Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr

Stories of injustice and justice

These Are Some Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar in 2020

DeSmog

These Are Some Climate Stories That Flew Under the Radar in 2020

By Sharon Kelly                                     December 28, 2020

 

2020 wildfires

At the start of December 2020, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres spoke at Columbia University, appearing not before a packed auditorium as in years past, but before a “virtual” audience, making his annual State of the Planet address. “To put it simply,” he said, “the state of the planet is broken.”

“Today, we are at 1.2 degrees of warming and already witnessing unprecedented climate extremes and volatility in every region and on every continent,” Guterres said.

“Let’s be clear: human activities are at the root of our descent towards chaos,” he went on. “But that means human action can help solve it.”

The speech was a fitting postscript for a year that brought not just the Covid-19 pandemic, but also a pummeling of catastrophes worldwide, many related to climate change.

But amid those disasters and under an openly hostile-to-science Trump administration, momentum continued to quietly build — albeit excruciatingly slowly — away from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas and towards, perhaps, meaningful action to slow the climate crisis.

The past year may be a difficult one to look back on — but amid the crises, there are signs that long-entrenched powerful interests may in fact be dug in on shaky ground.

Unprecedented Disasters

2020 may well be the warmest year ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in mid-December.

Amid that heat came a seemingly unending series of climate-linked disasters, prompting the Red Cross Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain to warn in November that “climate change will have a more significant medium- and long-term impact on the human life and on Earth” than even Covid-19.

The U.S. was hit by a billion-dollar weather and climate disasters 16 times between January and September, according to NOAA — an average of one major catastrophe every 2.5 weeks for 40 weeks.

During this record-shattering Atlantic hurricane season that brought 30 named storms (the historic yearly average is 12), other multi-billion-dollar disasters barely registered in the national media. NOAA’s list includes eleven outbreaks of derechos, tornadoes, hail, or “severe weather” in the central and southern U.S., along with three named hurricanes (Laura, Sally and Isaias).

“It was such a busy and crazy a year that a derecho that savaged the Midwest somehow flew under the radar, despite damage nearing $10 billion, and is barely remembered,” the Associated Press reported of the August events.


Grain bin at the River Valley Cooperative in Martelle, Iowa – the tallest structure in this town of 250 people – which collapsed onto itself, spilling thousands of bushels of corn to the roadway, due to derechos in August. Photo Credit: Phil Roeder, via Flicker. 

And while major storms themselves made headlines, the toxic pollution that followed in their wakes often barely registered in the national press — and at times, went unmeasured because monitors were offline.

Fires Around the World

In January, as Wuhan entered its first lockdown and quarantine and the first Covid-19 cases were diagnosed in the U.S., Australia was battling deadly bushfires that ultimately raged across an area twice the size of Florida.

By summer, it was the U.S. Pacific coast that was burning. A horrific fire season this year turned skies blood-red from California to Washington state.


San Francisco smothered in smoke, September 9, 2020. Credit: Christopher Michel, via Flickr

As of December 18, the National Interagency Fire Center had tracked 56,914 wildfires in the U.S., which burned across more than 10.25 million acres.

“We’re seeing fires in places that we don’t normally see fires,” Crystal A. Kolden, a University of California, Merced professor of fire science, told the New York Times in September. “Normally it’s far too wet to burn.”

That’s in part because 2020 also brought an extraordinary — but relatively less discussed — drought that spread across a third of the U.S. “Compared to late 2019 and early 2020, when there was very little drought in the continental United States, this is quite an extreme single-year event that developed rapidly over the course of 2020,” Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “But if you look over longer time scales, I would argue this is really a continuation of a multi-decadal event that began around 2000. There have been some breaks, but the Southwest has been in more-or-less continuous drought conditions since then.”

Not only did California’s wildfires continue into December, but a third major wildfire system further south also burned this year while attracting less global attention. In Brazil, the Pantanal wetlands — afflicted by drought — caught fire repeatedly this year and burned rapidly, with the blazes consuming a quarter of the tropical wetlands in what the World Wildlife Fund* calls “one of the most biologically rich environments on the planet.”

And this summer, the Arctic, which has seen climate heating at roughly double average rates, not only experienced an abnormally hot summer — with temperatures in the Siberian town Verkhoyansk hitting 100.4°F, the highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic circle — but the Siberian tundra then broke out in wildfires of its own.

Plummeting Fossil Fuel Prices

But amid all the crises, signs of a different shift have begun to emerge — one that may have some potential to alter the climate trajectory we’ve stayed on for decades.

The oil, coal, and gas industries went into 2020 in rough financial shape, generating the lowest returns in the S&P 500 in 2019 after underperforming compared to the rest of the economy for a decade. That was before the price of oil plunged — and even, for a very brief moment in April, dipped far below zero.

Take, for example, ExxonMobil, which has continually doubled down on fossil fuel expansions. “The company, for decades one of the most profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 percent this year,” The New York Times reported in December. “In August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by Salesforce, a software company.”

Also in December, Exxon’s former CEO Lee Raymond, incidentally, quit the board of JPMorgan Chase, a role he’d held for more than three decades. Divestment campaigners at 350.org took credit for an ouster, calling it “a sign of the changing winds of financial institutions taking climate action seriously.”

Cheap Renewables

In contrast, renewable energy sources like solar and wind have proved to be relatively resilient — or, in the words of Fatih Birol, director of the International Energy Agency, in November, “immune to Covid.”

Utility-scale renewable energy saw costs continue to fall, making renewable energy often cheaper than fossil fuels — and installations reflected that competitiveness. “For solar, for example, new U.S. residential installations will be basically flat for 2020, and new non-residential (commercial, industrial, and institutional) megawatts will be down from 2019’s tally,” The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental organization, writes. “But large-scale projects have mostly been able to keep happening, boosted by favorable (but declining) tax incentives, and their successes will be enough to actually propel solar to a record year: We look set to have a total of more than 19,000 megawatts in new solar power capacity, 43 percent above 2019’s installations, and 20 percent above the previous record.”


