Maddow Blog | Rachel Maddow: Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.
Rachel Maddow and Allison Detzel – November 12, 2024
This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
The last time Donald Trump was president, his Interior secretary was embroiled in a corruption scandal and ended up referred to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. His Transportation secretary was also embroiled in her own corruption scandal and also was referred to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation.
It used to be if you had one Cabinet official involved in a big ethics and/or corruption scandal that forced them out of the job or led to them being referred for criminal investigations, that would be enough to brand your whole presidency a disgraced and scandal-ridden mistake.
Just consider Warren G. Harding — what’s remembered about his presidency? Maybe that he died in office? Or that he had an affair? No, it’s the Teapot Dome corruption scandal, which resulted in a Cabinet official being criminally charged. A century later, that one scandal involving one Cabinet official is basically all we remember about Harding’s presidency.
The first Trump term had so many Cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges that it’s actually hard to remember them all. However, despite an unprecedented number of Cabinet officials being referred for criminal investigations, the supposedly independent DOJ decided to bring charges against precisely none of them.
One of the more memorable ethical disasters along these lines from the first Trump term was a situation involving his secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie. This might be the most memorable scandal because it happened right at the end of his administration, Dec. 10, 2020 — after Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden but before the Jan. 6 attack.
MaddowBlog’s headline at the time, by Steve Benen, read, “Yet another Trump Cabinet secretary caught up in scandal: As Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an ignominious end, it’s apparently not too late for one more Cabinet controversy.”
The Justice Department didn’t charge Wilkie, just like they didn’t charge any of these guys. But more than 20 different veterans groups rose up in outrage against him. Disparate veterans groups with very different takes on the world banded together — everyone from the American Legion to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to the Veterans of Foreign Wars – all demanding that Wilkie resign or be fired.
It was just a disaster, and it was a sign that even right up to the very bitter and ultimately violent end of Trump’s first term, things weren’t merely bad. It’s not normal to have a half-dozen members of the Cabinet referred for investigations into potential crimes committed while they were serving in the Cabinet.
Now, as the nation marked Veteran’s Day, a day to honor and celebrate our veterans, we learned Trump has decided to bring Wilkie back, tapping him to lead the transition efforts for the entire Defense Department. At a time when the country is looking to the U.S. military for assurances that they won’t deploy against American civilians the way Trump has threatened, the guy charged with staffing up the Defense Department leadership for the military is same guy who left office last time while his “possible criminal conduct” was under investigation by federal prosecutors.
Wilkie is not the only one who’s been tapped for the second Trump administration in recent days. NBC News has learned Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once memorably cast aspersions on the size of Trump’s genitals in a presidential debate, is expected to be the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state.
Trump has also chosen Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida to be his national security adviser. Walz helped in the effort to try to overthrow the government and keep Trump in power after he lost re-election in 2020. Waltz has distinguished himself by claiming that Trump was not responsible for Jan. 6 and that Dulles Airport should be renamed the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” So clearly, he’s checked all the boxes he needs to be national security adviser.
We learned Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, will be his administration’s “border czar.” Remember when Republicans used to maintain with a straight face that it was a huge scandal and evidence of communism to call anyone the czar of anything?
Trump has put the other architect of family separation, Stephen Miller, in charge of all policy planning for the transition. A source tells NBC News that Miller will also serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the second Trump White House.
So anyone telling you that a second Trump administration is going to be at all moderate or normal in terms of what they’re going to do, that person is living on a nice planet that I’d like to visit sometime, but it’s not our planet.
Any expectation that the most extreme things Trump talked about were just talk and that normal people would come into his administration to do normal things, well, that wishful thinking hasn’t survived one week after the election.
Scientists warn that a key Atlantic current could collapse, among other climate tipping points
Evan Bush – November 12, 2024
Icebergs drift by in Disko Bay at Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 16.
The Summary
A new report describes the dire state of Earth’s snow and ice.
Among other findings, it warns that several key climate tipping points appear more likely to be reached than previously thought.
They include ice melt that could cause severe sea-level rise and the collapse of a crucial ocean current that governs how heat cycles in the Atlantic Ocean.
Venezuela lost its final glacier this year. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing, on average, 30 million tons of ice per hour. Ice loss from the Thwaites Glacier, also known as the “Doomsday” glacier because its collapse could precipitate rapid Antarctic ice loss, may be unstoppable.
These are just a few of the stark findings from more than 50 leading snow and ice scientists, which are detailed in a new report from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative.
The report summarizes the state of snow and ice in 2024: In short, experts agree, it’s been a horrible year for the frozen parts of Earth, an expected result of global warming. What’s more, top cryosphere scientists are growing increasingly worried that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key ocean current that governs how heat cycles in the Atlantic Ocean, is on a path toward collapse.
A rapid halt to the current would cause rapid cooling in the North Atlantic, warming in the Southern Hemisphere and extreme changes in precipitation. If that happens, the new report suggests, northern Europe could cool by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit in a decade.
