Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 288 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The future of the world may depend on what a few thousand Pennsylvania voters think about their grocery bills | Timothy Garton Ash

      by

      On 5 November, people around the globe will tune in to watch the world election. It’s not a “world” election in the sense of the World Cup – a football championship in which many nations actively participate – but it’s much more than a World Series, the curiously named baseball championship that involves only teams from North America. This year has been called the biggest election year in history. By the end of it, something approaching half the world’s adult population will have had the possibility to put a cross against a name on a ballot paper. But the US presidential election is the year’s big match.Why? Because this is a genuine democratic election that will result in a single person holding exceptionally concentrated executive power in what is still the world’s most powerful country. It’s a highly watchable soap opera, with a classic plot familiar to all. And one of this year’s two contenders, Donald Trump, is a danger to his own country and the world. If the “election” of the president of China, the world’s other superpower, were a genuine democratic choice, that event would perhaps be as consequential. But it isn’t, so it isn’t. Russia had a presidential “election” earlier this year, but at issue was only the size of Vladimir Putin’s declared majority.Equally, if the US were a parliamentary democracy, and especially if it had an electoral system of proportional representation, the stakes would not be so high. The resulting government would depend on the party-political composition of parliament and in many such countries you routinely end up with coalition governments. Even in Britain’s “elective dictatorship”, as the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) once characterised the British political system, the prime minister has significantly less power than a US president. President Emmanuel Macron of France is now behaving as if he thinks he is the US president, with an unrestricted right to form the nation’s government, but that’s not what his country’s constitution says.As the American political scientist Corey Brettschneider reminds us in his new book, The Presidents and the People, the danger inherent in this concentration of power was already highlighted by Patrick Henry, a hero of the American war of independence, when the US constitution was debated at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788. What if a criminal were elected president, Henry asked. What if he could abuse his position as singular head of the executive branch and commander in chief of the military to realise his criminal ambitions? Well, here we are 236 years later, and a convicted felon and notorious fan of autocrats is neck-and-neck with the newly crowned Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.If her opponent were Nikki Haley, the runner-up in the Republican primary contest, the drama would be nothing like as intense. This would be something like a normal election. But it’s Trump, so it isn’t.I arrived in the US the day before Joe Biden finally conceded that he would not stand again. Since then we have witnessed a tidal wave of hope flow into the candidacy of Harris and her folksy running mate, Tim Walz. This culminated in the Democratic national convention in Chicago, where the usual orgy of razzmatazz was accompanied by genuine joy and unabashed flag-waving patriotism.View image in fullscreenTo their own and everyone else’s surprise, the Democrats give every impression of being united. Harris raised about $500m for her campaign in just a month. She is not a great orator, like Bill Clinton and both Obamas, but she gave an excellent acceptance speech. She introduced herself to the American public as the child of an indomitable Indian immigrant mother. She elaborated on her campaign’s brilliantly chosen theme of freedom – therefore taking what has been for years a Republican leitmotif and reconnecting liberty with liberalism. She listed some of those freedoms from that are also freedoms to: women’s freedom to decide about their own bodies, the freedom to live safe from gun violence, the freedom to love whom you choose, the freedom to breathe clean air, the freedom to vote.Importantly for a female candidate with a left-liberal background, Harris successfully conveyed the image of a strong leader who would give the US “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” and enable it to out-do China in the competition for the 21st century and “stand strong with Ukraine and our Nato allies”. In substance, 90% of this could equally have been said by Biden, but the way she said it – not least in seeming credibly to care about the heartbreaking scale of Palestinian suffering – made it feel new and promising.As a result, enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate has soared – but only to the point where this election has become too close to call. Recalling his own electrifying slogan from the 2008 election, “Yes we can”, Barack Obama told the convention, “Yes she can!”Yes, she can; but that doesn’t mean she will. She may be marginally ahead in nationwide polling, but with the antiquated electoral system that the US uses for its presidential election, she could win the popular vote, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and still lose because of a few tens of thousands of swing voters in battleground states in the midwest and the sun belt.One leading pollster tells me that the top three issues for the electorate are the economy, crime and immigration, and on all three, Republicans typically have the edge. Trump himself looks all over the place, giving long rambling speeches, but he’s a formidable political counter-puncher.The social aquifers of white working-class anger are still very full, especially among men. (The gender gap is very marked in the Harris v Trump contest.) Moreover, if it’s a narrow victory for Harris, Trump will immediately declare the election “stolen”, and we will be set for a long bout of bitter litigation, as happened in 2000, but with the supreme court now seen by many as biased towards the Republican side.All of which is a long way of saying: nobody knows. And that, after all, is the hallmark of a genuine democratic election. But here’s the uniquely curious thing about this one. Millions of people all over the world, from Austria to Zimbabwe, not only follow it closely but also know many of the sometimes arcane psephological details that may decide the result in the electoral college. This is not just because Washington is the world’s political theatre, as much as Netflix is now the world’s movie theatre, but because the result will have important consequences for them. If you are Ukrainian or Palestinian, it may literally be a matter of life and death.Ultimately, what is most peculiar about this world election is the sheer incongruity of cause and potential effect. Whether women and children in Kharkiv or Rafah live or die may depend on what Mike the mechanic in Michigan and Penny the teacher in Pennsylvania think about their grocery bills.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The chilling effect’: behind GOP-led states’ efforts to purge some voters from the rolls

