The ‘uniparty’? Conservatives bash bipartisanship by attacking fellow Republicans
Sahil Kapur and Allan Smith – March 3, 2024
WASHINGTON — An empowered faction of Donald Trump – aligned Republicans is seeking to redefine dealmaking as an insult by deploying the term “uniparty” to attack colleagues who work with Democrats and strike deals that fall short of what their base wants.
The growing use of the word among the GOP’s ascendant culture warriors represents an effort by conservative lawmakers, activists and commentators to disparage bipartisan agreements on matters that have broad support in Congress like government funding, infrastructure spending and aid for U.S. allies like Ukraine.
Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., chair of the far-right Freedom Caucus, called the recent House passage of a bill to avert a partial government shutdown an example of a “uniparty vote,” with Republicans who “talk about spending cuts and talk about fiscal responsibility” but ultimately support compromise spending measures.
“The uniparty is when the rubber meets the road and Republicans and Democrats join hands to stick it to the American people,” Good told NBC News.
He added that “unfortunately, too many Republicans are all too eager” to compromise with Democrats.
While Republicans control the House, Democrats hold the Senate majority and the White House, where President Joe Biden on Friday signed into law the short-term funding bill that was negotiated with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to keep the government open.
House and Senate Republicans who have assailed the so-called uniparty — including Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, as well as Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and J.D. Vance of Ohio — all voted against the latest government funding bill.
The House voted 320-99 to pass the measure, followed by a 77-13 vote in the Senate — evidence that there is “absolutely” a “uniparty” in Washington, according to Boebert.
“It means Republicans who vote Democrat Light, who side with the other party because they are weak and refuse to take a stand,” she said in an interview. “Unfortunately, too many Republicans campaign as conservatives and govern like Nancy Pelosi.”
Vance, a leading critic of additional funding for Ukraine’s military effort, said he doesn’t know where the term “uniparty” came from but cited the recent debate over assisting Ukraine in fending off Russia as an example.
“Whether you call it a uniparty or something else, I do think it suggests something’s broken about our democratic process,” he said.
Where did the term come from?
The modern use of “uniparty” traces back a few years, though its roots run deeper. The term’s framing has long been a favorite of Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House official and right-wing media personality who has been deploying it for years. Trump himself has reposted items from supporters who use the descriptor on his Truth Social platform.
The right has previously embraced similar wording, like “regime,” which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used repeatedly during his 2024 presidential campaign to describe the federal government, and “drain the swamp,” a rallying cry during Trump’s 2016 campaign. There’s also “the cathedral,” a term used by some on the right to describe institutions they see as controlling acceptable political discourse.
Meanwhile, the left and third-party candidates have at times embraced similar terminology. An aide to former President Barack Obama described the foreign policy establishment as “the Blob,” while former Green Party presidential nominees Ralph Nader and Jill Stein have used “uniparty” in railing against the U.S. political system.
In the 2024 campaign, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has invoked the term, including when he wrote in The Baltimore Sun last month that special interest groups “control our government to such an extent that — no matter which party is in charge — many Americans now refer to the two parties as the ‘uniparty.’”
Stefanie Spear, a Kennedy spokesperson, said in a statement that “more Americans of all political persuasions are recognizing that both establishment parties largely represent the same corporate interests.”
“The term uniparty is therefore quite natural, and Mr. Kennedy is pleased that it is gaining traction,” she said.
Sen. Rand Paul, the son of libertarian former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, noted the third-party roots of the uniparty framework, saying, “There’s been a uniparty since I was a kid and would come up here in the 1970s.”
“Libertarians always used it when they were running as another independent party,” Paul, R-Ky., said in an interview. “Hadn’t been used as much within the Republican Party, but I think it’s catching on.”
Some Republicans dislike the framing
The term is most often used when discussing two distinct issues — funding for Ukraine and government spending. And the leader who finds himself most under attack on that front is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who recently announced he will step down from leadership after the November elections.
McConnell has vociferously pushed for additional funding for Ukraine and, in a time of divided government, has been able to cut a series of deals with the Biden administration.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time,” McConnell said during a portion of his Senate floor speech on Wednesday announcing his pending retirement that focused on the need for America to lead on the global stage. “I have many faults; misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”
Yet some Republicans, including those aligned with the lawmakers who voted against the short-term spending agreement and have pushed back on new funding for Ukraine, find the term odd.
“What, you can’t differentiate between a Democrat and Republican up here?” said Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas.
Asked why his colleagues are using the term, he replied: “I don’t know. I guess everybody’s gotta come up with something clever.”
And one Senate Republican aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they “don’t like the term, frankly.”
“I think it went from ‘the swamp,’ which I do like, to ‘the regime,’ which I like less, then ‘uniparty,’ which I like even less,” this person said. “And they all kind of mean the same thing. But I think it sounds increasingly nerdy and weird and people don’t really know what they mean.”
This person said they feel some lawmakers are using this language because it sounds “like a vaguely intellectual term, even though it’s not, actually.”
As for what separates “uniparty” initiatives from the kind of bipartisanship some of these right-wing lawmakers might take part in, this person said the distinction was simple: If leadership on both sides is for it, it’s “uniparty,” but if the leaders of both parties oppose it, it’s not.
Democrats continue to celebrate bipartisanship
Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a member of Democratic leadership, said the use of the term by certain Republicans highlights their interest in catering only to a narrow slice of the electorate.
“If they want to make it crystal clear that their coalition comprises 28% of the public, then I welcome that,” he said. “They are a minority and they are trying to turn the fact that their views are minority opinions into some sort of virtue. But the truth is that they’re way out of the mainstream, and any competent political party would not emphasize that point.”
Democrats have not hesitated to celebrate acts of bipartisanship, even when it leads to legislation or policies they consider imperfect.
“As I said directly to the speaker over and over and over again, the only way to get things done here is with bipartisanship, and this agreement is another proof point,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the floor Thursday of the short-term government funding bill. “When bipartisanship is prioritized, when getting things done for the American people takes a high priority, good things can happen even in divided government.”
In a statement Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre used “bipartisan” three times in one sentence to describe the legislation.
“The bipartisan agreement announced today would help prevent a needless shutdown while providing more time to work on bipartisan appropriations bills and for the House to pass the bipartisan national security supplemental as quickly as possible,” she said.
Could it apply to Trump?
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., framed his use of “uniparty” entirely around spending, using the term to describe “the group that always votes for more spending and more debt.”
“The letter beside their name does not matter: [They’re] Republicans that vote like Democrats and the Democrats that vote like Republicans,” Burchett said.
By that measure, the term could extend to Trump, whose policies in office led to increased spending and deficits, even when Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who worked in the Trump administration as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has repeatedly brought up Trump-era spending on the campaign trail as she seeks to defeat her onetime boss for the GOP nomination.
“I would love to tell you that Joe Biden did that to us,” she said in South Carolina last month while expressing dismay over the national debt. “But I always have spoken to you in hard truths. And I’m going to do that with you tonight. Our Republicans did that to us too. You look at the fact that President Trump put us $8 trillion in debt in just four years. More than any other president.”
One word she did not use in describing that predicament: uniparty.
Trump’s White House Was ‘Awash in Speed’ — and Xanax
Noah Shachtman and Asawin Suebsaeng – March 3, 2024
If you ever looked at the actions of the Trump White House and wondered, ‘Are they on drugs?’ — the answer was, in some cases, yes. Absolutely, yes.
In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.
The report didn’t say why so many of those pills had been given out. But for many who served in the Trump White House, the investigation highlighted an open secret. According to interviews with four former senior administration officials and others with knowledge of the matter, the stimulant was routinely given to staffers who needed an energy boost after a late night, or just a pick-me-up to handle another day at a uniquely stressful job. As one of the former officials tells Rolling Stone, the White House at that time was “awash in speed.”