The report highlights a shift in consensus: Scientists once thought tipping points — like the collapse of AMOC — were distant or remote possibilities. Now, some of those thresholds are appearing more likely to be crossed, and with less runway to turn the situation around.
“The latest science is not telling us that things are any different to what we knew before, necessarily, but it’s telling us with more confidence and more certainty that these things are more likely to happen,” said Helen Findlay, an author of the report and a professor and biological oceanographer at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England. “The longer we record these things, and the longer we’re able to observe them and start to understand and monitor them, there’s more certainty in the system and we start to really understand how these tipping points are working.”
The Thwaites glacier seen by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite.
Last month, 44 leading scientists wrote in an open letter to leaders of Nordic countries that the collapse of AMOC remained “highly uncertain” but that evidence in favor of such a collapse was mounting, and risks have been underestimated. Dramatic changes to the AMOC, they warned, would “likely lead to unprecedented extreme weather” and “potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe.”
The new report similarly draws attention to the risk of AMOC collapse.
Additionally, it projects that roughly two-thirds of glacier ice in the European Alps will be lost by 2050 if global greenhouse gas emissions keep their pace. Already, an estimated 10 million people are at risk of glacial outburst floods in Iceland, Alaska and Asia — a phenomenon already occurring as meltwater collapses ice dams and rapidly floods downstream. If high emissions continue, the report adds, models suggest that sea level could rise by roughly 10 feet in the 2100s, imperiling parts of many coastal cities.
The report was released as world leaders gathered Monday in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for the United Nations’ COP29 climate conference.
“Timing is everything,” said Julie Brigham-Grette, a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an author of the new report.
She said the group hopes to rattle world leaders to attention: “The sense of urgency couldn’t be higher. We’ve been talking about urgency for a decade. It almost starts to feel like a useless word. What’s more than ‘urgent?’ ‘Catastrophic?’ We’ve run out of ways to describe it.”
To date, the report says, world governments are falling short on the pledges they made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris Agreement.
Even if they were on track, those commitments are insufficient to reach global climate goals, the authors say. On paper, the world’s pledges would limit the rise in global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) this century. That’s well short of the goal to cap warming at 1.5 degrees C.
Global temperatures are currently on pace to rise more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), on average.
Melting icebergs crowd the Ilulissat Icefjord near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 16.
“I feel quite frustrated,” Findlay said. “I don’t really understand how they’re missing the severity of the issue.”
In Baku on Monday, world leaders did agree to new rules for a global market to trade carbon credits. In a news release, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev, who has been Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology and natural resources since 2018, said the agreement was a “game-changing” tool to direct climate financing to the developing world.
But he also acknowledged, in a speech to delegates, that the world is “on a road to ruin” under current climate policies.
That warning and the new report both come amid fears the U.S. will backslide on its climate commitments and pull out of the Paris Agreement after Donald Trump takes office in January. Trump wants to remove the U.S. from the international treaty, and he began that process during his first presidential administration. President Joe Biden reversed the move in 2021.
Peter Neff, a glaciologist and climate scientist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new report, said its authors clearly communicated the scientific consensus.
“It’s nothing surprising for a glaciologist. Across the board, there’s not good news with respect to ice on Earth. It’s all, for the most part, going in one direction,” Neff said.
But he added that he still found the report’s findings to be staggering: “These documents can hit you like a ton of bricks, and that’s intentional.”
What does a second Trump presidency mean for climate change?
By Amber Phillips – November 12, 2024
The planet is at a “can’t-miss” moment to stop climate change, world leaders at an international climate summit warned this week.
Meanwhile, the United States has just elected a president who has described climate change as a “hoax,” and some of his allies have suggested doing away with entire federal agencies that deal with climate.
Here’s what a second Trump presidency could mean for a rapidly warming planet and extreme weather.
The government may stop trying to reduce emissions:
Many scientists expect Trump to redo many of his first presidency’s antagonistic actions toward climate change, such as when he yanked the United States out of the Paris agreement, an international pact to lower emissions by a certain date.
That would create a vacuum that may not be filled by anotherworld leader, climate analysts say. The Earth is already behind on its modest goals to prevent the worst ravages of climate change.“You can see the global difference with U.S. leadership and the U.S. leaning in, saying, ‘This is where we want to go,’” said Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a right-of-center climate nonprofit that has endorsed Republican candidates. “It will be incumbent on other countries to lead now, but they may not have the same leverage as the U.S.”
The U.S. will increase drilling for oil:
“Drill, baby drill!” was literally in Republicans’ official policy platform. Trump argues that this will make oil prices cheaper and help the United States become less reliable on foreign oil. But that’s not where the world is heading, say climate experts.
“Doubling down on fossil fuels is absurd,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at the world climate summit Tuesday. “The clean-energy revolution is here.”But ironically, Trump’s emphasis on drilling could boost investments in clean energy, too, Ream said.