      by

      Earlier this week, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent out a press release with an eye-popping headline: his state had removed more than 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Among them were 6,500 non-citizens. A little under a third of those non-citizens had some sort of voting history in Texas, where there were nearly 18 million registered voters as of March, and were referred to the attorney general for further investigation.Two days later, the governor’s office quietly revised the statement posted online. Instead of saying 6,500 non-citizens had been removed, the updated version said 6,500 potential non-citizens had been removed. Renae Eze, an Abbott spokesperson, said that the statement sent out to an email list of reporters on Monday contained the phrasing “potential non-citizens”. She did not respond to a query on why the version that was publicly posted initially omitted the word “potential”.The statement was the latest example of how Republican-led states are touting aggressive efforts to remove people with early voting, scheduled to begin in weeks and less than 70 days until election day. Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio have all made similar announcements recently.Voting rights groups are concerned these announcements are misleading, and that the efforts to purge are putting naturalized citizens – eligible voters – at risk for being removed. There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally. The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen. That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship. All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.“We’re extremely concerned about the chilling effect this has on registered voters generally speaking, and particularly newly naturalized citizens,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, one of several groups that signed on to the letter warning Alabama that it may be running afoul of federal law.The Alabama secretary of state’s office did not say how many people had responded indicating they were citizens. In Jefferson county, one of the largest in the state, 557 were flagged as potential non-citizens, according to Barry Stephenson, the county’s registrar. Three people have responded to notices that went out so far, Stephenson said. Two people said they did not know how they had become registered voters. The third said they were a citizen.One Alabama voter, a Huntsville man named James Stroop, told the local news outlet WAFF 48 that he had been wrongly flagged. The Alabama department of labor had incorrectly noted he was a non-citizen on a form years ago. Even though he had corrected the issue with the department of labor, he was still marked as a non-citizen when the agency sent data to the Alabama secretary of state.“Imagine if Alabama’s DMV had different information about a different group of voters and they knew that some vanishingly small percentage of people with green eyes were ineligible to vote for some reason,” she added. “And then they pulled everyone with green eyes off the rolls. I think the problem would be obvious to everyone that you can’t just deregister voters because some vanishingly small percentage of them may be ineligible to vote.”In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order noting that his administration had removed 6,303 non-citizens from the rolls since taking office. That represents an incredibly small fraction of the more than 6.3 million people registered to vote in the state as of 1 July.Like Tennessee and Alabama, Virginia is flagging non-citizens on its rolls using both data from its DMV and the Department of Homeland Security to identify potential non-citizens. Anyone removed is given 14 days to indicate they are in fact citizens. It’s unclear how many of the people removed were actually non-citizens and how many simply didn’t respond.“We take seriously the potential for errors in database matching, the consequences for voters and the public at large of any erroneous removal of eligible voters from the voter registration rolls, and Virginia’s recent history of mistakes and errors with data sharing protocols in particular,” a group of civil rights groups wrote to Youngkin and Susan Beals, who runs the state’s department of elections.Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose has promoted his office’s efforts to remove 137 suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls using DMV data. Several naturalized citizens have come forward to say they were wrongly flagged, including one man who said his voter registration was challenged months after he was naturalized.“We know that the number of non-citizens who vote is a vanishingly small number based on all available evidence,” Huddleston said. “By inflating the issue and sweeping in very predictably naturalized citizens, the Alabama secretary of state and others are preventing naturalized citizens from being able to vote and creating this chilling effect.” More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising | Kevin Carroll

