well as the elimination of various environmental, labor, and economic regulations.

For all the talk of Trump’s abnormality, the fact that he’s always marched to the recognizable, old-school beats of the GOP drum has always been the less celebrated aspect of his time in politics. So there’s a danger in continually casting him as a pathbreaking sort of politician. Voters don’t like the status quo. They’ve repeatedly voted to reject the economic dogmas that have defined Republican policymaking for several consecutive elections. They thought that this was what they were getting from Trump in the first place—and the media did a much better job of selling Trump as a change-of-pace candidate, and clung to the notion that he was an economic populist long after he’d demonstrated no real interest in refreshing the Republican brand.

Democratic messaging needs to account for both Trump’s unique authoritarian leanings and his embrace of vintage Republican ideas. To solely advance the idea that Trump is a unique political figure in American life—a wild departure from the norm—runs the risk of implanting the idea that he is a politician bent on shattering the status quo during a time when many might prefer the short sharp shock of change. Ideally, you want to capture Trump as a chaos agent whose plans to sledgehammer the system won’t lead anywhere fruitful or new, but will more deeply entrench the unpopular ideas for which the GOP has long been known.

The clearest and most potent position for Democrats is to push on reproductive rights—it embodies the new post-Dobbs dystopia with the Republican Party’s decades-long effort to bring it about. Trump has, of late, escaped much attention for his abortion policy, in part because he’s skipped the Republican debates and in part because many of his opponents have adopted even more extreme positions. (Trump claims to oppose a nationwide abortion ban, though it seems highly likely he would sign one if he was given the chance.) More to the point, no one in the country is more responsible for the repeal of Roe v. Wade than Donald Trump, who appointed the three justices to the Supreme Court necessary to do the deed. Still, there is nothing new under the sun. Here we see a normal Republican doing normal Republican stuff. It is both odious and unpopular: Republicans have repeatedly lost elections when abortion is on the ballot. It will be again in 2024.

For Democrats, campaigning against Trump’s reelection will be an exercise in threading a needle between the new threats he poses and bad, old ideas to which he clings. This is something Democrats did successfully in the 2020 presidential election and then refined to great effect in the 2022 midterms; voters said that abortion and threats to democracy were the two issues that were front of mind as they tamed the “red wave” that was supposed to sweep Republicans into power. With less than a year before the election, both Biden and the press are doing a better job of making the case that Trump is a unique danger to the Republic. They should spend a little time reminding voters that he’s just as bad in other, more banal ways, as well.

Trump Campaign Officials Try to Play Down Contentious 2025 Plans

The New York Times

Trump Campaign Officials Try to Play Down Contentious 2025 Plans

Maggie Haberman – November 14, 2023

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, U.S., November 11, 2023. REUTERS/Brian Snyder (Brian Snyder / reuters)

Two top officials on former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign on Monday sought to distance his campaign team from news reports about plans for what he would do if voters return him to the White House.

Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who are effectively Trump’s campaign managers, issued a joint statement after a spate of articles, many in The New York Times, about plans for 2025 developed by the campaign itself, and trumpeted on the trail by Trump, as well as efforts by outside groups led by former senior Trump administration officials who remain in direct contact with him.

Wiles and LaCivita focused their frustration on outside groups, which they did not name, that have devoted considerable resources to preparing lists of personnel and developing policies to serve the next right-wing administration.

“The efforts by various nonprofit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful. However, none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign,” they wrote, calling reports about their personnel and policy intentions “purely speculative and theoretical” and “merely suggestions.”

Trump’s team has sought to portray him as the most substantive candidate on policy in the Republican Party. But according to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Trump’s campaign advisers have grown enraged at what they perceive alternately as credit-taking by the groups, and headlines that could be problematic for more moderate voters in a general election.

The statement noticeably stopped short of disavowing the groups and seemed merely intended to discourage them from speaking to the press.

One challenge for the Trump team is that the most incendiary rhetoric and proposals have come from Trump’s own mouth.

For instance, an article in the Times in June explored Trump’s plans to use the Justice Department to take vengeance on political adversaries by ordering investigations and prosecutions of them, eradicating the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from White House political control.

Trump said in June: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”

The Times recently published an extensive article on Trump’s immigration plans for a second term. He has promised what he called “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and has used increasingly toxic language to describe immigrants, including saying that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The Times article detailed plans for an immigration crackdown in part based on a lengthy interview with Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump White House immigration policy. The Trump campaign, after being approached by Times reporters about Trump’s immigration agenda, had asked Miller to speak with them.

President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign pounced on the article concerning immigration — which described plans for mass detention camps, among other things — saying that Trump had “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that were “meant to stoke fear and divide us.”

