Trump says Caracas is ‘safer’ than most U.S. cities. Here’s what the numbers show
Antonio Maria Delgado – August 24, 2024
Former President Donald Trump has said on different occasions that Caracas, the Venezuelan capital with a reputation for a sky-high crime rate, has now become a “safe” city because most of its criminals have entered illegally into the United States.
On Thursday night he repeated the claim in an interview with Newsmax. “We’ll go to Caracas, because it will be safer than any place in our country,” he said.
On Aug. 5, he told livestreamer Adin Ross that “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city and now it’s very safe,” he said. “In fact, the next interview we do, we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.”
The Nicolas Maduro regime has not broken out numbers for crime in Venezuelan cities for years. But there are organizations that keep track of the figures — and they show the Venezuelan capital is still significantly less safe than most American cities.
Those numbers show that while crime has come down in recent years, a visit to the Venezuelan capital still is not recommended for the fainthearted. According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a Caracas-based non-profit group widely regarded as the authority on the nation’s homicide rate, Caracas had a rate of 50.8 homicides per 100,000 people.
That’s more than six times the U.S. national average of 7.8 registered in 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national homicide average for Venezuela in 2023 was 26.8, almost four times higher than the rate in the U.S.
According to the group, the Caracas homicide rate rate for 2023 came down a bit from previous years. Part of the reason is that 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past few years, and among them are a comparatively small numbers of criminals, according to experts on Venezuelan crime. In 2020, for example, Caracas closed the year with a homicide rate rate of 56.2 per 100,000 people.
Caracas’ 2023 homicide rate is surpassed by only two large U.S. cities: New Orleans, at 58.4, and St. Louis, at 57.2, according to 2022 numbers from the CDC.
Most large American cities have numbers between the mid single digits and the low double digits. In 2022, for example, the city of Miami’s homicide rate was 8.6, while Jacksonville stood at 15.3, according to the CDC numbers.
Despite their high rates, New Orleans and St. Louis could be considered relatively peaceful in comparison with Venezuela’s most violent cities, all located in the mining region of the southern state of Bolivar. These are El Callao, with 424 violent death victims for 100,000 people, Sifontes, with 151, and Roscio, with 134, according to the violence observatory.
Concerns about the lack of security in Venezuela led the U.S. State Department to maintain a level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory on Venezuela, originally issued on January 2023, warning Americans that they would be at risk in the South American country given its high crime, civil unrest and the risk of becoming victims to kidnappings or ill treatment from local police.
“Violent crimes, such as homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, and carjacking, are common in Venezuela. Political rallies and demonstrations occur, often with little notice. Anti-Maduro demonstrations have elicited a strong police and security force response, including the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against participants, and occasionally devolve into looting and vandalism,” the State Department warned in its advisory.
How U.S. cities rate
Here are the homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in the 10 largest U.S. cities in 2022, according to the CDC:
Mr. Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for The Times.
In purely military terms, Ukraine’s surprise incursion of Russia earlier this month is a dubious gamble. Moscow has not diverted forces from its grinding advances on the Donetsk front, a main focus of the current fighting, and the physical cost in dead or captured troops and evacuated citizens does not concern Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
The more significant potential of the invasion lies on the other front — that of information, propaganda, morale, image and competing narratives. That is where the fight is being fought to keep the West involved, to keep Ukrainians hopeful and to get Russians worried about the toll of the war in lives and treasure. And this is where Ukraine may see an advantage.
The very invocation of Kursk, the region where Ukraine made its advance, is familiar to every Russian as the site of not only a great World War II Soviet triumph but also the catastrophic accident that sank a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine in 2000. By moving into Kursk, Ukraine’s military has loudly advertised its boldness just when it looked like its troops might never regain the initiative.
The surprise and speed of the Ukrainian attack and the flaccid Russian response have given new strength to calls by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the United States and his other Western supporters to abandon their insistence that he not use their weapons to attack Russian territory. Mr. Zelensky calls this the “naïve illusion of so-called red lines,” and so far, his allies have not complained about the Kursk invasion. They may see little value in scolding Ukraine, the plucky David in this war, right after he has landed an audacious strike against a plodding Goliath.
Just as important, Ukraine’s move into Kursk highlights the inherent contradiction in Mr. Putin’s propaganda, which portrays the conflict as a proxy war against Western powers trying to deny Russia its destiny, and one in which a calm, united and prosperous Russia is certain to prevail. But that illusion falls apart once Ukrainian forces have succeeded in slicing into Russia and forcing tens of thousands of Russians to flee their homes.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The overriding imperative of Mr. Putin’s propaganda, inherited from the Soviet Union, is to enforce the belief that whatever is happening, however grave it may seem and whatever the cost, the Kremlin — Vladimir Putin, to be precise — is in full control. The depth of the disaster precipitated by Russia’s war is revealed by the intensity of the effort — the euphemisms, insinuations, scapegoats and excuses — marshaled toward propaganda.
Mr. Putin, a product of the old K.G.B., is well practiced in this dark art. From the moment the war against Ukraine began in February 2022, he has been ruthless in enforcing a ban against even calling it a war. Russians are subject to arrest if they fail to call it a “special military operation,” even though Mr. Putin himself has occasionallyslipped. When the Russian caterer and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a suspicious plane crash after sending his mercenaries who were fighting in Ukraine to march on Moscow, Mr. Putin kept a straight face as he offered his condolences, noting only that his latest victim had “made serious mistakes in life.”