There’s bipartisan support in Congress for permitting reform, which would make it easier for all energy companies — oil, solar, wind — to get permits to produce more energy.“Republicans are laser-focused on energy dominance and reducing energy prices,” Reams said. “And that could benefit an all-of-the-above approach.”
The government may even get out of weather forecasting:
Project 2025, a blueprint for a future Republican administration that was written by many of the president-elect’s allies, calls for taking a hatchet to the government’s role in forecasting not only climate change but extreme weather. Trump distanced himself from the plan during the campaign, but much of it aligns with his priorities.
Project 2025 wants to scrub mentions of climate change in nearly every corner of the federal government, including eliminating departments — and even entire agencies — that deal with it. That would mean dramatically downsizing or getting rid of the United States’ hurricane forecasting agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and even the National Weather Service. Meanwhile, the plan calls for putting people who question the science of climate change into positions of leadership.
This week, Trump named Republican former congressman Lee Zeldin, a Trump loyalist without much experience in environmental policy, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates polluters.
Also this week, the Biden administration began requiring oil companies to pay a fee for emitting methane. But Trump could pretty easily roll that back, reports The Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow.“It’s kind of like ‘stick your head in the sand and the problem will go away,’” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-host of the climate podcast “A Matter of Degrees.” “But that isn’t how physics and climate change work. Even if you don’t think it’s real, it’s real. Even if you don’t talk about it, it’s still happening.”
Conservatives may prioritize clean-energy investments, despite large-scale Republican inaction on climate change, there is a growing conservative movement interested in addressing the problem, Reams noted, including a roughly 80-member Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives.
And Trump has a billionaire clean-energy tycoon in his inner circle, Elon Musk, who has said climate change is real and a threat.
The first test of whether Republicans in Congress are willing to move forward on clean energy will be whether they repeal President Joe Biden’s energy efficiency tax credits, to pay for broader tax cuts Trump is pushing. The clean-energy tax credits have become more popular than expected across the country. Americans who make climate-friendly upgrades to their homes are eligible for the credits, and by some estimates, three-quarters of investments go to Republican communities to help manufacture clean-energy products. This summer, 18 Republicans sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), asking him to keep the incentives.
Expect a major fight among Republicans about this, Reams predicted.
In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better
Steve Benen – November 11, 2024
Then-President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the Oval Office in 2020.
One of the forgotten stories of Donald Trump’s first term came around this time five years ago, when the then-president tried to arrange for a G7 summit to be held at one of his struggling businesses. Even by his standards, it was quite brazen.
Trump, in no uncertain terms, told some of the world’s most powerful leaders that if they wished to participate in an international gathering, they would have to spend quite a bit of money at one of the venues he owns that was short on customers. The Republican had already earned a reputation for welcoming money from foreign governments, but this represented an escalation: Trump was insisting upon money from foreign governments.
To be sure, he ultimately backed off, but the effort was part of an ugly pattern. As The American Prospect’s David Dayen recently explained in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s entire term in office was marked by profit-taking schemes and uses of public funds for personal benefit.”
Unfortunately, we can keep going down the same road: Trump also issued corrupt pardons to those who engaged in corruption. Members of his Cabinet faced so many corruption allegations that it was difficult to keep track of them all. For all intents and purposes, the result was effectively the first modern pro-corruption administration.
It’s nevertheless a safe bet that his second term in the White House will be considerably worse.
Indeed, less than a week after Election Day, there’s already some unsettling evidence coming to the fore. The New York Times reported, for example, that the president-elect “has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office.”
Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act. While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, noted that Trump’s transition team was supposed to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration by Sept. 1. That didn’t happen.
Why does that matter? Because, while that would’ve released millions of dollars in funding to cover transition costs, it also, as the Times’ report noted, would impose a $5,000 cap on donations to the transition team and require the public disclosure of all its donors.
“By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly,” the article added. “Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.”
Those looking to bribe the president-elect, in other words, wouldn’t have to place orders for overpriced wristwatches.
But wait, there’s more. The New York Times also reported on Howard Lutnick, the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, whose influential new role is raising eyebrows.
As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise. But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.
Given Lutnick’s vast business interests, the Times added, it’s unclear how he might “keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics.”
Looking ahead, there’s little reason for optimism. Indeed, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently highlighted a broader context, noting that if Trump moves forward with plans to purge much of the federal workforce, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, Americans might soon see a dynamic in which independent officials “muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency.”
I suspect that if a pollster were to ask Americans whether they’re comfortable with government corruption, the vast majority would say no. And yet, we’re about to experience a brutal elections-have-consequences moment when it comes to the corrupting of the executive branch of the federal government.
What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
What I Wrote
I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.
Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.
Let’s begin with the simplest and most obvious observation: A majority of Americans prefer what Donald Trump has been selling over Kamala Harris. It’s hard to stomach, because this election offered a pretty clear choice between a cheerful and humane future and a rapturously brutish one. But the latter won out. More Americans wanted the 1939 German-American Bund–style hate rally at Madison Square Garden than the big-tent party with high ideals about the American constitutional order. And we can no longer reassure ourselves, as we did in 2016, that Trump voters didn’t precisely know what they were getting or that much of what he promised to do was not to be taken seriously. We know what he’s about now, and a majority of voters clearly want it.
