DES MOINES, Iowa — Mike Pence was met by a respectful, even warm, crowd in his first trip back to Iowa since the election. Republicans at a picnic in the northwestern corner of the state stood and clapped for him on Friday. In Des Moines later that afternoon, a ballroom full of Christian conservatives did the same.
He was “honorable,” a “man of faith,” attendees at the annual Family Leadership Summit said. Evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats called him “a very consistent conservative voice in Congress and then as governor, and then as vice president.”
What few people said they saw in Pence, however, was the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
Many Iowa Republicans had seen the results of the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, released just days earlier, in which Pence flatlined, drawing no more than 1 percent support. Before that, they’d watched the video of Pence getting heckled and called a “traitor” at a major gathering of conservatives in Florida last month.
“I don’t imagine he’d have a whole lot of support,” said Raymond Harre, vice chair of the GOP in eastern Iowa’s Scott County. “There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the Antichrist.”
Harre said Pence “did a good job as vice president,” and he called the vitriol directed at him “kind of nutty.” Still, he said, “I don’t see him overcoming the negatives.”
Six months after he left the vice presidency, that is the prevailing view at the grassroots and among the GOP political class. By most accounts, both here and nationally, Pence is dead in the early waters of 2024.
“Who?” Doug Gross, a Republican operative who was a chief of staff to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, replied flatly when asked about Pence. “It’s just, where would you place him? … With Trumpsters, he didn’t perform when they really wanted him to perform, so he’s DQ’d there. Then you go to the evangelicals, they have plenty of other choices.”
At the moment, Pence occupies a political no-man’s land. Vocal elements of Trump’s base remain furious at him for his refusal to reject the results of the November election, despite him having no authority to do so. Moderates, meanwhile, see too little distance between Pence and the president he catered to for four years. They’re wary the association may turn off the independents and suburban women Trump hemorrhaged in 2018 and again in 2020.
At 62 — and with several contenders in their 40s — Pence is too old to represent a new generation of Republican leadership. His deep well of support among Christian conservatives, which served as a critical validator for Trump, will matter less in a field where the religious right has other candidates to pick from.
“He’s got to justify to the Trumpistas why he isn’t Judas Iscariot, and then he’s got to demonstrate to a bunch of other Republicans why he hung out with someone they perceive to be a nutjob,” said Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and on several presidential campaigns.
Describing Pence as “caught in between” those competing factions, Walsh said, “I just think it is an awfully tough, tough hill for him to climb.”
After hecklers greeted Pence at the Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Florida last month, organizers of a speaker series in one early nominating state decided to hold off on inviting him. They were sympathetic to Pence, but fearful he’d be embarrassed by a similar reception there, according to a source involved in the decision.
Three years before an election — and especially for someone with Pence’s name recognition and expansive donor and political network — no campaign is irredeemable. But not since another former vice president from Indiana, Dan Quayle, ran for president in 2000, has such a prominent Republican politician’s pre-presidential campaign seemed more forlorn.
“I really like him,” said Carmine Boal, a former Iowa state representative who chairs the Northside Conservatives group in Ankeny. But Pence, she said, just doesn’t have “the wow factor.”
“You have to have something that just reaches out and grabs people where they’re at,” she said. “Pence just seems a little cool and removed.”
Even if that demeanor might not fit the moment, Pence, a former Indiana governor, still possesses the traits of a formidable candidate. If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024 — the only scenario in which most credible contenders would likely enter the race — Pence would have the benefit of familiarity to Republican voters, a reliably conservative record and relationships forged during time in Congress, in the Trump administration and while sharing a ticket with Trump on two presidential campaigns.
A national survey of GOP voters by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio last week placed Pence at 15 percent, far behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but second in a presidential primary field without Trump competing. After returning to the speaking circuit in recent months, Pence drew appreciative crowds in the early nominating states of New Hampshire and South Carolina. In Sioux County, Iowa, on Friday — where Trump pulled nearly 83 percent of the vote last year — freshman GOP Rep. Randy Feenstra had Pence headline his inaugural family picnic.
“If you’re a donor, and the vice president of the United States calls and says he wants to have a meeting with you, you’re going to listen,” said Wesley Enos, the former chair of the Republican Party in Iowa’s Polk County.
Vander Plaats, president of The Family Leader, which hosted the Des Moines summit, said that “if Trump doesn’t run, Pence is definitely in the top tier.” In South Carolina, where Pence spoke at the Palmetto Family Council’s annual gala in April, the council’s Dave Wilson said that by the time of the 2024 primary, Republicans may “take a more rational view” of how Pence stood up to Trump.
And in New Hampshire, where Pence addressed a party dinner in Hillsborough County last month, Chris Ager, the state’s Republican national committee member, saw standing ovations for the former vice president and said that “if you just go back in history” of presidential politics, “there are many examples of people who were not even on the radar at this time.”
“Will some of the base ever get past this perception that he could have done more?” said Brett Doster, a Florida-based Republican strategist who served as the state’s executive director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential reelection campaign. “I’m not saying it will, but I’m just saying it’s way too early to count the guy out. I just think he’s got too big of a profile, too big of a donor network.”
Pence needs more than time or the traditional ebb and flow of a presidential campaign to revive his prospects. His path to the nomination, more than most contenders, hinges on the highly uncertain prospect that the primary electorate’s view of the November election — and Pence’s role in it — will change. A majority of Republicans still believe Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, according to numerous polls. And Trump supporters are not letting go, with a controversial audit continuing in Arizona and with Trump devotees pushing for similar reviews in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states, despite no evidence that the election results were skewed.
It isn’t only Trump supporters broadly who pose a problem for Pence. White evangelicals, in particular, feel burned by the last election, more likely than members of any other religious group to believe the November contest was stolen. Those voters once constituted Pence’s base.
Pence is trying to hold on to that constituency — if not to change the minds of his Republican critics, to shift their focus. Earlier this year, he said he and Trump may never “see eye to eye” on the Jan. 6 insurrection. But he does not dwell on it. Instead, he says he “couldn’t be more proud” to have served with Trump, heralds the policies of the Trump-Pence administration and contrasts them with those of the current, Democratic White House. Implicitly, he’s urging Republicans to view Trump — and him — less for their roles in the aftermath of the election than for the four years preceding it.
