What I Truly Expect if an Unconstrained Trump Retakes Power
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist – November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking why, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, our bags aren’t packed. “It’s tempting to begin trolling my anti-Trump friends by asking if they are liquefying assets, getting passports in order, etc.?” Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, posted on X. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similarly snarky: “So fascism is here and you’re not doing what people did when fascism showed up, which is contemplating emigration in terror or joining armed resistance.”
These jabs seem meant to mock the dread many of us are living in. But despite their bad faith, they’ve lodged in my mind, especially during the late-night insomniac hours when I’m up panicking about what’s going to happen on Tuesday. They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.
Many people I know who have the privilege to do so are in fact making contingency plans; friends whose family histories entitle them to European passports have secured them. But while I’m having lots of half-idle conversations about emigration, I’m not living my life as if either tyranny or exile is imminent, even though I believe, in keeping with assessments by prominent generals who’ve worked closely with Trump, that he’s a fascist.
Partly, I just feel frozen with horror. This awful liminal period is like waiting for the results of a biopsy, and it’s hard to reason clearly about the future until there’s a prognosis. Beyond that, a lesson of modern autocracy is that ordinary life, or at least a diminished version of it, can go on even as democratic hopes are slowly strangled.
My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.
If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past. This is what I envision when I think of MAGA fascism: people demonized as “vermin” being dragged off to camps, while dissent is violently crushed by the armed forces. I don’t know how anyone who has listened to Trump and those around him can dismiss this scenario as hysterical.
There will, I assume, be persecutions of Trump’s more high-profile enemies. We know that Trump, in his first term, harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ex-president and his allies have been clear about their intention to end the independence of the Justice Department. Mitt Romney is taking seriously the possibility that Trump will use the government to go after him, telling The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, “I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word.” Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and President Biden until he retired last year, told the journalist Bob Woodward that he fears Trump could have him recalled to duty and court-martialed for disloyalty. Anyone significant enough to threaten Trump could find themselves targeted.
And it won’t be only the powerful who need fear attacks by the MAGA state. Just look at those who’ve found themselves in the cross hairs of America First Legal, an organization headed by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, which The New York Times called “a policy harbinger for a second Trump term.” It has sued charities that help women pay for abortions, Maryland schools that “expose children to radical gender ideology,” and “woke” corporations — including the N.F.L. — trying to increase diversity. In a second Trump term, Miller and his allies will be able to deploy the power of agencies including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their foes.
Often, of course, they won’t have to; we’re already seeing troubling signs that some plutocrats are obeying in advance. The Washington Post’s decision to quash its editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris shocked so many of the paper’s readers because it seemed, despite the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ insistence to the contrary, like an act of corrupt capitulation.
As The Post itself has reported, Bezos’ companies have billions of dollars in government contracts at stake, and during the last Trump administration, the president went out of his way to punish the billionaire for Post coverage he didn’t like. In 2019, The Post reported, Marc Short, then Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told leaders of Bezos’ space exploration company, “You have a Washington Post problem.”
The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch. By the end of Trump’s first term, when the president was pressuring state officials to change vote totals, staffing the highest levels of government with thugs and lackeys, and, eventually, siccing a vigilante mob on the Capitol, we’d already gone farther on the path to authoritarianism than I’d once thought possible. The place we left off at in January 2021 will, in all likelihood, be the starting point for a Trump administration in 2025.
Johnny McEntee, who started as a Trump bag carrier, had by the end of Trump’s presidency become so powerful that some referred to him as the “deputy president.” As The Atlantic reported, he turned the Presidential Personnel Office, an agency in charge of hiring and firing political appointees, “into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”
Now a leader of Project 2025, McEntee will most likely have a major role in staffing a new Trump White House. He recently called — with the kidding-not-kidding sneer common to MAGA — for scrapping the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote.
Days out from the election, pointing out the potential nightmares ahead feels like screaming into a void. Trump’s deep contempt for liberal democracy is, as they say, baked in. When Milley called Trump “fascist to the core,” and when Gen. John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, said that he wanted to rule as a dictator, the political debate wasn’t about whether they were correct, but about whether their words would matter. (The consensus seemed to be no.) So those of us who recognize what Trump is lurch forward to Tuesday, a coin flip away from losing what we thought was our democratic birthright, trying and often failing to think through the aftermath of the unthinkable.
But even if the unthinkable happens, it won’t happen all at once. Hannah Arendt wrote, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” about how the dislocations of World War I created a mass of stateless people who lived “outside the pale of the law.” Seeing these people deprived of human rights, those secure in their citizenship did not generally worry about their own. “It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule,” wrote Arendt.
My kids keep asking anxiously what will happen if Trump wins. I tell them that their lives won’t change, that we’ll have to try to stand up for others who are more vulnerable, but that we ourselves will be fine. The last two words I only say in my head: “For now.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist– November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
What does it mean to say that “democracy is on the ballot” on Election Day?
In her speech on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., delivered from the same place near the White House where Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris said it was a question of whether Americans “have a country rooted in freedom for every American” or whether they have one “ruled by chaos and division.”
It was a question, she said later in her remarks, of whether the United States would “submit to the will of another petty tyrant” and become a “vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
The vice president was not wrong. Election Day will be a referendum on whether we want an autocrat in office — a plebiscite, of sorts, on the very idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people. But Harris’s answer is incomplete. Also at stake on Tuesday, when it comes to the question of American democracy, is the future of the Constitution.
Will it continue into the 21st century as Frederick Douglass’s “glorious liberty document,” or will it legitimize an American-style authoritarianism as a new “covenant with death,” to use the words of Douglass’s erstwhile abolitionist ally, William Lloyd Garrison.
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”
The framers’ Constitution would tamp down on and bind the democratic energies of those Americans who thought their revolution stood for something more egalitarian — more revolutionary — than what its leaders and leading figures imagined. It would channel democratic energy through divided institutions backstopped by counter-majoritarian rules and requirements, each designed to make it as difficult as possible to turn popular energy into governing majorities.
In short, the founders built a limited, exclusionary government centered on elite management of the people’s affairs. But by the start of the 19th century, it was clear that the people would not allow the Constitution to contain their democratic impulses and aspirations. The American Republic would not be as limited or as exclusive as the framers had envisioned.
Broad literacy and the wide availability of newspapers, pamphlets and books brought a vibrant culture of political debate and contestation. The emergence of organized political factions and, later, formal political parties brought large numbers of Americans into the political process, transforming the very nature of the union.
As Americans democratized their culture, their Constitution followed. They reshaped their constitutional order around political parties and embraced mass political participation as an integral part of the system.
