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      The first 100 days of Biden were also the first 100 without Trump – that’s telling | Robert Reich

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      By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.Two-thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn’t feel radical.Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Bill Clinton failed to accomplish and which Barack Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as preschool, public community college, paid family and medical leave, home care and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared with workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few if any social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it’s time we caught up.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s handBesides, it’s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn’t feel scary. He’s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He’s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it’s clear he knows them.Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it’s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.In his address to Congress, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first 100 days. They had been accomplished “because of you”, he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden’s proposals. Donald Trump left it with little more than a list of grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans: that Trump would have been re-elected but for fraudulent votes and a “deep state” conspiracy, that Democrats are “socialists” and that the “left” is intent on taking away American freedoms.Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he is to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump’s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden’s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.Trump’s giant $1.9tn tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which “trickled down”, make Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.Trump’s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden’s “buy American” initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump’s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers’ refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes have alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump’s overt racism and overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden’s initiatives to end police brutality and “root out systemic racism”, as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.With any luck, Biden’s plans might prove to be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working-class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the rightwing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury. More

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      Trump’s border wall hits a wall as Pentagon cancels parts funded from its budget

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      The US Department of Defense said on Friday it was cancelling the construction of parts of former president Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico that were being built using military funds.All unobligated money was being returned to military, the Pentagon said.Trump declared a national emergency in 2019, in an effort to redirect funding to build a wall along the southern border.Joe Biden issued a proclamation on 20 January, his first day in office, ordering a freeze on border wall projects and directing a review of the legality of funding and contracting methods.“The Department of Defense is proceeding with canceling all border barrier construction projects paid for with funds originally intended for other military missions and functions such as schools for military children, overseas military construction projects in partner nations, and the national guard and reserve equipment account,” said a Pentagon spokesperson, Jamal Brown.Brown said the returned funds would be used for deferred military construction projects.It was not immediately clear how much would be returned to the military, but it was likely to be several billion dollars.Trump’s diversion of funds from the Pentagon was heavily criticized by lawmakers, who said it put national security at risk and circumvented Congress.In 2019, the military said more than 120 construction projects would be adversely affected by Trump’s move.The Department of Homeland Security also announced on Friday that it would take steps to address “physical dangers resulting from the previous administration’s approach to border wall construction”.It said it would repair the Rio Grande Valley flood barrier system, into which it said wall construction under the Trump administration had blown large holes. The department also said it work to remediate soil erosion along a wall segment in San Diego. More

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      Restorationists urge Jill Biden to erase Melania Trump’s Rose Garden makeover

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      Efforts to erase the Trump family legacy have reached the White House potting sheds and nurseries with Jill Biden being urged to restore the mansion’s garden to a state that predates ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s 2019 makeover.An online petition calling on the first lady to return the Rose Garden to its “former glory” has been signed by more than 54,000 people. The petition says Biden’s predecessor “had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself”.Restorationists urge that the garden be returned to a state that was created in the early 1960s by Jacqueline Kennedy with the help of famed designer Bunny Mellon.“Jackie’s legacy was ripped away from Americans who remembered all that the Kennedys meant to us,” the petition reads, and notes that her husband, the president, had said that “the White House had no garden equal in quality or attractiveness to the gardens that he had seen and in which he had been entertained in Europe.”In July 2020, as her husband fought for re-election and the coronavirus pandemic raged, Trump announced that her renovation project, which included electrical upgrades for television appearances, a new walkway and new flowers and shrubs, would be an “act of expressing hope and optimism for the future”.The changes to the garden were the first since Michelle Obama initiated a project in 2009 to dig up an 1,100 square foot plot on the South Lawn adjacent to the tennis courts for a vegetable garden.The plan included replacing crab apple trees, introducing a new assortment of white “JFK” and pale pink “peace” roses, and a new drainage system. “In a way, the metaphor of openness and improved access became our overall plan concept,” wrote Perry Guillot, the landscape architect overseeing the project.But the renovation met with criticism focused on Trump’s decision to go ahead with her project during the Covid-19 pandemic. There is no indication, as yet, that Jill Biden plans to act on the petition’s recommendations.On Thursday, her husband was spotted by the White House press corps picking a dandelion for his wife from the White House lawn before they boarded a helicopter.A day later, on Friday, the first lady commemorated Arbor Day by planting a linden tree on the north lawn of the White House. Her press office said it was to replace one removed last month that was deemed a risk and had not been planted by a historical figure.“Who doesn’t plant trees in high heels?” she said. More