In some corners of the MAGA movement, that will likely be impossible. Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign strategist whose “War Room” podcast has served to amplify Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, said that Pence is “dead now” but that as Republicans draw more attention to ballot reviews in Arizona and other states he is “officially going to be buried.”
“MAGA is maniacally focused on 3 November, and they understand Pence betrayed them,” said Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump as he left the White House. “He is being shunned and erased from the MAGA movement, and it hasn’t even started.”
He said, “Mike Pence’s political career is over … It’s done.”
A source close to Pence said he is “entirely focused on 2022,” not presidential politics. Still, he is taking steps to both stay in public view and nurture relationships with Republican politicians and donors who could be helpful to him in 2024. In April, Pence announced the formation of Advancing American Freedom, a policy group. He has a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and he is raising money for House candidates ahead of the midterm elections next year. Later this year, he plans to tour college campuses for the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization.
Pence’s supporters point out that Joe Biden was widely dismissed as a presidential contender before winning the Democratic nomination and the presidency last year. Trump was a political non-entity at this point in the 2016 election cycle. One former adviser predicted that “once more and more people start talking about the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration, and when you get to the actual campaigning that will take place two to three years from now and compare it to the current administration, there’s a very good case to make.”
The overarching problem for Pence, however, is that even if a large number of Republican voters do get over the last election, and respond to the policy contrast with Biden, it’s not clear that Pence will be the beneficiary. Election truthers, like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and chanted “hang Mike Pence,” will remain a segment of the electorate unavailable to Pence.
Trump supporters who liked Trump’s policies but not his behavior — the “Trump without the tweets” constituency — will have an entire stable of contenders who aren’t burdened by Pence’s baggage from crossing Trump. And never-Trump Republicans will likely have other, more Trump-skeptical candidates to choose from, potentially including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Pence, who is uniquely tethered to Trump by the vice presidency and distanced from him by Jan. 6, has liabilities with all of those factions.
“Where does he even go with that?” an attendee shrugged outside the ballroom where Pence spoke in Des Moines.
Stuart Spencer, the famed Republican strategist who advised Ronald Reagan, said he concluded that Pence was a “sincere guy and has a belief system” when Pence refused to be cowed by Trump on Jan. 6. But he doubted that will do him any good in 2024.
“The Trump people don’t like him, and all the people who were anti-Trump don’t like him,” Spencer said.
For Pence, he said, “That’s not a big Lincoln Day dinner.”
Olivia Beavers and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
Sen. Rob Portman has been among the Republicans who have been very busy pretending to negotiate a "bipartisan" infrastructure package that Republican senators itching over their reelection prospects can point to as evidence that there is theoretically something that the nihilistic Republican Party can agree ought be done for the good of the country, even if the same Republicans couldn't agree that presidential corruption should be checked, violent sedition should be investigated, or a worldwide health crisis should be aggressively responded to. The problem is that every time the bipartisan group begins to hammer out even the most fundamental details, things get dodgy quickly. Republican senators don’t have a long list of details they’re for, but they have a nearly unending list of things they’re against.
What Sen. Rob Portman says Republicans will now ensure is not in the bill is any move to go after wealthy and corporate tax cheats by returning IRS funding levels to levels that would allow more audits. Any previous announcement that the bipartisanship bill would include boosting of tax enforcement resources is now null and void, because Sen. Rob Portman says there was "pushback" from Republicans.
Appearing on CNN (Portman is one of the Republican senators that make a second home at the Sunday talk shows), Portman attempted to pin the blame on Democratic attempts to pass a reconciliation package that might … also maybe propose doing the same thing?
"[W]e found out that the Democrats were going to put a proposal into the reconciliation package, which was not just similar to the one we had, but with a lot more IRS enforcement," Portman told Dana Bash. "That created quite a problem because the general agreement is that this is the bipartisan-negotiated infrastructure package and that we will stick with that."
Yeah, yeah. So the "bipartisan" version of the bill will, Republicans are now insisting, contain zero additional funding for IRS enforcement measures rather than the $40 billion the negotiators had previously announced, and the reason for that is because Democrats have hurt Republican feelings, again, by threatening to do it themselves if they can't get Republican buy-in.
The actual reason for the Republican "pushback" is likely fairly simple. Republicans have devoted their few attempts at actual governance to the idea of slashing taxes on the wealthy and the corporate, producing policies that are wildly unpopular with the American public but which are heavily lobbied for by wealthy and corporate Republican donors. Slashed IRS enforcement of tax law has amounted to yet another tax break to anyone wealthy enough to hire accountants to obscure their income (see: Donald Trump); the odds of getting caught become so low that sketchier and sketchier schemes become worth the risk.
If Democrats are planning on boosting funding so the IRS can better go after tax-dodging companies and rich people, there's an advantage to Republicans in being able to say to their dark money donors well we certainly didn't vote for that.
The Republican Party has gone to great efforts over these last decades to defund law enforcement ... aimed at rich criminals.
This reversal does create a new problem for Republican "negotiators," however. “Let’s just enforce the current tax laws” was low-hanging fruit, when it comes to things you might be able to squeeze out bipartisan votes for; there is widespread agreement that spending money on IRS enforcement would bring in much more tax money than it costs, and bipartisan negotiators were using the IRS boost as one of the "pay-for" planks offsetting infrastructure costs. Now they have to find that money some other way, and the two parties have been locked in bitter, bitter fights over who should pay for even the more meager infrastructure plans Republicans claim to agree to not just during these negotiations, but for years. It's going to be hard to come to agreement after Republicans take "let's just enforce the current tax laws" off the list of things they're willing to tolerate.
All that presumes, naively, that any of the efforts by Portman and other Republican negotiators are sincere. We have been down this road literally dozens of times, in recent years: Republicans demand Democrats compromise with them in order to achieve "bipartisan" consensus; when that consensus is reached, Republican senators balk and make new demands; when those demands, too, are eventually agreed to, Republican leaders come up with new reasons why Actually, they can't agree to any of this and will vote against even their own negotiated compromise—typically, for the reason Rob Portman is alluding to today, a claim that Democrats have now done some new thing to hurt Republican feelings and well now that means the previous deal is off.
