Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
The situation at the southern border looks very different these days.
Gone are the headlines about surging border crossings crushing border communities and cities like New York struggling to fund housing for migrants who recently came to the country.
The reality is that the numbers at the southern border have dropped to levels not seen before in the Biden administration — and lower than they were during parts of the Trump administration.
The dramatic drop in border crossings came after a Biden administration policy seen by White House officials as a major success for an administration that has spent three years fighting Republican attacks over its handling of surging border crossings.
Vice President Kamala Harris, however, has not focused on the dramatic change at the southern border in her presidential campaign. I’ll explain what’s happening at the border, and offer some theories about why Harris isn’t talking it up.
A Border Shutdown That Worked
The border had seen a steady drop in crossings all year, but things took a dramatic turn in June. That’s when the Biden administration took a hallmark of the failed immigration bill from February — a measure allowing border officials to turn back migrants quickly when crossings exceed a certain level — and put a version of it into place via presidential proclamation.
Since then, the results have been clear: Border arrests are down, asylum claims are plummeting and fewer newly arrived people are being released into U.S. communities.
Crossings have gotten so low that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has stopped busing migrants to Democratic-run cities, a political tactic he wielded to force the public to pay attention to the border. There are simply no longer people to send.
Harris Steers Clear
During her speech in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, Harris discussed immigration — but focused on blaming Republicans for the collapse of bipartisan legislation this year. It would have increased resources by providing more money for detention, border agents and asylum officers.
“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades,” she said to the crowd in Chicago. “The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.”
That deal would have allowed the president to shut off asylum access at the southern border if the crossings reached a certain level — but Harris did not mention the fact that the administration went ahead and did something similar anyway.
So why isn’t Harris talking about it more in her run for the presidency?
There could be several reasons.
1. The number of arrests at the border often fluctuates and could spike at any moment.
Last summer, the Biden administration cautiously hailed a brief dip in crossings after a different asylum restriction took effect. By the end of the year, record numbers of people were crossing into the country, and the administration needed to send top officials to Mexico to figure out a solution. Migration experts have also said that smugglers can adapt to new policies in the United States, and that could happen with President Joe Biden’s asylum limit as well.
2. Democrats don’t want to revive ‘border czar’ attacks.
Focusing on border policy could also draw renewed attention to a Republican talking point that has dogged Harris’ vice presidency and presidential campaign: Is she in charge of the southern border or not?
Harris was asked by Biden early in her vice presidency to focus on “root causes” of migration, and Republicans seized on that assignment to describe her misleadingly as responsible for crossings overall. Taking credit for border policy successes now could leave Harris more open to criticisms if crossings rise; it could also give Republicans an opportunity to point to the record number of arrivals before 2024.
3. The border still divides Democrats.
Discussing a restrictive policy could inflame progressives who have seemed energized by Harris’ run for the presidency, and dampen the overall vibes of joy and unity that have given the campaign a burst of momentum.
Immigration advocates have already sued over Biden’s policy and denounced the administration for turning back migrants who they believe have rightful claims to protection in the United States.
Harris’ presidential campaign is just over a month old, and a pair of high-stakes moments are approaching when the border may come into focus: Harris’ first major interview as a presidential candidate Thursday on CNN, as well as the planned debate between Harris and Trump on Sept. 10.
The campaign has found places to mention the dip in crossings, including in emails to the press. But it has not become a standard part of her speeches, which is notable given how closely she is associated with the topic of border control, fairly or not.
“The VP is proud that their administration’s actions have led to significant reductions in border crossings, and the campaign has and will continue to talk about that,” Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “But she also knows we need to go even further, which is why you hear her talk about the urgent need to get the bipartisan border bill passed and her commitment to doing that as president.”
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery to honor the memory of 13 fallen service members. What happened next was a reminder of how little the former president understands about service, sacrifice, and heroism.