Solar installer. Photo Credit: Tool Dude, via mechanicalcaveman.com

 

Building electrification efforts also spread in 2020. As of December 2, Sierra Club tracked 40 communities in California that had made that commitment, and 50 more considering all-electric policies. While electricity is still mostly generated by fossil fuels, those efforts lay the groundwork for renewable energy and proponents claim they will help reduce a single-family home’s emissions by up to 90 percent within 30 years.

Exposing Risk

This year also saw investigative reporting into ways that, for example, automakers GM and Ford have known for a half-century that climate change was underway and failed to act. Journalists have also exposed the ways that PR firms like FTI Consulting used deceptive campaigns and front groups to spread pro-fossil fuel propaganda.

The impacts of climate change drew closer scrutiny from large financial institutions. “More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk,” the New York Times reported this summer. “And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans fail.”

That, of course, isn’t exactly a heartwarming story of hope — but it is a sign that efforts by fossil fuel companies to sow confusion and doubt on climate change are becoming less and less compelling to decision-makers.

Moving Forward

The year also saw Black Lives Matter protests become what the New York Times called the “largest movement in U.S. history” in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This summer’s uprisings across the U.S. brought growing attention to widespread, institutionalized racial injustice — and echoed with the idea that, as marine biologist and Urban Ocean Lab founder Ayana Elizabeth Johnson put it in a June column in Time magazine, “we can’t solve the climate crisis unless Black lives matter.”

In 2021, in addition to taking a more intersectional approach towards environmental justice, climate activists have vowed to keep the pressure on the incoming Biden administration — which has promised to move the U.S. towards a net zero pathway. If it does so, the U.S. will join China, Japan and South Korea which all announced net zero emission targets this year.

This shift, according to the Financial Times, means that the Paris goals aren’t entirely out of reach. “‘If all these countries meet their long-term targets of net zero, then the Paris agreement goals are within reach again,’ says Niklas Höhne, professor of environmental systems at Wageningen University in the Netherlands,” as the FT reported in December. “Warming of 2.1C is now likely by the end of the century — much lower than seemed likely only a few years ago, according to analysis he has done with colleagues at the NewClimate Institute and at Climate Analytics, both non-profit research groups.”

The picture, of course, looks a lot more grim when you take into account countries’ questionable records of delivering on Paris pledges, the FT adds.

While this was a year of compounding and overlapping crises and tragedies, there is perhaps some glimmer of hope to be found in the fact that some of the past year’s under-reported stories could signify — depending on what we all do in the coming days — that structural shifts may be underway and that, as U.N. Secretary Guterres suggested, as 2020 comes to an end, some elements of the climate crisis remain unwritten.

*Updated 1/4/2021: The World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) name has been corrected from “World Wildlife Foundation.”

Main Image: A wildfire at Florida Panther NWR, April 2009. Photo Credit: Josh O’Connor – USFWS.

Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy

Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy

Robert Reich                             December 27, 2020
<span>Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

 

Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America.

Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy.

Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows.

The message: do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it.

The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity.

In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet not no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.

In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the members of the Sackler family that own it, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.

Here, too, they’ve got away with it. These windows remain broken.

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.

And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.

A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.

Trump’s recent pardons have broken double-pane windows.

Not only has he shattered the norm for presidential pardons – usually granted because of a petitioner’s good conduct after conviction and service of sentence – but he’s pardoned people who themselves shattered windows. By pardoning them, he has rendered them unaccountable for their acts.

They include aides convicted of lying to the FBI and threatening potential witnesses in order to protect him; his son-in-law’s father, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, witness tampering, illegal campaign contributions, and lying to the Federal Election Commission; Blackwater security guards convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians, including women and children; Border Patrol agents convicted of assaulting or shooting unarmed suspects; and Republican lawmakers and their aides found guilty of fraud, obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations.

It’s not simply the size of the broken window that undermines standards, according to Wilson and Kelling. It’s the willingness of society to look the other way. If no one is held accountable, norms collapse.

Trump may face a barrage of lawsuits when he leaves office, possibly including criminal charges. But it’s unlikely he’ll go to jail. Presidential immunity or a self-pardon will protect him. Prosecutorial discretion would almost certainly argue against indictment, in any event. No former president has ever been convicted of a crime. The mere possibility of a criminal trial for Trump would ignite a partisan brawl across the nation.

Congress may try to limit the power of future presidents – strengthening congressional oversight, fortifying the independence of inspectors general, demanding more financial disclosure, increasing penalties on presidential aides who break laws, restricting the pardon process, and so on.

But Congress – a co-equal branch of government under the Constitution – cannot rein in rogue presidents. And the courts don’t want to weigh in on political questions.

The appalling reality is that Trump may get away with it. And in getting away with it he will have changed and degraded the norms governing American presidents. The giant windows he’s broken are invitations to a future president to break even more.

Nothing will correct this unless or until an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize and condemn what has occurred.

The Fine Print in a 5,593-Page Spending Bill: Tax Breaks and Horse Racing

The Fine Print in a 5,593-Page Spending Bill: Tax Breaks and Horse Racing

Luke Broadwater, Jesse Drucker, Rebecca R. Ruiz – December 23, 2020
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) departs a meeting at the Capitol in Washington late Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020, with the top congressional leaders to discuss the omnibus package and COVID-19 relief. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)

 

WASHINGTON — Tucked away in the 5,593-page spending bill that Congress rushed through Monday night is a provision that some tax experts call a $200 billion giveaway to the rich.

It involves the tens of thousands of businesses that received loans from the federal government this spring with the promise that the loans would be forgiven, tax free, if they agreed to keep employees on the payroll through the coronavirus pandemic.

But for some businesses and their high-paid accountants, that was not enough. They went to Congress with another request: Not only should the forgiven loans not to be taxed as income, but the expenditures used with those loans should be tax deductible.

“High-income business owners have had tax benefits and unprecedented government grants showered down upon then. And the scale is massive,” wrote Adam Looney, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Treasury Department tax official in the Obama administration, who estimated that $120 billion of the $200 billion would flow to the top 1% of Americans.

