Column: Trump’s worst Cabinet picks aren’t just unqualified, they’re part of a bigger power grab
Doyle McManus – November 18, 2024
Donald Trump walks by Matt Gaetz, left, after a day in court during his criminal trial in New York this spring. Former Rep. Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has vowed to purge the Justice Department and FBI of anyone who might get in the president-elect’s way. (Mike Segar / Pool photo via Associated Press)More
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But there’s a more important and potentially more dangerous factor that ties their nominations together: They are foot soldiers in a power grab that, if it succeeds, would weaken the institutional guardrails that limit the president’s powers and concentrate more authority in Trump’s hands.
Former Rep. Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has promised to purge the Justice Department and FBI of anyone who might get in the president’s way. Trump “is going to hit the Department of Justice with a blowtorch — and that torch is Matt Gaetz,” former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon said last week.
Hegseth, the Fox News host who could become Defense secretary, has proposed purging military officers he sees as too committed to diversity, including Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The Pentagon likes to say our diversity is our strength,” Hegseth said on Fox News in June. “What a bunch of garbage.” (“Pete’s a leader,” Bannon said. “He’s kind of a madman — but hey, you need that.”)
Former Rep. Gabbard, who as director of National Intelligence would oversee the CIA and 17 other agencies, has criticized the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine so fervently that a Russian state television host once called her “our girlfriend.”
And Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist who is Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, has said he wants to fire hundreds of senior officials in the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health on “day one.” Trump has encouraged him to “go wild.”
Their pledges are all in keeping with Trump’s broader promise to dismantle much of the federal bureaucracy and bring what remains under his personal control.
“We will demolish the deep state,” the president-elect often said at his campaign rallies, “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
During his first term, Trump often expressed frustration at the legal and political limits on what he could do as president.
In 2018, he expressed an expansive view of his powers under the Constitution: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want.”
But in practice, he found himself hemmed in by experienced Cabinet officials, White House lawyers and military officers, some of whom dubbed themselves “the adults in the room.”
His attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, quietly sidelined his demands that they prosecute Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats.
Trump also denounced the CIA and other intelligence agencies for their finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election campaign to help him defeat Clinton — a judgment he seemed to consider partisan, rather than based on the evidence.
So it’s no surprise that he wants to bring those national security agencies to heel.
But Trump’s plans to expand his personal authority extend much further.
He has vowed to weaken civil service rules that protect federal bureaucrats from being fired if they disagree with their bosses’ decisions. “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president,” he said last year, adding: “I will wield that power very aggressively.”
Robert Shea, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration, explained the real world impact. “If you told your boss that what he or she was proposing was illegal, impractical [or] unwise, they could brand you as disloyal and terminate you,” he said.
The result would be what one expert called “transformation by intimidation.”
Trump has also proposed weakening Congress’ power to direct federal spending — one of the legislative branch’s core functions.
He plans to revive the practice of “impounding” funds — blocking agencies from spending money that Congress has appropriated for programs he doesn’t like.
That tactic could enable him, for example, to stop parts of President Biden’s clean energy program from being implemented, even though Congress has already approved the expenditures.
A 1974 law made impoundment illegal, but Trump has suggested that he will ignore the prohibition and challenge it in court.
And, of course, Trump warned the Senate last week that if it refuses to confirm any of his Cabinet nominees, he may put them in office anyway — by using “recess appointments,” which allow a president to fill top jobs when Congress isn’t in session.
And if the Congress doesn’t recess, Trump may have another norm-shattering gambit in reserve. In his first term, he threatened to adjourn both chambers under a presidential power laid out in the Constitution for “extraordinary occasions.”
That wouldn’t just test the guardrails on a president’s powers, it would “crash through them,” wrote Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice.
That makes it all the more important that Republicans in the Senate, to preserve their constitutional powers, subject Trump’s nominees to searching scrutiny and reject any that are unqualified, dangerous or both.
Those controversial nominations will decide more than the future of the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence community and the vast Department of Health and Human Services — although those stakes are high enough.
They will help determine whether Trump can undo the checks and balances the founders wrote into the Constitution, and turn the executive branch into an instrument of a would-be autocrat’s will.
Democratic AGs rush to form line of defense against Trump
Julia Mueller – November 17, 2024
Democratic attorneys general across the country are readying their legal defenses against the incoming Trump administration, preparing to pounce on potential violations and even take the president-elect to court if he implements controversial policies.
During his first term, state attorneys general brought a wave of lawsuits against the Trump administration as they worked to block moves like his travel ban and family separations at the border. Four years after he left office, as President-elect Trump touts plans for mass deportations and a rollback of environmental regulations, the top prosecutors are on high alert.
They join Democratic governors, some of whom are already in the spotlight as possible 2028 contenders, as a critical line of defense for the party, with the GOP set to take a trifecta of control over the White House and Congress.
“This time, not just with the trifecta, but also a more conservative judiciary, the number of venues for Democrats to advance their policies has shrunk on the federal level,” said Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political scientist and the director of a database on state litigation and attorney general activity.
“Whenever that happens, what we’ve seen is that parties then really use the states as a way to advance their own policy. And when Democrats are still in control of states like California, New York, Illinois … the actions of governors, the actions of state AGs, they really can make a difference not only in their own states, but across the country, on national policy,” he said.
The days since Trump’s win have seen a surge of Democratic attorneys general stepping up to signal they’re ready to counterbalance the GOP when it takes power in Washington next year.
“I don’t wake up every morning dying to sue the president of the United States or his administration,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin (D) told The Hill.
“If he’s operating lawfully, we’re not going to challenge it. But when he violates the law, we’re not going to hesitate to protect our residents,” Platkin said.
Trump has said his Day 1 agenda would launch “the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back Biden orders on equity and “drill, baby, drill.”
“It’s not like the Democrats made it up or something,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, of the prospective threats posed by a second Trump term. “It comes from the mouth, and social media, of Trump himself.”
The president-elect has also stoked concerns with his picks for Cabinet positions, including Trump ally former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for U.S. attorney general. Gaetz, who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, resigned from Congress after getting the nod.
Platkin blasted the nomination on the social platform X as a sign that Trump “would use the DOJ to punish political opponents and undermine the rule of law.”
Attorneys general from coast to coast have been preparing for months amid the competitive White House race, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) told The Hill. They’ve monitored comments from Trump and his inner circle and scrutinized Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term.