On Monday, Donald Trump visited the sacred ground of Arlington National Cemetery, where many of America’s war dead are buried, and posed for photos. In the strangest of these pictures, the former president is smiling and giving a thumbs-up by the grave of a Marine. It’s an image of a man who has no idea how to behave around fallen heroes.
Trump was at Arlington ostensibly to honor the memory of the 13 service members who were killed in a suicide bombing during the chaotic final days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The event was supposed to be respectful and private; according to a press-pool note, the families of the troops had asked that there be no media coverage in the area where the service members were buried. But Trump seemed to have other ideas.
According to a report by NPR, Trump’s campaign staff got into a verbal and physical altercation with a cemetery official who tried to stop campaign staffers from filming and taking photographs in the area of the cemetery reserved for recently fallen soldiers.
The cemetery confirmed that an incident took place on Monday but did not provide any details, instead noting in a statement that federal law prohibits “political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries.” The Trump-campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that “there was no physical altercation as described,”and added in a post on X that Trump had been allowed a private photographer on the premises. But in his statement, Cheung also accused the cemetery official who’d tried to block Trump’s staff of “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
It’s hard to see Trump’s Monday visit as anything but a campaign stop intended to court the military vote. Speaking to a group of National Guard members in Detroit later that day, he blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the failures of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
By now, Trump’s use of the military as a prop for his own ends should surprise no one. Despite his vigorous avoidance of military service, Trump has a long history of denigrating the service of others, even as he poses as a defender of the nation’s military.
As a candidate for the Republican nomination in 2015, he mocked Senator John McCain’s status as a prisoner of war. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at the time. “I like people who weren’t captured.”Later, as president, he told his then–chief of staff John Kelly that he didn’t want “any wounded guys” in his planned Independence Day parade: “This doesn’t look good for me.”
Recently, he suggested that the civilian Medal of Freedom is “actually much better” than the military’s Medal of Honor, “because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
But Trump is especially out of place around the nation’s fallen troops. As reported by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Trump went to Arlington Cemetery with Kelly on Memorial Day 2017 and visited the gravesite of Kelly’s son Robert, who had been killed in Afghanistan. Standing next to the former Marine general, Trump said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
In 2018, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris; as Jeffrey reported, Trump told staff members that the cemetery was “filled with losers.” Trump also “referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who’d lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed,” according to Jeffrey’s reporting.
Jeffrey’s story is very much a sore spot for a candidate who wants to wrap himself in the flag. Trump has denied the reporting, but it was confirmed to CNN by Kelly: “What can I add that has not already been said? … A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’”Kelly went on to corroborate other details in Jeffrey’s article. “God help us,” he concluded.
Monday’s wreath-laying at Arlington was, in part, Trump’s attempt to clean up the mess he has created, and to establish some credibility as a champion of men- and women-at-arms. But in the end, it merely served to remind Americans how little he understands about service, sacrifice, and heroism.
More than 200 Bush, McCain, Romney alums endorse Harris for president, criticize Trump
Joey Garrison, USA TODAY – August 27, 2024
WASHINGTON — More than 200 Republicans who previously worked for either former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in an open letter Monday obtained exclusively by USA TODAY.
The letter from alums of the three Republican presidential nominees prior to former President Donald Trump comes on the heels of a Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago that showcased Republican detractors of the GOP nominee. At least five former aides to former President George H.W. Bush also signed the letter, which has 238 signatures in all.
A similar group of about 150 anti-Trump former staffers of Bush, McCain and Romney pledged support for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“We reunite today, joined by new George H.W. Bush alumni, to reinforce our 2020 statements and, for the first time, jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November,” the letter reads. “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris delivers her acceptance speech during the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22, 2024.
Among those who signed the letter in support of Harris and her running-mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, include: former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Chris Koch; Joe Donoghue, former legislative director for McCain; Jennifer Lux, press secretary for McCain’s 2008 campaign, and Jean Becker, longtime chief of staff for George H.W. Bush.