The new provision allows for a classic double dip into the Paycheck Protection Program, as businesses get free money from the government, then get to deduct that largess from their taxes.

And it is one of hundreds included in a huge spending package and a coronavirus stimulus bill that is supposed to help businesses and families struggling during the pandemic but, critics say, swerved far afield. President Donald Trump on Tuesday night blasted it as a disgrace and demanded revisions.

“Congress found plenty of money for foreign countries, lobbyists and special interests, while sending the bare minimum to the American people who need it,” he said in a video posted on Twitter that stopped just short of a veto threat.

The measure includes serious policy changes beyond the much-needed $900 billion in coronavirus relief, such as a simplification of federal financial aid forms, measures to address climate change and a provision to stop “surprise billing” from hospitals when patients unwittingly receive care from physicians out of their insurance networks.

But there is also much grumbling over other provisions that lawmakers had not fully reviewed, and a process that left most of them and the public in the dark until after the bill was passed. The anger was bipartisan.

“Members of Congress have not read this bill. It’s over 5,000 pages, arrived at 2 p.m. today, and we are told to expect a vote on it in two hours,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote on Twitter on Monday. “This isn’t governance. It’s hostage-taking.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, agreed — the two do not agree on much.

“It’s ABSURD to have a $2.5 trillion spending bill negotiated in secret and then — hours later — demand an up-or-down vote on a bill nobody has had time to read,” he wrote on Twitter on Monday.

The items jammed into the bill are varied and at times bewildering. The bill would make it a felony to offer illegal streaming services. One provision requires the CIA to report back to Congress on the activities of Eastern European oligarchs tied to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The federal government would be required to set up a program aimed at eradicating the murder hornet and to crack down on online sales of e-cigarettes to minors.

It authorizes 93 acres of federal lands to be used for the construction of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota and creates an independent commission to oversee horse racing, a priority of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader.

McConnell inserted that item to get around the objections of a Democratic senator, who wanted it amended, but he received agreement from other congressional leaders.

Alexander M. Waldrop, CEO of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, said Tuesday that McConnell had “said many times he feared for the future of horse racing and the impact on the industry, which of course is critical to Kentucky.”

That the racing legislation — versions of which the industry had debated for years — passed as part of the COVID-19 relief bill was of no particular mind, Waldrop said.

“It just developed this way over the last several weeks,” he said. “The only approach left to us was a federally sanctioned, independent, self-regulatory organization. It was our only viable option left, and this legislation accomplishes that.”

But the tax provisions — including extending a $2.5 billion break for race car tracks and allowing a $6.3 billion write-off for business meals, derided as the “three-martini lunch” expense — have prompted the most hand-wringing.

The bill also lowers some taxes on alcoholic beverages.

No break is bigger, however, than the deductions that will soon be permitted under the Paycheck Protection Program. Businesses had been lobbying the Treasury Department and the IRS since the spring to deduct spending from PPP loans, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was firmly opposed, saying deducting expenditures from funds not considered taxable income violated “Tax 101.”

The PPP was the most visible part of the federal government’s coronavirus relief efforts in the spring to keep small businesses afloat. So far, the government has distributed more than $500 billion in loans, which could be forgiven and turned into permanent grants as long as the businesses use most of the money to pay workers and keep people employed.

In passing the law in the spring, Congress explicitly said that the PPP funds should not be included as taxable income — unlike, say, unemployment benefits.

Despite that largess, businesses wanted more. In May, the heads of the tax-writing committees — Sens. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Mass. — wrote Mnuchin urging him to reconsider his opposition.

“Small businesses need help maintaining their cash flow, not more strains on it,” they wrote.

But a Brookings Institution analysis said the change would help far more wealthy than mom-and-pop business owners.

“So there’s no cost on the way in and no cost on the way out — those two don’t add up,” said Richard L. Reinhold, the former chairman of the tax department at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and a professor at Cornell Law School. Congress could have simply expanded the PPP program, but instead it did it almost by stealth, through a tax deduction.

“That’s the part that is troublesome,” he said.

Although there had been discussion of limiting the deduction to PPP recipients below a certain income threshold, the final provision was made available to anyone, regardless of income.

The Small Business Administration this month released data showing that just 1% of the program’s 5.2 million borrowers had received more than a quarter of the $523 billion disbursed.

That 1% included high-priced law firms like Boies Schiller Flexner and the operator of New York’s biggest horse tracks, which received the maximum loan amount of $10 million.

“The year 2020 is going to be one of the most unequal years in modern history,” Looney said. “Part of the inequity is the effect of COVID, which hammered service sectors the most and allowed rich, educated people to work on Zoom. But the government totally compounded these inequities with their response.”

Yet in the end, only six senators, all Republicans, voted against the coronavirus relief package and spending bill, mostly citing fiscal concerns about runaway spending, while 85 House members — a mix of Democrats and Republicans — voted against its military provisions. The bill increased military spending by about $5 billion.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., opposed the military spending but voted for other aspects of the bill. He and his liberal colleagues had lobbied for direct payments for most Americans as part of a relief package, and he said he shared colleagues’ concerns about a lack of time to review the final piece of legislation.

“We need a better system to have members review online text as it is being drafted and have input,” Khanna said. “That said, leadership did keep us informed on almost daily calls about the essential aspects of the bills and the issues at stake.”

Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., one of the leaders of the bipartisan group that pushed for a $900 billion stimulus, said leadership intentionally waited until the last minute to unveil final proposals.

“Leadership likes the process the way it is,” he said. “Wait until the deadline, and then there’s no input at all. They say, take this or not. I’m sick and tired of how this game has been played.”

That said, there was plenty for lawmakers to cheer for. They sent out news releases promoting preferred provisions like the ban on most surprise medical bills, the restoration of college financial aid for incarcerated people, and the restrictions on the use of powerful planet-warming chemicals that are commonly used in air conditioners and refrigerators. The bill also creates new museums honoring women and Latinos.

“What you see at the end of every Congress is a clearing of the decks,” said Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “It’s all the stuff we wanted to pass but couldn’t. Everybody would love for legislation to be passed individually, but that is really a function of a bygone era that is not coming back.”