You can see the vibrancy of this early form of American democracy, as exclusive as it still was, in the multitude of movements and minor parties that emerged throughout the antebellum period. There were Know-Nothings and Anti-Masons and Free Soilers, Liberty Party partisans and groups like the Wide Awakes.
“In America,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his tour of Jacksonian America, “democracy is given over to its own inclinations. Its pace is natural and all its movements are free.”
Out of the contradictions of America’s nascent democracy came a catastrophic civil war. And out of the practical and ideological demands of that war came the most expansive and, to that date, most inclusive vision yet for American democracy, encoded in a set of amendments that reconstituted the union as a nation. The 13th Amendment abolished chattel slavery. The 14th Amendment enshrined birthright citizenship and guaranteed the “privileges and immunities” of that citizenship. And the 15th Amendment outlawed racial discrimination in voting, giving Congress all the authority it needed to enforce that prohibition.
It should be said here that it wasn’t simply the act of amendment that changed and further democratized the Constitution. A political document as much as a legal one, its character and meaning are realized as much through practice and the everyday challenge of making it work as they are in law and legislation. Which is to say that if the Constitution that emerged out of the Civil War was more democratic than the one that helped produce that war, a good part of that was because Americans themselves, like the freed people of the South, fought to realize their democratic aspirations.
They were joined, in subsequent decades, by Americans of many other backgrounds. Over the next century and through great effort, American democracy would grow in fits and starts to include women and a broad variety of immigrant groups. And while Black Americans would suffer under the long night of Jim Crow, they would continue their struggle for equality, inclusion and recognition.
We were not given a democratic Constitution; we made one. We unraveled the elitist and hierarchical Constitution of the founders to build something that works for us — that conforms to our expectations.
But nothing is permanent. What’s made can be unmade. And at the foundation of Donald Trump’s campaign is a promise to unmake our democratic Constitution.
Consider his priorities. He wants to use the law enforcement arm of the federal government to harass his opponents and exact “retribution” on his political enemies.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said last year. In September he threatened “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” with “long-term prison sentences” if they are found guilty of voter fraud, which Trump seems to equate with any form of political opposition.
Trump also wants to deport tens of millions of people from the United States, which will inevitably include American citizens, whether they’re the children of undocumented immigrants or students demonstrating in support of Palestinians. “Immediately after taking the oath of office, I will launch the largest mass deportation program in American history,” Trump said at an event in Texas last week.
To accomplish this, the former president intends to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain and deport noncitizens from countries at war with the United States. The idea, if it needs to be spelled out, is to classify undocumented immigration as an act of war and use the law to remove foreign nationals from the United States without due process. To obtain the personnel necessary to carry out deportations on such a large, national scale, Trump would deputize local and state law enforcement as well as deploy the National Guard.
It is not just that Trump would attempt these power grabs — which would, on their own, introduce a level and degree of state repression heretofore unseen in American history — but that he would have the support of a legal and political movement eager to constitutionalize his actions as a legitimate exercise of presidential power. Trump would act in an authoritarian manner, and his allies would then write that authoritarianism into the Constitution.
That, in fact, is what the Supreme Court did in Trump v. Hawaii, when it turned a blind eye to the clear evidence of racial and religious bigotry driving the former president’s “travel ban” (neé Muslim ban) and freed the administration to impose its restrictions under a theory of broad (or perhaps a better word would be “credulous”) deference to the executive branch.
The court took a similar approach this year in Trump v. United States, when it gave the president a broad grant of criminal immunity from prosecution for “official acts.” Rather than reckon with the overwhelming evidence that Trump abused the office of the presidency in an illegal effort to overturn the results of an election he lost, what is in effect the Republican majority on the court turned the plain meaning of the Constitution on its head, freeing future presidents — including, perhaps, a future President Trump — to abuse their power under cover of law.
More so than most of his predecessors, Trump strained against the limits of the presidency. He never understood that the office was bound by higher law — that his power wasn’t absolute. He never understood that he was an officer of the Constitution and a servant of the people; he never understood that he was a subject and not the sovereign.
It was because of this fundamental misunderstanding — itself tied to his bottomless solipsism — that Trump tried to twist and turn the presidency into an extension of his ego. To the extent he failed to accomplish this, it was only because he was stymied by those around him — officials who chose to honor their commitment to the Constitution over the interests of one man. Those same officials now warn that if he is given another term in office, he will rule as a tyrant.
America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
“Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy,” the historian Sean Wilentz writes in “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”:
It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.
Most Americans have lived only in a world where democracy was secure, where democracy was assumed. On Tuesday we’ll decide if we want to stay in that world or leave it behind.
Vice President Kamala Harris, before tens of thousands at the Ellipse near the White House, said Tuesday night: “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised. A nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us. And fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”
Hmm. Hard to tease out the nuanced distinction between Harris’ graceful rhetoric about the greatness of our country and Trump’s “We suck.” But the difference is there, I promise.
Kamala Harris offers unity and inspiration as Donald Trump divides and demeans
Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris campaigns at the Ellipse near the White House on Oct. 29, 2024, to give her closing arguments before Election Day.
The former president was coming off a weekend rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City that featured vile racism, profanity and enough hate speech to, I would hope, anger God. The “giant garbage can” line has become a part of his schtick, as he paints America as a crime-ridden nation overrun by immigrant gang members, rapists and murderers.
It’s all hogwash, of course, but it’s all he’s got. That and the lies he emits like a flatulent prune-farm dog.
Harris spoke from the same place where Trump, on Jan. 6, 2021, fomented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. The location was wholly intentional, as was her infinitely more mature and unifying message.
“America, for too long we have been consumed with too much division, chaos, and mutual distrust,” she said. “And it can be easy then to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way. … It is time to stop pointing fingers. We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division.”
Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff wave to supporters after her presidential campaign speech at the Ellipse near the White House on Oct. 29, 2024.
Chaos and mutual distrust? Conflict, fear and division?
What could she be talking about?
Trump says fellow Americans represent ‘a great evilness’
Earlier in the day, Trump said of Democrats: “This is a sick group of people, I’m telling you. There’s a great evilness. You know, we want to come together as a country, but there’s a lot of evil there.”
At his night rally in Allentown, he continued going after Democrats: “Who the hell can win an election with open borders, transgender everybody, men playing in women’s sports? … Allow millions of people through an open border totally unvetted, totally unchecked, they come from parts unknown, they come from countries you’ve never even heard of, and then you find out that they came from jails and mental institutions, no, no, they cheat like hell and it’s a damn disgrace.”
