Just three weapons will turn the Ukraine war back around. And the USA is back in the fight
David Axe – March 27, 2024
A Ukrainian artillery piece fires on Russian positions. Artillery, and supplies of artillery shells, have been crucial factors in the Ukrainian fighting – Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty
Six months after blocking US president Joe Biden’s proposal to spend another $61 billion on aid to Ukraine, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson – who alone can schedule votes in the narrowly Republican-controlled legislative body – seems to have reversed his opposition to Ukraine’s war effort.
With retirements and special elections having reduced his majority to just two votes out of 438, and with a small contingent of far-right Republican extremists refusing to vote on any bill that has bipartisan support, Johnson increasingly relies on Democrats to enact budgets and other legislation.
And that means he answers more to the Democratic agenda than the Republican one. And strong support for Ukraine is a Democratic priority. The US House is on vacation until the first week of April. But once it reconvenes, Johnson will call a vote on fresh aid to Ukraine, according to some of his House colleagues.
With tens of billions of dollars in fresh funding, the US Defence Department could send a lot of weapons to Ukraine – and soon. Some could come straight from existing US stocks, with the new funding paying for newly-built weapons to replenish these stocks. Others could come from new commercial contracts brokered by the Pentagon.
It’s obvious what the priorities should be.
First and foremost, Ukraine needs artillery shells. For the first 18 months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the United States was the main supplier of artillery ammo to Ukrainian batteries. In total, the Americans donated around two million shells. Half came straight from American magazine stockpiles. The other half, America quietly bought from South Korea.
These shells, along with additional ammo from other sources, kept Ukrainian guns blasting away at a rate of around 10,000 rounds a day for much of the war’s first year and a half. That was enough to match Russian batteries once the Russians burned through much of their ammo stockpile in the wider war’s first few weeks.
The Republican funding blockade, and the subsequent run down of US supplied munitions through the end of last year, cut by two-thirds the Ukrainians’ daily allotment of shells. In some of the darkest days of the war in February, as a pair of Russian field armies closed in on the Ukrainian stronghold in the eastern city of Avdiivka, Russian guns were firing five times as many rounds as Ukrainian guns were – and demolishing Ukrainian defence s without fear of return fire.
The US Army has been building a new shell factory in Texas to complement its existing factory in Pennsylvania. Soon, the Army should be capable of producing around 70,000 shells a month – a sixfold increase over its 2022 production rate.
There’s no reason most of the shells can’t go to Ukraine, once there’s funding to pay for each $5,000 round. Combined with shells from the European Union as well as a separate Czech initiative, urgent shipments of shells from the United States could give Ukraine an enduring artillery advantage for the first time in the wider war.
Once the shells are shipping, the Americans can address Ukraine’s second-greatest need: Patriot air-defence batteries and missiles for these batteries. The US-made Patriot is Ukraine’s best air-defence system. Its 90-mile-range missiles can reliably shoot down all but the fastest Russian missiles – and swat down Russian warplanes like flies.
When the Ukrainian air force shot down 13 Russian fighter-bombers in 13 days last month, it was apparently a mobile Patriot battery that did most of the shooting.
But Ukraine has just three Patriot batteries with around three dozen launchers – and lost a pair of those launchers in a devastating rocket ambush in early March. The batteries are spread thin. One normally protects Kyiv. Another protects Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic port on the Black Sea. The third battery apparently travels the front line in order to engage Russian jets.
Ideally, Ukraine would place a $1-billion Patriot battery in each of its half-dozen biggest cities and also assign one each to the eastern and southern fronts. And these batteries should be free to fire away at their fastest rate – meaning they’ll need a steady supply of missiles, each of which costs around $3 million.
Doubling or tripling Ukraine’s Patriot force could help the Ukrainians wrest back control of the air over the front line – and also reverse the disturbing trend toward bigger and bloodier Russian missile-strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Having replenished Ukraine’s artillery and air-defences, the United States should rescue one of the Ukrainian army’s best brigades. The 47th Mechanized Brigade is the main operator of American-made armoured vehicles, including M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles.
The 69-ton M-1 and 42-ton M-2 – thickly armoured and armed with a 120-millimetre cannon and a 25-millimetre autocannon, respectively – are some of the best armoured vehicles in the world, and the 47th Brigade has put them to good use. Counterattacking Russian assault groups west of Avdiivka, the M-1 and M-2s have blunted Russia’s winter offensive – and minimized Ukraine’s territorial losses as its artillery supplies bottomed out.
But the Americans shipped just 31 M-1s and around 200 M-2s before Republicans cut off aid. Four of the M-1s and more than 30 of the M-2s have been destroyed and others damaged. The 47th Brigade is running out of vehicles.
The US Army has thousands of older M-1s and M-2s in storage. They’d need overhaul before going to war in Ukraine, but a billion dollars should be enough to pay for the work as well as expedited shipping.
Once Speaker of the House Johnson bends to Americans’ overwhelming support for a free Ukraine and finally brings aid to a vote, the Pentagon could speed hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles to the Ukrainian army.
Trump earlier in the day released a video of himself holding the $60 “God Bless The USA Bible” as he insisted that the Bible is his favorite book and that he has “many” in his home.
“Many? Many? Many?” Klepper repeated in disbelief. “How does that thing not burst into flames immediately?”
Trump’s version of the book, done with country singer Lee Greenwood, contains the lyrics to Greenwood’s hit song “God Bless The USA” ― which is played at Trump rallies ― as well as the texts of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
“Trump is mashing together the Bible and the Constitution like it’s a Pizza Hut-Taco Bell,” Klepper cracked. “I know people will say that you’re not supposed to mix the Bible and the Constitution, but what you have to understand is Trump has never read either of them.”
Klepper also predicted where this would lead.
“Trump getting into business with God can only mean one thing: God is gonna end up bankrupt and serving a three-month prison sentence for lying under oath,” he said.