The prep is as specific as prewriting briefs so officials “just need to cross the Ts, dot the Is and press print and file it,” Bonta said. California alone reportedly brought more than a hundred lawsuits against Trump in his first term.
“What we learned from the first Trump administration is that he can’t help but break the law. It’s part of his brand. It’s part of what he does,” Bonta said.
During Trump’s first term, Democratic attorneys general led more than 130 multistate lawsuits against the administration, according to Nolette’s database, and boasted an 83 percent win rate. That was more than twice as many as Republican attorneys general led against the Obama administration, with a 63.5 percent win rate. Against President Biden’s administration so far, Republican AGs have seen a win rate of around 76 percent.
The first Trump administration ushered in a “world of heightened AG activism,” Nolette said, making the latest crop of state legal officers “much more proactive in getting ready for challenges that currently don’t even exist.”
The attorneys general are connecting with each other through the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), as well as coordinating with their governors, who are also gearing up to resist Republican policies.
“Nothing unites Democrats more than Donald Trump,” said James Tierney, a Harvard Law School lecturer, the director of StateAG.org and a former Democratic attorney general of Maine.
After Trump’s win, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called a special session of the state legislature to protect progressive policies, vowing the Golden State is “ready to fight.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who brought a major lawsuit against Trump in 2022, joined with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to announce their offices would be convening regularly to “coordinate legal actions” and develop responses to the incoming administration, according to a release.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey (D) — herself a former state AG — has promised her state’s law enforcement would “absolutely not” assist if the Trump administration asked for help with mass deportation plans.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D) said she’s on alert for threats to reproductive health care, gun safety, consumer protections and other issues, and told The Hill that she has “real concerns about the president-elect’s position when it comes to the rule of law.”
“The role of the Democratic AG is the most critical, I think, in this moment in time,” Campbell said, arguing they’re “on the front line.”
Several Democratic governors were in the running for the veepstakes to join Vice President Harris’s 2024 presidential bid, and they’re also making early lists of possible 2028 contenders. Some state AGs, too, may have higher political aspirations, adding a political subtext to their public defense of their party ideals.
“The old joke, of course, is that AGs are ‘aspiring governors.’ And I think at this point we’ve seen, certainly, plenty of evidence that AGs have leveraged their roles to become good candidates for higher office,” Nolette said.
Harris herself is a prime example: She served as California AG before jumping to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. Along the 2024 campaign trail, she touted her work in the role.
Washington state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) won his gubernatorial bid on Election Day. He told reporters after the results that his office feels “prepared to defend” progressive policies in his state as both the White House and his seat changes hands.
And that defense doesn’t always look like lawsuits, experts noted. State attorneys general often write letters to congressional leaders, participate in the notice-and-comment rule-making stage and speak out about certain policies.
“The wise attorney general understands that they’re more than just a lawsuit machine,” Tierney said.
DAGA president Sean Rankin told The Hill that state AGs will continue their work in the courtroom during a second Trump term, but also work to “do a better job” of explaining the work of attorneys general to the public.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R), the chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), argued in a statement to The Hill that the Democratic AGs are “making an empty gesture” with their responses to Trump’s win, “given that regulatory overreach has been a hallmark of the Biden Administration.”
“Unlike President Biden who lost dozens of times to Republican AGs for promulgating illegal and unconstitutional rules and regulations, President Trump will be focused on reducing excessive overreach,” Kobach said.
A Trump White House 2.0. will also likely have a “more sophisticated approach” both to reverse Biden-era regulations and advance their own policies, Nolette said. And Democrats are set to face new hurdles in the increasingly conservative court system — including at the U.S. Supreme Court level, thanks to Trump’s appointments.
“It’s like the filibuster in the Senate. Both sides use it when it’s to their advantage. Republicans had a huge amount of litigation against the Biden administration in these past four years, and there’s more to come. And so this isn’t specific about Trump,” Nolette said of using litigation to combat the administration.
“It’s something that I think AGs of both parties have realized is a very good strategy to delay and to stop policies that they disagree with,” he said. “This is part of the process that’s now entrenched.”
The Lesson of This Election: We Must Stop Inflation Before It Starts
By Isabella Weber – November 12, 2024
Dr. Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Credit…Guillem Casasús
Unemployment weakens governments. Inflation kills them. That’s what a government official from Brazil once told me. But in rich countries including the United States, the politically destructive power of inflation had been forgotten. Standard policy tools left us unprepared and the Biden administration was slow to fight back. The re-election of Donald Trump should serve as a warning to democratic governments.
In this age of overlapping emergencies — hurricanes, an Avian flu outbreak, two regional wars — threats to supply chains are becoming commonplace. Each threat brings the risk of inflation and its power to destabilize governments, including our own. With such emergencies being the new normal, if we learned anything from last week’s earthquake election result, it’s that we need new means of protecting our society and democracy.
Among the biggest problems that need fixing: Many business sectors today are dominated by large corporations that can profit from these one-time events.
Using A.I. and natural language processing in an upcoming paper, several co-authors and I analyzed more than 130,000 earnings calls of publicly listed U.S. companies and found that businesses can coordinate price hikes around cost shocks. This enabled companies, by and large, to pass on or amplify the impact of the initial cost increase in response to shocks in the wake of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.
In other words, the sudden news of cost shocks, like the onset of a pandemic and war, grants companies more freedom to coordinate price hikes across sectors because they realize that their rivals are very likely going to do the same.
Skeptics of this idea often counter that corporate concentration was already high before the pandemic, yet those same powerful businesses kept prices stable for many years, despite close-to-zero interest rates. That’s because under normal circumstances, a company that decides to increase prices without knowing that its competitors would follow suit risks losing business to rivals. This was the world we were living in before the pandemic. Globalization had created the most efficient, just-in-time production networks the world has seen and, for the most part, even giant companies kept prices stable under the pressure of competition.
But when supply bottlenecks occur, the clockwork stops. Every producer is naturally limited in how many products it can produce. This means that even if a company increases prices, competitors cannot easily ramp up their supply to take its business. Plus, everyone in the business sector understands the natural reaction to a shock is to raise prices. Jacking up prices is now a safe choice and has become the rational thing to do for profit-maximizing businesses.
In the wake of Covid, most companies managed to pass on their higher costs to the consumer and defend their margins, while some even increased them. But even if they simply keep their profit margins in response to a cost shock, their profits increase. Think of how the broker’s fee is higher for a more expensive house even if the percentage terms are the same. Corporate leaders know this to be the case. That’s why we found that when cost shocks are large and hit the whole economy, executives sound quite upbeat about them.
