Joe Biden

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Amy Klobuchar to Democrats: don’t rule out female candidate in 2028 after Harris loss

      by

      US senator Amy Klobuchar says she hopes her party does not reflexively rule out running a woman for the White House after Kamala Harris – her fellow Democrat – lost to her Republican rival Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, arguing it’s not the “lesson to learn”.Responding to a question Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about whether Harris’s defeat might dissuade Democrats from nominating a female presidential candidate, Klobuchar said: “You have seen women run other countries quite well” before singling out the former German chancellor Angela Merkel as an example.Klobuchar added, “You’ve also seen women in the US [be] incredible mayors, incredible governors,” while further noting that fellow Democrats Tammy Baldwin, Elissa Slotkin and Jacky Rosen defeated Republican men in Senate races held in battleground states that Trump carried in the fall.“I mean – this happened,” Klobuchar, of Minnesota, said to Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker. “So I just – I don’t think that’s a lesson to learn.”Klobuchar’s remarks served to rebut comments that Joe Biden recently delivered to the ABC program The View about his vice-president’s electoral loss to Trump. In a clip Meet the Press aired Sunday, Biden said Harris was “qualified” to succeed him as president. But the president told The View that, as disappointed as he was, he wasn’t surprised Harris’s run for the Oval Office came up short after her critics went “the sexist route, of the whole, ‘This is a woman, she’s this, she’s that.’”Welker asked Klobuchar whether Democrats may have had a better chance of retaining the presidency if Biden, who defeated an incumbent Trump in 2020, had not waited until June to announce that he was abandoning his campaign for a second term.Klobuchar said her party “would have been served better by a primary” election that was different than the one which saw Biden easily beat a few longshot Democratic challengers. Biden subsequently avoided a rematch with Trump by dropping out in the wake of a disastrous debate performance that exacerbated questions about his mental acuity and then endorsing Harris for president instead.Trump then captured every battleground state in November to decisively win the electoral college at Harris’s expense. He also narrowly clinched the popular vote – though he didn’t quite manage to secure 50% of the ballots cast in the race. It was the second time Trump outran a woman for the presidency, having defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in 2016.He summarily went on to spend the beginning of his second presidency implementing brutal cuts to the federal government, waging economically destabilizing trade wars and deporting or detaining a significant number of immigrants, sometimes defying court orders to do so, among other moves.“We are where we are,” Klobuchar said, before maintaining that she and her colleagues had “to deal with helping the American people” as Trump’s policies throttled the country ever closer to a constitutional crisis rather than “looking backwards”.Welker asked Klobuchar – a senator since 2007 – whether she would run for president as she did in the 2020 Democratic primary won by Biden on his way to victory against Trump. Klobuchar did not rule out joining what is widely expected to be a crowded field of contenders but said, “I’m focused on my job right now.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump says Biden caused the economic downturn. That’s malarkey | Steven Greenhouse