See more in his Tuesday night “Daily Show” monologue:
Here’s who could be responsible for paying for the Baltimore bridge disaster
Erin Snodgrass – March 26, 2024
Scroll back up to restore default view.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a container ship collided with it.
Several entities will likely be on the hook to foot the bill in the aftermath of the disaster.
The maritime insurance industry will be saddled with the highest costs.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed on Tuesday after a large container ship ran into it, leading to six presumed deaths and millions of dollars in possible damage.
It’s still too early to estimate the total economic impact of the disaster, but between the cost of rebuilding the decades-old bridge, compensating the victims’ families, and paying out damages for disruptions to the supply chain, the eventual cost of the disaster is expected to be significant.
Who will pay to rebuild the bridge?
President Joe Biden said on Tuesday the federal government should be responsible for paying to reconstruct the damaged Francis Scott Key Bridge.
“It is my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect Congress to support my effort,” Biden said.
The bridge was built in the 1970s for about $60 million, but the cost of rebuilding it could be 10 times its original price tag, an engineering expert told Sky News.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, named for Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner.WilliamSherman via Getty Images
Baltimore is among the busiest ports in the nation, seeing more than a million shipping containers pass through each year. The collapse — which closed the port to all maritime and most road traffic until further notice — is already beginning to wreak havoc on the supply chain.
The cost of building the bridge back fast enough to offset diversions as much as possible could saddle the government with a more than $600 million bill, David MacKenzie, chair of engineering and architecture consultancy COWIfonden, told Sky News.
Who will pay for damages to the ship and its cargo?
The container ship, the Dali, is owned by a Singapore-based firm. The ship’s charterer, Maersk, confirmed to Business Insider that vessel company Synergy Group operates the ship.
However, the companies with cargo aboard the Dali will ultimately be responsible for the ship’s damages and cargo costs.
The Dali was carrying 330 containers, which now must be re-routed, according to Ryan Petersen, CEO of supply chain logistics company Flexport, which had two containers on the ship.
An ancient maritime law known as “general average” dictates that companies with even a single container aboard a ship have to split the damages pro rata based on the number of containers, ensuring all the stakeholders benefiting from the voyage are splitting the risk, Petersen said.
Drone footage shows aftermath of the Dali container ship’s collision into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 26, 2024.Anadolu Agency via Reuters
The principle dates back hundreds of years and was originally meant to ensure sailors on board a ship weren’t worried about specific cargo if a disaster required them to start throwing containers overboard, according to Petersen.
Who will pay for everything else?
The majority of the financial fallout is likely to lay primarily with the insurance industry, according to media reports.
Industry experts told FT that insurers could pay out losses for bridge damage, port disruption, and any loss of life.
The collapse could drive “one of the largest claims ever to hit the marine (re)insurance market,” John Miklus, president of the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, told Insurance Business.
He told the outlet that the loss of revenue from tolls while the bridge is being rebuilt will be expensive, as will any liability claims from deaths or injuries.
The Dali is covered by the Britannia Steam Ship Insurance Association Ltd., known as Britannia P&I Club, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Britannia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider but told FT it was “working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally.”
Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers included in the International Group of P&I Clubs, which maintains more than $3 billion of reinsurance cover, sources familiar with the matter told Insurance Business.
Britannia itself is liable for the first $10 million in damages, both FT and Insurance Business reported. Whatever remains is dealt with by the wider mutual insurance group and Lloyd’s of London, a reinsurance market in the UK, according to FT.
Fast-food companies seeing low-income diners pare orders
Waylon Cunningham – March 27, 2024
McDonald’s Corp. reports fourth quarter earningsA Wendy’s sign and logo are shown at one of the company’s restaurant in Encinitas, California
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) – Runaway prices at U.S. fast-food joints and restaurants have made people skittish down the income ladder and executives at chains including McDonald’s and Wendy’s recently said they worry about losing business from those on the tightest budgets.
Roughly a quarter of low-income consumers, defined as those making less than $50,000 a year, said they were eating less fast food and about half said they were making fewer trips to fast-casual and full-service dining establishments, according to polling in February by Revenue Management Solutions, a consulting firm.
The rising price of food is contributing to budget-conscious diners cutting back.
Whether consumed at home or in a restaurant, food prices rose 20% from Jan. 2021 to Jan. 2024, the fastest jump on record. A recent census Household Pulse Survey showed half of people earning less than $35,000 a year had difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80% were moderately or “very” stressed by recent price increases.
Lauren Oxford, a musician who works part time at a bed-and-breakfast in Tennessee, said she used to stop by McDonald’s after running errands, treating herself to two double hamburgers, fries and a drink, for less than $5. As prices rose, she switched to smaller hamburgers and stopped getting the drink.
But after a year in which McDonald’s franchisees drove prices up about 10% according to the company’s executives, she’s going to McDonald’s less in general. “Now I don’t know if I can justify that.”
In the Fed’s most recent Beige Book compendium of anecdotal reports gathered from business and community contacts around the country, 7 of 12 regional Fed districts reported low-income consumers were changing spending habits in search of bargains, seeking more help from community groups, or struggling to access credit.
About one-third of Black American households, and 21% of white American households, earned less than $35,000 in 2022, according to the latest available U.S. census data.
For fast-food companies that often promote an image of affordability, low-income consumers are a significant portion of the customer base and a bellwether for longer-term trends. But they are typically the first to cut back spending and the last to come back.
But now, chains may be less likely to chase customers as hard as they have in the past because even with a drop in traffic, sales have remained consistent supported by increased prices.
Fast food companies aren’t “in a hurry to take traffic over profit the way they were a decade ago,” said Mike Lukianoff, CEO of SignalFlare.ai and a veteran consultant in the fast food industry.