Massive shocks can be even better news for the sectors directly hit. Take oil. When demand collapsed overnight because people stayed home during the shutdowns, fossil fuel companies, suddenly faced with an unprecedented collapse in demand, closed some of their highest-cost oil fields and refineries. When demand recovered, the result was a shortage that led to record-high margins. In another forthcoming paper, my co-authors and I estimate that in 2022, U.S. shareholders in publicly listed oil and gas companies had claims on $301 billion in net income, a more than sixfold increase compared to the average of the four years before the pandemic. Oil and gas profits also exceeded the U.S. investments of $267 billion in the low-carbon economy that year.
Oil is inherently a boom-bust sector, but we cannot afford such extraordinary profit spikes in times of emergency. They prop up a sector that needs to be phased out to mitigate climate change. They also exacerbate inequality. As our new research shows, at the peak of the fossil fuel price spike in 2022, the wealthiest 1 percent claimed through shareholdings and private company ownership 51 percent of oil and gas profits. The less affluent faced higher inflation and only got a small slice of the oversized oil and gas profits pie.
Working people suffer through no fault of their own. Even if their wages eventually catch up, they are squeezed and feel cheated in the first place. This is why sellers’ inflation deepens economic inequality and political polarization, which are already threatening democracy.
President Biden mobilized a few unconventional measures to fight inflation, including an antitrust renewal to address outsize corporate power and increasing oil supply by drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. These actions were an important departure from old orthodoxies, but were ad hoc and retroactive. The main policy tool remained increasing interest rates. Sharp rate increases deepened the housing crisis, exacerbated the debt crisis for developing countries and increased the costs of investments urgently needed to address the climate crisis.
Economic stabilization used to be part of the disaster preparedness toolbox. It is time we add it back in. Just as it was recognized that some banks were too big to fail after the global financial crisis, we have to recognize that some other sectors are “too essential to fail.” In essential sectors, we need to move from a pure efficiency logic to strategic redundancies. This requires policy interventions.
Ports and other critical infrastructure should have spare capacity and a well-paid work force large enough to ramp up activity when needed. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a publicly owned buffer stock of oil, should be employed systematically to buy when prices collapse and sell when prices explode to avoid price extremes. It should buy oil on the open market when demand is falling short, thus preventing prices from collapsing, and sell oil when there is a threat of short supply, thus preventing prices from exploding. Such countercyclical purchases and sales by buffer stocks in commodity markets operate on the same logic as central banks’ open market operations in money markets.
It is not enough to release oil when prices spiral upward. As we have learned during the pandemic, a collapse in prices can create a sudden reduction in production capacity that breeds price spikes when demand picks back up.
Another lesson is that where markets are global, it is a good idea to coordinate stabilizing measures internationally — as the International Energy Agency did for its member states. And where futures markets exist, buffer stocks can buy futures when prices fall and sell when they rise for stabilization.
Countercyclical price stabilization through buffer stocks is important beyond oil. We also need it for critical minerals to encourage investments in the green supply chain and for food staples like grains, to avoid violent commodity price fluctuations in the wake of extreme weather events.
In addition to buffering essentials, we need policies that align public and private interests with resilience. As long as corporations see profits go up thanks to threats of shortages in times of disaster, we cannot assume that they prepare for emergencies in the best interest of the public. Price-gouging laws and windfall-profit taxes are relevant policy tools here.
Of course, the main task remains tackling the root causes of the emergencies. But this is a momentous task, especially in our climate change era, and in the interim a systemic set of buffers, regulations and emergency legislation is necessary. Without this economic disaster preparedness, people’s livelihoods and the outcome of elections remain at the whim of the next shock.
Isabella Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we’ll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
What I Wrote
I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.
Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.
Let’s begin with the simplest and most obvious observation: A majority of Americans prefer what Donald Trump has been selling over Kamala Harris. It’s hard to stomach, because this election offered a pretty clear choice between a cheerful and humane future and a rapturously brutish one. But the latter won out. More Americans wanted the 1939 German-American Bund–style hate rally at Madison Square Garden than the big-tent party with high ideals about the American constitutional order. And we can no longer reassure ourselves, as we did in 2016, that Trump voters didn’t precisely know what they were getting or that much of what he promised to do was not to be taken seriously. We know what he’s about now, and a majority of voters clearly want it.
The country is set to change in stark ways, as Project 2025 jumps from the pages of a far-right dream journal into our lives. There will be big rollbacks in the civil rights many of us have come to enjoy, causing disproportionate pain to women and members of the LGBTQ community. I feel terribly for all the people who voted to protect reproductive freedoms in their states because the effort may be all for naught. As we have relentlessly explained on TNR’s pages, Trump’s Department of Justice can create a national abortion ban by enforcing the Comstock Act, thus bypassing the legislative process and the will of voters entirely. Wherever reproductive rights have managed to secure a haven in a state constitution, those rights will be fought over in inhospitable venues, like the Supreme Court.
Trump’s signature policy proposal is a mass deportation scheme that will target legal citizens for “remigration” alongside the undocumented. The regulatory state will be transformed into something that serves corporations instead of the public. The civil service, as I have mentioned before, will be reconfigured into something that, at best, may look like the “spoils system” of yesteryear; more likely it will exist to dole out punishments to Trump’s political opponents. Imagine a world in which blue states don’t receive disaster relief; where Democrats don’t get their Social Security checks.
Part of Trump’s second-term agenda includes a plan to crush left-liberal organizing. The movement to end the war in Gaza, which was highly effective in shifting public opinion on Israel’s ongoing military assault, will feel this hammer blow first. Trump has been lately dogged by generals who opposed his fascist inclinations; his future generals will be much less reluctant. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will retire and be replaced by younger versions of themselves. Probably worst of all, the timeline on permanent climate catastrophe has moved up—it’s not unfair to say that we may soon arrive at a point of no return (though my strong suspicion is that we have reached it already).
At the moment, I can’t exactly figure out what kind of Democratic Party emerges from the wreckage of this election. Harris ran a distinctly centrist style of politics, for which influential members of the punditocracy and the party’s most entrenched elites had long agitated. This approach flopped, badly. This brand of politics makes complete sense on paper to a lot of people who now need to contend with the fact that the voters that Democrats need the most to win presidential elections are rejecting it in substantial numbers.
