An earthquake. An eclipse. A bridge collapse. A freak blizzard. A biblical flood. Donald Trump leading in battleground states.
Apocalyptic vibes are stirred by Trump’s violent rhetoric and talk of blood baths.
If he’s not elected, he bellowed in Ohio, there will be a blood bath in the auto industry. At his Michigan rally on Tuesday, he said there would be a blood bath at the border, speaking from a podium with a banner reading, “Stop Biden’s border blood bath.” He has warned that, without him in the Oval, there will be an “Oppenheimer”-like doomsday; we will lose World War III and America will be devastated by “weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.”
“And the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump has said.
An unspoken Trump threat is that there will be a blood bath again in Washington, like Jan. 6, if he doesn’t win.
That is why he calls the criminals who stormed the Capitol “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” He starts some rallies with a dystopian remix of the national anthem, sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” and his own reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.
In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare uses blood imagery to chart the creation of a tyrant. Those words echo in Washington as Ralph Fiennes stars in a thrilling Simon Godwin production of “MacBeth” for the Shakespeare Theater Company, opening Tuesday.
“The raw power grab that excites Lady Macbeth and incites her husband to regicide feels especially pertinent now, when the dangers of autocracy loom over political discussions,” Peter Marks wrote in The Washington Post about the production with Fiennes and Indira Varma (the lead sand snake in “Game of Thrones.”)
Trump’s raw power grab after his 2020 loss may have failed, but he’s inflaming his base with language straight out of Macbeth’s trip to hell.
“Blood will have blood,” as Macbeth says. One of the witches, the weird sisters, urges him, “Be bloody, bold and resolute.”
Another weird sister, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is predicting end times. “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” she tweeted on Friday. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Like Macbeth, Trump crossed a line and won’t turn back. The Irish say, “You may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” Macbeth killed his king, then said: “I am in blood. Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that since Trump put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee, prospective employees are asked if they think the election was stolen. Republicans once burbled on about patriotism and defending America. Now denying democracy is a litmus test for employment in the Formerly Grand Old Party.
My Irish immigrant father lived through the cruel “No Irish Need Apply” era. I’m distraught that our mosaic may shatter.
But Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred. He has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” Last month, he called migrants “animals,” saying, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”
Trump’s obsession with bloodlines was instilled by his father, the son of a German immigrant. He thinks there is good blood and bad blood, superior blood and inferior blood. Fred Trump taught his son that their family’s success was genetic, reminiscent of Hitler’s creepy faith in eugenics.
“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told PBS. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
Trump has been talking about this as far back as an “Oprah” show in 1988. The “gene believer” brought it up in a 2020 speech in Minnesota denouncing refugees.
“A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” he told the crowd about their pioneer lineage, adding: “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” usurpers don’t ascend to the throne without complicity. Republican enablers do all they can to cozy up to their would-be dictator, even introducing a bill to rename Dulles airport for Trump. Democrats responded by introducing a bill to name a prison in Florida for Trump.
“Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers?” Greenblatt asked. “Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?”
Like Macbeth’s castle, the Trump campaign has, as Lady Macbeth put it, “the smell of blood,” and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten” it.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – February 13, 2024
Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
It is unclear whether Donald Trump has forgotten the precise nature of NATO or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place.
What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue about what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish — the kind of outrageous nonsense that flows without interruption from an empty and unreflective mind.
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’” Trump said, recalling an implausible conversation with an unnamed, presumably European head of state. “‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recounted responding. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”
The former president’s message was clear: If NATO members do not pay up, then he will leave them to the mercy of a continental aggressor who has already plunged one European country into death, destruction and devastation.
Except NATO isn’t a mafia protection racket. NATO, in case anyone needs to be reminded, is a mutual defense organization, formed by treaty in 1949 as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union hardened into conflict. “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” states Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.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.
According to the terms of an agreement reached last year, member states will work to spend at least 2 percent of national G.D.P. on military investment.
But let’s set this bit of fact-checking aside for a moment and look at the big picture.
It is not just that Trump is ignorant on this and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.
Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.
Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.
Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”
There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.
“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on Jan. 6.
If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:
“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.
“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” he added.
I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.
But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.
Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.
In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.
Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected Trump, in the 2016 election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, he was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.
It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue here is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is.
One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.
Supreme Court slow to resolve potentially election-altering cases as justices inch toward final arguments
John Fritze, CNN – April 6, 2024
As the Supreme Court turns toward a series of politically charged disputes in its final arguments later this month, it is wrestling with a backlog of controversies on guns, elections and transgender rights that will thrust its conservative majority into the middle of another turbulent presidential contest.
But as the high court moves toward a busy and fraught final sitting this term, it is also once again slipping behind its past pace, issuing fewer opinions than it did at this same point in its nine-month work period just a few years ago. The court has handed down 11 opinions so far this term – most in relatively obscure matters that were decided unanimously.
The Supreme Court has issued opinions in just 22% of its argued cases this year, compared with 34% through mid-April two years ago and 46% in 2021, according to data compiled by Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS. The share of resolved cases is up slightly over last year – a historic low.
The comparison would improve if new rulings land next week.
Taken together, the numbers point to a term in which the court’s decisions could be scrunched into a shorter time fame – potentially giving the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority an opportunity to reshape the political debate around culture war issues just as Americans begin tuning into the Biden-Trump rematch for president.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, said it had become a “clear trend” in recent years that the court is “very slow” releasing decisions. Though there are many theories about why that may be, the court’s opaque-by-design practice of negotiation and opinion crafting makes it difficult to say with certainty.
A large share of the court’s docket touches on “enormously significant and difficult issues,” Chemerinsky told CNN. “It also is a court that has deep divisions. I assume that all of this leads to delays in releasing decisions.”
Writing a majority opinion is only part of the behind-the-scenes process: Sometimes delays are caused by the concurrences and dissents other justices write. More fractured decisions, in other words, can generate separate opinions and take longer.
The slower pace could prove particularly meaningful this year because of Trump’s assertion of immunity from special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion charges. Trump asked the justices to block a lower court ruling that flatly rejected those immunity claims. The high court agreed to hear the case in late February, but did not set arguments until the end of this month.
The case has put the Supreme Court on the clock and opened it up to criticism that delay will play into Trump’s broader legal strategy of pushing off his pending criminal trials until after the November election. Unless the court speeds up its work, it’s difficult to see how the Trump immunity decision would arrive before the end of June.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor stand on the House floor ahead of the annual State of the Union address by U.S. President Joe Biden. – Shawn Thew/Pool/Getty Images
Trump redefines Supreme Court’s docket
The court heard oral arguments in mid-October over South Carolina’s new congressional map, which a lower court found was a racial gerrymander that violated the Constitution. Both the GOP state lawmakers defending the map and the parties challenging it had asked the Supreme Court to rule by January.
Noting that deadlines for this year’s election were nearing, the state lawmakers filed an emergency appeal last month, asking for permission to use the disputed map while the justices continued their deliberations. Ultimately, a lower court stepped in to allow the state to use the map for now, lamenting that “the ideal must bend to the practical.”
On the court’s emergency docket, meanwhile, where cases are decided more quickly and without oral argument, the justices have been sitting for weeks on a request from Idaho officials to enforce a strict statewide ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Initially filed in mid-February, the request has been fully briefed since early March.
The go-slow approach is not a new phenomena this year. The pace of opinions fell sharply last year, according to Feldman’s data, which led to speculation that the shocking leak of the court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade months earlier gummed up the court’s internal works.
Several justices indicated the leak damaged trust, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who described the unprecedented breach as “kind of an infidelity.”