Other Times articles have focused on plans being fleshed out by close allies of Trump who occupied senior roles in his White House and are likely to return to power if he is elected.

Those plans include efforts to increase White House control over the federal bureaucracy that are being developed, among others, by Russell Vought, who was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.

But as the Times noted, Vought’s plans dovetailed with statements Trump made in a video his campaign published on its website, including vowing to bring independent regulatory agencies “under presidential authority.”

The Times series has also examined plans by Trump allies to recruit more aggressive lawyers seen as likely to bless extreme policies. Trump fired the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security in 2019 after disputes over White House immigration policies and has blasted key lawyers from his administration who raised objections to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The statement from Wiles and LaCivita on Monday said that, “all 2024 campaign policy announcements will be made by President Trump or members of his campaign team. Policy recommendations from external allies are just that — recommendations.”

Joe Scarborough Warns Trump Is ‘Going Full-On Hitler’ After Weekend Rhetoric

HuffPost

Joe Scarborough Warns Trump Is ‘Going Full-On Hitler’ After Weekend Rhetoric

Josephine Harvey – November 13, 2023

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Donald Trump is “going full-on Hitler” after the former president referred to political opponents as “vermin” over the weekend.

The “Morning Joe” host took it as a warning ahead of the 2024 election.

“You look at the language of Donald Trump, you look at what Donald Trump says he’s going to do, and you go back to Maya Angelou saying that ‘when somebody tells you who they are, believe ‘em the first time,’” Scarborough said on his morning show Monday, quoting the late civil rights activist.

“We have to believe him, and we also have to believe that this is the most important election probably since 1864,” he added. That election, during the Civil War, saw Abraham Lincoln elected to a second term.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump vowed to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within,” the leading contender for the Republican 2024 nomination added.

He made similar remarks during a Veterans Day rally in Claremont, New Hampshire.

As commentators in the media have noted, Trump’s rhetoric is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, which referred to Jewish people as “vermin.”

Last month, Trump drew rebuke after he said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” another phrase that echoes language used by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

I Have Never Been to This Israel Before

The New York Times – Opinion

I Have Never Been to This Israel Before

By Thomas L. Friedman – November 9, 2023

A soldier in combat gear walks toward a concrete wall blocking a road. — Credit…Amir Levy/Getty Images

People warned me before I came to Tel Aviv a few days ago that the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before — certainly not with the urgency and resolve that would lead a U.S. president to fly over and buck up the whole nation.

After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948. And it’s for three key reasons:

First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cybercapabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support. I am speaking about Iranian-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and now even the openly Hamas-embracing Vladimir Putin. These foes have long been there, but all of them seemed to surface together like dragons during this conflict, threatening Israel with a 360-degree war all at once.

How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question these demonic forces wanted to instill in the mind of every Israeli. They are not seeking a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions and then they will move out of the country altogether.

I am stunned by how many Israelis now feel this danger personally, no matter where they live — starting with a friend who lives in Jerusalem telling me that she and her husband just got gun licenses to have pistols at home. No one is going to snatch their children and take them into a tunnel. Hamas, alas, has tunneled fear into many, many Israeli heads far from the Gaza border.

The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States. President Biden, quite heroically, has been trying to help Israel with its immediate and legitimate goal of dismantling Hamas’s messianic terrorist regime in Gaza — which is as much a threat to the future of Israel as it is to Palestinians longing for a decent state of their own in Gaza or the West Bank.

But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties — innocent men, women and children — among whom Hamas deliberately embedded itself to force Israel to have to kill those innocents in order to kill the Hamas leadership and uproot its miles of attack tunnels.

But Biden can sustainably generate the support Israel needs only if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.

This leads directly to my third, deep concern.

Israel has the worst leader in its history — maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.

Worse, I am stunned by the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base — and pre-emptively blaming Israel’s security and intelligence services for the war — ahead of maintaining national solidarity or doing some of the basic things that Biden needs in order to get Israel the resources, allies, time and legitimacy it needs to defeat Hamas.

Biden cannot help Israel build a coalition of U.S., European and moderate Arab partners to defeat Hamas if Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”

Let’s drill down on these dangers.

Last Saturday night, a retired Israeli Army commander stopped by my hotel in Tel Aviv to share his perspective on the war. I took him to the 18th-floor executive lounge for our chat, and when we got into the elevator to go up, we joined a family of four — two parents, a toddler and a baby in a stroller. The Israeli general asked them where they were from. “Kiryat Shmona,” the father answered.