But these failures are not the biggest problem Democrats face. The real crisis is that all the roads ahead are fraught with peril. The country has clearly tacked to the right in substantial ways. It’s going to make sense to a lot of Democrats to keep chasing the electorate in that direction. But a party that, in 2024, was only really defending a narrow portfolio of traditionally Democratic principles ceases to be the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense if they abandon those few battlements which they’ve retained the courage to defend. Tacking right might be a path to power, but we should dispense with the delusion that a Democratic Party choosing this path would continue to be a liberal party. Rather, it would come to reside in the same ideological province of the pre-Trump Republican Party—and remember, that’s a movement that Trumpism dispatched far more rapidly and soundly than the Democrats.
At the same time, organizing the party around a bolder, leftward direction is difficult to fathom. A more leftist set of domestic policy prescriptions requires its proponents to run the sort of piping-hot, high-spending economy that Biden attempted—and probably to a greater extent than Biden was willing to go. The failure of Bidenomics to impress the very voters it strove so mightily to help will make politicians extremely skittish about taking that approach again anytime soon. But even if Democrats were brave enough to let it rip, bolder policies also require a functioning administrative state to administer them. Right now, the Supreme Court is not committed to the administrative state’s survival and is more likely to keep dismantling it. So a Democratic Party that shifts in this direction is destined to make a ton of near-term promises that it can’t fulfill and risk making voters more cynical about government, which helps strongmen like Trump stay in power.
All that said, Trump might very well run up against the problem of unfulfillable promises a lot sooner than the Democrats. Trumpism has always been a slow march into the thickets of its own policy paradoxes, and this will only grow more pronounced as all the reins and fetters that impeded Trump’s first-term ambitions come off in the second. Here, the laws of gravity snap back with a vengeance. Trump cannot deport millions of people without sending the economy into a doom spiral. He can’t create a more efficient government by asking a noodlehead failure like Elon Musk to manage it. He can’t put a quack like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health without people getting a lot sicker. You can’t make America great again while destroying the regulatory regime that keeps a staggering range of everyday harms at bay: coal ash spills and E. coli and shoddy building construction and, lest we forget, pandemics. And, no, you can’t arrest climate change by pretending it’s not happening.
The problem, of course, is that the rug-pull always arrives too late for the conned to prevent. While we are waiting for these bills to come due, however, Trump will probably manage to keep two of his promises: He will duck accountability for the malfeasances for which he’s already facing judgment in various legal fora (and likely extend this privilege to a grip of bad actors, beginning with the January 6 rioters), and he will hurt the people he deems to be his enemy. Those supporters who are inclined to dole out punishments of their own will feel a freer hand to do so. This is going to be an immediately more dangerous country to reside in for lots of Americans.
This has, unfortunately, been the cauldron in which recent Democratic electoral successes have been conjured: The collapsed reality and widespread destruction wrought from GOP misrule provokes a backlash that drives up enough public support for a change. This is how we got Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House. This is also the widening gyre in which we’re now trapped: Republican failures, and the intense period of crisis management that follows, have made it harder for Democrats to build anything of their own that’s truly enduring, which in turn gives them little to run on. I’m left with the strong impression that the only thing most people know about Democrats is that they didn’t want Trump to be president.
As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted on election night, “Incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic.” Perhaps this outcome was predetermined. But it wasn’t our fate to end up with, as Marshall described, “Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways” as the alternative. That a cruel president is returning to office on the promise of doubling down on the cruelty speaks to something really unpleasant about ourselves. There was a notion, once, that Obama’s election indicated that the United States was closer than ever to becoming the nation we were always destined to be. With Trump’s reelection, we should reckon with the dreadful possibility that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie is correct when he says, “Most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.”
The exact thing that helped Trump win could become a big problem for his presidency
Analysis by Matt Egan – November 7, 2024
Donald Trump rode a powerful wave of discontent over the cost of living back to the White House.
Voters, fed up with high prices on everything from groceries to car insurance, have ousted Democrats from power in Washington.
Trump reminded voters often that inflation wasn’t a problem when he was calling the shots. And he has promised to attack high prices by shaking things up.
But if he’s not careful, Trump could have an inflation problem of his own.
Not only that, but the bond market is already getting nervous about Trump’s plans to add trillions to the national debt. Bond yields have climbed sharply, a situation that will make it more expensive to get a mortgage or home equity loan and finance the purchase of a car.
“The lesson of this election shouldn’t go unnoticed by Republicans – inflation doesn’t sit well with voters, and they won’t forget,” Ryan Sweet, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, told CNN.
Of course, it’s far too early to know which of Trump’s campaign promises will become a reality. For now, Wall Street seems largely unfazed by the inflation warnings.
Investors appear to be betting that Trump won’t actually go forward with plans to impose tariffs on all $3 trillion of US imports, or that he won’t be able to deport millions of undocumented workers. And they may be right.
After all, there’s a long history of presidential candidates softening their approach once the votes are done being counted and the business of governing begins.
America’s affordability crisis
Voters made clear Tuesday their frustrations with the state of the economy.
Two-thirds (67%) of voters described the US economy as not good or poor, according to CNN exit polls.
Despite historically low unemployment, just 32% rated the economy as excellent or good.
And this proved to be pivotal in the outcome.
Among those who described the economy as not good or poor, 69% voted for Trump. Likewise, 40% of Latino voters indicated the economy was the No. 1 issue. Trump decisively carried Latino voters who picked the economy as the No. 1 issue.
The findings illustrate just how angry voters are about the cost of living.
Yes, the rate of inflation is down sharply. It peaked at a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 when gas prices spiked above $5 a gallon.
But no, prices are not down.
“Though economists focus on the rate of price changes, consumers focus on the level of prices,” Sweet said. “The American consumer generally has a short memory, except for when it comes to prices. Many can tell you the price of gasoline, milk and bread down to the penny today versus four years ago.”
Prices vs. paychecks
And all too often, Americans are spending much more than they were when President Joe Biden took office.
Each month, the typical US household must spend $1,120 more than in January 2021 just to buy the same goods and services, according to Moody’s Analytics.
Paychecks are up by about the same amount ($1,192 more per month, on average) but that means many people must spend all their pay hikes just to get by. They’re treading water, not getting ahead.
And keep in mind, these are averages. For many others, wages have not kept up with inflation.