Former President Donald Trump campaigns for reelection on Oct. 29, 2024, in Allentown, Pa.
Oh, I see, that’s the fear and chaos and divsion Harris referenced.
After hearing Trump’s rambling, I wish she had said, “We have to stop pointing fingers, and also stop using run-on sentences filled with weird fabricated nonsense.”
Harris, by contrast, said this from the Ellipse: “The fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within. They are family, neighbors, classmates, co-workers. They are fellow Americans, and as Americans, we rise and fall together.”
She also said: “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
Harris’ humility vs. Trump’s hubris
Harris showed humility – something Trump is allergic to – during her speech: “Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes.”
Trump, earlier in the day Tuesday, described people who may or not exist allegedly telling him how wonderful he is: “They said he’s the greatest president we’ve ever had. And then one of them said, ‘Sir, you’re the greatest president of my lifetime.’ … I said, ‘Does that include Abe Lincoln?’ Yes, sir. ‘Does that include George Washington?’ Yes, sir. I said, ‘That’s good.’ ”
The differences are stark as day and night
Harris said: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep people divided and afraid of each other. That is who he is.”
Fact check: True.
She continued, “But America, I am here to say: That’s not who we are.”
That part will be determined next week. It’s grace vs. the garbage can.
Column: Listen to Trump’s former aides: He’d be far more dangerous in a second term
Doyle McManus – October 28, 2024
Donald Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, any time he wanted,” his former chief of staff said. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
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Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, broke a long silence and denounced his former boss as a man who fits “the general definition of fascist.”
The conservative, normally taciturn Kelly was moved to speak out after Trump condemned former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Adam B. Schiff and other Democrats as “the enemy from within” and said he would deploy troops onto the nation’s streets to suppress opposition.
“Using the military on, to go after, American citizens is … a very, very bad thing,” Kelly told the New York Times. “Even to say it for political purposes to get elected, I think it’s a very, very bad thing.”
Kelly wasn’t the only former Trump aide to warn that the GOP candidate shouldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. Dozens of people who worked in senior positions in the Trump administration have chimed in. Gen. Mark A. Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called him “fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to the country.” Former national security advisor John Bolton said he was “unfit to be president.”
Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, any time he wanted,” Kelly said.
Did those warnings from authoritative sources — eminent figures Trump once appointed to high-ranking jobs — have any effect on his voters as election day approaches?
Readers of this column won’t be surprised to learn that I agree wholeheartedly with Kelly, Milley, Bolton and their colleagues: Trump is a danger to our democracy.
He neither understands nor respects the Constitution. He yearns openly to rule the way China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin do, as an autocrat answerable to no one. “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist,” he said admiringly of Xi.
Some, his hardcore base, agree with everything the former president says right down to the coarsest insults.
Others admit to qualms about Trump’s style but say they support him because they hope he can bring back the low-inflation prosperity of his first two years in office.
But a third group, which includes many independents as well as moderate Republicans, is the most perplexing. Not only do they dislike Trump’s style, they worry about some of his positions: his desire to unravel Obamacare, his threats to deploy the military against domestic opponents, his indiscriminate tariffs, his plan to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists.
But many say they don’t think Trump would — or could — actually make those things happen.
In a focus group last week organized for NBC News by the public opinion consulting firm Engagious, for example, an Atlanta home inspector named Kevin said he worried that Trump’s tariffs would make consumer prices go up.
“It’s a bad idea,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to really go anywhere. I think it’ll cost too much money. It’ll be too difficult politically.” He’ll probably vote for Trump anyway, he said.
Pollsters have called this Trump’s “believability gap.” Voters hear what he says, but they discount it — they think that “he’s just talking” or that surely somebody will stop his more outlandish ideas.
But there are two problems with those Trump voters’ self-comforting rationalizations.
The first is that Trump already has a track record of trying to do most of those things. He tried to repeal Obamacare, but a handful of moderate Republican senators got in his way. He issued an executive order that would have enabled him to replace civil servants with political appointees, but time ran out on his term before he could use it.
And when demonstrators assembled across the street from the White House, he urged military officials to deploy troops and shoot protesters in the legs — but Gen. Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper stopped him.
“When he starts talking about using the military against people … I think we should take that very seriously,” Olivia Troye, who served as an aide to Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, told my colleague Noah Bierman recently. “He actually talked about shooting Americans. I was there … I witnessed that.”
The second problem with the “believability gap” is that if Trump gets back to the White House, he will be more likely to get his way.
He has frequently complained that he made a mistake in his first term by appointing aides like Kelly, Milley and Bolton, who believed it was their duty to restrain the president’s ill-considered impulses. If he gets a second term, he’ll surround himself with more people who will do his bidding without raising pesky questions.
He’ll run into less opposition from other institutions too.
Republicans in Congress, who occasionally restrained Trump when he was president, have purged most of the moderates from their ranks. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is retiring. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, an occasional Trump critic, will no longer be his party’s leader in the Senate.
Federal courts may be more hospitable, too, thanks to judges Trump appointed his first time around.
So moderate Republicans and independents who are tempted to vote for Trump because they hope he will lower taxes or improve the economy should think long and hard about the risks of that bargain.
When Trump says he’ll order prosecutors to go after Joe Biden and “the Pelosis,” he means it. When Trump says he’ll punish businesses like Amazon if he doesn’t like their owners’ views, he means it. When Trump says he believes the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” he means it.
And this time, he would know better how to turn his wishes into reality. A second Trump term wouldn’t be a benign rerun of the first version. As his former aides are trying their best to warn us, it would be far worse.
Fact check: Debunking 16 false claims Trump made at Madison Square Garden
Daniel Dale, CNN – October 28, 2024
Former President Donald Trump repeated a series of false claims, many of which have long been debunked, about immigration and other subjects in his speech at a Sunday evening rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Here is a fact check of 16 false claims he made in the speech.
FEMA and North Carolina: Trump falsely claimed of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Helene: “They haven’t even responded in North Carolina. They haven’t even responded. There’s nobody, they don’t see any FEMA.” This is not even close to true; FEMA immediately responded to the disaster in North Carolina and said Friday that it had more than 1,700 staff deployed in the state. FEMA said on October 16 that it had approved more than $100 million in individual aid to North Carolina residents.
At a briefing in early October, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said, “We’re grateful for the quick actions and close communications that we have had with the president and with the FEMA team.” State emergency management director Will Ray said at the briefing: “We’re grateful for the support not just from the 22 states that have sent teams to support us but also from our FEMA team and other members of the federal family.”