Knowledgeable sources say that samples of the stimulant were passed around for those contributing lines to major Trump speeches, working late hours on foreign policy initiatives, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, coping with the deluge of media inquiries about that investigation, and so much more. (Trump’s campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.)
Modafinil — also known by its brand name, Provigil — wasn’t the only controlled substance that Trump officials young and old routinely acquired. “It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” one source with direct knowledge of the matter recalls.
The anti-anxiety medication Xanax was also a popular, easy-to-get drug during the Trump years, three sources tell us. Neither Xanax nor its generic, alprazolam, is mentioned in the Pentagon report, which notes that it is not a comprehensive list of the controlled substances ordered during the Trump years. Two people with direct knowledge of the situation recall senior officials getting Xanax from the White House Medical Unit — and sharing it with colleagues.
The Trump administration was well known for its chaotic, often-erratic approach to policymaking — and for its atmosphere of paranoia, where staffers regularly spilled their colleagues’ secrets and bureaucratic factions often spent as much energy attacking one another as addressing matters of state. It’s impossible to know how much of that was fueled by the widespread availability of drugs like Xanax and Provigil. But what’s clear is that there was a breakdown of medical standards and safeguards at the highest levels of the American government; some staffers even believed that confidential information about their mental health was at risk. With Trump pushing to return to power on an agenda even more vicious than his first, a full accounting of the misuse of powerful stimulants and sedatives by his staff isn’t just a matter of historical interest. It’s a preview of a very possible future.
During Trump’s presidency, two sources say, senior staffers would repeatedly down Xanax with alcohol. Such a combination increases the risk of “serious, life-threatening side effects,” according to the National Library of Medicine. Nevertheless, senior officials would use Xanax and alcohol together to soothe themselves while enduring the sky-high levels of stress that come with working at the highest pressure environment job in America — with the added pleasure of serving the whims of the infamously volatile, intemperate Trump.
As one former senior administration official puts it: “You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol.”
THE WHITE HOUSE MEDICAL UNIT has been handing out prescription medications to staffers for decades — especially when they’re traveling abroad, and need to combat jet lag. “I think any White House staff knows that overseas trips are very grueling,” Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary, recalls. “For us, you’d be on a flight with a president who never sleeps, and then you hit the ground running in a foreign country, and you have to be alert and ready for the president and other foreign leaders.”
She describes a procedure broadly familiar to staffers across administrations: On overseas trips, physician to the president Dr. Ronny Jackson “would come around Air Force One asking Donald Trump’s senior staff if they needed anything. This included Provigil and [the sleep aid] Ambien, and he would hand them out, typically in the form of packets with two or three pills in them. When this happened on Air Force One, a nurse would be trailing him, writing down who got what.”
It’s back home where things got sloppier, the Defense Department investigation and our sources note. Pills were often handed out without a specific need or diagnosis. Black-and-white procedures that doctors and pharmacists routinely follow when prescribing controlled substances were ignored. Orders for pills were often written down incorrectly, or not at all. One former White House Medical Unit staffer told Pentagon investigators that the unit “work[ed] in the gray… helping anybody who needs help to get this mission done.” Another said, “Is it being done appropriately or legally all the time? No. But are they going to get to that end result that the bosses want? Yeah.”
So while prescription drugs have long been in the White House — John F. Kennedy reportedly took a cocktail of uppers and downers to fight back pain, and Richard Nixon allegedly took an anti-epileptic drug “when his mood wasn’t too good” — they have rarely been dispensed as widely as they were in the Trump years.
Then-President Donald Trump participates in a briefing at the White House on April 21, 2020.
The anything-anytime-anywhere approach inspired a sense of entitlement among Trump staffers. Some senior administration officials would casually mention their Xanax intake, one source with direct knowledge of the matter recalls. The source describes a time when an aide to Melania Trump walked into the White House Medical Unit and said, “‘Could you prescribe me Xanax.’ She just came in and demanded it.” The source wasn’t a doctor or pharmacist, however, and wasn’t allowed to prescribe the anti-anxiety drug. The source politely turned the aide down. “She stormed out,” the source says.
This is not, to put it mildly, how these drugs are ordinarily handled. “We tightly track controlled substances like this because they’re addictive or can cause overdoses,” says Dr. Beata Lewis, a psychiatrist based in Brooklyn. “It sounds like with all of these substances, people could get whatever they wanted. That puts people at risk for addiction.”
She adds: “The significant thing is these rules apply to everyone … except for the White House. It’s a culture of entitlement and being above the rules to the point of putting people in danger.”
There wasn’t much the medical unit staffers could do, even if they wanted to hold the line. Several told Pentagon investigators “they feared they would receive negative work assignments or be “fired” if they spoke out.
ADDING TO THE CLIMATE OF FEAR was the sense that even private therapy sessions would not be kept private in the Trump White House. The medical unit provided psychological counseling on request. But White House staffers were instructed to be on their guard. One former senior administration official tells Rolling Stone that within the first two years of the Trump presidency, they were warned by a colleague against divulging anything during a private White House medical session that they “would not want to be used against” them. At the time, this source notes, this puzzled the official, who was then told that under Trump, the office had a reputation for being more porous with private information “than you might expect.”
The former administration official didn’t think much of it at the time. The source shrugged the warning off as mere gossip and moved on. However, according to other individuals with intimate knowledge of the matter, it was hardly an idle rumor. Immediately after counseling sessions, therapists were pressed for information about what they were told.
“They’d say, ‘We need you to see this person.’ They’d walk me over there. I’d see this person. Then as soon as I got out, they would ask, ‘Hey what happened?’” one of these sources tells us. To this source, this was a blatant violation of patient confidentiality. The source would try to be as vague as possible in their responses to the questions, but in the Trump White House, “it was all kind of open kimono,” they say.
Keith Bass, who led the White House Medical Unit from 2017 to 2019, confirms that these sorts of debriefs did, in fact, happen after counseling sessions. But he says they never went into details; they were merely to determine whether a “medical/behavioral health event” would prevent a “military/DoD staff” member “from performing their duties or impac[t] their ability to maintain a [top secret] clearance while assigned to the White House,” Bass says in an email. “Detailed clinical notes were not required from the psychologist; only a broad overview to determine fitness for duty status.”
Our source says that’s not entirely accurate. For starters, these debriefs happened after therapy sessions with civilian staffers as well. And while the questions may have been “seemingly innocent,” the source says they could be seen as the start of a “slippery slope,” which would then “drif[t] down into asking for information that was not appropriate.”
The White House Medical Unit’s often casual approach to giving out controlled substances didn’t exactly inspire confidence. “The sloppiness around handing out medications had me highly concerned about the protection of behavioral health information — medical information at large. There was no protection of sensitive patient information, period,” the source says.
Any attempts to add more rigor were entirely unwelcome, the source adds. “The more I held to professional standards” — the more the source objected to the pressure to divulge details about therapy sessions, and to keep patient information private — the worse it got. White House staffers “ostracized me,” the source says. “Nobody would talk to me. The culture was toxic as fuck.”
MODAFINIL WAS DISCOVERED in the 1970s by French scientists and was first handed out to pilots to help keep them awake and on task in the 1991 Gulf War. The U.S. military started to use modafinil in earnest around the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At the time, it was heralded as a massive improvement over previous stimulants: stronger and more effective than caffeine, less physically addictive than amphetamines. “These medications aren’t stimulants like the old military ‘go pills,’ there are few if any side effects when taken as prescribed. They simply stave off drowsiness until the medication wears off, then you naturally fall asleep,” one knowledgeable source writes.