As we stepped out, I joked with the general that he could dispense with his briefing. It took just 18 floors and those two words — “Kiryat Shmona” — to describe Israel’s wickedly complex new strategic dilemma created by the surprise Hamas attack of Oct. 7.

Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon. That father said his family had fled the northern fence line with thousands of other Israeli families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinian militias in southern Lebanon began lobbing rockets and artillery and making incursions in solidarity with Hamas.

When might they go back? They had no idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. And it has taken only a few weeks for Israelis to begin driving up real estate prices in seemingly safer central Israeli towns. For Hezbollah, that alone is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas. Together, Hezbollah and Hamas are managing to shrink Israel.

On Sunday I drove down to a hotel on the Dead Sea to meet some of the hundreds of surviving members of Kibbutz Be’eri, which had some 1,200 residents, including 360 children. It was one of the communities hardest hit by the Hamas onslaught — suffering more than 130 murders in addition to scores of injured and multiple kidnappings of children and elderly. The Israeli government has moved most survivors of the kibbutz across the country to the Dead Sea, where they are now starting their own schools in a hotel ballroom.

I asked Liat Admati, 35, a survivor of the Hamas attack who ran a clinic for facial cosmetics for 11 years in Be’eri, what would make it possible for her to go back to her Gaza border home, where she was raised.

“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. “Before this situation, I felt I have trust in the army. Now I feel the trust is broken. I don’t want to feel that we are covering ourselves in walls and shelters all the time while behind this fence there are people who can one day do this again. I really don’t know at this point what the solution is.”

Before Oct. 7, she and her neighbors thought the threat was rockets, she said, so they built safe rooms, but now that Hamas gunmen came over and burned parents and kids in their safe rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets, not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. What is most dispiriting, she concluded, is that it appears that some Gazans who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.

There are a lot of Israelis who listened to the recording, published by The Times of Israel, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught, identified by his father as Mahmoud, calling his parents from the phone of a Jewish woman he’d just murdered and imploring them to check his WhatsApp messages to see the pictures he took of some of the 10 Jews he alone killed in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border.

“Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews,” he says, according to an English translation. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he adds. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.

This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’

The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.

As a result, there is a conviction in the army that it must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq, to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that it will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of the borders. While the army insists that it is hewing to the laws of war, it wants to show that no one can outcrazy Israel to drive its people from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if it does not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.

As Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters on Wednesday: “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”

This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.

Which is why I so worry about the leadership here today. I was traveling around the West Bank on Tuesday when I heard that Netanyahu had just told ABC News that Israel plans to retain “overall security responsibility” in Gaza “for an indefinite period” after its war with Hamas.

Really? Consider this context: “According to Israel’s official Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2021, 9.449 million people live in Israel (including Israelis in West Bank settlements), the Times of Israel reported last year. “Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21 percent) are Arab, and 472,000 (5 percent) are neither. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over three million and the Gaza population at just over two million.”

So Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.

Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu posted and then deleted a message on social media in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack. (Netanyahu somehow forgot how often the Israeli military and intelligence leaders had warned him that his totally unnecessary coup against the country’s judicial system was fracturing the army and Israel’s enemies were all noticing its vulnerability.)

After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new post. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”

But the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?

Let me not mince words, because the hour is dark and Israel, as I said, is in real danger. Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.

The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath. And the better chance that Biden — who may be down in the polls in America but could get elected here in a landslide for the empathy and steel he showed at Israel’s hour of need — will not have hitched his credibility and ours to a Netanyahu Israel that will never be able to fully help us to help it.

This society is so much better than its leader. It is too bad it took a war to drive that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms, the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after the Hamas invasion,

Hillary Clinton visits “The View”, says Donald Trump winning in 2024 would be the ‘end of our country’

Entertainment

Hillary Clinton visits “The View”, says Donald Trump winning in 2024 would be the ‘end of our country’

Joey Nolfi – November 8, 2023

“The wreckage is almost unimaginable,” Clinton said on The View.

Hillary Clinton brought a premonition of the United States’ decimation when she visited The View for a summit on current events.

The former Secretary of State stopped by the show Wednesday for a multi-segment interview, during which cohost Sunny Hostin told Clinton that her 2016 election loss to Donald Trump would go down as “one of the most pivotal moments” in U.S. history, and asked the politician to comment on Trump’s potential re-election in 2024 despite multiple indictments against him.

“I can’t even think that, because I think it would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly. I hated losing, and I especially hated losing to him because I’d seen so many warning signals during the campaign,” Clinton replied, adding that she tried to support Trump as the leader of the country. “Literally, from his inauguration on, it was nothing but accusing people of things, making up facts, denying the size of the crowd at his own inauguration. Everything I worried about, I saw unfolding.”