      by

      The tranquil majesty of Arlington national cemetery tends to bring forth civic virtues in Americans and eloquence in their leaders. Speaking there in 1985 above the graves of the fallen, Ronald Reagan observed that while we may imagine the deceased as old men, most “were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived … they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers … They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”Nowhere in that vast cemetery is Reagan’s point driven home as poignantly as in section 60, which embraces those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice at painfully young ages since 9/11. Here the dates on the simple headstones are within memory, the grief of loved ones is raw and visitors may witness acts of tenderness in response.Good manners, Jane Austen observed, hold a society together. George Washington copied longhand in boyhood and preserved into adulthood a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior”. Another general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, cautioned in his Guildhall address after VE Day that “humility must always be the portion” of any man who receives acclaim earned by others’ sacrifices.Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.Worse is the allegation that two Trump staff members assaulted a small, middle-aged female Department of the Army employee who attempted to enforce the regulation and preserve the cemetery’s dignity. The victim reportedly refrained from filing charges due to a reasonable fear of violence or harassment from Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign defamed this woman as mentally ill. His running mate, JD Vance, said Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for her campaign’s suggestion that the unauthorized footage was intended for use as political footage – just before Trump used it for exactly that.This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016. In 2024 it is already, probably intentionally on Trump’s part, being replaced in the news by reaction to his social media posts making lewd innuendos about Harris, and QAnon threats to imprison Democratic party leaders. But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president.Trump infamously described America’s dead from the first world war as “suckers” and “losers”. Trump also asked my former boss, White House chief of staff John Kelly – on Memorial Day and over the section 60 grave of his Marine son killed in Afghanistan – “What was in it for them?” I walked up to a visibly shocked Kelly moments after that exchange, the details of which he later confirmed.Trump demanded military equipment parades in Washington of the kind Soviet leaders held on May Day in Moscow’s Red Square, but disdained appearing with wounded service members. He called America’s service chiefs “dopes and babies” and needled them about their public sector pay – God only knows what he thinks of enlisted troops who make a fraction of a general’s salary.Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016 by mocking the late senator John McCain for being a prisoner of war; he followed this by feuding with the bereaved parents of Muslim American and African American soldiers; recently, he belittled Medal of Honor recipients shot during the brave actions that led to their awards.More serious than Trump’s words are his actions and plans regarding the armed forces. In 2018 Trump discussed having troops shoot civilian migrants, including women and children, as they tried to cross America’s south-west border – a patently illegal order. In 2020 he unlawfully used national guardsmen to clear protesters from Lafayette Park for yet another campaign photo opportunity. In 2021 Trump and his advisors planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to misuse the military to put down protests anticipated if Mike Pence and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Trump’s Project 2025 envisions using the national guard for internal immigration investigations, a vast and ill-advised expansion of the American military’s limited role in domestic law enforcement.Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party. Beyond that, his boorish statements and bad behavior regarding the military almost certainly come from a place of self-loathing. Trump dodged the Vietnam war draft by claiming – probably falsely – to suffer from bone spurs. A gnawingly insecure man, Trump is self-conscious of his lack of the virtues towards which the military strives: as the US army puts it, loyalty to the constitution, dutiful fulfillment of responsibilities, respect for others, selfless service to both the country and subordinates, honor, integrity and personal courage.His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump. This attitude would be a sad commentary about any man, but ought to disqualify someone seeking to serve as commander-in-chief.

      Kevin Carroll served as a senior counselor to US secretary of homeland security John Kelly, and as a CIA and US army officer More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US army confirms Arlington cemetery worker ‘pushed aside’ by Trump staff