But that “taken as prescribed” caveat is crucial. When handed out willy-nilly, outside a doctor’s supervision, modafinil can pose serious risks, notes Dr. Rachel Teodorini, a researcher at London South Bank University’s division of psychology who has examined the drug and its effects. “If people have cardiovascular problems, heart problems, or blood pressure issues, it could cause things like strokes or heart attacks,” she tells us. And while modafinil doesn’t appear to physically hook patients, “there’s an element of at least psychological dependence. Tolerance builds up, and you need more and more.”
Modafinil tablets.
As a recent study in the journal Military Medicine notes, “although modafinil was initially said to comprise no risk for abuse, there are now indications that modafinil works on the same neurobiological mechanisms as other addictive stimulants.”
And just like with other stimulants, the overuse of modafinil can lead to the perceived need for anti-anxiety medications like Xanax. “Effectively, you’re using one drug to get you up and another to get you down,” Teodorini said.
Some former Trump staffers tell Rolling Stone they didn’t get these drugs directly from the White House Medical Unit. One former Trump White House aide concedes they “borrowed” some modafinil from “a friend,” who said they’d gotten it from the unit. “I had a lot going on in my life and I wanted some,” they say.
In other administrations, modafinil was used “99 percent of the time” for jet lag, one source notes. The Trump White House was a free-for-all. Two other sources each independently compared the White House during those years to college campuses where students cramming for finals or pulling all-nighters would pass around Adderall and other drugs, prescriptions be damned. But it wasn’t just the administration’s junior staffers — the recent college grads — who partook. The sources add that midlevel and certain senior officials — including those who reported to then-President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump — came to rely on modafinil, as well. The sources and former senior Trump officials, who all requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, recall instances of staff casually slipping the medical unit-provided stimulant to one another, in efforts to stay focused and help navigate the exhausting chaos of the Trump presidency.
It was “ironic” that Trump’s White House was “one place the war on drugs wasn’t being fought,” one of the former officials sardonically notes, given Trump and many of his lieutenants’ zeal for waging the internationalwar on drugs.
NEARLY EVERY SOURCE INTERVIEWED for this story traced the problems with the White House Medical Unit back to Jackson, who joined the team during the George W. Bush administration and became physician to President Barack Obama in 2013. Before then, he was known as an eccentric. Afterward, he became a menace, as several Defense Department investigations detail.
On a trip to Argentina in March 2016, one of those reports notes, Jackson’s “intoxicated behavior in the middle of the night, pounding on [a female subordinate’s] hotel room door, screaming, yelling, and overall loud behavior in his hotel room exhibited less than exemplary workplace conduct while on official travel to provide medical care for the President.” The Pentagon interviewed 60 of Jackson’s former subordinates; 56 “experienced, saw, or heard about [him] yelling, screaming, cursing, or belittling subordinates.” During a six-week stretch in 2018, a Defense Department hotline received 12 complaints” about Jackson. (Jackson’s office did not respond to a request to comment on this article.)
His nomination to become Secretary of Veterans Affairs that same year was derailed over accusations he handed out pills to White House staffers like a “candyman.” (In one case, a Senate report noted, medical staffers fell “into a panic” because he had given such “a large supply” of Percocet pain pills to a member of the White House Military Office.)
Then-President Donald Trump looks to White House physician Ronny Jackson during an event at the White House on Aug. 3, 2017.
Jackson briefly returned to the White House as Trump’s “chief medical adviser” in 2019 before running for Congress. But no matter what position he held, several sources tell us, his influence dominated medical care at the Trump White House, and Jackson’s “minions” and “loyalists” ran the White House Medical Unit in his stead. “Any practices existing at that time were all set up by Jackson, who’d been there for a dozen years. Though the med unit was led by an administrator, little happened without his say-so,” one of those sources say.
The source adds, “Unit leadership did slowly start making appropriate changes, but due to [the] complicated nature of missions, individual expectations within the organization, a self-imposed cone of silence and fear of being held liable for sins of the father, it took a long time to find the right way forward.”
OUR INTEREST IN THIS STORY was sparked, in part, by a handwritten ledger reprinted on page 14 of the January inspector general’s report: a tracking form for the controlled substances ordered by the White House Medical Unit. In addition to the thousands of pills of Ambien and Provigil listed are even more potent sedatives and pain pills: morphine, hydrocodone, diazepam and lorazepam (better known by their brand names, Valium and Ativan), fentanyl, and even ketamine.
Jackson, now a Republican congressman from Texas, told the Washington Post that his team prescribed narcotics “less than five times” across his tenure. And according to the paper’s sources, drugs like fentanyl were “kept on hand for extreme emergencies — such as a White House fence jumper impaling themselves on a spike.”
That’s a ridiculous example, a well-placed source tells us. “Someone just made up something. If there was a jumper, someone would call 911,” the source says. The jumper would then be transferred to a nearby civilian hospital.
But there was a grain of truth to the idea that the medical unit retained fentanyl and the like for extreme events. In the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a desire to bring the advances in battlefield medicine to the White House. If the president or vice president were to get shot in a remote location, far from any hospital, the unit’s physicians wanted to be able to insert a breathing tube into the VIP almost instantaneously, a process known as “rapid sequence induction and intubation.” Doing that requires sedating the patient in a hurry with powerful drugs.
“The unit employed the world’s standards in pre-hospital trauma care, as directed by the DoD’s Joint Trauma System & Committee on tactical-combat casualty-care guidelines. That includes the use of ketamine, fentanyl, etc. for pain management,” a second knowledgeable source writes. “The whole mission is contingency planning for providing most/best possible care for the worst/craziest scenarios.”
Needless to say, they never encountered a scenario that nuts. And we didn’t uncover any evidence that ketamine or fentanyl were handed out to White House staff the way Xanax and Provigil were.
But as the handwritten ledger shows — and our sources confirm — the medical unit’s procedures had grown so sloppy, so lax, that it’s impossible to prove the negative, that these sedatives and dissociatives weren’t given to White House staff. “In our analysis of the White House Medical Unit’s controlled substance records, we found that medications, such as opioids and sleep medications, were not properly accounted for,” the inspector general’s report reads. “These records frequently contained errors in the medication counts, illegible text, or crossed-out text that was not appropriately annotated.”
That might sound like minor errors in paperwork. They’re not. They’re the kind of transgressions that turn patients into addicts, and doctors into ex-doctors. “If you’re sloppy even a little bit with controlled substances, you’ll lose your [medical] license,” one source notes. Without proper record keeping, there’s no way to say just how much of the Trump White House was on drugs. There’s no way to tell how they might use — and abuse — prescription medications if they come back to power. “Nothing is written down,” another source says of the unit’s drug distribution during the Trump years, “because we will always get to yes.”
Trump warns of ‘languages coming into our country’ that ‘nobody’ has heard of
Alec Hernández, Jake Traylor and Katherine Koretski – March 3, 2024
Warning about the dangers of illegal immigration at the southern border has long been one of Donald Trump’s campaign mainstays, going back to the day he launched his first presidential bid. At the time, he said Mexico was sending “rapists” and people who were bringing “drugs” and “crime.”
But lately, the former president has seized on a new thing he says migrants are bringing: languages.
“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said before a crowd of thousands of supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., last month.
“These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing,” he added.
Trump repeated the comment the following week during an appearance at the southern border alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, saying that migrants are entering the country speaking “truly foreign languages.”
“Nobody speaks them,” he said after a tour of the border in Eagle Pass.