It is, in other words, an entrenched strategy in which Republicans look to run out the clock on Democratic-pushed legislation (say, pandemic relief) with a series of negotiations that at no point result in actual Republican support for the negotiated things. Sen. Mitch McConnell has been a master of using insincere negotiation tactics to smother popular proposals the party does not want to be explicitly seen to be rejecting, forever coming up with new trivialities to sabotage months of previous work. He's very often done it in alliance with the so-called "moderate" Republicans who want to be seen, in public, as "bipartisan" stalwarts.
We remain at the same impasse; this is not a party that can tolerate governing. There remains no function of government that the party can abide, if that function requires spending money that could otherwise be handed out to party patrons in the form of tax cuts.
It's very much in Republicans’ interest to be seen as willing to not let our damn bridges fall down, at least in the abstract. But it's also very much in the party’s interest to come up with an unending list of cheap reasons why it's better to let the bridges fall down than (checks notes) force the wealthy tax dodgers that fund the Republican Party to pay the taxes they're supposed to be paying all along. Portman may be retiring from his current position in the Senate after the upcoming midterms, but his party is still bent on undermining even democracy itself rather than put up with non-Republican policies or non-tax-cut related government acts. There remains a near-zero chance that even half of the so-called Republican “negotiators” will end up voting for whatever proposal they actually negotiate.
They're not serious. They want to keep people blatantly flouting the law as long as they're rich. But pass a counterfeit $20? Death sentence.
Sen. Rob Portman said Sunday that IRS enforcement was officially off the table as a means for funding the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
The Ohio Republican, one of 22 senators working in the bipartisan group to negotiate the infrastructure framework, said increasing IRS enforcement as a way to raise new revenues faced pushback from Republican colleagues — one of the reasons it was no longer a viable option. He also said Democrats are considering including that proposal in the separate $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which “created quite a problem.”
Portman said the group of 22 is meeting again Sunday to negotiate ways to pay for the package.
“That's one reason we're having initial meetings today and had more meetings over the past few days on this topic. There are other ways to do this. There’s legislation, one called the Medicare Rebate Rule that provides significant revenue,” Portman said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I've been on the phone a lot with the Congressional Budget Office and with the Joint Committee on Taxation over the weekend. And we have a number of pay-fors. And that’s important that it be paid for.”
The deal would have provided a $40 billion budget boost for the Internal Revenue Service after decades of cuts, funding that would presumably allow the IRS enforcement division to collect unpaid taxes. Recent IRS research says the annual tax gap between 2011 and 2013 was $441 billion, and a Treasury Department analysis used that figure to project a $584 billion gap for 2019.
The Senate left town last week with a lot of unfinished business on the bipartisan infrastructure deal, despite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s attempt to push it forward by advancing a floor vote on Wednesday.
Portman didn’t say whether or not the bill could be finalized by Schumer’s “arbitrary deadline,” but said it’s “more important to get it right.”
“We are still negotiating. In fact, last night I was negotiating some of the final details with the White House and later today we'll be having additional negotiations with the Republicans and Democrats who come together to put this bill into a track that's very unusual for Washington,” he said.
“This is a little confusing for people because it's actually 11 Republicans and 11 Democrats putting this together. Chuck Schumer, with all due respect, is not writing the bill. Nor is [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell, by the way. So that's why we shouldn’t have an arbitrary deadline of Wednesday.”
By any historical measure this country should not be where it is right now, politically speaking. The worst pandemic to strike this nation in over a century has begun its slow but inexorable transformation into an event now comprehensible in hindsight rather than experienced in the immediate moment. The economic crisis has started to recede, with millions of Americans’ thoughts increasingly occupied by their summer vacations and reuniting with friends and relatives instead of focusing on whether they can safely return to work. People are once again going out to eat, to shop, and to entertain themselves, spending money and traveling.
In short, you could fairly expect this to be a time of resurgence and shared national enthusiasm as the country emerges from an unprecedented, unbelievably stressful, involuntary hibernation, and as Americans begin to reclaim their former lives. And you could fairly expect the political differences among the nation’s citizens to reflect the same general sense of relief.
Instead, the prevailing public sentiment right now is one of politically polarized anger, distrust, suspicion and hatred on a scale that most of us have not witnessed in our lifetimes. These sentiments have consumed the nation’s politics solely because one of our two major political parties has willfully adopted the delusional notion that the 2020 election—possibly the most secure election in our country’s history—was somehow tainted by widespread fraud, even though absolutely no evidence of such fraud exists. This farcical narrative has become so embedded and fundamental to the Republican Party’s thinking that its adherents now feel emboldened and justified in attempting to disenfranchise those Americans whose votes they arbitrarily deem unworthy or illegitimate, a judgment based primarily on their skin color. But worse than that, and even more ominously, that party has now become much more overt in countenancing outright violence against other Americans in furtherance of its goals.
As a result, the nation now faces a crisis even worse than the one foisted upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic, this time not from any unexpected health calamity or foreign invasion, but one that is entirely homegrown, spun out of thin air by people with no respect or regard for the country’s democratic principles, or even democracy itself. Conservative David Frum, writing for The Atlantic, recognizes what we are witnessing in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s brief tenure has a name, and it’s past time to start calling it out for what it is: fascism.
Frum acknowledges he’s arriving late to this acknowledgement, having cautioned against labeling the autocratic tendencies of Donald Trump as akin to those infamous European fascists who deservedly turned that word into a monstrous epithet, encapsulating every horror of the 20th century as wielded by the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. But the analogy now is inescapable; as Frum observes, there is simply no other word that applies when a movement couples both contempt for the law and legal process together with an explicit endorsement of violence against one’s political opponents.
That is what the GOP has become in the shadow of Trump’s Big Lie, and its recent trajectory suggests it will become much, much worse. Frum notes the change in Trump himself, comparing his shockingly equanimical but still somewhat tempered treatment of far-right white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville—while he still had to consider his reelection prospects—to the vitriol-spewing, unapologetic racist monster he has visibly morphed into since his electoral defeat in 2020:
Whatever he felt in his heart, he was constrained [in 2017] by certain political and practical realities. His non-Twitter actions as president were filtered through bureaucracies. He had to work with Republican congressional allies who worried about losing seats in Congress in the next election. He himself was still basking in the illusion of his supposedly huge victory in 2016, and hoping for a repeat in 2020. Outright endorsement of lethal extremism? That was too much for Trump in 2017. But now look where we are.