So when the Ukrainian army launched its unexpected drive into the Kursk region on Aug. 6, the Kremlin propaganda mill got to work. There was no invasion, of course, only an “armed provocation,” a “situation,” a “terrorist attack” or “events in the Kursk region.” And of course, the insidious West was to blame. At a televised meeting at his residence with security chiefs and regional governors six days into the Kursk invasion, Mr. Putin declared that once again, it was “the West fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” He insisted that Russian forces would retaliate appropriately and still accomplish “all our goals.”
When the acting governor of the Kursk region, speaking over a video link, began giving some actual details of the invasion, including the number of towns and villages affected and the amount of territory seized by the Ukrainian army, Mr. Putin sharply cut him off, saying he should leave such detail to the military and focus on the humanitarian response. The poor governor, who probably never imagined having his remote province invaded by anyone, must have assumed that his president wanted to learn what was really happening. Perhaps he was unaware that his job was not to worry the population with facts, but only to show that the government was in control and taking care of its people.
Mr. Putin has so far held firm to the line “We have everything under control.” He has not bothered to visit Kursk, and he has not delivered a rousing speech calling for a grand defense of the motherland. The state-controlled media has focused on showing the government ensuring that evacuees are safe and cared for and that the nation was rallying with an outpouring of humanitarian aid. The latest report from Russia’s emergencies ministry on Tuesday said more than 122,000 civilians had been relocated, including more than 500 in the previous 24 hours, many to shelters across Russia.
At the same time, the Kremlin has not reined in bellicose bloggers and commentators who are demanding a brutal retaliation for Kursk or shaming evacuees for not standing and fighting against the foreign invaders. Such critics actually serve a purpose for Mr. Putin. Hawks who call on an authoritarian ruler to be even more authoritarian are a useful foil, presenting the ruler as relatively reasonable.
Though public opinion is hard to gauge in a country where candor is dangerous, some discontent over Kursk has been gleaned on social media, and it does seem that Mr. Putin has been rattled. His irritation with the acting governor was one sign; another was his display of anger when he declared that the Ukrainian initiative undermined the possibility of negotiations. “What kind of negotiations can we talk about with people who indiscriminately attack the civilian population and civilian infrastructure, or try to create threats to nuclear power facilities?” he asked, oblivious to the rich irony of his words.
Whether the rant revealed that Mr. Putin was considering negotiations or that he was warning the West that it has to keep Ukraine in check if it wants negotiations is unclear. Mr. Zelensky has said only that the goal was to push the Russians further back from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have made little headway in Kursk after the initial assault, while to the south, Russian troops are advancing on their next major target, the city of Pokrovsk.
Whatever happens next in this unpredictable war, the importance of the information front must not be underestimated. Any operation that raises Ukrainian morale, bolsters Western support and jolts Mr. Putin’s narrative is a battle won.
Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
Negative remarks on social media have increased since Ukrainian troops launched an incursion, according to a firm that tracks Russian attitudes.
Julian E. Barnes, from Washington – August 22, 2024
A heavily damaged statue of Vladimir Lenin in Sudzha, Russia, after Ukrainian troops crossed the border in a counteroffensive this month. Credit…Yan Dobronosov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Negative feelings about President Vladimir V. Putin have appeared to increase across Russia since Ukrainian troops pushed into Russian territory two weeks ago, according to a firm that tracks attitudes in the country by analyzing social media and other internet postings.
While news outlets in Russia have tried to put a more positive spin on the developments in the war, focusing on the Russian government’s humanitarian response, some Russian social media users have expressed discontent.
Many of the online postings, according to the analysis by FilterLabs AI, say Ukraine’s advance is a failure of the Russian government and, more specifically, Mr. Putin.
It is difficult to accurately gauge public opinion in Russia, or any other authoritarian country, because people responding to polls often give answers that they think the government wants. To address that shortcoming, FilterLabs tracks comments on social media sites, internet postings and news media sites, using a computer model to analyze sentiments expressed by ordinary Russians.
Positive attitudes about Mr. Putin took a hit last year after a short-lived armed rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a Russian paramilitary force. But the shift in sentiment has appeared sharper in the days since Ukrainian troops launched their incursion into the Kursk region of western Russia.
“Putin’s response to the incursion was seen as inadequate at best and insulting at worst,” said Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs.
Attitudes toward Mr. Putin remain more positive in Moscow, where Russia keeps a firmer hand on the news media and public debate. But views of Mr. Putin have soured even there, though not as quickly as elsewhere in the country. In Russia’s outlying regions, frustration with the Kremlin is growing, according to the analysis.
American officials cautioned that it was too early to know whether any damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation would be lasting. Mr. Putin’s standing in Russia quickly rebounded after Mr. Prigozhin ended his rebellion, the officials said, and the Russian president has consistently demonstrated an ability to manipulate the public view of himself.
Still, a permanent loss of popularity could complicate the Kremlin’s ability to wage war in Ukraine.
“It is right now difficult to determine the effect of the Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Mr. Teubner said. “But it is clear that is shocking and, for Putin, embarrassing. Kremlin propaganda, spin, and distraction can only do so much in the face of bad news that is widely discussed across Russia.”
Sentiment toward Mr. Putin has fallen sharply in the regions of Russia where the Kremlin focuses its military recruiting efforts. The Kremlin’s recruiting strategy depends on its ability to manage perception of the war.
“If Putin’s prestige and popularity fall in these key regions (especially if Russians feel that the war is going badly), the Kremlin may find it more difficult to fill its military ranks,” the FilterLabs analysis said.
The Kremlin continues to exert influence on how Russia’s national news outlets cover the war, with few running prominent stories, the analysis showed. But regional news outlets are less likely to sugarcoat the news, Mr. Teubner said.