And addressing a rally in Virginia Saturday night, Trump described New York classrooms as overwhelmed with “pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they don’t even know what the language is.”
“We have nobody that even teaches it. These are languages that nobody ever heard of,” he claimed.
It’s not entirely clear what languages Trump is referencing.
When asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded, “There are migrants invading from countries that we know nothing about, which is the point.” He did not respond to a follow-up question about what those countries are.
At campaign rallies, Trump routinely says he would carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in history if re-elected. Trump also vows to reinstate his infamous Muslim travel ban, expand it to include Gazan refugees, and incorporate “ideological screenings” for all immigrants. Trump has also claimed multiple times that immigrants are poisoning the blood of America, a comment President Joe Biden’s campaign likened to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.
“I’ve been so proud of how Joe has placed women at the center of his agenda. But Donald Trump?” the first lady said to boos. “He spent a lifetime tearing us down and devaluing our existence. He mocks women’s bodies, disrespects our accomplishments and brags about assault. Now he’s bragging about killing Roe v. Wade.”
The first lady continued: “He took credit again for enabling states like Georgia to pass cruel abortion bans that are taking away the right of women to make their own health care decisions. How far will he go? When will he stop? You know the answer: He won’t. He won’t.”
As the first lady embarks on a three-day, four-stop battleground state campaign swing, launching the “Women for Biden-Harris” coalition, her role in the reelection effort is becoming clearer. The campaign is looking to use a top surrogate to organize – and mobilize – female voters heading into the general election, all while delivering a clear message about Trump.
“Donald Trump is dangerous to women and to our families. We simply cannot let him win,” she said in Atlanta.
The first lady is also traveling through Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, and she’s expected to court Black and Latino communities as the campaign looks to make inroads with those key demographic groups.
Much of the first lady’s work in the early stages of the campaign has focused on crisscrossing the country for fundraisers, but in the months ahead she’s expected to become a more frequent presence on the trail advocating on behalf of her husband and his agenda.
The first lady has long said that she’s not a political adviser to the president, instead explaining to CNN that she helps her husband by relaying what she sees and hears from people on the road. But she is his most trusted partner and holds influence in the White House and campaign. She sits in on some of the president’s political meetings and hiring decisions for some key staff, sources familiar with the matter said, and is eager to hit the road to push for a second Biden term.
The first lady is juggling her campaign work with her official role and her full-time teaching job at Northern Virginia Community College. While she took a break from teaching for part of 2020 to focus on the campaign, there’s no indication just yet that she’s decided to do the same this year. The campaign is looking to hire staff to support the first lady as she ramps up her outreach, a source familiar with the plans said.
A majority of her travel in 2024 will be stateside with campaign season in full swing, but it’s possible she could travel alongside the president to the G7 summit in Italy in June, as well as attend the Paris Olympics, according to a source familiar with her plans.
How to use a less-divisive Biden
Jill Biden was an active surrogate on behalf of her husband in 2020 and campaigned for Democratic candidates down the ballot during the 2022 midterm elections. As she’s traveled the country to promote the administration’s initiatives, she’s appeared in a mix of red states and more moderate areas and is expected to take a similar approach in 2024.
“She’s not going to just go to deep, deep blue areas. She’s going to go to a variety of areas in this country,” a source familiar with the planning said.
Biden campaign advisers believe the first lady’s appeal has far reach – particularly with women and grassroots supporters and in moderate parts of the country.
“The first lady’s trusted voice has been critical in reaching the voters who will decide this election. As a mom, grandmother, and educator, the first lady is uniquely able to reach and relate to core constituencies and effectively communicate the President’s message to the American people,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told CNN in a statement.
Like many first ladies who have come before her, Biden is making her pitch as a surrogate who is significantly more popular than her husband. A recent CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that 59% of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of the president, compared with 30% who viewed the first lady unfavorably. As a less polarizing and relatable figure, the first lady is now being deployed to sell her husband’s policies and candidacy to the critical coalition of women that he’ll need once more in November.
Female voters made up a key part of the president’s 2020 coalition – he won 57% of female voters, who made up 52% of all voters in the 2020 election, according to CNN exit poll data.
“Women for Biden-Harris” is the first coalition effort the campaign has launched as it hopes to use the days around Super Tuesday to mobilize voters. The women-focused effort will include organizing calls from campaign surrogates and digital ad buys targeted toward women. This will include digital ads from the first lady’s swing, marking the first time she and her campaign work will be a central focus of an advertising push this cycle.
The push for female voters was on display in Atlanta on Friday as the first lady encouraged women to use their voices to organize heading into November.
“We’re going to do what we did in 2020 and 2022. We’re going to talk to our friends, and we’re going to tell them why this election is so important. We’re going to tell them what’s at stake. Sign up for phone banks and canvassing shifts. We’re going to meet this moment as if our rights are at risk because they are. As if our democracy is on the line, because it is,” she said.
Dr. Biden, who is the first presidential spouse to keep her full-time job teaching English at a community college, often approaches her speeches from that teaching experience, trying to distill policy issues for voters in “real terms.” She’s also expected to leverage her personal background as a working mother and grandmother to connect with female voters, tapping into common threads in their lives to talk about the power of women.
“Here’s the thing about men like Donald Trump – they underestimate our power because they don’t understand it,” she said in Atlanta. “They see us working night shifts and making grocery lists, driving to soccer practices and volunteering, caring for parents and raising money for those in need, and they think we can be ignored. They don’t know that our to-do lists are our battle maps.”
“When our daughters’ futures are at stake, when our country and its freedom hangs in the balance, we are immovable and unstoppable,” she added.
On Saturday, the first lady was confronted with an issue that has caused frustration within parts of the Democratic Party – the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. She was interrupted several times by pro-Palestinian protesters as she spoke in Tucson, Arizona, at an event for Arizona List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights.
Taking on Trump
Jill Biden’s willingness to hit the campaign trail aggressively – and to support a reelection campaign, her husband’s fourth and final presidential bid – stems in part from the president’s predecessor and expected opponent, she told journalist Katie Rogers in an interview for her book, “American Woman,” which explores the role of the modern first lady.
“I would rail against injustice if I feel like somebody who would be Joe’s opponent would not be a good thing for this country,” the first lady told Rogers when asked about Trump being the possible Republican nominee. “I think I would work even harder.”
As she prepared for her first speech of this week’s campaign swing, the first lady specifically wanted to tap into the feelings many Democrats had when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race to remind voters about what’s at stake in November’s election, a source familiar with her thinking said.
“We can’t wake up on November 6 like we did in 2016 terrified of the future ahead of us, thinking, ‘My God, what just happened? What are we gonna do now?’’” she said. “We must reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Many of her critiques of her husband’s predecessor this campaign season have come in off-camera fundraisers. In one of her first fundraisers of the campaign, she expressed shock that Republicans appeared to continue supporting the former president as he faced his first indictment.
In the hours after Trump called on Republicans in a social media post to block the president’s hard-fought bipartisan border package this year, Jill Biden fired back, telling a group of donors in Houston, “Trump is trying to do everything he can to make Joe look bad, you know, even at the lives – sacrificing lives of so many people just for his own political gain.”
The first lady, a fierce defender of the president, has also pushed back on other critiques of her husband, including from special counsel Robert Hur, whose report questioned the president’s mental faculties while noting that he couldn’t remember the year their son Beau Biden passed away from brain cancer.
That detail struck a nerve with the Biden family, and the campaign channeled the first lady’s frustration into an email sent in her name to defend her husband and call out “inaccurate and personal political attacks against Joe.” The personal missive, which only featured a donate button at the end and did not include a specific contribution ask from the first lady, became the campaign’s second most lucrative email since the president’s launch announcement.