For example back in 2008, Subway introduced its nationwide $5 footlong, which became the poster sandwich for the Great Recession. That spurred rivals to introduce extreme value deals for budget-conscious customers, such as “$5 Fill-Up Boxes” at Yum! Brands KFC.
In 2016, McDonald’s, after a prolonged slump in sales, introduced a bundle deal it called “McPick 2”, allowing customers to choose 2 items, like a McDouble, for $2. Within months, Wendy’s offered a four for $4 deal. Burger King offered five for $4. Pizza Hut had a $5 “flavor menu.”
APP-DRIVEN DISCOUNTS
Now, instead of across-the-board menu slashes and broad discounts, industry analysts say chains are being more selective, aiming them at specific demographics or limiting them to specific meal times or channels, such as its app or only through delivery.
McDonald’s executives told investors in February that it would rely on its existing “value menu” to appeal to low-income consumers who might be tempted to eat packaged food at home instead. CFO Ian Borden said affordability is core to the brand, and the company would continue “evolving” its value offerings.
“The battleground is certainly with that low-income consumer,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told investors, referring to people making less than $45,000.
Wendy’s recently introduced a limited-time $1 burger — available only through its app. Its CFO Gunther Plosch told investors in February that among lower-income customers, their traffic is down but their share with the general market is unchanged.
For major fast-food companies, loyalty apps are the go-to strategy among major brands to increase retention and the average amount of money spent. The upside for chains, David Henkes, senior principal with Technomic said, is that they capture more transaction data and demographic data for the consumer, “which is a trade-off many are happy to do.”
For example, McDonald’s frequently offers in-app discounts, such as 20% off an order or free delivery with a large enough order.
Domino’s halved the minimum purchase price to get points in its loyalty program, to $5 from $10, its CEO told investors at a conference in January. It also reduced the number of purchases needed to get a free pizza to as few as two from six. “And so essentially, for this lower-income consumer, we’ve made the brand more accessible,” CEO Russell Weiner said.
To be sure, not every chain is seeing weakness among low-income customers. At Taco Bell, which sells a single taco for $1.40 at many of its stores in San Antonio, locations in low-income markets did better than other locations, Yum! CEO David Gibbs told investors in February.
McDonald’s still holds its appeal for Andreas Garay, a retail worker eating at a McDonald’s in westside San Antonio. He said he plans to keep his coffee-and-Big-Mac habit– even if prices continue going up.
(Reporting by Waylon Cunningham in San Antonio and Howard Schneider in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Anna Driver)
Mumbai becomes Asian capital with most billionaires, bumping Shanghai: Report
Filip Timotija – March 27, 2024
The city of Mumbai has officially surpassed Shanghai as Asia’s capital with the most billionaires, according to a new Hurun Global Rich List 2024 report.
Mumbai, India’s financial powerhouse, now has 92 billionaires, closely edging out Beijing’s 91 and Shanghai with 87.
This year’s list marked Mumbai’s first time in the world’s top three, according to the report.
Globally, the Big Apple still leads the way. New York City has the most billionaires with 119. London was second with 97. Beijing, which was ranked first last year, dropped to fourth place.
China has the most billionaires out of any country with 814, although it lost 155 of them. The U.S. was second with 800 billionaires. India was third with 271.
“Wealth creation in China has gone through deep changes these last few years, with the wealth of billionaires from real estate and renewables down,” the research firm said in the report.
“Whilst as many as 40% of the Hurun Global Rich List from the high water mark two years ago have lost their billionaires status, China has added a 120 new faces to the list. Despite the large drop in the number of billionaires, China still has more known billionaires than the US.”
Zhong Shanshan, chair of bottled water giant Nongfu Spring, kept his spot as the richest person in China.
Globally, the number of billionaires increased — now at 3,279 billionaires, up 167 from last year, according to the report.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has helped generate new ultra-wealthy individuals.
“AI has been the major driver for wealth growth, generating over half of all the new wealth this year,” the research firm said. “The billionaires behind Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle and Meta have seen significant surges in their wealth as investors bet on the value generated by AI.”
India’s Income Inequality Is Now Worse Than Under British Rule, New Report Says
Astha Rajvanshi – March 27, 2024
A fisherman colony alongside commercial buildings in the Indian city of Mumbai, now Asia’s billionaire capital. Credit – Dhiraj Singh—Bloomberg/Getty Images
A new study from the World Inequality Lab finds that the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India—now among the highest in the world and starker than in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income in India was more equitable under British colonial rule than it is now, according to the group of economists who co-authored the study, including the renowned French economist Thomas Piketty.
The current total number of billionaires in India is peaking at 271, with 94 new billionaires added in 2023 alone, according to Hurun Research Institute’s 2024 global rich list published Tuesday. That’s more new billionaires than in any country other than the U.S., with a collective wealth that amounts to nearly $1 trillion—or 7% of the world’s total wealth. A handful of Indian tycoons, such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, and Sajjan Jindal, are now mingling in the same circles as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, some of the world’s richest people.
“The Billionaire Raj headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” the authors write.
The observation is particularly stark when considering India is now hailed as an 8% GDP growth economy, according to Barclays Research, with some projecting that India is poised to surpass Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.
But the authors of the World Inequality Lab study reached this conclusion by tracking how much of India’s total income, as well as wealth, is held by the country’s top 1%. While income refers to the sum of earnings, interest on savings, investments and other sources, wealth (or net worth) is the total value of assets owned by an individual or group. The authors combined national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth to present the study’s findings.
For income, the economists looked at annual tax tabulations released by both the British and Indian governments since 1922. They found that even during the highest recorded period of inequality in India, which occurred during the inter-war colonial period from the 1930s until India’s independence in 1947, the top 1% held around 20 to 21% of the country’s national income. Today, the 1% holds 22.6% of the country’s income.