FilterLabs also tracks Russian disinformation. Mr. Teubner said the firm found that the Kremlin began targeting Russians in border regions with a propaganda campaign after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began.
The campaign, which was reminiscent of Soviet propaganda, warned that Ukrainian “psychological operations” were targeting Russians.
But even as localized news sites pushed out the propaganda, they also mixed it with reports of the Ukrainian incursion, information that was harder to find in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, the technique of wrapping bad news in propaganda, Mr. Teubner said, was known as “rotten herring.”
One article, for example, featured paintings of Russian military might even as it chronicled the artillery duel Ukrainian troops were forcing in Kursk.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Crime has declined since Donald Trump was president. He insists on lying about that.
Chris Brennan, USA TODAY – August 22, 2024
Former President Donald Trump, in his weeklong attempt to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention, visited Michigan on Tuesday to accuse Vice President Kamala Harris of being soft on crime.
Here’s why: Trump has a sliver of statistics to offer and a national sentiment that tends to see crime as a much larger issue than it really is. So first, let’s get a few simple truths out here in the conversation:
Crime rates have been steadily falling in America since the early 1990s but did see a significant increase, especially in murder, in 2020 during Trump’s last year as president as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the country. The decline in crime rates resumed after he left office.
That’s great for America, but not so great for Trump’s nonstop melodramatic claims that the country is some dystopian hellscape and only by returning him to power can we live in peace and prosperity again.
That’s bunk. Here’s why.
Trump and his campaign pick pieces out of a larger crime puzzle
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks on crime and safety at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Mich., on Aug. 20, 2024.
Trump on Tuesday claimed that Harris, as vice president, “presided over a 43% increase in violent crime.”
His campaign later told me that he referred to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that showed a 42% increase in nonfatal violent crime in 2022. That September report, which is now nearly a year old, also noted that the particular rate of crime had just reached “a 30-year low” during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
No surprise that Trump left that part out of his speech.
Trump really grabbed hold of the second method this week. Why? Because the first method, conducted by the FBI, debunks his lies about America being caught in some terrible, prolonged crime wave.
Of course, Trump then attacks the FBI for reporting factually about crime
If you’re Trump and a federal agency’s data disproves your claim, what do you do? You attack the agency, of course.
Trump has repeatedly derided the FBI data as “fake numbers” because of a change the agency made in 2021 in how those reports are compiled. That change was long in the planning but happened in the middle of a pandemic, and some law enforcement agencies didn’t immediately switch to the new way of reporting to the FBI.
Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center For Justice, told me the FBI faced “a data hiccup in 2021” and addressed the problem by collecting information through its previous system and the new system for 2022 and 2023.
Grawert noted that the murder rate is a reliable data point in this discussion because, unlike other crimes, “murder is pretty much always reported.” And “murder is one of the offenses that’s falling fastest nationwide,” he said.
“We have very, very good reason to believe that violent crime is falling in 2023 and 2024 very fast, offsetting much, if not all, of the increase in violence we saw in 2020,” Grawert told me. “And nothing President Trump said (in Michigan Tuesday) really undermines that.”
Truth is crime reporting happens at a slower pace than political rhetoric
Trump won’t let facts get in the way of a horrible story. He suggested on Tuesday that the average American out shopping for a loaf of bread faces a threat of being robbed or shot or raped.
Do you have a loaf of bread in your house right now? If so, did you face an arduous and dangerous journey to obtain it?
Trump is leaning hard on a standard American perception that has been true since long before he entered politics. We tend to believe that the national crime rate is worse than the data shows, even when we don’t see crime as a major threat closer to home.
John Gramlich, an associate director at Pew Research Center, told me that long-standing sentiment was typically stronger in Republicans but has recently become more bipartisan, even as the data shows crime rates are falling.
“Republicans are almost always more likely than Democrats to be concerned about crime or to prioritize the crime issue,” Gramlich said. “But what’s interesting is that people in both parties have become more concerned about it since the beginning of the Biden administration.”
One factor might be helping to prompt that: Crime data takes time to compile. Politics is happening around us every day. Gramlich said a temporary “vacuum” of data can allow “misperceptions to fill the void.”
“An election is a very fluid discussion about what’s happening right now,” he told me, and the lag for the data to catch up “can sometimes be filled with misinformation or fear or any number of other things.”
Are you safe buying groceries?
That’s why Trump was in Michigan this week claiming that Harris “will deliver crime, chaos, destruction and death” if she is elected president.
He held what looked like a healthy lead in the race until last month, when Biden dropped his bid for a second term and endorsed Harris.
Trump was president when the crime rates spiked in 2020. That doesn’t mean he’s to blame for that. He certainly wouldn’t accept responsibility for it (or anything else).
Now he’s trying to hang one sliver of statistics on Harris as she pulls ahead of him in the presidential race. Think about that and then ask yourself this: Do you feel safe shopping for a loaf of bread right now in your community? If you do, consider the possibility that people all across America probably feel that way, too.
$15 million Ohio State study takes aim at molecule at the heart of Long COVID
Samantha Hendrickson, Columbus Dispatch – August 14, 2024
COVID-19 is here to stay, and for some, that means symptoms last months, even years after developing the little-understood Long COVID — but a team at the Ohio State University has received millions to find out more.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $15 million over the next five years to fund the university’s efforts, including developing new ways to treat COVID-19 and to further understanding of why Long COVID happens and how to fend it off.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that millions of adults and children have suffered — and continue to — suffer from Long COVID.
Dr. Amal Amer, center with glasses, stands with fellow Ohio State University researchers, who have been granted $15 million over five years to study Long COVID. The research is personal for Amer, who suffered from Long COVID herself.