Last year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh downplayed the slower pace by noting many of the court’s biggest cases – which usually are not settled until June – were heard at the start of the term. For instance, the court heard arguments early on that year in a major challenge to the consideration of race in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court ultimately barred consideration of race in June.
This year, some of the biggest cases have been more spread out. On the other hand, the court has been pummeled by a series of divisive emergency appeals. It also has agreed to take on several high-profile matters involving Trump.
In one, the court ruled that Trump would remain on Colorado’s presidential ballot despite claims he violated the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban” because of his actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The court was unanimous on the bottom line conclusion but splintered over its reasoning.
In another, the justices agreed to hear arguments April 25 about Trump’s immunity claims.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday, April 2. – Paul Sancya/AP
The Supreme Court will also hear arguments later this month over a federal law the Biden administration says requires hospitals to provide an abortion if the health of the mother is in danger, even in states such as Idaho that have approved strict abortion bans. The rise of state abortion restrictions following the court’s overturning of Roe has become an election-year cudgel for Biden and congressional Democrats.
Also this month, the court will take up the question of whether a federal obstruction law can be used to prosecute some of the rioters involved in the Capitol attack. The decision could also affect Trump, who has also been charged with that crime.
‘Something has to give’ on Supreme Court docket
The court also dealt with a divisive and ongoing dispute over a Texas immigration law that allowed law enforcement in the state to arrest and detain people it suspects entered the country illegally. Over a public dissent from the three liberal justices, the court cleared the way for Texas to enforce that law last month.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the enforcement hours later and the appeals court heard arguments over the law Wednesday.
The emergency cases, which have drawn increased criticism in recent years, take time away from consideration of the court’s regular docket.
“The court only has so many resources,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “Something has to give, and the court really ought to be thinking through ways to avoid putting itself in this position every year.”
In an aerial view, Texas National Guard soldiers load excess concertina wire onto a trailer at Shelby Park on January 26, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. – Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images
At the same time, the Supreme Court has always moved at its own pace and the justices have little incentive to worry about timing. By its own standards, the court moved unusually quickly to resolve the Trump ballot dispute this year – handing down a decision two months after the former president filed his appeal.
That kind of speed is the exception.
“If you look systematically over time, they’re becoming slower and they’re taking fewer cases,” Feldman said.
But other than stirring speculation among court watchers, he said, the pace of opinions doesn’t have much practical impact. Taking an extra few weeks to finish an opinion, Feldman said, simply means the justices get more time to write.
“It makes sense to me from their perspective that they might want to be slower,” Feldman said. “For efficiency, it probably makes sense to hold off as much as they can until the end of the term.”
‘Building an authoritarian axis’: the Trump ‘envoy’ courting the global far right
Richard Grenell’s shadow foreign policy campaign is unsettling diplomats and threatens to collapse US interests.
Robert Tait – April 5, 2024
For Donald Trump, he is “my envoy”, the man apparently anointed as the former US president’s roving ambassador while he plots a return to the White House.
To critics, he is seen as “an online pest” and “a national disgrace” – and most importantly, the dark embodiment of what foreign policy in a second Trump administration would look like.
Meet Richard Grenell, vocal tribune of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage and the man hotly tipped to become secretary of state if the presumed Republican nominee beats Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.
A senior executive in the rightwing Newsmax cable channel, Grenell, 57, has crafted a persona as the archetypal Trump man, keen and ever-ready to troll liberals, allies and foreign statesmen in public forums and social media.
Grenell – who served as a rambunctious ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term – has carved a niche as the articulator-in-chief of a Maga approach to global affairs that appears to echo his political master’s voice.
Seasoned analysts fear his hyperactivity is already unsettling US diplomats even while Trump is out of office.
In recent months, he has pitched up in Guatemala, where he tried to stymie US state department pleas for a peaceful transition of power by backing rightwing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo, on supposed electoral fraud grounds about a poll previously declared “free and fair” by international observers.
Arévalo subsequently took office, but not before Grenell lambasted American diplomats for “trying to intimidate conservatives” over “a phony concern about democracy”.
He has also repeatedly visited the Balkans – building on a previous role as the Trump administration’s special envoy to the region and working on property deals in Serbia and Albania with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
He attempted to broker a meeting between Trump and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at last year’s United Nations general assembly in New York at a time when the Turkish leader was blocking Sweden’s bid to join Nato, although the proposal was subsequently rejected amid security concerns.
Grenell knows who can be seduced, intimidated and destroyed
Fulton Armstrong
Grenell’s high profile has an intimidating effect on serving US diplomats, according to Fulton Armstrong, senior fellow at American University’s Centre for Latin American Studies.
“Grenell’s very cunning and effective. Having penetrated both the intelligence and the policy world, he knows who can be seduced, intimidated and destroyed,” Armstrong, a former senior analyst at the CIA, told the Guardian.
“The state department eventually did the right thing in Guatemala but only after a lot of dawdling and this tells Grenell that it has issues of commitment and allegiance [that he can exploit].
“Weak people at the state department are scared to piss off the right wing because they want to be ambassadors and fear for their careers, which makes them vulnerable. Someone like Grenell knows how this can be used for issues favoring Trump.”
For his part, Grenell has accused the state department of “playing politics” and “pushing leftwing ideas” in Latin America.
Addressing the influential CPAC gathering of conservatives in February, he said US foreign policy cried out for an “SOB diplomat”, a role he apparently envisions for himself.
“What we need right now is diplomacy with muscle,” Grenell told an online video debate last summer on the Balkans hosted by the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute. “We need to stop mocking tough diplomats. What we’ve seen with Ukraine is that when diplomats fail, we have war and conflict.”
There are many aspects to what Grenell is doing. One is grift …
Joe Cirincione
Grenell has become a strident advocate of abandoning negotiations in decades-old territorial disputes in the Middle East and the Balkans in favor of trade and economic agreements that he hails as sidestepping political problems through creating jobs.
“The success that Donald Trump had was that he avoided politics and concentrated on the economy,” he told CPAC. “Young people leave the region because they don’t have help and they don’t have a job. So part of our foreign policy, if we want to solve problems, is to avoid the political talk and figure out ways to do greater trade.”
For detractors, such talk is code for a transactional foreign policy tailored to Trump’s personal and business interests at the expense of America’s traditional democratic alliances – as well as a signal that Ukraine would be pressured to surrender territory to end its war with Russia.
“There are many aspects to what Grenell is doing,” said Joe Cirincione, a veteran Washington foreign policy and arms control specialist. “One is grift, looking for business deals, particularly in Serbia, where Trump has longstanding business interests and Trump seems to be helping him pursue this.
“Another is more sinister. It looks as though Grenell is trying to build up a developing authoritarian network of rightwing leaders to form this authoritarian axis that Trump might govern by – ranging from Putin to [Viktor] Orbán [prime minister of Hungary] to Erdoğan.
“All these are anti-democratic forces and use the simple playbook of using democracy to overthrow democracy.”
Grenell’s own pronouncements give proponents of America’s existing alliances little cause for comfort.
A relentless critic of Germany’s financial contributions to Nato, he trolled Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, when he attended Biden’s State of the Union address in January to mark his country’s accession to Nato, a move Grenell had opposed, purportedly on the grounds that it would not pay its way.
“The leader of Sweden, who currently isn’t paying his fair share of Nato obligations but has promised to do it later, is leaping to his feet to applaud Joe Biden and the far Left spending policies Biden wants to enact,” Grenell posted on X.
All these are anti-democratic forces and use the simple playbook of using democracy to overthrow democracy
Joe Cirincione
The comment echoed Grenell’s crockery-breaking spell as ambassador to Berlin, where he infuriated his hosts on arrival by demanding that they renew sanctions on Iran after Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear deal agreed by Barack Obama’s administration – even though Germany still adhered to the agreement.
