Trump praises Russia’s military record in argument to stop funding Ukraine’s fight
Adriana Gomez Licon – September 24, 2024
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks about the tax code and manufacturing at the Johnny Mercer Theatre Civic Center, Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Savannah, Ga. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives for the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, at UN headquarters. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Donald Trump on Tuesday praised Russia’s military record in historical conflicts and derided U.S. aid to Ukraine as he again insisted he would quickly end the war launched by Moscow’s invasion if elected president.
Speaking in Savannah, Georgia, Trump mocked President Joe Biden’s frequent refrain that the U.S. would back the Ukrainian armed forces until Kyiv wins the war. He raised two long ago conflicts to suggest Moscow would not lose — the former Soviet Union’s role in defeating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in World War II in the 1940s, and French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s failed invasion of Russia more than a century earlier.
Trump insisted that the U.S. had “to get out,” though he did not specify how he would negotiate an ending to U.S. involvement in the war.
“Biden says, ‘We will not leave until we win,’” Trump said, lowering his voice to mimic the Democratic president. “What happens if they win? That’s what they do, is they fight wars. As somebody told me the other day, they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That’s what they do. They fight. And it’s not pleasant.”
An official on Trump’s campaign also said Tuesday that the Republican nominee will not meet this week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is visiting the U.S. to attend the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.
No meeting had been scheduled between the two, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, despite a statement from Ukrainian officials last week that said Zelenskyy had planned to see the former president.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his characterization of Zelenskyy as “the greatest salesman on Earth” for winning U.S. aid to help Ukraine.
“Every time Zelenskyy comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion,” Trump said, erroneously. The U.S. has provided more than $56 billion in security assistance since Russia invaded in 2022, according to the State Department.
Trump and Zelenskyy have a long history dating back to the former U.S. president’s time in the White House. The then-president pressured Zelenskyy to open investigations of Biden and his son Hunter as well as a cybersecurity firm Trump falsely linked to Ukraine. That call — and the hold placed by the White House on $400 million in military aid — led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Zelenskyy plans to meet with Biden and Harris in Washington.
Earlier this week, in an interview with The New Yorker, Zelenskyy implied Trump does not understand and oversimplifies the conflict, and said his running mate JD Vance is “too radical” and essentially advocates for Ukraine to “make a sacrifice” by “giving up its territories.”
On Monday, Trump’s son Donald Jr. criticized Zelenskyy on X, reminding his followers that the suspect in his father’s second assassination attempt had lambasted Trump’s approach to foreign policy, including the war in Ukraine.
“So a foreign leader who has received billions of dollars in funding from American taxpayers, comes to our country and has the nerve to attack the GOP ticket for President?” he posted.
Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?
How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”
Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.
“Beginning in the early 2010s — and accelerating during the presidency of Donald J. Trump…” The New York Times noted earlier this year, “white voters without a degree, increasingly moved toward the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of all white, non-college voters identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party.”
This is the heart of Trump supporters who told YouGov pollsters they believe Trump is telling the truth about Haitian immigrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.”
The YouGov polls also found that 80 percent of Trump supporters also buy his lie that Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” into the U.S. I wrote a 2018 book about Trump’s history of racism. Vice President Harris echoed the book’s research in talking last week of Trump’s racist past. She pointed back to his participation in the “birther” lie, the incendiary claim that the first Black president, President Obama, had not been born in the U.S.
Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”
In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”
Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”
There are real consequences to all these racist lies. Last week, a Trump-supporting sheriff in Ohio encouraged people to report their neighbors who displayed Harris-Walz lawn signs. This incident called to mind parallels with police in Nazi Germany.
Widening the racial and political divide leads to alarm over possible violence. USA Today recently reported that more than one-third of Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump “say political violence is acceptable.”
According to a new Deseret News-HarrisX poll, 77 percent of U.S. voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about political violence before Election Day, including 80 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.
The 48 percent backing Trump try to move away from his racism by talking about the need for a better economy. But Trump’s main economic plan is to impose tariffs that will drive up prices. He has no plan to improve health care or provide more affordable housing.
It was less than 30 years ago when Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, stared down racism in the GOP. “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion…,” Dole said at the 1996 convention, “the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.”
Where are those Republicans now?