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      Josh Hawley attacks ‘woke capitalism’ and claims to be victim of cancel culture

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      In a new book, the Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri attacks what he calls “woke capitalism” and claims to be a victim of cancel culture over his actions around the Capitol attack of 6 January.Hawley, 41, is a leading figure on the far right of the Republican party, jostling to inherit Donald Trump’s populist crown and with it the presidential nomination in 2024.The Tyranny of Big Tech will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.In his introduction, Hawley seeks to defend his actions surrounding what he calls the “grisly riot” at the US Capitol which was stormed by a pro-Trump mob in scenes of violence that shocked the world and cost five lives.But he does not mention his most controversial act: raising a fist in solidarity with Trump supporters told by the then president to march on the building and “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.Hawley’s gesture became a worldwide symbol of a riot in which the mob roamed the halls Congress, in some cases looking for lawmakers to kidnap or kill. More than 400 people have been charged.Later on 6 January, in a process delayed by the riot and with the world in shock, Republicans in the House and Senate went through with formal objections to results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, states which Biden won.Hawley objected to the Pennsylvania result. In Arizona, Republicans are proceeding with a hugely controversial audit which Trump has backed. Had the two states been overturned, Biden would still be president.Publisher Simon & Schuster dropped Hawley’s book, only for it to be swiftly picked up by Regnery, a conservative imprint for which Simon & Schuster handles distribution.That notwithstanding, Hawley writes: “This is the book the corporate monopolies did not want you to read.”He also claims “not [to have] encourag[ed] the riot, as the publisher certainly knew” and says he “fiercely condemned the violence and the thugs who perpetrated it”.He says his “sin” was to formally object to election results in one state, “precisely as permitted by law” and as Democrats had done before.Hawley writes that he was “branded a ‘seditionist’ and worse. But like many others attacked by the corporations and the left, my real crime was to have challenged the reign of the woke capitalists.”On Monday, the senator responded to this story on Twitter.“Oh dear,” he wrote. “I’ve offended the delicate sensibilities of The Guardian! I didn’t get their approval before I wrote my book. Order a copy today and own the libs.”On the page, Google and Facebook are among Hawley’s main targets, in part for their exploitation of user data. He does not discuss his own links with donor Peter Thiel, founder of the tech firm Palantir, which became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.Hawley has introduced the “Bust Up Big Tech Act” and found some common ground with Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat seeking antitrust reform. But the Republican remains a leading troll for liberal discontent. Last week, his was the sole vote against an anti-Asian hate crimes bill which 94 senators backed.On Monday, meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that more than 200 staff members at Simon & Schuster had signed and delivered a petition demanding the company cease all dealings with people connected to the Trump administration.The petition, reportedly supported by “several thousand outside supporters, including well-known Black writers”, followed the company’s rejection last week of a staff demand it not publish two books by former vice-president Mike Pence. More

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      Trump delayed $20bn in aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, report finds