The country is set to change in stark ways, as Project 2025 jumps from the pages of a far-right dream journal into our lives. There will be big rollbacks in the civil rights many of us have come to enjoy, causing disproportionate pain to women and members of the LGBTQ community. I feel terribly for all the people who voted to protect reproductive freedoms in their states because the effort may be all for naught. As we have relentlessly explained on TNR’s pages, Trump’s Department of Justice can create a national abortion ban by enforcing the Comstock Act, thus bypassing the legislative process and the will of voters entirely. Wherever reproductive rights have managed to secure a haven in a state constitution, those rights will be fought over in inhospitable venues, like the Supreme Court.
Trump’s signature policy proposal is a mass deportation scheme that will target legal citizens for “remigration” alongside the undocumented. The regulatory state will be transformed into something that serves corporations instead of the public. The civil service, as I have mentioned before, will be reconfigured into something that, at best, may look like the “spoils system” of yesteryear; more likely it will exist to dole out punishments to Trump’s political opponents. Imagine a world in which blue states don’t receive disaster relief; where Democrats don’t get their Social Security checks.
Part of Trump’s second-term agenda includes a plan to crush left-liberal organizing. The movement to end the war in Gaza, which was highly effective in shifting public opinion on Israel’s ongoing military assault, will feel this hammer blow first. Trump has been lately dogged by generals who opposed his fascist inclinations; his future generals will be much less reluctant. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will retire and be replaced by younger versions of themselves. Probably worst of all, the timeline on permanent climate catastrophe has moved up—it’s not unfair to say that we may soon arrive at a point of no return (though my strong suspicion is that we have reached it already).
At the moment, I can’t exactly figure out what kind of Democratic Party emerges from the wreckage of this election. Harris ran a distinctly centrist style of politics, for which influential members of the punditocracy and the party’s most entrenched elites had long agitated. This approach flopped, badly. This brand of politics makes complete sense on paper to a lot of people who now need to contend with the fact that the voters that Democrats need the most to win presidential elections are rejecting it in substantial numbers.
But these failures are not the biggest problem Democrats face. The real crisis is that all the roads ahead are fraught with peril. The country has clearly tacked to the right in substantial ways. It’s going to make sense to a lot of Democrats to keep chasing the electorate in that direction. But a party that, in 2024, was only really defending a narrow portfolio of traditionally Democratic principles ceases to be the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense if they abandon those few battlements which they’ve retained the courage to defend. Tacking right might be a path to power, but we should dispense with the delusion that a Democratic Party choosing this path would continue to be a liberal party. Rather, it would come to reside in the same ideological province of the pre-Trump Republican Party—and remember, that’s a movement that Trumpism dispatched far more rapidly and soundly than the Democrats.
At the same time, organizing the party around a bolder, leftward direction is difficult to fathom. A more leftist set of domestic policy prescriptions requires its proponents to run the sort of piping-hot, high-spending economy that Biden attempted—and probably to a greater extent than Biden was willing to go. The failure of Bidenomics to impress the very voters it strove so mightily to help will make politicians extremely skittish about taking that approach again anytime soon. But even if Democrats were brave enough to let it rip, bolder policies also require a functioning administrative state to administer them. Right now, the Supreme Court is not committed to the administrative state’s survival and is more likely to keep dismantling it. So a Democratic Party that shifts in this direction is destined to make a ton of near-term promises that it can’t fulfill and risk making voters more cynical about government, which helps strongmen like Trump stay in power.
All that said, Trump might very well run up against the problem of unfulfillable promises a lot sooner than the Democrats. Trumpism has always been a slow march into the thickets of its own policy paradoxes, and this will only grow more pronounced as all the reins and fetters that impeded Trump’s first-term ambitions come off in the second. Here, the laws of gravity snap back with a vengeance. Trump cannot deport millions of people without sending the economy into a doom spiral. He can’t create a more efficient government by asking a noodlehead failure like Elon Musk to manage it. He can’t put a quack like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health without people getting a lot sicker. You can’t make America great again while destroying the regulatory regime that keeps a staggering range of everyday harms at bay: coal ash spills and E. coli and shoddy building construction and, lest we forget, pandemics. And, no, you can’t arrest climate change by pretending it’s not happening.
The problem, of course, is that the rug-pull always arrives too late for the conned to prevent. While we are waiting for these bills to come due, however, Trump will probably manage to keep two of his promises: He will duck accountability for the malfeasances for which he’s already facing judgment in various legal fora (and likely extend this privilege to a grip of bad actors, beginning with the January 6 rioters), and he will hurt the people he deems to be his enemy. Those supporters who are inclined to dole out punishments of their own will feel a freer hand to do so. This is going to be an immediately more dangerous country to reside in for lots of Americans.