The disease can be present for as short as three months, but can also last years after someone is first infected. It’s defined as a chronic condition that occurs after a COVID-19 infection with a wide range of debilitating symptoms such as severe fatigue, brain fog, heart and lung problems, bodily pain or exacerbating already existing health issues, all of which can impact someone’s daily life.
“It’s just unacceptable, you can’t just let that happen,” said Dr. Amal Amer, a professor of microbial infection and immunity at OSU and a principal investigator in the project, “We have to understand it, and if somebody, not just us, anybody, happens to have a clue or the beginning of the story, we have to follow it.”
Tiny creatures lead to big discoveries
This massive undertaking started with simple mice and a single molecule.
An OSU study published in 2022 found that mice infected with COVID-19 reacted differently to the disease depending on if they had a certain enzyme-producing molecule known as caspase 11.
Research showed that blocking this molecule in the infected mice resulted in lower inflammation, tissue injury and fewer blood clots in the animals’ lungs.
Humans have their own version of this molecule, or caspase 4, Amer said, and researchers discovered high levels of the enzyme in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in intensive care units — a direct link to severe disease.
“It starts getting high because it has useful functions, but any molecule, when it gets too high, then these useful functions start becoming harmful,” Amer said.
The new work funded by the NIH will go beyond the study of the lungs and into how this molecule may impact the brain and the rest of the body, interfering with immune responses and possibly resulting in more blood clots in pathways leading to the brain and other vital organs – an entertained explanation for why Long COVID impacts people differently from case to case.
Currently, there are over 200 serious symptoms associated with Long COVID, according to the CDC.
Understanding how Long COVID comes to be is the first step in creating a treatment, Amer said. “Once you know the mechanism, then you can design what to target, where to target it and how to target it in order to reduce the damage being done.”
No one left behind
For Dr. Amer, finding that mechanism is an incredible research opportunity, but it’s also personal.
She herself contracted Long COVID during the pandemic. For three months, the leader in cutting edge research in her field suffered from terrible brain fog and other neurological symptoms after her second, thought seemingly mild, COVID-19 infection.
Amer has traveled all over the world, and confessed she’s gotten sick in many countries, including contracting the often deadly malaria. But nothing compared to Long COVID.
Amer would receive emails from her students, and read one sentence, but not remember what it said after reading it. She started having trouble typing on a keyboard. She couldn’t recall things people had just said to her moments before.
“I started thinking, ‘what’s gonna happen to my life?’ My job is a brain job. I lose my job, then what’s gonna happen to me?” Amer recalled. Now, she’ll head the brain-focused part of the project.
This continued for three months, before she gradually started to recover. Around six months, Amer said she began to feel normal again. Though she can’t be certain that she’s back to where she was before Long COVID, she acknowledges some people aren’t as lucky as she is.
“I have to find out, and I have to understand it, and I’m not going to let anybody be left behind,” she said.
Scientists Drilled So Deep Into the Center of the Earth, They Knocked on the Mantle’s Door
Darren Orf – August 13, 2024
Scientists Go Deeper Into Mantle Than Ever BeforeBloomberg Creative – Getty Images
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To understand the mantle—the largest layer of Earth’s rocky body—scientists drill deep cores out of the Earth.
In May of 2023, scientists drilled the deepest core yet and recovered serpentinized peridotite that forms when saltwater interacts with mantle rock.
Although this is the deepest into the mantle scientists have ever drilled, the mission didn’t uncover pristine mantle that lies beyond the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho, boundary.
If you want to understand the geology of our home planet, studying the mantle is a great place to start. Separating the planet’s rocky crust and the molten outer core, the mantle makes up 70 percent of the Earth’s mass and 84 percent of its volume. But despite its outsized influence on the planet’s geologic processes, scientists have never directly sampled rocks from this immensely important geologic layer.
And that’s understandable, especially when you consider that the crust is roughly 9 to 12 miles thick on average. Luckily, that average contains outliers—areas of the world where the crust is actually incredibly thin and faulting exposes the mantle through cracks. One such area is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, specifically near an underwater mountain called the Atlantis Massif.
On the south side of this massif is an area known as the Lost City—a hydrothermal field whose vent fluids are highly alkaline and rich in hydrogen, methane, and other carbon compounds. This makes the area a particularly compelling candidate for explaining how early life evolved on Earth. Additionally, it contains mantle rock that interacts with seawater in a process known as “serpentinization,” which alters the rock’s structure and gives it a green, marble-like appearance.
It was here, 800 meters south of this field, in May of 2023 that members of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP)—aboard the JOIDES Resolution, a 470-foot-long research vessel rented by the U.S. National Science Foundation—extracted a 1,268-meter core containing abyssal peridotites, which are the primary rocks that make up the Earth’s upper mantle. The results of the study were published last week in the journal Science.
Although this makes this particular drill core the deepest sample of the mantle yet, going that deep into the rock wasn’t the goal of this record-breaking expedition.
“We had only planned to drill for 200 meters, because that was the deepest people had ever managed to drill in mantle rock,” Johan Lissenberg, a petrologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study, told Nature. He said that the drilling was so easy that they progressed three times faster than usual. The team eventually drilled a staggering 1,268 meters, and only stopped due to the mission’s limited operations window.
Andrew McCaig—study co-author and University of Leeds scientist—said in an article from The Conversation that, according to a preliminary analysis of the rock, the core’s composition contains a variety of peridotite called harzburgite that forms via partial melting of mantle rock. It also contained rocks known as gabbros, which are coarse-grained igneous rocks. Both of these rocks then chemically reacted with seawater, changing their composition.