He also ruffled German feathers by telling Breitbart that part of his ambassadorial role was “to empower other conservatives throughout Europe”, a comment seen by some as a tacit olive branch to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) party.
For figures like Cirincione, such rhetoric is a harbinger of worse to come.
“If Trump were president and Grenell secretary of state, it would set back American interests by decades, collapse the development of the democratic west and assist the rise of the global right wing, no questions about it,” he said.
Terrified Parents, New Age Health Nuts, MAGA Exiles. Meet the R.F.K. Jr. Faithful.
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist – April 4, 2024
Photographs by Michael Schmelling
Chris Inclan, an alcohol and drug counselor from Sonoma, Calif., voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016. In 2020 he backed Andrew Yang in the Democratic primary and cast a ballot for Donald Trump in the general election. Joe Biden, he said, was “so ingrained in the establishment and politics as usual,” while Trump “went against the grain on a lot of issues,” including wars and government regulation. But Inclan, a big bearded 39-year-old with tattoos on his hands, doesn’t want to have to make that choice again, which is why he’s now enthusiastically supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I met Inclan at the Oakland rally where Kennedy introduced his new running mate, the 38-year-old political donor Nicole Shanahan. Held in the auditorium of the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, it was the first political rally Inclan had ever attended.
“The system is corrupt,” he said of what he called the two-party “duopoly.” “We keep playing the same game. But I think Americans are fed up.” He’d joined Kennedy’s We the People Party, formed to help Kennedy get on the ballot in several states, and has aspirations to run for office himself someday.
Setting up banners at Kennedy’s campaign event in Oakland, Calif., to announce his pick for a running mate.
Inclan’s politics are hard to understand in purely left or right terms. The more relevant dichotomy, for him as for many Kennedy voters, is insider versus outsider, which is why Kennedy’s following sometimes overlaps, in unexpected ways, with the MAGA movement.
Matt Castro, a San Francisco bus driver at the rally, described himself as “extremely left-leaning,” but didn’t vote in the last election and said that, if Kennedy isn’t on the ballot, he’d probably vote for Trump in the next one, because of his opposition to military support for Ukraine. Alex Klett, a 33-year-old Kennedy volunteer from Wisconsin who was handing out American flags, described himself as a right-leaning independent who voted for Trump in 2016 and then, in 2020, wrote in Kanye West.
Another Kennedy volunteer, Jaclyn Aldrich, a striking 43-year-old Black woman who sometimes works as a model, has never cast a presidential ballot, because she hadn’t trusted any of the candidates. “I didn’t even vote for Obama,” she said. Among her fellow volunteers, she said, are some former Bernie Sanders voters, but “it’s mostly Trump people.”
This is a paradox of the Kennedy campaign. Many Democratic and Republican insiders view Kennedy as a danger to Biden’s re-election. Timothy Mellon, the top donor to the Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., is also the top donor to the Kennedy super PAC American Values 2024, suggesting he thinks Kennedy will help Trump. The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, has recently formed a unit, including veteran Democratic operative Lis Smith, devoted to battling third-party candidates, and Kennedy is getting most of its attention.
But on the ground, I haven’t met many Kennedy-curious voters for whom Biden is a second choice. Instead, Kennedy attracts many of the same sort of alienated political eccentrics who in the past have gravitated to Trump. “They keep saying that he’s pulling from Biden, but most of our people are actually coming from the right,” said Leigh Merinoff, volunteer chair of the finance committee of American Values.
Anecdotes aren’t the same thing as data, and people who go to rallies and volunteer for campaigns aren’t necessarily representative of the electorate, which is full of people who are much more disengaged. Nevertheless, there’s a gap between both Democratic and Republican assumptions about Kennedy’s appeal and the character of his real-life movement. He’s much more of a wild card than left-wing third-party candidates like Stein and Cornel West. There’s something distinctly Trumpy in his campaign’s mix of New Age individualism, social media-fueled paranoia and intense, aching nostalgia for the optimistic America of the early 1960s, when Kennedy’s uncle John F. Kennedy was president and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, served as attorney general. It’s not surprising that some otherwise Trump-leaning voters are picking up on it.
Faces at recent Kennedy campaign events in California.
On the surface, Kennedy’s choice of Shanahan, a patent lawyer and former Democrat who has donated to candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Marianne Williamson, might seem as if it would draw more left-leaning voters into the campaign. In introducing Shanahan, an avid surfer who met her ex-husband, the Google founder Sergey Brin, at a yoga festival, Kennedy said, “I wanted a vice president who shared my passion for wholesome, healthy foods, chemical-free, for regenerative agriculture, for good soils,” as well as an athlete who “would help me inspire Americans to heal, to get them back in shape.”
One can imagine voters who frequent farmers markets and follow wellness influencers seeing an idealized version of themselves in her. And while large parts of the New Age and alternative health community moved right during the pandemic in response to lockdowns and vaccine mandates, it’s still a world with plenty of people who think of themselves as progressives.
Indeed, the most interesting thing about Shanahan is the way she dramatizes how Kennedy wins over voters like her. In the week after her debut as a candidate, Shanahan hasn’t made any mainstream media appearances, but she did speak at length on the podcast of Rick Rubin, the music producer and, recently, self-help author, telling the story of her conversion from lifelong Democrat to Kennedy acolyte.
Their conversation is fascinating, demonstrating how frustrations with conventional medicine and the desire for a transcendent order — for a big holistic framework that makes sense of the world’s destabilizing chaos — lead away from technocratic liberalism and toward, well, the unstable political formation that’s coalescing around Kennedy. Listening to it, you can hear a smart and sensitive woman narrating her own journey down the rabbit hole, a portal that took her to a place where she could help swing the 2024 election and thus the course of American history.
Shanahan came to Kennedy the way many desperate parents have. During the pandemic, her 18-month-old daughter was diagnosed, over Zoom, with autism, and she described how none of the interventions offered by experts helped. Another Silicon Valley mom with an autistic child urged her to listen to Kennedy, who has long asserted a false link between vaccines and autism. Though Shanahan was resistant at first — she knew about Kennedy’s reputation as a conspiracy theorist — she tuned into his podcast.
Around the same time, she got deep into the work of Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon and self-described “biohacker” who emphasizes the importance of sunlight for good health. (Kennedy and Kruse appeared together on Rubin’s podcast last year.) Kruse, said Shanahan, awakened her to the idea that autism could be “related to the way that the brain was responding to some kind of outside influence” — like vaccines — “and how to heal the brain.”
She started her daughter, Echo, on a regimen that included lots of early morning light, swimming in a saltwater pool and music frequencies that send “a signal to brain cells that they can repair.” (“Morning sunlight in particular is like chicken soup for metabolic health,” she told Rubin.) At the same time, she worked to reduce Echo’s exposure to “nonnative light sources,” and cellular and Wi-Fi signals. These interventions, she said, have all helped her daughter. “When it works, maybe we need science to catch up,” she said.
When she met Kennedy last summer, she was impressed by his record of “looking at the environmental exposures and the things that impact human health that are man-created,” she said. Shanahan lamented what she sees as widespread closed-mindedness in the face of the questions she wants to explore. “My daughter has lifted the veil for me,” she said, in an allusion to Aldous Huxley’s work on psychedelics. “If we’re talking about my support for Bobby Kennedy, that is what has brought me to this movement.”
A Kennedy supporter in Oakland.Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate.
Shanahan was never all that left-wing; she helped fund the recall campaign against San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Still, her presence on the ticket has alienated some right-leaning Kennedy fans. Shortly after she was announced, one erstwhile Kennedy supporter posted a link to an online “Save R.F.K. Jr. Rally” on Kennedy’s campaign website, demanding the firing of Kennedy’s campaign manager for promoting a “C.I.A., feminist agenda” by bringing Shanahan on board. (It was quickly taken down.) “I think the pick was meant to be more about covering his left flank, and I found that an odd calculation,” Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who has co-hosted a fund-raiser for Kennedy, said on the podcast “All-In.”