“There’s a lot of good stuff,” he said, “but something definitely gets snuck in.”

I’m Haunted by What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

New York Times

No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.

By Erica Newland December 20, 2020

Ms. Newland worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18.

 
Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

 

was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.

I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.

But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.

This burst into public view early in the Trump administration in the litigation over the executive order banning travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, which my office approved. The first Muslim ban was rushed out the door. It was sweeping and sloppy; the courts quickly put a halt to it. The successive discriminatory bans benefited from more time and attention from the department’s lawyers, who narrowed them but also made them more technocratic and therefore harder for the courts to block.

After the Supreme Court’s June 2018 decision upholding the third Muslim ban, I reviewed my own portfolio — which included matters targeting noncitizens, dismantling the Civil Service and camouflaging the president’s corruption — overcome with fear that I was doing more harm than good. By Thanksgiving of that year, I had left my job.

Still, I felt I was abandoning the ship. I continued to believe that a critical mass of responsible attorneys staying in government might provide a last line of defense against the administration’s worst instincts. Even after I left, I advised others that they could do good by staying. News reports about meaningful pushback by Justice Department attorneys seemed to confirm this thinking.

I was wrong.

Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.

Unlike the Trump Justice Department, the Trump campaign has relied on second-rate lawyers who lack the skills to maintain the president’s charade. After a recent oral argument from Rudy Giuliani, Judge Matthew Brann (a Republican) wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.” Even judges appointed by Mr. Trump have refused to throw their lots in with lawyers who can’t master the basic mechanics of lawyering.

After four years of bulldozing through one institution after another on the backs of skilled lawyers, the Trump agenda hit a brick wall.

The story of the Trump campaign’s attack on our elections could have been the story of the Trump administration’s four-year-long attack on our institutions. If, early on, the Justice Department lawyers charged with selling the administration’s lies had emptied the ranks — withholding our talents and reputations and demanding the same of our professional peers — the work of defending President Trump’s policies would have been left to the types of attorneys now representing his campaign. Lawyers like Mr. Giuliani would have had to defend the Muslim ban in court.

Had that happened, judges would have likely dismantled the Trump facade from the beginning, stopping the momentum of his ugliest and most destructive efforts and bringing much-needed accountability early in his presidency.

Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

And we owe our best efforts to restore our democracy and to share what we learned to help mobilize and enact reforms — to remind future government lawyers that when asked to undermine our democracy, the right course is to refuse and hold your peers to the same standard.

To lead by example, and do everything in our power to ensure this never happens again. If we don’t, it will.

Erica Newland, counsel at Protect Democracy, worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18.

Who are you calling a socialist? Republicans are the real party of socialism in America

Who are you calling a socialist? Republicans are the real party of socialism in America

Steven Strauss, Opinion columnist               December 19, 2020

 

With Senate control on the line in two Georgia runoff elections next month, Republicans are claiming that President-elect Joe Biden and the Democrats are “socialists.” That’s their shorthand for government interference in the economy, corruption, failure to enforce the law, incompetence, and subsidizing people who should support themselves.

Let me suggest four areas where the incoming Biden administration, allied with serious conservatives, can fight “socialism” while upholding progressive values.

► Eliminate farm subsidies and farm support programs (which will cost $46 billion this year — up from $22 billion last year — and will account for about 40% of this year’s farm income) that interfere with agricultural markets. As Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute noted: “Agriculture is no riskier than other industries and does not need an array of federal subsidies.” Also from the Cato Institute: “About 97% of all farm households are wealthier than the median U.S. household. Farm income was 52% higher than median U.S. household income.”

I know of no progressive organization that supports these farm subsidy programs. However, America’s farmers are different from other Americans. They are 95% white and do one thing the majority of Americans refuse to do: Farmers overwhelmingly vote Republican (President Donald Trump may have gotten as much as 85% of the farm vote this year).

Tax subsidies that make no sense

► Eliminate the money-losing “socialist” National Flood Insurance Program. From the point of view of progressives (who believe climate change is a real and pressing concern), NFIP makes no sense. It encourages living in flood-prone areas (where progressives believe flooding will get worse due to climate change) by offering subsidized federal flood insurance. As the General Accounting Office noted: “NFIP premiums do not reflect the full risk of loss, which increases the Federal fiscal exposure created by the program, obscures that exposure from Congress and taxpayers …”

In 2017, Congress wrote off $16 billion in losses from this program. But by March 2020, it had already accumulated another $20 billion in losses. About 60% of NFIP policies were issued in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, which all voted for Trump this year.

U.S. Capitol building on March 25, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
U.S. Capitol building on March 25, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

 

► Invest $10 billion per year to fund IRS tax enforcement, targeted at the very wealthy — those making over $1 million a year. According to a recent estimate by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin and former IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti, this investment would yield about $100 billion a year in extra Federal tax revenues.

If you’re a conservative who thinks defunding police enforcement is a bad idea, you should think the same about the recent defunding of IRS tax enforcement (by cutting the IRS budget). The IRS budget shrank 20% in real terms from 2010 to 2019, while in the same period the U.S. economy grew about 25%. The result is that the number of audits of Americans making over $1 million per year declined by about 75%. At the same time, the IRS was pressured to focus its scarce resources on auditing low income Americans. Notably, the main driver of this IRS defunding is the GOP.

► Make states routinely subsidized by the rest of the country get their act together. Most American states are roughly in balance between what their residents pay into the federal government and what they receive back. A few states (mainly Democratic) are “maker” states (among them Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York) that pay vastly more to the federal government than they receive.

‘Taker’ states do bad job for citizens

Then there are states that get back a lot more than their residents pay in taxes. These “taker” states are mainly low-income states in the southeast, most of them dominated by Republicans. Given our progressive tax system and safety net, federal money tends to automatically flow to these states.

If you’re a conservative, transferring money from “makers” to “takers” is generally frowned on. If you’re a progressive, it makes sense to ask some hard questions about what’s going on with these “taker” states. Because, despite all the money these states receive, they don’t do a good job for their citizens.