While this core represents an incredibly opportunity to learn more about the Earth’s mantle, as well as give an in-depth look at the geologic substrate upon which the Lost City rests, the mission didn’t quite complete the “grand challenge” of crossing the Mohorovičić discontinuity. Otherwise known as the Moho, the Mohorovičić discontinuity is recognized as the true boundary between the crust and pristine mantle.
Future missions could continue exploring this site near the Atlantis Massif, but sadly, those missions won’t include JOIDES Resolution—the NSF declined to fund more core drilling past 2024. Just as scientists are finally knocking on the door to the Earth’s most ubiquitous geologic layer, the future of these kinds of drilling missions is now uncertain.
The Trump Campaign Just Tweeted Something Really Racist
Nathalie Baptiste – August 13, 2024
On Tuesday, an official social media account of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign posted a racist meme implying that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency in November, nice suburban neighborhoods will be overrun with hordes of Black people and immigrants.
“Import the third world. Become the third world,” read the post on X, the former Twitter.
Side-by-side images ― captioned “Your Neighborhood Under Trump” and “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala,” respectively ― show a tranquil residential street and a 2023 Getty photo of recent migrants to the U.S. sitting outside New York’s Roosevelt Hotel in hopes of securing temporary housing. (The Roosevelt now serves as an intake center for homeless migrants, and has been described as a “new Ellis Island.”) Most of the migrants in the photo are people of color.
In a conversation with X owner Elon Musk on the platform Monday night, Trump repeatedly vilified immigrants, bringing up cases of alleged murders by undocumented migrants. “These are rough people,” Trump told Musk. “These are criminals that make our criminals look like nice people. And it’s horrible what they’re doing.”
Trump has, once again, made building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border a campaign priority, and has promised that his administration will deport every undocumented immigrant living in the U.S. At the Republican National Convention in July, attendees cheered and waved signs reading “Mass Deportations Now!”
In the three weeks since President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term, reports have suggested that Trump is flailing for ways to counter the swell of enthusiasm for Harris, now the Democratic nominee.
Racism is a go-to approach for Trump, as evidenced by his quest over a decade ago to “prove” that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. Some of his advisers have told the media in recent weeks of their plans to rerun the “Willie Horton” playbook, referring to an infamous ad from 1988 that supporters of Republican George H.W. Bush produced for his presidential campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis. (Trump’s current pollster and adviser Tony Fabrizio had a hand in that advertisement.)
According to The New York Times, GOP donors and Trump’s own advisers have been pleading with him to attack Harris’ policies and stay on message, instead of questioning whether she is actually Black, as he has repeatedly done in the past two weeks. The fear among conservatives is that blatant racism will drive voters away in November.
But it seems that even when attacking Harris’ immigration policies, the Trump campaign just can’t help itself.
The Founders Saw This Insane Political Moment Coming 237 Years Ago
By Stacy Schiff – August 1, 2024
Stacy Schiff is the author of, most recently, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.”
Credit…Hunter French
If you’re feeling wrung out from the last dizzying weeks of political news, just imagine how the word “unprecedented” must be faring, dragged from its recliner for daily — sometimes hourly — workouts. It needn’t have been.
To understand how we got here, it’s helpful to return to another sweltering summer, a summer when everything actually was without precedent. The 55 men who assembled in Philadelphia 237 years ago to hammer out an American Constitution differed on a great many things. Among the rare points on which most agreed was that the American people could not be trusted to choose a president for themselves. They were easily misled, too often “the dupes of pretend patriots.” The size of the country alone made an informed electorate impossible, given the press, the postal service and the miserable infrastructure.
Slavery (barely discussed) and the mechanics of representation (much discussed) proved vexing. But few questions so confounded the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention as those pertaining to the American presidency. The Articles of Confederation, which had held the colonies together through the Revolution, had made no provision for a chief executive. How should the president be selected and how long should he serve? By what mechanism could he be removed? Should he report to the legislature? Should Congress be empowered to impeach him? What qualified as an impeachable offense?
No subject proved more divisive or elicited such a staggering array of options. It befuddled the delegates in June. They wrangled with it still in September.
King George III loomed large over the proceedings; a single executive seemed a high-risk proposition. Several Southerners favored a three-person executive, a committee that would represent each region of the fledgling Republic. From the start there was concern that rural voices would be drowned out. Some delegates worried that multiple officeholders would dilute the power of the presidency. Others feared the authority of an American president might come even to exceed that of the king. Would a president not do all in his power to retain his hold on the office? What if he committed crimes? “Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished” move him to cling to the office, Patrick Henry would later ask. (He had refused to attend the convention because, he claimed, he “smelt a rat.”)
The doctrine of separation of powers asserted itself only slowly. It dogged the delegates as they argued back and forth, attempting to deliver an American presidency that was both insulated from and accountable to Congress. The initial idea was for Congress to elect the chief executive, an idea that met with early, unanimous agreement. The more it was discussed, the muddier the matter grew. Perhaps state legislatures should do the electing? One term seemed sufficient in June but wrongheaded by July. It had not yet occurred to the delegates that the president would sit at the head of a political party. In the original conception he was to transcend factions, like a British sovereign.
A presidential term, it was initially agreed, should be seven years. The convention went on to entertain options of six, 11, 12, 15 and 20 years. Early on, the delegates converged upon a single term, though some had a different definition of what one term constituted. The most ardent proponent of executive authority, Alexander Hamilton, believed a president should serve for life. “It may be said, this constitutes an elective monarchy,” he conceded. But the president best able to resist popular pressures, corruption and foreign influence was the president with life tenure. “An executive is less dangerous to the liberties of the people when in office during life, than for seven years,” argued Hamilton.