In fact, the calculation makes perfect sense: Kennedy needs Shanahan’s money. Her divorce settlement from Brin isn’t public, but she reportedly asked for more than $1 billion, about 1 percent of his net worth at the time, and she’s clearly extremely wealthy. Campaign finance law allows both presidential and vice-presidential candidates to pour unlimited funds into their own races, and the process of getting Kennedy on state ballots as a third-party candidate is going to be expensive. Shanahan has shown she’s willing to spend; she gave $4 million to American Values 2024 to fund a Kennedy ad that ran during the Super Bowl.
Introducing Shanahan in Oakland, Kennedy said, with a straight face, that there is “no American more qualified” than she to serve as vice president. But his speech also gestured at the heart of those qualifications. Shanahan, he said, would help him liberate America from the “predatory cabal” that controls the campaign finance system.
It’s doubtful, however, that Shanahan will be able to help Kennedy in ways that go beyond finances, and not just because the influence of vice-presidential candidates tends to be limited, especially with third-party aspirants. (My guess is that few readers remember either Ralph Nader’s or Jill Stein’s running mates.) Shanahan appears to find negative publicity debilitating, an unusual quality in an aspiring politician and one that may limit her visibility.
Before joining the Kennedy ticket, she was probably best known for her divorce from Brin, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, was precipitated by an affair with Elon Musk. (Both she and Musk deny this.) In an essay in People magazine, she described the scrutiny that followed the Journal article as unbearable. “I was thrust into the public eye; the online images and commentary felt more like a zeitgeist than depictions of my lived experiences,” she wrote. Insisting that she’s “not a public person,” she called the Journal article and its aftermath “a disaster for my work life, my reputation and my ability to communicate the things I care most deeply about.”
This week, “Fox & Friends” promoted an appearance by Kennedy and Shanahan, but Kennedy ended up going on alone. In a post on the social media platform X, Shanahan wrote, “While Bobby’s out there spreading our message on TV right now, I’m working behind the scenes to make sure we’re on the ballot in all 50 states.” So rather than add a new note to Kennedy’s message, Shanahan is mostly just using her fortune to amplify what he’s already been saying. And what he’s been saying is often quite reactionary. (The campaign didn’t respond to my requests to interview Kennedy or Shanahan.)
At a Kennedy campaign event in Los Angeles.
The last time I saw Kennedy speak, in June in New Hampshire, he was still a Democrat, running a doomed primary challenge to Biden in a campaign managed by the quirky former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich. Seeking to echo the famous 1963 “Peace” speech in which his presidential uncle called for a halt to the Cold War arms race, Kennedy warned against antagonizing Russia over Ukraine, presenting himself as an antiwar candidate.
Some of his followers still see him that way, but now they must either rationalize or overlook his zealous support for Israel’s war in Gaza. In March, weeks after the Biden administration called for a six-week cease-fire, Kennedy was skeptical of the idea, telling Reuters that previous truces have “been used by Hamas to rearm, to rebuild and then launch another surprise attack.” Though he often rails against censorship, he cheered on the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman’s demand that Harvard do more to crack down on antisemitism, writing, “It’s time to hold college administrations responsible for the epidemic of campus antisemitism by insisting on zero-tolerance policies.”
Kucinich left the campaign in mid-October in ambiguous circumstances, though he’s hinted that disagreements with Kennedy about Gaza had something to do with his departure. (The campaign is now run by Kennedy’s daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a former C.I.A. officer.) In November, Sayer Ji, an alternative medicine promoter and key anti-vaccine influencer, withdrew his endorsement of Kennedy over Gaza. Charles Eisenstein, a major intellectual figure in New Age circles, is still advising Kennedy but has been openly critical of his stance on Israel.
While there are still some progressive figures in Kennedy’s orbit, his campaign has an increasingly right-wing vibe. Border security has become a central part of his pitch. Since January, his communications director has been Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaccine activist who doubts that climate change is caused by human activity and who spoke at the MAGA Freedom Rally near the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I wish I could tell you that this pandemic really is dangerous,” Bigtree said then. “I wish I could believe that voting machines work and that people care. You’ve been sold a lie!”
The conservative talk radio host Randy Economy, one of the leaders of the campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, is Kennedy’s senior adviser for ballot access. An opening speaker at the Oakland event was Angela Stanton-King, a Black conservative QAnon promoter who served time for her role in a car-theft ring and was pardoned by Donald Trump.
An attendee at a Kennedy event carried a book of L. Ron Hubbard essays.Yvette Corkrean, the Republican nominee for a California Senate seat, attended the Oakland event.
Some strains of New Age wellness culture — with its distrust of mainstream expertise, moralistic view of health and weakness for quackery — have long intersected with right-wing politics. (Alex Jones, after all, made much of his fortune shilling health supplements.) The connection between alternative medicine and conservatism grew significantly stronger during the pandemic, as the center of gravity in the anti-vaccine movement moved rightward and longtime right-wingers grew increasingly mistrustful of Big Pharma and, with it, Big Food.
“The globalists want you to be fat, sick, depressed and isolated — the better to control you and to milk you for as much economic value as they can before they kill you,” a pseudonymous far-right figure who goes by Raw Egg Nationalist said on the 2022 Tucker Carlson special “The End of Men.”
Kennedy’s conservationism can sound a lot like that of Raw Egg Nationalist. His commitment to the environment is tempered by paranoia about federal government power that makes him suspicious of regulation. Climate change “is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls, the same way the Covid crisis was, and it’s the same people,” he said in a campaign video featuring Jordan Peterson, the anti-woke psychologist and author. Dismissing the efficacy of a “war on carbon,” Kennedy said he’d approach energy issues using “free markets and not top-down control.”
Because of his hostility to the state, Kennedy’s environmentalism often manifests as a belief in the redemptive power of healthy living and closeness to nature, which Shanahan shares. This ethos helps explain Shanahan’s much-publicized criticism of I.V.F. “I believe I.V.F. is sold irresponsibly, and my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed,” she wrote in People. She’s interested in low-cost, organic alternatives. “I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health,” she said on a panel last year. “I would love to fund something like that.” Hearing this, I couldn’t help thinking of Carlson’s promotion, on his “End of Men” special, of testicle tanning to raise testosterone levels.
Of course, even though the Kennedy camp has a lot in common with the esoteric new right, Kennedy could still siphon Democratic votes from Biden. A lot of undecided voters don’t follow politics closely, and some who are unhappy about their major-party choices may find themselves drawn to Kennedy’s mythic last name and green-seeming, anti-establishment pitch.
“Anything that splits up the anti-Trump coalition hurts Biden,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump conservative pollster who regularly asks about Kennedy in focus groups. As she sees it, the largest group of persuadable voters in 2024 are the so-called double haters, those who disapprove of both Trump and Biden. “My experience over the years in the focus groups is that when Trump is top of mind for people, people who dislike both him and Biden end up disliking Trump more,” said Longwell. Kennedy, she fears, could give people who might otherwise reluctantly vote for Biden an off-ramp from making a dispiriting decision.
No one knows how the race will ultimately shake out.
Some polls back up this analysis. A recent Quinnipiac survey shows Kennedy getting 13 percent of the vote; he has support from 9 percent of Democrats, 8 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of independents. The poll shows Biden leading Trump by three points in a head-to-head matchup but Trump ahead by one point when third-party candidates are included. Though both numbers are within the poll’s margin of error, they suggest that Trump could benefit if the election isn’t seen as a binary choice.