Mississippi illustrates just how bad this situation is. Annually, Mississippi receives $19 billion more from the federal government than it pays into the system. Despite this support, Mississippi has the highest homicide rate, highest infant mortality rates and lowest median household income of any American state.

No socialist nightmare: Georgia, if you’re listening, ignore conservatives peddling socialist Senate hallucinations

It’s time the leaders in these poorly run states make changes to improve the lives of their citizens — hopefully while reducing their hefty dole from the rest of the country. If they are unwilling to reform, maybe federal money and programs should be cut off.

Some of what I’m proposing will require legislation, and the devil’s in the details. But if you’re an ideological conservative, you should be willing to work with the Biden administration to implement some or all of these proposals.

If you’re a hypocritical member of the GOP (that is, you want to keep using federal tax dollars to buy the farm vote for Republican candidates), and-or a Trumpist, you probably loathe everything I’ve proposed. But it’s time for the incoming Biden administration to pull back the curtain on which is the true party of socialism in America.

Steven Strauss is a lecturer and visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

Trump’s Future: Tons of Cash and Plenty of Options for Spending It

Trump’s Future: Tons of Cash and Plenty of Options for Spending It

Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman  December 18, 2020
Election workers during the Fulton County ballot recount in Atlanta on Nov. 14, 2020. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)
Election workers during the Fulton County ballot recount in Atlanta on Nov. 14, 2020. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)

 

Donald J. Trump will exit the White House as a private citizen next month perched atop a pile of campaign cash unheard-of for an outgoing president, and with few legal limits on how he can spend it.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

More than $60 million of that sum has gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the matter, which Trump will control after he leaves office. Those funds, which far exceed what previous outgoing presidents had at their disposal, provide him with tremendous flexibility for his post-presidential ambitions: He could use the money to quell rebel factions within the party, reward loyalists, fund his travels and rallies, hire staff, pay legal bills and even lay the groundwork for a far-from-certain 2024 run.

The postelection blitz of fundraising has cemented Trump’s position as an unrivaled force and the preeminent fundraiser of the Republican Party, even in defeat. His largest single day for online donations actually came after Election Day — raising almost $750,000 per hour Nov. 6. So did his second-biggest day. And his third.

“Right now, he is the Republican Party,” said John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who worked on Trump’s reelection campaign. “The party knows that virtually every dollar they’ve raised in the last four years, it’s because of Donald Trump.”

Trump has long acted with few inhibitions when it comes to spending other people’s money, and he has spent millions of campaign dollars on his own family businesses in the last five years. But new records show an even more intricate intermingling of Trump’s political and familial interests than was previously known.

Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, served on the board — and was named on drafts of the incorporation papers — of a limited liability company through which the Trump political operation spent more than $700 million since 2019, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The arrangement has never been disclosed. One of the other board members and signatories in the draft papers of the LLC, American Made Media Consultants, was John Pence, the nephew of Vice President Mike Pence and a senior Trump adviser. The LLC has been criticized for purposefully obscuring the ultimate destination of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending.

Lara Trump and John Pence were originally listed as president and vice president on the incorporation papers, documents reviewed by the Times showed. Sean Dollman, the campaign chief financial officer, was the AMMC treasurer.

“Lara Trump and John Pence resigned from the AMMC board in October 2019 to focus solely on their campaign activities; however, there was never any ethical or legal reason why they could not serve on the board in the first place,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesperson for Trump. “John and Lara were not compensated by AMMC for their service as board members.” Murtaugh also said the two were not compensated for other positions they were listed as holding.

For Trump, the quarter-billion dollars he and the party raised over six weeks is enough to pay off all of his remaining campaign bills and to fund his fruitless legal challenges and still leave tens of millions of dollars.

Trump’s plans, however, remain extremely fluid. His refusal to accept Joe Biden’s victory has stunted internal political planning, aides say, with some advisers in his shrinking circle of confidants hesitant to even approach him about setting a course of action for 2021 and beyond.

Those who have spoken with Trump say he appears shrunken, and over his job; this detachment is reflected in a Twitter feed that remains stubbornly more focused on unfounded allegations of fraud than on the death toll from the raging pandemic.

Trump has talked about running again in 2024 — but he also may not. He has created this new PAC, but a different political entity could still be in the works, people involved in the discussions said. Talk of counterprogramming Biden’s inauguration with a splashy event or an announcement of his own is currently on hold.

Trump had been tentatively planning to go to Georgia on Saturday, according to a senior Republican official, to support the two Republicans in Senate runoff races there. But he is still angry at the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for accepting the election result and simply doesn’t want to make the trip. There is some discussion about him going after the Christmas holiday, but it’s not clear he will be in a more magnanimous mood by then.

But even as he displays indifference toward the Georgia races, the Trump political apparatus has taken advantage of the grassroots energy and excitement over the two runoffs to juice its own fundraising. Email and text solicitations have pitched Trump supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” even though no funds go directly to either Republican senator on the ballot, irritating some Senate GOP strategists.

Instead, the fine print shows 75% of the donations to the Georgia fund go to Trump’s new PAC, called Save America, with 25% to the Republican National Committee.

After weeks of shouting “FRAUD” to supporters in emails and asking them to back an “Election Defense Fund” (which also sent 75% of donations to his new PAC), the Trump operation has subtly shifted its tone and focus, returning to more sustainable pre-election themes, like hawking signed hats and opposing socialism.

Trump and the RNC did spend about $15 million combined in legal costs and other spending related to disputing the election between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23, according to federal records.

Besides a $3 million payment to Wisconsin to fund a partial recount in the state, Trump’s largest recount-related payment did not go to attorney fees but to American Made Media Consultants, the Trump-linked LLC on which Lara Trump was listed an original signatory. The firm received $2.2 million Nov. 12 in two payments labeled “SMS advertising,” better known as text messaging.

American Made Media Consultants was the subject of a complaint to the Federal Election Commission earlier this year that accused it of “laundering” funds to obscure the ultimate beneficiary of Trump campaign spending. Federal records show the firm had more than $700 million in funds flow through it since 2019. The vast majority of funds were spent before Lara Trump resigned from the board.