Similarly, the economists also tracked the dynamics of wealth inequality, beginning in 1961, when the Indian government first began conducting large-scale household surveys on wealth, debt and assets. By combining this research with information from the Forbes Billionaire Index, the authors found that India’s top 1% had access to a staggering 40.1% of national wealth.
Because the number of Indian billionaires shot up from one in 1991 to 162 in 2022, the total net wealth of these individuals over this period as a share of India’s net national income “boomed from under 1% in 1991 to a whopping 25% in 2022,” the authors said.
The report also found that the rise in inequality had been particularly pronounced since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014. Over the last decade, major political and economic reforms have led to “an authoritarian government with centralization of decision-making power, coupled with a growing nexus between big business and government,” the report states. This, they say, was likely to “facilitate disproportionate influence” on society and government.
They added that average Indians, and not just the Indian elite, could still stand to gain from globalization if the government made more public investments in health, education, and nutrition. Moreover, a “super tax” of 2% on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest Indian families in 2022-23 would result in 0.5% of national income in revenues, and “create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the authors argued.
Until the government makes such investments, however, the authors caution against the possibility of India’s slide toward plutocracy. The country was once a role model among post-colonial nations for upholding the integrity of various key institutions, the authors say, and they point out that even the standard of economic data in India to study inequality has declined recently.
“If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged,” the authors say.
It is an overcast, unseasonably warm morning on Wednesday, Nov. 6, and the world has woken up in shock as Donald Trump has emerged as the winner of the U.S. presidential election. America’s cities are once again full of mute, stunned liberals avoiding eye contact with one another on the morning commute, as the grim reality of what Trump might do with this power begins to set in. At his victory speech just after 2 a.m., when the networks called Wisconsin, and thus the election for him, Trump took the stage and declared, “Judgment Day is coming for America’s enemies, and no Marxist, Harvard leftist, gender-radical, illegal, or criminal thug in our great country will be safe come January.” And in some ways that bleak morning might represent the high point of the next four—or 40—years, given what Trump and his allies have in store for us.
This is a worst-case scenario. But it’s far from impossible. A Trump restoration is in the works—and it should feel like an existential threat to everyone who cares about liberal democracy and the incomplete but tangible social, racial, and economic progress that has been made since the New Deal era.
And yet, President Joe Biden’s manifest flaws are dangerously obscuring the scale of the threat of a second Trump term. There is no sense in denying it: Biden looks and sounds very old, and his speaking style, never particularly inspirational, has deteriorated to the point that he is a clear political liability. While he brought what passes for his A-game to the State of the Union, he will need to sustain that level of energy and coherence through an eight-month-long slog to the election to improve his chances of winning.
His decision to run for a second term has not only jeopardized his many achievements but put the very existence of U.S. democracy at much more serious risk. His administration’s staunch support of Israel, a defensible posture in the aftermath of the unconscionable Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, has become a genuinely baffling study in Biden’s inability to pivot or use America’s considerable leverage to do the right thing. The White House hasn’t settled on a winning strategy to address the lingering consequences of post-pandemic inflation, preferring to boast about the very real low unemployment numbers and robust GDP growth that simply have not moved the needle politically. And the Biden administration has remained curiously inert in the face of growing public frustration with the migrant crisis, preferring to blame Congress for refusing to fix it.
Nevertheless, allowing Donald Trump and his friends to plunge our country into a dystopian nightmare of authoritarianism will not help anyone in Gaza, in the grocery store, or at the border. It will worsen, not rectify, America’s history of writing blank checks to far-right governments in Israel. It will not lead to humane policy options for asylum-seekers but instead deliver them into the hands of morally bankrupt demagogues. Electing Trump would merely add more considerable suffering and trauma to theirs, and deprive us all of the ability to do anything about it.
Much has been made of the far-right Project 2025—a blueprint for radically restructuring and reorienting executive-branch policymaking, created by a network of right-wing think tanks and pressure groups—and its terrifying implications for U.S. democracy. But that document concerns only the threats Trump’s reelection poses to executive-branch agencies (and contains many unresolvable contradictions between dismantling and wielding the “administrative state”). Myriad public dangers emanating from the Trump and GOP legislative agenda, as well as the possibility of an even harder-right Supreme Court, are getting far less attention. That needs to change.
Let’s start with the court. That Sonia Sotomayor, who will turn 70 this year, is still sitting on the Supreme Court means that Democrats have yet to grasp how strategic retirements work in the new hyperpartisan political order. Unlike Democrats, who still seem to view a Supreme Court seat as a personal sinecure bestowed upon the righteous for a lifetime of achievement, the leaders of the far-right judicial movement understand the stakes and will place enormous pressure on the oldest Republican appointees to retire under a second Trump term. Clarence Thomas, who has been on the court since 1991, turns 76 this year, and Samuel Alito turns 74. Even John Roberts, who would turn 70 just after Trump’s inauguration, might go.
Think about it this way: If Republicans replace this trio with three early-middle-age ideologues like Amy Coney Barrett, the court will be in the GOP’s hands until everyone reading this article is dead or nearing retirement. If Trump gets to replace Sotomayor, who suffers from a health problem (Type 1 diabetes) that significantly reduces life expectancy, the far right would have an unassailable 7–2 majority with which to remake American society for a generation.
Very little that liberals or progressives care about is likely to survive another 20 or 30 years of reactionary control of the Supreme Court. Although much of the focus has justifiably been on Dobbs, and the looming threat to Obergefell, birth control, and IVF, a conservative supermajority would also likely gut a century of jurisprudence around taken-for-granted features of the American political and economic order, including bargaining rights for organized labor, the constitutionality of federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, and—it nearly goes without saying—the Affordable Care Act. We will effectively return to the early 20th century’s Lochner era, when the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down worker protections and rights for more than 30 years until FDR threatened it with court packing.
