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Democratic leaders across US work to lead resistance against Trump’s agenda
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 November 2024, 14:00
After the November elections ushered in a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, Democratic leaders across the country are once again preparing to lead the resistance to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he would convene a special legislative session next month to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights”.Washington state’s governor-elect, Bob Ferguson, who is currently the state’s attorney general, said his legal team has been preparing for months for the possibility of a second Trump term – an endeavor that included a “line-by-line” review of Project 2025, the 900+ page policy blueprint drafted by the president-elect’s conservative allies.And the governors of Illinois and Colorado this week unveiled a new coalition designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism, as the nation prepares for a president who has vowed to seek retribution against his political enemies and to only govern as a dictator on “day one”.“We know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy,” the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said on a conference call announcing the group, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. “We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it.”With Democrats locked out of control in Washington, many in the party will turn to blue state leaders – governors, attorneys general and mayors – as a bulwark against a second Trump administration. For these ambitious Democrats, it is also an opportunity to step into the leadership void left by Kamala Harris’s defeat.Progressives such as Newsom and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are viewed as potential presidential contenders in 2028, while Democratic governors in states that voted for Trump such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are seen as models for how the party can begin to rebuild their coalition. And Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, returned home to Minnesota with a national profile and two years left of his gubernatorial term.Leaders of the nascent blue state resistance are pre-emptively “Trump-proofing” against a conservative governing agenda, which they have cast as a threat to the values and safety of their constituents. As a candidate, Trump promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In statements and public remarks, several Democrats say they fear the Trump administration will seek to limit access to medication abortion or seek to undermine efforts to provide reproductive care to women from states with abortion bans. They also anticipate actions by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations and expand gun rights.“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people – you come through me,” Pritzker said last week.Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory shocked the nation, blue state leaders say they have a tested – and updated – playbook to draw upon. But they also acknowledge that Trump 2.0 may present new and more difficult challenges.Ferguson said Trump’s first-term executive actions were “often sloppy”, which created an opening for states to successfully challenge them in court. Eight years later, and after studying Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, he anticipates the next Trump White House will be “better prepared” this time around.Pritzker said Trump was surrounding himself with “absolute loyalists to his cult of personality and not necessarily to the law”. “Last time, he didn’t really know where the levers of government were,” the governor said on a call with reporters this week. “I think he probably does now.”The courts have also become more conservative than they were when Trump took office eight years ago, a direct result of his first-term appointments to the federal bench, which included many powerful federal appeals court judges and three supreme court justices.The political landscape has also changed. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Despite Republican control of Congress, there were a number of Trump skeptics willing – at least initially – to buck the president during his first two years in office.This time around, Trump is all but certain to win the popular vote, and he made surprising gains in some of the bluest corners of the country.Though the former president came nowhere close to winning his home state of New York, he made significant inroads, especially on Long Island. At a post-election conference last week, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, struck a more neutral tone. Hochul, who faces a potentially tough re-election in 2026, vowed to protect constituents against federal overreach, while declaring that she was prepared to work with “him or anybody regardless of party”.In New Jersey, where Trump narrowed his loss from 16 percentage points in 2020 to five percentage points in 2024, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, acknowledged the result was a “sobering moment” for the party and country. Outlining his approach to the incoming administration, Murphy said: “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”Progressives and activists say they are looking to Democratic leaders to lead the charge against Trump’s most extreme proposals, particularly on immigration.“Trump may be re-elected but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for young people brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers.She called on state and local officials, as well as university heads and business leaders, to “use every tool at their disposal” to resist Trump’s mass deportation campaign, stressing: “There is a lot we can do to ensure Trump and his cabinet are not successful in their plans.”State attorneys general are again poised to play a pivotal role in curbing the next administration’s policy ambitions.