This has, unfortunately, been the cauldron in which recent Democratic electoral successes have been conjured: The collapsed reality and widespread destruction wrought from GOP misrule provokes a backlash that drives up enough public support for a change. This is how we got Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House. This is also the widening gyre in which we’re now trapped: Republican failures, and the intense period of crisis management that follows, have made it harder for Democrats to build anything of their own that’s truly enduring, which in turn gives them little to run on. I’m left with the strong impression that the only thing most people know about Democrats is that they didn’t want Trump to be president.
As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted on election night, “Incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic.” Perhaps this outcome was predetermined. But it wasn’t our fate to end up with, as Marshall described, “Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways” as the alternative. That a cruel president is returning to office on the promise of doubling down on the cruelty speaks to something really unpleasant about ourselves. There was a notion, once, that Obama’s election indicated that the United States was closer than ever to becoming the nation we were always destined to be. With Trump’s reelection, we should reckon with the dreadful possibility that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie is correct when he says, “Most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.”
Ballot measures deliver big wins for progressive policy priorities
From education to abortion rights, minimum wage to family leave, progressive policy measures fared quite well in 2024, even amid Republican victories.
By Steve Benen – November 8, 2024
As the dust settles on the 2024 election cycle and the scope of Republican successes comes into view, some observers are drawing a predictable conclusion: If voters backed GOP candidates in such large numbers, it must be because the electorate agrees with the party on the major issues of the day.
Mark Penn, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, published a flawed election assessment to social media, which began, “America is a center right country at heart. Only 25 per cent are liberal and the other 75 per cent won’t be ruled by the 25.”
At a superficial level, I can appreciate how some arrive at conclusions like these. If most voters supported Donald Trump and Republican congressional candidates, the argument goes, then it stands to reason that voters prefer conservative ideas to progressive ideas.
But a closer look at some of the election results suggest the ideological lines aren’t nearly that clean. Trump and his party, for example, championed private school vouchers. But as The New York Times reported, voters in three states — including two red states where Trump won easily — rejected voucher schemes.
In Kentucky, nearly two-thirds of voters defeated a proposal to allow state tax dollars to fund private and charter schools. In Nebraska, 57% of voters approved a ballot initiative that repealed a small program intended to give low-income families tax dollars to pay for private-school tuition. In Colorado, votes are still being counted. But it looks likely that voters have narrowly rejected a broadly worded ballot measure that would have established a “right to school choice,” including in private schools and homeschool settings.
Note, Nebraska voters backed the GOP ticket by more than 20 points. In Kentucky, the margin was more than 30 points. But those same voters nevertheless took a good look at one of the Republican Party’s top educational priorities and said, “No thanks.”
What’s more, it wasn’t just vouchers. Voters in 10 states considered abortion-rights initiatives this year, and they passed in seven — including in some states Trump carried. (In Florida, a majority of voters supported an abortion-rights measure, but it wasn’t a large enough majority to pass.)
In ruby-red Missouri, where Republicans such as Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley won easily, voters also easily approved measures to raise the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave. Voters in Alaska, which also supported the GOP ticket by a wide margin, did the same thing, increasing the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour and requiring employers to provide paid sick leave.
A few weeks before Election Day, YouGov conducted an interesting survey in which it asked respondents for their opinions about Trump’s and Kamala Harris’ policy priorities — except the twist was that participants weren’t told which policies were associated with which candidates.
The results were remarkable: Harris’ agenda was far more popular than Trump’s, but many people had no idea that the Democrat’s priorities were, in fact, her priorities.
Asked what they wanted, voters backed Harris’ vision. Asked who they wanted, voters backed the candidate offering the opposite of her vision.
To be sure, there’s room for a broader conversation about why many Americans who support progressive policies end up also supporting candidates who’ll reject those same progressive policies. But on a variety of key fronts, it’s nevertheless true that a true center-right nation, filled with an electorate where conservatism was ascendent, probably wouldn’t have backed quite so many progressive ballot measures.
The long and winding political campaign road is ending (we hope) on the doorsteps of the 60th U.S. Presidential Election. This is only my 16th, my first was just after I joined the Army. But I would wager no other election in our history will compare to 2024’s, in length, breadth, cost or more importantly, historical consequence.
Most clear thinking voters refuse to believe pollsters, who claim this is way, way, too close to predict. They insist it will again come down to the smallest percentage of voters in a handful of states. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada they say, hold the keys to the White House, and the fate of the Republic.
The residents of those swing states have suffered the brunt of the $16 billion onslaught of political ads. Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance floodgates sprung wide open to Corporate and special interest quid pro quo. This judicial abomination of the First Amendment has inflicted America with endless campaigning, astronomical expenditures and a potentially violent polarization. Too many MAGA faithful predict a Civil War on steroids, unless Trump is returned to his ordained position as their White Christian Savior and President.