The failed insurrection of Jan. 6, which Trump himself orchestrated along with his most virulent and fanatical accomplices, provided a springboard for him to convince those followers that violence was not simply the only course to follow, but the correct and proper course, one fully justified by the sinister presence of allegedly hidden forces aligned against them. To emphasize the point, Frum quotes another well-known fascist, speaking to his crimes in the face of an establishment that had considered him defeated. When Hitler was imprisoned after failing to overthrow the German government in 1923, he defended his actions as not only justified, but necessary:
I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918.
Frum compares this infamous Nazi sophistry to the revisionist tripe now being peddled by Trump’s media enablers concerning the events of Jan. 6, in which a mob of violent thugs attacked the U.S. capitol with full intent of killing members of Congress to stop the certification of a lawful election. At first Republicans sought to distance themselves from that insurrection, attributing it (falsely) to subterfuge by antifa or to media distortion of “peaceful,” law-abiding protests, even as hundreds of Trump-supporting seditionists were arrested for crimes ranging from assault on police officers to conspiracy to overthrow the government.
But the tone has changed. Now, instead of minimizing them, more and more Republicans are endorsing the events of Jan. 6, much like Hitler endorsed the crimes of his failed putsch in 1923, as a necessary response to government tyranny. The insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, fatally shot while breaking into the Capitol along with her fellow rioters, is being lionized by some Republicans as a type of martyr rather than someone who recklessly threatened to inflict violence. This shift in narrative from minimizing the events to extolling the perpetrators is calculated and deliberate: it fuels the idea that the insurrection was an appropriate response to a grave crime committed against a select segment of the American people. And it makes no difference that this fanciful scenario is wholly derived from baldfaced lies.
Frum notes how Trump has pushed this narrative in the past week, praising the rioters as great people, calling Babbitt (who he certainly never met) an “incredible, wonderful” woman and darkly insinuating, again, falsely, that she was shot by a “democratic” head of security (implying that Chuck Shumer somehow orchestrated Babbitt’s death). As Frum observes, all of this nonsense is directly culled from the Nazi playbook, specifically the endorsement of violence as a a justified political tactic, and the elevation of those who commit that violence in the service of fascism. But the most important takeaway for Frum is that this is a new, evolving tactic, one characteristic of fascist regimes:
Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.
Emphasizing that fascism wears a coat of many colors, Frum cautions against relying solely on the European model as an analogue to what we are witnessing in the United States. In particular, the cult of personality surrounding the autocratic, politically opportunistic regime of Juan Perón of Argentina is most strongly suggestive of the following Trump has cultivated in this country:
Juan Perón, a bungling and vacillating leader, attracted followers with a jumble of often conflicting and contradictory ideas. He had the good luck to take power in a major food-producing nation at a time when the world was hungry—and imagined that the brief flash of easy prosperity that followed was his own doing. The only thing he knew for certain was the target of his hatred: anybody who got in his way, anybody who questioned him, anybody who thought for himself or herself. An expatriate Argentine who grew up under Perón’s rule remembered the graffiti on the walls, the Twitter of its day: Build the Fatherland. Kill a student. As V. S. Naipaul astutely observed, “Even when the money ran out, Peronism could offer hate as hope.”
Frum isn’t the first person to compare Trump to Argentina’s Perón. In May, writing for the New York Review of Books, Duke Emeritus professor Ariel Dorfman made the same analogy between Trump’s exile and that of the Argentinian dictator:
After being ousted as president, Perón sought refuge in Madrid (Franco was an amiable host), and instead of quietly retiring, he kept determining from afar the destiny of his native land by keeping a hypnotic hold on millions of his working-class followers, before triumphantly returning to govern Argentina at the age of seventy-eight. He is a chilling model for Trump to emulate as he ponders his next moves in his Florida exile or even from abroad.
If this was just about Trump it wouldn’t matter much; he would simply occupy his place in a long list of presidents rejected by Americans for incompetence or other reasons, whining about his perceived mistreatment by an electorate who had finally, decisively taken the full measure of his character, or lack thereof.
But the true fascist cannot cope with such a desultory vacuum if he wants to regain power. He must constantly up the ante, driving his followers to more desperate extremes until violence appears as the only solution to their ginned-up grievances. What we are seeing slowly being developed in the U.S. is the cultivation of violence in a substantial segment of the population: in effect, the formation of a base of support carefully primed to endorse the use of violence to achieve their leader’s political ends. In fact, as Frum points out, the sheer number of ordinary Republicans who buy into the Big Lie nonsense is the very reason so many Republican elected officials feel compelled to embrace it, willingly or otherwise:
[T]he post-election Trump movement is not tiny. It’s not anything like a national majority, but it’s a majority in some states—a plurality in more—and everywhere a significant minority, empowered by the inability of pro-legality Republicans to stand up to them. Once it might have been hoped that young Republicans with a future would somehow distance themselves from the violent lawlessness of the post-presidential Trump movement. But one by one, they are betting the other way.
There is no longer any question about what we are facing in this country. The sooner all Americans realize that fact, the better we all will be equipped to defeat it, before it’s too late.
Microsoft hit yet another snag in its efforts to lock down the Windows print spooler, as the software maker warned customers on Thursday to disable the service to contain a new vulnerability that helps attackers execute malicious code on fully patched machines.
The vulnerability is the third printer-related flaw in Windows to come to light in the past five weeks. A patch Microsoft released in June for a remote code-execution flaw failed to fix a similar but distinct flaw dubbed PrintNightmare, which also made it possible for attackers to run malicious code on fully patched machines. Microsoft released an unscheduled patch for PrintNightmare, but the fix failed to prevent exploits on machines using certain configurations.
Bring your own printer driver
On Thursday, Microsoft warned of a new vulnerability in the Windows print spooler. The privilege-escalation flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-34481, allows hackers who already have the ability to run malicious code with limited system rights to elevate those rights. The elevation allows the code to access sensitive parts of Windows so malware can run each time a machine is rebooted.
Enlarge / The exterior of the headquarters of biotechnology company Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe)
Biogen's new Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm continues to face opposition after its contentious approval by the Food and Drug Administration last month—which the FDA now says should be independently investigated. Some insurers say they won't pay for the drug, some hospitals say they won't administer it, and yet more experts say it has no proven benefit and is dramatically overpriced at $56,000 for a year's supply.