“The quantity of litigation since the first Trump administration has been really off the charts – it’s at a new level,” said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “I fully expect that to continue in Trump 2.0.”There were 160 multi-state filings against the Trump administration during his four years in office, twice as many as were filed against Barack Obama during his entire eight-year presidency, according to a database maintained by Nolette.Many of the Democratic lawsuits succeeded – at least initially – in delaying or striking down Trump administration policies or regulations, Nolette said. Attorneys general can also leverage their state’s influence and economic power by entering legal settlements with companies. States have used this approach in the past to “advance their own regulatory goals”, Nolette said, for example, forcing the auto industry to adopt stricter environmental regulations.In a proclamation calling for a special session next month, Newsom asked the legislature to bolster the state’s legal funding to challenge – and defend California against – the Trump administration. Among his concerns, the California Democrat identified civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, as well as Trump’s threats to withhold disaster funding from the state and the potential for his administration to repeal protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.Trump responded on Truth Social, using a derisive nickname for the Democratic governor: “Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”Democratic leaders in battleground states that Trump won are also calibrating their responses – and not all are eager to join the resistance.“I don’t think that’s the most productive way to govern Arizona,” the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, told reporters this week, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Hobbs, who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight in 2026, said she would “stand up against actions that hurt our communities” but declined to say how she would respond if Trump sought to deport Dreamers or to nationalize the Arizona national guard as part of his mass deportation campaign.The state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who also faces re-election in two years, drew a harder line against Trump, vowing to fight “unconstitutional behavior” and protect abortion access, according to Axios. In an interview on MSNBC, Mayes said she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against allies of the former president who attempted to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in the state.Yet she insisted there would be areas of common ground. She urged Trump to revive a bipartisan border deal that he had previously tanked and called on the next administration to send more federal resources and agents to help combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the new Indivisible Guide, a manual developed by former Democratic congressional staffers after Trump’s election in 2016 and recently updated to confront a new era of Maga politics, envisions a major role for blue states.“Over the next two years, your Democratic elected officials will make choices every single day about whether to stand up to Maga or whether to go along with it,” the Indivisible guide states. “Your spirited, determined advocacy will ensure that the good ones know they’ve got a movement behind them as they fight back – and the bad ones know they’re on notice.”Among the examples of actions blue state activists can demand their leaders consider, it suggests establishing protections for out-of-state residents seeking abortion access or gender-affirming care; refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and forging regional compacts to safeguard environmental initiatives, data privacy and healthcare.Democratic leaders at every level and across the country – even those in purple or red states – can serve as “backstops for protecting the democratic space”, said Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible.“The important things are to be proactive and bold, to be innovative and to work with each other,” she said. “I don’t think everybody has to have all of the answers right now, but to have that intention and that commitment and to not shrink down in anticipation of a more oppressive federal government.” More
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Rudy Giuliani turns over property to former election workers he defamed
by Eliana Willis 16 November 2024, 13:48
Rudy Giuliani has relinquished dozens of watches and a Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148m defamation judgment against him, his lawyer said.Joseph Cammarata said in a letter filed late on Friday in Manhattan federal court that the trove of watches and a ring were delivered by FedEx to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, in the morning.The 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 was turned over at an address in Hialeah, Florida, and an undisclosed amount of funds from Giuliani’s Citibank accounts were also surrendered to the two women who won the judgment, according to the letter.Cammarata called Giuliani “a victim of political persecution” in an email and said this month’s election demonstrated Americans were tired of “witch-hunts, indictments, impeachments, prosecutions, convictions, civil cases and judgments”.On 22 October, Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets. But after Giuliani missed that deadline, he appeared in court on 7 November and Liman threatened to hold him in contempt.A jury previously ruled that Giuliani owes Freeman and Moss around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.“The road to justice for Ruby and Shaye has been long, but they have never wavered,” Aaron Nathan, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss, said in October. “Last December, a jury delivered a powerful verdict in their favor, and we’re proud that today’s ruling makes that verdict a reality.”“We are proud that our clients will finally begin to receive some of the compensation to which they are entitled for Giuliani’s actions,” said Nathan. “This outcome should send a powerful message that there is a price to pay for those who choose to intentionally spread disinformation.”Giuliani was also ordered to turn over his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York and several items of Yankees memorabilia. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.But in his letter, Cammarata argued that some of Giuliani’s other possessions should also be exempt from the judgment under New York and Florida law.That includes all apparel – even a shirt signed by New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio that is part of the judgment – and all household furniture, as well as a refrigerator, radio receiver, television set, computer, cellphone, tableware and cooking utensils, the letter stated.Representatives for Freeman and Moss said last week that they visited Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment only to discover it was cleared out well before the October deadline. Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.After losing the defamation case last fall, Giuliani declared bankruptcy to try to avoid paying Freeman and Moss the money they were owed. A judge dismissed that bankruptcy case earlier this year.After the 2020 election, Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused Freeman and Moss of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night in 2020. He continued to do so even after Georgia election officials said the video showed both women doing their jobs with no issue. They have also been formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing.The video and lie about the two women became central to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. The ex-president mentioned Freeman by name on a phone call in 2021 with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asking him to overturn the vote.Both women have rarely been seen in public since the incident, but have spoken about how it has upended their lives. They received constant death threats, were chased from their homes and lost their jobs. During the defamation trial in Washington DC, they spoke about the depression they faced after the election.Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York and Washington DC, has shown little regret for his false statements. During the trial, he gave a press conference on the courthouse steps in which he insisted everything he said about Freeman and Moss was true.Cammarata, in his Friday letter, also asked to delay Giuliani’s January trial over the disposition of some of his assets so that he can attend president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.Giuliani has claimed he was the victim of a “political vendetta” and expects to win on appeal and get back all his possessions. More
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Are US women protesting Trump by ‘swearing off sex with men’? | Arwa Mahdawi
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 November 2024, 13:00
Have rumours of a US sex strike been greatly exaggerated?Sex sells. Sex strikes, meanwhile, make for an irresistible headline. Ever since Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the election, there have been endless headlines about how American women are emulating South Korea’s fringe 4B movement (which encourages heterosexual women not to date, procreate, marry or have sex with men) and “swearing off sex with men” in protest.“A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women,” a recent op-ed in the New York Times proclaimed, for example.“No sex. No dating. No marriage. No children. Interest grows in 4B movement to swear off men,” a PBS headline declared.“Ahead of Trump’s Second Term, Calls for a Sex Strike Grow Online,” the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) wrote.It’s certainly true that there has been a spike in US interest in the 4B movement. Voluntary celibacy was growing in popularity long before the election but Trump’s victory gave it a huge boost. There are more than 100,000 videos about 4B on TikTok and there has been a surge in Google searches relating to it. There have also been various viral calls for women to withhold sex in order to protest against Trump. (Just in case you’re wondering if you have a severe case of deja vu, there were also calls for a sex strike during Trump’s first term.)But is this online chatter actually translating to offline action? It doesn’t seem that way yet. There is zero evidence that there are large-scale sex strikes protesting against Trump happening in the US. All the hand-wringing by the likes of the New York Times seems to be over something that doesn’t actually exist. The headlines treating women as some sort of monolith also obscure the fact that, according to AP VoteCast, 53% of white women voted for Trump this year.Still, that doesn’t mean that growing interest in 4B should be written off as some sort of meaningless fad. On the contrary, engagement with the movement points to the fact that many women are not taking Trump’s victory lying down. While there may be no proof of widespread strikes in the sheets, there have been plenty of demonstrations on the streets. Meanwhile, online sales of emergency contraceptives and abortion pills are rocketing before the “reproductive apocalypse” that will be Trump’s second term. With rights being rolled back and pregnancy growing increasingly dangerous in the US, women are also reconsidering whether they want to have children.Let’s say that sex strikes did actually take off, however. Might they be effective? The most famous sex strike certainly was. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, women withhold sex in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian war and the ruse pays off: peace is declared. Since then, there have been plenty of other real-world sex strikes with varying results, waged everywhere from Belgium to Liberia. A small town in Colombia held a “crossed legs” protest in 2011, for example; women refused sex with their husbands until the government paved a road linking their town to the rest of the province. The protest is widely considered to have been successful.Less headline-worthy forms of protest, however, tend to be rather more effective. This, by the way, is the rather less talked-about message in Lysistrata itself. As the cultural critic and classicist Helen Morales told the Guardian back in 2022, the play isn’t just about sex strikes: “There are elder women seizing control of the treasury and the younger women withdraw their unpaid labour at home. They’re much more a model for effecting political