Also backing Harris are David Nierenberg, Romney’s 2012 campaign finance chair; David Garman, under secretary of Energy for George W. Bush; and Olivia Troye, a former advisor to both George W. Bush and Vice President Mike Pence. Troye spoke from the stage of the DNC convention last week.
President George W. Bush speaks during an interview on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at his office in Dallas about his recollections of Sept. 11, 2001.
“At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions,” the letter says, referring to the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint that the Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from.
“Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen.”
The animosity between the camps of McCain, Romney, and Bush and Trump is well-documented.
Others who signed the letters include: Reed Galen, McCain’s deputy campaign manager and co-founder of the Lincoln Project; Jim Swift, a former Republican operative who is now senior editor of The Bulwark, an anti-Trump news and opinion site; and former McCain campaign strategist Mike Murphy.
Citing 2020 exit polling and other voter data, the group claims it was “moderate Republicans and conservative independents in key swing states” who were pivotal in Biden’s victory that ultimately delivered the presidency Biden − Americans who “put country far before party,” they write in the letter.
The group called on more moderate Republicans and independents to “take a brave stand once more” and support Harris over Trump in the fall.
September 13, 2023: Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) announces his intention to not run for reelection. Romney, who is 76, announced in a release, “the next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership.”.
The Harris campaign has worked to highlight its backing from Republicans who oppose Trump, launching a “Republicans for Harris” group this month and featuring Republican speakers at last week’s convention.
Republicans who addressed the convention included former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who served on the House panel that investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Mesa, Ariz. Mayor John Giles; and Troye, who worked as a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Pence. Pence has said he won’t endorse Trump for president.
Over the weekend, a dozen prominent Republican attorneys who worked for former President Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush endorsed Harris for president. The group included conservative former federal appellate Judge Michael Luttig, who plans to vote for a Democratic president for the first time.
Former Illinois Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger speaks during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center.
On the COVID ‘Off-Ramp’: No Tests, Isolation or Masks
Emily Baumgaertner – August 27, 2024
Visitors on the Coney Island boardwalk on the Friday ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, May 24, 2024. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)
Jason Moyer was days away from a family road trip to visit his parents when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.
COVID-19?
The prospect threatened to upend the family’s plans.
“Six months ago, we would have tested for COVID,” said Moyer, 41, of Ohio. This time they did not.
Instead, they checked to make sure the boy’s cough was improving and his fever was gone — and then set off for New Jersey, not bothering to tell the grandparents about the incident.
In the fifth summer of COVID, cases are surging, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state. The rate of hospitalizations with COVID is nearly twice what it was at this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down almost 75% from what they were at the worst of the pandemic — are still double what they were this spring.
As children return to schools and Labor Day weekend travel swells, the potential for further spread abounds. But for many like Moyer, COVID has become so normalized that they no longer see it as a reason to disrupt social, work or travel routines. Test kit sales have plummeted. Isolation after an exposure is increasingly rare. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of a COVID surge — are sparse, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.
Human behavior is, of course, the reason that infections are soaring. But at some point, many reason, we need to live.
“I no longer even know what the rules and recommendations are,” said Andrew Hoffman, 68, of Mission Viejo, California, who came down with respiratory symptoms a few weeks ago after his wife had tested positive for COVID. He skipped synagogue, but still went to the grocery store.
“And since I don’t test, I can’t follow them,” he said.
Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available (despite the poor turnout during last year’s round).
But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While COVID cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-COVID world, but a postcrisis one.
Epidemiologists have long predicted that COVID would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has a sort of social definition — a virus that’s around us all the time — and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”
Certain threats remain clear. For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always present a heightened risk of serious infection and even death. Long COVID, a multifaceted syndrome, has afflicted at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have suffered from it have said they still have not recovered.
But the CDC director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, called the disease endemic last week, and the agency decided this year to retire its five-day COVID isolation guidelines and instead include COVID in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with symptoms of COVID, RSV or the flu to stay home for 24 hours after their fever lifts. The updated guidelines were an indicator that, for most people, the landscape had changed.