On Thursday, a panel of medical experts convened by the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) voted 15 to 0 to say that there is no evidence that Aduhelm provides clinical benefit to patients. The unanimous vote echoes another one from a panel of expert advisors for the Food and Drug Administration who voted last November against FDA approval. Eleven of ten advisors voted that data collected in two identical Phase III clinical trials failed to show that the drug is effective, with the remaining advisor voting "uncertain."
The FDA nevertheless approved the drug on June 7, sparking a firestorm of criticism. In an unprecedented move last week, the FDA updated its recommendation for who should receive the drug, significantly narrowing the pool from all Alzheimer's patients to only those with mild disease. It's unusual for the FDA to make such a modification so soon after an initial decision and without fresh data to back a change.
The California legislature unanimously approved a plan to build a statewide, open-access fiber network yesterday. The legislation was supported by Democrats and Republicans in votes of 78-0 in the California Assembly and 39-0 in the state Senate.
The statewide, open-access fiber lines will function as a "middle-mile" network that carries data from Internet backbone networks to connection points in cities and rural areas. A middle-mile network doesn't extend all the way to residential properties, but "last-mile" ISPs can get access to it and focus on building infrastructure that connects the middle mile to homes.
California's decision to make the middle-mile network open-access means it will provide "non-discriminatory access to eligible entities on a technology and competitively neutral basis, regardless of whether the entity is privately or publicly owned," the bill text said. If all goes as planned, the network will make it easier for existing ISPs to expand and for new ISPs to get started, filling in gaps where there's no modern access and boosting competition and speeds in other areas. Last-mile ISPs could use network technology other than fiber to connect to homes because of the provision allowing technology-neutral access.
Having a hard time believing this guy is actually a democrat
Sen. Joe Manchin met with the courageous Texas Democrats who left Austin this week to deny the House a quorum, to keep their state from further eroding the right to vote. They came to D.C. to try to get the Senate to do what the House has already done—pass critical voting rights legislation to stop the tide of voter suppression in their state and across the nation.
Manchin failed. He came out of the meeting with those Democrats saying the "filibuster doesn't need" a special carveout to allow voting rights issues to pass with a simple majority. “There is no thing about the filibuster," he told reporters, and insisted a basic voting rights bill will get Republican support." He said he wants "one piece of legislation that protects the rights of voting—the procedure of voting… the guardrails on democracy." Again, Manchin reiterated that he believes "there shouldn't be a Republican or Democrats who should oppose it."
Here's what Manchin decided to do Friday, one day after meeting those Texas Democrats: have a $5,800 a head fundraiser IN TEXAS, "with a host committee that includes several wealthy Republican donors."
WOW. Joe Manchin is headed to Texas today for a $5,800/head fundraiser with major Republican donors, one day after meeting with Texas Democrats. In invite to oil execs, he highlights his role on the energy and natural resources committee. https://t.co/mniyQMn0H7pic.twitter.com/YyZqKQpsAK
"We invite you to join us for a special evening supporting our friend, US Senator Joe Manchin," the invitation said, signed by the hosts who are titans of the Texas oil and gas industry. They went on to call Manchin "a longtime friend since his days as Governor of West Virginia."
"Among the hosts are oil billionaires like Jeff Hildebrand, who cofounded the energy company Hilcorp and Richard Kinder, a cofounder of Kinder Morgan, an energy infrastructure company," The Texas Tribune reports. "Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry appointed Hildebrand to the University of Texas Board of Regents for a six-year term beginning in 2013."
How lovely for all of them all these "prolific donors to past GOP nominees, including former President Donald Trump, and to organizations like the Republican Party of Texas, the Republican National Committee, state parties, GOP candidates across the country and to Republicans in U.S. Senate and House leadership." Oh, and the whole current crew of Republican leadership in the state, including House Speaker Dade Phelan. The ones who are hellbent on suppressing votes in their state.
After meeting with Manchin Thursday, Texas state Rep. Joe Moody was trying to be gracious to the senator. "Senator Manchin was very generous with his time, and Texas Democrats were heartened by our talks with him," he said. "We have no doubt that he completely shares our goal of protecting voting rights for all Americans, and we all realize that this is a struggle that won't be over in just a few days—it's a journey, one we look forward to taking together."
Meanwhile back in Texas, Speaker Phelan—who has been financially supported by the same people now raising all this money for Manchin—was stripping Moody of his position as speaker pro tempore of the state House. In that position, Moody was in charge of filling in when Phelan wasn't present.
"I followed my conscience knowing that doing the right thing could cost me, but not fighting would've cost even more: the civil rights of Texans," Moody told CNN after Phelan's action. "The job I swore an oath to do is to defend our Constitution, so I'd make that trade any day. Titles come and go, but my commitment to the people of El Paso and this state will always remain."
That's a man of principle. Who gave Manchin far too much benefit of the doubt for sharing his principles. Someone, preferable the goddamned president to the United States, needs to have a sit down with Manchin and remind him about his duty to the Constitution.
It also might not hurt for Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to have a talk with Manchin about just how much he does value that position as chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The one that makes him so valuable to the Republican oil and gas titans of Texas.
Hovertext: My favorite finance headlines are the tautological ones, along the lines of 'Stock market down as stock market fails to go up or stay same.'
For the first time in 45 years, House appropriators have not included the Hyde Amendment in a key spending bill. The House Appropriations labor and health and human services subcommittee advanced the Department of Health and Human Services funding bill to the full Appropriations Committee on Monday, excluding the ban on federal funding for abortions. This fulfills a promise by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, to remove the decades-old restriction.
"I know this is an issue on which many of us disagree," DeLauro said during the committee hearing passing the bill. "But regardless of the original intent of Hyde, it has disproportionately impacted women of color, and it has ultimately led to more unintended pregnancies and later riskier, and more costly abortions," she added. "We are finally doing what is right for our mothers, our families, our communities by striking this discriminatory amendment, once and for all." Hyde allows abortion only under the most restrictive of cases, when continuing the pregnancy will endanger the patient's life, or when the pregnancy results from rape or incest.