      by

      US army officials issued a strongly worded rebuke of Donald Trump’s campaign on Thursday as they confirmed a worker at Arlington national cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an altercation with members of the former president’s staff.The statement was the strongest official criticism yet of Trump’s controversial visit in which he gave a thumbs-up over graves as a photo opportunity and there was an alleged physical assault by two of his staffers on the army official. It came as outrage continued to mount from veterans and families of some of the service members buried there.Adding to pressure on the election campaign of the Republican presidential nominee was the army’s revelation that Trump’s team was explicitly told in advance by a defense department official that taking photographs and video footage at the cemetery breached federal law.The campaign ignored the warning and filmed anyway, sparking a confrontation, during the visit on Monday that one Democrat called “abhorrent and shameful”. And on Thursday the Trump campaign continued to aggressively insult the unnamed cemetery staff member caught up in the altercation, who was shoved when trying to enforce rules, after learning she had declined to press charges for fear of retribution from Trump’s supporters.“Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [defense department] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” the army statement said.“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”Steven Cheung, the former president’s communication director, said the employee was experiencing something he termed “Trump derangement syndrome”. A day earlier he claimed the person was mentally ill, while Chris LaCivita, Trump’s senior adviser, called the employee “despicable”.The ramping up of rhetoric by the Trump campaign was widely seen as an effort to deflect from growing condemnation of the candidate’s efforts to seize political capital by staging a photo opportunity at the Virginia cemetery on the third anniversary of a suicide bomb attack outside Kabul airport in Afghanistan that killed 13 US servicemen and women.According to reports, the Arlington employee was “pushed and verbally abused” by two Trump campaign staffers after trying to prevent them entering the cemetery’s heavily restricted section 60, where recent US casualties, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, are buried.Federal law “prohibits political campaign or election-related activities” within military cemeteries, Arlington officials said in a statement, noting that a report of the incident was filed with military authorities.But Trump, who has blamed Joe Biden as well as Kamala Harris, his opponent in November’s election, for the US military’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, posted to social media on Wednesday footage of himself laying a wreath and talking with the family of one of the deceased veterans at his grave.The fallout from the episode was gathering pace on Thursday after the family of a fallen special forces Green Beret soldier reportedly said footage of his adjacent grave was taken without their permission, and politicians and other military families stepped up to offer condemnation.“According to our conversation with Arlington national cemetery, the Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit to Staff Sergeant [Darin] Hoover’s gravesite in Section 60, which lays directly next to my brother’s grave,” Michele Marckesano, sister of Master Sgt Andrew Marckesano, who died in 2020, told the New York Times.“We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”Khizr Khan, father of the 27-year-old army captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004 and is buried in section 60, questioned why Trump made the visit.Khan, who has previously criticized the former president for calling deceased veterans “suckers” and “losers”, told the Daily Beast: “He has proven his disrespect. Somebody needs to ask him, ‘You have shown that contempt multiple times and yet again, you go there.’”Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democratic congressman, said: “It’s sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honoring our heroes.“His behavior and that of his campaign is abhorrent and shameful. I urge Arlington cemetery to publicly release all that transpired so the American people can ensure the ground in which our nation’s heroes are buried is not being debased by a man who has no concept of service and sacrifice,” he added in a statement.Cheung said on Wednesday that the campaign had footage of the Arlington altercation that it was willing to release, but by Thursday morning it had not done so.JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate, attempted to defend his running mate on Wednesday during a campaign stop in Erie, Pennsylvania.Harris, he said during a speech critical of Biden and the vice-president’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, “can go to hell”, insisting falsely that Trump had not “filmed a TV commercial at a grave site”.

      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump takes sexist Harris attacks to ‘whole other level’ on Truth Social