For a sense of scale of just how much money Donald Trump will have at his disposal, the new Trump PAC’s $60 million-plus haul — and counting — is about as much money as he spent to win his party’s presidential nomination in 2016.

Some campaign finance experts have speculated that Trump might try to use the excess of cash in his new PAC, formally known as a leadership PAC, to pay for his own personal future legal quagmires as he faces investigations once he leaves office. (A senior Trump adviser said they don’t expect the money to be used for personal legal needs.)

“A leadership PAC is a slush fund,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a group that supports increased political transparency. “There are very, very, very few limits on what he can’t spend money on.”

In the last five years, Trump has never shied from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from his contributors on his private businesses, a practice he could continue or expand while out of office.

Just since mid-October, the Trump Victory Committee, a joint account operated with the RNC, has paid more than $710,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection, while his reelection account has continued to pay more than $37,000 per month to rent space in Trump Tower.

It is not clear where his post-presidential operation will be based or who will run it, although several advisers expect it will be in Florida, where he is planning to move.

But as a former president, Trump will be allocated a certain amount of taxpayer money for staff and office space for life after leaving the White House, and he is beginning to have discussions about which aides from the West Wing will accompany him.

His senior political advisers — Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Jason Miller, among others — are among those who may stay involved with him politically.

While Trump’s post-presidency remains largely shapeless, he has demonstrated his desire to exert his control on national politics, especially among Republicans.

He has already endorsed Ronna McDaniel, a close ally, to serve another term as chair of the RNC. He has floated primary challenges to Republicans, such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who have crossed him by rejecting his baseless theories of election fraud. He has even asked aides how he can retain control of the party if he isn’t a candidate.

One person close to Trump said that he has sounded less certain about declaring he’s running in 2024 than he had just two weeks ago. That uncertainty is causing anxiety for a number of advisers and aides to the president, some of whom might join other campaigns but are stuck in limbo until Trump makes up his mind. Announcing for president would trigger tighter rules on Trump’s political spending and added financial disclosures, including of Trump’s personal finances, that simply operating a PAC would not.

Trump’s future ambitions have also created a cloud over who exactly will control some of the most valuable assets from the 2020 campaign, including Trump’s lengthy list of supporters from whom he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Both the RNC and Trump are entitled to some of this valuable voter data, and efforts at “decoupling” the data are underway but expected to last months.

The RNC has typically stayed out of presidential primaries, but no former president in the modern era has seriously considered running again after losing reelection, putting the party apparatus in uncharted territory. His embrace of McDaniel as an ally in running the party could further complicate matters.

“There’s no bully pulpit as large as the presidency, but nevertheless, President Trump is likely to play a significant role in the future of the Republican Party,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “It’s very difficult to imagine him following the same pattern as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and other presidents have followed in keeping their mouths shut and letting the new president try to govern.”

White House counsel’s office warned Trump not to fire Chris Wray

White House counsel’s office warned Trump not to fire Chris Wray

December 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has come so close to firing FBI Director Christopher Wray in recent months that the White House counsel’s office has warned him not to do so because it could put him in potential legal jeopardy, according to a senior administration official with direct knowledge of the discussion and a U.S. official familiar with the discussion.

White House lawyers “strongly” advised Trump against firing another FBI director out of concern that doing so would risk creating the perception that a “loyalty test” was being imposed on a position that traditionally has maintained independence from the White House, according to the senior administration official.

The lawyers, led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone, specifically said that firing Wray could spark legal issues similar to those raised after Trump ousted James Comey as FBI director in 2017 in the midst of the Russia investigation, the officials said.

Their concern was that firing Wray could be seen as retaliation because the president has publicly pressured him to take specific actions on certain investigations — such as announcing a probe into President-elect Joe Biden’s son — and then expressed frustration that Wray has not followed his suggestions.

Trump’s firing of Comey, whom he’d asked to drop an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, became a key part of the special counsel’s probe into whether he had obstructed justice.

As a result, the president’s legal team advised him against firing Wray, the officials said.

While Trump’s frustrations with Attorney General Bill Barr boiled over in recent days, and Barr resigned on Monday, the president’s advisers hope he’s been persuaded against ousting Wray. Multiple current and former senior administration officials said firing Wray does not appear imminent, but they also point out that the president could make such a decision on a whim at any time. Indeed officials said they are prepared for Trump to go on a firing spree before leaving office next month.

“I wouldn’t take anything off the table in coming weeks,” the senior administration official said of personnel changes, as well as presidential pardons. The official said to expect “some more fairly significant terminations in the national security or intelligence community.”

It’s unclear how Trump’s complaints that Wray hasn’t done anything to investigate Biden’s son Hunter might affect his job given the announcement last week that the FBI has already been conducting such an investigation since 2018. Trump had criticized Barr for not publicly disclosing the investigation before the election.

Trump also recently threatened to fire acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, according to two senior administration officials. The president blamed Wolf for the public statements from Christopher Krebs, the former head of the agency in charge of election security at the Homeland Security Department. Krebs has called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

But some of the president’s advisers convinced him to leave Wolf in his job, and they believe — or at least hope — he won’t be fired.

The White House declined to comment on the president’s current thinking about firing members of his administration. “If the president doesn’t have confidence in someone he will let you know,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. “We have no personnel announcements at this time.”

The likelihood of Trump firing top officials he’s been frustrated with or feels betrayed by is expected to increase over the holidays, the current and former officials said.

CIA Director Gina Haspel was so convinced she might be fired that she was seen cleaning personal items out of her office at CIA headquarters last month after Trump ousted Defense Secretary Mark Esper, according to three former and current administration officials familiar with the matter.

Haspel’s job has been rumored to be in doubt in the weeks after the election, in part because of her reluctance to release classified documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, even when other intelligence community leaders like John Ratcliffe have pushed to release the information. But her position may now be more secure than it was even a few weeks ago, officials said, given that several Senate Republicans conveyed their support for her to the White House.