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
Scientific American makes presidential endorsement for only the second time in its 179-year history
Myriam Page – September 18, 2024
Scroll back up to restore default view.Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways
A top science magazine has waded into the political sphere after making a presidential endorsement, only the second in its 179-year history.
“Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health and the Environment,” read the headline in Scientific American on Monday, announcing the publication’s official support for the Democratic presidential candidate.
Harris is Scientific American’s second presidential endorsement in its history, after the magazine backed President Joe Biden during the 2020 election.
“The US faces two futures,” the editors wrote, pushing one candidate who “offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience.”
They continued: “In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies.”
Scientific American, which has a global readership of six million, cited Harris’s record as vice president, senator and presidential candidate as reasons for endorsing her.
The magazine firstly focused on the candidates’ healthcare policies and proposals, in particular, health insurance in its comparison.
Praising the Biden-Harris administration for bolstering the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – which expanded the number of adults eligible for health insurance – the editors noted that while Harris has said she would expand the program, Trump has pledged to repeal it but failed to clarify what he would replace it with.
“I have concepts of a plan,” he said while facing off against Harris during the September 10 presidential debate.
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump before the debate on September 10 in Philadelphia (AFP via Getty Images)
The article refers to the debate multiple times, seemingly agreeing with many across the political spectrum (including some of Trump’s closest allies) that Harris won.
The article highlights Trump’s baseless claim during the debate that some states allow a person to obtain an abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy, and calling it “execution after birth.”
“No state allows this,” Scientific American clarified. The magazine also emphasized that Trump refused to answer whether he would veto a national abortion ban.
Meanwhile, Harris was hailed as a “staunch supporter of reproductive rights” for vowing to improve access to abortion care and for co-sponsoring a package of bills to reduce rising maternal mortality rates when she was a senator.
Turning to technology, the editors highlighted the CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by Biden in 2022, which brought more funding to the chip-making industry to boost homegrown production and research.
They said the legislation “invigorates the chipmaking industry and semiconductor research while growing the workforce.”
The magazine claimed that a second Trump administration would “quickly” undo this progress under a conservative framework, Project 2025, that has been set out to guide his potential second term.
“Under the devious and divisive Project 2025 framework, technology safeguards on AI would be overturned,” the editors wrote. “AI influences our criminal justice, labor and health-care systems.
“As is the rightful complaint now, there would be no knowing how these programs are developed, how they are tested or whether they even work.”
The article concludes: “One of two futures will materialize according to our choices in this election.”
The editors closed by underlining their point. “We urge you to vote for Kamala Harris.”
Cumulatively, this campaign has succeeded in maintaining a comparatively high level of support from ordinary Russians for a fight that has lasted much longer and exacted a much heavier toll than authorities in Moscow originally advertised. But since mid-July, Ukraine’s unexpected incursion into Russia’s Kursk region — and Moscow’s inability to marshal a serious response to it — has shaken public sentiment within Russia.
By just how much? This is documented in a new study by OpenMinds, a Ukrainian data analytics and communications firm. By extensively parsing Russian social media and news outlets, it chronicles that the events in Kursk have impacted popular support for the war among ordinary Russians, as well as increased their dissatisfaction with the Kremlin.
Specifically, it notes a surge of content relating to the war as a result of Ukraine’s raid, as well as a significant decline in positive sentiment in posts, broadcasts and messages regarding the broader conflict. This, the study attributes to two causes.
First, it notes, “there have been fewer cheerful publications about the war” by Russia’s extensive state propaganda organs. Second, “there were more grievances compared to the previous two months … [both] blaming the Russian authorities and general panic regarding the incursion.”
Local fears are indeed rising. Russia’s September 2022 “partial mobilization,” as Vladimir Putin’s domestic conscription effort was euphemistically known, proved to be profoundly unpopular at home, sparking a mass exodus of citizens eager to avoid the draft. Now, worries are rising anew that Moscow’s ongoing struggles on the Ukrainian front could prompt the Kremlin to launch a new effort to beef up its military ranks.
The study documents “a growing concern” for renewed mobilization to respond to Ukraine’s incursion. During the first week of Ukraine’s offensive, it notes, “approximately 39 percent of the publications about mobilization mentioned the Kursk incursion” as a potential precipitating factor. So significant was the furor that Russian lawmakers were forced to speak out publicly to refute rumors that plans for a new conscription drive were in the works.