Other polls, however, show Kennedy pulling more voters from Trump, and the truth is no one knows how the election will ultimately shake out. “The public polling, if you dig into it, can be really head-swiveling,” said Smith. “It’s very hard to gauge the impact, but it does seem like he pulls from both, and right now — emphasis on ‘right now’ — slightly more from Biden.”
Kennedy certainly has no qualms about spoiling the election for Trump. On CNN on Monday, he argued that Biden poses a “much worse” threat to democracy than Trump because of the Biden administration’s attempts to get social media companies to remove vaccine misinformation, much of it spread by Kennedy.
“President Biden is the first candidate in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent,” he said. The primary threat to democracy, he added, “is not somebody who questions election returns,” noting that he believed the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry. “So I don’t think people who say that the election is stolen — we shouldn’t make pariahs of those people,” he said.
This interview was clarifying about Kennedy’s intentions. But precisely because he evidently views Trump, not Biden, as the lesser of two evils, he may prove most attractive to voters who also view the election that way. That, however, would depend on people grasping what he stands for. So it might not be a disaster for Democrats if Shanahan can help Kennedy be more widely heard.
“If anyone is listening who never considered an independent ticket, I want to extend the same invitation to you that my friend did to me last year,” said Shanahan in her Oakland speech. “Please, listen to Bobby Kennedy in his own words.” It’s sage advice.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
Just three weapons will turn the Ukraine war back around. And the USA is back in the fight
David Axe – March 27, 2024
A Ukrainian artillery piece fires on Russian positions. Artillery, and supplies of artillery shells, have been crucial factors in the Ukrainian fighting – Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty
Six months after blocking US president Joe Biden’s proposal to spend another $61 billion on aid to Ukraine, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson – who alone can schedule votes in the narrowly Republican-controlled legislative body – seems to have reversed his opposition to Ukraine’s war effort.
With retirements and special elections having reduced his majority to just two votes out of 438, and with a small contingent of far-right Republican extremists refusing to vote on any bill that has bipartisan support, Johnson increasingly relies on Democrats to enact budgets and other legislation.
And that means he answers more to the Democratic agenda than the Republican one. And strong support for Ukraine is a Democratic priority. The US House is on vacation until the first week of April. But once it reconvenes, Johnson will call a vote on fresh aid to Ukraine, according to some of his House colleagues.
With tens of billions of dollars in fresh funding, the US Defence Department could send a lot of weapons to Ukraine – and soon. Some could come straight from existing US stocks, with the new funding paying for newly-built weapons to replenish these stocks. Others could come from new commercial contracts brokered by the Pentagon.
It’s obvious what the priorities should be.
First and foremost, Ukraine needs artillery shells. For the first 18 months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the United States was the main supplier of artillery ammo to Ukrainian batteries. In total, the Americans donated around two million shells. Half came straight from American magazine stockpiles. The other half, America quietly bought from South Korea.
These shells, along with additional ammo from other sources, kept Ukrainian guns blasting away at a rate of around 10,000 rounds a day for much of the war’s first year and a half. That was enough to match Russian batteries once the Russians burned through much of their ammo stockpile in the wider war’s first few weeks.
The Republican funding blockade, and the subsequent run down of US supplied munitions through the end of last year, cut by two-thirds the Ukrainians’ daily allotment of shells. In some of the darkest days of the war in February, as a pair of Russian field armies closed in on the Ukrainian stronghold in the eastern city of Avdiivka, Russian guns were firing five times as many rounds as Ukrainian guns were – and demolishing Ukrainian defence s without fear of return fire.
The US Army has been building a new shell factory in Texas to complement its existing factory in Pennsylvania. Soon, the Army should be capable of producing around 70,000 shells a month – a sixfold increase over its 2022 production rate.
There’s no reason most of the shells can’t go to Ukraine, once there’s funding to pay for each $5,000 round. Combined with shells from the European Union as well as a separate Czech initiative, urgent shipments of shells from the United States could give Ukraine an enduring artillery advantage for the first time in the wider war.
Once the shells are shipping, the Americans can address Ukraine’s second-greatest need: Patriot air-defence batteries and missiles for these batteries. The US-made Patriot is Ukraine’s best air-defence system. Its 90-mile-range missiles can reliably shoot down all but the fastest Russian missiles – and swat down Russian warplanes like flies.
When the Ukrainian air force shot down 13 Russian fighter-bombers in 13 days last month, it was apparently a mobile Patriot battery that did most of the shooting.
But Ukraine has just three Patriot batteries with around three dozen launchers – and lost a pair of those launchers in a devastating rocket ambush in early March. The batteries are spread thin. One normally protects Kyiv. Another protects Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic port on the Black Sea. The third battery apparently travels the front line in order to engage Russian jets.
Ideally, Ukraine would place a $1-billion Patriot battery in each of its half-dozen biggest cities and also assign one each to the eastern and southern fronts. And these batteries should be free to fire away at their fastest rate – meaning they’ll need a steady supply of missiles, each of which costs around $3 million.
Doubling or tripling Ukraine’s Patriot force could help the Ukrainians wrest back control of the air over the front line – and also reverse the disturbing trend toward bigger and bloodier Russian missile-strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Having replenished Ukraine’s artillery and air-defences, the United States should rescue one of the Ukrainian army’s best brigades. The 47th Mechanized Brigade is the main operator of American-made armoured vehicles, including M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles.
The 69-ton M-1 and 42-ton M-2 – thickly armoured and armed with a 120-millimetre cannon and a 25-millimetre autocannon, respectively – are some of the best armoured vehicles in the world, and the 47th Brigade has put them to good use. Counterattacking Russian assault groups west of Avdiivka, the M-1 and M-2s have blunted Russia’s winter offensive – and minimized Ukraine’s territorial losses as its artillery supplies bottomed out.
But the Americans shipped just 31 M-1s and around 200 M-2s before Republicans cut off aid. Four of the M-1s and more than 30 of the M-2s have been destroyed and others damaged. The 47th Brigade is running out of vehicles.
The US Army has thousands of older M-1s and M-2s in storage. They’d need overhaul before going to war in Ukraine, but a billion dollars should be enough to pay for the work as well as expedited shipping.
Once Speaker of the House Johnson bends to Americans’ overwhelming support for a free Ukraine and finally brings aid to a vote, the Pentagon could speed hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles to the Ukrainian army.
It is an overcast, unseasonably warm morning on Wednesday, Nov. 6, and the world has woken up in shock as Donald Trump has emerged as the winner of the U.S. presidential election. America’s cities are once again full of mute, stunned liberals avoiding eye contact with one another on the morning commute, as the grim reality of what Trump might do with this power begins to set in. At his victory speech just after 2 a.m., when the networks called Wisconsin, and thus the election for him, Trump took the stage and declared, “Judgment Day is coming for America’s enemies, and no Marxist, Harvard leftist, gender-radical, illegal, or criminal thug in our great country will be safe come January.” And in some ways that bleak morning might represent the high point of the next four—or 40—years, given what Trump and his allies have in store for us.
This is a worst-case scenario. But it’s far from impossible. A Trump restoration is in the works—and it should feel like an existential threat to everyone who cares about liberal democracy and the incomplete but tangible social, racial, and economic progress that has been made since the New Deal era.
And yet, President Joe Biden’s manifest flaws are dangerously obscuring the scale of the threat of a second Trump term. There is no sense in denying it: Biden looks and sounds very old, and his speaking style, never particularly inspirational, has deteriorated to the point that he is a clear political liability. While he brought what passes for his A-game to the State of the Union, he will need to sustain that level of energy and coherence through an eight-month-long slog to the election to improve his chances of winning.