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      The Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, according to a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector General.The efforts to deliver recovery funding to the island were “unnecessarily delayed by bureaucratic obstacles”, according to the 46-page report. The hurricane, which hit the island in 2017, killed thousands of people and left thousands more without electricity or water for months.One of the main hurdles was the requirement imposed by the Office of Management and Budget, which established an interagency review before grant approvals, according to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud). The process, which was never before required for allocating disaster funds, prevented Hud from publishing its draft notice of funding by the target date.The investigators were unable to determine why the extra layer of review was required due “denials of access and refusals to cooperate”, according to the report.The inspector general’s office conducted 31 interviews of 20 current and former Hud officials and two now-former Puerto Rico department of housing senior officials to write the report. However, investigators did not have access to the former Hud secretary Ben Carson and other political officials. The investigators were also denied or delayed access to Hud information on several occasions.The report found that Hud’s review and approval of their funding action plan for Puerto Rico was delayed due to the 2018-2019 government shutdown.“Staffing shortages due to the shutdown and miscommunications between HUD and the Puerto Rico Department of Housing pertaining to the grantee’s bank information delayed PRDOH’s ability to access grant funds until several days after the shutdown ended,” reads the document.The office of the inspector general investigation also said that both the former Hud secretary and former Hud assistant secretary Brian Montgomery expressed “mounting concerns and frustrations” to the then OMB director, Russell Vought, about Hud’s “inability” to expedite the release of funds.The report was conducted after a request from representatives Nydia Velázquez, Bennie Thompson, and Raúl Grijalva to investigate several allegations that had been reported in a January 2019 Washington Post article related to the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program (CDBG-DR) funds appropriated for Puerto Rico.In February 2020, the office of the inspector general received a request from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Edward Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen, and Representatives Joaquín Castro, Darren Soto, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, James P McGovern, Raúl Grijvala, and José Serrano, asking the office to conduct an inquiry into whether delays in Hud’s release of the disaster-recovery funds for Puerto Rico violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.On Monday, Hud removed restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on access to $8.2bn in Community Development Block Grant Mitigation. The agency stalled the release of the disaster relief aid in 2019 and imposed additional restrictions on how the island could access the funds. The agency cited corruption and financial mismanagement concerns for the blocks.Hurricane Maria hit hundreds of thousands of homes on 20 September 2017, and many were still living under blue tarps three years later.More than 5,000 people died in Puerto Rico in 2017 due to the hurricane, according to a study by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. A George Washington University suggests more than 2,000 died due to the hurricane.On Wednesday, a group of Puerto Rican scientists said they will begin to conduct verbal autopsies or surveys with relatives, friends and other acquaintances of the fatal victims of the hurricane. The study aims to elaborate on the causes and factors that contributed to the deaths.The study is a collaboration between the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health and George Washington University, which were hired by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and will conduct the report as part of an order by the US Congress.“Some people might have died instantly due to drowning, landslides or collapses, but others might have died days, weeks or months later due to socio-environmental and infrastructure factors, such as the lack of water or electricity, oxygen or medicines,” Pablo Méndez Lázaro, associate professor of the department of environmental health at the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health, told a local news outlet. More

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      Joe Biden’s southern border challenge: reversing Trumpism

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      The 46th US president took office promising a more welcoming immigration policy. But Republicans are calling a new wave of migrants at the southern border a ‘crisis’ and demanding action. In this episode of Full Story, Washington bureau chief David Smith describes the pressure Biden is under to respond to the issue. Plus, the Guardian’s Nina Lakhani describes what she witnessed on the border in Texas, where migrants are still being detained, and many sent straight back across the border

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      Read Nina Lakhani’s story about her visit to the US-Mexico border in Texas here. More

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      Trumpism lives on in new thinktank – but critics say it’s ‘just a grift’