All this has profoundly constrained the Kremlin’s options. Ordinarily, Moscow would be quick to rally the country around Kyiv’s incursion, which it would invariably depict as an “existential threat” to its sovereignty. However, it hasn’t yet done so — something the OpenMinds study suggests is because “the Russian government understands the sociopolitical risks of a new wave of mobilization and fears the potential consequences related to it.”
What all this might mean for Russia is still too early to tell. Policymakers in Moscow have initiated an array of measures in response to the Ukrainian incursion, ranging from declaring a state of emergency in Kursk as well as the neighboring Belgorod region, surging troops into the area, and creating new administrative units to manage the crisis). Still, as NATO officials have noted, Russia’s official response has been “slow and scattered” — at least so far.
Whether it stays that way is still an open question. It’s already clear, however, that Ukraine has accomplished one of the principal aims of its daring military raid: to bring the conflict home to ordinary Russians and underscore that the war of choice embarked upon by their president carries potentially dire consequences for them personally.
Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery to honor the memory of 13 fallen service members. What happened next was a reminder of how little the former president understands about service, sacrifice, and heroism.
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the sacred ground of Arlington National Cemetery, where many of America’s war dead are buried, and posed for photos. In the strangest of these pictures, the former president is smiling and giving a thumbs-up by the grave of a Marine. It’s an image of a man who has no idea how to behave around fallen heroes.
Trump was at Arlington ostensibly to honor the memory of the 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing during the chaotic final days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The event was supposed to be respectful and private; according to a press-pool note, the families of the troops had asked that there be no media coverage in the area where the service members were buried. But Trump seemed to have other ideas.
According to a report by NPR, Trump’s campaign staff got into a verbal and physical altercation with a cemetery official who tried to stop campaign staffers from filming and taking photographs in the area of the cemetery reserved for recently fallen soldiers.
The cemetery confirmed that an incident took place on Monday but did not provide any details, instead noting in a statement that federal law prohibits “political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries.” The Trump-campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that “there was no physical altercation as described,”and added in a post on X that Trump had been allowed a private photographer on the premises. But in his statement, Cheung also accused the cemetery official who’d tried to block Trump’s staff of “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
It’s hard to see Trump’s Monday visit as anything but a campaign stop intended to court the military vote. Speaking to a group of National Guard members in Detroit later that day, he blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the failures of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
By now, Trump’s use of the military as a prop for his own ends should surprise no one. Despite his vigorous avoidance of military service, Trump has a long history of denigrating the service of others, even as he poses as a defender of the nation’s military.
As a candidate for the Republican nomination in 2015, he mocked Senator John McCain’s status as a prisoner of war. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at the time. “I like people who weren’t captured.”Later, as president, he told his then–chief of staff John Kelly that he didn’t want “any wounded guys” in his planned Independence Day parade: “This doesn’t look good for me.”
Recently, he suggested that the civilian Medal of Freedom is “actually much better” than the military’s Medal of Honor, “because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
But Trump is especially out of place around the nation’s fallen troops. As reported by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Trump went to Arlington Cemetery with Kelly on Memorial Day 2017 and visited the gravesite of Kelly’s son Robert, who had been killed in Afghanistan. Standing next to the former Marine general, Trump said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
In 2018, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris; as Jeffrey reported, Trump told staff members that the cemetery was “filled with losers.” Trump also “referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who’d lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed,” according to Jeffrey’s reporting.
Jeffrey’s story is very much a sore spot for a candidate who wants to wrap himself in the flag. Trump has denied the reporting, but it was confirmed to CNN by Kelly: “What can I add that has not already been said? … A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’”Kelly went on to corroborate other details in Jeffrey’s article. “God help us,” he concluded.
Monday’s wreath-laying at Arlington was, in part, Trump’s attempt to clean up the mess he has created, and to establish some credibility as a champion of men- and women-at-arms. But in the end, it merely served to remind Americans how little he understands about service, sacrifice, and heroism.
More than 200 Bush, McCain, Romney alums endorse Harris for president, criticize Trump
Joey Garrison, USA TODAY – August 27, 2024
WASHINGTON — More than 200 Republicans who previously worked for either former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in an open letter Monday obtained exclusively by USA TODAY.