His decision to run for a second term has not only jeopardized his many achievements but put the very existence of U.S. democracy at much more serious risk. His administration’s staunch support of Israel, a defensible posture in the aftermath of the unconscionable Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, has become a genuinely baffling study in Biden’s inability to pivot or use America’s considerable leverage to do the right thing. The White House hasn’t settled on a winning strategy to address the lingering consequences of post-pandemic inflation, preferring to boast about the very real low unemployment numbers and robust GDP growth that simply have not moved the needle politically. And the Biden administration has remained curiously inert in the face of growing public frustration with the migrant crisis, preferring to blame Congress for refusing to fix it.
Nevertheless, allowing Donald Trump and his friends to plunge our country into a dystopian nightmare of authoritarianism will not help anyone in Gaza, in the grocery store, or at the border. It will worsen, not rectify, America’s history of writing blank checks to far-right governments in Israel. It will not lead to humane policy options for asylum-seekers but instead deliver them into the hands of morally bankrupt demagogues. Electing Trump would merely add more considerable suffering and trauma to theirs, and deprive us all of the ability to do anything about it.
Much has been made of the far-right Project 2025—a blueprint for radically restructuring and reorienting executive-branch policymaking, created by a network of right-wing think tanks and pressure groups—and its terrifying implications for U.S. democracy. But that document concerns only the threats Trump’s reelection poses to executive-branch agencies (and contains many unresolvable contradictions between dismantling and wielding the “administrative state”). Myriad public dangers emanating from the Trump and GOP legislative agenda, as well as the possibility of an even harder-right Supreme Court, are getting far less attention. That needs to change.
Let’s start with the court. That Sonia Sotomayor, who will turn 70 this year, is still sitting on the Supreme Court means that Democrats have yet to grasp how strategic retirements work in the new hyperpartisan political order. Unlike Democrats, who still seem to view a Supreme Court seat as a personal sinecure bestowed upon the righteous for a lifetime of achievement, the leaders of the far-right judicial movement understand the stakes and will place enormous pressure on the oldest Republican appointees to retire under a second Trump term. Clarence Thomas, who has been on the court since 1991, turns 76 this year, and Samuel Alito turns 74. Even John Roberts, who would turn 70 just after Trump’s inauguration, might go.
Think about it this way: If Republicans replace this trio with three early-middle-age ideologues like Amy Coney Barrett, the court will be in the GOP’s hands until everyone reading this article is dead or nearing retirement. If Trump gets to replace Sotomayor, who suffers from a health problem (Type 1 diabetes) that significantly reduces life expectancy, the far right would have an unassailable 7–2 majority with which to remake American society for a generation.
Very little that liberals or progressives care about is likely to survive another 20 or 30 years of reactionary control of the Supreme Court. Although much of the focus has justifiably been on Dobbs, and the looming threat to Obergefell, birth control, and IVF, a conservative supermajority would also likely gut a century of jurisprudence around taken-for-granted features of the American political and economic order, including bargaining rights for organized labor, the constitutionality of federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, and—it nearly goes without saying—the Affordable Care Act. We will effectively return to the early 20th century’s Lochner era, when the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down worker protections and rights for more than 30 years until FDR threatened it with court packing.
Sure, “Vote for Biden so the conservative supermajority can’t get younger and larger” is tough to fit on a bumper sticker, and no one in the party from Biden on down seems to have the stomach for the necessary escalation or a political vision for the court that can be communicated to voters. But unless you want to spend the rest of your lives watching Brett Kavanaugh and his friends upend your lives one right and benefit at a time, you have to hold the line here.
SCOTUS is, of course, also right now at the very center of Trump’s threat to American democracy. The court’s galling decision to repeatedly delay Trump’s trial for the 2020 post-election coup attempt and the Jan. 6 insurrection means that he probably won’t face justice until after he could conceivably win reelection. Most concerningly, this off-the-rails Supreme Court has bafflingly decided to take up the question of a president’s absolute immunity after Trump’s team argued that he should be free from any consequences of anything he did as president. Though cooler heads may in the end prevail over the Thomas-Alito wing, the fact that this is up for debate at all is incredibly alarming.
Much has been made of reports that Trump plans to deploy the military to quell post-election protests under the Insurrection Act. But a Trump unchained from any conceivable repercussions for his decisions in his office is a far worse threat than just that. Imagine for a moment what would happen if the Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favor: First of all, the effort to hold him accountable for trying to overthrow the American system of government would be over—instantly. Even more problematically, what conceivable limits would there be on a President Trump beginning in 2025 if SCOTUS has just ruled that his efforts to perpetrate a coup in broad daylight were well within the ambit of his presidential authority?
Who or what exactly would stop Trump from, say, creating a new security apparatus, abducting leftists and political enemies—as he has pledged—and dropping them out of helicopters over the Pacific like the Latin American dictators the far right still worshipsonce did? He could order the hits, then preemptively pardon the people who carry out his orders. That might seem melodramatic and far-fetched. But if the Supreme Court grants him immunity as president, no one could touch him for it legally. And if Republicans simultaneously controlled both chambers of Congress, there would be no impeachment option either. We’ve learned the hard way, far too many times, that a critical mass of elected Republicans will do Trump’s bidding no matter how grotesque his actions.
Maybe he’ll stop short of creating an American Stasi. But a president who is unbound by the law could order the DOJ to gin up investigations of leading journalists, prominent Democrats, professors, activists, and nonprofit leaders. Independent media outlets could be “acquired” by allies or buried under lawsuits and government harassment, as they have been in Trump’s favorite quasi-authoritarian regime in Hungary. Troops could be deployed to garrison blue cities, to not only find and deport immigrants but also chill and repress any dissident fervor that develops in the aftermath of his takeover. He would say he’s merely fighting crime, “illegals,” and election fraud, but Trump could conceivably place the cities he fears and despises, where his political adversaries wield most of their power and influence, under what amounts to an open-ended military occupation.
It gets worse. If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, he is highly likely to do so while bringing Republican control of the House and Senate with him. With Mitch McConnell out of the way as party leader, there is a very good chance that the new GOP Senate leadership will nuke the filibuster and govern with a simple majority. And that means that the toxic, vengeful politics of Texas and Florida will go national. Trump showed time and again during his first term that he was not just willing but eager to subcontract his domestic policymaking to the right-wing think tanks that write most state-level legislation for Republicans. National Republicans no longer pretend to have a written or informal platform, but Trump has a campaign website with policy plans called “Agenda 47” that can be read alongside Project 2025, as well as the actual policy record of state Republicans, to give us a pretty clear sense of what they have planned.
Trump continues to spin and deflect, but under unified Republican control, Congress could obviously try to pass a national abortion ban, and he would sign it. House Republicans are already gunning for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care, and electing a Republican trifecta this November will mean that, practically speaking, it could soon be either illegal or impossible to be transgender in the United States. The proof is in the hundreds of red-state anti-trans bills introduced and the dozens passed just since 2023, including Florida’s ban on gender reassignment surgery for minors, which also gives the state the right to kidnap children from parents who pursue gender-affirming care. Agenda 47 claims that the Trump administration will “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side-effects of ‘sex transitions’ in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.” As Masha Gessen once said, “Believe the autocrat.”
The enemies list doesn’t stop there. Trump’s promised militarized mass-deportation effort could be just the beginning of the crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration; we could also see an effort to end birthright citizenship, a move that, if it succeeds, would result in millions being suddenly stripped of their status as Americans. You will find this not in Project 2025 but in Trump’s online platform and the ugly words that frequently spill out of his mouth, like in May 2023, when he posted a video in which he argued, “I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.” Whether you believe the “going forward” part of that promise is up to you.