Benjamin Franklin — at 81, older than everyone in the room, in most cases by decades — demurred. Even if that executive were a man of unerring, incorruptible instincts, what would happen if he were to grow frail? A man’s life often outlasted his prime, observed Franklin, who strayed from his chair only with visible difficulty. He meandered freely from his point. He entrusted most of his speeches to a colleague.
Weeks of heated inconclusiveness followed. How to remove an unfit executive, whether to allow him a veto and the extent of his powers occupied days. So did the question of salary. At one point it was suggested that anyone elected to the presidency be in possession of a “clear unencumbered estate” of at least $100,000, an amount equivalent to roughly $3.5 million today. Franklin objected, generally opposing the idea that rights be restricted to property owners. “Some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with,” he was said to have quipped, “were the richest rogues.” He strongly urged that the president be reimbursed only for his expenses.
Having spent years in London, having observed the British court at close hand, he knew that men made outlandish efforts to grasp and retain lucrative, powerful offices. He warned against a natural inclination to embrace kings. (He may or may not have known that nearly half his colleagues seemed to prefer some form of royal government.) “I am apprehensive, therefore — perhaps too apprehensive,” he warned, “that the government of these states may in future times end in a monarchy.” An awkward moment followed. In the room, after all, stood General Washington, who had served his country for eight years with honor and without profit. Franklin’s motion found a respectful second. It seems never to have returned to the table.
Some parts of that summer sound deeply familiar. There were long weeks of acrimony and about-faces, personal attacks and pouting. There were deadlocks, diatribes and tantrums. Consensus remained elusive for months and arrived grudgingly in the end. Ultimately it was James Madison who crafted the bare bones of the Electoral College, a system born of confusion and bruising exasperation. (When finally it came time for individual states to ratify the Constitution, some Pennsylvania delegates hid themselves away in their boardinghouses, from which they had to be bodily dragged.) Six days a week the delegates suffocated together for hours, practically seated atop each other in a stifling forty-by-forty-foot room. They took no daily breaks. It was not always possible to follow the debate.
In cutting a Constitution from whole cloth, the delegates met with infinitely more negative examples than appealing models. They had reviewed the republics of antiquity. They had examined the modern states of Europe. They had read their Hume, Montesquieu and Blackstone. They found no single formula that suited their purposes. They had agreed on secrecy — the room felt particularly airless as, for security, the windows were locked tight — an oath that has hampered historians ever since but did nothing to stanch the misinformation that flew from Philadelphia. Toward late July a rumor flew around New England that the delegates had resolved to invite George III’s second son to be crowned king of America.
Then, in mid-convention, came something wholly startling. During a particularly bitter June impasse, Franklin ventured to observe that five weeks’ work had yielded lamentably little. At that same Philadelphia address the Continental Congress had appealed for divine illumination. Should this new assembly do the same? The full Congress consisted of 53 Protestants, the majority of them Episcopalians. Two Catholics rounded out the ranks. Many of them were men of deep piety. If they were founding an American Christian nation when they wrote the Constitution it was not obvious: Franklin’s proposal met with a deafening silence. Hamilton gamely weighed in, to comment that an appeal to heaven would likely alarm the country. It reeked of desperation. A North Carolinian objected that Congress was without the funds to pay a cleric. Only three or four delegates, Franklin noted with what sounds like astonishment, thought prayer essential!
Much of what was said in that room suggests that the founders guessed we would sooner or later wind up injecting coconuts and couches into our political discourse. When they were not attempting to craft a viable American presidency, the delegates worried about how to protect a fledgling government from the worst instincts of its constituents. Those, too, were on full display that July, when the unprecedented collided with the immemorial.
Already once that spring a Philadelphia mob had attacked in the street an elderly German woman named Korbmacher. Long suspected of witchcraft, she was rumored to have poisoned a child with a magic charm. On July 10, a week during which the convention wrangled with the three-fifths clause, a formula that struck even its proposer as abhorrent, the widow Korbmacher was again attacked. This time her assailants armed themselves with stones and knives. She died from her injuries a week later while inside the State House the best minds in America designed — for citizens they felt might not best be trusted with their own political choices — the most enlightened government they could imagine. “Prejudices, worm-eaten prejudices, as our old companions, are hard to be parted with,” The Pennsylvania Packet opined about the attack.
The case went to court in October. It is unclear if the presiding judge handed down any convictions, though he did allow himself a comment from the bench. How had a wrinkled old crone caused such a commotion? Now if some of the luscious damsels he had noticed around town, “animated with the bloom of youth and equipped with all the grace of beauty” had been charged, the accusation would merit attention. Those women, he declared, were created to befuddle and bewitch.
The record is silent as to whether old Korbmacher was childless or owned even a single cat.
Stacy Schiff is the author of six books, including, most recently, “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.”
How Hungary’s Orbán uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark
Justin Spike – July 31, 2024
FILE – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivers a speech at Tusvanyos Summer University, in Baile Tusnad, Harghita county, Romania, on July 27, 2024. In Hungary, Orbán has extended his party’s control over the media, directly affecting informed democratic participation. (AP Photo/Alexandru Dobre, File)Members of the media work during the government’s press conference on Thursday, Jan 18, 2024. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has extended his party’s control over the media, directly affecting informed democratic participation. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)A headphone of a cameraman is seen in the press room during the government’s press conference on Thursday, Jan 18, 2024. Polarization has created “an almost Orwellian environment” in Hungarian media, where the government weaponizes control of a majority of outlets to limit Hungarians’ access to information. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — In the months leading up to elections for the European Parliament, Hungarians were warned that casting a ballot against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would be a vote for all-out war.