change.”How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s women – photo essay“It was important for us to look beyond the traditional representations of Afghan women as passive victims of the Taliban and show them as active players in their own lives,” say journalist Mélissa Cornet and photographer Kiana Hayeri in this piece for the Guardian.Argentina votes alone against UN resolution combating misogynistic online violenceWhich is not a huge surprise as Argentina’s President Javier Milei is incredibly rightwing and a vocal critic of the UN.Gender-fluid Mary, Queen of Scots ballet to debut at Edinburgh festival 2025It’s the latest example of a trend of gender-neutral casting in artistic productions. You can guarantee that this will drive the usual suspects completely bonkers.Armie Hammer’s mother gifted him a vasectomy for his birthdayThe disgraced actor, who has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, has returned to public life via a podcast. He seems to be having trouble rustling up guests so recently had his mum on the podcast, where she shared this little snippet of info.What happened to Palestinian-Egyptian actor May Calamawy’s role in Gladiator II?When Calamawy was originally cast (long before 7 October 2023) it was reported that she’d have an “important” or leading role. Now it seems like she has been all but cut from the movie – relegated to a tiny non-speaking background part. There has been a lot of speculation that this is punishment for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. As we have seen, talking about a genocide and ethnic cleansing can be a real career-killer.Sydney Sweeney says female solidarity in Hollywood is ‘fake’Wait, you’re telling me that Hollywood – a place that fetishizes unrealistic beauty ideals and where women over 40 struggle to find roles – isn’t a utopia of intersectional feminism? You’re kidding me!Iran announces ‘treatment clinic’ for women who defy strict hijab laws“It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison,” one young woman from Iran told the Guardian.Sweden’s minister for gender equality is terrified of bananasAs someone who also hates bananas with a passion, I would like to extend my solidarity to Paulina Brandberg, whose banana-phobia has made international headlines. As one of her colleagues noted, we should be focusing on her work to help vulnerable women rather than her hatred for an alarmingly yellow fruit.The week in pawtriarchyJust in case you were wondering whether the US could get any more dystopian, it turns out that robot dogs are guarding Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Still, probably better to have robots rather than the real thing considering how close Trump is to Kristi Noem. The South Dakota governor, whom Trump has just picked for head of homeland security, famously wrote about shooting and killing her family dog, Cricket, and an unnamed goat. More
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Loyalists and jesters fill Trump’s ‘winter White House’ for court of King Donald
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 November 2024, 12:00
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View image in fullscreenThe shutters are down, the curtains are open, and Donald Trump’s opulent, waterfront palace of intrigue is open for business once more. A succession of ambitious, ultra-loyal subjects has paraded through, vying for attention and seeking favors from the throne. Servants fall over themselves to indulge their master’s every whim. And then there are the jesters …Given this week’s extraordinary developments at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, as he builds the cabinet with which he will govern in January, it is difficult to escape the notion that the operation is being run something akin to a royal court.Trump certainly gives the appearance of acting as America’s first monarch since the official end of the revolutionary war in 1783, plotting, scheming and playing favorites, and setting individuals against each other as his courtiers are assembled.His unexpected nomination as attorney general of the Mar-a-Lago regular Matt Gaetz, the controversial Florida congressman under investigation for sexual misconduct, was a power move that wrong-footed even his closest advisers, and threw a gauntlet to Republicans in the US Senate who must confirm the appointment.It followed Trump’s equally astonishing choice a day earlier of a weekend presenter from the rightwing TV station Fox News to be the US defense secretary in charge of the world’s largest and most potent military: Pete Hegseth, the ultimate entertainer who caught the eye of the king.Public health experts decried the choice of the vaccine denier Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary. And perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of all is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a billionaire who has been elected to precisely nothing, strutting around the expansive resort’s perfectly manicured lawns and flaunting his new bromance with the next supposed leader of the free world.Reports say Musk has accompanied Trump almost every day since the election, joining telephone calls to multiple world leaders, offering advice on policy and staffing decisions, playing golf with Trump family members, and dining with them on the open-air patio.Musk received a standing ovation from assembled guests on the other side of the red velvet rope, according to the New York Times, and joined Trump and the classical singer Chris Macchio in a cringy rendition of God Bless America at a Thursday night gala.On Tuesday, five days into his tenure as Trump’s most favored house guest, Musk was named joint head of the freshlycreated Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), where he will generate plans to “slash and burn” government spending. It remains to be seen if any proposed cuts extend to the billions of dollars in lucrative government contracts and subsidies enjoyed by his own companies, SpaceX and Tesla.“He loves Mar-a-Lago. Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him,” Trump joked to Republicans on Wednesday in his first return to Washington DC since the election, before adding ominously: “Until I don’t like him.”Observers say it is no surprise that these machinations are playing out at Mar-a-Lago, the $1m-a-head private members’ club haughtily branded his “winter White House” by Trump during his first term, where he handed out ambassadorships to wealthy friends and donors, and where he took policy advice from regulars written on cocktail napkins.“A lot of action will get done down there during Trump’s second term, as we’re seeing right now with the transition,” said the political historian Matt Dallek, professor of political management at George Washington University.“It’s really a hub. People come in and out of there all the time, he spends a great deal of time there, and as he famously likes to do, he has multiple people telling him different things and he talks to a lot of people.“He’ll be talking to his wealthy friends, and people who come to the resort from around the world to pay homage to him there. He partly likes it because it’s kind of a shrine to him, and it’s his best version of himself, his best vision of himself and the kind of power that he wants to cultivate. He loves the attention. He loves the people coming in and around him.”Dallek noted that Trump also thrived on the atmosphere of unpredictability his presence at Mar-a-Lago creates. This was evident this week by his unorthodox cabinet hiring and procession of hopefuls desperate for an interview in a hastily assembled war room at what CNN called the “chaotic epicenter” of his transition.“There’s a certain amount of chaos that has long surrounded Trump, that Trump really cultivates, and that is a core part of his political identity. And Mar-a-Lago has been a center of that chaos,” Dallek said.“It’s been a kind of hothouse of fringe figures who’ve come there. He dined there with Ye, the antisemitic rapper, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. There have been foreign spies who have attempted to penetrate the resort. It’s where he stored some of the most highly classified documents on the planet in his bathroom.“We don’t need to look very far back in time to get a sense of the goings-on, how freewheeling and just how bonkers it is. He’s dealing with these incredibly important matters of life and death, of national security, and doing it in this unsecured, chaotic atmosphere where people are coming and going all the time, and where some of his more memorable, and memorably unhinged, moments have occurred.”Dallek, and others, expect Trump to spend considerable time at Mar-a-Lago during his second term. During his first four years in office, the Washington Post calculated in 2021, he was there for all or part of 142 days, and played an estimated 87 rounds at his Trump International golf club in West Palm Beach. Mar-a-Lago’s 128 guest suites are always full when he is in residence.“It’s possible that some people just want to hang out with the president and the people who are around the president, but I think people were explicit about it and the first presidency was an opportunity to be able to tell him what your thoughts were, but also to seek favor,” Robert Weissman, president of the Washington DC-based pro-transparency group Public Citizen, told the Guardian in August.“There are profound and systemic issues regarding ethics, and big money, and access for the rich, but Trump is in a category by himself.”As well as operating Mar-a-Lago as his command center ahead of his second administration, Trump is also reaping a significant financial windfall.Mar-a-Lago is expected to be at full occupancy until January’s inauguration, and CNN reported that members had been offered money by outsiders eager to accompany them on to the grounds to get face time with him.Even after he takes office, return trips to Mar-a-Lago will keep Trump’s coffers swollen. In October, it was revealed that Trump properties had overcharged the Secret Service by 300% for rooms occupied by agents providing security for Trump and his family.“Of course it’ll be a money-making opportunity for him,” Dallek said. “Which he’ll never pass up.” More
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US overdose deaths decreased in 2023 – will Trump continue this trend?
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 November 2024, 11:00
The Biden administration saw unprecedented levels of US opioid overdose fatalities, but those deaths are now declining faster than they have in decades – progress a second Trump administration could continue or threaten, experts say.The number of overdose deaths in the US declined for the first time in five years in 2023, and have continued to decline more rapidly this year, according to provisional data.Some of the decline may have resulted from Biden administration efforts to expand access to harm-reduction services, especially the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, which received over-the-counter approval for the first time last year. Public health experts worry that the second Trump administration will gut access to healthcare, including addiction treatment.The president-elect’s legacy on opioids is complicated. When Trump first took office, he inherited a rapidly escalating overdose crisis. Opioid overdose deaths more than doubled during the Obama administration,according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The three most recent presidential administrations have all failed to quell escalating opioid overdose deaths, which nearly doubled again during the Trump and Biden administrations, dipping slightly in 2018 but overall jumping by 62% during Trump’s first term in 2020. Under Biden, deaths increased by 19% from 2020 to 2022, to 81,806, before declining by 2% last year.At times, the Trump administration seemed to work against itself when it came to the crisis. For example, Trump repeatedly attempted to gut funding for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, although Congress blocked his efforts. Similarly, Trump was frequently in disputes with Congress over attempts to repeal elements of the Affordable Care Act and its expansions to Medicaid, which funds treatment for 40% of adults with opioid use disorder.Still, experts contacted by the Guardian within and outside the first Trump administration credit the president-elect for putting unprecedented focus on the crisis.Trump signed an executive order in 2017 forming the Presidential Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. Bertha Madras, a professor in Harvard’s psychiatry department who served on the commission, said it wasn’t until Trump “established the commission that a significant integrated national response materialized”.Adm Brett Giroir, who served as an assistant secretary in Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, says that he was given the authority to head up an unofficial “opioids cabinet … which met every week at the White House under Kellyanne Conway to make sure every department was working on this crisis”.Others praise Trump for supporting harm-reduction efforts, despite past opposition from his party.