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      Malcolm X, Mark Twain, Malcolm Gladwell. Lewis Carroll, Steve Jobs. Douglas Adams, Mohandas Gandhi, Rocky Balboa – all seem unlikely sources of inspiration for a definition of Trumpism.Yet these are among the prominent figures quoted by members of a new thinktank dedicated to resurrecting former US president Donald Trump’s populist-nationalist agenda.The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) describes itself as both “non-profit” and “non-partisan”. Critics, however, regard it as a cash cow for alumni of the Trump administration whose stained reputations make it hard to find gainful employment.Despite Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp”, the AFPI reportedly has a first-year budget of $20m, which it hopes to double to $40m next year, and plans to expand beyond its current headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to locations that include a spacious office on Washington’s Capitol Hill.The AFPI unveiled a website this week replete with images of the Stars and Stripes and Mount Rushmore. It profiles 35 team members with, in most cases, an inspirational quotation from a famous person.The board chair, Linda McMahon, for example, a former professional wrestling executive who led Trump’s Small Business Administration, attributes a line to the actor and comedian Lucille Ball: “If you want something done, give it to a busy woman to do it.”Pam Bondi, an ex-Florida attorney general who defended Trump against impeachment, quotes the French fashion designer Coco Chanel: “Keep your heels, head and standards high.” Kaelan Dorr, who was senior adviser at the treasury department, dips into film fiction with the boxer Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone: “Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up.”But vice-chair Larry Kudlow, former economic adviser to Trump, simply quotes himself: “Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity.”Trump this week gave the organization his blessing, issuing a statement in praise of its “patriots” as “some of the greatest champions for freedom, free enterprise, national greatness, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities, that our Nation has ever seen”.The former president said these “freedom warriors” have his full support “as they work not only to preserve the historic accomplishments of my Administration, but also to propel the America First Agenda into the future”.The team includes Rick Perry, former energy secretary, and John Ratcliffe, ex-director of national intelligence. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, will be informal advisers to the group, according to the Axios website.The AFPI’s president and chief executive is Brooke Rollins, whose past roles have included policy director for Perry when he was governor of Texas, head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) thinktank and Trump’s top domestic policy adviser.With priorities including criminal justice reform, government efficiency and education reform, Rollins oversaw a significant expansion and enhanced profile of the TPPF during her 15 years there, a formula she hopes to replicate at the new thinktank. Her successor as chief executive of the TPPF, Kevin Roberts, said: “She loves ideas. She loves policy.“She wants to be able to continue to promote the great successes that came from the Trump administration, many of them originating in states; that really makes sense when you think about what she was doing before she went to the White House. I think she’s going to be a forceful and classy voice of objection to some of the priorities of the Biden administration. She’s going to do an exceptional job in leading the group.”Roberts believes that Trump’s policy achievements on criminal justice reform, the US-Mexico border and the pre-pandemic economy are worth preserving, studying and developing. “I think bottling that up into a thinktank and asking questions from an academic point of view – how was it that we achieved that? – is really important,” he said.The AFPI is organized around 20 “policy centers”, such as homeland security and energy independence. A profile of the “Center for 1776” rails against “academic elites and demagogues” who are choosing to “embrace identity politics, division, and submission”. It appears to be picking up where Trump’s “1776 Commission”, a thinly disguised rightwing backlash against the New York Times’s 1619 Project, left off.But some observers found irony in the notion that a president who exhibited few ideological commitments – other than “owning the libs” and Republican orthodoxy on tax cuts for the rich – is now spawning a policy institute.Michael D’Antonio, an author and political commentator on CNN, said: “I guess I give them credit for exhibiting creativity. I didn’t expect that the level of gall would reach the point where they would actually create an institute devoted to policies that never existed in the first place.Many of these people are so disgraced that their options for gainful employment outside of this make-believe world of Trump policy are very limited“Trump is nothing if not energetically imaginative and this is a great way to suggest that there was something that never existed. Maybe they could at last develop Trump-related policies. So maybe now there’ll be a healthcare plan and it could come from this institute.”D’Antonio suggested that the AFPI will spend time attacking Joe Biden and is unlikely to impress political scholars. “I can’t imagine anyone outside of the Trumpian universe taking anything that they produce seriously,” he added. “It’s not exactly a team of policy superstars. Many of these people are so disgraced that their options for gainful employment outside of this make-believe world of Trump policy are very limited.”When a president leaves office, his former staff often slot into lucrative work on a corporate board or in the lobbying industry. Trump’s uniquely divisive leadership appears to have stigmatized former aides, although several – including Kudlow – have taken roles at Fox News, Fox Business or other conservative media. The AFPI offers another refuge.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, wondered: “How could anything having to do with Trump have the word ‘think’ in it? No. It’s all just a grift. It won’t be a thinktank. It’ll be a vehicle for people to give money to pay people who worked for Trump and can’t get hired elsewhere to keep Trump relevant.”As Trump resides at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, teasing another run for president in 2024, organizations have sprung up to carry on his legacy. They include the Conservative Partnership Institute, established by the former Republican senator Jim DeMint, and America First Legal, a legal group set up by the former White House policy adviser Stephen Miller.The AFPI will easily be the biggest and may help Trump maintain his grip on the Republican party, but will have to work hard to establish credibility in Washington’s already crowded hive of policy thinktanks.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which traces its origins to 1916, said: “This is not the first research centre or joint venture to have been established to give a patina of intellectual respectability to Trumpism and it probably won’t be the last.“After all, there are a lot of unemployed Trump alumni and, to be fair, if you strip away all of the unacceptable personal stuff, all of the prejudice, you are still left with a handful of ideas that form the core of Trumpism, for better or for worse. It obviously represents a shift in the intellectual centre of gravity within the Republican party.”Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, added: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that, in four years or eight years, we’ll look back on this flurry of intellectual activity in the Trumpist wing of the Republican party and say this is where the political eruption that Donald Trump represents was organised into something that the party could newly coalesce around.”The AFPI also includes Paula White-Cain, a Trump spiritual adviser and televangelist who will lead a “Center for American Values”. Her online profile quotes the African American poet Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” More