She said the warning signs are “even worse now” and speculated that he was “restrained” by those around him during his first term from 2016 through 2020 because “they stood up to him.”

The camera then cut to View star Alyssa Farah Griffin, who worked for Trump’s communications team before resigning — and subsequently spoke out against her former boss in 2020.

ABC Hillary Clinton on 'The View' — *ABC Hillary Clinton on ‘The View’*

Clinton went on to predict that, if Trump regained control of the White House, his administration would be filled with “people who have no principles, no conscience, who are totally tied to his fortunes, literally, and therefore would do whatever he said,” she observed. “The wreckage is almost unimaginable.”

The 76-year-old finished her thought by comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler, who was “duly elected” in Germany, Clinton said, as well as other authoritarian and dictatorial leaders in history.

Unlike Trump, though, Clinton stressed that those figures “didn’t usually telegraph” their intentions at first, she stressed. “Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word. The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to undermine the rule of law and country’s values.”

Before throwing the show to commercial, moderator Whoopi Goldberg referenced Trump’s ongoing criminal woes — which he has consistently pushed back against and called a “witch hunt” against him — telling the audience that “he’s not going to do a whole bunch of stuff right now” as he’s tied up in a legal web.

At a live speaking event in New York City in October, Griffin and fellow ex-Trump associate Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified during the House investigation into the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, warned their fellow Republicans about electing Trump in 2024, amid polls indicating that the ex-Apprentice TV host is the party’s leading candidate.

“I think it’s the responsibility of every American to make sure his name is not on the Republican ticket,” Hutchinson said, later adding: “If Donald Trump were to be elected to a second term in office, I fear for the future of our country, I fear for the future of our democracy.” (Trump’s office did not respond to EW’s request for comment.)

Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear Narrowly Secures a Second Term Following Tough Reelection Bid

People

Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear Narrowly Secures a Second Term Following Tough Reelection Bid

Virginia Chamlee – November 7, 2023

Beshar won reelection against Republican nominee Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general

<p>AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley (2)</p> Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron — AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley (2)Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear won his reelection bid in Kentucky, a red state easily carried by former President Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections, the Associated Press reports. Beshear defeated GOP nominee Daniel Cameron, currently Kentucky’s attorney general.

Polling showed Beshear, 45, with a sizable lead as recently as last month, when he was up 16 points, but an Emerson College poll released last week saw both candidates tied at 47%, with 4% of voters undecided.

<p>Greg Eans/The Messenger-Inquirer via AP</p> Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at a reelection campaign event in Owensboro on Nov. 4, 2023 — Greg Eans/The Messenger-Inquirer via APKentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at a reelection campaign event in Owensboro on Nov. 4, 2023

Representing a conservative state with a Republican-dominated legislature and two Republican U.S. senators, Beshear worked hard to shift the focus of the race away from partisan politics, instead zeroing in on his leadership.

Speaking at a campaign rally Monday, he said, “I run as a proud Democrat, but you saw the moment I won, I took that hat off and I serve every single family, because it’s time for us to recognize that a good job isn’t Democrat or Republican. So, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent, there is a place for you in this campaign.”

In a separate event held in recent days, Beshear stressed that he is adept at reaching across the aisle and working with conservative politicians, saying, “The people of northern Kentucky know how hard I’ve worked to get this grant for building this corridor. But I didn’t do it alone. The person I did it with is a Republican governor of Ohio. We worked across party lines to get it done.”

<p>AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley</p> Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the 2023 Republican nominee for governor — AP Photo/Timothy D. EasleyKentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the 2023 Republican nominee for governor

Cameron, 37, would have made history as the first Black Republican governor in the country since the Reconstruction era.

Cameron previously made national headlines for his handling of the investigation into Louisville police officers involved in Breonna Taylor‘s 2020 killing. In that case, his office opted not to seek criminal charges for the officers who fired at Taylor, leading to widespread protests against the decision. (The federal Justice Department later announced civil rights charges against four Louisville police officers in relation to her death.)

Kentucky’s 2023 gubernatorial race was closely watched, with many political pollsters speculating that it could signify how next year’s presidential race will play out in the state. Kentucky has not given its Electoral College votes to a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton‘s 1996 reelection bid.

In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas

The New York Times

In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas

Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel – November 3, 2023

Motorists drive past a giant billboard depicting Muslim peoples walking with their national flags towards the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, erected in Valiasr Square in the centre of Tehran on October 25, 2023. (Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP) (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images) (ATTA KENARE via Getty Images)

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is fast becoming a world war online.

Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States.

Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also joined the fight online, along with extremist groups, like al-Qaida and the Islamic State, that were previously at odds with Hamas.