“President Trump publicly supported syringe services programs, a first for a Republican president,” said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general under Trump. Indeed, the Trump administration in some ways paved the way for the Biden administration’s response to the crisis. Access to naloxone expanded significantly under Trump, and even more under Biden.But despite these efforts, the number of US overdose deaths climbed for the majority of Trump’s first term. Giroir and Madras both attribute the huge overdose spike in 2020 to the Covid-19 pandemic, which overwhelmed the healthcare system and increased depression and suicide.Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, says the administration should have done more.“The first time around, President Trump did an excellent job of calling attention to the opioid crisis and designating it as a public health emergency,” he conceded, but he also said the then president failed to take sufficient action or establish a long-term plan.While the Trump administration allocated unprecedented amounts of funding to combat the crisis, Kolodny said the impact was limited, because states were usually given funds in the form of one- or two-year grants.“That’s not really adequate for building out a treatment system that doesn’t exist yet,” Kolodny said. “If you were to hire a whole bunch of staff, what would you do if you don’t get that appropriation the next year? Do you lay everybody off?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionExperts disagree on whether the administration spent too much of that funding on law and border enforcement, rather than treatment. Giroir supported harm-reduction and treatment expansion during his time under Trump, and is proud of his efforts to remove red tape and increase access to the opioid-cessation drug buprenorphine. Still, he says, “enforcement has to dominate the discussion”, because treatment is less effective than preventing addiction in the first place.Other experts say that criminalization only exacerbates the crisis.“Under Trump’s previous administration, they federally criminalized all fentanyl-related substances in 2018 – and overdose deaths increased from 67,367 that year to 70,630 and 93,331 in 2019 and 2020 respectively,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.Kolodny didn’t necessarily agree that criminalization drove the overdose increases, but he did say “the balance should be different” when it comes to prioritizing treatment over law enforcement. He said the best way to immediately reduce the overdose death count would be to make treatment “basically free” and overall easier to access than fentanyl.“[People with opioid use disorder] are not out there using fentanyl because it’s so much fun. If they don’t use, they’re gonna be very, very sick … People can really feel like they’re gonna die,” he said.It’s hard to predict how Trump will tackle the overdose crisis the second time around. He avoided the topic during his recent presidential campaign, and instead focused on inaccurate talking points about immigrants trafficking drugs across the border. He also falsely claimed he had never wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But a Republican-controlled Congress could cut ACA subsidies and Medicaid.Frederique worries that Trump will continue prioritizing drug arrests during his second term, but said during his first term “he also dedicated billions of dollars toward research, education, prevention and treatment. We are committed to supporting the Trump administration’s previous efforts to advocate for health approaches such as increasing access to treatment and naloxone.” More
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The Republican and Democratic parties are killing electoral reform across the US | David Daley
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 November 2024, 10:00
Ohio’s extreme gerrymanders have enabled more than a decade of corruption, lawless behavior and unpopular legislation passed by lawmakers safely insulated from the ballot box.Voters tried to fix it by bringing a citizen-led independent redistricting commission to the ballot. Due to Republican subterfuge, they ended up voting against themselves. With breathtakingly Orwellian tactics, Ohio Republicans twisted the ballot language and presented it to voters as an initiative that would require gerrymandering rather than end it.When Ohioians arrived at Issue One on their ballots, they were told that a yes vote would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering”. Voters were understandably confused. So while redistricting reform won huge wins in the Buckeye state in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70% of the vote, this year 54% of Ohio voters rejected it.Most analyses of the 2024 elections have focused on the swing toward Republicans at the top of the ballot. But another trend could be more consequential: when citizens stood up across red, blue and purple states this year with reforms designed to strengthen democracy and make all elections more meaningful and competitive, the parties undermined them with brutal, deceptive tactics and submerged them in a swamp of dark money.It worked nearly every time. Unlike 2018, when pro-democracy reforms won big nationwide, this time, reformers were routed.This is frightening news. The vast majority of states – even the purple ones – are either safely Republican or Democratic, or have been gerrymandered that way. Ballot initiatives and citizen-driven reforms uniting voters across party lines have been