Sure, “Vote for Biden so the conservative supermajority can’t get younger and larger” is tough to fit on a bumper sticker, and no one in the party from Biden on down seems to have the stomach for the necessary escalation or a political vision for the court that can be communicated to voters. But unless you want to spend the rest of your lives watching Brett Kavanaugh and his friends upend your lives one right and benefit at a time, you have to hold the line here.
SCOTUS is, of course, also right now at the very center of Trump’s threat to American democracy. The court’s galling decision to repeatedly delay Trump’s trial for the 2020 post-election coup attempt and the Jan. 6 insurrection means that he probably won’t face justice until after he could conceivably win reelection. Most concerningly, this off-the-rails Supreme Court has bafflingly decided to take up the question of a president’s absolute immunity after Trump’s team argued that he should be free from any consequences of anything he did as president. Though cooler heads may in the end prevail over the Thomas-Alito wing, the fact that this is up for debate at all is incredibly alarming.
Much has been made of reports that Trump plans to deploy the military to quell post-election protests under the Insurrection Act. But a Trump unchained from any conceivable repercussions for his decisions in his office is a far worse threat than just that. Imagine for a moment what would happen if the Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favor: First of all, the effort to hold him accountable for trying to overthrow the American system of government would be over—instantly. Even more problematically, what conceivable limits would there be on a President Trump beginning in 2025 if SCOTUS has just ruled that his efforts to perpetrate a coup in broad daylight were well within the ambit of his presidential authority?
Who or what exactly would stop Trump from, say, creating a new security apparatus, abducting leftists and political enemies—as he has pledged—and dropping them out of helicopters over the Pacific like the Latin American dictators the far right still worshipsonce did? He could order the hits, then preemptively pardon the people who carry out his orders. That might seem melodramatic and far-fetched. But if the Supreme Court grants him immunity as president, no one could touch him for it legally. And if Republicans simultaneously controlled both chambers of Congress, there would be no impeachment option either. We’ve learned the hard way, far too many times, that a critical mass of elected Republicans will do Trump’s bidding no matter how grotesque his actions.
Maybe he’ll stop short of creating an American Stasi. But a president who is unbound by the law could order the DOJ to gin up investigations of leading journalists, prominent Democrats, professors, activists, and nonprofit leaders. Independent media outlets could be “acquired” by allies or buried under lawsuits and government harassment, as they have been in Trump’s favorite quasi-authoritarian regime in Hungary. Troops could be deployed to garrison blue cities, to not only find and deport immigrants but also chill and repress any dissident fervor that develops in the aftermath of his takeover. He would say he’s merely fighting crime, “illegals,” and election fraud, but Trump could conceivably place the cities he fears and despises, where his political adversaries wield most of their power and influence, under what amounts to an open-ended military occupation.
It gets worse. If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, he is highly likely to do so while bringing Republican control of the House and Senate with him. With Mitch McConnell out of the way as party leader, there is a very good chance that the new GOP Senate leadership will nuke the filibuster and govern with a simple majority. And that means that the toxic, vengeful politics of Texas and Florida will go national. Trump showed time and again during his first term that he was not just willing but eager to subcontract his domestic policymaking to the right-wing think tanks that write most state-level legislation for Republicans. National Republicans no longer pretend to have a written or informal platform, but Trump has a campaign website with policy plans called “Agenda 47” that can be read alongside Project 2025, as well as the actual policy record of state Republicans, to give us a pretty clear sense of what they have planned.
Trump continues to spin and deflect, but under unified Republican control, Congress could obviously try to pass a national abortion ban, and he would sign it. House Republicans are already gunning for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care, and electing a Republican trifecta this November will mean that, practically speaking, it could soon be either illegal or impossible to be transgender in the United States. The proof is in the hundreds of red-state anti-trans bills introduced and the dozens passed just since 2023, including Florida’s ban on gender reassignment surgery for minors, which also gives the state the right to kidnap children from parents who pursue gender-affirming care. Agenda 47 claims that the Trump administration will “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side-effects of ‘sex transitions’ in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.” As Masha Gessen once said, “Believe the autocrat.”
The enemies list doesn’t stop there. Trump’s promised militarized mass-deportation effort could be just the beginning of the crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration; we could also see an effort to end birthright citizenship, a move that, if it succeeds, would result in millions being suddenly stripped of their status as Americans. You will find this not in Project 2025 but in Trump’s online platform and the ugly words that frequently spill out of his mouth, like in May 2023, when he posted a video in which he argued, “I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.” Whether you believe the “going forward” part of that promise is up to you.
And get ready for a flurry of moves against the remaining redoubts of liberalism and democracy, particularly in secondary and higher education. Radicalized Republicans in Congress will try to bar federal loans and grants from being used at any universities with policies that support inclusion and diversity. This is not speculation: Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced a bill in the House last year to prevent public funds from being used at schools with DEI policies, based on existing Texas legislation.
They won’t stop there. Republicans would eventually try to block funding for schools with any kind of race or gender studies programs, as the state of Florida tried to do last year, and before long every syllabus in the country could be scrutinized for evidence of anti-patriotic crimes, until anyone who isn’t a right-wing ideologue is driven from the academy altogether. Trump’s Agenda 47 promises to establish a new national “American Academy” by “by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments”—i.e., strip-mining them for cash. A Trump administration, in other words, would effectively end American higher education as we know it.
That’s to say nothing of how, under GOP rule, every public school librarian and schoolteacher in America could suddenly find themselves under siege by cranks and culture warriors like their counterparts today in Texas and Florida. Agenda 47 threatens to create a new “credentialing body” that would “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,” to eliminate teacher tenure, and to rescind funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” And like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Trump would surely relish the opportunity to sign legislation banning public school teachers from going on strike.