FEMA and migrants: Trump falsely claimed that FEMA didn’t respond in North Carolina because “they spent their money on bringing in illegal migrants, so they didn’t have money for Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina.” He repeated, “They didn’t have any money for them. They spent all of their money on bringing in illegal immigrants.”
FEMA did not spend its disaster relief money on undocumented people. Congress appropriated the agency more than $35 billion in disaster relief funds for fiscal 2024, according to official FEMA statistics, and also gave FEMA a much smaller pool of money, $650 million in fiscal 2024, for a program aimed at helping communities shelter migrants. Contrary to Trump’s claims, these are two separate pots of funds.
Trump’s favorite immigration chart: Trump repeated his long-debunked false claim that his favorite chart about migration numbers at the southern border — which he had fortunately turned his head to look at when a gunman tried to kill him at a campaign rally in July — has an arrow at the bottom pointing to “the day I left office,” when, he said, the US had “the lowest illegal immigration that we’ve ever had in recorded history.”
The chart doesn’t show that. In fact, the arrow actually points to April 2020, when Trump still had more than eight months left in his term and when global migration had slowed to a trickle because of the Covid-19 pandemic. After hitting a roughly three-year low (not an all-time low) in April 2020, migration numbers at the southern border increased each month through the end of Trump’s term.
Harris’ border role: Trump repeated these false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris: “She was the border czar. She was in charge of the border.” Harris was never “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate, and she was never in charge of border security, a responsibility of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. In reality, President Joe Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.
Migrants, cities and towns: Trump repeated his vow that, if elected, he would liberate every “city and town that has been invaded and conquered” by migrants. This is nonsense; no US town has been conquered by migrants.
Migrants in Springfield, Ohio: Trump falsely claimed: “You take a look at Springfield, Ohio, think of this – where, think of this, where 30,000 illegal migrants were put into a town of 50,000 people.”
This is false in more than one way. While we don’t know the immigration status of each and every Haitian immigrant in Springfield, the community is, on the whole, in the country lawfully. The Springfield city website says, “YES, Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program. Once here, immigrants are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS).” Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wrote in a New York Times op-ed about Springfield in September that the Haitian immigrants “are there legally” and that, as a Trump-Vance supporter, he is “saddened” by the candidates’ disparagement of “the legal migrants living in Springfield.”
And while there is no official tally of the number of immigrants in Springfield, Trump’s “30,000” figure exceeds local estimates. The website for the city of Springfield says there are an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants in the county that includes Springfield, where the total population is about 138,000. Chris Cook, the county’s health commissioner, said in July that his team estimated the best number was 10,000 to 12,000 Haitian residents in the county.
“Missing” migrant children: Trump repeated his regular false claim that, because of Harris, “325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves. They came through the open border and they’re gone. Their parents will most likely never see them again, almost any of them.”
Trump was wildly distorting federal statistics.
He appeared to be referring to an August report from the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General, which said ICE reported more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear as scheduled for immigration court hearings after being released or transferred out of custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – a period that, notably, includes two years and four months under the Trump administration. The report also said that 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children during this period were not given notices to appear in court.
The report said that ICE has “no assurances” these children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not definitively assert that any of them were being exploited – let alone that almost all of them have vanished for good.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN in a message this summer: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. 32,000 kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the OIG are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”
Trump’s rally crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania: Trump repeated his wild exaggeration that there were “101,000 people” at the campaign rally he held earlier this month at the same Pennsylvania site where a gunman tried to kill him in July. CNN affiliate KDKA in Pittsburgh reported that the Secret Service put the crowd at 24,000 people, while the Trump-supporting sheriff of Blair County, Pennsylvania, James Ott, said in his speech at the rally itself (more than three hours before Trump took the stage) that he was looking out at “21,000-plus people.”
Trump and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: Trump repeated his false claim that he “ended” the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, adding, “It was dead.” Trump did not kill the pipeline. He signed sanctions related to the project into law about three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already about 90% complete, and the state-owned Russian company behind the project announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming.
Trump and the defeat of ISIS: Trump repeated his false claim that “it took us like four weeks” to defeat the ISIS terror group even though generals had told him it would take five years. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency.
Trump and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that, when he was president, “we had no inflation.” Cumulative inflation during Trump’s presidency was about 8%.
Harris and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that Harris’ votes to break legislative ties in the US Senate “caused the worst inflation in the history of our country.” Aside from the claim about Harris’ role, it’s not true the US has had its worst inflation ever during the Biden administration; Trump could fairly say that the US inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920. (And the rate has since plummeted. The most recent available inflation rate at the time Trump spoke here was 2.4% in September.)
Harris and law enforcement: Trump touted his endorsements from police officers and law enforcement organizations, then falsely said of Harris: “I don’t think they have one cop. They’re looking for just one cop.” In early September, 101 current and former law enforcement officials, including active sheriffs, police chiefs and other senior officers, released a letter endorsing Harris. A Michigan sheriff gave a televised speech endorsing Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August, as did a former Capitol Police officer who was injured when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s border wall: The former president repeated his false claim that he “built 571 miles of wall” on the southern border. That’s a significant exaggeration; official government data shows 458 miles were built under Trump — including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers.
Trump and the military: The former president repeated his false claim that “I rebuilt our military, in total — rebuilt all of our military.”
Trump has previously made clear that he is claiming to have replaced all of the military’s equipment. “This claim is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” Todd Harrison, an expert on the defense budget and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told CNN in November 2023, after Trump made a version of the claim.
Harrison said in an email at the time: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term. I just ran the numbers for military aircraft, and about 88% of the aircraft in the U.S. military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighters in particular, we still have F-16s and F- 15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.”
The 2020 election: Trump repeated his false claim that his opponents “used Covid to cheat” in the 2020 election. There is no basis for the claim that the Democrats cheated; many states, including states with Republican election chiefs and Republican governors, modified their election procedures because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Fact check: 32 false claims Trump made to Joe Rogan
Daniel Dale, CNN – October 27, 2024
Donald Trump sat down Friday with prominent podcast host Joe Rogan for a conversational interview that ran for nearly three hours — and the former president delivered his standard bombardment of false claims, at least 32 in all.
Many of those false claims are lies that were debunked months or even years ago. The claims spanned a variety of topics, including immigration policy, environmental and energy policy, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Trump’s record in office, Vice President Kamala Harris, crowd sizes, and how schools deal with transgender children.
Here is a fact check of 32 false claims Trump made to Rogan. This is not intended as a complete list of the inaccurate statements Trump uttered in the interview; with just over a week to go until Election Day, we were unable to look into every dubious assertion he made.