The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before, according to government officials and independent researchers — a reflection of the world’s geopolitical division.

“It is being seen by millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president at Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv, Israel, “and it’s impacting the war in a way that is probably just as effective as any other tactic on the ground.” Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.

The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict. Iran, though it has denied any involvement in the attack by Hamas, has threatened as much, with its foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, warning of retaliation on “multiple fronts” if Israeli forces persisted in Gaza.

“It’s just like everyone is involved,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The institute, a nonprofit research organization in London, last week detailed influence campaigns by Iran, Russia and China.

The campaigns do not appear to be coordinated, American and other government officials and experts said, though they did not rule out cooperation.

While Iran, Russia and China each have different motivations in backing Hamas over Israel, they have pushed the same themes since the war began. They are not simply providing moral support, the officials and experts said, but also mounting overt and covert information campaigns to amplify one another and expand the global reach of their views across multiple platforms in multiple languages.

The Spanish arm of RT, the global Russian television network, for example, recently reposted a statement by the Iranian president calling the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 an Israeli war crime, even though Western intelligence agencies and independent analysts have since said a missile misfired from Gaza was a more likely cause of the blast.

Another Russian overseas news outlet, Sputnik India, quoted a “military expert” saying, without evidence, that the United States provided the bomb that destroyed the hospital. Posts like these have garnered ten of thousands of views.

“We’re in an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries,” James Rubin, the head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said in a recent interview.

From the first hours of its attack, Hamas has employed a broad, sophisticated media strategy, inspired by groups like the Islamic State. Its operatives spread graphic imagery through bot accounts originating in places like Pakistan, sidestepping bans of Hamas on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Cyabra’s researchers.

A profile on X that bore the characteristics of an inauthentic account — @RebelTaha — posted 616 times in the first two days of the conflict, though it had previously featured content mostly about cricket, they said. One post featured a cartoon claiming a double standard in how Palestinian resistance toward Israel was cast as terrorism while Ukraine’s fight against Russia was self-defense.

Officials and experts who track disinformation and extremism have been struck by how quickly and extensively Hamas’ message has spread online. That feat was almost certainly fueled by the emotional intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and by the graphic images of the violence, captured virtually in real time with cameras carried by Hamas gunmen. It was also boosted by extensive networks of bots and, soon afterward, official accounts belonging to governments and state media in Iran, Russia and China — amplified by social media platforms.

In a single day after the conflict began, roughly 1 in 4 accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X posting about the conflict appeared to be fake, Cyabra found. In the 24 hours after the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, more than 1 in 3 accounts posting about it on X were.

The company’s researchers identified six coordinated campaigns on a scale so large, they said, that it suggested the involvement of nations or large nonstate actors.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s report last week singled out Iranian accounts on Facebook and X that “have been spreading particularly harmful content that includes glorification of war crimes and violence against Israeli civilians and encouraging further attacks against Israel.”

Although the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denied the country’s involvement in the attack, the accounts have depicted him as the leader of a “Pan-Islamic resistance” to Israel and neocolonial Western powers.

A series of posts on X by a state-affiliated outlet, Tasnim News Agency, said the United States was responsible for “the crimes” and showed a video of wounded Palestinians. On Telegram, accounts have also spread false or unverified content, including one widely debunked account that CNN had faked an attack on a television crew.

Cyabra also identified an online campaign in Arabic on X from Iraq, evidently from Shiite Muslim paramilitary groups supported by Iran, including the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. A network of accounts posted identical messages and photos, using the hashtag #AmericasponsorIsraelTerrorism. Those posts peaked on Oct. 18 and 19, amassing more than 6,000 engagements, and had the potential to reach 10 million viewers, according to Cyabra.

Israel, which has its own sophisticated information operations, has found itself unexpectedly on the defensive.

“Like its military, Israel’s social media was caught flat-footed and responded days late,” said Ben Decker, the CEO of Memetica, a threat intelligence consulting firm, and a former researcher for The New York Times. “The response, even when it got off the ground, was chaotic.”

Two Israeli government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said Israel was tracking the bot activity from Iran and other countries. They noted that it was larger than any previous campaign they had seen.

The war has heightened concerns in Washington and other Western capitals that an alliance of authoritarian governments has succeeded in fomenting illiberal, anti-democratic sentiment, especially in Africa, South America and other parts of the world where accusations of American or Western colonialism or dominance find fertile soil.

Russia and China, which have grown increasingly close in recent years, appear intent to exploit the conflict to undermine the United States as much as Israel. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which combats state propaganda and disinformation, has in recent weeks detailed extensive campaigns by Russia and China to shape the global information environment to their advantage.