This radical agenda would surely be accompanied by an assault on Democrats’ ability to ever win another free and fair election. Congress would pursue a national voter ID law, a ban on ballot harvesting, harsh new restrictions on mail-in balloting, the elimination of same-day voter registration, and new ways to purge Democrats from voter lists—all plans that are already in the “American Confidence in Elections Act,” which has been introduced in the House. What’s left of the Voting Rights Act would be set aside or perhaps repealed. Maniacs exercising their “constitutional carry” rights would patrol outside polling stations across the country with AR-15s, and Democratic voters would be subjected to endless legal challenges. Any Democratic effort to retake a chamber of Congress in 2026 or win the presidency in 2028 would have to run through President Trump’s formidable election conspiracy machine, the army of aspiring petty autocrats who will be put in charge of the nation’s election machinery, and the elected leaders who will come under enormous pressure not to turn power over to Democrats should those Democrats win.
At that point, the vaunted separation of powers that some analysts still cling to as our last great hope won’t be of much help. With as many as seven Trump judges on the Supreme Court and a federal judiciary that will once again be stocked with his allies and true believers, even many of the brazenly unconstitutional orders and laws that are in the works will have a good chance of standing up in court. And all the while, demoralized Democrats will be pointing fingers at one another for their catastrophic loss, which—knowing Dems—could easily be pinned on Biden’s more progressive policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, whose historic climate provisions would also be reversed almost immediately. Efforts to highlight the contributions of his age and Gaza policies to this disaster would run straight into the same narrative-makers who pinned the disappointing scale of Democrats’ 2020 victory on progressive activists chanting “Defund the Police” rather than on Biden’s overcautious campaign and reliance on appealing to disenchanted Republicans.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the America that a second Trump term would create might be an almost unrecognizable realm of economic insecurity, political persecution, racist hatred, and gender tyranny, a Christian nationalist hellscape that would be virtually impossible to dismantle once it is put into place.
Joe Biden may not be the ideal man standing between us and this horror show, but he is a seasoned politician with a strong track record and a plenty competent team. (Plus, he’s all there is unless he decides to step aside.) He and every Democrat in the White House and Congress must do everything they can to shift the focus from Biden’s age and unpopularity to Trump’s very public laundry list of malevolent plans, and national media organizations must continue to do the relatively easy work of telling readers and viewers about Trump’s reactionary agenda. Readers may be completely burned out on learning about Trump’s crimes, but the alternative—that Trump gets into office and perpetrates more of them—is truly unthinkable.
“Hastening his deterioration”: Dr. John Gartner on impact of court trials on “Trump’s fragile brain”
Chauncey DeVega – March 26, 2024
Donald Trump brain scans Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s already abominable behavior has been getting much worse in these last few weeks – and there may be a physiological component to it. In a series of conversations here at Salon, Dr. John Gartner, who is a prominent psychologist and contributor to the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President”, has been warning that Trump appears to be suffering from serious cognitive challenges as manifest by his speech, memory, and other behavior. In an attempt to raise public awareness about Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive challenges and the extreme danger they represent to the nation if he were to take back the White House, and in essence be a type of mad king dictator, Gartner has started a petition at Change.org called “We diagnose Trump with probable dementia: A petition for licensed professionals only.”
Unfortunately, the American mainstream media – especially the elite agenda-setting news media – has largely continued to ignore Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive and other mental and emotional health challenges. The Washington Post appears to be slowly creeping towards a more direct engagement with Trump’s apparent cognitive challenges. Last week, the Post featured a story about Donald Trump’s father who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s:
Trump’s long fixation on mental fitness followed years of watching his father’s worsening dementia — a formative period that some associates said has been a defining and little-mentioned factor in his life, and which left him with an abiding concern that he might someday inherit the condition. While much remains unknown about Alzheimer’s, experts say there is an increased risk of inheriting a gene associated with the disease from a parent.“Donald is no doubt fearful of Alzheimer’s,” said a former senior executive at the Trump Organization, who worked for years with Trump and saw him interact with Fred Trump Sr., and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a confidential relationship. “He’s not going to talk about and not going to admit to it. But it’s relevant because every day he is hitting Biden with whether or not he is capable mentally of doing the job.”Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.
This failure to consistently and boldly speak truth to power about Donald Trump’s apparent cognitive challenges contributes to the larger crisis in credibility that the American news media as an institution is experiencing. Any reasonable person can see that something is wrong with Donald Trump’s behavior. Many Americans have direct experience with relatives, friends, and other people they care about who have been or are afflicted with some type of brain disease related to aging. For the American news media and other gatekeepers and agenda-setters to deny the obvious about Donald Trump is a willful decision to ignore the facts and reality.
Continuing with our ongoing conversation about Trump’s apparent cognitive challenges, I spoke with Dr. Gartner several days ago via email about the failures of the American news media, the MAGA people and their devotion to their Dear Leader, and what will likely happen next if Trump’s behavior continues to trend in the same direction.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length:
At a rally in Ohio, Donald Trump again exhibited symptoms of something apparently being wrong neurologically. Trump ties to turn it all into a joke by claiming he is being intentional and it is part of his performance. But at this point such deflections have no credibility, even given the ex-president’s “challenging” relationship with the truth and reality. You and your colleagues’ warnings and predictions appear to be proven correct almost every week.
Our Trump dementia-watch weekly round-up is becoming a regular ritual for one simple reason: Trump can’t go a full week without displaying gross signs of what appears to be dementia. This week he said “Joe Biden beat Barack Hussein Obama. Ever heard of him?” Donald Trump is disoriented. He doesn’t know who the president is, who he’s running against in the primary, or whether E. Jean Carrol is his wife. (I’m not trying to be funny, but it reminds me of the Oliver Sacks book, “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.”) In my opinion, this is brain damage. There is no medically credible explanation for these occurrences that doesn’t not involve brain damage, most probably dementia. These telltale signs used to be more intermittent, but his apparent dementia is progressing at an accelerating rate, as is normal for the illness. But at some point, these patients fall off a cognitive cliff and become suddenly incapable of independent living. Given the accelerating rate of Trump’s apparent decline, it’s almost certain he would become incapacitated while in office. The man with the nuclear codes would be wandering around the White House in an angry agitated fog of confusion.