Immigration
Migrants and murderers: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that “we had 13,099 murderers dropped in our country over the last three years.” In reality, as the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have noted, that official figure is about immigrants with homicide convictions in the US today who entered the country over decades, including during Trump’s own administration, not over the past three years or under the Biden administration. You can read more here.
Trump’s border wall: The former president falsely claimed, “You know, I built 570 miles of wall.” That’s a significant exaggeration; official government data shows 458 miles were built under Trump — including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers.
Harris’ border role: Trump repeated a regular false claim about Harris: “She was in charge of the border.” She was not and is not; Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the Biden administration official in charge of border security. In reality, President Joe Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.
The number of migrants: Trump claimed that at least “21 million” people have illegally crossed the border during the Biden administration. Through September, the country had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during the Biden administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country; even adding in so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2 million, there’s no way the total is “21 million.”
Elections, campaigns and crowds
The outcome of the 2020 election: Trump repeated his lie that he won the 2020 election, falsely claiming, “I won that second election so easy.” He lost, fair and square, to Biden, who beat Trump 306-232 in the Electoral College and earned over 7 million more votes than Trump.
The legitimacy of the 2020 election: Trump made various specific false assertions about the 2020 election, claiming it was “crooked”; that his opponents cheated using the guise of the Covid-19 pandemic; and, vaguely, that it was marred by “old-fashioned ballot-screwing.” All of this is baseless.
Polling in 2016: Trump told a story about how, he said, a Washington Post/ABC News poll of Wisconsin during his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton showed him “down 17 points the day before the election,” but he knew it was wrong because of the size of his crowds, and he ended up winning the state: “I was down 17 points in Wisconsin and I won; it’s crooked stuff.” This story is false; the poll showing him down 17 the week of the election came during his 2020 race against Biden, and he lost Wisconsin that year — though by less than one percentage point.
The 2020 election and Wisconsin: Trump falsely claimed, “If you take a look at Wisconsin, they virtually admitted that the election was rigged, robbed and stolen.” This did not happen, “virtually” or otherwise; while some Wisconsin Republicans certainly support Trump’s claim that the election was rigged and stolen, the state’s elections authorities have not made such assertions — and as PolitiFact previously reported, even Republican-led election reviews did not find that Trump won the state.
An election ruling in Virginia: Trump falsely claimed that, just before he walked in for the Friday interview, there was a ruling in a legal “case where they found thousands of illegal ballots.” This case did not involve “illegal ballots”; rather, a judge ruled that Virginia had purged voter registrations from its rolls too close to Election Day. You can read more here.
Grocery stores and identification: Calling for strict voter identification laws, Trump spoke of how identification is required in other circumstances, saying, “When you go to a grocery store, you give ID.” This was a little vaguer than his previous declarations that “you need” ID to buy groceries, but it’s nonsense nonetheless; few grocery shoppers are required to provide identification unless they are paying by check or buying alcohol, tobacco or certain medications.
A Carter commission and mail-in ballots: Trump repeated his false claim that a commission led by former President Jimmy Carter published a report whose “primary finding was you cannot have mail-in ballots.” Trump added, “The one thing with Jimmy Carter: He had a very strong commission. It was, no mail-in ballots.”
Though the commission Carter co-chaired was generally skeptical of mail-in ballots, calling absentee voting “the largest source of potential voter fraud,” it did not say, “You cannot have mail-in ballots,” as Trump claimed. In fact, its report highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections — noting that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.”
The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail (as well as early voting).
Trump’s Las Vegas crowd size: In his latest exaggeration about crowd sizes, Trump claimed there were “29,000 people” at his event the night prior. His rally Thursday night, in Las Vegas, was at an arena with a capacity under 19,000.
Trump’s McDonald’s crowd size: Trump falsely claimed that there were “28,000 people sitting around” the McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he held a publicity event last weekend in which he briefly performed some of the duties of an employee (the restaurant was closed to the public). This is fiction; while videos show there was a substantial pro-Trump crowd gathered in the vicinity of the restaurant, it is obvious that it didn’t approach 28,000. A local journalist on the scene, Tom Sofield, the publisher of Bucks County news outlets, wrote on social media Tuesday: “There were several thousand excited supporters nearby, but the figure wasn’t 25,000, as stated by the former president later.”
Harris’ schedule: Trump, criticizing Harris’ work ethic, falsely claimed she “took off yesterday” and “took off the day before,” and also that “she’s going to take off tomorrow or the next day.” Trump is entitled to argue that Harris isn’t campaigning hard, but she was not “off” or scheduled to be off any of these days. On Wednesday, she participated in a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania; on Thursday, she held a rally in Georgia; on Friday, she held a rally in Texas; on Saturday, she held a rally in Michigan; on Sunday, she is scheduled to make a series of campaign stops in Philadelphia.
Foreign policy
Trump and ISIS: Repeating one of his regular false claims, Trump said, “We defeated ISIS in record time. It was supposed to take years, and we did it in a matter of weeks.” The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency.
Obama and Kim Jong Un: Trump, touting his relationship with Kim Jong Un, revived his old false claim that the North Korean leader refused to meet with Barack Obama when the then-president sought a meeting: “They wouldn’t meet Obama. He (Obama) tried to meet. They wouldn’t even talk to him about it.”
There is no evidence that Obama ever sought a meeting with Kim. Independent experts on North Korea and former Obama officials told CNN in 2019 that the claim is fictional.
Who pays tariffs: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that, through tariffs, “I took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China.” US importers make the tariff payments, not China, and study after study has found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s tariffs on China.
Previous presidents and tariffs on China: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that no previous president had imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, saying, “Nobody took in 10 cents, not one other president.” The US was actually generating billions per year in revenue from tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since 1789. Trump’s predecessor, Obama, imposed additional tariffs on Chinese goods.
China and Taiwan: Trump repeated an exaggeration about China: “The day I left, they flew 28 bombers over the middle of Taiwan — 28 bombers.”
Trump was wrong about key details of this incident. On the third and fourth days of the Biden presidency, not the day Trump left office, China sent military planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone over the Taiwan Strait — not “over the middle of Taiwan,” a major difference. Also, the incident involved 28 Chinese planes but not “28 bombers.” The New York Times reported at the time that the Taiwanese military said eight Chinese bombers were involved; the other planes were fighters, anti-submarine aircraft and a reconnaissance plane.