But I’m not ready to give up on the American Experiment. I honestly and reasonably believe Kamala Harris could get between 6 and 15 million more popular votes that trump. The electoral congress is a bit uncertain, but the Dem’s should prevail; by how much depends on disaffected true Conservative Republicans. I believe the Democrats could take back the House of Representatives, and have an even chance at retaining the U.S. Senate. Hope springs eternal. Polling yesterday revealed a three point lead for V.P Harris, in Iowa of all states. And I like Colin Allred’s chances in Texas at last. The Democrats as usual, have enlisted highly qualified, intelligent, committed and honorable candidates across the country. The republi-cons have insisted on election denying, unthinking, dimwitted, sycophantic cult followers of trump Inc. Inquiring minds have to wonder why people who hate government and governing principles, run for positions running the government. I guess the answer is obvious.
OnSeptember 29, 2023 – Sarah Pruitt, a writer and editor based in New Hampshire wrote:
“The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart”
“Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.”
“This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.”
‘“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”’
“George Washington’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamiltononce called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”’
As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.
“In George Washington’s Farewell Address to the Nation, Washington and Hamilton worked closely together on the address, which took the form of a public letter to the American people. It was published in the Daily American Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, on September 19, 1796, and later reprinted in papers throughout the country. The letter included three main principles:”
1. Importance of Unity:
“After opening with an explanation of his choice not to seek a third term, Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole. “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together,” Washington declared. “The Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.”
“Regions such as North, South, East and West should see their common interests rather than their differences, he continued. “Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty and…the love of the one ought to endear you to the preservation of the other.”
2. The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
“According to Washington, one of the chief dangers of letting regional loyalties dominate loyalty to the nation as a whole was that it would lead to factionalism, or the development of competing political parties. When Americans voted according to party loyalty, rather than the common interest of the nation, Washington feared it would foster a “spirit of revenge,” and enable the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“In fact, political parties had already begun to emerge by the time Washington stepped aside. Federalists, who drew their support largely from New England, advocated a strong national government and the fiscal programs created by Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Republicans (later Democratic-Republicans) led by Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, opposed Hamilton’s economic policies. They also split with the Federalists in foreign policy, favoring a closer relationship with France over Great Britain.”
“Washington supported Hamilton’s financial programs and sided with the Federalists in supporting the Jay Treaty with Britain. By the end of his presidency, Washington was weathering increasingly bitter attacks from his Republican critics, and his farewell address represented his response to such attacks, as well as a more general statement of his principles.”
3. Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
“Just as regionalism would lead to the formation of political parties, Washington believed, partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” While he advocated for the United States to be on good terms with all nations, especially in commercial relations, he argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”
“Europe had its own, very complicated, set of interests, and the United States should keep its distance from European affairs, Washington believed. A foreign policy based on neutrality was the safest way to maintain national unity, and stability, in the United States. Although Washington saw the need for the nation to involve itself in foreign affairs in the case of war or other emergencies, he argued that it must “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Sarah Pruitt, Updated July 6, 2023
Needless to say, the Founding Fathers would be stunned and appalled at the current state of our multi-billion dollar campaigns and political divide.
“Consider, for example, that after a wealthy 25-year-old man named George Washington, in 1757, bought “$195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends prior to an election,” the Virginia Legislature enacted a law prohibiting candidates, “or persons on their behalf,” from giving voters “money, meat, drink, entertainment or provision . . . any present, gift, reward or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.”
That historic guard rail hasn’t dissuaded Elon Musk from pledging to give away $1 million each day to registered voters in battleground states, just for signing on the dotted line, and purportedly to vote for his BF Trump.
“Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole.”
But Trump’s first and foremost principle, is to divide America into MAGA’s and everyone else. To pit his faithful against the others. To demonize immigrants, in spite of two of his wives and in-laws being recent immigrants. And most recently, to scare the bejesus out of as many American’s as possible, on the dangers of immigration from non-Christians.
Washington warned:The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
It’s blaringly obvious that Trump and his myriad of sycophantic MAGAnians, are not loyal to the Republic or to our Democratic institutions, they’re government hating bomb throwers.
Washington feared:Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
But in this ever dangerous and fractured world, with growing numbers of anti-Democratic, autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic and fascist regimes, NATO, the Indo-Pacific Alliance and other international pacts are necessarily more important than ever.
Unfortunately, trump and his followers are more aligned with leaders he admires and is clearly envious of; trump regards Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orban, and Nicolás Maduro as great world leaders to be applauded and emulated.
Trump, cowardly and treasonous Republi-cons in Congress, Musk and other billionaire MAGA benefactors, and the millions of MAGA, hate filled sheeple, and most importantly, a majority of extreme right supreme court justices, have failed American Democracy on all three of Washington’s governing principles.
The MAGA Republi-cons in the U.S. Senate could have stopped trump, at any time in his 5 year reign of Anti-American terrorism, and then failed to convict him at his two impeachments. The supreme court could have reigned in trump, instead, they gave him free rein to subvert the Department of Justice’s attempts to hold him accountable for his crimes and also ruled to allow him to commit even more consequential malfeasances if he’s returned to the White House.