A week before Hamas attacked Israel, the State Department warned in a report that China was employing “deceptive and coercive methods” to sway global opinion behind its worldview. Since the war began, China has portrayed itself as a neutral peacemaker, while its officials have depicted the United States as a craven warmonger that suffered a “strategic failure in the Middle East.”

Accounts of Russian officials and state media have shared that sentiment. Numerous pro-Kremlin accounts on Telegram abruptly shifted after Oct. 7 from content about the war in Ukraine to post exclusively on Israel, including an Arabic-language channel linked to the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary force that rebelled against President Vladimir Putin in June.

Putin, who met with Hamas leaders after the war began, described the wars in Ukraine and Israel as part of the same broad struggle against American global dominance. He also claimed, without evidence, that “Western intelligence services” were behind a riot Sunday that targeted Jews at the airport in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia.

“They’re in a conflict, a geostrategic competition, with the United States,” said Michael Doran, a former White House and Pentagon official who is now director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. “And they recognize that when Israel, the U.S.’ primary ally in the Middle East, is wrapped up in a war like this, it weakens the United States.”

Trump’s Demands for Extreme Loyalty Are Starting to Backfire

Rolling Stone

Trump’s Demands for Extreme Loyalty Are Starting to Backfire

Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng – October 31, 2023

Throughout the criminal investigations of Donald Trump, the former president has expected his co-defendants, alleged co-conspirators, and potential witnesses for the prosecution to stay fiercely loyal to him. This has included — according to people who’ve discussed the matter with him — his belief that some of his former lieutenants should risk jail time rather than turn on him.

As he’s faced an array of criminal charges, Trump’s demands for aides and lawyers to martyr themselves for him hasn’t saved him. If anything, it’s done the opposite, driving several possible key witnesses to consider throwing Trump under the bus before he gets the chance to do it to them.

That’s because, as is often the case with the former president, the notion of extreme loyalty only goes one way. Rolling Stone spoke to seven potential witnesses, former Trump confidants ensnared in the Fulton County, Georgia, and federal criminal probes, their legal advisers, and other sources familiar with the situation. All of them say that Trump’s willingness to hang them out to dry has fueled legal strategies focused on self-preservation.

Three of these sources say that Team Trump’s comically unsubtle search for patsies and fall guys — MAGA die-hards who would take the blame and possible prison sentences in lieu of Trump — drove a larger wedge between the ex-president and many of his former fellow travelers.

“If I went to jail for Donald Trump, if I did that, what would that do for me and my family?” says a former Trump administration official who has been interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith’s office. “I don’t think he would even give us lifetime Mar-a-Lago memberships if I did that for him.”

Lawyer Sidney Powell, for example, put her adulation of Trump to work in the aftermath of the election by filing bogus lawsuits and making bizarre false claims against voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems. The moves got her sanctioned by a Michigan court, sued for a billion dollars by Dominion, and charged alongside Trump in Fulton County.

But her legal ordeal has brought her no meaningful help from the former president. Trump has gone out of his way to claim publicly that Powell was never his attorney while other Trump allies have worked to try to pin the blame for any criminal wrongdoing after the election on her. She has since also taken a plea deal this month, a move that shocked a number of top Trump lawyers and loyalists. Trump’s communications aide Liz Harrington has recently claimed the former president was “confused” by his allies’ plea deals because, in his apparent belief, “there’s no crimes here.” Powell, for her part, is still trying to have it both ways, portraying herself as a victim of a zealous prosecution and as a stalwart defender of Trump’s election lies.

But as some contemplate potentially cooperating with authorities, others have already publicly flipped, a decision that Trump now associates with “weaklings” who betray him.

In a statement to Rolling Stone, Trump’s lead counsel in the Fulton County Steven Sadow wrote that “[Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed charges in return for probation. What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for Willis. Truthful testimony will always exonerate President Trump.”

Jenna Ellis, an attorney for the Trump campaign charged in the Fulton County election-subversion case, has been vocal about her disappointment in the former president’s abandonment of his co-defendants. Ellis wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in August that she had been “reliably informed Trump isn’t funding any of us who are indicted,” and wondered “why isn’t [the pro-Trump Super Pac] MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?”

After an attempt at crowdfunding her legal fees, Ellis accepted a plea deal from prosecutors last week. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” a tearful Ellis said in a courtroom speech accepting responsibility for making false statements about the election that President Joe Biden clearly won.