And it’s worth noting that China also sent planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone during Trump’s presidency. In early 2021, Taiwan News reported that, according to a recent report funded by Taiwan’s government, “In 2020, the Chinese military violated Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) more times than in any year since 1996.”
Environment and energy
Global warming and sea level rise: Trump repeated a regular false claim minimizing the threat of climate change: “I watch these poor fools talking about, ‘Our oceans will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 500 years.’” The global average sea level is rising more per year than Trump claimed that unnamed concerned people say it will rise over 500 years; NASA reported in March that the global average sea-level rise in 2023 was 0.17 inches per year, more than double the rate in 1993.
Electric vehicle charging stations: Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration spent $9 billion on just eight electric vehicle charging stations: “They built the charger stations, right, in the Midwest. They built eight of them. They cost $9 billion.”
As FactCheck.org and others have noted, Trump was distorting news articles about the slow pace at which $7.5 billion in federal funds allocated for electric charging have been spent. The articles reported that, as of March, only eight charging stations had been built under the program (not all in the Midwest). The articles did not say that these stations had themselves cost the entire $7.5 billion, let alone $9 billion.
The number of charging stations built with this federal funding has increased since March. The Federal Highway Administration told USA Today that, as of October 11, 20 stations had been built with the money, with plans underway for more than 800 additional stations.
California and electricity: Trump, reviving his false claim about the stability of the electric system in California, said, “They want to go to all electric cars, but they have brownouts every weekend.” California does not have “brownouts every weekend.” A spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN in late August that the state had not had any outages because of electricity demand since 2020, and a spokesperson for the entity that manages the power grid for about 80% of the state said the same.
A LNG plant in Louisiana: Trump revived a false claim he repeatedlymade during his presidency, claiming that he “instantly” secured a key environmental permit to allow for the construction of a massive liquefied natural gas facility in Louisiana after the initiative had been on hold “for 14 years.” In fact, this facility was granted its key permits under the Obama administration, and its construction also began under Obama.
“To quote our friends at PolitiFact, what Trump said in this case qualifies as ‘pants on fire,’” Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates, said last year after Trump made the same claim. Molchanov said, “No one was ready to start drilling there, in 2017 or at any other point in time.”
There is no drilling infrastructure in place in the refuge; major oil companies have shown little interest in the site; and the seven leases the Biden administration eventually canceled were all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state entity that is not an oil company.
Trump’s record and history
Trump’s response to “lock her up” chants: Trump repeated his false claim that he “never said” the words “lock her up” when his supporters chanted that refrain about his 2016 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. He added, “I’d always go, ‘Take it easy. Just relax.’” In fact, Trump repeatedly said the words “lock her up” in both 2016 and 2020, and he also repeatedly called for Clinton’s imprisonment using other language.
Trump and Oprah: Trump repeated a false claim he has been making for at least 11 years, saying he appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television program during “one of her last shows” in “that final week.” In fact, Trump appeared about three and a half months before Winfrey’s show concluded, not during its star-studded final week.
Trump’s tax cuts: Repeating another regular false claim, the former president claimed that he signed the “biggest tax cuts in history.” Independent analyses have found that his tax-cut law was not the biggest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Supreme Court appointments: Trump touted the fact that he appointed three Supreme Court justices, then said, “Most people get none,” adding that “even if a president is in there for eight years, oftentimes they never have a chance.” This is false; no president who served for eight years did not get a chance to appoint a single Supreme Court justice. Only four presidents didn’t get a chance to appoint one justice to the Supreme Court, as PolitiFact previously reported, and three of them served for less than a full four-year term, while the other, Carter, served for four years.
Trump’s uncle and MIT: Trump repeated a false claim that his uncle John Trump, whom he has repeatedly invoked as evidence of the smarts of his family, was the “longest-serving” professor in the history of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. John Trump was one of the longest-serving professors at MIT, but not the very longest; the school told Newsweek early this year that at least 10 other people were on the faculty for longer.
Miscellaneous
Schools and transgender children: Trump repeated his false claim that schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without parental consent: “Who would want to have — there’s so many — the transgender operations: Where they’re allowed to take your child when he goes to school and turn him into a male — to a female — without parental consent.”
There is no evidence that schools in any part of the United States have sent children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ approval, or performed unapproved such surgeries on-site; none of that is “allowed” anywhere in the country. Even in the states where gender-affirming surgery is legal for people under age 18, parental consent is required before a minor can undergo such a procedure.
Trump’s own campaign has not been able to find a single example of this ever having happened anywhere in the United States. You can read more here.
Alyssa Farah Griffin: Trump told a thoroughly false story about a former official in his administration, Alyssa Farah Griffin, who is now a co-host of the ABC talk show “The View” and a political commentator on CNN. Trump claimed Griffin worked in the administration as “like an assistant press secretary”; that, upon leaving the administration, she “writes me this gorgeous letter,” “the most beautiful letter,” declaring “he was the greatest president”; but then, upon joining “The View,” that she suddenly started “hitting the hell out of me” with criticism.
This is untrue in several ways.
Griffin had the top-tier role of White House communications director and assistant to the president upon her resignation in late 2020, not “assistant press secretary” (she had previously been Pentagon press secretary and Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary).
Griffin did issue a statement upon her resignation saying, “It’s been the honor of a lifetime to serve in the Trump administration over the last three and a half years,” but did not say that Trump was “the greatest president.” She said Saturday that she has never written Trump a private letter.
And she began sharply criticizing Trump shortly after the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, not when she started guest-hosting “The View” in October 2021 or when she was named a permanent co-host in August 2022.
Abraham Lincoln’s sons: Trump told a story about how President Abraham Lincoln was a “very depressed” person in part because he lost his son “whose name was Tad.” Trump repeated later in the story that Lincoln lost his son “Tad.” In fact, Tad Lincoln outlived Abraham Lincoln by six years; the son Abraham Lincoln lost in 1862 was Willie. (This appeared to be an inadvertent mistake by Trump, but his claim was still inaccurate, and Trump has repeatedly bashed Biden over such mix-ups.)
13 Signs Of Fascism Seen In Donald Trump’s Actions
Megan Liscomb – October 27, 2024
In a recent interview with the New York Times, John Kelly, a former four-star Marine general and former chief of staff to former president Donald Trump, described his former boss as someone who “falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
He also described conversations with Trump in which he claims the former president said, “Hitler did some good things, too.” The Atlanticalso reported this week that, during his presidency, Trump allegedly said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
More former Trump officials issued a letter to Politico Friday backing Kelly’s warning about Trump’s authoritarian leanings.