Numerous journalists and news organizations have attempted to shine a light through the trump smoke-screen of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and countless lies he used to subvert, the Grand Old Party, the conservative movement and MAGA-ward Christians. We know what trump accomplished in his first term. Above all, he attempted to overthrow our Democracy and Democratic institutions, and hired government hating, self-serving like-minded operatives to turn over federal and state power to the rich and powerful, to fossil fuel and extractive benefactors and to enemies foreign and domestic. No opportunity to enrich himself and his friends and family was left untapped. And we know what trump and the MAGA republi-cons in congress would inflict on America and the world if they get control of the White House and the congress. More on the order of massive budget busting tax cuts for the ultra-rich and tax dodging corporations, 80% of which will go, as before, to the top 1%.
But a second trump administration will be operating in “Katie bar the door” territory, thanks to the SCOTUS.
MAGA operatives published their plans in a 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides.
FactCheck.org®A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center enlightens: “Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.”
“It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”
“The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.”
“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.
Government ‘efficiency’: Project 2025 proposes cutting federal spending and firing “supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats.” (Separately, Trump has praised businessman Elon Musk for firing employees, and floated the idea of putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.)
“The project recommends privatizing government functions, including the National Weather Service, Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as eliminating the Department of Education and scores of programs, bureaus and offices throughout government. The project also calls for removing the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The courts have blocked the rule from taking effect.”
“As for other departments, the project calls for the “wholesale overhaul” of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, and a return “to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget” at the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department overhaul would include “a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.”
“One frequent target for cuts are offices and programs that promote clean energy and monitor or mitigate the effects of climate change.”
“For example, the project calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts research and issues reports on climate change. Project 2025 says “many” of NOAA’s functions can be “eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
“Social welfare programs: Project 2025 cites fraud and waste in safety net programs and calls for eliminating or reducing basic benefits for low-income individuals and families.”
“For Medicaid, Project 2025 proposes adding work requirements for beneficiaries and “time limits or lifetime caps … to disincentivize permanent dependence.” The health insurance program for low-income Americans covered nearly 74 million people in May, according to the latest data.”
“The conservative plan also calls for tightening work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and changing the eligibility requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was created by the overhaul of the welfare system in 1996. New eligibility requirements would also reduce the number of students served by the national school breakfast and lunch programs — which were described in the book as “inefficient, wasteful” programs.”
“Project 2025 also seeks to incentivize at-home child care. “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” the plan states.”
“The plan calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that funds education, health and social services programs for low-income children under 5 years old.”
I would personally like to thank all the critical thinking patriots – journalists, activists, fact based news organizations and others, for helping America to think critically about who’s attempting to turn our Democratic Republic over to anti-Democratic autocrats, self-serving kleptocrats, theocrats, misogynists, white national racists and fascists. They’ve gallantly tried to help turn the page on America’s trump presidential nightmare.
Hundreds of true conservative, Eisenhower and Regan Republican party faithful, who’ve been driven out of the party, or fled for their lives, have advocated for and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in this consequential election. There are Republican’s for Harris, scientists for Harris, historian’s for Harris, Puerto Rican’s for Harris, Dad’s for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Mom’s for Harris and probably dozens that I haven’t heard about.
Some, like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and others, have went further and endorsed Democrats running against election denying trump apologists and January 6th sympathizers in congress. Many tens or hundreds of thousands have resigned themselves to vote against their long lost party. Virtually everyone who worked for trump in his administration have declared they would refuse to endorse or vote for trump in 2024.
trump, fearing another lost election, has become more unhinged from political reality. The MAGA rally lies and campaign promises have become more outrageous by the day. The twice impeached, 4 times indicted, thrice convicted felon, can’t help but envision himself spending time in a federal prison at the ripe old age of 80. If he loses, odds are favoring him fleeing the country before the Justice Department overcomes the $100 million dollars he’s spent trying to subvert a just reckoning. Also if he loses the election, the campaign faithful piggy-bank will dry up and he’ll be forced to spend his own dwindling wealth on his many legal defenses.
trump’s campaign rhetoric becomes darker and more ominous by the day. Aside from immigrants eating cats and dogs, something that should not even be repeated, trump blames immigrants for every crime, malady, immorality, and unfairness imposed on real white Christian citizens.
Kamala, on the other hand, preaches joy, inclusion, unity and optimism. Her message is somehow getting through the right-wing MAGA-phones, republi-con congressional treason and obfuscation, foreign interference, social media conspiracies, and trump’s fantasized, Democratic dystopian future.
Although Jeffrey Preston Bezos, American business magnate and oligarch best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, decided to block a Washington Post endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, most of the Post’s journalists have voiced their choices in the election, through their reporting and writings. “Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” It’s too bad that More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the paper. Don’t blame the messenger.