This follows the Biden administration's decision to drop the Hyde Amendment from its proposed 2022 budget. The amendment has disproportionately hurt women of color and their families because those are the populations disproportionately covered by the federal health programs that can't provide abortion care. That includes Medicaid (though states can opt to cover it under their portion of the joint funding). Thirty percent of Black women and 24% of Hispanic women are enrolled in Medicaid, compared to 14% of white women. The other programs with the ban include Indian Health Services, the Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as the military's TRICARE program, federal prisons, the Peace Corps, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
That means federal employees and their families, military personnel and their families, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and inmates in federal prisons are forced to pay out of pocket in order to access a safe and legal medical procedure, on top of all the other hurdles so many face in obtaining care. This appropriation bill only affects the programs under HHS—Medicaid, Indian Health Service, Medicare, and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds that "on average in 2014 an abortion cost between $500 at 10 weeks gestation, while at 20 weeks gestation, costs soared to $1195 or more."
KFF estimates that, if the ban had been lifted in 2019 "it could have provided federal support for abortion coverage for 13.9 million reproductive-age women enrolled in Medicaid, as well as millions of others in similarly restricted federal programs." That's a forced birth mandate on millions of women in 33 states, plus the District of Columbia.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement that her organization was "thrilled" that the provision was finally dropped. "For far too long, the racist and sexist Hyde Amendment has put the government in control of a personal health care decision for many people with low incomes. And its extension to our federal prison system is cruel and unjust. Your ZIP code, financial situation, whether you're incarcerated or the type of health insurance you have should never determine what kind of essential health care services you can access, including abortion," she wrote.
"This is a historic victory for reproductive freedom and this moment has been decades in the making," NARAL Pro-Choice America’s acting president, Adrienne Kimmell, said in a statement following the committee's action. "We extend our deepest gratitude to our partners in the reproductive justice movement and to the women of color who have led the fight to end these harmful bans on coverage of abortion care."
That includes President Biden. "If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," he said about leaving Hyde out of his budget. "I can't justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to exercise their constitutionally protected right."
Unfortunately, that might not hold getting the appropriations bill through the Senate. Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who will be responsible for the HHS bill in her committee, probably won't have the votes to keep the Hyde Amendment out. "Well I support [dropping] it," she said. "But I have to have the votes and that's what we're looking at." That doesn't make the fact that the House left it out and that the president left it out any less momentous. It's bending the curve in the right way.
Critics said the pandemic would make the industry flee San Francisco and its southern neighbor, Silicon Valley. But tech can't seem to quit its gravitational center. New York Times: The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area's tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas -- where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don't exist. But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri [Editor's note: anecdote in the story who is the chief executive of Akash Network] is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.
Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region's bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live. And on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) yesterday filed a complaint against Amazon over the sale of hundreds of thousands of hazardous products, including carbon monoxide detectors that fail to detect carbon monoxide, hair dryers without required protection from shock and electrocution, and flammable sleepwear meant for children. The CPSC said it sued Amazon to "force [the] recall" of the dangerous products. While Amazon has halted sales of most of them already and issued refunds, the CPSC said it isn't satisfied with how Amazon notified customers and said the industry giant must do more to ensure that the faulty products are destroyed.
The dangerous products were offered by third parties using the "Fulfilled by Amazon" (FBA) program, in which Amazon stores products in its warehouses, ships them to customers, and takes a sizable cut from the proceeds. The CPSC's administrative complaint alleges that Amazon hasn't taken enough responsibility for dangerous third-party products that it ships via FBA.
The complaint didn't mention any specific incidents of injury but said the evidence supporting the charges includes "lawsuits concerning incidents or injuries involving various consumer products identified in the Complaint." It also said that CPSC staff tested the products and found that they don't meet safety requirements. Products that don't meet these requirements pose a substantial risk of injury or death to consumers, the agency said.
If only there were a political party that could highlight this fatal hypocrisy.
Here’s a quote from a vaccine supporter who was anxious to see the FDA give early approval to Pfizer back in November: “I’ve been a big proponent of releasing it early. I think that we’ve had enough safety and effectiveness data.” Another person encouraged by the rapid production of the vaccines praised the “brilliant” way in which Project Warp Speed had made vaccines available so quickly.
As The Washington Post reports, that first person praising the early release of vaccines was Republican Sen. Rand Paul. The second was Sen. Ron Johnson.
They were just two of many Republicans who were perfectly happy to brag when vaccines were under development, crediting Donald Trump for the speed with which they became available. They were happy to cheer for Trump even though both the Pfizer/BioNTech vand Moderna vaccines were actually created months before Trump started the program, Pfizer actually received no funds for developing its vaccine, and the two biggest investments that Operation Warp Speed made—to Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline and Novavax—have yet to produce one dose of available vaccine. Still, there were vaccines. And Trump had funded vaccines. So vaccines … yah!
Only Trump never put in place a system to effectively distribute vaccines. When he left office, only about 1% of the nation had been vaccinated and the biggest complaint from states was that the vaccine supply was inadequate. It took President Joe Biden immediately mounting a program of additional vaccine purchases, providing states with levels of vaccine expected, and creating thousands of vaccination sites, large and small, to get the nation where it is now—with 59% of all adults fully vaccinated, 69% with at least one shot, and just under 100% of the rest being Republicans who won’t get the shot because it’s not coming from Trump.
To be fair, Republican vaccine resistance has been high from the beginning. Civiqs actually shows vaccine refusal by Republicans increasing after the vaccines became available under Trump. Since then the lines have been almost flat, and currently 44% of Republicans say they will not take the vaccine. Just 2% of those who have not already been vaccinated say they intend to get vaccinated.
That resistance has held in spite of a huge spike in cases over the holidays that saw official death totals top 600,000. It’s held even as the delta variant has turned red counties into red-hot spots of disease. It’s held in spite of the fact that 99.2% of COVID-19 deaths in the month of May were among those who remain unvaccinated.
Part of the reason is because that resistance has been constantly supported by both right-wing media and Republican politicians. When Ronny Jackson was a White House physician last November, he said he would get vaccinated. Now U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson falsely claims that the vaccines are “experimental” and warns Fox viewers to think twice.
Or how about this pair of statements:
1. “Everyone in America can have the COVID-19 vaccine thanks to President Donald J Trump and everyone who worked on Operation Warp Speed. President Trump saved lives!”
2. “Thousands of people are reporting very serious life changing vaccine side effects from taking covid vaccines.5,946 deaths are reported on the CDC website. Social media is censoring their stories & the media is silent. Biden is going to homes to push shots. Just say NO!”