      by

      Donald Trump has reposted a crudely misogynistic comment about Kamala Harris on Truth Social in a move that reprised his past record of sexist behaviour and brazenly flouted pleas from members of his own party to emphasize issues over personal attacks.With fresh polls showing Harris further improving her standing – and widening the gap with her opponent among women voters – Trump drew online opprobrium by sharing a vulgar post on his social media site implying that the Democratic nominee owed her political rise to sexual favours.The post – originally posted by another user – featured photos of Harris and Hillary Clinton alongside the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”The comment was an oblique reference to innuendo surrounding Harris’s former relationship with Willie Brown, the San Francisco mayor. The mention of Clinton – Trump’s defeated opponent in the 2016 presidential election – alluded to the affair between Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and her husband Bill Clinton in the 1990s, which came close to ending his presidency.It was not the first time Trump had made lewd references to Harris. On 18 August, he shared a video by the Dilley Meme Team, a group of rightwing content creators, to the soundtrack of a parody of the Alanis Morrisette song Ironic that contained the lines, “She spent her whole damn life down on her knees”, as an image of Brown appeared behind a picture of the US vice-president and her husband, Doug Emhoff.But the latest post appeared among a flurry of other extreme posts on Wednesday that also included tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory that holds that Trump is waging war against an elite network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media.He reposted: “WWG1WGA! RETRUTH IF YOU AGREE.” The acronym is short for the QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” He similarly reposted another QAnon phrase: “nothing can stop what is coming.”The FBI has previously identified fringe theories like QAnon – which Trump has stopped short of endorsing while praising its supporters – as likely to fuel domestic terrorism.In yet another incendiary communication, Trump posted manipulated images of some of his favourite targets – including the entrepreneur Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, who spearheaded the US vaccine effort against Covid-19, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi – imprisoned and wearing orange jumpsuits.The Harris campaign made no immediate response to Trump’s latest burst of social media activity, which followed disclosures of an altercation between his campaign team and staff at Arlington national cemetery, the resting place of fallen US military heroes, during a visit on Monday.However, the CNN host Anderson Cooper – in a lengthy segment – said the posts took Trump’s previous campaigning to a “whole other level”.“This is the Republican candidate for president and the 45th president of the United States, talking about two women who, no matter what you think of their politics, are two of the most accomplished women in American political history,” Cooper said.Wednesday’s online outbursts came as a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Harris with a four-point nationwide lead, 45% to 41%, over Trump. Among women, the survey showed the vice-president increasing her lead to 13%, compared with an average of 9% in polls for July.A separate Fox News survey showed Harris leading or increasing her support in four southern Sun belt states, all considered vital battlegrounds in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a two-way race, Harris was up by one point in Arizona and by two points in Georgia and Nevada, while Trump is ahead by one point in North Carolina, according to the poll.Beyond the polls, there was irritation among Republicans strategists who had previously urged Trump to desist from attacking Harris personally and focus on issues of concern to voters, such as the economy, inflation and immigration.“I think people are incredibly frustrated,” Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican party, told the Washington Post.He said Harris’s campaign and policy stances gave “opportunities for the Trump campaign to talk about issues that actually will matter to swing voters. And rather than doing that, he’s delving into this nonsense.”Stuart Stevens, a member of the anti-Trump Republican group, the Lincoln Project, and a strategist for Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid, challenged widespread predictions of a close election by suggesting that Trump’s approach would eventually alienate voters and enable Harris to win convincingly.“There’s been a lot of talk – it’s sort of a universal truth – that this election is going to be close,” he told CNN. “I have a different opinion. I think it’ll be close till about October 20th, and then I think it’s going to be like Carter versus Reagan [in 1980, when Reagan won in a landslide], that the bottom is going to start to drop out [of Trump’s campaign].“I think this is going to be a race that Democrats are going to win by more than Biden did,” he added. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      The Wisconsin race that could tip the Democratic majority in the US Senate