I, on the other hand, am not afraid of endorsing Kamala and Tim to bring America back from the abyss. I’m a Veteran who served my country for 3 years in the Army, in a nuclear missile artillery battalion. We had our missiles aimed at the Soviets and they had theirs aimed at us. I think I fell asleep 60 years ago, just woke up and nothing has changed. We’re still butting heads with the Russkies. We were required to have secret clearances to serve in our Pershing unit. We had monthly seminars from intelligence officers on the necessity of protecting secrets and documents, especially when we were out in public. We couldn’t even have a camera near the military Kaserne. They found a camera on one soldier and we never heard from him again. It shocks myself and fellow veterans how trump abused the national trust by illegally taking highly classified government secrets and documents from government intelligence agencies, and then refusing to turn them over when ordered by the courts, and also by recklessly storing them in a public bathroom. A president who betrays his country and his oath of office should not be returned to the White House. I can’t believe how any Veteran could vote for trump.
As a member of a dozen or so unions and working in manufacturing and construction, I vote for the folks who valiantly fought to stem the flight of manufacturing jobs offshore. Those were all Democrats, including Joe Biden, Three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and many other Democrats. The republi-cons in congress greased the pathways and fought for tax incentives for corporations to offshore high-paying middle class jobs.
trump and J.D. Vance have already proposed trying to overturn the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administrations Chips and Science Act. “The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion. The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China.
“When the CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022, it had bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both political parties hailed the law’s importance for reviving US chip-making capacity in the face of China’s growing influence in the semiconductor sector.”
“But in the final days of this presidential election cycle, the law has become a point of contention between the political parties, putting its future in doubt.”
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who voted against the CHIPS Act, drew criticism after suggesting he would consider repealing the program under the Trump administration
“Analysts estimated that the act incentivized between 25 and 50 separate potential projects, with total projected investments of $160–200 billion and 25,000–45,000 new jobs.”
How can any laborer, union member or otherwise, vote for trump and his anti-labor supporters in congress, who overwhelmingly vote against labor issues at every chance.
President Biden, Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and the Democratic party as a whole, are strong supporters of labor and labor unions.
The Democratic party, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have always, and will always fight for women’s reproductive freedom and the right to make their own healthcare decisions, and to have access to safe and legal abortions. Harris wants to restore Roe v. Wade, which protects abortion up until the time of fetal viability or about 22 weeks. The vast majority of voters agree with her; 89%, think this election will have an impact on abortion rights, and 61% said it will have a “major” impact.
If trump and his MAGA Christian supporters regain control of the White House, a national abortion ban will be at the top of their to-do lists.
For all these reasons, and the fact that trump is the absolute worst, most vile inhabitant of the White House in U.S. history, I believe the Democrats and Kamala Harris will prevail in this election and will be able to turn the page on this ugly and divisive period in our history. As she says, we’re not going back. I just hope that a large resounding victory, might force the republi-cons to alter their anti-Democratic mind set.
So where does that leave the MAGA republi-cons and the unholy, un Christ-like prosperity Christians who went all in on trump’s campaign of grievance, revenge and retribution? They ignored the hundreds of red flags, the habitual lies, the rampant self-serving, the crimes, the indiscretions, the flagrant immorality, and the daily un-presidential conduct. Millions of true and faithful conservative Republicans have fled the party, or the party has left them in it’s toxic wake. Are there enough influential, authentic, conservative Republican’s like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney and others, capable of resurrecting the Grand Old Party, or it it destined for the waste bin of history.
trump, Christian Nationalists, and MAGAnians in congress, believe scaring their faithful out of their wits, and holding together their coalition of disaffected, grievance based bro-crew faithful is enough to win trump a second term and keep him out of prison.
$170 million has already been wagered on this election, an abomination causing the founding fathers to turn over in their graves. Who will lose their political shirts.
I believe they’re wrong on all counts. The others, and especially women in every town and burb, in every corner of the nation are not settling for returning to the dark ages of female subjugation and purgatory. The women of America might just save the Republic.
The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
New York Times Editorial Board Rips Apart Donald Trump in Single Paragraph
Liam Archacki – November 2, 2024
Brian Snyder
The editorial board of The New York Times just eviscerated Donald Trump in a single paragraph.
The piece, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president during the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.
Rhetorically matter-of-fact, the piece succinctly lays out many of the reasons Trump’s critics think his second term would be disastrous for the country—the implicit point being that nobody really needs a lengthy review of all Trump’s actions; everyone already knows what he’s about.
Last week, the Times’ editorial board published a longer and nearly as scathing article urging voters not to elect Trump.
“Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency,” the piece reads. “We have two words for American voters: Believe him.”
Many major publications have endorsed Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
Another even lengthier editorial called Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, “the only patriotic choice for president,” citing Harris’ vow to unite the country and describing Trump as “morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest.”
Presidential endorsements from newspapers have been a point of debate in recent political discourse after The Washington Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The decision prompted multiple resignations from the Post’s editorial board, and significant criticism from throughout the journalism world.
The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also controversially ordered its editorial board not to endorse a presidential candidate.
Joining the Times’ in endorsing Harris are other major publications such as The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others. The New York Post endorsed Trump.