Influence and issues
With her efforts on the trail, Jill Biden joins a long line of first ladies who have campaigned for incumbent presidents seeking a second term. That role comes with an inherent ability to influence public perception of their husbands.
“A first lady definitely has that opportunity and privilege, really, to soften the messages – even the hardest messages,” said Anita McBride, who served as a top aide to former first lady Laura Bush.
Biden is confronting challenges to women’s health care and reproductive rights, an issue her husbad’s campaign is making a centerpiece of its strategy to attract moderate voters.
While Vice President Kamala Harris is the administration’s lead voice on the topic, the first lady is also using her platform, meeting with women affects by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and extending an early invitation to the State of the Union address to Kate Cox, the Texas mother of two who had to leave her state to seek an abortion to end a life-threatening pregnancy. She’s spoken about abortion in personal terms, recounting how she helped a high school friend recover from an abortion in the era before Roe v. Wade.
“Women will not let this country go backwards,” the first lady said. “We’ve fought too hard for too long. And we know that there is just too much on the line.”
She approaches the conversation from a practical, less political standpoint.
“It’s just the nature of the job of first lady – that is probably the only person who’s campaigning for the president that could really find the windows of opportunity to rise above the politics, turn down the heat a little bit, appeal to people’s sensibilities and compassion for each other,” McBride said, adding that Biden is able to speak to more controversial issues such as abortion in a “humanizing way, and just a less combative way” than elected politicians.
The first lady is also looking for ways to interact with people in the community, aside from formal events and campaign speeches.
Before leaving Atlanta on Friday, she visited 3 Parks Wine Shop, a small business owned by a Black woman, to hear about its work and the neighborhood while also partaking in a wine tasting.
The first lady decided to take two bottles – a red and a white – for the plane ride out West. And as the group members sampled a sauvignon blanc, they raised their glasses to a campaign season toast: “To 2024.”
The context behind Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s dueling immigration speeches at Texas border
Maria Ramirez Uribe – March 2, 2024
The two 2024 presidential election front-runners traveled to Texas on Thursday to deliver vastly different messages about a key election issue: immigration.
Former President Donald Trump stoked fear about the people crossing the southern U.S. border, citing recent high-profile criminal cases in which authorities charged immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally. President Joe Biden blamed Republicans for sidelining a Senate immigration bill he said would have given his administration the resources and powers needed to reduce illegal immigration.
Speaking at Eagle Pass, the epicenter of a feud between the state and the federal government, Trump joined Gov. Greg Abbott, the Border Patrol union’s leader and Texas National Guard members.
A few minutes after Trump spoke and about 300 miles south, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, and Border Patrol agents joined Biden as he spoke in Brownsville.
Trump spent the hours before his speech blasting Biden’s immigration policies over social media and in a Daily Mail article, seeking to position himself as the only person able to “stop Biden’s illegal immigrant invasion.”
At the end of his speech, Biden asked Trump to join him in getting Congress to pass the Senate border security bill.
“Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done,” Biden said.
PolitiFact listened to both presidential candidates. Biden overstated the authority provided to him in the border security bill. Trump made broad, often unsubstantiated statements about the migrants entering the U.S. and his administration’s immigration successes.
Here’s the context behind some of their statements:
Biden overstates possible effect of emergency authority in border security bill
The Senate bill “would also give me as president, or any of the next presidents, emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border between ports of entry.” — Biden in Brownsville
The Senate proposal, which failed 49-50, sought to enable the executive branch to block people from seeking asylum in between ports of entry if illegal immigration encounters reach certain levels.
That doesn’t mean people would stop coming to the border. A public health policy to mitigate COVID-19’s spread that was in place from March 2020 to May 2023 also largely blocked people from seeking asylum, but border encounters rose.
“There is this idea that we control how many migrants attempt illegal crossings. We do not,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s senior adviser for Immigration and border policy, previously told PolitiFact. “We control what happens once we encounter someone who has already crossed the border illegally.”
Under current immigration law, people on U.S. soil can seek asylum regardless of how they entered the country. The bill’s emergency authority tried to change that. But the government’s ability to quickly remove people from the U.S. would still hinge on its resources and other countries’ willingness to take back immigrants.
“In short, there is no authority that Congress could pass that would allow for a ‘complete and total shutdown of the border,’” Brown told us in February. “That’s just not how borders work in any real sense. Especially not our border with Mexico.”
Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden were both on the border Thursday, with Trump in Eagle Pass and Biden in Brownsville.
Trump leaves out context on migrants and crime, exaggerates his administration’s success
The person charged with a Georgia nursing student’s murder “is an illegal alien migrant who was led into our country and released into our communities by ‘Crooked Joe’ Biden.'” — Trump in Eagle Pass
Laken Riley, a 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student, was killed while on a run Feb. 22. Authorities charged Jose Ibarra with the murder.
Ibarra, a 26-year-old from Venezuela, was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection when he illegally crossed the border in September 2022, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ibarra was paroled in, allowing him to be released in the U.S. to await further immigration proceedings.
There is conflicting information on whether he was arrested in New York City. ICE told PolitiFact the New York Police Department arrested Ibarra on Aug. 31, 2023, and charged him with “acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17 and a motor vehicle license violation.” ICE said the police released him before immigration authorities were able to issue a detainer request for him. But NYPD told PolitiFact there were no arrests under the name “Jose Ibarra” in 2023.
Despite high-profile cases of crimes committed by, or charged to immigrants in the U.S. illegally, research shows that immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born people. A 2023 Stanford University study found immigrants are 30% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. Research published in 2024 by the libertarian Cato Institute found that in Texas, immigrants in the U.S. illegally have a lower homicide conviction rate than people born in the U.S.
“We ended catch and release.” — Trump in Eagle Pass
This is misleading and doesn’t reflect what happened. Republicans often use the term “catch and release” to describe immigration authorities stopping immigrants at the border and releasing them so they can await their court hearings outside of federal custody.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have followed this practice for decades because there’s limited detention space and court rulings have capped how long someone can be held.
In January 2017, Trump signed an executive order to end “catch and release.” But a few months later, his own attorney general testified to the Senate that the practice continued because of the long case backlog and a shortage of immigration judges.
“We built 571 miles of border wall, much more than I promised I’d build.” — Trump in Eagle Pass
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to build a border wall along at least 1,000 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S. southern border. He didn‘o‘t fulfill that promise.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection data say the Trump administration built barriers along 458 miles. But even most of that construction replaced existing smaller, dilapidated barriers and didn’t add to the total miles of southern border barriers.
The amount of new primary barriers built — 52 miles — is about 10 times less than Trump’s estimate. Primary barriers are the first impediment people encounter when trying to cross the border from Mexico; they can block people who are walking or driving.
Trump waves at migrants he’s trying to keep out at the US-Mexico border
Alia Shoaib – March 2, 2024
Donald Trump waved at migrants at the southern border and exclaimed that they like him.
Trump has proposed launching a mass deportation campaign if reelected in 2024.
On a rival visit, Biden urged Trump to support a bipartisan border security package.
Former President Donald Trump waved and pumped his fist at migrants at the southern border with Mexico — the very same ones he is trying to keep out of the country.
“They like me, governor,” Trump added to Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, who was taking him on a border tour.
Trump has suggested that he would launch the largest deportation campaign in history if he’s reelected in 2024, among other stringent measures to keep migrants out.
Not long after he waved at the migrants, Trump gave a speech at Eagle Pass in which he said Biden had the “blood of countless innocent victims” on his hands” because of his immigration policies.