Still, officials said Trump could decide to fire Haspel anyway. “That hasn’t been put to rest,” one former senior administration official said.

When asked about Haspel packing up her personal items in her office, a CIA spokesperson said, “I stopped by Director Haspel’s office, and right there on her conference room table was one of her favorite mementos, a bowl with the London skyline.”

Franklin Graham Says Trump ‘Will Go Down in History As One of the Great Presidents’

Newsweek

Franklin Graham Says Trump ‘Will Go Down in History As One of the Great Presidents’

By Rebecca Speare-Cole          December 16, 2020

Evangelical leader Pastor Franklin Graham has thanked God for Donald Trump’s four years in the White House, saying he will “go down in history as one of the great presidents.”

Graham posted a lengthy statement on Facebook on Monday, writing that he had been asked if he was disappointed about the election but was instead “grateful to God” for the past four years.

The pastor, a Trump supporter since 2016, said the president had “protected our religious liberties,” “stood up for the lives of the unborn” and “nominated conservative judges to the Supreme Court.”

His statement came after the 538 members of the Electoral College met to cast their ballots for president and vice president, formalizing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ victory.

Rev. Franklin Graham
Franklin Graham records an invocation to the Republican National Convention on August 27, 2020.DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

 

Trump has refused to concede and continues to make unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. Over the past few weeks his campaign and Republican allies have launched dozens of lawsuits in key battleground states, but nearly all of them have failed.

Graham, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical Christian leaders, was seen as a key voice to maintain the president’s support among white evangelicals ahead of the election last month.

After the electoral college vote on Monday, he wrote on Facebook: “People have asked if I am disappointed about the election. When I think about my answer, I have to say honestly, that I am grateful—grateful to God that for the last four years.

“He gave us a president who protected our religious liberties; grateful for a president who defended the lives of the unborn, standing publicly against abortion and the bloody smear it has made on our nation; grateful for a president who nominated conservative judges to the Supreme Court and to our federal courts; grateful for a president who built the strongest economy in 70 years with the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years before the pandemic; grateful for a president who strengthened and supported our military; grateful for a president who stood against “the swamp” and the corruption in Washington; grateful for a president who supported law and order and defended our police.

Graham also wrote that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had recognized the importance of prayer and were not ashamed of the name Jesus Christ.

He said: “I’m thankful that the president stood against the secularists who wanted to take Christ out of Christmas and that he brought back the greeting ‘Merry Christmas!’ So as we come to the end of this election season, I look back with a grateful heart and thank God for all of these things.”

Trump has repeatedly railed against the phrase “Happy Holidays” for being politically correct, while seeking to perpetuate the idea that US citizens have been barred from using the more traditional greeting “Merry Christmas.”

The president insisted that he “led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase,” although his predecessor, Barack Obama often wished Americans a Merry Christmas during his presidency.

Graham finished his statement saying: “It is unfortunate that many people got confused and made the election about personalities rather than the policies of the candidates. President Trump will go down in history as one of the great presidents of our nation, bringing peace and prosperity to millions here in the U.S. and around the world. May God bless him, Melania, and their family, as God leads him to the next chapter in his life.”

trump graham franklin
Franklin Graham talks with President Donald Trump during a ceremony to honour his late father Billy Graham on February 28, 2018, in Washington, D.C.RON SACHS-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

 

White evangelical Christians have been one of Trump’s strongest bases of support since 2016. Exit polling by Pew Research Center showed about 8 in 10 evangelical Christians had voted for Trump four years ago. But a survey by the non-partisan think tank in June found that somewhat less—72 percent—of white evangelicals approved of the job Trump was doing as president.

Graham recently claimed in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network that Democrats were “opposed to faith,” although President-elect Biden is a devout Catholic.

In September, more than 10,000 Christians signed a petition calling for Graham to be removed as the head of the humanitarian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse following his prayer in support of President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention.

Graham is not the only high-profile evangelical leader who supports Trump. Paula White, the president’s spiritual leader, held an impassioned live-streamed prayer the day after the election that sparked hundreds of internet memes.

U.S. sees biggest yearly jump in poverty rate in 60 years

U.S. sees biggest yearly jump in poverty rate in 60 years

Tim O’Donnell                         December 16, 2020

 

By historical standards, poverty levels in the United States remain low, but the country has seen the biggest jump in poverty in a single year since the government began tracking such information 60 years ago, The Washington Post reports.

New data released Wednesday by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame shows the poverty rate increased to 11.7 percent in November, up 2.4 percentage points since June, marking the fifth straight month of incline. In that time span, around 7.8 million Americans have fallen below the poverty line, or an income of $26,200 for a family of four.

Not only is the rise the largest in several decades, it is also nearly double the second-biggest increase, which occurred between 1979 and 1980 during the oil crisis, the Post reports.

Notre Dame and University of Chicago economists say the situation, unsurprisingly, stems from the coronavirus pandemic and the tough labor market it has created, as well as the fact that government aid is dwindling. A solution to either would help — when Congress passed the CARES Act in the spring and sent stimulus checks to Americans, poverty actually decreased — and it looks like a new relief bill is the more realistic goal. “Given the state of the virus, I wouldn’t bet on significant improvement in the labor market in the short run,” James Sullivan, a professor at Notre Dame, told the Post.

Mar-a-Lago neighbors to Trump: Spend your post-presidency elsewhere

Washington Post – Style

Mar-a-Lago neighbors to Trump: Spend your post-presidency elsewhere

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Carol D. Loennig        December 15, 2020

 

President Trump, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017.

Next-door neighbors of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Fla., that he has called his Winter White House, have a message for the outgoing commander in chief: We don’t want you to be our neighbor.

That message was formally delivered Tuesday morning in a demand letter delivered to the town of Palm Beach and also addressed to the U.S. Secret Service asserting that Trump lost his legal right to live at Mar-a-Lago because of an agreement he signed in the early 1990s when he converted the storied estate from his private residence to a private club. The legal maneuver could, at long last, force Palm Beach to publicly address whether Trump can make Mar-a-Lago his legal residence and home, as he has been expected to do, when he becomes an ex-president after the swearing-in of Joe Biden on Jan. 20.