      by

      While Donald Trump delusionally asserts that “we’re celebrating the most successful first 100 days of any administration in American history”, last week’s economic news emphatically refutes that. Trump’s commerce department reported on Wednesday that the US economy – in a sharp and dismaying reversal – shrank in the first quarter of this year.That of course is when Trump returned to the White House, but Trump, true to form, denied that he was in any way responsible for the surprisingly bad economic news. Trump, who has spent his life blaming others and refusing to admit mistakes, was quick to blame Joe Biden for the downturn. The nation’s gross domestic product declined at a 0.3% annual rate in the quarter, after adjusting for inflation.At Wednesday’s cabinet meeting – where cabinet secretaries sounded like North Korean officials obsequiously extolling Kim Jong-un – Trump noted the bad first-quarter report and said: “This is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden.” Later in the day in a speech to corporate executives, Trump continued to try to dodge responsibility, saying: “This is Biden’s economy.”Even the very careful New York Times said that Trump was full of it. The Times wrote that Trump “blamed his predecessor for handing him a bad economy, despite data showing that growth was strong when he took office”.When Biden left office, many economists had glowing words about the economy. “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than pre-pandemic.”With regard to the bad first-quarter GDP report, economists overwhelmingly agree that there was one overriding cause, and that cause was not Joe Biden. Rather, it was the huge uncertainty and fears stirred by the prospect of Trump’s tariffs. Eager to stock up on foreign goods before Trump imposed his wave of tariffs, US businesses rushed to increase their imports, and according to the formula used to calculate GDP, soaring imports have a downward effect on economic growth.Like the boy who would never admit he broke the cookie jar, Trump refused to admit that his tariffs had anything to do with the first-quarter downturn. For Trump, truth is a distant galaxy. It’s a foreign enemy that he is forever trying to repel. He stubbornly refuses to admit that the economy was in strong shape when he took office, just as he shamelessly refuses to admit that “MS-13” was Photoshopped on to the knuckles of Kilmar Ábrego García, an immigrant who was wrongly deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Far too often, Trump seems allergic to the truth. During an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News, he brazenly insisted that Moran accept Trump’s falsehood about Ábrego García, telling him: “Why don’t you just say: ‘Yes, he does’” have MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles.It’s as delusional for Trump to claim that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe”, as he did in a speech to a joint session of Congress in March, as it is for him to insist that Ábrego García’s knuckles say “MS-13”.When Biden left office, no economists were forecasting a recession anytime soon – that’s why Wednesday’s report that the economy shrank in the first quarter was such a surprising reversal. During last year’s fourth quarter, Biden’s last full quarter in office, the nation’s GDP grew at a solid 2.4% rate. Indeed, ever since the Covid-19 pandemic ended, economic growth in the US was considerably stronger than in Britain, Germany, France, Japan and other G7 nations. Several weeks before election day, the Economist magazine ran headlines saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.When Biden’s term ended, the jobless rate was a low 4.0%. Not only that, during Biden’s four years, the average unemployment rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s. Trump won over many voters by attacking high inflation under Biden – and it was a serious problem – but by the time Biden left office, inflation had slid to just 2.9%, far below its 9% peak in 2022 and nearly down to the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.As part of his economic disinformation efforts, Trump has repeatedly said that job growth was a disaster under Biden. Sorry, Donald, that’s a lie. The fact is that during Biden’s four years, the US added 16.6 million jobs, more than during any four-year term of any previous president. (Trump will never tell you this, but during his first term, the nation lost 2.7 million jobs overall, making his first-term presidency the first presidency since Herbert Hoover’s to suffer an overall loss in jobs. The pandemic was largely responsible for that.)As part of his never-ending effort to dodge responsibility, Trump blamed Biden for the stock market’s recent troubles. During Trump’s first 100 days, the S&P 500 fell 7%, making it the market’s worst beginning to a presidential term since Gerald Ford took office in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal.Devious as ever, Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday: “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th.” What Trump failed to say was that the stock market didn’t begin to plunge until 2 April, when he announced his steep, worldwide “liberation day” tariffs. That was more than two months after Biden left office – so it’s absurd for Trump to blame him for that decline. And don’t expect Trump to ever acknowledge that Wall Street soared during Biden’s four years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 39% and the S&P 500 soared by 55.7%, including a 28% jump during 2024.Jared Bernstein, who was chair of the council of economic advisers under Biden, said on MSNBC on Thursday that it was ludicrous for Trump to blame Biden for the first-quarter downturn. “I have never seen a more direct connection to what we’re seeing in the economy and stock market to the action of one person, which is to President Trump and his trade war,” Bernstein said.Many economists warn that the US economy may sink further in the second quarter due to Trump’s tariffs as some supply chains break down, some imports dry up, prices rise on many goods and many consumers and business pull back on spending due to all the uncertainty and anxiety.John Kasich, a Republican and former governor of Ohio, sneered at Trump’s efforts to weasel out of responsibility. “You can’t blame Biden,” he said. “It’s like saying the dog ate my homework.”