Both of those statements come from the new leader of the Republican Party, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Greene’s statements also illustrate another source used in keeping up vaccine resistance: conspiracy theories and rumors. In a party that’s gone all on QAnon, Pizzagate, and the Big Lie, Republicans are seeing stories like this one from the BBC in which a Miami private school didn’t just not require vaccinations by it’s teachers, it actively discouraged vaccination and warned people against associating with those who have been vaccinated. A letter from the school stated: “We cannot allow recently vaccinated people to be near our students until more information is known,” citing claims that people had been “negatively impacted” just by being near someone who had accepted the vaccine.
And then there was the claim published in Robert Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax site The Defender(link intentionally omitted) that claims that studies showing high vaccine efficacy were false, that getting the vaccine if you’ve had COVID-19 can make you seriously ill, and that since people can have asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, getting the vaccine puts everyone at "potential risk of harm, including death."
Or the claim that vaccines are actually generating new variants that has circulated widely on social media. Or the Facebook site of far-right author Liz Wheeler, which just last week began pushing a claim that “A peer reviewed, scientific study showed that the COVID-19 vaccine causes two deaths for every three lives it saves.”
Buoyed up on a bed of lies and, with Republicans now finding it much more convenient to attack the vaccine than protect the health of the nation, it shouldn’t be surprising that The Washington Post is reporting vaccine hesitancy has turned into vaccine hostility. Republicans aren’t just refusing to get a shot—they are actively cheering the fact that vaccinations are slowing and disease is spreading. They’re framing President Biden’s call for volunteers to conduct door-to-door canvasses for residents who might have difficulty accessing a vaccine into a sinister attempt to get “government agents” into every home. A plot, says Rep. Madison Cawthorn, that is maximum Big Brother. “Think about the mechanisms they would have to build to be able to actually execute that massive of a thing,” said Cawthorn. “And then think about what those mechanisms could be used for. They could then go door-to-door and take your guns, they could go door-to-door and take your Bibles.”
Republicans were happy to push the idea of the vaccines when they could attribute that idea to Trump. Now they’re working hard to keep their party stoked on the two Republican food groups: fear and hate.
And they have definitely inoculated their supporters against truth.
Today, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report on combatting disinformation about COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines. It’s a handy reference that’s worth consulting when facing down anti-vax lies.
Health misinformation is not a recent phenomenon. In the late 1990s, a poorly designed study, later retracted, falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism. Even after the retraction, the claim gained some traction and contributed to lower immunization rates over the next twenty years. Just since 2017, we have seen measles outbreaks in Washington State, Minnesota, New York City, and other areas.
Health misinformation is also a global problem. In South Africa, for example, “AIDS denialism”—a false belief denying that HIV causes AIDS—was adopted at the highest levels of the national government, reducing access to effective treatment and contributing to more than 330,000 deaths between 2000 and 2005.22 Health misinformation has also reduced the willingness of people to seek effective treatment for cancer, heart disease, and other conditions.
Carmakers can expect a sharp upturn in chip supplies in the coming weeks, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) said, signaling that a global shortage may have moved past its most crippling stage.
In the first six months of 2021, TSMC increased its output of micro-controlling units, an important component used for car electronics, by 30 per cent compared with the same period last year, the world’s largest contract chipmaker told investors on an earnings call on Thursday. MCU production is expected to be 60 percent higher for the full year than in 2020, it added.
“By taking such actions, we expect the shortage to be greatly reduced for TSMC customers starting this quarter,” said CC Wei, TSMC’s chief executive.
Facebook’s ability to track users and show them certain ads appears to be tanking thanks to Apple’s “ask not to track” feature, according to some advertisers.
Apple rolled out the privacy prompt in late April with iOS 14.5. Since then, nearly half of all iOS devices worldwide have at least version 14.5 installed, according to Statcounter, and a vast majority of these devices' users have chosen to deny Facebook and other apps the ability to track them. Nearly three months after the feature's launch, just 17 percent of users worldwide have opted in, according to analytics company Flurry.
The changes could have a significant effect on Facebook’s bottom line. Eric Seufert, an analyst who writes Mobile Dev Memo, forecasts that if only 20 percent of users consent to tracking, Facebook’s revenue could drop 7 percent in the first full quarter that the opt-in prompt is active (the forthcoming third quarter). The company warned back in February that the iOS changes would curtail its ability to track users across the Internet.
Associate Justice Stephen Breyer has not decided when he will retire from the Supreme Court, he told CNN in an interview published Thursday.
The two factors that would impact his retirement plans, Breyer said, are "primarily, of course, health," and "second, the court."
Breyer, the court's oldest justice by nearly a decade, has faced pressure from some on the political left to step down and make way for a younger justice who would be nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by a Democratic majority in the Senate.
But the 82-year-old Breyer, a 1994 nominee of former President Bill Clinton, did not retire last month when the court's most recent term ended. He told CNN that he has enjoyed his status as the senior-most justice of the court's liberal wing, a role he assumed after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last fall.
The ideological tilt of the Supreme Court has been a sore spot for Democrats since 2016, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, then-President Barack Obama's pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. McConnell argued that voters in that year's election should be allowed to decide which president would fill Scalia's seat, a move that paid off for Republicans when President Donald Trump was elected to the White House.
Trump nominated three justices to the Supreme Court during his four years as president, bolstering the court's conservative advantage from 5-4 to 6-3. The former president's final nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, was hurried through the confirmation process with just days to spare before Trump's defeat in last November's election.
McConnell, who pushed Barrett's confirmation through in the weeks leading up to a presidential election despite his 2016 insistence that voters be allowed to weigh in, has already indicated that he could block any Biden Supreme Court nominee should Republicans retake the Senate majority in 2022's midterm elections. That suggestion has stoked concern among liberals that a delayed retirement from Breyer could put control over his replacement in GOP hands.
Breyer, for his part, has long said that outside politics should not play a role in judges' work.
“They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment,” he said of federal judges during a Harvard law school lecture in April.
The monthly payments included in the American Rescue Plan’s expanded child tax credit start going out on July 15, which means most families with children under age 18 will be getting $250 per child per month—$300 for children under six—through the end of 2021, and an additional tax credit at tax time in 2022. This is set to be the most effective anti-poverty program in decades, and Democrats are already calling for the tax credit expansion to be permanent. Every single Republican voted against the American Rescue Plan.