Hanage defended the hard-line mandates from the early years of the pandemic as “not just appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”
“But,” he said, “it is just as important to help people onto an off-ramp — to be clear when we are no longer tied to the train tracks, staring at the headlights barreling down.”
The absence of stringent guidelines has left people to manage their own risks.
“I don’t bother testing myself or our kids for COVID,” said Sarah Bernath, 46, a librarian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. “My husband doesn’t test himself either. Knowing if it’s COVID wouldn’t change whether I stay home or not.”
In some social circles, diverging choices can make for uncomfortable dynamics.
Debra Cornelius, 73, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, stayed home from a recent indoor party because she learned that several other guests — a family of five — had returned from vacation and tested positive for COVID three days before the gathering, but still planned to attend.
“They said, ‘Oh, it’s like a bad cold, we wouldn’t stay home for a cold,’” she said. “I think people’s attitudes have changed considerably.”
But for countless others, attitudes haven’t changed at all. Diane Deacon, 71, of Saginaw, Michigan, said she tested positive for COVID three days into a trip to Portugal with her two adult daughters. She isolated herself for five days before flying home wearing a mask.
“A number of people asked me, ‘Why did you test? You could have carried on with your vacation,’” she said.
For Deacon, it was about remembering the refrigerated morgue trucks of 2020 and anticipating the vulnerable people she might see on her flight home — people in wheelchairs, or people on oxygen, she said.
“I’m trying to avoid a moral judgment of people who make other choices,” she said. “To me, it was inconvenient and it was unfortunate, but it was not a tragedy.”
In a Gallup poll this spring, about 59% of respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the proportion of people who said they felt concerned about catching COVID has been generally declining for two years. Among people who rated their own health positively, almost 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting infected.
That could be, at least partly, a result of personal experience: About 70% of people said they had been through a COVID infection already, suggesting that they believed they had some immunity or at least that they could muscle through it again if need be.
If the Olympics were any barometer, the rest of the world seems to have exhaled as well. In Tokyo in 2021, there were daily saliva samples, plexiglass dividers between cafeteria seats and absolutely no live spectators; the arenas were so empty that coaches’ voices echoed. In Beijing in 2022, under China’s zero-tolerance policy, conditions were much the same.
But in Paris last month, the organizing committee for the 2024 Olympics offered no testing requirements or processes for reporting infections, and so few countries issued rules to their athletes that the ones that did made news.
There were high-fives, group hugs, throngs of crowds and plenty of transmission to show for it. At least 40 athletes tested positive for the virus, including several who earned medals despite it — as well as an unknowable number of spectators, since French health officials (who had once enforced an eight-month-long nightly COVID curfew) did not even count.
In the United States, about 57% of people said their lives had not returned to prepandemic “normal” — and the majority said they believed it never would. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.
The years-old social-distancing signage is faded and peeling from the floors of an indoor market in Los Angeles. Hand-sanitizer dispensers at amusement parks have dried up. The summer camp hosted by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requires children to bring a face covering — not to protect other children, but the animals.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: COVID variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” COVID into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said.
Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington this month — a number of whom were older than 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask.
“We’ve decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk,’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Osterholm said. “You can’t get much more informed than this group.”
Asked about how the perception of risk has evolved over time, Osterholm laughed.
“They’ve now resorted to attacking the family dog,” she said. “I really wish I was joking. I am not joking.”
Right-wingers found a 2022 photo Walz posted on social media saying he went to a dog park with his pup Scout. Since the dog in the picture is not Scout, some conservatives treated it as a gotcha moment.
“As crazy as it sounds, bad-faith right-wingers on social media said it was all evidence that Tim Walz was lying about something,” Psaki said.
But a video Walz posted at the same time shows him with Scout at the dog park, playing with other dogs, including the one in the picture conservatives seized on.