a rare bright spot and showed a possible path to defeat extremism and entrenched one-party control. But not this year.This year brought defeats – and Ohio-style trickery – across the map, and on a wide variety of pro-voter reforms, including redistricting reform, ranked-choice voting and open primaries. One state, Missouri, even jumped ahead of reformers and banned them in advance with a new prohibition on ranked-choice voting and open primaries – cleverly rolled into an amendment headlined by a ban on “noncitizen voting”, which, of course, isn’t actually happening there or anywhere.Voters in Colorado, Nevada and Idaho advanced initiatives that would have created open primaries and advanced either four or five candidates to a ranked-choice general election. Reformers hoped to give growing numbers of independent voters a say in which candidates are on the ballot in November, and ensure that candidates need a majority to win – instead of a fraction of a fraction of voters in low-turnout, closed primaries.The parties and their dark-money allies pushed back, hard. In Idaho, rightwingers determined to maintain their grip on power ran ads filled with both lies and red meat to outrage the base. “They have open borders. They want open bathrooms. They need open primaries,” claimed one of the most ridiculous and misleading, but effective, mailers.Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar dark-money network – which, after capturing the US supreme court and multiple levels of the judiciary, has now cast its eye on locking in far-right minority rule in the states – dispatched its operatives to mislead voters with one dishonest claim after another about ranked-choice voting. In one especially rich claim, opponents funded by billionaires and the wealthiest rightwing foundations have created front groups to argue that ranked-choice voting would make it easier for the wealthy to buy elections.The true agenda is clear: to protect and defend extreme lawmakers who perform best in base-driven primaries with multiple candidates and a small, divided electorate. That’s why a constellation of groups with ever-shifting names – but with the same far-right foundations and even election deniers behind them – have engaged in this multimillion-dollar scare operation.In Nevada, both Democrats and Republicans (and their aligned groups) spent millions in a successful effort to defeat open primaries and ranked choice. The state’s political elites – the still powerful machine built by the late senator Harry Reid and the Maga state Republican apparatus – built an odd coalition to brand a heretofore popular political reform, incorrectly, as “unproven” and “complicated”.Some Colorado Democrats, and even advocates of ranked-choice voting elsewhere such as Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, sadly swallowed Leo’s talking points whole to ensure the party retained power in this growing Democratic bastion where a record half of registered voters are unaffiliated.Perhaps what’s happening here is no surprise. Citizens want to reclaim state legislatures that have been distorted by gerrymandering and captured by unrepresentative winners of party primaries. The powerful want to close off one of the last avenues for reform.After all, Ohio’s unbreakable gerrymander, now in its 14th year, is so extreme that only four of 99 state house races were within five points this year, and just one of 17 state senate races. Uncompetitive elections push all the action to low-turnout primaries, where the tiniest percentage of the base can select unrepresentative candidates to coast into the general – and then advance unpopular legislation such a six-week abortion ban once in office.Ohio’s supreme court rejected the state house and congressional maps as unconstitutional not once, not twice, but seven times. A cowed governor, Mike DeWine, conceded that the maps could have been “more clearly constitutional”, but went along with the party line anyway. Lawmakers lawlessly disobeyed, ran out the clock, then found Trump-appointed federal judges with longstanding ties to Leo and the Federalist Society to impose the gerrymandered maps.“It is hard to recognize Ohio,” the former governor Bob Taft, a Republican, told me. “The consequences of extreme gerrymandering have been obvious here.”Idaho’s far right, meanwhile, has captured much of a once-traditional Republican machinery and moved to relentlessly consolidate power. In 2018, voters found an end run around the legislature and used the initiative process to expand Medicaid. More than 60% of voters supported the measure, after lawmakers refused to accept Affordable Care Act dollars during multiple sessions.Lawmakers, recognizing that the initiative represented a last opportunity for the public to check a hijacked legislature, endeavored time and again to make one of the nation’s most difficult initiative processes even more onerous and to oppose efforts to open Idaho’s system to voices beyond their own. Then, when courts and determined citizens pushed forward anyway, the legislature drowned them out with the support of organizations funded not only by Leonard Leo but also the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust (“the dark-money ATM of the right”).There was one significant bright spot last Tuesday: Washington DC, which overwhelmingly adopted ranked-choice voting despite some misleading efforts by officials from the district’s dominant Democratic party.But the simple truth is that the structural reform we so desperately need has become harder, as those from both the left and the right who prefer to govern without majorities, and without persuading everyone to their side, recognize it as a threat. They won’t stop here, and they have said so.Leo and his henchmen, armed with dark money, having grabbed control of election machinery, will stop at nothing to expand their ill-won and ill-held power. These fights will arrive in more state capitols and in Congress. They are trying to steal control while hiding behind phoney names and untold billions.The good news is that their scam is easy to see through. The test for our democracy – and for reformers – will be how to rise to this new challenge in a polarized, partisan moment. No task will be harder. None is more important.