We’d like to believe his vice president and Cabinet would step in and invoke the 25th Amendment for the good of the country should this occur. But would they? The kind of corrupt officials Trump attracts, including those representing foreign interests, would benefit from a demented president they could wheel around in public and manipulate in private.
I thought electing a malignant narcissist who idolizes dictators and appears to be loyal to Vladimir Putin was the worst conceivable outcome for our country, but I was wrong. A demented malignant narcissist who basically works for Russia is a hundred times worse. In the Middle Ages they had a saying: “A bad king is better than no king. And no king is better than a child king.” We would have a child king, or at least one with the brain and character of a child.
Your petition at Change.org is gaining momentum. What is happening?
This subject was once forbidden in the press. If you searched online for Trump and dementia, as I began to do ten times a day, you wouldn’t find one article asking, Does Trump have dementia? The words dementia and Trump never appeared in the same sentence, anywhere. Instead, there were articles about President Biden’s memory and whether he was “too old.” Or pieces that quoted doctors saying we can’t know anything about either candidate’s cognitive health from what we see on TV.
But thanks to the petition, we’re breaking through. Newsweek has reported on it. And for the second week in a row, Jennifer Rubin praised Salon in her Washington Post column for breaking this story: “Salon, one of the few outlets to take Trump’s cognitive decline seriously, displayed this headline: “‘Experts are desperate to warn the public’: Hundreds sign Dr. John Gartner’s Trump dementia petition.” The article’s description reads, “They see the signs of Trump’s cognitive decline through the eyes of years of training and experience.” That succinctly spelled out the basic facts surrounding a petition signed by hundreds of mental health professionals, pointing to obvious signs of Trump’s mental dysfunction.”
The petition has filled a desperate unmet public need to hear from experts about Trump’s cognitive health. We’re up to 500 validated licensed professional signers: But far more persuasive than the numbers are their voices. I put together a tweet thread of their comments, that I add to daily, because I want America to hear in their own words, they offer their credentials and experience, explain the diagnostic criteria for dementia, give examples from Trump’s behavior, and explain why they felt compelled to sign. The petition, despite the risk to their careers or personal lives, to say in public: “our diagnostic impression of Donald Trump is probable dementia.”
The public is desperate to hear the truth from real experts about the state of Trump’s cognitive health. Don’t they deserve that? Especially when all of our lives may depend on it. As people of conscience, we are defying this absurd professional gag order, to speak the truth about Trump’s probable dementia before it’s too late.
Given what we know about Trump’s personality, how will he respond if and when he is confronted by the obvious facts about the apparent problems with his brain and thinking?
It is important that people understand that dementia worsens all personality disorders, including malignant narcissism, which is one of the worst personality disorders a human being can have. It’s difficult for us to even imagine a Trump ten times more paranoid, agitated, and impulsive than he already is. His judgment was always terrible, but Trump is heading towards a cognitive cliff where he will lose the capacity to form a coherent judgment of any kind. The White House may become a kind of nursing home where they need to medicate him at sundown.
If Donald Trump’s behavior continues to decline in an obvious way to the point where it can no longer be denied, will his MAGA followers leave him? Will seeing their personal superhero and god made mortal break the psychological adhesion?
I don’t think it will separate him from his followers. Their cultish idealization of him is an addictive drug. As long as Trump can spew hate, and do a funny little dance on stage, his followers will be satisfied, even if he’s so disoriented that he doesn’t actually know where he is. The people who can be influenced are independents and Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley. The election may come down to their gut feeling about which candidate is “stronger.” Trump gives the appearance of strength with his hypomanic bluster and braggadocio, but he is cognitively weak and closer than you might think to being completely disabled.
What do you think happens next with Donald Trump given all the pressure he is under, and specifically with his property potentially being seized in New York and elsewhere?
Every bit of stress is going to deepen the cracks in Trump’s fragile brain, hastening his deterioration. If the press deigns to show them to us, we’ll see evermore flagrant displays of cognitive decline, and more often. He can’t get through a single rally without displaying a tell that looks a lot like a symptom of dementia. I’m sure this time next week, they’ll be more fodder for discussion. But will you read about it in the New York Times or see it on CBS News? Likely not.
Trump ally Clark attempted ‘coup’ at US Justice Dept, ethics counsel says
Andrew Goudsward – March 26, 2024
FILE PHOTO: Justice Department makes announcement on opioids settlement in Washington
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Jeffrey Clark, a former senior official in the U.S. Justice Department, made false claims as he attempted to enlist the agency in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undo his 2020 election loss, a Washington ethics lawyer said on Tuesday.
Clark is facing a disciplinary hearing which could see him lose his license to practice law. Trump tried to put Clark in charge of the Justice Department in his administration’s final days as Clark sought to pursue the former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.
“What Mr. Clark was attempting to do was essentially a coup at the Department of Justice,” Hamilton “Phil” Fox, the District of Columbia Bar disciplinary counsel said in his opening argument.
Harry MacDougald, a lawyer representing Clark, denied that Clark had violated attorney ethics rules. He said Clark was engaged in “internal debate and disagreement” within the department about the impact of voter fraud on the election.
“Mr. Clark should not be here for giving his candid opinion and independent judgment,” MacDougald said.
Clark, who served as acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division under Trump, faces a multi-day hearing on ethics charges that accuse him of attempting to take actions “involving dishonesty” and that “would seriously interfere with the administration of justice.”
Clark sought to send a letter to Georgia officials in December 2020 falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” that may have led to Trump’s loss in that state, according to ethics charges filed in 2022.