For much of this year, Trump attorneys had been concerned that Kenneth Chesebro, one of the legal theorists behind the fake-electors scheme, would end up cooperating with prosecutors. The attorney accepted a plea deal in Fulton County and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents, but his attorney, Scott Grubman, denied any suggestion that his client was turning against Trump. “I don’t think he implicated anyone but himself,” Grubman told CNN earlier this month. Still, Chesebro and his legal team have been dropping hints for months that the blame and criminal exposure lay elsewhere in Trumpland, not with him.

“Whether the campaign relied upon that advice as Mr. Chesebro intended,” Grubman told Rolling Stone in August, “will have to remain a question to be resolved in court.” He continued: “We hope that the Fulton DA and the special counsel fully recognize these issues before deciding who, if anyone, to charge.”

These public statements came months after some of Trump’s closest allies and legal counselors began amassing informal lists of the best possible fall guys in the Jan. 6 riot-related probes and the Mar-a-Lago documents case. John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Powell, and Chesebro were indeed among the names. The lawyers, such as Chesebro, were easy scapegoats for Team Trump, who have openly signaled that the former president’s courtroom strategy will lean on an “advice of counsel” defense.

Asked if Chesebro could tell how much of Trumpland wanted him to take the fall to help insulate Trump, a lawyer who’s known Chesebro for years, and has spoken to him about this matter, simply tells Rolling Stone, “Of course.”

In private, Trump reserves some of his harshest words for one-time loyalists who are willing to cut deals with prosecutors, securing light sentences in exchange for likely testifying against Trump and others. However, the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner’s fury often extends to his lieutenants who don’t have formal cooperation agreements — but are simply willing, or legally bound, to answer prosecutors’ questions.

According to people close to Trump, the mere act of talking to federal investigators can sometimes be enough to get you branded a traitor or a snitch in the former president’s mind. This is because, his longtime associates say, Trump often doesn’t see a meaningful difference between witnesses who have formal cooperation agreements (to flip, in other words) and those who happen to tell investigators useful information during interviews.

Further, Trump and several of his closest advisers have been trying for months to find out how generous his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been with prosecutors lately. In June, The New York Times revealed that Meadows had testified before grand juries in both the special counsel’s Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case and its investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. This has fueled suspicions among Trump’s inner orbit this year, with some advisers now simply referring to Meadows in private communications by using the rat emoji.

Last week, ABC News reported that Meadows was “granted immunity” by the special counsel in order to spill potentially damaging details about Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election. Meadows’ lawyer has since disputed much of the report as “inaccurate,” though he refused to say what in the story supposedly wasn’t correct.

In the days since that news broke, a few of Trump’s political and legal advisers have tried to assure him that the ABC story doesn’t mean that Meadows has “flipped,” and that he is just doing what he is legally compelled to do in these conversations with federal investigators.

And yet, Trump isn’t entirely buying it. In the past week, the ex-president has asked confidants, with clear annoyance in his voice, why his former chief of staff would be telling prosecutors anything about Trump’s activities “at all,” two people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone. The former president’s position is that Meadows should invoke claims of executive privilege in these cases — the doctrine that some communications with a president should be shielded from outside scrutiny in certain circumstances.

It’s a similar move to what former Trump administration official Peter Navarro attempted in defying a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee, landing him a conviction for contempt of Congress.

If Meadows and other witnesses indulged Trump’s demands for a blanket defiance of prosecutors, Trump’s ex-chief could also risk jail time. Trump’s attorneys had attempted to block Meadows from testifying before a federal grand jury investigating the effort to overturn the election, citing executive-privilege claims. But in March, Judge Beryl Howell rejected the argument.

Navarro, a former top trade aide in the Trump White House, stonewalled a subpoena from the congressional Jan. 6 inquiry demanding he appear before the panel and turn over documents related to its investigation of the 2021 insurrection. Navarro’s defiance earned him a criminal referral and a conviction on contempt of Congress charges in September. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist and campaign aide, also defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House committee and earned a conviction for contempt of Congress. Both men have appealed their convictions.

Trump’s lack of loyalty to allies facing legal jeopardy for allegedly assisting him in various crimes has landed him in difficult spots in a number of cases.

“Trump’s view of loyalty is one way, and that one way benefits only him. Donald has a history of using and abusing his associates, and he has shown no hesitation in throwing them under the bus when it suits his needs,” Michael Cohen, a former Trump fixer and attorney who experienced that lack of reciprocal loyalty firsthand, said. “This is not the kind of person that people are willing to or should sacrifice their freedom for.”

Hard-right Republicans say they hate government, but they sure love the power

CNN – Opinion:

Hard-right Republicans say they hate government, but they sure love the power

Opinion by Nicole Hemmer – October 31, 2023

Editor’s note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and co-hosts the podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.”