The contretemps sets up a potentially awkward scenario, unique in recent history, in which a former Oval Office occupant would find himself having to officially defend his choice of a place to live during his post-presidency. It also could create a legal headache for Trump because he changed his official domicile to Mar-a-Lago, leaving behind Manhattan, where he lived before being elected president and came to fame as a brash, self-promoting developer. (Trump originally tried to register to vote in Florida using the White House in Washington as his address, which is not allowed under Florida law. He later changed the registration to the Mar-a-Lago address.)

In the demand letter, obtained by The Washington Post, an attorney for the Mar-a-Lago neighbors says the town should notify Trump that he cannot use Mar-a-Lago as his residence. Making that move would “avoid an embarrassing situation” if the outgoing president moves to the club and later has to be ordered to leave, according to the letter sent on behalf of the neighbors, the DeMoss family, which runs an international missionary foundation.

For years, various neighbors have raised concerns about disruptions, such as clogged traffic and blocked streets, caused by the president’s frequent trips to the club. Even before he was president, Trump created ill will in the town by refusing to comply with even basic local requirements, such as adhering to height limits for a massive flagpole he installed, and frequently attempting to get out of the promises he had made when he converted Mar-a-Lago into a private club.

“There’s absolutely no legal theory under which he can use that property as both a residence and a club,” said Glenn Zeitz, another nearby Palm Beach homeowner who has joined the fight against Trump and had previously tangled with him over Trump’s attempt to seize a private home to expand his Atlantic City casino. “Basically he’s playing a dead hand. He’s not going to intimidate or bluff people because we’re going to be there.”

A White House spokesperson and Palm Beach’s mayor did not respond to requests for comment. To date, Palm Beach has made no public attempt to prevent Trump from living at Mar-a-Lago or from using it as his legal residence.

“There is no document or agreement in place that prohibits President Trump from using Mar-a-Lago as his residence,” said a Trump business organization spokesman who was not authorized to speak publicly about a legal issue.

The Mar-a-Lago residence that Trump plans to call home after departing the White House.

The current residency controversy tracks back to a deal Trump cut in 1993 when his finances were foundering, and the cost of maintaining Mar-a-Lago was soaring into the multimillions each year. Under the agreement, club members are banned from spending more than 21 days a year in the club’s guest suites and cannot stay there for any longer than seven consecutive days. Before the arrangement was sealed, an attorney for Trump assured the town council in a public meeting that he would not live at Mar-a-Lago.

At the time, the town’s leaders were wary of Trump because he had sued them after they blocked his attempt to subdivide the historic Mar-a-Lago property into multiple housing lots. Placing the limitations on lengths of stays assured that Trump’s property would remain a private club, as he had promised, rather than a residential hotel.

Documents obtained by The Post via a public records request suggest there may be gaps in Palm Beach’s enforcement of key provisions of the agreement that could affect Trump’s ability to live at the club. Each year, the club is required to report whether at least 50 percent of Mar-a-Lago’s members live or work in Palm Beach; that the club has fewer than 500 members; and that no one is using the guest suites more than 21 days a year. However, the town says it has no records of the reports for four of the past 20 years.

Trump has repeatedly attempted to change parts of his agreement. In 2018 he asked the town to waive a provision banning him from building a dock at the club, initially saying the Secret Service and local law enforcement officials needed the structure for his protection. The reasoning was later changed to say the dock was for the private use of the president and first lady Melania Trump. Neighbors feared that the dock would be used for rowdy booze cruises. Trump withdrew the dock request early this year — three days after a Washington Post report that unearthed the details of his 1993 agreement with the town.

Trump has traveled to Mar-a-Lago at least 30 times during his presidency, and spent at least 130 days there, according to a Post tally. There has been no public indication that the town has raised objections about that practice. Trump also has appeared to openly flout the agreement, stating on Mar-a-Lago’s website that he maintains private quarters there.

During his presidency, Palm Beach has shown deference on security issues, allowing a helipad that was expressly prohibited in his 1993 agreement. Once Trump leaves office, he will no longer have use of the helipad.

The 1993 Palm Beach agreement isn’t the only document that raises questions about whether Trump can legally live at Mar-a-Lago. He also signed a document deeding development rights for Mar-a-Lago to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington-based, privately funded nonprofit organization that works to save historic sites around the country. As part of the National Trust deal, Trump agreed to “forever” relinquish his rights to develop Mar-a-Lago or to use it for “any purpose other than club use.”

The National Trust did not respond to requests for comment.

The controversy over Trump’s expected move to Mar-a-Lago could muddy matters for the Secret Service, which will continue to protect him after he leaves office. Government agencies take pains to comply with all federal and local laws in their activities, and a legal dispute over Trump’s right to set up residence at Mar-a-Lago could complicate the Secret Service’s ongoing work to prepare for staff to secure his home and safety there.

A Secret Service spokesperson declined to comment.

Since this year’s election, the Secret Service has been preparing for Trump’s life after the White House and the protections he is legally due as a former president. A much-reduced set of Secret Service agents will shadow him in his private life, and the agency will man and occupy a separate room at his property as a base of security operations.

The protective service would need to make living arrangements for its agents in advance of Trump leaving the White House — wherever he ends up living. If he is suddenly blocked from living at Mar-a-Lago, the Secret Service would most likely have to scramble to develop a new plan to protect him at a different location.

The Mar-a-Lago neighbors would be okay with Trump finding a new place to bunk. Their letter, written by West Palm Beach attorney Reginald Stambaugh, includes a zinger that harks to the vibe of the old money enclave on Florida’s east coast: “Palm Beach has many lovely estates for sale, and we are confident President Trump will find one which meets his needs.”

Philip Bump contributed to this report.

Manuel Roig-Franzia is a feature writer in The Washington Post’s Style section, where he profiles national figures in the worlds of politics, the law and the arts. He previously served as bureau chief in Miami for The Post’s National staff and in Mexico City for the Post’s Foreign staff. He is the author of a biography of Sen. Marco Rubio.
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service.