As CNN’s Phil Mattingly noted, Trump flipped multiple counties in Pennsylvania where wages have failed to keep up with prices.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to not just get the rate of inflation down but to make prices plunge by deporting millions of undocumented people and unleashing fossil fuel production. In August, Trump said he would to get prices to “come down fast.”
“The price level for many consumer goods and services aren’t going to plunge,” Sweet said. “The level of prices for many things is permanently higher.”
Tariffs and deportations could lift prices
Not only that, but elements of the Trump agenda could spike prices – if they were enacted. Trump has held up tariffs as a magical fix to almost any problem, describing these taxes on imports as “the greatest thing ever invented.” He’s threatened to impose unthinkably high tariffs on friend and foe alike.
Trump’s promises to impose massive tariffs, deport millions of undocumented workers and potentially influence the Federal Reserve would weaken growth, boost inflation and lower employment, according to a recent working paper released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Inflation would climb to at least 6% by 2026, and by 2028, consumer prices would be 20% higher, the researchers found.
Trump has insisted that his trade agenda will not be inflationary, noting that price increases were modest during his administration even as he lobbed massive tariffs on China.
Still, Trump’s calls for across-the-board tariffs have alarmed mainstream economists. They point to study after study that shows Americans bore almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on China.
Trump’s tariff proposals would cost the typical US household over $2,600 a year, according to a separate analysis from the Peterson Institute.
Slapping tariffs on apparel, toys, furniture, household appliances, footwear and travel goods alone would cost Americans at least $46 billion a year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group that represents retailers.
“We’re going to create the worst of both worlds: We’re going to have higher domestic prices for goods and some services…and we’re going to have no overall improvement to the jobs picture or the wage picture,” Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, told CNN’s Allison Morrow.
Even Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has been very supportive of the overall Trump agenda, recently told CNN he’s “not a big fan” of tariffs like what Trump has proposed.
“When Trump uses tariffs as a negotiating tool, I’m fine with that,” Moore said during a phone interview in late October. “But I don’t want to see us dramatically raise tariffs on imported goods. Tariffs are taxes. And my worry is, if you take it too far, you’re going to get into a tit-for-tat situation.”
And that raises one of the paramount economic questions of this next Trump era: Will he soften his economic proposals to avoid reigniting prices? Or will he triple-down on tariffs in a way that invites a return of inflation?
The long and winding political campaign road is ending (we hope) on the doorsteps of the 60th U.S. Presidential Election. This is only my 16th, my first was just after I joined the Army. But I would wager no other election in our history will compare to 2024’s, in length, breadth, cost or more importantly, historical consequence.
Most clear thinking voters refuse to believe pollsters, who claim this is way, way, too close to predict. They insist it will again come down to the smallest percentage of voters in a handful of states. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada they say, hold the keys to the White House, and the fate of the Republic.
The residents of those swing states have suffered the brunt of the $16 billion onslaught of political ads. Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance floodgates sprung wide open to Corporate and special interest quid pro quo. This judicial abomination of the First Amendment has inflicted America with endless campaigning, astronomical expenditures and a potentially violent polarization. Too many MAGA faithful predict a Civil War on steroids, unless Trump is returned to his ordained position as their White Christian Savior and President.
But I’m not ready to give up on the American Experiment. I honestly and reasonably believe Kamala Harris could get between 6 and 15 million more popular votes that trump. The electoral congress is a bit uncertain, but the Dem’s should prevail; by how much depends on disaffected true Conservative Republicans. I believe the Democrats could take back the House of Representatives, and have an even chance at retaining the U.S. Senate. Hope springs eternal. Polling yesterday revealed a three point lead for V.P Harris, in Iowa of all states. And I like Colin Allred’s chances in Texas at last. The Democrats as usual, have enlisted highly qualified, intelligent, committed and honorable candidates across the country. The republi-cons have insisted on election denying, unthinking, dimwitted, sycophantic cult followers of trump Inc. Inquiring minds have to wonder why people who hate government and governing principles, run for positions running the government. I guess the answer is obvious.
OnSeptember 29, 2023 – Sarah Pruitt, a writer and editor based in New Hampshire wrote:
“The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart”
“Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.”
“This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.”
‘“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”’
“George Washington’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamiltononce called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”’
As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.
“In George Washington’s Farewell Address to the Nation, Washington and Hamilton worked closely together on the address, which took the form of a public letter to the American people. It was published in the Daily American Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper, on September 19, 1796, and later reprinted in papers throughout the country. The letter included three main principles:”
1. Importance of Unity:
“After opening with an explanation of his choice not to seek a third term, Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole. “You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together,” Washington declared. “The Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.”
“Regions such as North, South, East and West should see their common interests rather than their differences, he continued. “Your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty and…the love of the one ought to endear you to the preservation of the other.”
2. The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
“According to Washington, one of the chief dangers of letting regional loyalties dominate loyalty to the nation as a whole was that it would lead to factionalism, or the development of competing political parties. When Americans voted according to party loyalty, rather than the common interest of the nation, Washington feared it would foster a “spirit of revenge,” and enable the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterward the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
“In fact, political parties had already begun to emerge by the time Washington stepped aside. Federalists, who drew their support largely from New England, advocated a strong national government and the fiscal programs created by Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Republicans (later Democratic-Republicans) led by Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, opposed Hamilton’s economic policies. They also split with the Federalists in foreign policy, favoring a closer relationship with France over Great Britain.”
“Washington supported Hamilton’s financial programs and sided with the Federalists in supporting the Jay Treaty with Britain. By the end of his presidency, Washington was weathering increasingly bitter attacks from his Republican critics, and his farewell address represented his response to such attacks, as well as a more general statement of his principles.”
3. Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
“Just as regionalism would lead to the formation of political parties, Washington believed, partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” While he advocated for the United States to be on good terms with all nations, especially in commercial relations, he argued that “inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”
“Europe had its own, very complicated, set of interests, and the United States should keep its distance from European affairs, Washington believed. A foreign policy based on neutrality was the safest way to maintain national unity, and stability, in the United States. Although Washington saw the need for the nation to involve itself in foreign affairs in the case of war or other emergencies, he argued that it must “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Sarah Pruitt, Updated July 6, 2023
Needless to say, the Founding Fathers would be stunned and appalled at the current state of our multi-billion dollar campaigns and political divide.
“Consider, for example, that after a wealthy 25-year-old man named George Washington, in 1757, bought “$195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends prior to an election,” the Virginia Legislature enacted a law prohibiting candidates, “or persons on their behalf,” from giving voters “money, meat, drink, entertainment or provision . . . any present, gift, reward or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.”