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      Mike Lindell’s new free speech network won’t let you use the Lord’s name in vain

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      Mike Lindell, the man best known for his internet pillow company My Pillow, as well as for his fierce allegiance to Donald Trump, is set to launch a new free speech platform this week that he thinks will put YouTube and Twitter out of business. But it turns out it will limit what users can say – by stopping them from, among other things, taking the Lord’s name in vain.“Everyone is going to be able to talk freely,” said Mike Lindell about the platform, called Frank, which is set to roll out on 19 April, in an interview with the conservative host Graham Ledger on the Ledger Report podcast. “When you come over now you are going to be able to speak out and have opinions.”“You don’t get to use the four swear words: the c-word, the n-word, the f-word, or God’s name in vain,” Lindell explained in a video on the Frank landing page.In an attempt to differentiate itself from other “anything goes” conservative-leaning social networking platforms, Lindell, a Christian, has laid out the type of speech his users will not be able to freely use, including profanity, sexual content, and blasphemous language.Lindell, the, let us say, creatively minded political theorist, who was banned from Twitter earlier this year for his persistent lies about how Trump actually won the 2020 election, met with the former president in January apparently urging him to consider martial law to defend that claim, and has recently said he’s hired private investigators to look into why Fox News won’t book him any more, has framed the social media venture as a mix between Twitter and YouTube.“You’re going to have your own like YouTube channel, only that’s your Twitter handle,” he’s said.Oh and, by the way, it will also put both companies out of business he said.Mike Lindell announces that he’ll be unveiling a new social media platform within two weeks that will put both Twitter and YouTube out of business. pic.twitter.com/PsDuBOWd5H— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 11, 2021
      He has also, without necessarily explaining how the concept will work, promised users more followers, certainly a unique pitch.“People are going to have more followers,” Lindell told Steve Bannon recently. “Ten times more followers.”In a shocking move, Lindell has admitted that criticism of Trump will be permitted on the site.“Free speech is not pornography. Free speech is not ‘I’m going to kill you’,” said Lindell, who is currently being sued by voting machine manufacturer Dominion for $1.3bn over his own personal free speech about the election. More