      by

      Tammy Baldwin faces a race in November that will test the rural-urban coalition the Democratic Wisconsin senator has built and help determine whether Democrats will be able to hold onto their narrow majority in the US senate.Baldwin faces Eric Hovde, a real estate mogul and banker, who has campaigned on popular Republican issues like immigration and the economy, while linking Baldwin to Joe Biden.Baldwin, who was first elected in 2012 on a tide of progressive support, is one of 23 Democratic US senators up for re-election this year; her ability to keep the support of voters in purple and red districts could determine the outcome of the critical race.Baldwin has maintained relationships and a support base among farmers and rural voters, even as Democratic attrition from rural parts of the state has eroded Democratic margins in other statewide races. It’s a trend so persistent that “Trump-Tammy” voters are recognized as a constituency in Badwin’s base – with the senator winning 17 counties during her 2016 election that Trump won the same year.“That’s definitely Tammy’s bread and butter right there,” said campaign spokesperson Jackie Rosa, of Baldwin’s rural supporters.On the campaign trail, Baldwin has made stops at farms and in rural areas, launching a “Rural Leaders for Tammy” coalition to make her case in areas of the state that tend to lean red. Issues like healthcare access and hospital deserts and subsidies for farmers form core aspects of her platform. She has highlighted populist-leaning bills, like one she drafted with JD Vance, the Republican senator and vice-presidential candidate, to require goods and services developed with federal dollars in the US to be manufactured in the US. She has even taken up issues that are less popular with liberals, like removing gray wolves from Wisconsin’s endangered species list – a move supported by some farmers but criticized by environmental and conservation groups.“She never shied away from going out into the countryside,” said Hans Breitenmoser, a dairy farmer from northern Wisconsin and a member of the Lincoln county Democratic party. “I think her message has resonated to an extent, because, you know, it’s not just all BS – she tries to understand the issues, and understands the issues at a level that some other politicians don’t.”For Hovde to win the seat, he will have to erode that support and hope for high turnout outside heavily Democratic areas like Milwaukee and Dane county, which have generated historic voter turnout in recent elections.Polling so far shows a close race, with Baldwin holding an approximately seven-point lead over Hovde, according to a poll conducted at the end of July by the Marquette University Law School. An earlier poll, conducted in June – before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race – showed Hovde trailing Baldwin more closely.Hovde, whose campaign did not agree to an interview, is something of a blank slate. On his website, he highlights a few key issues – among them, immigration, foreign policy and healthcare – but does not specify policy solutions he supports. He has earned Trump’s endorsement – a possible boost for the businessman – but has not held public office, and will need to overcome accusations from the Baldwin campaign of carpetbagging. That could be challenging.Although Hovde grew up in Madison and maintains numerous real estate properties there, the Baldwin campaign has cast him as an out-of-touch rich guy, pointing to his mansion in Laguna Beach, California – and his status in years past as one of Orange county’s most influential businessmen – as evidence of his position as an outsider.Baldwin has focused much of her campaign messaging on the fact that with a net worth of more than $195m, Hovde would be among the wealthiest members of the Senate if elected.In recent political ads, Hovde has highlighted his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and the numerous international charities he operates to offer a more personal side and present his wealth as a political asset.But he handles the topic of his finances sometimes uncomfortably. In numerous talk radio interviews, Hovde, who has slammed the Democrats for persistently inflated consumer prices, acknowledged that inflation could be good for a wealthy businessman like himself.“Look – inflation helps in the short to medium term, people who own assets – I’ve benefitted, because my real estate values go up, my equity portfolio goes up, the value of my private companies go up,” said Hovde in 2021, during a Wisconsin talk radio show hosted by Vicki McKenna, a popular rightwing radio personality. “But it hammers people who have a set salary, or lower-income people.”On an episode of a rightwing podcast called The Truth with Lisa Boothe in March, he echoed a similar sentiment, decrying the rise of inflation and its impact on the middle class before noting that he himself had somewhat enjoyed the period of inflation. “For those that own assets, you know, I benefit because I own real estate and stocks and companies. So, yeah, it makes me wealthier, but it’s hammering, you know, 90% of Americans,” said Hovde.According to his most recent filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Hovde has loaned $13m to his campaign, which has raised about $16m in total so far. Baldwin’s campaign had raised $27m by the end of the most recent FEC reporting period.Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, with Kamala Harris ascending to the top of the ballot, likely offered Baldwin a boost in the tight race.Baldwin, who did not join calls for Biden to drop out of the race, nonetheless refrained from campaigning with Biden when he made stops in Wisconsin. Hovde seized on Biden’s unpopularity and flailing campaign to cast Baldwin as a close Biden ally, even suggesting she had played a part in a Democratic party conspiracy to hide Biden’s age from voters.“Just how long has Tammy Baldwin been involved in the Biden coverup?” asked one ad that ran in July.The impact of the shakeup at the top of the Democratic party ticket in July also quickly led to a deluge of funding for Democrats, including in Wisconsin.“Every single thing that I can measure is going up,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, told Wisconsin Public Radio on 19 August. “Fundraising has shot up, hundreds of thousands of dollars came in the 48 hours after that big decision, and the contributions have not stopped.” Rosa, the Baldwin campaign spokesperson, noted that after the vice-president announced her presidential bid, she had seen a “noticeable difference” in terms of enthusiasm and crowd sizes at Baldwin’s events.“But we’re always just really focused on our race,” said Rosa. “Of course, supporting up and down the ballot, Democrats getting across the finish line. Because Wisconsin is going to determine the White House – we’re going to determine the Senate majority.” More

    • 213 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Project 2025 started a half century ago. A Trump win could solidify it forever | David Sirota