That historic guard rail hasn’t dissuaded Elon Musk from pledging to give away $1 million each day to registered voters in battleground states, just for signing on the dotted line, and purportedly to vote for his BF Trump.
“Washington’s farewell address urged Americans not to put their regional and sectional interests above the interests of the nation as a whole.”
But Trump’s first and foremost principle, is to divide America into MAGA’s and everyone else. To pit his faithful against the others. To demonize immigrants, in spite of two of his wives and in-laws being recent immigrants. And most recently, to scare the bejesus out of as many American’s as possible, on the dangers of immigration from non-Christians.
Washington warned:The ‘Worst Enemy’ of Government: Loyalty to Party Over Nation:
It’s blaringly obvious that Trump and his myriad of sycophantic MAGAnians, are not loyal to the Republic or to our Democratic institutions, they’re government hating bomb throwers.
Washington feared:Danger of Foreign Entanglements:
But in this ever dangerous and fractured world, with growing numbers of anti-Democratic, autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic and fascist regimes, NATO, the Indo-Pacific Alliance and other international pacts are necessarily more important than ever.
Unfortunately, trump and his followers are more aligned with leaders he admires and is clearly envious of; trump regards Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orban, and Nicolás Maduro as great world leaders to be applauded and emulated.
Trump, cowardly and treasonous Republi-cons in Congress, Musk and other billionaire MAGA benefactors, and the millions of MAGA, hate filled sheeple, and most importantly, a majority of extreme right supreme court justices, have failed American Democracy on all three of Washington’s governing principles.
The MAGA Republi-cons in the U.S. Senate could have stopped trump, at any time in his 5 year reign of Anti-American terrorism, and then failed to convict him at his two impeachments. The supreme court could have reigned in trump, instead, they gave him free rein to subvert the Department of Justice’s attempts to hold him accountable for his crimes and also ruled to allow him to commit even more consequential malfeasances if he’s returned to the White House.
Numerous journalists and news organizations have attempted to shine a light through the trump smoke-screen of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and countless lies he used to subvert, the Grand Old Party, the conservative movement and MAGA-ward Christians. We know what trump accomplished in his first term. Above all, he attempted to overthrow our Democracy and Democratic institutions, and hired government hating, self-serving like-minded operatives to turn over federal and state power to the rich and powerful, to fossil fuel and extractive benefactors and to enemies foreign and domestic. No opportunity to enrich himself and his friends and family was left untapped. And we know what trump and the MAGA republi-cons in congress would inflict on America and the world if they get control of the White House and the congress. More on the order of massive budget busting tax cuts for the ultra-rich and tax dodging corporations, 80% of which will go, as before, to the top 1%.
But a second trump administration will be operating in “Katie bar the door” territory, thanks to the SCOTUS.
MAGA operatives published their plans in a 887-page book, which was written in part by the former president’s aides.
FactCheck.org®A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center enlightens: “Project 2025 provides a roadmap for “the next conservative President” to downsize the federal government and fundamentally change how it works, including the tax system, immigration enforcement, social welfare programs and energy policy, particularly those designed to address climate change.”
“It also wades deeply into the culture war that has been dividing the country. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the teaching of “‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’” in public schools, and “deleting” terms such as “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “gender equity,” and “reproductive health” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.”
“The project is being led and funded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank founded in 1973. In addition to Heritage, there are more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board. Among those “coalition partners” are the Center for Immigration Studies, Moms for Liberty, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Tea Party Patriots, Turning Point USA and America First Legal Foundation, which is headed by Stephen Miller, a former Trump senior adviser.”
“In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” a CNN review found.
Government ‘efficiency’: Project 2025 proposes cutting federal spending and firing “supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats.” (Separately, Trump has praised businessman Elon Musk for firing employees, and floated the idea of putting Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.)
“The project recommends privatizing government functions, including the National Weather Service, Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as eliminating the Department of Education and scores of programs, bureaus and offices throughout government. The project also calls for removing the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The courts have blocked the rule from taking effect.”
“As for other departments, the project calls for the “wholesale overhaul” of the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, the “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, and a return “to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget” at the Department of Homeland Security. The Justice Department overhaul would include “a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.”
“One frequent target for cuts are offices and programs that promote clean energy and monitor or mitigate the effects of climate change.”
“For example, the project calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts research and issues reports on climate change. Project 2025 says “many” of NOAA’s functions can be “eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
“Social welfare programs: Project 2025 cites fraud and waste in safety net programs and calls for eliminating or reducing basic benefits for low-income individuals and families.”
“For Medicaid, Project 2025 proposes adding work requirements for beneficiaries and “time limits or lifetime caps … to disincentivize permanent dependence.” The health insurance program for low-income Americans covered nearly 74 million people in May, according to the latest data.”
“The conservative plan also calls for tightening work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and changing the eligibility requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which was created by the overhaul of the welfare system in 1996. New eligibility requirements would also reduce the number of students served by the national school breakfast and lunch programs — which were described in the book as “inefficient, wasteful” programs.”
“Project 2025 also seeks to incentivize at-home child care. “Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare,” the plan states.”
“The plan calls for the elimination of Head Start, a program that funds education, health and social services programs for low-income children under 5 years old.”
I would personally like to thank all the critical thinking patriots – journalists, activists, fact based news organizations and others, for helping America to think critically about who’s attempting to turn our Democratic Republic over to anti-Democratic autocrats, self-serving kleptocrats, theocrats, misogynists, white national racists and fascists. They’ve gallantly tried to help turn the page on America’s trump presidential nightmare.
Hundreds of true conservative, Eisenhower and Regan Republican party faithful, who’ve been driven out of the party, or fled for their lives, have advocated for and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in this consequential election. There are Republican’s for Harris, scientists for Harris, historian’s for Harris, Puerto Rican’s for Harris, Dad’s for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Mom’s for Harris and probably dozens that I haven’t heard about.
Some, like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and others, have went further and endorsed Democrats running against election denying trump apologists and January 6th sympathizers in congress. Many tens or hundreds of thousands have resigned themselves to vote against their long lost party. Virtually everyone who worked for trump in his administration have declared they would refuse to endorse or vote for trump in 2024.
trump, fearing another lost election, has become more unhinged from political reality. The MAGA rally lies and campaign promises have become more outrageous by the day. The twice impeached, 4 times indicted, thrice convicted felon, can’t help but envision himself spending time in a federal prison at the ripe old age of 80. If he loses, odds are favoring him fleeing the country before the Justice Department overcomes the $100 million dollars he’s spent trying to subvert a just reckoning. Also if he loses the election, the campaign faithful piggy-bank will dry up and he’ll be forced to spend his own dwindling wealth on his many legal defenses.
trump’s campaign rhetoric becomes darker and more ominous by the day. Aside from immigrants eating cats and dogs, something that should not even be repeated, trump blames immigrants for every crime, malady, immorality, and unfairness imposed on real white Christian citizens.
Kamala, on the other hand, preaches joy, inclusion, unity and optimism. Her message is somehow getting through the right-wing MAGA-phones, republi-con congressional treason and obfuscation, foreign interference, social media conspiracies, and trump’s fantasized, Democratic dystopian future.
Although Jeffrey Preston Bezos, American business magnate and oligarch best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, decided to block a Washington Post endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, most of the Post’s journalists have voiced their choices in the election, through their reporting and writings. “Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” It’s too bad that More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the paper. Don’t blame the messenger.
I, on the other hand, am not afraid of endorsing Kamala and Tim to bring America back from the abyss. I’m a Veteran who served my country for 3 years in the Army, in a nuclear missile artillery battalion. We had our missiles aimed at the Soviets and they had theirs aimed at us. I think I fell asleep 60 years ago, just woke up and nothing has changed. We’re still butting heads with the Russkies. We were required to have secret clearances to serve in our Pershing unit. We had monthly seminars from intelligence officers on the necessity of protecting secrets and documents, especially when we were out in public. We couldn’t even have a camera near the military Kaserne. They found a camera on one soldier and we never heard from him again. It shocks myself and fellow veterans how trump abused the national trust by illegally taking highly classified government secrets and documents from government intelligence agencies, and then refusing to turn them over when ordered by the courts, and also by recklessly storing them in a public bathroom. A president who betrays his country and his oath of office should not be returned to the White House. I can’t believe how any Veteran could vote for trump.
As a member of a dozen or so unions and working in manufacturing and construction, I vote for the folks who valiantly fought to stem the flight of manufacturing jobs offshore. Those were all Democrats, including Joe Biden, Three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and many other Democrats. The republi-cons in congress greased the pathways and fought for tax incentives for corporations to offshore high-paying middle class jobs.
trump and J.D. Vance have already proposed trying to overturn the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administrations Chips and Science Act. “The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion. The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China.
“When the CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022, it had bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both political parties hailed the law’s importance for reviving US chip-making capacity in the face of China’s growing influence in the semiconductor sector.”
“But in the final days of this presidential election cycle, the law has become a point of contention between the political parties, putting its future in doubt.”
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who voted against the CHIPS Act, drew criticism after suggesting he would consider repealing the program under the Trump administration
“Analysts estimated that the act incentivized between 25 and 50 separate potential projects, with total projected investments of $160–200 billion and 25,000–45,000 new jobs.”
How can any laborer, union member or otherwise, vote for trump and his anti-labor supporters in congress, who overwhelmingly vote against labor issues at every chance.
President Biden, Vice President and Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and the Democratic party as a whole, are strong supporters of labor and labor unions.
The Democratic party, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have always, and will always fight for women’s reproductive freedom and the right to make their own healthcare decisions, and to have access to safe and legal abortions. Harris wants to restore Roe v. Wade, which protects abortion up until the time of fetal viability or about 22 weeks. The vast majority of voters agree with her; 89%, think this election will have an impact on abortion rights, and 61% said it will have a “major” impact.
If trump and his MAGA Christian supporters regain control of the White House, a national abortion ban will be at the top of their to-do lists.
For all these reasons, and the fact that trump is the absolute worst, most vile inhabitant of the White House in U.S. history, I believe the Democrats and Kamala Harris will prevail in this election and will be able to turn the page on this ugly and divisive period in our history. As she says, we’re not going back. I just hope that a large resounding victory, might force the republi-cons to alter their anti-Democratic mind set.
So where does that leave the MAGA republi-cons and the unholy, un Christ-like prosperity Christians who went all in on trump’s campaign of grievance, revenge and retribution? They ignored the hundreds of red flags, the habitual lies, the rampant self-serving, the crimes, the indiscretions, the flagrant immorality, and the daily un-presidential conduct. Millions of true and faithful conservative Republicans have fled the party, or the party has left them in it’s toxic wake. Are there enough influential, authentic, conservative Republican’s like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney and others, capable of resurrecting the Grand Old Party, or it it destined for the waste bin of history.
trump, Christian Nationalists, and MAGAnians in congress, believe scaring their faithful out of their wits, and holding together their coalition of disaffected, grievance based bro-crew faithful is enough to win trump a second term and keep him out of prison.
$170 million has already been wagered on this election, an abomination causing the founding fathers to turn over in their graves. Who will lose their political shirts.
I believe they’re wrong on all counts. The others, and especially women in every town and burb, in every corner of the nation are not settling for returning to the dark ages of female subjugation and purgatory. The women of America might just save the Republic.
I’ve Covered Authoritarians Abroad. Now I Fear One at Home.
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist– November 2, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
With this presidential election seemingly a jump ball, what might American democracy and the world look like if Donald Trump is again elected president?
I think it’s hyperbole to suggest, as Hillary Clinton did, that a Trump election would be “the end of our country as we know it.” I don’t think that Trump could turn the United States into a dictatorship.
That said, in the course of four decades of covering the world, I’ve repeatedly seen charismatic leaders win democratic elections and then undermine those democracies. The populist left did that in Venezuela, Mexico and El Salvador, and the populist right did it in Hungary, India and Poland (Poland managed to claw its way back). In his lust for power, willingness to ignore democratic norms and eagerness to glorify himself and suppress opposition, Trump reminds me of those leaders.
“He is the most dangerous person to this country,” Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward.
It’s not that Trump would declare himself dictator for life, but he has already adopted the standard strongman approach of trying to weaponize the legal system to punish and intimidate critics. When he was president, he proposed prosecuting Clinton and did force a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State John Kerry.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in June.
It’s worth noting that his efforts to prosecute Clinton and Kerry didn’t succeed, and American democracy survived his first term largely unscathed. Democratic institutions are stronger in the United States than in Hungary or Venezuela, and our system is less vulnerable.