And get ready for a flurry of moves against the remaining redoubts of liberalism and democracy, particularly in secondary and higher education. Radicalized Republicans in Congress will try to bar federal loans and grants from being used at any universities with policies that support inclusion and diversity. This is not speculation: Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced a bill in the House last year to prevent public funds from being used at schools with DEI policies, based on existing Texas legislation.
They won’t stop there. Republicans would eventually try to block funding for schools with any kind of race or gender studies programs, as the state of Florida tried to do last year, and before long every syllabus in the country could be scrutinized for evidence of anti-patriotic crimes, until anyone who isn’t a right-wing ideologue is driven from the academy altogether. Trump’s Agenda 47 promises to establish a new national “American Academy” by “by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments”—i.e., strip-mining them for cash. A Trump administration, in other words, would effectively end American higher education as we know it.
That’s to say nothing of how, under GOP rule, every public school librarian and schoolteacher in America could suddenly find themselves under siege by cranks and culture warriors like their counterparts today in Texas and Florida. Agenda 47 threatens to create a new “credentialing body” that would “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,” to eliminate teacher tenure, and to rescind funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” And like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Trump would surely relish the opportunity to sign legislation banning public school teachers from going on strike.
This radical agenda would surely be accompanied by an assault on Democrats’ ability to ever win another free and fair election. Congress would pursue a national voter ID law, a ban on ballot harvesting, harsh new restrictions on mail-in balloting, the elimination of same-day voter registration, and new ways to purge Democrats from voter lists—all plans that are already in the “American Confidence in Elections Act,” which has been introduced in the House. What’s left of the Voting Rights Act would be set aside or perhaps repealed. Maniacs exercising their “constitutional carry” rights would patrol outside polling stations across the country with AR-15s, and Democratic voters would be subjected to endless legal challenges. Any Democratic effort to retake a chamber of Congress in 2026 or win the presidency in 2028 would have to run through President Trump’s formidable election conspiracy machine, the army of aspiring petty autocrats who will be put in charge of the nation’s election machinery, and the elected leaders who will come under enormous pressure not to turn power over to Democrats should those Democrats win.
At that point, the vaunted separation of powers that some analysts still cling to as our last great hope won’t be of much help. With as many as seven Trump judges on the Supreme Court and a federal judiciary that will once again be stocked with his allies and true believers, even many of the brazenly unconstitutional orders and laws that are in the works will have a good chance of standing up in court. And all the while, demoralized Democrats will be pointing fingers at one another for their catastrophic loss, which—knowing Dems—could easily be pinned on Biden’s more progressive policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, whose historic climate provisions would also be reversed almost immediately. Efforts to highlight the contributions of his age and Gaza policies to this disaster would run straight into the same narrative-makers who pinned the disappointing scale of Democrats’ 2020 victory on progressive activists chanting “Defund the Police” rather than on Biden’s overcautious campaign and reliance on appealing to disenchanted Republicans.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the America that a second Trump term would create might be an almost unrecognizable realm of economic insecurity, political persecution, racist hatred, and gender tyranny, a Christian nationalist hellscape that would be virtually impossible to dismantle once it is put into place.
Joe Biden may not be the ideal man standing between us and this horror show, but he is a seasoned politician with a strong track record and a plenty competent team. (Plus, he’s all there is unless he decides to step aside.) He and every Democrat in the White House and Congress must do everything they can to shift the focus from Biden’s age and unpopularity to Trump’s very public laundry list of malevolent plans, and national media organizations must continue to do the relatively easy work of telling readers and viewers about Trump’s reactionary agenda. Readers may be completely burned out on learning about Trump’s crimes, but the alternative—that Trump gets into office and perpetrates more of them—is truly unthinkable.
Ukraine ramps up spending on homemade weapons to help repel Russia
Hanna Arhirova – March 25, 2024
A worker assembles mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A mortar shell on a lathe at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers check 82mm mortars at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers weld reinforced steel for artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)An engineer installs components in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)An engineer assembles parts on a combat drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Monday, February 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A worker stores mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers moving by crane an armored artillery vehicle hood at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Armored vehicles are worked on at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)An engineer assembles an antenna for guiding an exploding drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Saturday, February 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A sea drone cruises on the water during a presentation by Ukraine’s Security Service in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)Engineers install components on exploding drones in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Exploding drones are ready to be shipped to the battlefield in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A worker walks past artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Engineers install antennas on a land drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers weld reinforced steel for armored vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine needs any edge it can get to repel Russia from its territory. One emerging bright spot is its small but fast-growing defense industry, which the government is flooding with money in hopes that a surge of homemade weapons and ammunition can help turn the tide.
The Ukrainian government budgeted nearly $1.4 billion in 2024 to buy and develop weapons at home — 20 times more than before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
And in another major shift, a huge portion of weapons are now being bought from privately owned factories. They are sprouting up across the country and rapidly taking over an industry that had been dominated by state-owned companies.
A privately owned mortar factory that launched in western Ukraine last year is making roughly 20,000 shells a month. “I feel that we are bringing our country closer to victory,” said Anatolli Kuzmin, the factory’s 64-year-old owner, who used to make farm equipment and fled his home in southern Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022.
Yet like many aspects of Ukraine’s war apparatus, its defense sector has been constrained by a lack of money and manpower – and, according to executives and generals, too much government red tape. A more robust private sector could help root out inefficiencies and enable factories to churn out weapons and ammunition even faster.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Russia controls nearly a quarter of Ukraine and has gained momentum along the 1,000 kilometer (620 mile) front line by showing a willingness to expend large numbers of troops to make even the smallest of advances. Ukrainian troops regularly find themselves outmanned and outgunned, and this has contributed to falling morale.
“You need a mortar not in three years, you need it now, preferably yesterday,” said Taras Chmut, director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, an organization that has raised more than $260 million over the past decade to equip Ukrainian troops with machine guns, armored vehicles and more.
WARTIME ENTREPRENEURS
Kuzmin, the owner of the mortar factory, fled the southern city of Melitopol in 2022 after Russia invaded and seized his factory that mostly made spare parts for farm equipment. He had begun developing a prototype for mortar shells shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, when it illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula.
Kuzmin took over a sprawling warehouse in western Ukraine last winter. His long-term goals include boosting production to 100,000 shells per month and developing engines and explosives for drones.
He is just one of many entrepreneurs transforming Ukraine’s weapons industry, which was dominated by state-owned enterprises after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Today, about 80 percent of the defense industry is in private hands — a mirror image of where things stood a year ago and a stark contrast with Russia’s state-controlled defense industry.
Each newly made projectile is wrapped in craft paper and carefully packed into wooden crates to be shipped to Romania or Bulgaria, where are loaded with explosives. Several weeks later, they’re shipped back and sent to the front.
“Our dream is to establish a plant for explosives,” said Kuzmin, who is seeking a partner to make that happen.
OBSTACLES TO GROWTH
Ukraine’s surge in military spending has occurred against a backdrop of $60 billion in U.S. aid being held up by Congress and with European countries struggling to deliver enough ammunition.
As impressive as Ukraine’s defense sector transformation has been, the country stands no chance of defeating Russia without massive support from the West, said Trevor Taylor, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
“Ukraine is not capable of producing all the munitions that it needs for this fight,” Taylor said. “The hold up of $60 billion of American help is really proving to be a significant hindrance.”
Russia is also pumping more money into its defense industry, whose growth has helped buffer its economy from the full brunt of Western sanctions. The country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, recently boasted of huge increases in the manufacture of tanks, drones and ammunition.
“The entire country has risen and is working for our victory,” he said.