      by

      You can be forgiven for thinking Vice-President Kamala Harris’s first attack ad against Donald Trump seems a little far-fetched. Launched this week, the television spot has all the hallmarks of a YouTube video promoting an internet conspiracy theory. There’s the obligatory scary music and the baritone narrator warning about a mysterious manifesto with the kind of cartoonish name that a Bond villain would label his blueprint for global conquest: Project 2025.And yet, this isn’t a Dr Evil send-up: Project 2025 is very real, it is absolutely Trump’s agenda and it wasn’t some slapdash screed that came out of nowhere. It is the culmination of the 50-year plot that our reporters at the Lever have uncovered in our new audio series Master Plan – a scheme first envisioned by the US supreme court justice who created the foundation for Citizens United and the modern era of corporate politics.Project 2025 touts itself as “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025” – a grandiose and self-important billing, but no overstatement. The 922-page manifesto is a plug-and-play agenda of detailed policies designed to immediately empower the conservative movement, billionaires and Republican donors the moment Trump is sworn in for a second term.Highlights include plans to kill off climate regulations; eviscerate pollution laws; terminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects Americans from Wall Street scams; raise taxes on the middle class to finance billionaire and corporate tax cuts; empower the White House to replace civil servants with ideological loyalists; and limit the government’s authority to enforce campaign finance laws designed to deter pay-to-play corruption.The blueprint’s provenance means that it isn’t some fanciful pie-in-the-sky wishlist – it is a meticulously constructed action plan designed to be implemented, just as an earlier version of it was in Trump’s first term.Project 2025 was built with the involvement of at least 140 former Trump administration officials, it is endorsed by a constellation of oligarch-funded conservative groups, and it is published by the powerful Heritage Foundation, which Trump himself lauded as “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America”.This connection to the Heritage Foundation isn’t incidental. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand half-century scheme to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society – a scheme first outlined a half-century ago.Heritage was originally launched in the early 1970s with seed funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. He told a historian that his political activism at the time was specifically “stirred” by a 1971 memo authored by the soon-to-be supreme court justice Lewis Powell. That memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce implored corporations and oligarchs to be “far more aggressive” in influencing the political system, which he feared was becoming far too responsive to popular demands for the regulation of business.“It is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system – at all levels and at every opportunity – be far more aggressive than in the past,” wrote Powell, who would soon after author a landmark supreme court ruling giving corporations new rights to spend money influencing elections. “There should be not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.”According to documents unearthed in Master Plan, the chamber established a taskforce on the Powell memorandum composed of executives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations including General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and United States Steel.At a series of secret meetings in the 1970s, those powerbrokers formulated ways corporate groups could build out their political, legal and communications apparatus. The resulting political infrastructure – conservative thinktanks, law firms and advocacy groups – aimed to weaken campaign finance laws so that corporations could wield more power, and then use that power to tilt the courts and legislative systems in their favor.With Powell’s memo inspiring Coors’s lavish funding, Heritage carved out a special role for itself in all this nascent organizing: it focused intently on public policy.“Around the vortex of Heritage have spun projects, individuals and organizations devoted to Coors’ ambition to rescue the United States from the gloom and despair he believes it to be in,” the Washington Post reported in 1975. “Weyrich and Coors agree that the liberalizing trend must be halted or the United States will become, in effect, another version of godless communism.”In a White House memo just before that story was published, President Gerald Ford’s deputy chief of staff, Dick Cheney, told his boss, Donald Rumsfeld: “Coors may have problems by using this tax exempt foundation to support political activities.”But as the Powell memo movement’s conservative legal groups secured supreme court victories gutting campaign finance laws and ushering in the era of dark money, such groups faced little scrutiny in how they blurred the legal distinction between dispassionate charity and political machine.Heritage was most certainly the latter, and within a few years of its launch, it was focused on influencing presidential administrations with the original version of Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership, described in the press at the time as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy”.“Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981 – the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency,” Heritage gushes in the foreword of Project 2025, which is officially the ninth installment of the Mandate for Leadership series. “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”Underscoring that success, Reagan delivered a speech at Heritage lauding “the importance of the Heritage Foundation, the remarkable work of Ed Feulner, Joe and Holly Coors [and] so many of you in this room in bringing to Washington the political revolution.”Fast forward through the neoliberal rampage of tax cuts and deregulation that defined Reagan’s term and three more Republican presidencies, and the question now is: would that same political revolution inspired by the Powell memo’s master plan continue if Trump wins again?The recent past offers clues: during the first year of Trump’s first term, Heritage boasted that two-thirds of its 2016 Mandate for Leadership recommendations were championed by the Republican president.Will Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda find the same receptive audience in a second Trump administration? Or should we trust Trump when now – under assault by Harris’s criticism – he insists he doesn’t even know what Project 2025 is?The answer to that can be found in the words of Trump’s own running mate.“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill,” wrote the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. “It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriter More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      This presidential race will be fought over competing understandings of ‘freedom’ | Eric Foner