The remarkable spectacle in the House of Representatives, where Republicans repeatedly failed for three weeks to fill the speaker’s seat they vacated in early October, has come to an end. The election of Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana to the seat, once the most coveted position in the House, has temporarily put the governing body back in session amid urgent foreign policy crises and a looming government shutdown.

It has been more than 150 years since the speakership sat vacant for so long. And this latest chaos only reinforces our current moment as a time when lengthy vacancies have become a regular feature of the federal government. The 422-day vacancy on the Supreme Court following Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016 was the longest since the court was set at nine members in 1869. The Trump administration was so rife with vacancies that record numbers of agencies had acting heads, which led The Washington Post to describe the executive branch as a “government full of temps.”

In each case, Republicans orchestrated these vacancies. But this government in absentia is not just a sign of the party’s dysfunction. While these vacancies emerged for different reasons, the driving force behind them all is a party that has radicalized to the point that it has created a crisis in democracy with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.

It is tempting to see these vacancies through the feature-not-a-bug lens of the Republican Party’s antigovernment politics. If a party doesn’t care about governing, why would it care that the government isn’t functioning? And certainly some on the right have made arguments to that effect. But that misses the much more insidious logic behind these vacancies: Many of today’s Republicans love government, because government is a form of power. You can’t ban reproductive and transition health care without government. You can’t ban books and drag shows without it. You can’t militarize a border or pardon your political allies without state power.

In many ways, the Republicans in the conference who are less radical are the ones more wary of how their colleagues deploy state power. But they have little power. They may have thwarted the nomination of Rep. Jim Jordan, the hard-right Trump ally who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, as speaker — but they fell in line behind Johnson, a far-right election denier. Right now, the party’s radicals run the conference, and they have found real power in the vacancy strategy.

The last time the speakership was vacant this long was in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War. The nation and its parties were riven by sectional divides over slavery that led politicians to contort the federal government to satisfy proponents of slavery. For eight years in the 1830s and 1840s, pro-slavery forces banned any discussion of antislavery petitions with the infamous gag rule. Conflict over slavery destroyed one political party (the Whigs) and gave birth to a new one (the Republicans). And in Congress, it ground all work to a halt in the House for two months as pro- and anti-slavery forces clashed over the speakership. Finally, a compromise candidate emerged, William Pennington of New Jersey, a freshly elected member who would serve just one term in office. And while the speakership crisis resolved, politics ultimately failed. War broke out a year after Pennington’s swearing-in.

We don’t need to draw the parallels too finely. The divisions in the US today are markedly different than those created by slavery. But the political failings that characterized the years leading up to the Civil War suggest we should pay attention when political institutions and procedures begin to systematically fail. Which is why we should spend some time thinking more seriously about these lengthy vacancies.

The first and most important thing to understand: The Republican Party has been responsible for nearly all these vacancies, at a time when a number of its members have also been responsible for one of the most serious incidents of political violence since the Civil War, the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (There have been deadlier domestic terror attacks, consequential assassinations and widespread state violence against persecuted groups, but the coordinated effort to overturn a presidential election, aided by the leaders of a major party, stands out even among these.)

The motivations have varied. Scalia’s seat remained vacant so Republicans could seize the power to fill it, just as lower courts have had lengthy vacancies to deny Democrats the right to fill those seats. The Trump administration vacancies were devised to give Trump more power over agencies and their leadership, whereas the speaker’s vacancy resulted from intraparty factionalism.

Yet these seemingly disparate motivations spring from a single source: an increasingly radicalized, illiberal Republican Party. In the case of the speakership vacancy, that dynamic annoyed Republican members but did not shake their commitment to antidemocratic politics. After all, the new speaker not only voted to overturn the 2020 election but was an enthusiastic participant in the illegal effort to prevent Joe Biden from taking office.

Scalia’s seat sat empty so Republicans could radicalize the court (mission accomplished). Trump skipped confirmation of Cabinet officials so he could wield more power over them (mission accomplished). A small band of Republicans vacated the speakership in hopes they could install a more right-wing speaker (mission very much accomplished). When government gets in the way of those larger goals, then it must be emptied, contorted or violently rejected, but the goal remains not the destruction of government, but the control of it. Which is why these vacancies — and their resolution — remain one of the most important signs we have of democratic decline in the United States.

By vacating the speakership and elevating Johnson to the highest position in the House, Republican radicals have confirmed the value of this vacancy strategy. And while Johnson may enjoy a longer run than his predecessor, the right has learned that vacancies fit perfectly with its power-grab politics. With an election just a year away — and the memory of a violent attempt at seizing power still fresh in mind — their commitment to this approach portends even more chaos ahead.