The letter from alums of the three Republican presidential nominees prior to former President Donald Trump comes on the heels of a Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago that showcased Republican detractors of the GOP nominee. At least five former aides to former President George H.W. Bush also signed the letter, which has 238 signatures in all.
A similar group of about 150 anti-Trump former staffers of Bush, McCain and Romney pledged support for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“We reunite today, joined by new George H.W. Bush alumni, to reinforce our 2020 statements and, for the first time, jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November,” the letter reads. “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris delivers her acceptance speech during the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22, 2024.
Among those who signed the letter in support of Harris and her running-mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, include: former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Chris Koch; Joe Donoghue, former legislative director for McCain; Jennifer Lux, press secretary for McCain’s 2008 campaign, and Jean Becker, longtime chief of staff for George H.W. Bush.
Also backing Harris are David Nierenberg, Romney’s 2012 campaign finance chair; David Garman, under secretary of Energy for George W. Bush; and Olivia Troye, a former advisor to both George W. Bush and Vice President Mike Pence. Troye spoke from the stage of the DNC convention last week.
President George W. Bush speaks during an interview on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at his office in Dallas about his recollections of Sept. 11, 2001.
“At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions,” the letter says, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint that the Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from.
“Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen.”
The animosity between the camps of McCain, Romney, and Bush and Trump is well-documented.
Others who signed the letters include: Reed Galen, McCain’s deputy campaign manager and co-founder of the Lincoln Project; Jim Swift, a former Republican operative who is now senior editor of The Bulwark, an anti-Trump news and opinion site; and former McCain campaign strategist Mike Murphy.
Citing 2020 exit polling and other voter data, the group claims it was “moderate Republicans and conservative independents in key swing states” who were pivotal in Biden’s victory that ultimately delivered the presidency Biden − Americans who “put country far before party,” they write in the letter.
The group called on more moderate Republicans and independents to “take a brave stand once more” and support Harris over Trump in the fall.
September 13, 2023: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) announces his intention to not run for reelection. Romney, who is 76, announced in a release, “the next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership.”.
The Harris campaign has worked to highlight its backing from Republicans who oppose Trump, launching a “Republicans for Harris” group this month and featuring Republican speakers at last week’s convention.
Republicans who addressed the convention included former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who served on the House panel that investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Mesa, Ariz. Mayor John Giles; and Troye, who worked as a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Pence. Pence has said he won’t endorse Trump for president.
Over the weekend, a dozen prominent Republican attorneys who worked for former President Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush endorsed Harris for president. The group included conservative former federal appellate Judge Michael Luttig, who plans to vote for a Democratic president for the first time.
Former Illinois Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger speaks during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center.
Opinion: The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered
Joel Edward Goza – August 25, 2024
President Reagan, shown in 1981, based many of his policies on ideas from the Heritage Foundation publication “The Mandate for Leadership.” Project 2025 makes up a majority of the latest edition of this title and recommends many of the same extreme policies. (Ron Edmonds / Associated Press)More
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that would overhaul much of the federal government under a second Trump administration, has sparked fear and concern from voters despite the former president’s attempt to distance his campaign from the plan. But while Project 2025 might seem radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate many of the worst racial, economic and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.
Project 2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework. It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation. Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.
If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes. Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.
This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal. Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while removing significant provisions from another 300,000. Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.
Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.
All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.
To ensure that wealth would be a long-lived family entitlement, Reagan instituted a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget. In 1980, the exemption stood at $161,000. By the time Reagan left office in 1989 it was $600,000. Today it is $13,610,000. This means that today nearly all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.
And beginning during Reagan’s presidency, the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively, while the poverty of Americans across racial lines intensified. Even white males were more likely to be poor following Reagan’s presidency. Today poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S., even though this is the wealthiest nation in the world.
If we feel like we live in a country that isn’t working for anyone who isn’t wealthy, these are some of the core reasons why. Looking back at the Reagan era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership,” we must remember that our domestic wounds are largely self-inflicted, results of buying into racial, economic and environmental lies that continue to be sold. It is precisely the types of policies that devastated the nation during the Reagan administration that Project 2025 now seeks to resuscitate. Perhaps the only truly new thing Project 2025 suggests is using more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.