It’s also true that in his first term, Trump’s autocratic inclinations were frustrated by incompetence and by frantic efforts by his own aides to impede him. What would be different in a second term is that he is better prepared and seems ready to bring in like-minded aides who would empower his antidemocratic efforts.
I’ve seen in many other countries how threats and revenge can intimidate the business community and civil society into grudging acquiescence. When Trump was in office, his administration reportedly took steps to hurt Jeff Bezos and his corporate interests, possibly costing him a $10 billion military contract for cloud computing. That may explain Bezos’ decision to withhold an endorsement in the presidential election by The Washington Post, which he owns.
When I was The Times’s bureau chief in Beijing many years ago and wrote tough articles about China’s prime minister, the Chinese government responded by aggressively auditing my taxes. So it felt familiar to learn that Trump told aides to use the I.R.S. to audit the taxes of his critics or those who wouldn’t do his bidding, like James Comey and Andrew McCabe of the F.B.I.
Aides initially resisted, but Comey and McCabe were later selected — supposedly randomly — for audits. Trump said he knew nothing about this, but his denials also felt straight out of the Chinese playbook. Officials in China would tell reporters things that we all knew were false not to persuade anyone but to confuse the issue or to establish the party line for followers to echo.
The first time I met Trump as a politician, he made absurd claims and then denied ever making them — and I felt I was transported back into meetings with Chinese officials whose relationship with truth and reality was not just casual but largely coincidental.
The First Amendment is long established in the United States, and it will survive. But Trump can undermine the free press by bullying corporate owners. After all, about a year ago, he called for NBC’s corporate owners to be investigated for treason because of the network’s coverage, and he suggested recently that ABC News should be punished for the way it managed the presidential debate.
“They’re a news organization,” he said of ABC News. “They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license.” Later he called for CBS to lose its license as well and said that “60 Minutes” “should be taken off the air, frankly.” National news organizations don’t actually need licenses, but their local affiliate TV stations do.
Trump has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to reduce protections for news organizations. Two years ago he called for imprisoning journalists who don’t reveal sources in national security cases and added gleefully that the prospect of prison rape would make journalists ready to give up sources. (I believe journalists are made of sterner stuff, and I’ve seen that in the raw courage of reporters risking their lives in autocracies like Russia.)
Just as alarming is Trump’s suggestion that he would use the armed forces against U.S. citizens. In October he suggested that the National Guard or military be deployed in America against “the enemy from within,” including “radical left lunatics.”
That kind of language may encourage more political violence of the type we already saw on Jan. 6. Trump seemed to acknowledge the risk in his April Time magazine interview, when he was asked about the possibility of post-election violence. “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he said ominously. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
Spare a moment as well to contemplate what a Trump election might mean internationally.
If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Russian forces might now be in Kyiv, for Trump could never have mustered the international coalition and rounded up the assistance to keep Russia at bay (even if he had wanted to). Ukraine would probably have collapsed, Russia might have moved on to Moldova or Latvia, and NATO might well be an empty shell. Observing the fecklessness of the West, China would probably be more aggressive toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, so war might be more likely in Asia.
Trump presents himself as a strongman, but my sense from conversations with foreign officials and business leaders is that what he actually projects is weakness. He would damage the Atlantic alliance and threaten the network of countries that Joe Biden has knit together to restrain China, and he seems to discount the challenges from Moscow and Beijing.
Just last month, Trump described some of his American critics as “scum” and “a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Perhaps that’s why Russia is interfering in the U.S. election with the apparent aim of helping Trump.
Similarly, some Chinese people joke that Trump’s Chinese name is Chuan Jianguo, or Build-the-Country Trump — meaning that for all Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, his chaotic approach and disregard for allies make China stronger.
Trump has little interest in foreign wars, but he can be reckless and inclined to escalate; the upshot is that early in his presidency we came “much closer than anyone would know” to war with North Korea, in Trump’s own words to Woodward. His defense secretary, James Mattis, was so worried that he slept in gym clothes for a time and installed a flashing light in his bathroom to alert him to a crisis if he happened to be showering.
None of us knows how events will unfold, and Trump would not achieve all his aims. Two years ago, he urged the “termination” of the Constitution, and that won’t happen. When he was in office and a federal circuit court blocked one of his programs, he told an aide to “cancel” the court — it didn’t work then, and it won’t next year.
But could Trump make the United States less democratic and make the world far more dangerous? Absolutely. We would be gambling with our future.
The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist– November 2, 2024
Credit…Eric Ruby for The New York Times
To conclude my Friday column on the stakes of the 2024 presidential election, I quoted a passage from Sean Wilentz’s 2005 book on the rise of American democracy. Here’s the passage, which I want to quote again because it’s a great piece of prose and directly relevant to an observation I want to make.
Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. 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.
Democracy is on the ballot next Tuesday. Democracy was on the ballot four years ago, and it was on the ballot four years before that.
Will democracy ever not be on the ballot? Are we doomed to exist in a world in which every contest for national leadership has critical stakes for the American system of government?
I won’t say yes — but I won’t say no, either.
The reason I won’t say “yes” is that there is a real chance that the Republican Party will back away from the ideological hostility to democracy that defines the MAGA tendency. If Donald Trump loses — thus leading the party to its fourth consecutive defeat (in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024) overall in national elections — ambitious Republicans may finally decide that he and his movement are a dead end for the party. In that world, presidential elections will still have the highest stakes of any of our electoral contests, but we may not be fighting over the fate of self-government itself.
But the reason I won’t say “no” is that there will never be — and there arguably never has been — an election in which we won’t be faced with the choice of how inclusive or exclusive we want our democracy to be. Even in a hypothetical future in which the Republican Party is not led by a would-be autocrat, it will almost certainly still be a party that opposes mechanisms designed to make it easier to participate in the political process. It will still be a party that tries to use the counter-majoritarian elements of the American system to its benefit. It will still be a party that opposes the robust use of federal power to protect voting rights.
Democracy will continue to be on the ballot, in other words, because there will still be a partisan divide on whether you want democracy to be broader and more inclusive than it has been. And if we ever find ourselves in a place where that isn’t true, democracy will still be on the ballot for the simple reason that democracy is not a steady state. It will always demand that we participate and keep constant vigil.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column was an analysis of Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden. In short, I wasn’t impressed.
I’m sure that to some observers, all of this — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.
My Friday column was on the stakes of the 2024 presidential election for the Constitution.
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.