The right-wing Fidesz party cast the June 9 election as an existential struggle, one that could preserve peace in Europe if Orbán won — or fuel widespread instability if he didn’t. To sell that bold claim, Orbán used a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.
The tactic worked, as it has since Orbán returned to power in 2010, and his party came first in the elections — though not by the margins it was used to. An upstart party, led by a former Fidesz insider, attracted disaffected voters and took 29% of the vote to Fidesz’s 44%.
“Everything has fallen apart in Hungary. The state essentially does not function, there’s only propaganda and lies,” said Péter Magyar, the leader of that new party who has emerged in recent months as perhaps the most formidable challenge yet to Orbán’s rule.
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.
Magyar’s Respect and Freedom, or TISZA, party campaigned on promises to root out deep-seated corruption in the government. He has also been outspoken about what he sees as the damage Orbán’s “propaganda factory” has done to Hungary’s democracy.
“It might be very difficult to imagine from America or Western Europe what the propaganda and the state machinery is like here,” Magyar said in an interview before elections with The Associated Press. “This parallel reality is like the Truman Show. People believe that it’s reality.”
Since 2010, Orbán’s government has promoted hostility to migrants and LGBTQ+ rights, distrust of the European Union, and a belief that Hungarian-American financier George Soros — who is Jewish and one of Orbán’s enduring foes — is engaged in secret plots to destabilize Hungary, a classic antisemitic trope.
Such messaging has delivered Orbán’s party four consecutive two-thirds majorities in parliament and, most recently, the most Hungarian delegates in the EU legislature.
But according to Péter Krekó, an analyst and head of the Political Capital think tank in Budapest, Orbán has created “an almost Orwellian environment” where the government weaponizes control of a majority of news outlets to limit Hungarians’ decisions.
“Hungary has become a quite successful informational autocracy, or spin dictatorship,” Krekó said.
The restriction of Hungary’s free press directly affects informed democratic participation. Opposition politicians have long complained that they only get five minutes of air time every four years on public television, the legal minimum, to present their platforms before elections.
In contrast, public television and radio channels consistently echo talking points communicated both by Fidesz and a network of think tanks and pollsters that receive funding from the government and the party. Their analysts routinely appear in affiliated media to bolster government narratives, while independent commentators rarely, if ever, appear.
During the campaign in May, Hungary’s electoral commission issued a warning to the public broadcaster for repeatedly airing Fidesz campaign videos during news segments, a violation of impartiality rules. The broadcaster carried on regardless.
Magyar, who won a seat in the European Parliament, credits his new party’s success partly to its ability to sidestep Orbán’s dominance by meeting directly with voters and developing a large following on social media.
But in Hungary, even those with a strong online presence struggle to compete with Fidesz’s control of traditional outlets.
According to press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Orbán has used media buyouts by government-connected “oligarchs” to build “a true media empire subject to his party’s orders.” The group estimates that such buyouts have given Orbán’s party control of some 80% of Hungary’s media market resources. In 2021, it put Orbán on its list of media “predators,” the first EU leader to earn the distinction.
The title didn’t come out of nowhere: in 2016, Hungary’s oldest daily newspaper was suddenly shuttered after being bought by a businessman with links to Orbán. In 2018, nearly 500 pro-government outlets were simultaneously donated by their owners to a foundation headed by Orbán loyalists, creating a sprawling right-wing media conglomerate. And in 2020, nearly the entire staff of Hungary’s largest online news portal, Index, resigned en masse after its lead editor was fired under political pressure.
A network of independent journalists and online outlets that continue to function in Hungary struggles to remain competitive, said Gábor Polyák, head of the Media and Communication Department at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
The government is the largest advertiser in Hungary, he said. A study by watchdog Mérték Media Monitor showed up to 90% of state advertising revenue is awarded to pro-Fidesz media outlets, keeping them afloat.
The government’s efforts to control media have moved beyond television, radio and newspapers, shifting into social media posts that are boosted by paid advertisements.
Hungary spent the most in the entire 27-member EU — nearly $4.8 million — on political ads on platforms owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, in a 30-day period in May and June, outspending Germany, which has more than eight times the population, according to a recent report based on publicly available data compiled by Political Capital, Mérték Media Monitor and fact-checking site Lakmusz.
The vast majority of that spending came from Fidesz or its proxies, the report found.
One major spender is Megafon, a self-declared training center for aspiring conservative influencers. In the same 30-day period, the group spent $800,000 on boosting its pro-government content on Meta platforms, more than what was spent in total by 16 EU countries in the same period.
With government narratives so pervasive across mediums, a level of political polarization has emerged that can reach deep into the private lives of Hungarians. In recent years, the views of Andrea Simon, a 55-year-old entrepreneur from a suburb of Budapest, and her husband Attila Kohári began to drift apart — fed, according to Simon, by Kohári’s steady diet of pro-government media.
“He listened to these radio stations where they pushed those simple talking points, it completely changed his personality,” Simon said. “I felt sometimes he’d been kidnapped, and his brain was replaced with a Fidesz brain.”
In December, after 33 years of marriage, they agreed to divorce.
“I said to him several times, ‘You have to choose: me or Fidesz,’” she said. “He said Fidesz.”
Still, like many Hungarians who hold fast to traditional values in a changing world, Kohári remains a faithful supporter of Orbán and his policies, despite the personal cost.
His love of his country and belief that Orbán has led Hungary in the right direction have him “clearly convinced that my position is the right one,” he said. “But it ruined my marriage.”