The hearing is being held by a three-member committee of the Board on Professional Responsibility, an arm of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. If it finds that Clark violated ethics rules, it could recommend that his license be suspended or revoked. The full board would take up such a recommendation, with final action in the hands of the appeals court.
The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates lawyers accused of violating legal ethics rules, brought the case against Clark.
Trump is the Republican candidate challenging Democratic President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 U.S. election. Trump faces criminal charges in state court in Georgia and federal court in Washington over his attempts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden.
Clark is one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia case and has pleaded not guilty. Clark is listed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the federal case. The ethics panel is expected to delve into incidents relevant to those cases.
Justice Department leaders found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and refused to send Clark’s proposed letter. Trump backed off his plan to name Clark as acting attorney general after department leaders and top White House lawyers threatened to resign in protest.
Two of Clark’s Justice Department superiors – former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, have cooperated with the ethics probe and are expected to testify during the hearing.
Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, an outspoken Trump ally, and former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows may testify on Clark’s behalf, his lawyers said.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; editing by Will Dunham, Andy Sullivan and Marguerita Choy)
Former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark fights to save law license as disciplinary trial begins
Kyle Cheney – March 26, 2024
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who worked closely with former President Donald Trump in a bid to subvert the 2020 election, should face professional consequences — including the potential loss of his license to practice law — for his effort to throw the nation into chaos, D.C. bar disciplinary authorities argued Tuesday.
But a lawyer for Clark said it would be unreasonable to punish him for his work during the tumultuous days ahead of Jan. 6, 2021, when he spearheaded a proposal to encourage state legislatures to consider overturning the results. That plan was never adopted and Trump ultimately turned it down. Punishing Clark for being on the losing side of a policy dispute would set a dangerous precedent, Clark’s team argued.
The alternate realities were on display Tuesday as bar investigators began laying out their case to penalize Clark for his role in Trump’s scheme to remain in power. Investigators charged Clark with violating professional rules of conduct in late 2020 by attempting to coerce his bosses to send a letter to Georgia lawmakers encouraging them to reconsider the outcome of the election there based on “significant concerns” about the integrity of the vote.
For Clark, the opening arguments in the case — heard by a three-member panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility — were never supposed to happen. Clark has spent two years fighting legal battles intended to scrap the case altogether, contending that the D.C. Bar has no jurisdiction over the conduct of federal government lawyers. But a federal court rejected Clark’s position, and an appeals court declined to step in to block the case from moving ahead.
Hamilton Fox, the lead investigator for the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, said Clark’s efforts amounted to a “coup” attempt within the Department of Justice, aimed at taking out the sitting leadership in order to effectuate a plan that would have thrown the 2020 election into even further disarray. Clark held unauthorized talks with Trump, violating DOJ policies against White House contacts, and then sought to outflank then-Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, by telling them he planned to accept an offer from Trump to take over the department unless they agreed to send his proposed letter to Georgia.
The showdown, which has been well documented by the Jan. 6 select committee and prosecutors in Georgia, led to an Oval Office confrontation on Jan. 3, 2021, in which Trump ultimately backed down from his plans to elevate Clark amid a mass resignation threat by top DOJ and White House officials. Clark has been criminally charged by Georgia prosecutors for his role in Trump’s effort to reverse the outcome of the election, and he was identified as a co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s Washington, D.C. case against Trump.
Donoghue was Fox’s first witness on Tuesday, describing his work to review claims of election fraud in 2020 and finding many of the fraud claims lodged by Trump and his allies to be meritless. He also described his conversations with Trump, recalling that Trump urged Rosen to simply declare the election “corrupt” and let him and his Republican allies in Congress do the rest. Donoghue recalled trying to educate Trump about DOJ’s limited role in elections and its work debunking many of the false allegations of fraud that had been circulating.
Disciplinary proceedings against the lawyers who formed the backbone of Trump’s effort have aired significant new details about the two months that threatened the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and 2021.
John Eastman, one of the architects of Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election, is expected to face a disbarment ruling by Wednesday, when a California judge issues her proposed punishment for alleged violations of professional conduct.
Rudy Giuliani has similarly had his law license suspended in New York and Washington, D.C.
And other attorneys involved in failed legal efforts to overturn election results in 2020 have also faced disciplinary charges, some of which are still pending.
Clark’s case is unique, however, because he was employed by DOJ at the time as acting head of the department’s Civil Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division. He first reached Trump’s radar as a result of efforts by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who helped connect the little-known DOJ official to the president. Trump, who had publicly expressed frustration that the Justice Department hadn’t done enough to back up his claims of election fraud, soon began floating the notion of elevating Clark to replace Rosen.
Clarks’ lawyers, though, say punishing him for taking cues from the president — the chief law enforcement officer of the United States — and advocating for a position that he genuinely believed would send a chilling effect across government. Clark’s efforts were intended to remain confidential — and the letter he drafted, which was never sent to Georgia, was supposed to remain secret, protected by various forms of executive and law enforcement privilege, until a leak to the press exposed the fraught discussions.
Clark’s attorneys said he intends to argue, using witnesses from Georgia and statistical experts that Trump has relied on in the past, that his concerns about the election were well-founded, that DOJ officials rebuffed them and the entire dispute amounts to an internal disagreement about what DOJ’s official position should have been.
“There is nothing dishonest and nothing in violation of the rules of professional conduct about proposing a change in position,” Clark’s lawyer, Harry MacDougald, argued. “Mr. Clark did nothing wrong.”
Clark is unlikely to testify in the proceeding. His lawyers have indicated he is likely to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to the stand.
Fox intends to rely on testimony from White House and DOJ officials — including Donoghue, Rosen and former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin. Clark’s lawyer said he intends to call former Attorney General Edwin Meese, as well as a member of the Atlanta-area election board who opposed certifying the results.
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