He listed specific cases in which undocumented immigrants were reported to have attacked people, including the killing of 22-year-old Laken Riley, whose death has grabbed national attention.
“The monster charged in the death is an illegal alien migrant who was led into our country and released into our country by crooked Joe Biden,” Trump said.
Despite such individual cases, studies have found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US-born individuals.
President Biden tells Trump — ‘join me’
Migrants wait in line adjacent to the border fence under the watch of the Texas National Guard to enter into El Paso, Texas, May 10, 2023.Andres Leighton/AP Photo
President Joe Biden simultaneously visited another border town across the state on Thursday as both tried to score political points on the flash point issue of immigration as the November election nears.
Polls show that immigration is one of Biden’s major vulnerabilities, and Trump has continued to highlight his contrastingly draconian approach.
On his rival Texas visit, Biden urged Trump to help him pass his proposed border security package, which Republicans tanked under Trump’s orders.
On his rival Texas visit, Biden urged Trump to help him pass his proposed border security package, which was tanked by Republicans under Trump’s orders.
The package would see billions of dollars put toward staff and resources on the southern border, where officials have been overwhelmed by a surge in migrant crossings.
“Here’s what I would say to Mr Trump,” Biden said. “Instead of playing politics with the issue, instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me.”
“You know, and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen. So instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?” Biden said.
CVS, Walgreens will start stocking mifepristone. What to know about the abortion pill soon to be at the center of a Supreme Court case.
Rachel Grumman Bender,Yahoo Life Health – March 1, 2024
Mifepristone will soon be available (with a prescription) at some CVS and Walgreens pharmacies. (Getty Images)
Mifepristone, a drug that’s typically used in combination with another drug called misoprostol in medication abortions, has been under fire ever since Roe v. Wade, which protected the right to abortion in the United States, was overturned in 2022. According to the Guttmacher Institute, medication abortion is the most common abortion method in the U.S., surpassing surgical abortions for the first time in 2020. Mifepristone is currently in the middle of a political tug of war, with some conservative states seeking to restrict or eliminate access to the abortion pill, while other states are trying to protect and expand access. Also, the Biden administration has recently allowed certified pharmacies to dispense medication abortion. Here’s what you need to know.
💊 What is mifepristone?
Mifepristone is a medication that effectively blocks the hormone progesterone and can be used, in combination with misoprostol, to end a pregnancy up to the first 10 weeks of gestation. “When someone first gets pregnant, there are a lot of changes in hormones, and one of the most important hormones at the beginning of a pregnancy is progesterone,” Dr. Jessica Shepherd, an ob-gyn, tells Yahoo Life. Shepherd explains that progesterone helps sustain a pregnancy, while mifepristone has “an anti-progesterone effect,” essentially blocking the hormone “from doing what it needs to do early in pregnancy, so it can’t sustain the pregnancy.”
🏥 What’s happening with CVS and Walgreens selling abortion pills?
On Friday, CVS and Walgreens — two of the largest pharmacy chains in the U.S. — announced that they will soon start selling mifepristone via a prescription in states where it’s legal to do so. Walgreens will begin dispensing the medication at select certified locations in New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Massachusetts within a week, while prescriptions will become available at CVS Health in Rhode Island and Massachusetts “in the weeks ahead,” according to CVS spokeswoman Amy Thibault.
The Biden administration called the move “an important milestone in ensuring access to mifepristone.” Many experts applaud the decision. “I think it’s good news and helps ensure women’s reproductive rights,” says Wider. Shepherd says that the move clearly shows that Walgreens and CVS are “making a stance toward how can we get women the care they need? It’s so imperative and so overdue. I look forward to seeing where it’s going and am hopeful it will expand to other states as well.”
⚖️ What’s happening with the Supreme Court and mifepristone?
After a federal judge in Texas ruled to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in April 2023, which would have pulled the drug off the market, there’s been an ongoing legal battle over access to the medication. In August 2023, an appeals court in New Orleans upheld some restrictions to the abortion pill — essentially, banning telemedicine prescriptions and mail delivery of mifepristone. However, that ruling was put on hold until the Supreme Court could weigh in, allowing in the meantime access to the drug in states where abortion is legal. On Dec. 13, 2023, the Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from the Biden administration and mifepristone manufacturer Danco Labs, both of which seek to reverse those restrictions. This will be the first time Supreme Court justices will weigh in on abortion since overturning Roe nearly two years ago. The court is expected to hear arguments beginning March 26.
Experts say that patients should have access to mifepristone, with Shepherd calling it a “reproductive justice issue.” She notes that “obstacles have been put in the way” in states with abortion restrictions and that access to the medication provides “ways for people to make decisions for themselves.”
Wider agrees, saying: “Access to mifepristone is very important because its use accounts for more than half of medical terminations across the country, and it’s safe and effective.” She adds: “It allows women to make these choices without putting themselves at risk.”
Trump’s CPAC speech showed clear signs of major cognitive decline — yet MAGA cheered
Chauncey DeVega – February 26, 2024
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Donald Trump was in his full glory over the weekend at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference. For his MAGA people, Republicans, and other neofascists and followers, Trump is like a father figure, preacher, teacher, confessor, lover, and god messiah prophet all in one person. In that way, CPAC is Donald Trump’s “church family” – only the church is full of fascism, hatred, wickedness, cruelty, and other anti-human values, beliefs, and behavior. Trump masterfully wields and conducts this energy.
Donald Trump’s speech at this year’s CPAC was truly awesome. As used here, “awesome” does not mean good, but instead draws on the word’s origins as in “inspiring awe or dread.” In his keynote speech on Saturday, Trump said that America is on a “fast track to hell” under President Biden and the Democrats and that “If crooked Joe Biden and his thugs win in 2024, the worst is yet to come. Our country will sink to levels that are unimaginable.”
He continued with his Hitler-like threats of an apocalyptic end-times battle between good and evil and that the country would be destroyed if he is not installed in the White House. Of course, Trump continued to amplify the Big Lie about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him and the MAGA people. He also made great use of the classic propaganda technique, as though he learned it personally from Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels: Accuse your opposition of that which you are guilty of.
If Mr. Biden is re-elected for a second four-year term, Mr. Trump warned in his speech, Medicare will “collapse.” Social Security will “collapse.” Health care in general will “collapse.” So, too, will public education. Millions of manufacturing jobs will be “choked off into extinction.” The U.S. economy will be “starved of energy” and there will be “constant blackouts.” The Islamist militant group Hamas will “terrorize our streets.” There will be a third world war and America will lose it. America itself will face “obliteration.”
On the other hand, Mr. Trump promised on Saturday that if he is elected America will be “richer and safer and stronger and prouder and more beautiful than ever before.” Crime in major cities? A thing of the past.
“Chicago could be solved in one day,” Mr. Trump said. “New York could be solved in a half a day there.”
“I stand before you today not only as your past and future president, but as a proud political dissident….“For hard-working Americans Nov. 5 will be our new liberation day — but for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and impostors who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day…. Your victory will be our ultimate vindication, your liberty will be our ultimate reward and the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge.”
Here, Donald Trump sounded like an evil version of President Thomas Whitmore in the 1996 movie “Independence Day.”
He also used stochastic terrorism to encourage violence by his MAGA followers and other supporters with the lie that they are somehow being “victimized” or “persecuted” in America: “I can tell you that weaponized law enforcement hunts for conservatives and people of faith.” Echoing those themes, Trump, who believes that he is above and outside the rule of law, described his finally being held responsible for his many obvious crimes against American democracy and society as “Stalinist Show Trials,” as The Guardian further details:
Facing 91 criminal charges in four cases, Trump projected himself as both martyr and potential saviour of the nation. “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell,” he continued.
“And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now because the fact is, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy – really is a threat to democracy.”
Speaking days after the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump hinted at a self-comparison by adding: “I stand before you today not only as your past and hopefully future president but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident.”
The crowd whooped and applauded. Trump noted that he had been indicted more often than the gangster Al Capone on charges that he described as “bullshit”. The audience again leaped to their feet, some shaking their fists and chanting: “We love Trump! We love Trump!”
Trump argued without evidence: “The Stalinist show trials being carried out at Joe Biden’s orders set fire not only to our system of government but to hundreds of years of western legal tradition.
“They’ve replaced law, precedent and due process with a rabid mob of radical left Democrat partisans masquerading as judges and juries and prosecutors.”
Trump is an expert on leveraging everyday people’s pain points and personal fear. In his CPAC speech, Trump triggered this by focusing on real economic anxieties and feelings of vulnerability and precarity about rising energy costs, the cost of living, and the “American Dream” more broadly.
To this point, President Biden and the Democrats have not been able to effectively counter such attacks by Donald Trump and his spokespeople and other agents. Appeals to the facts about how historically great Biden’s economy is, are no salve for how everyday people are experiencing hardship and increasingly view Donald Trump and Trumpism as a viable alternative to the Democrats and “democracy.”
Trump also spun up a horror story version of the United States as a country overrun by black and brown migrants and “illegal” immigrants who are like the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs.” Trump’s solution: mass deportations and concentration camps.
During his speech, Donald Trump would continue to valorize the Jan. 6 terrorists who attacked the Capitol as fascist saints and martyrs of the MAGA movement – a group who Trump vowed to pardon when/if he takes power in 2025. They will in turn become his personal shock troops. Trump’s megalomania and claims to god-like power, were on full display during his speech on Saturday, where the ex-president, described himself in the third person, telling the audience that “Trump was right about everything.”
In an excellent article at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer shared what she learned from embedding herself at last week’s CPAC conference (she did not attend as a credentialed reporter) and how in the Age of Trump and American neofascism that event is a festival of extreme right-wing politics and the hatred and intolerance that are among its most defining features:
Exiled from the press pen, I was just part of the audience, a space previously off-limits to reporters. To say the least, it was enlightening. On Friday, for instance, I listened to a main-stage speech from Chris Miller, a Republican running for governor of West Virginia. Because of its tax-exempt status, CPAC bans speakers from openly campaigning there, so he was listed on the program simply as “businessman.”
Like virtually every other speaker at the event, Miller devoted several of his allotted five minutes to railing against transgender healthcare. “Woke doctors are literally making boys into girls,” he declared. “They’re practicing mutilation, not medicine. They should be in prison.” At that point, a burly man in a giant black cowboy hat sitting next to me leaned over conspiratorially and proclaimed, “I think we should hang them all! I really do.” And he laughed like we were in on the same joke. I confess that I was too cowardly to tell him I was with the left-wing fake news.
Later, during a speech by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, I was sitting next to a woman in full-on MAGA gear. When Noem declared, “There are some people who love America, and there are some people who hate America,” my neighbor gave me a small heart attack. “Get the FUCK OUT!” she yelled furiously, ready to rumble. “Get the FUCK OUT!” Meanwhile, the old man in the camo Trump hat next to her had somehow fallen asleep.
Mencimer then reflected on the devolution of CPAC, describing it as, “[W]hat passed for policy discussions at CPAC this year was largely limited to mass deportations and attacks on trans athletes. The sober panels about the national debt, balancing the budget, or Social Security reform that once commanded top billing were a relic of another era before CPAC became an extension of Trump Inc., devoted to all the MAGA grievances like racial equity, the evils of windmills, or bans on gas stoves.”
However, one must be cautious and understand that Trump’s apparent mental, emotional, and overall cognitive decline, and other indications of a damaged mind, are largely irrelevant to his followers. Donald Trump is a symbol more than a man. His MAGA people and other loyalists and voters ignore, reconcile, and more generally make sense of Trump’s apparent cognitive and speech difficulties by telling themselves that he is “just like them” and “speaks a language they can understand” because he is “authentic” and “not a traditional politician.” By definition, the Dear Leader is infallible. Fake right-wing populism can be bent and shaped to accommodate any absurdity.
Donald Trump’s speech at CPAC is but more evidence that he is giving his MAGA people and other followers and supporters in the Republican Party and the larger right-wing and “conservative” movement what they want. Public opinion polls and other research have consistently shown that there are tens of millions of Americans who yearn for an American dictator or others strongman-type leader, who will “break the rules” to “get things done” for “people like them.” In addition, Republican and other Trump voters specifically support his taking power as a dictator and ending democracy. And as has been widely documented, a significant percentage of white voters do not support democracy if it means that their “racial” group does not have the most influence and power and privilege in American society as compared to black and brown people.
Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party and the larger right-wing and neofascist movement have successfully tapped into what is a centuries-old vein of white supremacist herrenvolk nightmare dreams and white rage in American society and life. The CPAC conference featured speakers and panels that reinforced that today’s Republican Party and “conservative movement” have rejected multiracial pluralistic democracy and seek to replace it with a White Christofascist Apartheid plutocracy.
In contrast to Donald Trump’s awfully awesome speech at CPAC on Saturday, President Biden solemnly warned reporters, again, that the 2024 Election is an existential battle for the country’s democracy and the soul of the nation where our most fundamental freedoms as Americans are imperiled.
The most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard a president say did not come from Donald Trump.
It came from Joe Biden. Speaking with reporters in California on Thursday, the president said this about Donald Trump. “Two of your former colleagues not at the same network personally told me if he wins, they will have to leave the country because he’s threatened to put them in jail,” Biden told Katie Couric. “He embraces political violence,” Biden said of Trump “No president since the Civil War has done that. Embrace it. Encourages it.”
Perhaps I should have been shocked at the revelation that Trump, should he return to power, would jail reporters. I wasn’t of course. I had to fight him (and beat him) three times in court during his first administration to keep my White House press pass. I had already privately heard Trump’s threats. It was just disturbing to hear Joe Biden confirm it publicly. …
That is why the world cannot see Trump back in the White House. He knows nothing but divisiveness. And Biden was right to point out that Trump wants to jail reporters.
Trump supporters don’t care. But I’ve eaten Texas jail food, so I do.
When Einstein fled Germany he fled the poison of nationalism and longed for a country of civil liberty and tolerance. The closest he found was here in the United States. Where is it today? More importantly, where will it be after the November general election?
As always, believe the autocrat-dictator or other such political thug. He or she – in this case Donald Trump – is not kidding or joking.
Echoing Karem’s experience, I have talked to members of the pro-democracy movement (specifically journalists and reporters), and they have shared with me how they are in the process of deciding if they will stay here in the United States or flee the country if Dictator Trump and his regime takes power in 2025.
On Election Day, which will be here very soon, the American people have a choice to make. Last weekend’s CPAC conference was just one more escalation in the direct and transparent threats and dangerousness of Trumpism and American neofascism. If Trump wins on Election Day, the American people cannot say they were surprised by the hell he and his regime and followers will unleash on the country. The American people were told repeatedly what would happen and through both their active and tacit support for Trumpism and neofascism (indifference or otherwise not voting for President Biden and by implication American democracy in this decisive moment) allowed it to happen. How great is the American people’s drive to self-destruction? We will soon find out in eight or so months.