      by

      The recently concluded Democratic national convention marked a sharp turn in US political rhetoric. “Freedom, where are you?” Beyoncé sang in the video that opened the gathering. Her song proved to be a fitting introduction to the days that followed. Joe Biden had made saving democracy from the threat of Maga authoritarianism the centerpiece of his ill-fated campaign for re-election. The keynote of Kamala Harris’s convention, invoked by nearly every speaker, was “freedom”.Nearly a century ago, in the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt linked freedom to economic security for ordinary Americans – “freedom from want” was one of the four freedoms summarizing the country’s aims in the second world war. This definition of freedom, a product of the New Deal, assumed an active role for the federal government. But since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan in effect redefined freedom as limited government, low taxes and unregulated economic enterprise, Democrats have pretty much ceded the word to their opponents. Now they want it back.Of course freedom – along with liberty, generally used as an equivalent – has been a US preoccupation ever since the American revolution gave birth to a nation that identified itself, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, as an “empire of liberty”, a unique embodiment of freedom in a world overrun by oppression. The declaration of independence includes liberty among mankind’s unalienable rights; the constitution announces at the outset its aim of securing the “blessings of liberty”. As a result, freedom has long been a powerful rhetorical weapon. As the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940: “Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow, knows that this is ‘The land of the free’ … [and] the ‘cradle of liberty’.”Yet freedom is neither a fixed idea nor an evolutionary progress toward a predetermined goal. The history of US freedom is a tale of debates and struggles. Often, battles for control of the idea illustrate the contrast between “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom, a dichotomy elaborated by Sir Isaiah Berlin in an influential essay in 1958. Negative liberty defines freedom as the absence of outside restraints on individual action. Positive liberty is a form of empowerment – the ability to set and fulfill one’s goals. As the contrast between FDR and Reagan illustrates, the first sees government as a threat to freedom and the second as removing barriers to its enjoyment, often by government intervention.The Democratic convention built upon this history. Positive and negative freedom co-existed and reinforced one another. The frequent calls for “reproductive freedom” – the right to make intimate decisions free of governmental interference (or as vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz put it, the principle of “mind your own damn business”) – embraced and expanded the idea of negative freedom. Never before has the 60s slogan “the personal is political” found such powerful expression at a party convention.Positive freedom also made its appearance, notably in Bernie Sanders’ litany of future government action against the likes of big oil and big pharma in the name of combating economic inequality and “corporate greed”. Walz, echoing FDR, commented that people who lack access to affordable housing and healthcare are not truly free.There is another crucial element to the ongoing debate about freedom: who is entitled to enjoy it. When the constitution was ratified, the United States was home to half a million enslaved African Americans. The first laws defining how immigrants could become citizens, enacted in the 1790s, limited the process to “white” persons. It took more than half a century for slavery to be eradicated and for Black persons, for a brief period during the era of Reconstruction that followed the civil war, to be incorporated into the body politic.This history exemplifies what the historian Tyler Stovall, in a recent book, calls “White Freedom”. Fast forward to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. With its freedom rides, freedom songs and insistent cry “freedom now”, that revolution linked freedom with equality regardless of race or national origin. What is now remembered simply as “the movement” did more to redefine the meaning of freedom than any other development of the last century. Its fruits were visible every night in the Democratic convention’s remarkably diverse composition.Throughout our history, freedom has been defined, in large measure, by its limits. This is how the Confederacy was able to claim to be fighting for liberty. The historian Jefferson Cowie, whose book Freedom’s Dominion won the Pulitzer prize for history in 2023, argues that negative freedom, expressed as opposition to federal intervention in local affairs, has often boiled down to little more than the determination of local elites to exercise political and economic power over subordinate groups without outside interference. Civil rights were condemned as a threat to white people’s liberty (the freedom, for example, to choose who is allowed to live in one’s neighborhood). The vaunted independence of men depended on limiting the freedom of women.With the party conventions over, the campaign now becomes, in part, a contest to define the meaning of freedom. Historical precedents exist for such a battle. In 1936, the New York Times observed that the fight for possession of “the ideal of freedom” was the central issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Three decades later, the journalist Theodore White noted that freedom was the “dominant word” of both civil rights demonstrators and supporters of the conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, but they meant entirely different things by it. The United States, he concluded, sorely needed “a commonly-agreed-on concept of freedom”.Freedom is often used to mobilize support in wartime. No recent president employed it for this purpose more egregiously than George W Bush, who made freedom an all-purpose justification for the invasion of Iraq. In his first inaugural address, Bush used the words “freedom”, “free” or “liberty” seven times. In his second, a 10-minute speech delivered after the invasion, they appeared no fewer than 49 times.Bush’s egregious distortion of the ideal of freedom seemed to discourage his successors from using the word at all. Barack Obama preferred the language of community and personal responsibility. Nor has freedom been a major theme of Donald Trump, who prefers to speak of raw military and economic power. But Trump’s long campaign to deny that Obama is a US citizen, and his calls for the immense deportation of undocumented immigrants, resonate with those who seek to redraw freedom’s boundaries along racial and nativist lines.The Democratic convention appears to have guaranteed that the 2024 election will be a contest over the meaning of freedom. Whatever the result, it will likely define American freedom for years to come.

      Eric Foner’s many books on American history include The Story of American Freedom More