In case you need a refresher, fascism is a form of authoritarian government. It often comes from the far-right, and fascist regimes typically feature a dictator who uses the military to squash political dissent. You’re probably familiar with the bloody regimes of historical fascist dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but before fascism reaches those extremes, there are also some early warning signs that you should be aware of.
The warning signs of fascism listed below come from the work of writer Laurence W. Britt. He created this list in 2003 after studying fascist movements throughout history, and it has gone viral a few times in recent years after a poster version of his list was spotted for sale in the gift shop at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
So, to illustrate exactly what Kelly and other former Trump officials are talking about, here are 13 warning signs of fascism, as seen on Donald Trump:
1.Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
Donald Trump has called himself a “proud nationalist,” often repeating the motto “America first.” Nationalism can pass for simple patriotic pride in one’s country. However, in Trump’s case, his ties to white nationalists like Steve Bannon and his alarming rhetoric about immigration, diversity, and repeated calls to “take our country back” all suggest a more sinister, fascistic form of national pride that elevates an imagined ideal of the nation over the rights of the actual people who live in it.Anna Moneymaker / Getty ImagesMore
2.Disdain for the importance of human rights.
During the Trump presidency, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review created and regularly updated a Trump Administration Human Rights Tracker to monitor his impact on human rights domestically and abroad. From his administration releasing federal rules that allow employers to deny insurance coverage for birth control to separating children from their parents at the border (among many more problematic actions), Trump’s policies showed a repeated lack of regard for human rights to autonomy, health, and freedom from discrimination and persecution.Pool / Getty ImagesMore
3.Identification of enemies as a unifying cause.
Trump often relies on inflammatory rhetoric about his “enemies” to rile up his base, and his favorite boogeyman by far is immigration. He infamously said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” During the most recent Presidential Debate, he falsely insisted that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats. He has repeatedly blamed immigrants for inflation and other economic issues (never mind the fact that inflation spiked worldwide due to the pandemic). There are so many examples of him scapegoating immigrants that I could go on listing them all day, but we still have 11 more signs of fascism to go, so I’ll leave it here.Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty ImagesMore
4.The supremacy of the military.
Despite portraying himself as an anti-war candidate, Trump has a long-standing preoccupation with using the military in service of his agenda. During his presidency, he indulged in a dictator-style military parade and was criticized for overreliance on military might in his foreign policy endeavors. He has campaigned on using the military to round up and deport immigrants. And, in recent days, Trump has spoken about using the military to go after his political opponents and regular citizens who disagree with him.Mark Wilson / Getty ImagesMore
5.Rampant sexism.
The way that Trump talks about and treats women is, unfortunately, old news. From the infamous “grab them by the pussy” tape to the 27 allegations of sexual misconduct against him, Trump’s words and actions show that he sees women as a means to his own sexual pleasure and little else. His choice of J.D. Vance, who seemingly can’t stop saying weird things about women, as his running mate shows that sexism continues to be part of the Trump agenda.NBC News / Via youtube.comMore
6.Controlled mass media.
Trump doesn’t control the media (yet), but he would definitely like to. If re-elected, Trump has threatened to imprison journalists who report facts he doesn’t like. He has also called for CBS’s broadcast license to be revoked following their interview with his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.Nurphoto / NurPhoto via Getty ImagesMore
7.Religion and government intertwined.
Trump is not himself a particularly religious man, but he continually appeals to the religious right, as in his campaign’s “Believers for Trump” program and his side hustle as a bible salesperson. And his administration took several steps that right-wing evangelicals long wished for, like appointing the conservative Supreme Court justices who would go on to overturn Roe V. Wade. Additionally, Trump’s ties to the Christian nationalist agenda in Project 2025 indicate that a second Trump term would do even more to intermingle religion and government.Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty ImagesMore
8.Corporate power protected.
In office, Trump enabled corporations to amass more money and power at the expense of working people. He cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which led to a boom in corporate stock buybacks instead of “trickling down.” His administration also rolled back over 100 environmental regulations and deregulated food safety.Jim Watson / AFP via Getty ImagesMore
9.Labor power suppressed.
Trump claims to be pro-worker, but his track record and statements about labor don’t appear to show a leader with workers’ interests in mind. His administration implemented rules that made it harder for workers to unionize their workplaces. He has also praised Elon Musk for allegedly firing striking workers and bragged about not paying employees overtime.Michael M. Santiago / Getty ImagesMore
10.Disdain for intellectuals and the arts.
Trump’s increasingly tenuous relationship with the truth goes hand in hand with his disdain for intellectuals. He’s cast doubt on experts in everything from climate change to COVID-19, with serious consequences. He couldn’t stop the spread of COVID by slowing down testing no more than he could change the course of a hurricane with a Sharpie. Rejecting evidence-based study, Trump prefers to remain in an echo chamber where he is always right, regardless of what’s actually happening before all of our eyes.Drew Angerer / Getty ImagesMore
11.Obsession with crime and punishment.
Rates of violent crime and property crime have fallen significantly since the 1990s, but you’d never know it to hear Trump talk. His rallies have long featured exaggerated rhetoric around crime and talk of “American carnage.” For a recent example, at a campaign event in Detroit, he claimed, “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped.” When confronted with actual falling crime statistics from the FBI, he said, “They didn’t include the cities with the worst crimes. It was a fraud.” He also recently suggested that “one tough, violent day” of policing could end crime. You know, like the dystopian plot of The Purge.Anadolu / Getty ImagesMore
12.Rampant cronyism and corruption.
Trump himself has been found guilty of 34 felony charges in a trial that took place earlier this year over falsifying business records to cover up hush money paid to adult actress Stormy Daniels as part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election. Additionally, he still faces three more felony indictments. Quite a few of his allies have also had criminal charges brought against them, including Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Michael Cohen.Handout / Getty ImagesMore
13.Fraudulent elections.
Donald Trump is the only president in American history to attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. In 2020, Trump declared victory before the vote count was complete, and then, when it became clear that he had lost, he refused to accept the election results. He pressured former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election and spread lies about the election results that arguably incited the January 6 riot. Now, he’s laying the groundwork to challenge the outcome again in 2024. He’s reportedly already talking with lawyers about contesting the result of an election that hasn’t even happened yet.Brent Stirton / Getty ImagesMore
So, in conclusion, please vote! And if anyone knows a foolproof way to take a little nap until the election is finally over, please let me know in the comments.
Homeowners left scrambling after insurers drop coverage targeting working-class families: ‘Almost impossible to find coverage’
Alyssa Ochs – October 24, 2024
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
Insurance companies are dropping customers in San Francisco due to extreme weather risks and if they fail to make unaffordable home upgrades.
Homeowners who still can get coverage are struggling to afford the sky-high premiums and risk having to pay out of pocket for natural disasters.
What’s happening?
As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, California’s insurance crisis is worsening.
Many insurers are telling homeowners they must make roofing and electrical repairs and replacements to keep their policies. As a result, an increasing number of San Franciscans are enrolling in the California FAIR plan, which provides the most basic but high-cost insurance to people who can’t get a policy through traditional insurance companies.
Jerry Becerra, Barbary Insurance Brokerage president, said the aging wiring of many San Francisco homes built in the 1940s or earlier makes it “almost impossible to find coverage.”
Beyond home maintenance-based denials, insurers are refusing to cover San Francisco homeowners due to wildfire risks. They also won’t cover homes where there are too many policies in the region prone to climate-related threats.
Why is homeowners insurance important?
San Francisco is just one of the many places experiencing an insurance crisis right now.
Insurance companies are dropping customers in high-risk areas all over the country due to extreme weather threats. These climate shifts result from planet-overheating pollution caused by unsustainable human activities like burning dirty energy.
Yet, in San Francisco and elsewhere, homeowners insurance is a crucial safety net for protecting against natural disasters.
What’s being done about insurance accessibility?
Insurance alternatives like the California FAIR Plan are helping homeowners get basic coverage for their homes for at least some peace of mind.
Ahsha Safaí from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors said, “It’s unfortunate that it’s playing out and hitting working families.” He also said the insurance crisis “has to be something that we advocate for through our state delegation.”
You can advocate for insurance accessibility by contacting your local government representatives and expressing your concerns. Vote for candidates who support pro-climate policies, and start making small changes in your daily habits to influence your neighbors as you lead by example.
For example, now is the perfect time to look into the available tax credits and government rebates for sustainable home upgrades. These cost savings may make it possible to update your home so that it is eligible for insurance coverage while lowering your monthly energy bills at the same time.
Homeowners outraged after major insurance company announces it won’t renew nearly 1,300 policies — here’s what you need to know
Jenny Allison – October 23, 2024
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
For many Oklahoma homeowners, November is ushering in the need to find new insurance coverage at a time when it seems many options are either too expensive, insufficient, or simply nonexistent.
What’s happening?
The reason behind their predicament is that Farmers Insurance has decided not to renew certain policies due to wildfire risk, Newsweek reported. Now, around 1,300 homeowners are scrambling to find new coverage, as their policies are expiring in November.
“As housing prices have swelled as have the costs to replace them, so too have insurance prices to cover potential damage,” Newsweek quoted Alex Beene, a financial literacy professor at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
“And when you mix those increased expenses with a home in an area that is highly likely to encounter some type of natural disaster, it’s forcing insurance providers to raise premiums to unfathomable heights or just drop coverage completely.”
Why is this pattern concerning?
While Farmers is choosing not to renew the selected policies due to wildfire risk, other states are seeing the same issue over risks of hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes, or other extreme weather-related events.
Unfortunately, scientists have found that these events are projected to grow even more intense as a direct result of our warming climate. And unless those temperatures slow down soon, wildfires and storms will continue to grow in severity.
For homeowners, losing coverage can mean having to enroll in a more expensive policy; in some cases, when no such policies are available or affordable, it can mean having to move towns or even states.
“Not only are they living in a property that won’t be covered in the case of damage, but the odds of them being able to relocate and sell that property go down considerably based on that same circumstance,” Beene told Newsweek.
What’s being done to protect homeowners?
Ideally, smaller insurance carriers in a market like Oklahoma’s could “come and pick up the pieces” left behind by a decision like this, Newsweek explained. But with carriers fearing increasing costs, many homeowners will instead see soaring premiums or be forced to use subpar providers.
Some states offer a state-managed plan, but it’s essentially a “last resort” arrangement and isn’t currently structured to withstand covering thousands of homeowners per state.
Homeowners left in the lurch after major insurance companies deem state ‘essentially uninsurable’: ‘Too many landscapes are ready to explode’
Kaiyo Funaki – October 24, 2024
Another turbulent wildfire season in California has left residents without insurance for some of their most valuable assets.
What’s happening?
According to a report from Wired, insurance companies are either hiking up premiums for homeowners or dropping policies altogether in fire-prone California.
For example, Allstate refuses to accept new customers, while Liberty Mutual and State Farm have stopped renewing plans for tens of thousands of customers — some of whom had been with a company for decades and have resorted to state-operated coverage that is far more expensive.
“My whole family has been with State Farm for maybe 75 years. They sent us a letter in July saying that they would keep us if they could, but had no choice and were canceling in August,” Suzanne Romaine, a resident of northern California’s Siskiyou County, told Wired.
The issue has become so prevalent that severalcounties have requested state officials to declare a state of emergency for insurance prices. Climate research and technology nonprofit First Street Foundation has even regarded parts of the state as “essentially ‘uninsurable.'”
Why are the rising insurance rates driven by wildfires concerning?
As global temperatures continue to climb, so will the frequency and destruction of wildfires.
According to Wired, California has suffered $30 billion in losses from wildfires since 2017. In that same period, the state experienced nine of its 10 largest fires and 13 of its 20 most destructive ones.
This past summer, first responders battled the fourth-largest fire in state history — one that spawned fire tornadoes and contaminated water supplies.
“The drying out of the U.S. Southwest since 1980 has created so much kindling that too many landscapes are ready to explode,” Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College, said. “The planet is warming rapidly, which increases the desiccation of vegetation and establishes near impossible conditions in which to fight fire.”
These conditions — coupled with improper forest management, the state’s restrictive fire insurance regulations, and economic restraints — have created an untenable situation with few winners.
“If you suppress rates and try to tell companies that they can only charge X, and they start losing money, eventually they are going to say: ‘I’m going to be super picky at that artificially low premium,’ or ‘We’re not going to write anybody, and will come back when things get reasonable,'” said David Russell, an insurance and finance professor at California State University, Northridge. “And that’s what you’ve seen with State Farm.”
What’s being done about the rising insurance costs?
Wired noted that California has initiated its Sustainable Insurance Strategy, which would allow insurance companies to utilize wildfire risk models that rely on future projections, whereas previous models used only historical data.
The state will also create a public risk model that will prevent private models from overestimating the future risk of wildfire losses that result in overcharged customers. Additionally, California is expediting rate increase approvals to get private insurers to return.
“There are changes afoot that could bring insurance supply back to the market. This cannot happen fast enough,” Russell added.