“We have a real opportunity to not just throw money at a problem, but to … lift up all children and families,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro at a Wednesday press conference.
Payments are going out on July 15 to 39 million families with 65 million children, with single parents making $75,000 or less and couples making $150,000 or less getting the full amount. The expanded credit phases out above those income levels. Above income levels of $95,000 or $170,000, households get the previously existing $2,000 child tax credit. (As Rep. Katie Porter has pointed out, single parents face a penalty here that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why does a married couple need twice as much income to raise the same number of kids?)
That said, this money will make a huge difference to many families. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell talked to a woman raising two grandchildren on a limited budget, for whom the monthly tax credit payments will mean concrete things like back-to-school clothes and money for extracurriculars her grandchildren have yearned for. But most of all, “It would mean getting out of the everyday cycle of having to worry, ‘Okay, is this bill going to be paid for? Can I get my medicine?’”
Less worry for parents, and more just being kids for the kids. A mother of two in Mississippi told The New York Times the money would help with rent, but would also let her kids fully participate in things like school trips. “Kids get to bullying, talking down on them—saying ‘Oh your mama don’t have money,’” Tammy Wilson said.
For kids whose lives are shaped by poverty and the accompanying instability, the child tax credit could improve educational outcomes: “Students living in poverty are twice as likely to repeat a grade, and 10 times as likely to drop out of high school, researchers found a decade ago, a sequence of events that makes it difficult for them to escape it. Household income is indelibly imprinted on test scores: On the SAT, students from households that made less than $20,000 scored, on average, 400 points less than did students growing up in homes where earnings exceeded $100,000, according to 2014 data,” The Washington Post’s Moriah Balingit reports.
Democrats are rightly touting the tax credit as a win for families. The next step is making it permanent—and making sure everyone, but everyone, knows which party turned the policy into law and which party opposed it. (In case you need a reminder: Democrats made this policy reality. Republicans voted against it, along with everything else in the American Rescue Plan.)
To find out if your family is eligible and how much you’ll be getting, check out this calculator. People who don’t file taxes may not get the payments automatically, but the IRS has a tool for signing up for both the expanded child tax credit and any relief payments people may have missed.
But remember kids, they were silent while this was happening
Previously released excerpts from a new book by Washington Post reporters indicated tension between members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Trump White House. However, additional material released on Wednesday night by CNN takes this to a new and terrifying level. According to Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, senior military officers were so concerned that Donald Trump might drag the military into a coup, that they developed a plan to resign, one by one, rather than accept an order to take part in such a plot.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley appears to have been particularly concerned about the idea he might simply refuse to leave office, and that in his final days in power, Trump would use the military to carry out his schemes. Milley, who took part in Trump’s Bible-waving stroll across Lafayette Square, was disturbed at how Trump inserted sycophants into key roles at the Pentagon following the election and saw this as a sign of an upcoming attempt to maintain power at the point of a gun.
According to the authors, Milley grew so concerned that he discussed the possibility not just with his friends, but with other generals and with members of Congress. "They may try, but they're not going to f**king succeed," Milley told his staff. "You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."
The book also indicates that Milley had specific concerns about Jan. 6. Trump’s calls for supporters to come to D.C. for a “wild” event, and intelligence showing that militia members were planning to attend in numbers, left Milley fretting Trump was deliberately “stoking unrest” and that he was trying to create an incident that would justify the use of the Insurrection Act along with military force.
“This is a Reichstag moment.”
Seeing Trump as a “classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose,” Milley became convinced he’d seen this story before. With Trump calling for a “Million MAGA March” following his loss in November, Milley feared it “could be the modern American equivalent of 'brownshirts in the streets.” In addition to referencing incidents in which Nazis had used violence to bring Adolf Hitler to power, Milley supposedly referenced the incident that Hitler had staged, then leveraged as a means of using violence against his enemies. "This is a Reichstag moment. The gospel of the Führer."
One of MIlley’s colleagues, quoted anonymously, confirmed to him that “this is all real” and warned the general "What they are trying to do here is overturn the government. ... You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff."
The revelations out of the book show a last minute scramble at the White House, with Trump clutching at every conspiracy theory and working to put in place those who might go along with a scheme to defy the outcome of the election. According to the authors, Milley was instrumental in preventing Trump from replacing FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel, with Milley regarding both of those positions as pivotal to the success or failure of any coup.
According to the book, Trump’s spiral into darkness was so severe that even Mike Pompeo came to Milley for a “heart to heart” talk in which he complained “you know the crazies are taking over.”
The incidents described in the book go beyond disturbing. They describe a nation well beyond the brink, with a White House actively working to position assets for an end of democracy and military leadership developing a pushback that was not at all certain of success. The revelations are terrifying enough that “shocking” seems an all-too-insubstantial term.
But there is one thing that isn’t completely clear. Though the article states that the book developed from over a hundred interviews conducted by Leonnig and Rucker, it doesn’t make clear when this information was known to them. If Washington Post reporters were aware in the final days of Trump’s occupation of the White House, that he was plotting to keep control of the nation, shouldn’t the nation have been made aware? And if there were reports that top military officials were convinced that Trump’s actions following the election were intended to generate violence, shouldn’t that information have been provided to case managers in Trump’s second impeachment?
There are a number of upcoming books on the final awful days of Trump, and the revelations will continue. But the first question these books need to answer is why are we just hearing about this now?
Enlarge / A person gets a sticker after getting a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)
Leading public health organizations and a growing number of independent health experts are coming together to push health care facilities to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory for all health care workers. Some experts say such mandates are overdue and that failure for any health care worker to get vaccinated against the deadly pandemic coronavirus is both "unethical and appalling."
On Tuesday, seven health organizations—including the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Association for Professionals in Epidemiology and Infection, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society—published a consensus statement, saying that "COVID-19 vaccination should be a condition of employment for all healthcare personnel."
Fully vaccinating health care workers has the advantage of protecting vulnerable patients, fellow health care workers, and the community overall, they write. And mandates are highly effective at getting high levels of vaccination among health care staff. For decades, many health care facilities have mandated seasonal flu vaccines to great success, they note. In the 2019-2020 flu season, health care facilities that mandated flu vaccines saw 94 percent of workers get vaccinated, while only 70 percent of health workers got vaccinated in facilities without mandates.