“Mystery solved,” Psaki said. “Of course, this is a particularly ironic attack coming from the party whose own rising star ― you know who I’m about to talk about here, Kristi Noem ― boasted about hating her own family dog so much she took it to a gravel pit and shot it.”
Noem, the governor of South Dakota, was on the short list to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick until she released a book bragging about killing her pooch.
“Better luck next time, guys,” Psaki said, then offered some unsolicited advice going back to the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose own dog came under attack from political rivals.
“If you resort to attacking a candidate’s dog, you’re probably losing,” Psaki said. “And you deserve all the ridicule coming your way.”
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the portion where Trump spoke was built under the Obama administration, the Post added.
The newspaper said a nearby extension was started under the Trump administration ― at a cost of $35 million a mile ― but didn’t get very far, with much of the construction material left in piles at the site.
Trump in 2016 repeatedly vowed to build a “big beautiful wall” across the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border if elected.
He has claimed that he completed the task.
“I did finish the wall,” he said on CNN earlier this year. “I built a wall.”
A 2022 report found the wall built under Trump was breached thousand of times using “inexpensive power tools.” Others reported the wall could be breached with a primitive ladder made from about $5 in material.
Trump border event at wall that Obama built highlighted an unfulfilled promise
Isaac Arnsdorf, Marianne LeVine and Erin Patrick O’Connor,
The Washington Post – August 26, 2024
MONTEZUMA PASS, Ariz. – A brown ribbon carved a straight gash across a vast, flat desert basin, the only mark of human civilization visible on this wilderness. The partition charged up a steep hill in Montezuma Canyon, then suddenly stopped. Extra pieces lay in piles nearby, rusting monuments to an unfinished campaign promise.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump came here on Thursday to heap praise on the structure standing to his right – “the Rolls-Royce of walls,” he called it – and lament the unused segments lying to his left. Joining him there, Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence “Trump wall” and the idle parts “Kamala wall,” after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Those labels were inaccurate. This section of 20-foot steel slats was actually built during the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump added the unfinished extension up the hillside, an engineering challenge that cost at least $35 million a mile. The unused panels of 30-foot beams were procured during the Trump administration and never erected.
“Where you were, that was kind of a joke today,” John Ladd, a Trump supporter whose ranch extends along the border, said while driving the dirt road along the barrier, the gapped panels making a flipbook out of the shrubby trees and grass on the other side. “Had to be in front of Trump’s wall, but you went to Montezuma, and that’s Obama’s wall.”
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the barrier next to Thursday’s campaign stop was built during the Obama administration. The Trump campaign and Perez did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.
“If Kamala truly wanted to close the border and continue building President Trump’s wall, she could go to the White House and do it today,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Only President Trump will get it done.”
This spot along the U.S.-Mexico border, quickly accessible from nearby Sierra Vista, has often served as the backdrop for Republican photo ops. The scenery here did not attest to the fearsome migrant caravans or invasions of military-age foreign men that Trump often describes. There was no evidence here of Trump’s depiction of vicious criminals and terrorists, cannibals and infectious hordes, or people sent directly from prisons and mental institutions pouring over the border. There was no sign of foot traffic over such hostile shadeless wilderness, other than a small patrol of Mexican authorities on the other side.
Nor did this site show the very real conditions that exist in other parts of the border: Towns teeming with displaced people, cars backed up at legal crossings and swept for smuggling, bodies recovered from the Rio Grande.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in front of the US-Mexico border, Thursday, Aug 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Arizona. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
For Trump, a campaign stop here on Thursday had larger meaning. It was an attempt to recapture the storyline of this presidential race from Vice President Kamala Harris, who wrapped up an ebullient Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday evening. For Trump, visiting the border was also something of a spiritual homecoming to the place that has animated his candidacy and movement since 2015.