Compared with last year, Ukraine’s output of mortar shells is about 40 times higher and its production of ammunition for artillery has nearly tripled, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries. There has also been a boom in drone startups, with the government committing roughly $1 billion on the technology — on top of its defense budget.
“We now produce in a month what we used to produce in a year,” said Vladislav Belbas, the director general of Ukrainian Armor, which makes a wide array of military vehicles.
For the Ukrainian army’s 28th brigade, which is fighting near Bakhmut, delays in foreign weapon supplies haven’t yet posed any problems for troops “because we are able to cover our need from our own domestic production,” said Major Artem Kholodkevych.
Still, domestic weapons factories face a range of challenges — from keeping up with changing needs of battlefield commanders, to their own vulnerability to long-range Russian missile strikes.
But perhaps the greatest immediate hindrance is a lack of manpower.
Yaroslav Dzera, who manages one of Ukrainian Armor’s factories, said he struggles to recruit and keep qualified workers, not least because many of them have been mobilized to fight.
CUTTING THROUGH RED TAPE
Weapons companies say another roadblock to growth is bureaucracy.
The government has tried to become more efficient since the war began, including by making its process for awarding contracts more transparent. But officials say the country has a long way to go.
Shortly before he was replaced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s former top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, highlighted the problem in an essay he wrote for CNN, saying Ukraine’s defense sector remained “hamstrung” by too many regulations and a lack of competition.
In spite of the challenges, one success story has been Ukraine’s drone industry. Ukrainian-made sea drones have proven to be an effective weapon against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.
There are around 200 companies in Ukraine now focused on drones and output has soared — with 50 times more deliveries in December compared with a year earlier, according to Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a standoff over whose got better drones or missiles, said Serhii Pashynskyi, head of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries trade group.
“We have a war of only two resources with Russia — manpower and money,” he said. “And if we learn to use these two basic resources, we will win. If not, we will have big problems.”
___
Associated Press reporter Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report.
Poland demands explanation from Russia after a missile enters its airspace during attack on Ukraine
Vanessa Gera and Tony Hicks – March 24, 2024
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Poland demanded an explanation from Russia on Sunday after one of its missiles strayed briefly into Polish airspace during a major missile attack on Ukraine, prompting the NATO member to activate F-16 fighter jets.
It was Russia’s third big missile attack on Ukraine in the past four days, and the second to target the capital, Kyiv.
The governor of the Lviv region, Maksym Kozytskyi, said on the Telegram platform that critical infrastructure was hit, but he didn’t specify what precisely was struck. No deaths or injuries were reported.
Later, authorities said that rescuers had just put out a fire at a critical infrastructure facility in the Lviv region, which had been attacked with missiles and drones at night and in the morning.
The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Serhiy Popko, said Russia used cruise missiles launched from Tu-95MS strategic bombers. An air alert in the capital lasted for more than two hours as rockets entered Kyiv in groups from the north.
He said the attacks were launched from the Engels district in the Saratov region of Russia.
According to preliminary data, there were no casualties or damage in the capital, he said.
Armed Forces Operational Command of Poland, a member of NATO, said in a statement that there was a violation of Polish airspace at 4:23 a.m. (0323 GMT) by one of the cruise missiles launched by Russia against towns in western Ukraine.
The object entered near Oserdow, a village in an agricultural region near the border with Ukraine, and stayed in Polish airspace for 39 seconds, the statement said. It wasn’t immediately clear if Russia intended for the missile to enter Poland’s airspace. Cruise missiles are able to change their trajectory to evade air defense systems.
Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz later told reporters in a televised news conference that the Russian missile would have been shot down had there been any indication that it was heading towards a target in Poland.
He said that Polish authorities monitored the attack on Ukraine and were in contact with Ukrainian counterparts. Polish and NATO F-16s were activated as part of the strategic response.
He said the missile penetrated Polish airspace about a kilometer or two (a half-mile to around a mile) as Russia was targeting the region around Lviv in western Ukraine.
“As last night’s rocket attack on Ukraine was one of the most intense since the beginning of the Russian aggression, all the strategic procedures were launched on time and the object was monitored until it left the Polish airspace,” he said.
On the diplomatic front, the Polish foreign ministry said that it would “demand explanations from the Russian Federation in connection with another violation of the country’s airspace.”
“Above all, we call on the Russian Federation to stop the terrorist air attacks on the inhabitants and territory of Ukraine, end the war, and address the country’s internal problems,” the statement read.
Andrzej Szejna, a deputy foreign minister, told the TVN24 broadcaster that the foreign ministry intended to summon the Russian ambassador to Poland and hand him a protest note.
Henryk Zdyb, the head of the village of Oserdow, said in an interview with the daily Gazeta Wyborcza that he saw the missile, saying it produced a whistling sound.
“I saw a rapidly moving object in the sky. It was illuminated and flying quite low over the border with Ukraine,” he told the paper.
Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, there have been a number of intrusions into Polish airspace, triggering worry in the European Union and NATO member state and reminding people of how close the war is.
“We have to come to terms with the fact that the war is taking place right next to us, and we are part of the confrontation between the West and Russia,” commentator Artur Bartkiewicz wrote in the Rzeczpospolita newspaper Sunday.
In 2022, two Poles were killed in a missile blast. Western officials blamed those deaths on a Ukrainian air defense missile that went astray, but also accused Russia of culpability because it started the war, with the Ukrainian missiles launched in self-defense.
On Saturday night, one person was killed and four others were wounded in a Ukrainian missile attack on Sevastopol on the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula, city Gov. Mikhail Razvozhaev said on his Telegram channel.
Lisa Murkowski, done with Donald Trump, won’t rule out leaving GOP
Manu Raju, CNN – March 24, 2024
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, aghast at Donald Trump’s candidacy and the direction of her party, won’t rule out bolting from the GOP.
The veteran Alaska Republican, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial amid the aftermath of January 6, 2021, is done with the former president and said she “absolutely” would not vote for him.
“I wish that as Republicans, we had … a nominee that I could get behind,” Murkowski told CNN. “I certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”
The party’s shift toward Trump has caused Murkowski to consider her future within the GOP. In the interview, she would not say if she would remain a Republican.
Asked if she would become an independent, Murkowski said: “Oh, I think I’m very independent minded.” And she added: “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
Pressed on if that meant she might become an independent, Murkowski said: “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Murkowski hasn’t always been on the outs within her party. Appointed in 2002 by her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski, the senator’s politics were in line with the president at the time – George W. Bush – as she maintained a tight relationship with the senior GOP senator from her state, Ted Stevens, who helped build Alaska through federal dollars he funneled back home.
She later found herself at odds with Sen. John McCain’s running mate, the then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who had been sharply critical of her father. As the tea party rose in 2010, Murkowski was at sharp odds with the insurgent right-wing of her party. She lost a primary in 2010 to Republican Joe Miller, only to later hold on to her seat after she became the second candidate ever to win a write-in campaign for Senate in the general election.
Murkowski skated to reelection in her next two elections, even after voting to convict Trump in 2021, voting against Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court in 2018 and supporting Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022. She had been targeted by Trump and his allies in 2022 but was backed by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and his high-spending outside group.
In the 2024 cycle, Murkowski – along with Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine – offered a late endorsement of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, just days before she dropped out of the race.
Now, Murkowski is clear she’s ready to move past Trump. Asked about Trump’s recent comments that Jewish people who vote for Democrats must “hate” their religion, Murkowski said it was an “incredibly wrong and an awful statement.”
And Murkowski pushed back when asked last week about Trump’s other controversial rhetoric, namely that he views January 6 prisoners as “hostages” and “patriots” who should be pardoned.
“I don’t think that it can be defended,” Murkowski said. “What happened on January 6 was … an effort by people who stormed the building in an effort to stop an election certification of an election. It can’t be defended.”