History has hinges, moments that change the trajectory of nations. The greatest progress in our country has almost always emerged during turbulent times. It is up to the United States’ most committed believers to close the door on terror and trauma and open one that leads to new democratic possibilities.
Our current moment represents more than an election. It is a turning point that has the potential to transform the United States for generations to come. We don’t need the version of the past that Project 2025 is trying to sell us. It didn’t work for most Americans then, and it won’t work for most of us now. But perhaps Project 2025 is the push the Democratic Party needed. While the Republican Party veers further into authoritarianism, Democrats must be equally determined to develop a truly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.
Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.”
Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist – August 24, 2024
Credit…Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times
In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.
The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.
You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.
“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. Pressed on those remarks last month, he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”
This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).
One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.
It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.
Think of it this way: We’d be saving the life of one American child between the ages of 1 and 5 every three hours if we had the same child mortality level as Norway or Finland.
Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump administration that Trump is frantically trying to disavow, would make things worse. It would end Head Start, a lifeline for low-income children, and would dismantle the Department of Education.
“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” Trump posted on Friday. But even putting aside abortion rights, Republican extremism has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization, especially after an Alabama court ruled that a frozen embryo must be considered a child. The Southern Baptist Convention, a bastion of support for Trump, this summer criticized I.V.F.
Vance has supported a watered-down bill that he says protects I.V.F., but Republican senators blocked stronger legislation to defend I.V.F. fertility treatments and expand access. They are leaving hanging so many of the one in seven women who have trouble conceiving or sustaining a pregnancy.
Can anything be more anti-family?
Look, I’ve repeatedly argued that growing up in a two-parent household is the one privilege that liberals ignore, that the left wrongly demonized Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his emphasis on family structure and that Democrats can do more to remove marriage penalties and bolster opportunities for children.
I’m troubled by the collapse of marriage in America’s working class — more than 70 percent of Americans without a high school diploma are unmarried. If we care about child poverty, we must face the reality that households headed by single moms are five times as likely to live in poverty as those with married couples. So concerns about family and children are legitimate, and Democrats should do better.
But for Republicans to blame Democrats is ludicrous, for the G.O.P. has seemingly gone out of its way to undermine families and children.
Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.
Republicans like the House speaker, Mike Johnson, object to no-fault divorce laws, which make it straightforward for couples to obtain divorces. They claim this is a pro-family stance. (Trump, understandably, appears more sympathetic to divorce.) But the evidence is overwhelming that before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children.
One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.
Is it really pro-family to increase the number of moms who are beaten and murdered?
I’m glad Republicans are squawking about the challenges facing families and children. But if Trump, Vance and other Republicans want to blame those most responsible for the plight of families and children in America today, they should look in the mirror and hang their heads in shame.
By David French, Opinion Columnist– August 25, 2024
Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images
This June, I was invited on a friend’s podcast to answer a question I’ve been asked over and over again in the Trump era. Are Christians really persecuted in the United States of America? Millions of my fellow evangelicals believe we are, or they believe we’re one election away from a crackdown. This sense of dread and despair helps tie conservative Christians, people who center their lives on the church and the institutions of the church, to Donald Trump — the man they believe will fight to keep faith alive.
As I told my friend, the short answer is no, not by any meaningful historical definition of persecution. American Christians enjoy an immense amount of liberty and power.
But that’s not the only answer. American history tells the story of two competing factions that possess very different visions of the role of faith in American public life. Both of them torment each other, and both of them have made constitutional mistakes that have triggered deep cultural conflict.
One of the most valuable and humbling experiences in life is to experience an American community as part of the in-group and as part of the out-group. I spent most of my life living in the cultural and political center of American evangelical Christianity, but in the past nine years I’ve been relentlessly pushed to the periphery. The process has been painful. Even so, I’m grateful for my new perspective.
Combine those stories with the personal tales of Christians who faced death threats, intimidation and online harassment for their views, and it’s easy to tell a story of American backsliding — a nation that once respected or even revered Christianity now persecutes Christians. If the left is angry at conservatives for seeking the protection of a man like Trump, then it has only itself to blame.
But when you’re pushed outside evangelicalism, the world starts to look very different. You see conservative Christians attacking the fundamental freedoms of their opponents. Red-state legislatures pass laws restricting the free speech of progressives and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Christian school board members attempt to restrict access to books in the name of their own moral norms. Other conservatives want to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, to bring legal recognition of same-sex marriages to an end.