But the reality on the ground was not as straightforward as the “Build the Wall” chant that electrified his campaign eight years ago suggested. His vow to finish the wall, now formalized in the Republican Party platform, highlights the uncomfortable fact that he did not finish it in his first term, and Mexico did not pay for it, as he once promised it would.
“I’d hear people say, ‘Oh, he didn’t build the wall’ – we built the wall,” Trump said defensively on Thursday in front of the unfinished barrier. “We built much more than I was anticipated to build.”
The day before, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump responded to a supporter who shouted “Build the Wall” by saying, “Well, the wall was largely built. We were adding space onto the wall.”
As president, Trump spent more than $11 billion to finish more than 450 miles of wall along the almost 2,000-mile southern border, one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in history. During the primary, some GOP rivals experimented with attacking Trump for failing to finish the wall, but Republican voters largely shrugged or scoffed.
He references the wall in a smaller percentage of his social media posts and speeches than he did eight years ago, according to a Washington Post analysis. Instead, he has emphasized plans for large-scale, militarized roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants throughout the United States. To justify such drastic measures, he has frequently used dehumanizing language to vilify undocumented immigrants as violent and dangerous. The overwhelming majority of people in removal proceedings do not have criminal charges, according to an analysis of Department of Homeland Security records by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.
Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration’s new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the Biden administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access.
A short walk from the spot where Trump spoke on Thursday, the barrier crosses a dry stream bed, and the uniform bollards give way to storm gates. The gates were wide open, to accommodate the sudden floods of the summer monsoon season, spanned only by a few strands of barbed wire. The base of some of the nearby slats show the scars of erosion that have sometimes left the fence dangling above the ground.
Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office. The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling, most of which happens at ports of entry.
The wall’s defenders argue that, as part of broader border enforcement, it helps slow down crossings and free up Border Patrol resources. The border wall “completely changed the operational environment and allowed Border Patrol to secure those areas with significantly fewer agents,” said Rodney Scott, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under Trump and under Biden until August 2021.
But some policy experts say the barrier simply shifts where and how migrants cross the border. And many experts argue that U.S. immigration policy and conditions in migrants’ home countries are what drive migration, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path to reaching the United States.
“It’s really hard to measure the effectiveness of the wall because it’s one piece of a larger puzzle in U.S. policy on immigration, and even though it is a physical barrier, there are so many other reasons why migrants end up where they end up trying to cross into U.S. territory,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
In his first term, Trump used executive power to bypass congressional opposition to the wall. In late 2018, his fight with Congress over funding led to the longest government shutdown in American history. When Congress refused to budge, Trump declared a national emergency in order to divert money from the military budget.
Former administration officials and the Trump campaign said he would be determined to use every available power to complete the wall in a second term.
“There’s no doubt in my mind … he will, I hope on day one, declare a national emergency,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under Trump. “On day one, that will give him the ability then to tap into those [Department of Defense] funds … while at the same time working with Congress … You’re going to see the same approach that he used during the first administration.”
The former president “will utilize any and all appropriate authorities necessary to continue construction of the border wall and protect America’s homeland,” Leavitt said in an emailed statement.
If Trump were to declare a national emergency again in a second term, outside groups would likely sue to stop him. But the legal process could take a long time, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Trump might be able to complete large sections of wall in the meantime, she said.
“The appeals would run the entire course of the Trump presidency and even though there might be, and I think there are, meritorious legal challenges … it’s still quite possible that the Trump administration could continue to rely on that power while this process played out, if the lower courts stayed their rulings,” Goitein said.
A changed political environment might also make it easier for Trump to complete the wall. The Republican Party has become more Trump-aligned, and should Trump become president and Republicans control the House and the Senate with significant margins, border wall funding is likely to increase in the annual appropriations process.
The border wall has also become more popular with the public than it was during the Trump administration. A Monmouth University poll found that 53 percent of Americans favored the border wall in February 2024, the highest share since Monmouth began asking the question in September 2015, when support for the wall was at 48 percent. Support for the wall hit a low in September 2017, with 35 percent of Americans in favor.
Mexico has opposed the construction of the border wall and has pursued more aggressive enforcement along the border, helping the Biden administration reach its lowest level of illegal border crossings in almost four years.
But as long as construction takes place on the U.S. side of the border, Mexico can’t do much to stop it, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior adviser for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Even if he gets the funding, Trump might face obstacles obtaining the land he needs for construction. Much of the land along the border in Texas is privately owned, and some landowners are reluctant to sell.
Trump might also face environmental opposition to renewed wall construction. The incomplete border wall has already affected the migration patterns of many northern American wildlife species, said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator at the Wildlands Network, a nonprofit conservation organization focused on sustaining biodiversity. The current barrier will also require constant, expensive maintenance, Traphagen noted.
“There’s going to be this big albatross hanging around America’s neck to continually maintain this beast,” he said.
For many Americans, though, the border wall has become a symbol. Traphagen added: “The border wall reinforces that, okay, this guy is doing something.”
Nick Miroff, Clara Ence Morse, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
Opinion: The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered
Joel Edward Goza – August 25, 2024
President Reagan, shown in 1981, based many of his policies on ideas from the Heritage Foundation publication “The Mandate for Leadership.” Project 2025 makes up a majority of the latest edition of this title and recommends many of the same extreme policies. (Ron Edmonds / Associated Press)More
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that would overhaul much of the federal government under a second Trump administration, has sparked fear and concern from voters despite the former president’s attempt to distance his campaign from the plan. But while Project 2025 might seem radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate many of the worst racial, economic and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.
Project 2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework. It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation. Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.
If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes. Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.
This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal. Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while removing significant provisions from another 300,000. Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.
Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.
All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.
To ensure that wealth would be a long-lived family entitlement, Reagan instituted a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget. In 1980, the exemption stood at $161,000. By the time Reagan left office in 1989 it was $600,000. Today it is $13,610,000. This means that today nearly all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.
And beginning during Reagan’s presidency, the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively, while the poverty of Americans across racial lines intensified. Even white males were more likely to be poor following Reagan’s presidency. Today poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S., even though this is the wealthiest nation in the world.
If we feel like we live in a country that isn’t working for anyone who isn’t wealthy, these are some of the core reasons why. Looking back at the Reagan era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership,” we must remember that our domestic wounds are largely self-inflicted, results of buying into racial, economic and environmental lies that continue to be sold. It is precisely the types of policies that devastated the nation during the Reagan administration that Project 2025 now seeks to resuscitate. Perhaps the only truly new thing Project 2025 suggests is using more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.
History has hinges, moments that change the trajectory of nations. The greatest progress in our country has almost always emerged during turbulent times. It is up to the United States’ most committed believers to close the door on terror and trauma and open one that leads to new democratic possibilities.
Our current moment represents more than an election. It is a turning point that has the potential to transform the United States for generations to come. We don’t need the version of the past that Project 2025 is trying to sell us. It didn’t work for most Americans then, and it won’t work for most of us now. But perhaps Project 2025 is the push the Democratic Party needed. While the Republican Party veers further into authoritarianism, Democrats must be equally determined to develop a truly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.
Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.”
Vice President Harris holds a 7-point edge over former President Trump nationally in a new poll, marking the latest gain for the Democratic presidential candidate as the general election approaches.
A survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University, released last Friday, found Harris leading Trump with 50 percent support to 43 percent nationally, while 7 percent of respondents said they will vote for someone else. Trump and Harris fare equally well with voters from their party, each having 95 percent support from their partisans, pollsters found.
Pollsters noted race or gender played a large role in pushing Harris’s lead. When voters are asked to think about race or gender, Harris’s lead grows significantly, while support for her and Trump are virtually tied when they are not made to think about it, they said.
With independents who do not lean toward either party, Harris still leads Trump, but by a smaller margin, 38 to 33 percent, the poll found. Harris holds a large lead among self-identified liberals, 87 to 10 percent, along with progressives, 93 to 5 percent, and moderates, 62 to 30 percent.