Anthropologist: CPAC displays how Trump’s base believes he is a savior
Alexander Hinton, Rutgers University – February 26, 2024
Former President Donald Trump acknowledges applause as he arrives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday. Thousands of conservative activists, elected officials and pundits gathered to hear speakers with this year’s theme “CPAC: Where Globalism Goes to Die.” Photo by Mike Theiler/UPI
Feb. 26 (UPI) — What is happening in the hearts of former President Donald Trump’s supporters?
The event began on Feb. 21, in National Harbor, Maryland, with Steve Bannon’s routine, untrue banter about how President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, and it peaked with an angry speech from Trump three days later. In between, I sat among the MAGA masses listening to speaker after speaker express outrage about American decline — and their hope for Trump’s reelection.
Everywhere I turned, people wore MAGA regalia — hats, pins, logos and patches, many with Trump’s likeness. I spent breaks in the exhibition hall, which featured a Jan. 6 insurrection-themed pinball machine featuring “Stop the Steal,” “Political Prisoners” and “Babbitt Murder” rally modes and a bus emblazoned with Trump’s face. Admirers scribbled messages on the bus such as, “We have your back” and “You are anointed and appointed by God to be the President.”
Those on the left who dismiss the CPAC as a gathering of MAGA crazies and racists who support a wannabe dictator do not understand that, from this far-right perspective, there are compelling and even urgent reasons to support Trump. Indeed, they believe, as conservative politician Tulsi Gabbard stated in her CPAC speech on Feb. 22, that the left’s claims about Trump’s authoritarianism are “laughable.” This is because CPAC attendees falsely perceive President Joe Biden as the one who is attacking democracy.
Here are my top three takeaways from CPAC about Trump supporters’ current priorities and thinking.
1. There’s a Reagan dinner – but CPAC is Trump’s party
Former President Ronald Reagan runs in CPAC’s DNA. Reagan spoke at the inaugural CPAC in 1974 and went on to speak there a dozen more times.
In 2019, the conservative advocacy group the American Political Union, which hosts CPAC, published a book of Reagan’s speeches with commentary by conservative luminaries. In the preface, Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Political Union, says he often asks himself, “What would Reagan do?”
CPAC’s pomp gala, held Friday, is still called the “Ronald Reagan Dinner.” But Reagan is otherwise hardly mentioned at the conference.
Reagan’s ideas of American exceptionalism have been supplanted by Trump’s populist story of apocalyptic decline. Reagan’s folksy tone, relative moderation and clear quips are long gone, replaced by fury, grievance and mean-spirited barbs.
2. There’s a method to the madness
Many commentators and critics, including groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, view CPAC as a frightening or bizarre gathering of white nationalists who have a nativist agenda.
Indeed, the U.S.-Mexico border was a constant topic at this year’s CPAC, which included controversial anti-immigrant speakers such as the head of Spain’s far-right Vox party and a representative of Hungary, whose leader stated at the 2022 CPAC that Europeans should not become “mixed-race.” Hungary will also host a CPAC meeting in April 2024.
Many of the sessions have alarming titles like, “Burning Down the House,” “Does Government Even Matter” and “Going Full Hungarian.” There are right-wing, populist speakers like Bannon and U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Overall, the program is informed by a conservative logic that largely boils down to God, family, tradition, law and order, defense and freedom.
Of these, God looms largest. As a result, CPAC’s hardcore conservative Christian orientation is anti-abortion rights, homophobic and oriented toward traditional family structure and what it considers morality.
Schlapp co-wrote a book in 2022 that warns of the dangers of “evil forces” — what he considers to be progressives, the radical left and American Marxists. Schlapp’s book title even dubs these forces “the desecrators.” Such inflammatory language is frequently used at CPAC, including by Trump during his Saturday speech.
3. Trump believers think he is their savior
CPAC’s love of Trump is shocking to many on the left. But at CPAC, Trump is viewed as America’s savior.
According to his base, Trump delivered on abortion by appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. They believe that, despite evidence of mixed results, Trump had wide successes at securing the border and creating jobs. For example, during Trump’s time as president, the U.S. economy lost nearly 3 million jobs, and apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the border rose.
Trump’s CPAC speech, like his campaign speeches, harped on such supposed achievements — as well as Biden’s alleged “destruction” of the country.
Conservatives roll their eyes at liberal fears of Trump the despot. Like all of us, they acknowledge, Trump has flaws. They say that some of his comments about women and minorities are cringeworthy, but not evidence of an underlying misogyny and hatefulness, as many critics contend.
Ultimately, CPAC conservatives believe Trump is their best bet to defeat the radical-left “desecrators” who seek to thwart him at every turn — including, as they constantly complained at CPAC, social media bans, “fake news” takedowns, rigged voting, bogus lawsuits, unfair justice, and lies about what they call the Jan. 6, 2021, “protest.“
Despite these hurdles, Trump battles on toward the Republican nomination for presidential candidate — the hero who CPAC conservatives view as the last and best hope to save the USA.The Conversation
Biden considering major new executive actions for migrant crisis
Myah Ward – February 21, 2024
The Biden administration is considering a string of new executive actions and federal regulations in an effort to curb migration at the U.S. southern border, according to three people familiar with the plans.
The proposals under consideration would represent a sweeping new approach to an issue that has stymied the White House since its first days in office and could potentially place the president at odds with key constituencies.
Among the ideas under discussion include using a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar migrants from seeking asylum in between U.S. ports of entry. The administration is also discussing tying that directive to a trigger — meaning that it would only come into effect after a certain number of illegal crossings took place, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
A trigger mechanism was part of a bipartisan Senate border deal that never reached the floor earlier this month. During the deal’s construction, President Joe Biden repeatedly said it would have given him the authority to “shut down” the border.
The administration is also discussing ways to make it harder for migrants to pass the initial screening for asylum seekers, essentially raising the “credible fear standard,” as well as ways to quickly deport others who don’t meet those elevated asylum standards. Two of the people said the policy announcements could come as soon as next week ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on March 7.
The slate of policies could allow the administration officials to fill some of the void left after congressional Republicans killed a bipartisan border deal in the Senate. But it would also open up the administration to criticism that it always had the tools at its disposal to more fully address the migrant crisis but waited to use them.
No final decisions have been made about what executive actions, if any, could be taken, an administration official said, speaking about internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. Administrations often explore a number of options, the official said, though it doesn’t necessarily mean the policies will come to fruition.
The consideration of new executive action comes as the White House tries to turn the border deal failure into a political advantage for the president. It also comes amid growing concern among Democrats that the southern border presents a profound election liability for the party. Officials hope that policy announcements will drive down numbers of migrants coming to the border and demonstrate to voters that they’re exhausting all options to try to solve the problem as peak migration season quickly approaches.
“The Administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system,” said White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández.
“No executive action, no matter how aggressive, can deliver the significant policy reforms and additional resources Congress can provide and that Republicans rejected,” he continued.
The three people familiar with the planning cautioned that the details of proposed actions remain murky and that the impact of the policies — particularly the asylum ban — is also dependent on the specific language of the federal regulation, they said. For example, the Senate bill included exceptions for unaccompanied minors and people who meet the requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture rules.
There are other complications as well. The implementation of any action from the White House would come without the funding and resources that could make implementation easier, though the administration is looking into ways to unlock additional funding. The actions would likely face legal challenges as well.
The Trump administration repeatedly used Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to aggressively shape the immigration system. In late 2018, President Donald Trump signed a policy that temporarily barred migrants who tried to illegally cross into the U.S. outside of official ports of entry. It was quickly blocked by a federal judge in California. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the decision, which was then upheld by the Supreme Court.
The policies, once announced, will likely be met with steep backlash from immigration advocates who will claim the president is once again walking back on his campaign promises to rebuild a humane immigration system and protect the right to asylum.