The media divide also has consequences for Hungary’s finances, says independent lawmaker Ákos Hadházy, who has uncovered dozens of suspected cases of graft involving EU funds.
Such abuses, he said, go largely unaddressed because the majority of voters are unaware of them.
“Following the Russian model, (the government) controls state media by hand and spends about 50 billion forints ($135 million) a year on advertisements … that sustain their own TV networks and websites,” he said. “The people that consume those media simply don’t hear about these things.”
On a recent day in Mezőcsát, a small village on the Hungarian Great Plain, Hadházy inspected the site of an industrial park that was built with 290 million forints ($795,000) in EU funds. The problem, he said, is that since the site was completed in 2017, it has never been active, and the money used to build it has disappeared.
Hadházy said that Hungarians “who consciously seek out the real news hear about these cases and don’t understand how it’s possible that there are no consequences when I present such things almost daily.”
He continued: “But it’s not important for the government that nobody hears about them, it’s important that more people hear their lies, and that’s the way it is now. Far more people hear their messages than the facts.”
This story has been corrected to show that the building of the industrial park in the village of Mezőcsát involved EU funds in the amount of 290 million forints, not 290 million euros.
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.
Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two in Westfield, Mass., on July 27. (Stephanie Scarbrough/AP)
Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris took the baton last Sunday from her boss, President Biden, and instantly became the Democratic Party’s new de facto presidential nominee, she has enjoyed one of the most significant “honeymoons” in recent U.S. campaign history.
As a result, the latest polls show Harris closing the gap with Donald Trump in key swing states; pulling even nationally; and surpassing him in terms of favorability and enthusiasm.
Yet all honeymoons come to an end. If Harris hopes to win in November, she will have to differentiate herself from Biden — and convince a decisive number of voters to reject four more years of Trump.
In an attempt to do just that, Harris and her allies have been testing out five main lines of attack: that Trump is “weird”; that he is old; that he is scared to debate; that he is a felon; and that his “Project 2025” agenda is extreme.
Harris has been so committed to these themes that even when Trump questioned her race Wednesday — falsely claiming that she suddenly “made a turn” and “became a Black person” after “only promoting [her] Indian heritage” — she refused to get sucked into a culture war.
“The American people deserve better,” is all Harris said in response.
More on the strategic contrasts Harris is trying to draw:
Trump is ‘weird’
When Biden was running, he constantly called Trump a “threat to democracy.”
Harris hasn’t left that line of attack entirely behind. “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate?” the vice president asked at a recent rally.
But for the most part, Harris and her allies have pivoted to a different anti-Trump message — one that comes across as a lot less alarmist and a lot more … dismissive.
“Some of what [Trump] and his running mate [JD Vance] are saying, it is just plain weird,” Harris said Saturday at her first fundraiser. “I mean that’s the box you put that in, right?”
The new term caught on after Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — who has been using it for months — called Trump, Vance and their policies “weird” a few times last week.
“Listen to the guy,” Walz told CNN, referring to Trump. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, and shocking sharks, and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit.”
So far, the “weird” attack has frustrated Republicans, “leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses,” David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University, told the Associated Press.
It “makes voters feel like Trump is out of touch,” added Brian Ott, a professor of communications at Missouri State University, in an interview with Newsweek. And “it’s hard to claim that it is in any way out of bounds politically, which makes any response to it seem like an overreaction and, well, weird.”
Trump is old
The first time the Harris campaign officially referred to Trump as “weird” was in a press release put out just days after the vice president announced her candidacy. But there was another, more familiar adjective alongside it.
“Trump is old and quite weird,” the statement said. “After watching Fox News this morning, we have only one question, is Donald Trump OK?”
As everyone knows, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history; at 81, he was also on track to become the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history until he ended his campaign last Sunday.
Now Trump, 78, has taken his place.
And so Harris, 59, has turned the tables and started describing the former president as someone who is “focused on the past” — while she, in contrast, is “focused on the future.”
For its part, the Harris campaign has been less euphemistic about the nearly two-decade age gap between the two candidates.
“Tonight, Donald Trump couldn’t pronounce words … went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant, let alone be president of the United States,” Harris spokesperson James Singer said after a recent Trump speech. “America can do better than [Trump’s] bitter, bizarre and backward-looking delusions.”
Trump is scared to debate
On Sept. 10, Trump and Biden were scheduled to debate for the second time this year. But after the president withdrew from the race — and Harris emerged as the new, de facto Democratic nominee — Trump started to backtrack.
“I haven’t agreed to anything,” Trump said on a press call last week. “I agreed to a debate with Joe Biden.” Around the same time, the former president suggested that ABC News should no longer host, calling the outlet “fake news.”
Harris immediately snapped back. “What happened to ‘any time, any place’?” she said in a post on X.
In response, Harris has seized on Trump’s waffling as evidence that “the momentum in this race is shifting” and that “Trump is feeling it,” as she put it Tuesday during a rally in Atlanta — effectively weaponizing the whole situation to question Trump’s confidence.
“Well, Donald,” Harris said in Atlanta, addressing Trump directly. “I do hope you’ll reconsider. Meet me on the debate stage … because as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”
“As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, of California,” Harris said. “And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.”
The reason is obvious. Democrats believe Project 2025 policies — deporting millions of immigrants, eliminating the Department of Education, installing loyalists throughout the federal bureaucracy, reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone — will be unpopular with the public.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” the former president claimed. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
But Harris — who has called Project 2025 a “plan to return America to a dark past” — is not moving on.
“This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country,” Harris spokesperson Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Tuesday. “Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”