The former president, meanwhile, leads among conservatives 76 to 19 percent, and MAGA voters, 95 to 4 percent.
Trump saw his strongest support among men “who hold traditionally masculine identities,” while women and other men who reject these identities favor Harris, according to pollsters.
“Trump has built his political career around a very specific performance of whiteness and masculinity,” Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson and the executive director of the poll, said in a release. “In the past, that’s been seen as a strength, but it’s no longer clear that it’s working.”
“Race matters in elections, but it’s not inevitable that voters are thinking about it,” he added. “Trump does reasonably well among nonwhite voters so long as they’re not thinking about race: Once they are, we see a huge shift to Harris.”
Since replacing President Biden atop the Democratic presidential ticket last month, Harris has quickly gained momentum, posing a threat to the healthy lead Trump held over the president, both nationally and in swing states.
This is the latest poll suggesting good news for Harris, though some political strategists have suggested it is too early to make conclusions about the November election.
According to a polling index by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill, Harris has a 3.6 percentage point lead over Trump.
When asked last Thursday by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum about Harris’s increasing support in the polls, Trump said, “No, she’s not having success. I’m having success. I’m doing great with the Hispanic voters. I’m doing great with Black men. I’m doing great with women, because women want safety.”
The survey was conducted Aug. 17-20 using a voter list of 801 registered voters nationwide. It was carried out by Braun Research and has a simple sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval.
Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist – August 24, 2024
Credit…Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times
In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.
The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.
You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.
“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. Pressed on those remarks last month, he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”
This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).
One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.
It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.
Think of it this way: We’d be saving the life of one American child between the ages of 1 and 5 every three hours if we had the same child mortality level as Norway or Finland.
Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump administration that Trump is frantically trying to disavow, would make things worse. It would end Head Start, a lifeline for low-income children, and would dismantle the Department of Education.
“My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” Trump posted on Friday. But even putting aside abortion rights, Republican extremism has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization, especially after an Alabama court ruled that a frozen embryo must be considered a child. The Southern Baptist Convention, a bastion of support for Trump, this summer criticized I.V.F.
Vance has supported a watered-down bill that he says protects I.V.F., but Republican senators blocked stronger legislation to defend I.V.F. fertility treatments and expand access. They are leaving hanging so many of the one in seven women who have trouble conceiving or sustaining a pregnancy.
Can anything be more anti-family?
Look, I’ve repeatedly argued that growing up in a two-parent household is the one privilege that liberals ignore, that the left wrongly demonized Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his emphasis on family structure and that Democrats can do more to remove marriage penalties and bolster opportunities for children.
I’m troubled by the collapse of marriage in America’s working class — more than 70 percent of Americans without a high school diploma are unmarried. If we care about child poverty, we must face the reality that households headed by single moms are five times as likely to live in poverty as those with married couples. So concerns about family and children are legitimate, and Democrats should do better.
But for Republicans to blame Democrats is ludicrous, for the G.O.P. has seemingly gone out of its way to undermine families and children.
Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.
Republicans like the House speaker, Mike Johnson, object to no-fault divorce laws, which make it straightforward for couples to obtain divorces. They claim this is a pro-family stance. (Trump, understandably, appears more sympathetic to divorce.) But the evidence is overwhelming that before easy access to divorce, large numbers of women were trapped in violent marriages that terrorized them and their children.
One careful study by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the introduction of no-fault divorce in America was associated with about a 20 percent reduction in female suicides, at least a 25 percent reduction in wife-beating and an apparent decline in husbands murdering wives.
Is it really pro-family to increase the number of moms who are beaten and murdered?
I’m glad Republicans are squawking about the challenges facing families and children. But if Trump, Vance and other Republicans want to blame those most responsible for the plight of families and children in America today, they should look in the mirror and hang their heads in shame.
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