David Daley is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More
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Karoline Leavitt named as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 22:52
Donald Trump named his White House press secretary on Friday, placing Karoline Leavitt, a 27-year-old firebrand from his inner circle, in position to aggressively defend him.The job of the White House press secretary typically is to help inform the American people about presidential activities without betraying the confidence of the boss.“Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator. I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium …, ” the statement read.The challenge for Leavitt will be to impart reliable information and gain credibility with reporters, while maintaining strong loyalty to Trump. Leavitt has been seen as a staunch and camera-ready advocate for Trump who is quick on her feet and delivers aggressive defenses of the president-elect in television interviews.In a June interview on CNN’s This Morning, Leavitt became embroiled in a heated exchange with host Kasie Hunt, bashing Dana Bash and Jake Tapper for their “biased coverage” of Trump before the highly anticipated debate between him and Joe Biden. Bash and Tapper had been moderators for that debate. Hunt abruptly ended that interview after Leavitt refused to be deflected.Leavitt will be the youngest person ever to hold the title of White House press secretary. Ron Ziegler was previously the youngest press secretary at age 29 when Richard Nixon gave him the position in 1969.Leavitt, a New Hampshire native, was an assistant press secretary during the latter part of Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021.When Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, Leavitt became communications director for Elise Stefanik, the Republican US representative, who has been tapped by Trump as his US ambassador to the United Nations.Leavitt ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives from New Hampshire in 2022, winning the Republican primary. She lost the general election to Democrat Chris Pappas, but the experience appeared to give her valuable experience with public speaking.She joined Trump’s 2024 campaign and has been the chief spokesperson for the president-elect’s transition team.Trump had four press secretaries during his 2017-2021 term: Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders, Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany. Spicer got off on the wrong foot with the White House press corps at his first appearance in 2017 after falsely claiming that the crowd gathered in Washington DC for Trump’s inauguration had been “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”.Spicer was replaced after just sixth months in the role, making his tenure the sixth-shortest since the position was created in 1929, according to data from the White House Transition Project. The average term is just under three years.Sanders, who is now the Republican governor of Arkansas, got praise from Trump for her parrying with the press corps.After Sanders left, Trump turned to Grisham, who never held a briefing, which she said was at Trump’s direction. Grisham resigned after the events of 6 January 2021, and is now a sharp Trump critic.Trump’s last chief spokesperson at the White House was McEnany, who sparred with reporters during the pandemic year of 2020 and is now an on-air personality at Fox News. More
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Racist and anti-LGBTQ+ texts target Americans across US, including teens
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2024, 22:18
Racist text messages targeting Black people across the US just hours after Donald Trump won a second presidency have now expanded to the Hispanic communities – and homophobic versions have been aimed at LGBTQ+ people, the FBI said on Friday.Authorities say they are investigating the messages – which now include emails – and that they have not received reports of violent acts stemming from the hateful messages.The recipients of the messages include high school students being told that they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp”, the FBI said in a statement.After the 5 November US presidential election saw Trump returned to the White House, Black Americans reported receiving racist text messages telling them they had been “selected” to pick cotton and needed to report to the “nearest plantation”.Black people in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey and Nevada, and in Washington DC and elsewhere, reported receiving the messages. The messages were sent to Black adults and students.Some of the texts were signed “a Trump supporter”. Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the campaign “has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages”.The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) condemned the messages, saying that they “represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear”.“The unfortunate reality of electing a president who historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes,” the NAACP president and chief executive officer, Derrick Johnson, said in a statement last week.The FBI said it is contact with the US justice department and other federal authorities on the racist and homophobic messages. More

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