Combine those stories with personal tales of progressives and other dissenters experiencing threats from and intimidation by conservative Christians, and you begin to see why the Christian persecution narrative rings hollow. And if conservative Christians are angry at progressive Americans for believing they are hateful hypocrites, then they have only themselves to blame.
After living inside and outside conservative evangelicalism, I have a different view. While injustice is real, the Christian persecution narrative is fundamentally false. America isn’t persecuting Christians; it’s living with the fallout of two consequential constitutional mistakes that distort our politics and damage our culture.
First, for most of American history, courts underenforced the establishment clause of the First Amendment. It wasn’t even held clearly applicable to the states until 1947. Americans lived under what my colleague Ross Douthat calls the “soft hegemony of American Protestantism.” It was “soft” in part because America never possessed a national church on par with European establishments, but it was certainly hard enough to mandate Bible readings and prayer in schools and to pass a host of explicitly anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments that were intended to blunt Catholic influence in the United States.
This soft hegemony wasn’t constitutionally or culturally sustainable. Mandating Protestant Scripture readings is ultimately incompatible with a First Amendment that doesn’t permit the state to privilege any particular sect or denomination. Culturally, the process of diversification and secularization makes any specific religious hegemony impossible. There simply aren’t a sufficient number of Americans of any single faith tradition to dominate American life.
In the 1960s the Warren court began dismantling the soft Protestant establishment by blocking school prayer and Scripture reading. A series of cases limited the power of the state to express a religious point of view. But then state and local governments overcorrected. They overenforced the establishment clause and violated the free speech and free exercise clauses by taking aim at private religious expression.
The desire to disentangle church and state led to a search-and-destroy approach to religious expression in public institutions. Public schools and public colleges denied religious organizations equal access to public facilities. States and public colleges denied religious institutions equal access to public funds.
I started my legal career in 1994, when equal access was very much in doubt. I spent the better part of two decades filing lawsuit after lawsuit that made essentially the same claim: State actors must treat religious speech the same as they treat secular speech. The proper interplay between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause ought to mean that private religious speech should neither be favored nor disfavored by the government. The state can’t run the church, and the church can’t run the state.
Conservative and liberal justices have created a different, sustainable equilibrium, but the religious liberty culture war rages on anyway — in part because millions of Americans don’t want to strike a balance. They actually prefer domination to accommodation. Many conservative evangelicals miss the old Protestant establishment, and they want it back. This is part of the impulse behind the recent Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, for example, or the recent effort in Oklahoma to establish a religious charter school, a public school run by the Catholic Church.
Combine these efforts at religious establishment with red-state legislation aimed at progressive and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and one could fairly assert that Christians are persecuting their opponents.
But there’s more to it than that. There are secular Americans who do take aim at Christian expression and at Christian institutions. They don’t want separation of church and state so much as they seek regulation of the church by the state, to push the church into conformance with a secular political ideology.
Then both sides tear into each other with an inexcusable level of fury and malice. When I was representing conservative Christian organizations, I could regale Christian audiences with stories of extreme secular intolerance, and I never ran out of material — especially when discussing religious liberty on college campuses.
Then conservative evangelicalism ejected me from its ranks, and I experienced a level of anger and malice that eclipsed anything I experienced from the most vitriolic secular progressives. I started to hear from others who’d experienced the same thing, and my eyes opened. Christians are wrecking lives in the name of righteousness.
Every culture war battle has casualties. Take a 2022 Supreme Court case about a praying high school football coach. He was seeking the right to pray on the field, and he won. The Supreme Court said his personal prayer was constitutionally protected. But that’s not the entire story.
Employees in the coach’s school district endured their own ordeal. I was struck by the opening sentence of an essay I read by a former teacher in the district: “‘That was another death threat,’ our high school secretary said to me after hanging up the phone.” A legal dispute isn’t proof of persecution, but threats most definitely count.
Christians who bemoan cultural hostility to their faith should be humbled by a sad reality. When it comes to inflicting pain on their political adversaries, conservative Christians often give worse than they get.
Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.
In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.
The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.
The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.
Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.
Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionallyslipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”
So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”
When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.
Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.
At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.
Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.
Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.
Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.
Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
Scroll back up to restore default view.Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways