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Everyone’s scared’: little appetite for mirth before White House correspondents’ dinner

      by

      It is no laughing matter. The annual dinner for journalists who cover the White House is best known for American presidents trying to be funny and comedians trying to be political. But this year’s edition will feature neither.Instead the event in a downtown Washington hotel on Saturday night will, critics say, resemble something closer to a wake for legacy media still trying to find an effective response to Donald Trump’s divide-and-rule tactics and the rise of the Maga media ecosystem.Joe Biden’s effort to restore norms included the former president giving humorous speeches at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) annual dinner. But just as in his first term, Trump will not be joining the group he has long branded “the enemy of the people” and most of his staff are expected to boycott.News outlets, including the Guardian, will be present but there will also be another major gap this year. The WHCA had lined up the comedian and writer Amber Ruffin but last month withdrew her invitation. Eugene Daniels, president of the association, wrote in an email: “I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.”Ruffin had referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” on a podcast the previous week and asserted that “nobody wants” Trump to attend the dinner. The WHCA may have been seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2018 dinner in which the comedian Michelle Wolf savaged Trump administration officials sitting just feet away and was condemned by some for going too far.But critics described the decision to drop Ruffin as an exercise in capitulation and cowardice, a metaphor for the failure of the media to unite around a strategy to push back against Trump’s all-out assault. Since returning to office he has seized control of the pool of journalists that follows the president, barred the Associated Press news agency from the Oval Office and handed access and prominence to far-right influencers.Kurt Bardella, a political commentator, NewsNation contributor and former Breitbart News spokesperson, said: “I expect that for those who attend the dinner this year it’s going to just be a collective bitch fest of the Washington legacy media that has been completely neutered and embarrassed during this time of Trump.“The idea that there would be this gathering of self-proclaimed media elites who on their watch have been completely dismantled, whose parent companies have all kissed the ring at this point, it’s like, what are you celebrating, exactly? I’m not entirely sure.”The media were unified in fact-checking Trump during his first term, Bardella argued, whereas now the ecosystem is radically different, for example with the Trump ally Elon Musk in control of the X social media platform and the Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, ordering that the newspaper narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market.Bardella added: “I would get it if it was the White House correspondents’ party thrown by Fox News or Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan were throwing a big party. But for the traditional legacy media to throw this parade of parties is almost embarrassing.”The first White House correspondents’ dinner was held in 1921. Three years later Calvin Coolidge became the first president to attend and all have since except Trump. In 2006 the comedian Stephen Colbert roasted George W Bush and the media over the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2011 Barack Obama mocked a stone-faced Trump and even displayed a pastiche of what the White House would look like if the reality TV star became president one day.The event also allows the WHCA to present reporting awards, raise money for scholarships and celebrate the constitutional first amendment that protects freedom of speech. During Trump’s first term the speakers included the Watergate journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and the historian Ron Chernow, who warned: “When you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy.” Saturday’s version is again likely to take a sober tone for a sobering time.Steve Clemons, editor at large of the National Interest and a guest at numerous WHCA dinners, said: “It’s not going to be as much fun. We’re going to see a tribute to quality journalism and there’s always a place for that but there’s a toxicity out there that is hard to ignore at this moment. In a way we all need to take a break for a year and see if we can get to a better place next year.”Clemons supports the WHCA’s decision to revoke Ruffin’s invitation. “You can’t use the dinner as a reason to do battle with the president,” he said. “When you have a comedian that goes out and says nobody wanted the president there that’s a real problem. That’s a dismissive and disrespectful position that the White House Correspondents’ Association cannot take, no matter what its grievances or problems are in working out the terms of trade.“You can’t create something that is institutionally biased against the presidency. That’s not our job. It’s not journalism’s job. Journalism is to report on the White House and the president in a fair and objectively distant way what’s going on. That exercise of having that comedian, if we’d gone through it, was not anything connected to the qualities of fair and objective journalism and celebrating the first amendment.”The WHCA, which is not a formal trade union, has an unenviable task. Its members are diverse, spanning wire service and newspaper reporters, photographers and TV and radio journalists from the US and countries all over the world. They work for outlets of all political stripes and inevitably hold conflicting views on whether to aggressively tackle Trump head-on or lie low and hope to wait out the storm.The association’s annual dinner could be a moment to regroup, renew a shared sense of purpose and gain brief respite from the relentless grind of the Trump beat. But it might just as easily prove a gloomy affair, full of chatter about declining relevance and failing strategies for combating Trump’s war on truth. And whereas celebrities were clamouring for a seat during the Obama years, the dinner has arguably also lost some of its glamour.Sally Quinn, an author, journalist and socialite, said: “I will never, ever, ever go to the White House correspondents’ dinner again because it’s the worst event in Washington every year. First of all, there are too many people in the Hilton Hotel; there are like 3,000 people jammed in; it’s like being in the subway in Manhattan at rush hour with bad food and bad jokes.“You stand in line forever and ever to get your ticket. Last year I was in line with the British ambassador in the rain because the line went all the way outside and we stood there and stood there and stood there and it was a nightmare.”For Quinn, the widow of Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, the lack of an entertainer at the dinner is no great loss because there is not much to laugh at in Washington right now.“Everyone’s scared,” she said. “You’re scared you’re going to get thrown in jail if you write something he doesn’t like and that’s going to happen very soon.“Then you have the owners of these news organisations who keep keeling over and bending the knee so you’ve got all these people in the media who are quitting in protest. It’s a horrible time to be covering Trump. If you’re a journalist and you want to be on the story, this is the story to cover, but people are not having fun covering it. It’s very intense and very upsetting.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Go-to author on White House reverses take on Biden and slams former president

      by

      “Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail,” Chris Whipple wrote in The Fight of His Life, his 2023 book on the 46th president, who was then warming up his re-election bid at the age of 80.In that book, Whipple quoted Bruce Reed, a senior aide, describing a long-distance flight. When others appeared exhausted, Biden was raring to go, Reed said. Biden showed “unbelievable stamina”.Speaking to the Guardian in January 2023, Whipple said Biden’s “inner circle” was “bullish about Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to govern. I never heard any of them express any concern and maybe you would expect that from the inner circle. Many of them will tell you that he has extraordinary endurance, energy.”Put it this way: much has happened since.Obviously, there was that whole 2024 election thing. You know – the one when Biden dropped out after a disastrous debate exposed his decline for all to see. There was also the day in February, before the campaign kicked off, when the special counsel Robert Hur declined to charge Biden with mishandling classified documents, because he found him too addled and sympathetic a prospective defendant.Hur wrote: “He did not remember when he was vice-president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice-president?’) and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘In 2009, am I still vice-president?’) … He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”Whipple, a former CBS producer, has emerged as a go-to author on the White House and those who work there. In The Gatekeepers, he examined the lives of chiefs of staff. Then came The Fight of His Life. With hindsight, Whipple seems to have missed key evidence of Biden’s decline.But Whipple is back with a vengeance. Uncharted, his third book, hits Biden and his aides like a bludgeon. Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew, fares little better: Whipple depicts a candidate who never should have been there, a sentiment repeatedly expressed by senior Democrats.Whipple had access. People talked. Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, is a key source – and demonstrates startling cognitive dissonance about Biden’s mental and physical decline. Klain says Biden should have stayed in the race – but also gives an absolutely withering account of debate prep at Camp David.At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, Klain describes Biden as “startled”. Whipple writes: “He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” He fell asleep.“‘We sat around the table,’” says Klain in the book. “‘And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’” Klain, Whipple writes, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US”.Come the debate against Trump, Biden gave perhaps the worst performance of all time. He shuffled, he stared, he made verbal stumbles and gaffes. He handed Trump the win.Klain also tags Biden for skipping a post-debate meeting with progressives in favor of a family photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz.“‘You need to cancel that,’” Klain says he told Biden. “‘You need to stay in Washington. You need to have an aggressive plan to fight and to rally the troops.’” Biden rebuffed him and instead held a Zoom call with the progressives. It went badly.“‘All you guys want to talk about is Gaza … What would you have me do?’” Biden said. “‘I was a progressive before some of you guys were even in Congress.’”How do you remind people you’re old without saying you’re old?Whipple also pays attention to Trump. Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff, and Karl Rove, a veteran of the George W Bush White House, speak on the record. So does Paul Manafort, a campaign manager in 2016, later jailed and pardoned.“Democrats wanted to know why Harris had lost to Trump and his MAGA movement,” Whipple writes. “Susie Wiles wanted to know why Harris and her team had run such a flawed campaign.”Wiles did not view a Trump victory as inevitable. Whipple asks Wiles: “‘Did that mean Harris couldn’t have won?’”Trump’s campaign chair didn’t mince words.“‘We’ll never know,’” she replies, “‘because it didn’t seem like she even tried.’“‘Voters want authenticity … and they didn’t get that from her.’”Leon Panetta, chief of staff to Bill Clinton, echoed Wiles.“‘I thought they were thinking they could tiptoe into the presidency without getting anybody pissed off at them,’” he tells Whipple. “‘Baloney. You’ve got to make the American people understand that you’re tough enough to be president of the United States.’”Rove does take a jab at Trump and Chris LaCivita, the ex-Marine who became a senior adviser. Rove introduced LaCivita to Trump, via the late megadonor Sheldon Adelson, but didn’t think LaCivita would take the gig. “‘I’m surprised because I know what he thinks of Trump,’” Rove tells Whipple. “‘He thinks Trump’s an idiot.’”LaCivita condemned January 6, after which he “liked” a tweet that urged Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment and remove him from power. LaCivita deleted the post – but did not join the second Trump administration.Back in 2023, in The Fight of His Life, Whipple wrote: “Presidents do not give up power lightly.” Andy Card, chief of staff to George W Bush, weighed in: “‘If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying. This applies to presidents, of any age, who are driven by vast reserves of ego and ambition.’”Biden did go – but not voluntarily. In Uncharted, in merciless detail, Whipple shows he should have gone much sooner.

      Uncharted is published in the US by HarperCollins More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden accuses Trump and Musk of taking ‘hatchet’ to social security

      by

      Joe Biden on Tuesday accused Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, Elon Musk, of “taking a hatchet” to the social security administration as they moved at warp-speed to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.In his first public remarks since leaving office, the former president avoided any explicit mention of Trump – his predecessor and successor – but he was sharply critical of the new administration for threatening social security, which Biden called a “sacred promise” that more than 70 million Americans rely on each month.“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction,” Biden said, addressing the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it could happen that soon.”He said Trump administration had applied the Silicon Valley concept of “move fast and break things” to the federal government: “They’re certainly breaking things. They’re shooting first and aiming later.”On Tuesday, Democrats across the country held a day of action to “sound the alarm” over the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the social security administration, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said earlier on Tuesday. Biden referenced the sweeping cuts to the agency’s workforce and its services in his remarks.Though it is unusual for a former president to return to the national stage so soon after exiting it, Biden, 82, said he felt the issue was a matter of grave importance to millions of retirees and disabled Americans fearful that the check they rely on each month might not arrive on time – or at all.“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the social security system, people have always gotten their social security checks,” Biden said. “They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now for the first time ever, that might change. It’d be a calamity for millions of families.”Asked earlier on Tuesday about Biden’s speech, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mocked his age and acuity. “I’m shocked that he is speaking at nighttime. I thought his bedtime was much earlier than his speech tonight.” Trump is 78.Biden also joked about his age, tweaking Trump for falsely claiming that millions of people born over a century ago are still receiving social security benefits. “I want to meet them because I’d like to figure out how they live that long,” he said, drawing laughs from the audience. “I’m looking for longevity.” Though Trump and Musk have both misleadingly pointed to the inclusion of people in the database with no recorded death date as evidence of widespread fraud, the glitch is well known and almost none of the people listed receive payments.Trump has pledged that his administration would not touch social security and congressional Republicans have accused Democrats of spreading lies about their support for the popular program.In a series of tweets on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, the social security agency rebutted many of the points made in Biden’s speech, writing that the president has “repeatedly promised to protect social security and ensure higher-take home pay for seniors by ending taxation on social security benefits”.Yet the Trump administration’s assault on the agency has left it in turmoil.Since Musk’s cost-cutting initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency targeted the agency, it has announced plans for deep staff reductions and dozens of offices closures, while policy changes have already begun to impact the program’s operations, leaving many beneficiaries anxious.In his remarks, Biden spoke of the “profound” psychological impact on beneficiaries who rely on the social security checks. “How do you sleep at night?” he said.He also criticized Musk for calling the program a “Ponzi scheme” and comments made by Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, also a billionaire, who said his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t complain if she didn’t receive her social security check one month. “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” he said on the business and tech podcast All-In last month.“She’s probably a lovely woman,” Biden said of Lutnick’s mother-in-law, but agreed that she would probably not miss the payment. “No kidding, her son-in-law is a billionaire. What about the 94-year-old mother living all by herself?”On Tuesday, Trump signed a presidential memo titled Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits – a benefit undocumented people are already ineligible for under US law. The directive orders an expansion of the social security administration’s full-time fraud prosecutor program and directs officials to scrutinize earnings reports for “persons age 100 or older”. It also establishes a similar prosecution program for Medicare and Medicaid.During Biden’s speech on Tuesday, he briefly reflected on the current state of affairs, urging Americans to uphold “fundamental American values”.“Nobody’s king,” he said, before lamenting how divided the nation had become. Healing the “soul of America” was a campaign theme that elevated Biden to office in the depths of the pandemic in 2020, but the divisions seemed only to deepen over the next four years. In an apparent aside, he said there was roughly “30%” of the country that “has no heart” – a remark Trump supporters immediately as interpreted an insult.“It’s what we see in America,” he continued. “It’s what we believe in – fairness. And that’s the America we can never forget or walk away from.” More

    • 200 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Trump and Musk are setting the example’: how companies are becoming emboldened to be more anti-union

      by

      Donald Trump’s aggressive wave of anti-union actions is already spurring some US employers to take a more hostile stance toward unions, as labor leaders voice fears that the president’s moves will embolden more and more companies to fight harder against unions and slow their recent progress.Indeed, some worker advocates worry that unions will be walloped during Trump’s second term the way they were under Ronald Reagan after he crushed the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike and inspired many corporations to fight harder against unions. As Trump and Elon Musk carry out their anti-union agenda in Washington DC, Utah passed a law that prohibits collective bargaining by public sector workers, and a Michigan company refused to move forward with a union election.“If history is any indicator on this – and I think it is – when you see a president’s administration basically declaring war on unions, that’s going to certainly embolden private sector employers,” said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University and author of the definitive book about the disastrous 1981 strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (Patco).Labor experts point to several Trump administration actions that show a huge hostility toward unions, including Trump’s order to end collective bargaining by 50,000 airport screeners and then a far-reaching order to rip up union contracts and prohibit bargaining for over a million federal employees at more than a dozen agencies, including the state department, the treasury and health and human services. Trump and Musk have also fired tens of thousands of federal workers while disregarding protections in their union contracts. Moreover, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, who was the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) acting chair. Wilcox insists her dismissal was illegal, but on 28 March a federal appeals court declined to reinstate her, at least for now.“What we’re seeing is Patco on steroids,” Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in an interview. “This is the president saying even the idea of having a union contract and having something in black and white to protect workers and having collective bargaining – he’s saying none of this should exist.”Trump’s anti-union and anti-worker actions have been piling up. He rescinded the $17.75-an-hour minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their workers. He issued an order to kill the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which seeks to settle potentially disastrous labor disputes. He nominated a management-side lawyer, Crystal Carey, to be the NLRB’s general counsel; her law firm represents anti-union employers, including Amazon, SpaceX and Tesla. Even the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, who has sought good relations with Trump, condemned that appointment, saying: “Carey has spent her entire professional career backing Big Business to the detriment of working people … [S]he wants to decimate labor unions.” (O’Brien did praise Trump’s choice of labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer.)Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly insulted the nation’s 2 million federal workers, saying: “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”Eric Blanc, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, said these actions have “demonstrated that Trump’s rhetoric about being pro-worker and pro-union was just that: pure rhetoric. This is an administration that is pushing the limits on how far you can go to destroy the labor movement and people’s labor standards.”Blanc said Trump’s replacing of the pro-union Joe Biden as president, has “certainly emboldened the big corporations that were already stonewalling their unions: Starbucks, Amazon, REI, where we saw the most emblematic union successes of the past few years”.In February, Utah’s governor signed a law that prohibits unions representing teachers, firefighters, police officers and other government employees from bargaining for better pay and working conditions. In a move directly inspired by Trump’s actions, a Michigan amusement and water park refused to move forward with a union election, believing that the NLRB was paralyzed after Wilcox was fired, leaving it without a quorum.“Companies could definitely get more anti-union because Trump and Musk are setting the example,” said Thomas Kochan, a longtime professor of industrial relations at MIT. “They’re firing workers who are unionized. They’re ignoring their labor contracts.”Kochan said he fears the consequences for unions if the supreme court upholds the firing of federal workers despite their contract protections or upholds Trump’s dismissal of Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum. “Then I think we will see companies come out of the woodwork to be more anti-union because there’s so little risk,” Kochan said. “We’ll see companies like SpaceX and Tesla just ignore the law because there will be no consequences. That’s the big risk now.”In his high-profile role, taking a figurative chainsaw to federal agencies and firing tens of thousands of workers, the fiercely anti-union Musk could inspire corporate executives to follow in his anti-union footsteps. SpaceX is even seeking to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. “Musk is sort of the praetorian guard of the anti-union movement,” McCartin said. “He’s the tip of the spear.”But Blanc said corporate executives might hesitate about following Musk. “He is extremely unpopular, and his policies are not popular,” Blanc said. “Corporate America is not blind to that, and they’ll think twice about unleashing a backlash like the one Musk has unleashed.”Labor experts said it could take a few years before many companies become visibly more hostile toward unions. That was the case after the Patco strike. It was not until two or three years after that strike that several prominent employers –International Paper, Greyhound and Phelps Dodge – showed a harder attitude toward unions. They broke their unions’ strikes by hiring large numbers of replacement workers – an unusual move at the time.That tougher behavior under former president Ronald Reagan sped the decline of private sector unions. Today, just 6% of private sector workers are in unions, while 32% of public sector workers are. Anti-union ideologues are increasingly targeting public sector unions, which often support Democrats.“Because almost half of the labor movement is now in the public sector, the assault that we’re seeing now is really focused on the public sector,” McCartin said. “That really threatens to break the spine of the labor movement.”The flight attendants’ Nelson said it’s imperative for the labor movement to stand up and stand together to resist Trump’s and Musk’s anti-union actions: “It’s on all of us to use the power we have to stop this before everything is broken and every safety net is stolen by the oligarchs,” including Musk. Nelson said the labor movement has very few options at this point except to mobilize for a general strike.

      This article was amended on 7 April 2025 to clarify the timing of an order to rip up union contracts and an appeals court declining to reinstate Gwynne Wilcox. More

    • 200 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats’ deference to Biden was a disaster. They still haven’t learned their lesson | Norman Solomon

      by

      Joe Biden’s insistence on running for re-election was certainly disastrous. It kept credible contenders out of the Democratic presidential primaries and prevented the selection of a nominee who had gained momentum in the winnowing process. Even after his stunningly feeble debate performance on 27 June last year, Biden took several weeks before finally opting out of the race. That left Kamala Harris a mere 107 days between the launch of her campaign and election day.Ample evidence shows that the Biden team was riddled with obstinate denial and misrepresentation aimed at the public. But tales of tragic egomania in high places can take us only so far. What’s essential is to scrutinize how – and why – the Democratic party, its leaders and its prominent supporters enabled Biden and his inner circle to get away with such momentous stonewalling for so long.Democrats in Congress, with few exceptions, refused to jump off the Biden 2024 bandwagon until the debate disaster. Similar enabling also came from state party chairs and Democratic governors. Likewise, a wide range of party-allied organizations toed the Biden party line. Meanwhile, many activists took on the role of spectators, if not cheerleaders for another Biden campaign, in an unfolding tragedy of vast proportions.A common denominator was fear. Fear of being accused of disloyalty to the Democratic president. Fear of being ostracized by fellow Democrats or denounced by anti-Trump commentators. Fear of being accused of weakening the party by pointing out Biden’s evident frailty. Fear of damaging personal ambitions or future access to halls of power. And on and on.The silence and compliance helped Biden to coast toward renomination. Yet by midway through his term, polling numbers and increasingly shaky public behavior were clear signals that he would be a weak candidate. Support from working-class voters, the young, and people of color drastically eroded.Notably, leading progressives in Congress assisted Biden in fending off a serious primary challenge. Representative Pramila Jayapal, then chair of the congressional Progressive caucus, made a very early endorsement. “I never thought I would say this, but I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out,” she said in November 2022. Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden in April 2023. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him three months later.Polls routinely showed that most Democratic voters did not want Biden to run again. But party leaders were on autopilot, choosing discretion over valor, benefitting their relations with the White House but undermining the party’s prospects of retaining it – as is now painfully and undeniably clear.A few weeks ago, speaking at a Harvard Kennedy School forum, Jayapal said: “I do think had the president just served one term, he would have gone out a hero, he would have passed the torch, he would have been celebrated for his accomplishments, we would have had a really strong Democratic primary with a lot of good candidates, and then we would have had the full election season to fight it out and to actually get somebody who could win.”Now, an open question is whether crucial lessons have been learned and will be heeded. At stake is the capacity of the Democratic party to defeat Trumpist forces in the midterm elections next year and in 2028.The outlook is not good. A grim reality is that the Democratic party and its loyalists have developed an enduring corrosive culture – which had everything to do with the insistence on continuing to fuel the faulty Biden 2024 locomotive as it dragged the party toward a calamitous defeat.I am not writing from a vantage point of hindsight alone. In November 2022, days after the midterm elections, my colleagues and I at the progressive non-profit RootsAction launched the Don’t Run Joe campaign (renamed Step Aside Joe when Biden announced his candidacy the following spring). During the next 20 months, not one other sizable national organization was willing to push for Biden to forego a re-election bid.We began in New Hampshire, the longtime first-in-the-country presidential primary state. (Biden had finished fifth with only 8.4% of the vote in the 2020 Democratic primary there. For 2024, he demoted New Hampshire to make South Carolina first.) On 9 November 2022, our kickoff digital ads reached Democrats across New Hampshire. Within days, upwards of 2,000 Democratic voters in the state had signed a Don’t Run Joe petition, conveying this message: “We cannot risk losing in 2024. We shouldn’t gamble on Joe Biden’s low approval rating.”That was the gist of our messaging that continued for more than a year and a half via online advertising, email blasts, social media, news releases, media interviews, mass texting to Democratic voters, leafleting at state party conventions and TV ads in several key states and Washington DC. A mobile Don’t Run Joe billboard circled the Capitol and White House as well as the site of a Democratic National Committee meeting.Don’t Run Joe placed full-page print advertisements in the Hill, aimed at congressional Democrats. One ad included a picture of men in suits with their heads in the sand. Presented as An Open Letter to Democrats in the House and Senate, the ad declared that “evasion is no solution” and concluded: “Conformity and fear of a White House rebuke have never served Democrats or the nation well. It is time to stop muffling genuine concerns and start being honest about the pivotal downsides of a prospective Biden ’24 candidacy. The future of the Democratic Party – and the country – is at stake.”Today, conformity and fear are still contagions afflicting the Democratic party, now impairing its capacity to roll back Donald Trump’s autocratic rule and effectively fight for a progressive agenda. The rebellion against Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, while encouraging, has not shaken the party’s underlying power structure. And habitual deference to uninspiring party leadership does not bode well.The day after the president’s recent demagogic speech to Congress, the new Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, were the featured speakers for “a virtual National Update and Call to Action”. The next morning, I received a text from a progressive Democratic party activist, who summarized the event as “sad and weak,” adding: “Jeffries and Martin’s delivery was anemic, content essentially pablum.” The activist signed off with the words “Really frightened”.I asked if it would be OK to use the activist’s name while quoting from the text in an article. The reply was both understandable and symptomatic of how fear prevents the kind of open debate that the Democratic party desperately needs: “No, I am working inside the party … ”

      Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine More