Perjury is no obstacle for the GOP as long as racism is the goal
Republicans from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf’s nomination to officially lead the agency (after nearly a year on the job) on Wednesday, by a strict party line giving him the thumbs up for a full Senate vote, Roll Call reports.
Sure, Unlawful Chad again lied under oath about his role in the family separation policy, but Republicans said that’s fine. Sure, Unlawful Chad’s wife’s consulting firm reportedly got millions in DHS contracts after he joined the agency, but Republicans said that’s fine. Sure, Unlawful Chad is defying the Supreme Court on DACA, but Republicans said that’s fine. In fact, they think he’s doing great: Unlawful Chad, chair Ron Johnson commented, “has done a pretty good job based on all the things he has to deal with as secretary.”
The lying in question came during Unlawful Chad’s brief Senate committee hearing last week, when U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada pressed him on the beginnings of the Trump administration policy that would eventually lead to the state-sanctioned kidnapping of thousands of babies and children at the southern border.
“You said you were going to separate—this is what you said in your memo—and I’m quoting, you ‘considered separating family units and treating the children as unaccompanied,’” Rosen said. But quickly becoming defensive, Unlawful Chad shot back that “it was not my memo,” and pointed to his former boss, then-Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen. “That was not my portfolio, it was not my issue set at that time,” he claimed.
But internal documents have already easily debunked Unlawful Chad’s claim: He was an architect of family separation. He’s a liar—and a liar under oath at that. But why should anyone expect Senate Republicans to hold that against him when they won’t hold it against their president, either? Senate Republicans also voted to advance Unlawful Chad’s nomination as a federal judge blocked the administration’s policy cruelly implementing an asylum fee because he’s likely not serving legally.
So suddenly rushing to confirm Unlawful Chad after nearly a year on the job isn’t at all to secure the “homeland,” it’s to save his ass, and the president’s. “Today’s vote to advance Wolf’s nomination is further proof that the Trump administration is trying to retroactively make Chad Wolf’s appointment as head of DHS valid,” Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, state and local policy manager of United We Dream, said in a statement received by Daily Kos.
It’s unclear when Unlawful Chad’s nomination may get a full Senate vote, but citing his defiance of the Supreme Court, targeting of demonstrators protesting police violence, and a recent horror show of immigration detention abuses, Macedo do Nascimento urged senators to oppose the nomination when it does happen.
“In July, Wolf issued a memo ignoring the Supreme Court ruling on DACA, instead moving to destroy DACA. Instead of acknowledging the illegitimacy of his memo, Republican senators are trying to promote Wolf to lead DHS in an official capacity,” she continued. “Today’s committee vote to advance Wolf’s nomination was a blatant support of the vile attacks he’s helped carry out and will continue to carry out if confirmed to his position permanently. Every Senator with a conscience and who says they support immigrants should vote ‘NO’ on Chad Wolf.”
Such courage...some private consternation while they continue to suck him off in public.
The last time Donald Trump had a megaphone and a broad captivated audience was around March, during his regular task force briefings at the outset of the coronavirus. It did not end well for him. Because the more regular people see of Trump, the more they're reminded how little there is to like—as in, nothing. After enjoying a brief coronavirus bounce, Trump’s approval ratings slumped back down.
And right on cue, Republican lawmakers started begging him to end his tour de farce at the podium, which he ultimately did. Because the only thing that ever concerns congressional Republicans is anything that hurts their reelection chances. Hundreds of thousands of American dying, solicitation of foreign election interference, degradation of U.S. democracy? Meh. But a Trump gaffe that might disrupt the GOP's hold on power—uh ohz!
Enter Tuesday's debate and Trump's command to the extremist group the Proud Boys to "stand by" in regard to the election. In fact, even worse than that, when challenged to denounce white supremacy, Trump suffered a deer-in-headlights freeze for several beats as he computed a way to weasel out of actually denouncing the hateful ideology. Because to his core, Trump has zero interest whatsoever in distancing himself from white supremacy.
More generally, Trump was a jabbering lunatic throughout the entire debate, but his attempt to wriggle out of condemning right-wing extremists produced one of the very few coherent moments of the entire night. And right on cue, Senate Republicans are concerned—not about Trump's embrace of violent hate groups and ideologies that pose an actual threat to U.S. citizens, and not about the fact that a madman is our head of government. But as both The Washington Post and The New York Times report, Republicans are shuddering over whether Trump's repulsive posturing could negatively impact their reelection hopes. Who knows—maybe they could have taken that into consideration when every damn Senate Republican but Mitt Romney gave Trump a free pass on trying to steal the 2020 election with help from a foreign government. Seems like that may have been a reasonable time to reflect on whether putting one’s personal stamp of approval on Trump's depraved and rudderless leadership might not bode well for one’s reelection chances.
But even with Trump's disturbingly unbalanced performance Tuesday, GOP lawmakers aren't exactly running to the mics to denounce Trump's behavior. When they worry, they almost always worry "privately," like spineless slugs curled into a ball. As the Post writes: "Few Republicans voiced outrage in the wake of Trump’s norm-shattering spectacle in Cleveland on Tuesday, including his statement that the extremist Proud Boys, a male-only far-right group known for street violence, should ‘stand back and stand by.’ Responses ranged from silence to muted criticism, reflecting how the GOP remains convinced that an alliance with Trump and his voters is crucial for its survival."
In fact, instead of taking a stand, vulnerable Senate Republicans are now strategizing about how to "deflect" questions about the Proud Boys in upcoming debates and "shift to more favorable topics." Here's a fresh idea: How about simply condemning white supremacy and right-wing extremism and saying Trump should have done the same? "Groups and ideologies that stoke violence and threaten law-abiding citizens are never acceptable." How hard is that?
Instead, we get absolute nonsense from senators like North Carolina's Thom Tillis, who's facing a tight reelection. Asked specifically about the Proud Boys, Tillis offered: “I’ll leave it to the president. I know he’s not racist. I’m sure he doesn’t approve of their activities."
Actually, Thom, Trump was given a second crack it Wednesday and instead of having the guts to condemn the group, he claimed ignorance about the Proud Boys. "I don't know who Proud Boys are, but whoever they are, they have to stand down and let law enforcement do their work,” Trump told reporters. Gee, ever heard of Google?
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, another vulnerable Republican, offered the worst kind of disingenuousness, suggesting that somehow Joe Biden was equally complicit in the debate mayhem as he actually tried to answer the questions posed to him through Trump’s blathering belligerence. “There was fault on both sides," Collins said, sounding eerily reminiscent of Trump's post-Charlottesville assertion that there were good people on "both sides" of the Hitler-esque neo-Nazi rally.
But as bad as Collins is, there's worse: Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan and Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. Given the opportunity to, at the very least, condemn violent racially motivated hate groups—not to mention Trump's comments—both senators, who are in unexpectedly tough races, took a pass. Here's a Thursday morning tweet from CNN's Manu Raju:
"Some GOP senators up for re-election not touching Trump’s white supremacy comments. “I’m not commenting. I didn’t see the debate,” said GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan. Joni Ernst, in tough race in Iowa, waved off a question from @tedbarrettcnn when asked about Trump’s debate comment."
It’s two days later and Sullivan claims ignorance about the debate. Really? He holds one of the highest offices in the land and apparently isn't the least bit interested in how the standard-bearer of his party is conducting himself. Sounds blissful—almost like he shouldn't be in government at all.
And then there's Ernst, the erstwhile hog castrater who ran on a promise to make Washington politicians "squeal." Now she's just dodging reporters because the politics of condemning white supremacy are a little too dicey for her.
Seriously, who are these jokers? Has the Republican Party reached the point where it's so beholden to right-wing extremists that senators running for reelection can't afford to condemn hate-based violence? “Yes” is clearly the answer to that question.
Trump arrives in Duluth on Wednesday. | Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
“She tells us how to run our country,” Trump said of Ilhan Omar.
Speaking Wednesday evening in Minnesota, a state with the largest Somali population in the country, President Donald Trump goaded his fans into, in effect, jeering their neighbors.
During a rally in Duluth, Trump accused Democratic nominee Joe Biden of having a plan “to inundate your state with a historic flood of refugees,” prompting his fans to boo. He then turned his ire on one of his frequent targets of abuse: Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who now represents Minneapolis in Congress.
“And what about Omar? Where she gets caught [ballot] harvesting. What the hell is going on? I hope your US attorney is involved,” Trump continued, referring to a newly released Project Veritas video that alleges (without any evidence) that Omar is involved in election fraud; the video has been dismissed as a “coordinated disinformation campaign” by researchers.
As “lock her up!” chants rang out, Trump added, “I mean, frankly, harvesting’s terrible, but it’s the least of the things that she has done. How the hell — then she tells us how to run our country. Can you believe it? What the hell is wrong with you people? What the hell happened?”
Before his rant was through, Trump suggested that another Congress member of color — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — should also be imprisoned for no reason in particular.
“[Omar’s] been crooked for a long time. This is the least of it. It’s time, and you know what, AOC also. It’s time. It’s time. If you take a look at what they — the corruption. The disgusting corruption,” he said. “Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.”
Watch:
"Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp" -- Speaking in a state with one of the largest Somali populations in the country, Trump goads his fans into booing refugees, prompting "lock her up!" chants directed at Ilhan Omar pic.twitter.com/dT2yuHxFDZ
Wednesday’s rally marked the second time in less than a month that Trump viciously attacked Omar in particular and the Somali community in general during a speech in Minnesota. On September 26 in Bemidji, Trump alluded to Somalis and asked his fans, sarcastically, “Are you having a good time with your refugees?”
Toward the end of that speech, Trump turned the white supremacy up to 11, telling his almost entirely white audience, “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
"You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." -- Trump pic.twitter.com/OiF63qZaKx
Over a 24-hour period before Trump’s speech in Duluth, his campaign spent more than $10,000 on Facebook ads demonizing refugees. Those ads were ultimately taken down by Facebook for violating the company’s advertising policies.
Trump’s regular attacks on Somalis in Minnesota put his racism on stark display
Trump’s speech in Duluth came one night after a debate that will perhaps be best remembered for Trump’s refusal to denounce white supremacist groups.
Pressed to “condemn white supremacists and militia groups and say they need to stand down” by moderator Chris Wallace, Trump instead mentioned the neo-fascist Proud Boys group and said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody has to do something about antifa and the Left.”
At this point, it’s not a surprise that Trump is unwilling to denounce racists who make up a substantial part of his base. But his trips to Minnesota — where he regularly uses Omar to demonize Somalis — have always illustrated how turning whites against minority groups is a key part of his divide-and-conquer strategy.
Speaking in Minneapolis almost exactly a year ago, for instance, Trump attacked Omar as “a disgrace to our country” and goaded the crowd into booing the city’s large Somali community. And during an interview with a Minneapolis TV station in April 2019, Trump said he had no regrets about the fact that his attacks on Omar led to threats on her life, saying, “She’s got a way about her that’s very, very bad, I think, for our country. I think she’s extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country.”
REPORTER: Congresswoman Omar says your video led to direct threats on her life. Any second thoughts?
Beyond racism, Trump’s sales pitch to Minnesota consists of lies about how much he’s done for the economy there — the state’s unemployment rate has in fact increased by about 50 percent since Trump took office — and lies about how his decision to deploy the National Guard to Minneapolis during George Floyd protests in May “saved” the city (in fact, the National Guard was deployed by the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz).
As condemnable as this pitch might be, it has had some resonance in Minnesota, where Trump came within 1.5 percentage points of becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state since Richard Nixon. But while Trump’s repeated trips to Minnesota indicate that he thinks he can actually win the state this time around, a new MPR News/Star Tribune/KARE-11 Minnesota Poll released last week showed Biden leading the president by six points. (FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has Biden leading Trump in the state by nine points.)
“If I lose Minnesota, I’m never coming back,” Trump told his fans in Duluth on Wednesday. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) responded on Twitter by saying, “Goodbye.”
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Donald Trump is very effectively depressing the mail vote … among Republicans. In state after battleground state, requests for mail ballots are up by enormous amounts, Democrats make up a majority of the people who’ve requested them—52% to Republicans’ 28% in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maine, and Iowa—and the available information suggests they are returning ballots at a higher rate, too. That’s a reversal from the traditional pattern in which Republicans excel at getting their supporters to vote by mail, and it has party leaders worried.
“It’s astronomical,” an unnamed Republican strategist told The Washington Post. “You see these numbers in a state like North Carolina, and how can you not be concerned?”
Republicans from the Republican National Committee on down to the state and local level are trying to reel it back and get their voters to request mail ballots, but they’re working against a strong force: Donald Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others have prevailed on Trump to draw a distinction between “universal” mail voting and mail voting that requires each voter to specifically request a mail ballot, but it’s too little, too late, too confusing. Especially when Trump continued his attacks on vote-by-mail during the debate, one of his biggest platforms of this campaign.
Republicans are planning a multi-pronged effort, trying to get their voters to mail in ballots, but also working for big Election Day turnout and trying to get as many Democratic votes as possible thrown out. Much of that effort will come after the election, as votes are counted, and will come as Trump tries to sow doubts about the validity of the votes, the count, and the election—and most of all about the loss he so obviously expects is coming.
According to University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, one in five votes cast in North Carolina and Georgia so far have come from people who didn’t vote in 2016, and some states have already seen almost 10% of the total votes cast in 2016. But, as is their habit, Republicans don’t think it’s a good thing that people are eager to vote or that people are voting after sitting out past elections. This is a very scary emergency situation for Republicans.
Trump’s attacks on mail voting are making it more likely that not only he but down-ballot Republicans will lose in November. He’s not going to stop, though, because he is serious about refusing to surrender power if and when he loses. Winning the election is no longer his priority, and he doesn’t care about Senate, House, or other Republican candidates, either.
Far-right protesters jeer at members of Antifa during protests organized by the far-right group the Proud Boys. | LightRocket via Getty Images
The far-right street fighting group has embraced violence — and Donald Trump.
During Tuesday night’s debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump was asked by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News whether he would be “willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and say they need to stand down and not to add to the violence” taking place in cities like Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Trump asked whom he should condemn; Biden suggested the Proud Boys, a far-right street fighting organization that has gained a following both online and in major cities across the country.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing [problem].”
On Wednesday, Trump said he meant the group should “stand down” and let law enforcement do their jobs, then denied knowing who they were at all. But, as Vox’s Fabiola Cineas detailed Tuesday night, the Proud Boys took this moment as a sign of Trump’s support for their group, even producing merchandise bearing the phrase “stand back and stand by”:
One Proud Boys leader, Joe Biggs, wrote on the social media platform Parler, “Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy,” according to the Daily Beast. Proud Boys national chair Enrique Tarrio, who organized the recent Portland event, wrote “I will stand down sir!!! Standing by sir. So Proud of my guys right now.”
The Proud Boys have already put this "standing by" t-shirt up for sale on their official merch website pic.twitter.com/dAN4EtuBJH
So who are the Proud Boys? Created by Gavin McInnes, a “provocateur” and one of the original co-founders of Vice Media, who has described himself as “an old punk from Canada”and turned right in 2008 (the same year he left Vice over “creative differences”), the Proud Boys are a strange amalgamation of a men’s rights organization, a fight club, and what some may see as a hate group — one that loves Donald Trump, hates Muslims (and Jews and trans people), but permits nonwhite membership. They’ve provided “security” for former Trump adviser Roger Stone, who allegedly joined the group.
The group has a magazine where members who win fights are celebrated with the slogan “They fucked around. They found out.” And in the age of concerns about “civility” and growing worries about political violence, the Proud Boys — and McInnes, who believes violence is “a really effective way to solve problems” — are more interested in fighting antifa.
As Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch told me back in 2018, “The Proud Boys have been the right wing’s enforcers in the streets against those who dissent against them.” And in 2020, not much has changed.
From Vice Media to “cuckmercials”
In 1994, McInnes, alongside Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi, launched Voice of Montreal, which later became Vice Media. McInnes was already the voice of a particular strain of right-wingerdomwithin the company, telling the New York Times, “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of.”
In what would become a standard McInnes move, he later attempted to couch his remarks as ironic humor in a letter to Gawker, telling the website that his words were a joke and adding, “It’s unfortunate that people in the know like Gawker are taking it all so seriously. I thought we were on the same page: baby boomer media like The Times is a laughingstock and we should do whatever we can to ridicule it.”
McInnes left Vice Media in 2008. He then moved to what he calls the “New Right,” which he seemed to define as a combination of “Western chauvinism” and social and political libertarianism or perhaps libertinism (for example, he has written extensively on how women want to be “downright abused” and that he had to stop “playing nice” and begin “totally defiling the women I slept with” to get more women to have sex with him).
His shift to the far right also included espousing anti-Muslim sentiments (“the Muslim world is filled with shoeless, toothless, inbred, hill-dwelling, rifle-toting, sodomy-prone men”) and an embrace of anti-Semitismand anti-Israel sentiments, including a video he made for the far-right Canadian outlet Rebel Media initially called “10 Things I Hate about Jews” (or as he would later tweet, “10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT THE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING JEWS!”). He’s also argued that historically, perhaps Jews “were ostracized for a good reason.”
These videos, and some of his others, earned him a host of new fans, including David Duke. And though McInnes has attempted to push aside accusations of racism (which he argues doesn’t exist), he has written for both VDare and American Renaissance, the latter the publication of the “race-realist, white advocacy organization” New Century Foundation.
From former KKK grand wizard David Duke’s Twitter feed. March 11, 2017.
Much of McInnes’s work, and that of a large swath of what he would call the New Right, is focused on what he views as the “feminization” of culture and politics, from commercials or “cuckmercials” that show “emasculated men” (or too many interracial couples) to politics. In an interview last year with Metro, he said, “There is a real war on masculinity.”
And it’s that search for the renewal of a very specific kind of masculinity — and McInnes’s belief that Western culture is in trouble because of “social justice warriors” and the mainstream media “belittling” white men — that resulted in the Proud Boys.
“Proud of Your Boy”
The Proud Boys were officially launched in September 2016, on the website of Taki’s Magazine, a far-right publication for which white nationalist Richard Spencer once served as executive editor.
Itstarted out as a joke, using the song “Proud of Your Boy” from Disney’s Aladdin musical as the basis for the name of the group and the hashtag #POYB, which appears alongside Proud Boys content on Twitter. Women are not permitted to be Proud Boys, as McInnes explained:
The basic tenet of the group is that they are “Western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” Like Archie Bunker, they long for the days when “girls were girls and men were men.” This wasn’t controversial even twenty years ago, but being proud of Western culture today is like being a crippled, black, lesbian communist in 1953.
According to the Proud Boys, “We do not discriminate based upon race or sexual orientation/preference. We are not an ‘ism,’ ‘ist,’ or ‘phobic’ that fits the Left’s narrative.”
However, McInnes himself decided he no longer supported marriage equality because he believed it’s part of a secret plan to destroy Christianity, and Facebook pages for Proud Boy chapters in Florida feature Holocaust denial (like a meme implying the number of those who died during the Holocaust was simply invented) and virulently racist rhetoric.
There are four levels of Proud Boy membership. First is to declare yourself to be a Proud Boy (“This means you make your Western chauvinism public and you don’t care who knows it.”) The second level is the swearing-off of masturbation (known online as “nofap” or #NoWanks) combined with a “cereal beat-in” — if you want into the group, you have to get beaten up while successfully reciting the names of five breakfast cereals, because “defending the West against the people who want to shut it down is like remembering cereals as you’re being bombarded with ten fists.”
(As the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer wrote in February 2017, the Proud Boys’ rules are a “mindbender.” But this is real.) The third level is to get a specific Proud Boys tattoo.
But it’s the fourth and newest level that is getting the most attention in the wake of Friday’s events: get into a physical altercation for the “cause.” “You get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa,” McInnes explained in 2017. He added, “People say if someone’s fighting, go get a teacher. No, if someone’s f---ing up your sister, put them in the hospital.”
It’s that violence that the Proud Boys have become best known for, with the group even boasting of a “tactical defensive arm” known as the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (or “FOAK”) reportedly with McInnes’s backing. McInnes made a video praising the use of violence this June, saying, “What’s the matter with fighting? Fighting solves everything. The war on fighting is the same as the war on masculinity.”
In parades and rallies across the country, from Berkeley, California, to New York City, members of the Proud Boys have fought with counterprotesters, antifa, and anyone who gets in their way. Jared Holt, of Right Wing Watch, told me that the group “acts as a violent pack of enforcers for the far right.”
And at events for conservative commentator Ann Coulter and right-leaning speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, members of the Proud Boys have even attempted to act as “security,” but those efforts have descended into chaotic violence (although they spun it as a victory):
For his part, McInnes believes the violence of the Proud Boys (in his view, a response to left-leaning violence) is a logical response to how the “left” has responded to right-wing speaking events, writing in June 2017:
The right isn’t violent. The left is. By allowing these sociopaths to shut down free speech with violence you are all but demanding a war. Okay, fine, you got it. It’s official. This is a war.
But McInnes left the Proud Boys in 2018 after the group was involved in a violent clash with anarchists on the streets of Manhattan, following an event in which McInnes portrayed Otoya Yamaguchi, a young far-right extremist who assassinated the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party. McInnes even had a fake katana (a type of Japanese sword), which he was filmed swinging at counterprotesters. Ten members of the group were eventually charged following the violent melee, with two ultimately sentenced to serve four-year terms in prison in October 2019.
In a since-deleted video, McInnes said, “I am officially disassociating myself from the Proud Boys. In all capacities, forever, I quit,” adding, “I’m told by my legal team and law enforcement that this gesture could help alleviate their sentencing,” referring to the Proud Boys who were facing legal problems.
The group also faced allegations that the FBI had classified the organization as “an extremist group with ties to white nationalism,” but in a statement to me made on background by a law enforcement official, I was told that “the FBI doesn’t designate groups.”
The Proud Boys’ embrace of violence — and Trump
While McInnes no longer technically leads the group, his inspiration remains visible, particularly in the violence embraced by the organization. At rallies in Portland and Seattle, the group — alongside right-wing militia organizations like Patriot Prayer — have taken part in events that have frequently turned violent.
Like Patriot Prayer, another multiracial far-right group that has embraced street fighting as a political tactic, the Proud Boys often rely on the actions of their opposition to draw attention to themselves and their cause. In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting in November 2019, Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said the Proud Boys hold events purely to attract counterprotesters, with the understanding that provoking any counterprotesters can feed a “victimization narrative.” “So when antifa throw stuff at them ... Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are able to say, ‘See, they are trying to silence us and stop our freedom of speech,’” he said.
The group has also effectively parlayed its anti-liberalism into MAGA-centric politics, making friends with right-leaning politicians like Rep. Matt Gaetz. And Trump’s mention of the group and the resulting media attention might provide the group with its largest narrative boost of all. Enrique Tarrio, who serves as chair of the Proud Boys, shared in a since-deleted tweet that he was “extremely PROUD” of Trump, and that “stand back and stand by” is what the Proud Boys have “ALWAYS” done.
Tarrio, who briefly ran for Congress against Rep. Donna Shalala earlier this year, attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (but allegedly left before the murder of Heather Heyer). He got involved with the Proud Boys after volunteering at an event for the far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017, and became a fourth-degree Proud Boy after punching a purported member of antifa in the face in June 2018.
The point of the Proud Boys is reflective anti-leftism, in which “leftism” is defined as “whatever they don’t like.” While they purport to speak for free speech and Western values, their overarching goal is to use violence as a political solution, with “the left” as the amorphous enemy they purport to fight — by any means necessary.
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Donald Trump’s sustained, lie-filled assault on vote-by-mail is only the latest in a long tradition of Republicans attempting to win by preventing people from voting. Trump has spent months screaming about fraud as a threat to his reelection despite the fact that the only major voter fraud case in recent memory was carried out in 2018, by a Republican campaign operative. But while Trump has taken this to a higher and louder level than other such efforts to use fraud claims to keep people from voting, Republicans have been doing the same basic thing—though more quietly—for decades, usually aimed at Black voters, young voters, poor voters, and new citizens. “Voter fraud” claims are a part of the machinery that rose up to replace poll taxes and overt violence aimed at preventing Black people from voting.
Trump came to the head of a Republican Party that had invested heavily in lawyers and elections officials dedicated to suppressing votes, a major New York Times Magazineinvestigation shows. The George W. Bush administration had raised up a generation of far-right lawyers dedicated to promoting the myth of voter fraud to keep Black and Latino people from voting, while state-level Republicans across the country pushed voter ID laws and voter purges that disproportionately targeted people of color. The efforts went up to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote to gut the Voting Rights Act. Then came Trump.
Trump made voter fraud claims a hallmark of his first year in office because he was dedicated to showing that he didn’t really lose the popular vote—it was just that there were millions of fraudulent votes cast against him. (It was never clear why such a powerful, well-funded, effectively secret operation didn’t cast those fraudulent votes in the places that would have tipped the electoral vote to Hillary Clinton.) But his claims were supported by the preexistence of that Republican voter suppression machine. For instance, in Indiana in 2016, a voter registration group flagged suspicious voter registration forms and stopped using the canvassers who had collected them, but despite those efforts at transparency and honesty, the group was raided by police … and then-Gov. Mike Pence used it as a major public example of voter fraud.
When Trump went to assemble his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, he was able to quickly stock it with dedicated warriors against people of color voting—people like former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Hans von Spakovsky. That commission fell apart when the designated Democratic patsies included on it for the appearance of bipartisanship refused to be quite the pushovers they were intended to be, with Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap ultimately suing and publicly posting documents showing a plan to go national with Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck system, which targeted people as double-registered to vote based simply on their names and birthdays. The problems with that system were huge.
”One study showed that Kobach’s program would cause 300 wrongful terminations for every double registration it might prevent,” The Times Magazine reports, while “another study found that nonwhite voters—who are more likely to share the same names than white voters are—were far more likely to be flagged in its data.”
Republicans have been trying to prevent people they suspect are Democrats—especially Black people—from voting basically for years, with false or massively exaggerated claims about voter fraud as one key weapon. A tiny handful of people accidentally voting when they shouldn’t, or somehow in the wrong way, becomes the evidence for excluding tens or hundreds of thousands of people from voting rights. It happens again and again. But under Trump this has been taken nuclear, first because he wanted to prove he didn’t really lose the popular vote in 2016, and now because he believes he is going to lose in 2020 and wants to delegitimize the election. Attorney General William Barr is lined up and ready, already lying about supposed voter fraud cases—Barr claimed that one case involved 1,700 fraudulent ballots when a local prosecutor said that in fact, early suspicions of widespread fraud had ended when “we couldn’t find it except that little tiny case.” Barr also said: “If there was a specific investigative danger that we detected some problem and risk—yes,” the Trump administration could and would send law enforcement to polling places. This after he had showed the willingness to lie about specific investigative dangers.
Trump is building on that longstanding framework of racist voter suppression to specifically benefit himself—and if, as polls suggest, he can’t suppress his way into a “win,” he will happily use that machinery, with the weight of the federal government behind it, to disqualify huge numbers of votes, fight the full counting of all votes … whatever it takes to either “win” or throw a Joe Biden win into doubt. But here, as in so many other areas, we cannot make the mistake of believing that other Republicans are somehow separate from Trump. He is just the pinnacle of what they’ve been working toward for decades.
The part that I wasn’t expecting, sitting at a picnic table with the former CIA director near the center of a working farm with goats and chickens and a cider barn, was when a man interrupted us—just as we were starting to talk about Barack Obama’s initial reaction to intelligence reports of Russian election hacking—and asked if we could help him jump his car battery. He had no idea that this was John Brennan climbing over the fence in his oxfords, showing him how to hook up the cables, making sure he wasn’t going far to get home, and revving the engine until the pale-blue Subaru started again.
Or maybe he did, and this was all some op out of The Americans. The whole afternoon felt more like pseudo-spycraft than a usual interview. Meet in a parking lot in suburban Virginia. Trust that the place really is called Frying Pan Farm Park. Assume that all the kids and their parents running around have no clue that a person who had access to America’s top-secret information was sitting there explaining the difference between compromise and kompromat.
There’s a moment in Brennan’s new book, Undaunted, that should be jaw-dropping, but at this point fits into the Twilight Zone of the past four years. Briefing the top Donald Trump team a few days before the inauguration, going through the CIA’s assessment that Vladimir Putin had ordered the election tampering, Brennan gets an uneasy feeling. Trump seemed less disturbed by the briefing than interested in probing for how Brennan knew what he knew, what the sources were. “This deeply troubled me, as I worried what he might do with the information he was being given,” Brennan writes.
The then-director of the CIA was suspicious of the president-elect of the United States, feeling that he couldn’t be trusted with American national security. Brennan writes that he had been wary of Trump going into the meeting, couldn’t believe he had won, then came away from that meeting thinking “foreign intelligence services take much the same approach” to interrogating information in search of sources. Despite the intelligence community conclusion that Russia was behind the attack, Trump was full of his own postulations about what other country might be responsible. And as they finished, Brennan writes, Trump looked at him and said, “Anyone will say anything if you pay them enough. I know you know that.” (Judd Deere, a White House spokesperson, replied to my request to verify this statement by cc’ing several current National Security Council staff on an email, but that was the extent of the response.)
We’ve lived through four years of drips and leaks and reports and insinuations, but no single piece of information neatly explains what exactly we’ve been living through. Is it just a bunch of coincidences, overinterpreted bits of facts, and the Kremlin poking at our confusion, or is Trump part of some Russian plot? Does Putin have something on him? In his book, Brennan describes a days-long process of going through all the intelligence, the most-secret secrets, before calling the White House and saying he had to brief Obama on what he knew. He’s got to know.
“I find it difficult to explain the extent to which Donald Trump has kowtowed” to Putin, Brennan says to me. One theory is that the Russians do have some compromising material or information on Trump, he offers. Another theory holds that he’s trying to line up future financial support from the oligarchs, who take their cues from Putin. Yet another option, I point out, is that Trump just likes strongmen; he has a toddler’s jealousy of the leaders who get to do whatever they want without being asked annoying questions like “Why?” or “Isn’t that against the law?”
That would make more sense if Trump hugged all authoritarians the way he hugs Putin, Brennan says.
So Putin does have something?
“I don’t know what Putin knows. Obviously, I know some of the things that Putin knows. I know some of the things that Donald Trump knows. But my description of those things in the book are limited by my security obligations,” Brennan says.
I can’t tell, I say to him, whether he’s not telling me something, or not telling me anything.
“I have my suspicions of things,” Brennan says. “But I think it would be unfair of me to just roll out my suspicions without doing the necessary review and the digging.”
More crazy-making. What about the pee tape? Is that real?
“I have no idea,” he says. “To me, that’s less important than all the other stuff. Trump has survived so much stuff. Will he be able to survive a pee tape? Probably. If Putin has something on him and/or if Trump is concerned about what Putin or the Russians could reveal, I think it would be something more significant. And I don’t think it’s unrelated to the reason why he’s not releasing financial records. He has a very well-deserved reputation, Donald Trump, for skirting regulations, laws, rules, whatever else he will do, whatever it is to advance his interests, and for many, many years, his focus was on advancing his brand as well as his financial interests.”
Brennan and I spoke two days before the New York Times exposé of Trump’s tax returns hit, but some of the broader facts about the Trump Organization’s melee of foreign debts and entanglements were already known—and they certainly seemed to be on Brennan’s mind.
The way that Brennan’s critics see him is as a man with Stage IV Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has infected him with unfair suspicions about the president’s ties to Russia. They think he’s used the imprimatur of his former job to cloak an anti-Trump agenda. (Brennan admits in his book that his distaste for the president goes back to the 1980s, when Brennan was in school and Trump was already a tabloid star.) He has already spent eight hours being interviewed for the Justice Department’s probe of the origins of the Russia investigation. He figures that if U.S. Attorney John Durham, who’s leading the probe, ever releases a report—earlier this week, the Justice Department announced that it won’t happen before the election—he’ll make an appearance in it. He bets the report will criticize him for a decision (touched on in Undaunted) to overrule two CIA case officers specializing in Eurasia, who tried to dissuade him from accepting CIA analysts’ assessment that Putin wasn’t just interested in mucking up the election, but in doing so specifically to benefit Trump. To have gone with the officers’ opinion over the analysts’ would have been “a very inappropriate action,” Brennan says. “I’m not going to tell them to change their judgment because you two folks who are now looking at stuff for a brief period of time believe that it should be changed. That would be a corruption of the analytic intelligence process.”
Trump acolytes aren’t the only ones wary of how far Brennan has gone. He’s faced complaints that he became enraptured by a mix of cable appearances and the Steele dossier (which he writes in his book he never saw until December 2016).
Trump’s defenders argue that he was rightly suspicious of the American intelligence apparatus, given that it had failed to stop the September 11 attacks and to properly vet claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion. That’s one part of a possible explanation for Trump’s response to Brennan during their briefing. Another, maybe, is that Trump’s curiosity about the intelligence methods isn’t nefarious, but just the product of a man new to government as he took over the top job, wrapping his head around what was ahead. Trump could have had ulterior motives then, and throughout his presidency—or his behavior could be explained by his overall instinct to burn down the system. I ask Brennan:
“I think that what all of us struggle with—those of us who don’t have access to many of the things that you had—is trying to figure out if he’s the Tasmanian Devil just tearing down everything or—”
Brennan cuts me off.
“Or the Manchurian Candidate?”
And he chuckles a little. The chuckle of a man who saw a lot during 33 years in intelligence, but who has been more shocked by some of what he’s seen in the past four years, since he’s been out. Amused. Bemused. Disbelieving. Chastened.
Brennan lived across the street from this park for 30 years—in Undaunted, he writes that he got his wife to agree to a two-year assignment in Saudi Arabia by noting that their housing costs would be covered and they’d be able to save up for a down payment. He loved coming here with his children, with his grandchildren. The same house, all the years he worked in the White House and CIA, under Republican and Democratic presidents including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. It’s a special spot to him.
Brennan had to move a few years ago. Speaking out against Trump led to him being a feature of early-morning angry tweets and a false declaration that his security clearance had been stripped. Brennan could deal with all that. What he couldn’t deal with were the wackos who found his address online and started showing up at his door, or the pipe bomb sent with his name on it to CNN’s office in New York. (The bomber was a bad researcher: Brennan is an MSNBC contributor.) Now he lives nearby, but keeps his exact address closely guarded.
Undaunted is a self-portrait of a life devoted to American government by a man who knows he has a temper that gets him in trouble. Take out the first chapter and the last three, and it’s a memoir about how someone not in the cast of Homeland ends up joining the CIA and navigates his way to the highest levels of government. It includes the September 11 attacks; his uneasiness with the agency’s use of torture (a word he won’t use), but a caveated defense of it; and getting to know and work for Obama. If you’d like to read more about how the Presidential Daily Briefing is assembled or what went wrong with Obama’s approach to Libya, or want to get a personalized perspective on keeping the secret of the plans for the Osama bin Laden raid, it’s all there. Brennan provides behind-the-scenes looks at government officials whom he respected but who disappointed him (high up on that list: Bush, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California), and those whose lack of seriousness bred contempt. “Oh, don’t pay any attention to what I say on the Senate floor. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just politics,” he quotes Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina saying to him at one point, and he describes former House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes as “notable for his general lack of curiosity or concern about what I had just told him.” (Graham’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
There’s no taking out those other four chapters, though. The first rumblings of 2016-election interference pass by in the middle of a paragraph, and are initially dismissed. Then, within a page, Brennan’s writing about how quickly the evidence convinced him that Putin was personally ordering the attack, because he “had good experience cutting deals with businessmen who had become heads of government—Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi being a prime example.”
Was this a clue slipped past the CIA, which, by standard practice, had to review his manuscript before publication?
“Well, what I was referring to was Putin’s interest in having government leaders be businessmen who are willing to make deals, and deals that may not be all that ethical or protective of one’s national-security interests. It’s more advancing individual agendas and making sure that they’re able to, you know, line their pockets,” Brennan says. “So, again, I think that there’s a lot there that we don’t know.”
In fairness, Brennan says, it’s been four years since he’s seen the intelligence that was alarming him in 2016, and the CIA did not allow him access to his old files or notes while he was writing his book. He doesn’t know what has been gathered since—what was ruled out, what was followed up on. Much of what he’s learned about what he calls “staggering” Russian information operations came from carefully reading Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report last year. That experience, he says, was both vindicating and frustrating.
How about this question, I say, trying to weave through his career-bred caution and security clearances: In his opinion, how much worse is whatever else he’s seen compared with what has come out publicly?
“I don’t think what is known at this point to U.S. officials gets close to the reality, because I think there’s still a lot about Trump and his background, some of the relationships with Russia between him and others, that is unknown,” Brennan says. “As he’s made clear, he wasn’t interviewed by Mueller; a lot of the financial information was never uncovered or accessed. So I think there’s still a lot there. There’s a lot that I was aware of when I was in the agency—a lot of intelligence. A lot of that intelligence, if it dealt with U.S. persons, got passed on to the FBI. I don’t know what the results of the follow-up investigative efforts were. So it’s really unclear to me, the full extent of it.”
Those FBI recommendations—were they members of the Trump family? Trump himself? Brennan says he won’t go into details. Another attempt: Would we know the people who were in those files?
“There are names that are familiar, sure,” he says.
Though, of course, it’s possible that whomever he’s talking about was investigated and cleared. And maybe, if nothing else has come out, with all the digging that’s been done, there isn’t anything more to connect Trump and Putin.
In 30 years, are we going to know? Are we ever going to know? Or is it always going to be this haze?
“Donald Trump, more than anybody else, knows what he has done in his life,” he says. “And I believe he does fear that it could come out once he leaves office, and then he’s not going to be protected, and then he’s going to be potentially subject to some type of liability.”
Brennan’s only answer on whether he thinks Trump should be charged with crimes after leaving office is that lawyers should sort out what is appropriate. But he says Trump has “absolutely, without question” violated his oath of office, that Attorney General Bill Barr is a “co-conspirator,” and that the Republicans in the Senate who have put political expediency ahead of challenging what he believes is a clear and present danger to the country are violating their own oaths. That goes for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, Brennan writes, responded to his own 2016 briefing on the Russian attacks with, “One might say that the CIA and the Obama administration are making such claims in order to prevent Donald Trump from getting elected president.” (David Popp, a spokesman for McConnell, told me that policy is not to comment on intelligence meetings, but “I’d remind you of what the Leader has said repeatedly in public: intelligence should never be used for partisan political purposes. Leader McConnell has always taken seriously the threat of foreign interference in our elections, and is encouraged by steps taken by Congress, the executive branch, and state and local election officials since 2016 to defend against this real threat.")
The way Brennan and those in his corner see it, he’s given his life and career to this country, the same way he jump-started that car in the lot—when I tried to politely decline the Subaru owner’s request, Brennan sprang into action. Like so many of us, he has regrets about how much he tweets these days. “I certainly wish I never felt the compulsion to go onto Twitter and to tweet, but it was because of Trump. I didn’t want to cede that Twitter-sphere to him,” he insists, arguing that he’s speaking out like that on behalf of his old compatriots in national security, who can’t talk publicly about a man “who is the antithesis of all that is good about this country.”
So yeah, Brennan says, the book will probably inspire more Trump tweets. He’s fine with that. His mind these days is more on hoping that Joe Biden wins, and imagining what a transition would look like. Trump, he thinks, would stoke violence, and probably make some moves aimed at punishing an incoming administration. He’ll challenge the results in court, Brennan thinks. He’ll try to draw out conceding for as long as possible.
Brennan spent all that time at the CIA learning how people tick. He’s studied Trump. He tells me he’s already run through the scenarios of what happens next, on the assumption that the president has information to hide and is worried about protecting himself. He’ll probably pardon himself, Brennan thinks. He might resign a day early as part of a deal to have short-term President Mike Pence pardon him. He definitely won’t go to Biden’s inauguration.
But Brennan doesn’t see Trump refusing to leave the White House if he loses. “He doesn’t want to have a scene of being taken screaming and kicking and crying from the White House. He might take his flag and go down to Trump Hotel and set up his own, you know, whatever.”
The goats have been led inside. A child’s small family birthday party has eaten cake and cleaned up. A little rainstorm is starting to gray the sky. Brennan bangs his hands on the table for emphasis when giving his final answer.
“I mean, he clearly is a historic figure. If that’s what he’s been aiming for, he’s certainly achieved it. But he’s going to go down in history as a very bad person, if not an evil person, who did tremendous damage to this country and also to the world,” he says. “The word Trump is going to just be toxic, I think, in future generations, as well it should be, because he has been so devastatingly damaging to this country.”
It'll be a disaster with the right wing nutjob brigade
The new Supreme Court term begins on Monday. | Al Drago/Getty Images
A Supreme Court without Ruth Bader Ginsburg is about to show us whether it still cares for the rule of law.
The new Supreme Court term will open on Monday under a cloud of uncertainty — and dread, if you’re a liberal.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death means Republicans will almost certainly control six seats on the Court before the year is up. And President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill Ginsburg’s seat, Amy Coney Barrett, is an extraordinarily conservative judge who is likely to support lawsuits advanced by the legal profession’s right flank.
If the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare — which, with Barrett essentially guaranteed to replace Ginsburg, is very much a possibility — every single one of those 20 million people could be stripped of their health coverage overnight.
Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images
Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third nominee to the US Supreme Court, poses with Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on September 29, 2020.
The upcoming term could also write the final chapter in a long-simmering dispute over whether someone with a religious objection to LGBTQ people has a constitutional right to discriminate against them. Proponents of LGBTQ equality already faced an uphill battle in Fulton v. City of Philadelphiabefore Ginsburg’s death. With a presumed six Republicans on the Court, their prospects are even more grim.
Moreover, it’s worth noting that the cases on the current docket were chosen by a nine-justice Court that included Ginsburg. In nearly all circumstances, at least four justices must agree to hear a case before it’s added to the Court’s argument calendar.
In the coming weeks and months, the Court’s Republican majority has the opportunity to add cases to its docket knowing it will likely have the votes to move the law sharply to the right.
In other words, the conservative legal movement is poised to remake large swaths of American law — and it’s well-positioned to do so in the years to come so long as Republicans control a supermajority of Supreme Court seats.
The Supreme Court could take health care away from millions of Americans
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: The legal arguments challenging Obamacare in California v.Texas are absurd. They’re the sort of arguments fair and impartial judges would laugh out of court, possibly after sanctioning the plaintiffs’ lawyers for bringing frivolous litigation.
As Yuval Levin, a prominent conservative commentator and policy wonk, wrote in the National Review, the notion that Obamacare cannot stand without the individual mandate “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.”
But with six conservative jurists, there’s a very real chance the Court will seize this opportunity to repeal a law Republicans have wanted to destroy for more than a decade. Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Senate staffer appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, already ruled in Texas that the whole law should be repealed. And two Republican appellate judges upheld much of O’Connor’s decision.
The case concerns a 2017 amendment to the ACA, which effectively repealed the law’s individual mandate requiring most Americans to either purchase health insurance or pay at least $695 in additional taxes.But the tax law Trump signed the same year reduced the penalty owed by people without health insurance to zero dollars.
The plaintiffs in Texas, which include 18 states with Republican governors or attorneys general, claim this zeroed-out mandate is unconstitutional.
One reason why this lawsuit should not be taken seriously is because it challenges an Obamacare provision that, at least after the 2017 amendment, does literally nothing. Again, the amended law requires individuals to either purchase health insurance or pay a zero-dollar tax.
The Constitution does not permit just anyone to show up in federal court and ask the judges to strike down a law. Rather, in order to bring a lawsuit challenging a legal provision, a plaintiff must show they were injured in some way by that law, a requirement known as “standing.”
Because no one is injured by a zero-dollar tax, no one has standing to challenge the zeroed-out individual mandate in court.
If the standing requirement did not exist, there is a plausible — though not exactly airtight — argument that the ex-mandate is indeed unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the fully operational mandate as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to levy taxes inNational Federation of Individual Business v. Sebelius (2012). But a zero-dollar tax is no tax at all, so there’s at least one non-frivolous argument that the neutered mandate is unconstitutional.
But even if you assume the non-mandate is unconstitutional, so what? Who cares whether a provision of the law that literally does nothing is constitutional?
Which brings us to the single most absurd aspect of Texas.
When a court strikes down part of a broader statute, it often needs to ask whether other parts of the law should fall along with it. This question, known as “severability,” is a normally speculative inquiry — courts must ask what hypothetical law Congress would have enacted had it known that one provision was invalid.
But speculation is unnecessary here because the question has been answered. In 2017, Congress spent months debating whether to repeal the ACA and how much of the law should go. Ultimately, it had enough votes to repeal only one provision: the individual mandate.
So we already know what Congress would have done had it been aware the zeroed-out mandate would ultimately be struck down: It would have enacted legislation that eliminated the individual mandate but kept the rest of the law intact. We know this because Congress enacted legislation that eliminated the individual mandate but kept the rest of the law intact.
California v. Texas, in other words, is more than just a challenge to the ACA. It is an early test of whether a Court with a 6-3 Republican majority is capable of honoring the rule of law. The plaintiffs’ arguments in this case would be comical if countless human lives weren’t endangered by them.
And if the Supreme Court is willing to strike down Obamacare on this risible legal theory, we cannot expect its new conservative majority to stay its hand in any case wherein the Republican Party’s preferred outcome is at odds with the law.
Religious conservatives could gain a constitutional right to discriminate against LGBTQ people
The question of whether private business owners who refuse to serve LGBTQ customers for religious reasons has been with us for quite some time. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Court sided with a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. That said, the Court’s decision in Masterpiece was quite narrow and largely punted on the larger question of when religion provides a license to discriminate.
Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which the Court will hear this upcoming term, superficially resembles Masterpiece. Like the earlier case, Fulton involves religious plaintiffs who claim the First Amendment’s command that the government shall not prohibit the “free exercise” of religion entitles them to discriminate against same-sex couples.
But there is one very important difference between Masterpiece and Fulton. Again, Masterpiece involved a private business. Fulton, by contrast, involves a government contractor that claims that it has a constitutional right to discriminate against same-sex couples while performing a governmental service.
The city of Philadelphia contracts with multiple private organizations to screen couples to determine whether they’re suitable to become foster parents. The city’s contract with these organizations contains a provision prohibiting them from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.
Historically, Catholic Social Services (CSS) has been one of the organizations that provided this service to the city. But in 2018, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that CSS refused to work with same-sex couples. The city investigated and determined CSS was, indeed, in violation of the contract’s non-discrimination provision, after which it did not renew its contract with CSS.
Regardless of whether the Constitution permits private businesses to discriminate, the Supreme Court has long acknowledged that the government has more authority over its own operations than it does over purely private citizens. “There is a crucial difference, with respect to constitutional analysis,” the Court explained in Engquist v. Oregon Dept. of Agriculture (2008), “between the government exercising ‘the power to regulate or license, as lawmaker,’ and the government acting ‘as proprietor, to manage [its] internal operation.’”
Fulton is not a case about whether private citizens can refuse service to LGBTQ people. It is a case about whether the government may refuse to discriminate against LGBTQ people — and whether it can order the people it pays to provide governmental services to provide those services equally to everyone.
Should the Supreme Court rule that religious conservatives may demand government contracts on their own preferred terms, the implications could be profound. It is one thing for private businesses to claim autonomy over their own limited domain. It is another thing altogether for a private contractor to effectively dictate terms to a government that is supposed to serve all people equally.
Federal law enforcement officers could gain immunity from lawsuits claiming they violated the Constitution
Bivens held that federal law enforcement officers may be personally sued when they violate the constitutional rights of a private plaintiff.
“Power, once granted, does not disappear like a magic gift when it is wrongfully used,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court in Bivens. “An agent acting — albeit unconstitutionally — in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus the Constitution must offer a remedy to victims of federal officers who inflict such harm on them.
But Bivens suits are “a ‘disfavored’ judicial activity,” according to a recent ruling joined by all five members of the Court’s current Republican majority. The 5-4 decision in Hernandez v. Mesa (2020) strongly suggests the Republican justices are ready to overrule Bivens.
Had those same five justices sat on the Court when Bivens was originally decided, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Hernandez, “It is doubtful that we would have reached the same result.”
Which brings us to Brownback v. King, which the Court will hear in November.
The facts of Brownback are simply horrific. James King, the plaintiff in the case, was a 21-year-old college student when two law enforcement officers mistook him for a criminal suspect in the summer of 2014. After falsely identifying King as the fugitive they were looking for, the officers arrested him before allegedly beating and choking him to the point of unconsciousness.
Courtesy of the Institute for Justice
A picture of James King taken after his encounter with two law enforcement officers in 2014.
King sued, alleging the officer’s actions violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure and excessive force.
The specific legal issue before the Supreme Court in Brownback is fairly technical, and thus difficult to summarize concisely. In essence, the Court must decide whether a statute known as the Federal Tort Claims Act prevents King from pursuing a Bivens claim against the officers.
Given the Court’s recently expressed hostility toward Bivens — and because Brownback is likely to be heard by an even more conservative Court than the one that decided Hernandez — there is a very real risk that Brownback could be used as a vehicle to overrule Bivens in its entirety, thereby leaving King without any remedy against the officers who mistook him for someone else, with violent consequences.
Government officials could be forced to compensate “religious liberty” plaintiffs
Tanzin v. Tanvir, which the Court will hear on Tuesday, presents a direct conflict between the conservative values pressed by the Fulton plaintiffs and the conservative disdain for decisions like that ofBivens — which, again, held that federal law enforcement officers could be sued directly — that is likely to animate the Court’s decision in Brownback.
Like Brownback, Tanzin arose from allegations of civil rights violations by federal law enforcement officers. Muhammad Tanvir says he was approached by two FBI agents who asked him “whether he had anything he ‘could share’ with the FBI about the American Muslim community.” After Tanvir declined to become an informant, those agents allegedly threatened him with deportation and placed him on the no-fly list.
Because he was placed on the list, Tanvir also claims that he was unable to fly to see his ailing mother in Pakistan and that he had to quit a job as a long-haul trucker because he could no longer fly home to New York after a one-way delivery.
The legal issue in Tanzin is whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which governs many federal religious liberty claims, permits Tanvir to directly sue the FBI agents who allegedly violated his civil rights. Thus, the conservative justices will have to choose between expanding the power of plaintiffs who allege their religious rights were violated and protecting federal law enforcement officers from liability.
Liberals are also likely to be conflicted about the proper result in Tanzin. Though the facts of this particular case involve a Muslim man who was allegedly abused by law enforcement, a ruling in Tanvir’s favor could also subject federal officials who enforce anti-discrimination laws against conservative Christians to personal liability.
The Court could cut deeply into the Constitution’s safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment
The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments,” and the Supreme Court has held that this amendment prohibits states from imposing certain punishments on certain individuals.
In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), for example, the Court held that “death is not a suitable punishment” for someone who is intellectually disabled. Roper v. Simmons (2005) extended this holding to juvenile offenders, relying in part on the theory that a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility are found in youth more often than in adults and are more understandable among the young.”
More recently, in Miller v. Alabama (2012), the Court held that juvenile offenders should not be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole unless they are “the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption.”
Notably, both Ginsburg and now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy were in the majority in these closely divided cases. It is far from clear whether the Court still has the five votes necessary to sustain the decisions in Atkins, Roper, and Miller.
Which brings us to Jones v. Mississippi, a case the Court will hear in November. The specific issue in Jones is whether sentencing judges must make an explicit determination that a juvenile offender is “permanently incorrigible” before sentencing them to life without parole. But the stakes in Jones are potentially much higher.
If there are five justices who wish to overrule decisions like those of Atkins, Roper, and Miller, Jones potentially presents them with a way to do it. Indeed, the case could enable the Court’s new Republican majority to drastically roll back much of the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Court could impose additional limits on Congress’s power to investigate the president
The specific legal issue in House Committee is fairly narrow. The House Judiciary Committee seeks grand jury materials related to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 election. As a general rule, such materials are kept confidential, but the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure sometimes allow such materials to be disclosed “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.”
A federal appeals court held that an impeachment trial counts as a judicial proceeding, and as such a House committee may potentially obtain grand jury materials if it seeks them as part of an impeachment inquiry. The Court will consider whether that conclusion was correct.
By the time this case is argued, it’s likely that the stakes in House Committee will be fairly low. Trump will either be a lame duck, in which case there will be less need to investigate him closely, or will have held onto the presidency, in which case a House investigation is unlikely to thwart his efforts to further consolidate power.
Nevertheless, House Committee could provide a window into the newly constituted Court’s eagerness to protect Trump from investigation.
The Court could retroactively invalidate years’ worth of agency actions
In last term’s Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau(2020), the Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional for Congress to create a federal agency led by a single person if that person cannot be fired by the president at will.
At least at first, the practical implications of the decision appeared fairly minimal — the only immediate impact of Seila Law is that the CFPB director can now be fired by the president at any time. Should Democratic nominee Joe Biden prevail in the upcoming election, this means he can replace Trump’s CFPB director immediately after taking office.
And yet Collins v. Mnuchin, a case the Court will hear in December, could raise the stakes of the Court’s Seila Law decision considerably.
Collins involves the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), an agency that, like the CFPB, has a single director who enjoys some protections against being fired by the president. After Seila Law, there is little doubt that FHFA Director Mark Calabria will be stripped of these protections. If Biden wins, he will almost certainly be allowed to dismiss Calabria.
But the plaintiffs in Collins ask for substantially more. As several lower court judges explained, the plaintiff’s claim is that “everything the FHFA has done since its inception is void because it was an unconstitutionally structured agency” (Congress created the FHFA in 2008).
As a result, a dozen years’ worth of federal actions could potentially be vacated.
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“If you want to make God laugh,” Woody Allen once famously said, paraphrasing a Yiddish proverb, “tell him about your plans.”
That’s not an issue for President Donald Trump, at least not on health care.
He’s been promising a health care plan since he started running for president, often with superlative adjectives attached, and yet has never produced one. His lack of a proposal was a stumbling block in Tuesday's debate and plays into a broader, long-standing Republican vulnerability on health care.
Polling tends to show that, far and away, the three most important issues to voters are the economy, Covid-19 and health care. Trump leads narrowly on the economy and trails on the other two. To the extent that issues play a role in a Trump defeat in November, health care will have had some hand in it, and he’s done little to inoculate himself, in fact has gone out of his way to expose himself.
His administration backs a lawsuit that seeks to strike down Obamacare, including its popular protections for people with preexisting conditions. This allows Democrats to say—and they say it all the time—that he wants to destroy Obamacare. They believe this line of attack is so useful that it has also become their main argument against confirming Amy Coney Barrett, lest she rubber-stamp the anti-Obamacare lawsuit once she’s on the Supreme Court.
Never mind that the suit is very unlikely to succeed. The background is that in a previous case, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate in Obamacare as a tax. Then, Congress zeroed out the tax. The current case argues that the individual mandate therefore can no longer be upheld as a tax and further—this is the real stretch—that if this now toothless mandate is thrown out, the rest of the law has to go as well. There’s no reason to believe that the conservative justices would undertake this legal adventure.
But this makes the politics a worst-of-both-worlds scenario for the White House. By backing the suit, it opens itself up to the attack prior to the election that it will eliminate protections for preexisting conditions, without having any realistic chance of winning when the court takes up the case after the election.
It would help at least to have a plan, and that’s Trump’s instinct. But his supposedly imminent health care plan has become as meaningful as the various versions of “infrastructure week.”
Coming up with a health care plan should be something within his control. It’s not like, say, promising to create 10 million jobs, a pledge that would depend on circumstances not fully under any president’s control. Drafting a plan, at bottom, requires only a consensus among some wonks, a word-processing program and a printer.
No one would have bet at the outset that the administration would have in hand two historic Middle East peace agreements—namely, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalizing relations with Israel—before having one health care plan. But here we are.
It’s not as though there aren’t options (and it should be noted that the administration has adopted worthy, piece-meal changes to nudge the health care system in a more free-market direction). There’s the old House Republican plan from the Obamacare repeal debate in 2017, and a plan from The Heritage Foundation that is tailor-made to be picked up by the administration. In fact, it’s been promoted in an op-ed titled, “A Health Plan for President Trump.”
But there hasn’t been a consensus within the administration. At least one faction, once associated with former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, opposes any plan at all. It reflects vintage Tea Party thinking circa 2014 that Obamacare needs to be repealed and not replaced.
In addition, once you get into brass tacks, health care policy involves trade-offs that are all politically perilous. If you send the spending in Obamacare back to the states, how will the individuals currently receiving Obamacare subsidies react? Alternative conservative reform plans involve their own far-reaching, intricate policy changes that can’t be undertaken lightly.
So the path of political least resistance is to commit to nothing, which the administration has done. It has attempted to compensate for its lack of a plan with an executive order committing to come up with a way to cover people with preexisting conditions at some future date. The president has touted this as a historic act, even though it's only a more official version of Trump’s prior promises.
There’s no doubt Trump is more populist, both in manner and substance, than his Republican predecessors. But health care is an area where his populism is insufficiently realized. Seeking to repeal Obamacare without bothering to tell people how it’s going to be improved on is what you’d expect from a stereotypical Republican, and it’s been Trump’s posture for four years.
God might scoff, but it’d be better to have a plan.
The effort by Donald Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and their henchmen to drop the government's criminal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn has turned into an epic display in abuse of power.
During a hearing Tuesday, Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell finally admitted under tough questioning that she had directly briefed Trump and one of his campaign attorneys on the case two weeks ago, and she requested that Trump not issue Flynn a pardon, according to Politico.
“I can tell you I spoke one time to the president about this case to inform him about the general status of this litigation,” Powell said.
Absolutely nothing good can come from Trump (or his campaign attorney) getting briefed directly on the defense of a former deputy and central figure in the Russia investigation whom Trump has been desperate to exonerate for years. One of the chief reasons Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey in early 2017 was precisely because he wouldn’t go easy on Flynn at Trump’s urging.
But Trump's current Justice Department, under Barr's tutelage, is now doing everything possible to drop the case even though Flynn pleaded guilty twice in a court of law to lying to the FBI before he ultimately changed his representation and Barr sought to dismiss the charges on a fabricated technicality. In fact, Barr’s renewed interest in the case came after Powell directly sent him a letter in 2019 requesting that he change out the prosecutorial team on the case.
But U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan didn't seem to be having any of it on Tuesday, affirming that to his mind, “The sentencing has already commenced in this case.” In fact, Sullivan agreed to delay sentencing during the original hearing in December 2018 so Flynn could further cooperate with federal prosecutors and perhaps secure a lighter sentence. Once Justice Department lawyers pulled a 180 and sought to dismiss the charges, Sullivan appointed a former federal judge, John Gleeson, to review the case and recommend a way forward under almost unprecedented circumstances. Gleeson ultimately concluded that the department's bid to toss Flynn's conviction was "corrupt" and "politically motivated," and it should be denied "because there is clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power."
But at Tuesday's hearing, federal prosecutor Kenneth Kohl assured Judge Sullivan the dismissal request was made for the "right reasons," adding, “We’re completely unafraid to get in the weeds and address the specifics as to why we thought we needed to dismiss this case."
Kohl then argued that the main witnesses in the case—Peter Strzok, Joe Pientka, Andrew McCabe—were all too flawed to be credible. Of course, all three men, and particularly Strzok and McCabe, have been the subjects of an ongoing Trump smear campaign for years now. So in essence, the Justice Department is now using a rationale for dismissal that at least partially hinges on Trump's politically motivated character assassinations.
Gee, that doesn't sound fishy.
Furthermore, Politico writes, "While Kohl touted his credentials as a career department prosecutor, his critique of the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team sounded like the litany of complaints one might hear on a Fox News prime-time broadcast. He treated as fact individual opinions of agents and analysts — revealed in recently disclosed internal messages — and interpreted ambiguous messages in the most damning light for FBI investigators pursuing the case against Flynn."
Kohl's clearly the man for job, but for none of the "right reasons," to borrow a phrase.
But during the four-hour proceeding, Powell really distinguished herself by accusing Judge Sullivan of "a hideous abuse of power" for his unwillingness to toss the case as she moved to disqualify Sullivan.
“I want to make that motion right now, your honor,” Powell said.
“Put it in writing,” Sullivan responded.
Former Judge Gleeson, the court-appointed amicus curiae, urged Sullivan to proceed with the case. “If the executive wants to take Michael Flynn off the hook, he can pardon him,” he said.
But that pardon is clearly something Flynn is trying to avoid having on his record since Powell admitted counseling Trump against it. Taking such an action also appears to be an electoral consideration for Trump, whose campaign attorney was weirdly present for his briefing with Powell.
Gleeson is obviously saying: Make Trump do it if Flynn's exoneration is so important to him. But don't let Flynn off scot-free through Barr's bogus gambit to do Trump's personal bidding.
If we look at potential tipping-point states, the race is a bit closer, but not that much closer. After a couple of strong polls for Joe Biden earlier this week in Pennsylvania — the state that’s currently most likely to decide the election — Trump now trails there by 5 to 6 points. He’s down by about 7 points in Michigan and Wisconsin, meanwhile. Those states, along with Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire — where Biden has also polled strongly lately — suggest that Biden is winning back some of the Obama-Trump white working-class voters who flocked to Trump four years ago. Indeed, Biden is as close to winning South Carolina or Alaska as Trump is to winning Michigan and Wisconsin, based on recent polls of those states.
At a time when Trump desperately needed a boost, the debate probably didn’t help him either — it may have hurt him. Every scientific poll we’ve seen had Trump losing the debate, some by narrow margins and some by wide ones.
That includes the poll FiveThirtyEight conducted with Ipsos, which surveyed the same group of voters before and after the debate. While the poll didn’t show a massive swing — most voters stuck to their initial preferences — more voters did rate Biden’s performance favorably, and Biden gained ground relative to Trump based on the number of voters who said they were certain to vote for him, roughly tantamount to a 3-point swing toward Biden in head-to-head polls.
Now, I’m not predicting this will happen, but if Biden’s national lead were to expand to 9 or 10 points, which is consistent with the sorts of polling bounces we’ve seen in the past for candidates who were perceived to win debates — especially challengers debating an incumbent for the first time — Trump’s situation could become quite desperate.
To be clear, none of this means that Trump’s chances are kaput. As of this writing, our forecast still gives him around a 21 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. That’s not great, but it’s a lot better than zero.
But it’s possible Trump’s chances may decline further after post-debate polling begins to roll into our forecast. Furthermore, the mere passage of time helps Biden in our model, because every day that Trump doesn’t gain ground is a day when his fate becomes slightly more sealed. (Lots of people have already voted!) Case in point: In an election held today — Trump has no more time to make up ground — his chances would be 9 percent, not 21 percent, according to our forecast.
We assume that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. The model also does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.
Let’s back up for a second. This is FiveThirtyEight’s fourth presidential election campaign. And in the previous three, there was at least some question about who was ahead in the stretch run of the race. John McCain, for instance, briefly pulled ahead of Barack Obama following the 2008 Republican convention, and Obama didn’t really solidify his lead until early October. In 2012, national polls were very tight between Obama and Mitt Romney following the first presidential debate, and remained fairly tight thereafter (although Obama always maintained an Electoral College edge). And people forget how close the 2016 race was for stretches of the campaign; it was not such a huge upset. In fact, Hillary Clinton led by only 1.4 points in our national polling average heading into the first debate that year.
But there isn’t any of that ambiguity this time. Since we launched our general election polling averages on June 18, Biden has never led by less than 6.6 points nationally. Literally only one national poll — a Rasmussen Reports poll that put Trump ahead by less than a full percentage point — has shown Trump leading by any margin during that period. It’s been an exceptionally stable race.
But, amazingly, that hasn’t really shaken people’s confidence in Trump’s ability to win. In our own poll with Ipsos, we found respondents thought Biden and Trump had roughly equally likely chances of winning. And maybe that boils down to three perpetual sources of anxiety I hear in conversation with liberal friends or liberal readers:
Trump could win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin.
There could be a large polling error in Trump’s favor.
Trump could somehow steal the election.
All three are legitimate sources of concern for Biden backers. The first two are relatively easy to quantify, however. Indeed, the whole purpose of a model like FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast is to answer questions like those. The third one, however, is harder to get a handle on, so let’s talk about No. 1 and 2 first..
The Electoral College could still help Trump, but it only goes so far
The possibility of an Electoral College, popular vote split remains a point in Trump’s favor. In fact, there’s an 11 percent chance that Trump wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote in our forecast (but less than a 1 percent chance the other way around). At the same time, Biden’s strength in the Upper Midwest relative to Clinton’s — at least, if polls are correct there — potentially mitigates this disadvantage to some extent. The table below shows Biden’s probability of winning the Electoral College given various popular vote margins, according to our forecast as of Wednesday afternoon. And as you can see, Biden is only truly safe to win the Electoral College once he has a popular vote margin of 5 points or more! But, he’s a fairly heavy favorite with a 3- to 5-point margin, and has roughly break-even odds with a 2- to 3-point margin.
Biden’s favored, if he wins the popular vote by +2 to +3 points
Chances of Biden winning the Electoral College under different popular vote scenarios, according to the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast, as of Sept. 30
POPULAR VOTE MARGIN scenarios
Biden’s chances
of winning the ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Biden +6 to Biden +7
>99%
Biden +5 to Biden +6
98
Biden +4 to Biden +5
93
Biden +3 to Biden +4
77
Biden +2 to Biden +3
54
Biden +1 to Biden +2
29
TIE to Biden +1
11
Trump +1 to TIE
3
Trump +2 to Trump +1
<1
So, for practical purposes, you can take Biden’s lead in national polls and subtract 2 or 2.5 points from it to infer his margin in tipping-point states. In other words, if he’s ahead by around 7.5 points in national polls, that’s more like the equivalent of a 5-point lead in the Electoral College. That’s still a reasonably large advantage; empirically, it’s not that easy to overcome a 5-point deficit at this stage of the race.
A big polling error could help Trump … or Biden
One of the misconceptions I hear about FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is that “it assumes that polls are right.” Actually, in some sense the whole purpose of the forecast is to estimate the chance that the polls are wrong. In 2016, the polls did show Clinton ahead, but between tight margins in tipping-point states and the large number of undecided voters, there was a fairly high probability — around 30 percent, according to our forecast — that Trump was going to win anyway.
So while a polling error is possible — indeed, our forecast assumes there’s likely additional error this year because of an uptick in mail voting — it would still take a bigger error than in 2016 for Trump to win.
Assume that current polls hold until Election Day, and subtract 3 points from Biden’s margin in every state (roughly the average error in swing state polls in 2016) … Biden still wins Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin fairly comfortably, and therefore, the Electoral College; he’d also be a slight favorite in Arizona. And as our friends at the Upshot have calculated, even if you had a polling error of the exact same magnitude in the exact same states as in 2016, Biden would still win, albeit narrowly.
Of course, nothing intrinsically rules out a larger polling error. We had one in 1948 — when Dewey didn’t defeat Truman, after all — and in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won in an epic landslide instead of the narrow margin that polls predicted.
I want to spend more time on this topic in the coming days, so I won’t go on at too much length here. But for now, know that a 7-point Biden lead on Election Day could, indeed, turn into a 2-point Biden popular vote win where Trump narrowly wins the Electoral College.
As I wrote earlier in the piece, our forecast gives Trump about a 9 percent chance of winning an election held today despite his current deficit in polls — not bad when you’re 7 points down! But it’s about equally likely that a 7-point Biden lead could translate into a 12-point Biden win, in which he’d not only carry states like Georgia and Texas, but would also have a shot in South Carolina, Alaska and Montana.
Trump’s comments on respecting the election outcome are deeply worrisome, but it’s hard to estimate his chances of overturning the result
Hoo, boy. At some point I’m going to have to write a column about this too, I suppose. As I said at the outset, our forecast assumes that the election is free and fair — at least to the extent that past elections that we used to train the model were free and fair. (Throughout American history, there has always been plenty of voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement.)
But for now, let me advance a few propositions:
Even a small probability that the U.S. could become a failed or manifestly undemocratic state is worth taking seriously.
Trump’s actions are much more likely to actually change the result of the election if the outcome is close, and right now, the most likely scenario is that Biden wins by a not-so-close margin.
Beyond that, it’s hard to estimate the probability that Trump could steal the election to any degree of precision. It requires, at a minimum, some knowledge of the probabilities in a free and fair election plus some knowledge of election law and how many votes could realistically come under dispute plus some theory of the institutional incentives of the Supreme Court and various other courts plus some opinions on how Congress might interpret the Constitution in the event of a disputed election. Maybe a panel of experts could get together and try to put together some reasonable bounds on the probability of various scenarios, but I don’t know that any individual could — certainly not me.
After Trump’s actions over the past few weeks, though, I wonder if there’s some tradeoff between Trump’s chances of winning legitimately and his willingness to engage in authoritarian rhetoric and behavior, even if it probably wouldn’t succeed at stealing the election. It’s not like this is coming entirely out of left field; Trump also said in 2016 that he wouldn’t necessarily respect the election results. But his recent statements have come at a moment of increasing peril for his campaign. It’s hard to know for sure, but I think Trump’s comments might be more tempered if he were 2 points ahead in Wisconsin instead of 7 points down.
It’s not easy to see which cards Trump has left to play or which contingencies could work in his favor enough for him to win — other than if the polls have been wrong all along.
If Trump intuits that he’s unlikely to win legitimately — it’s not hard to imagine him escalating his anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior. It’s also not hard to imagine this rhetoric further eroding his position in polls. It’s highly unpopular in focus groups (yes, take those with a huge grain of salt) and Trump’s polling over the past several days has been particularly bad (although there’s been a lot of other news, too).
So we could be headed for a vicious cycle where Trump increasingly gives up on trying to persuade or turn out voters and voters increasingly give up on him. But from a polling standpoint, this is one of the clearer elections to diagnose: Biden isn’t home-free, but he’s in a strong position. Nonetheless, the outlook for what’s actually in store for America has rarely been more cloudy.
Amy Coney Barrett is not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Every circumstance of her acquiescence to this nomination disqualifies her. Her extremism disqualifies her. Her refusal to say she will not recuse herself from a challenge to the action from Donald Trump—the primary reason he wants her on the court—disqualifies her. It's all of those problems that are driving Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham to jam her nomination through at breakneck speed.
By the end of Wednesday, Politico's Capitol Hill reporter Sarah Ferris reckons, Barrett will have met with about a third of Senate Republicans. She has already begun her hearing preparation, getting her schtick on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which she has called unconstitutional in previous statements, and Roe v. Wade—she is a rabid forced birther who belongs to an extreme charismatic Catholic sect. Her confirmation hearing is in 12 days, with McConnell and Graham fully intending to have her seated before the election, in time to hear arguments in Trump's challenge to the Affordable Care Act on Nov. 10 and in time to rule on a potential Trump challenge to the election results.
McConnell and Graham want—need—to get this done before the election. Graham is in a tight race and has got to have every Republican vote back home in South Carolina; seizing the SCOTUS majority with a partisan extremist will do it for him. McConnell knows that a delay until the lame duck session after the election will be too dangerous for that goal. There's no guarantee at all that he'd be able to get his 51 votes if the election swings as hard against Republicans as polls now suggest it will.
As Barrett's past writings and decisions—as well as her 2017 confirmation hearings for the Appeals Court seat she now holds—receive more scrutiny, the need to ram this through at breakneck speed becomes even more apparent for Graham and McConnell. Even Trump is aware of some potential hurdles, like abortion. He insisted in Tuesday night's debate that abortion wasn't on the ballot this election because of the Supreme Court and told Biden "you don't know her view on Roe v. Wade." At least it seems like that was what he was getting at. It was all pretty chaotic, but Trump did make sure to get that in.
Looking at her 2017 hearing, you can see how clever she was in walking a tightrope on the issue. In questioning from Sens. Mazie Hirono and Dianne Feinstein, Barrett was very careful to sat that as an appellate judge, she would consider Roe a "super-precedent," more than 40 years old and having survived multiples challenges. "One thing I would observe is that, for a Court of Appeals, all Supreme Court precedent is super-precedent," Barrett said. "So as I had said to Chairman [Charles] Grassley, as a Court of Appeals judge, if I were confirmed, I would follow all Supreme Court precedent without fail." She added again that Roe is "40 years old, and it's clearly binding on all Courts of Appeals. And so it's not open to me or up to me, and I would have no interest in as a Court of Appeals judge challenging that precedent. It would bind." She did it again at another point: "I'm being considered for a position on a Court of Appeals, and there would be no opportunity to be a no vote on Roe. And as I said to the committee, I would faithfully apply all Supreme Court precedent." But when she's on the Supreme Court, and has a chance to be a “no” vote on Roe? She sure left that door open a mile wide.
On the ACA, Barrett has criticized Chief Justice John Roberts (he's gotta be really excited at the prospect of serving with her) in arguing that he should have found the law unconstitutional because of the individual mandate being beyond Congress' authority. In 2012, she signed a public statement of protest against the the birth control benefit included in the law, saying coverage of birth control was "assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience." The chances that she'll uphold the law are slim. The chances that she would allow any expansion of the ACA are slimmer.
The health coverage for something like 130 million people with medical histories that would have precluded them from having health insurance pre-ACA hangs in the balance with the Supreme Court. Women's bodily autonomy hangs in the balance. What's left of civil rights hangs in the balance. This seat flipping from humanitarian Ruth Bader Ginsburg to far-right extremist Amy Coney Barrett would be the most profound shift on the Supreme Court since Antonin Scalia was put on the court after Chief Justice Warren Burger's retirement in 1986.
McConnell and Graham are aware of that, too. They know just how radical what they are doing right now is, just how massive a departure from every governing norm it is, and just how much her presence on the court could upend ... everything. That's why there’s the need to rush. They don't want any Republican who might still have a shred of principle left to have time to think about it.
Enlarge / Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), attends an event about coronavirus vaccine development in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 15, 2020, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer)
Trump administration officials have once again sidelined the head of the country’s leading public health agency while crafting public health policy. This time, officials torpedoed a plan to extend the “no-sail” order on cruise ships until next year.
Cruise ships were initial hotbeds of coronavirus transmission at the start of the global pandemic, which is still far from under control in the United States. Mass outbreaks on the tightly-packed, social vessels forced the cruise industry to shut down in March, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a no-sail order that is set to expire today, Wednesday, September 30.
In a meeting in the White House Situation Room Tuesday, CDC Director Robert Redfield floated a recommendation to extend the no-sail order until February 2021, according to a report by Axios. But Vice President Mike Pence, who chaired the meeting, told Redfield that the administration will be setting a different course.
Some employers are giving their Zoomed-out workers a break. From a report: From tech startups to sprawling hospitals, businesses say they are trying to dial back time employees spend in remote meetings after realizing that hours spent on video calls every day have taken a toll. Still, some employees have a hard time breaking the Zoom habit, even with their bosses telling them to stop. Executives making the switch say meeting schedules ballooned in the pandemic's early days, largely due to the perceived ease of video calls and a desire to maintain workday normalcy as much of the country sheltered in place. "Zoom fatigue is real," said Abby Payne, chief people officer at SailPoint Technologies. The Austin, Texas, company has instituted a ban on meetings from 10 a.m. to noon every Tuesday and Thursday. Employee comments about sitting down at their computers at 7 a.m. and not getting up for 12 hours helped prompt the move, Ms. Payne said. "This is really a way for the organization as a whole to address both the fatigue of staring into a computer and also the reality that half of us have little ones," she added. The 1,000-person company enacted the restriction on meetings in August when it realized many employees would be juggling work while also raising children who would be attending school remotely in the fall.
Americans reported drinking alcohol more frequently and in higher quantities since last year, according to a study published in JAMA. From a report: Excessive alcohol consumption may cause or worsen mental health problems, such as anxiety or depression. Experts have also warned the stress of the pandemic has fomented alcohol and drug abuse. The greatest changes were among women and people 30 to 59 years old. On average, alcohol was consumed one day more per month by three of four adults. Frequency of alcohol consumption for women increased by 17%. Heavy drinking among women -- four or more drinks within a few hours -- spiked 41% since 2019. Adults aged 30 to 59 years increased their drinking by 19% since last year.
FOX News analyst Andrew Napolitano is facing lawsuits from two separate men accusing the New Jersey judge of “forcible sodomy” in one case and attempted rape in the other.
Business Insider reports: “The first lawsuit against Napolitano was filed on September 11 and alleged that he had ‘forcibly sodomized’ Charles Corbishley, then a 20-year-old defendant in Napolitano’s court, in 1987. Napolitano filed a countersuit against Corbishley on September 15 for defamation, denying all of Corbishley’s allegations.
“On Monday, New Jersey resident James Kruzelnick filed a lawsuit seeking $15 million in damages from Napolitano, claiming a pattern of coercion and sexual abuse between 2014 and 2017. Kruzelnick alleges that Napolitano stalked and harassed him at his place of work, coerced him into ‘bizarre’ sexual acts, and attempted to rape him, resulting in ‘severe and permanent emotional distress.'”
Napolitano’s lawyer called the charges “total fiction” and accused the attorney, the same in both instances, of filing “copycat” lawsuits.
In Corbishley’s case, the young man was facing arson charges in November 1987 and his case was transferred to Napolitano’s court after his criminal defense attorney Robert Hollis was charged with money laundering in relation to a prostitution ring. In 1988, Hollis instructed Corbishley to meet with Napolitano at the New Jersey judge’s residence.
NorthJersey.com reported on Corbishley’s suit: “In the suit, Corbishley, who was 20 at the time, said he was told to bring a snow shovel and a Christmas card and when he got there, he was told to shovel the driveway which he found ‘peculiar because the driveway already had been shoveled.’ He said in the lawsuit that Napolitano came outside dressed in a long trench coat and made small talk before saying ‘you know, you could be going away for a long time.’ According to the suit, Napolitano pushed Corbishley to his knees and told him to ‘be a good boy.’ The lawsuit states: ‘Charles Corbishley was then forced to perform fellatio on the Honorable Andrew Napolitano, the presiding Justice on his criminal case.’ Corbishley said that he wanted to stop but was ‘terrified about what Judge Napolitano would do to him if he resisted or fought back.’ According to the suit, Corbishley spoke to Hollis two days later and he ‘knew exactly what had happened between Judge Napolitano and Mr. Corbishley’ and said ‘something to the effect that ‘we both have him now, and ‘don’t worry about anything.'”
After the incident, two of Corbishley’s charges were dismissed and he was given a more lenient sentence on the third while his co-defendant got three years in prison.
Kruzelnick’s lawsuit says Napolitano began stalking him when he was a waiter at Mohawk House restaurant in Sparta, New Jersey, where he was ordered to serve Napolitano by the restaurant’s owner, who was friends with the judge.
Kruzelnick said it began after Napolitano followed him into the bathroom and groped him, saying, “You are just so hot.”
According to the filing (transcriptions here from Law & Crime): “Plaintiff was shocked by Napolitano’s actions, as the two men did not know each other and had never been together outside of the restaurant prior to that night. Plaintiff immediately pushed defendant Napolitano off of him, and told him that he shouldn’t do things like that in a public place, and that he shouldn’t touch him like that again. Plaintiff had no interest in Napolitano, who was 20 years older than him, and who was more of a father figure than anything else. Plaintiff felt that Napolitano was a brilliant man and he enjoyed speaking with him at the restaurant, but he did not want anything more than that to develop between them.”
The filing continues: “Napolitano would not be deterred. After this unwanted groping, Napolitano’s sexual harassment of Plaintiff only increased. Every time Napolitano came to the restaurant, he would specifically ask for Plaintiff to be his waiter.”
The harassment continued into the following month, according to the filing: “In January 2015, Napolitano started making sexually explicit remarks to Plaintiff. He started telling Plaintiff things that he would like to do to Plaintiff sexually, and started to ask him blunt sexual questions. Plaintiff was very uncomfortable with these sexual remarks. While Plaintiff looked up to Napolitano and saw hm as a very powerful and accomplished man, he did not want to engage in this type of sexual talk with Napolitano, especially in a work environment.”
The filing continues: “Napolitano continued to make sexually suggestive and inappropriate remarks, but he seemed to understand that Plaintiff was not interested in any sexual relationship but rather just wanted to be friends. As long as Napolitano respected these boundaries, Plaintiff was okay with their friendship and genuinely enjoyed their conversations at the restaurant about life, politics and world events.”
But nine months into the “friendship,” Napolitano allegedly did this, according to the filing:
“As defendant Napolitano entered the living room, Plaintiff observed that Napolitano’s pants were down, and his penis was fully erect and exposed. Plaintiff was truly shocked by Napolitano’s conduct, and didn’t know how to react. Before Plaintiff could say anything, Napolitano said ‘I am really into certain things’ and ‘I want you to do something for me.’ Thereafter, defendant Napolitano walked up to Plaintiff’s chair, and suddenly threw himself onto Plaintiff’s lap. Napolitano then told Plaintiff that ‘I want you to start slapping me really hard.’ Before Plaintiff could say anything in response, defendant Andrew Napolitano then demanded that James Kruzelnick spank his exposed buttocks while Napolitano masturbated on his lap. Plaintiff was repelled by Napolitano’s request and had no interest in playing this bizarre ‘sex game.’ But when Plaintiff told Napolitano that he did not want to spank him, Napolitano shouted at him: ‘just fucking do it!!’ … James Kruzelnick began spanking Andrew Napolitano on his buttocks while Napolitano masturbated. Napolitano then demanded that James Kruzelnick call him ‘son’ while Plaintiff played the role of ‘daddy’ and spanked Napolitano. Thereafter, Andrew Napolitano ejaculated onto one of Plaintiff James Kruzelnick’s shoes, leaving Plaintiff feeling disgusted.”
Kruzelnick alleges that Napolitano continued to “relentlessly pursue” him, and Kruzelnick asked him for legal advice because he felt his boss at the restaurant was discriminating against him because he is gay.
According to the filing, Napolitano took the opportunity of giving legal advice as an opportunity to get Kruzelnick to his home, where he wanted to do the aforementioned sex scene: “Plaintiff felt like he could not risk telling Napolitano ‘No.’ He feared not only that Napolitano would withdraw his offer for help, but also, that he would tell Steve Scro, his boss, that Plaintiff had gone to Napolitano to get legal advice for the discrimination he was experiencing at Mohawk House, which could cost him his job. The risk seemed too high to Plaintiff, so he acquiesced to Napolitano’s demands.”
Kruzelnick says he also bent to Napolitano’s demands because the judge offered to help his brother, who was involved in a criminal lawsuit.
“While Plaintiff felt humiliated, degraded and abused by Napolitano, he also felt that he was powerless to stop the abuse. If he refused to do what Napolitano wanted him to do, then Napolitano would refuse to help out his brother [who] would go to jail.”
And then this allegedly took place and involved a FOX News intern: “This was not the first time that Napolitano had brought a young man from Fox News to the Mohawk House for dinner. But it was the first time that Napolitano had actually introduced the young man to Plaintiff, and had made plans with Plaintiff that involved an intern from Fox News. Specifically, that evening Napolitano invited Plaintiff and the Fox News intern back to his home. Shortly after arriving at Napolitano’s home, Plaintiff was given a drink and within ten to fifteen minutes of consuming the beverage, Plaintiff felt extremely woozy as if he had been drugged. He woke up hours later in Napolitano’s bed, with blurred memories of engaging in a sexual threesome with Napolitano and the Fox news intern.”
Napolitano has denied all the charges through his lawyer.
The bombshell report from the New York Times which revealed Trump paid a paltry $750 in income tax in 2016 and 2017 features in a searing new ad from the Biden campaign comparing Trump’s payment to that of essential workers like teachers, firefighters, and nurses.
President Donald Trump at the first presidential debate. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Despite Trump’s debate promises, experts say vaccines will take months or years to roll out.
At the first presidential debate of the 2020 general election, President Donald Trump tried to reassure viewers about his Covid-19 response by promising that he’s ready to distribute a vaccine: “We have the military all set up. Logistically, they’re all set up. We have our military that delivers soldiers, and they can do 200,000 a day. They’re going to be delivering the vaccine.”
In reality, this would be a paltry amount of vaccine distribution. At a rate of 200,000 vaccinations a day, it’d take more than 1,650 days — nearly five years — to vaccinate the entire country. If everyone needs two doses, which could be the case with the first generation of vaccines, it would take more than nine years.
Presumably, Trump was saying the military would play a supplementary role to other efforts, with hospitals, family physicians, pharmacies, and others distributing the vaccine alongside the military. But if the military piece is really the highlight of Trump’s plan, the math shows it’s so little it shouldn’t reassure anyone.
Trump also claimed that the US will have a vaccine in the coming weeks, echoing previous comments he’s made that a vaccine will be ready in October. In the past, he’s also claimed that the vaccine will be available to everyone quickly — what he called “full distribution.” He repeated that last night, claiming, “Well, we’re going to deliver it right away.”
If you talk to experts, including some within the Trump administration, they disagree with Trump’s assessment across the board. It’s possible, even likely, that we’ll get a vaccine by the end of the year, but October is far too soon for the ongoing, necessary trials to conclude, with November or December much more likely.
Even once a vaccine is approved by federal regulators and made available, supply will be limited. And the distribution process will likely be extremely difficult and slow for the first generation of vaccines. (One of the big challenges: One of the leading vaccine candidates in the US must be kept at temperatures as low as -94 degrees Fahrenheit, which requires freezing equipment that even some advanced facilities don’t have.)
That’s why many experts believe the vaccination process could take well into 2021 — and potentially 2022 or 2023. That means the Covid-19 pandemic could be with us for up to years, even after if we get a vaccine, and could remain a significant problem until the next round of elections.
Covid-19 “will continue to come up as an issue in the next midterms,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, previously told me. “It’s not going away.”
It would be one thing if Trump had done anything to assure the American public that he has the pandemic under control. Maybe that would have earned him some faith in how he and his administration will roll out a vaccine.
As a result, America has more than 200,000 deaths from Covid-19 — by far the highest recorded death toll in the world. When controlling for population, the US hasn’t had the highest death rate for Covid-19, but it’s among the top 20 percent of developed nations, and has seven times the death rate of the median developed country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, more than 120,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.
Trump, however, has repeatedly refused to admit any fault or culpability. That continued at last night’s debate, in which he tried to shift blame: “It’s China’s fault. It should have never happened. They stopped it from going in, but it was China’s fault.”
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
President Trump speaks during the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 29, 2020. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Don’t let Trump’s debate bullying distract you from his ignorance and malevolence.
President Donald Trump wasted no time turning his first debate against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden into a gutter fight. His constant interruptions made it difficult for the former vice president to complete a thought, and for moderator Chris Wallace to articulate a sentence, and likely prompted many casual viewers to quickly turn the channel.
“Will you shut up, man?” an exasperated Biden said early during the debate, as he struggled with Trump’s verbal bulldozing.
It was not an uplifting or clarifying event. Trump forced Biden to lower himself to respond to his interruptions, and perhaps in that respect the debate was a success for him. But as the more than 90-minute affair dragged on, there were a number of moments that illustrated how singularly unfit the incumbent is for public service. Here’s a rundown of just a few of them.
Trump was teed up a softball about racism — and wouldn’t even swing at it
Trump has a long history of racism extending from his current attacks on Black Lives Matter all the way back to the mid-1970s, when the Trump Management Company was investigated by the FBI for racial discrimination. On Tuesday, Wallace and Biden gave him a chance to at least pay lip service to anti-racism by pressing him to denounce white supremacist groups.
Instead, Trump bizarrely addressed the far-right, neo-fascist Proud Boys group and asked them to “stand by.” He then pivoted to bashing antifa, saying to Biden, “they’ll overthrow you.”
Trump won’t even pledge to not try to steal the election
Wallace closed the debate by asking Biden and Trump if they would wait to pledge victory following November’s election until the results are independently certified.
The question would’ve been a layup for any previous president and any previous major party presidential candidate (with the notable exception of Trump in 2016). But Trump wouldn’t even commit to not trying to steal November’s election, and he’s been laying the groundwork for questioning the election results for months.
“I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that’s what has to happen,” Trump said.
"I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully" -- Trump refuses to pledge to not declare victory until the election has been independently certified pic.twitter.com/YD14K8t8nQ
Biden, by contrast, quickly answered yes. The debate concluded with him saying Trump “has no idea what he’s talking about” when he pushes conspiracy theories about mail voting being used to rig the election against him, which have been debunked by his own FBI director and Department of Homeland Security secretary.
Trump’s comments on climate change were an infantile mess
The West Coast was ravaged by wildfires for most of the last month, and the Gulf Coast is experiencing a historic hurricane season. So you’d think that when Wallace asked Trump to acknowledge climate change as a real problem caused by humans, that would be the absolute least the president could do. But on Tuesday Trump wouldn’t.
Instead, Trump responded to Wallace’s question about if he believes that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to the warming of the planet by saying “I think a lot of things do.” He then went on an absolutely bonkers tangent about “forest management” and how Europeans purportedly do it better than Californians.
The point of the rant was to push back on climate science. Here’s a transcript, followed by the video.
In Europe, they live, they have forest cities. They’re called forest cities. They maintain their forest, they manage their forest.
I was with the head of a major country, it’s a forest city. He said, ‘Sir, we have trees that are far more — they ignite much easier than California.’ There shouldn’t be that problem. I spoke with the governor about it — I’m getting along very well with the governor — but I said at some point, you can’t every year have hundreds of thousands of land just burned to the ground. That’s burning down because of a lack of management.
"In Europe, they live, they have forest cities, they're called forest cities. They maintain their forest, they manage their forest. I was w/ the head of a major country, it's a forest city. He said, 'Sir, we have trees that are far more - they ignite much easier than California'" pic.twitter.com/ip4BLzbSUb
It’s almost impossible to take Trump’s nonsense seriously. But the stakes of this election are deadly serious. Trump’s strategy of constant interruptions may have resulted in many people walking away from the first debate unenthused about both candidates, but the fact of the matter is the choice voters face has never been so stark.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Kamala Harris participates in the Democratic presidential debate at Tyler Perry Studios November 20, 2019, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will face off in the next 2020 debate on October 7, with Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, moderating.
The debate will air live on ABC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox, NBC, and PBS Utah from 9 to 10:30 pm ET from the University of Utah’s Nancy Peery Marriott Auditorium in Salt Lake City, where there will be a small live audience of students. (That’s 8-9:30 pm CT, 7-8:30 pm MT, and 6-7:30 pm PT.) Debate organizers have secured the Cleveland Clinic as a health adviser to ensure that the debates can continue safely amid the pandemic.
Vice presidential debates haven’t historically attracted much fanfare, drawing much lower viewership than presidential debates. But Democrats are hoping that Harris — a former San Francisco district attorney who earned a reputation for being a strong debater during the Democratic primaries and who is known for her incisive style of questioning witnesses during congressional hearings — will go on the attack.
Her most notable debate performance during the primaries was when she criticized Biden, now her running mate, for opposing mandatoryschool busing during the 1970s, which she argued created an obstacle to desegregation efforts. Harris, as the most junior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also famously grilled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018 regarding his stance on abortion and about whether he had inappropriately discussed the Mueller investigation with Trump’s personal attorney.
In preparation for the upcoming debate, Harris reportedly has been practicing with former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has been playing the role of Pence in mock debates.
Pence, for his part, has enlisted the help of former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who served at the same time that Pence was governor of Indiana, the Washington Post reported. Page, the moderator, hasn’t announced debate topics yet, but Pence, as the leader of the White House coronavirus task force, will likely be called on to answer for his role in failing to prevent the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans amid the pandemic. He recently told the public to “anticipate that cases will rise in the days ahead,” predicting another surge.
Pence has faced criticism over his handling of the pandemic even from within his own camp: Olivia Troye, his former top aide on the coronavirus task force, went so far as to endorse Biden publicly, joining the group Republican Voters Against Trump.
There are still two more presidential debates
There will also be two more presidential debates on October 15 and 22 in Miami, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee, respectively. C-SPAN editor Steve Scully will moderate the Miami debate, and NBC anchor Kristen Welker has been selected to do so in Tennessee.
With just weeks to go before the November 3 election, Biden remains ahead in the polls, besting Trump nationally by a margin of about 7 points on average, according to FiveThirtyEight. He also appears to be carrying a narrower lead in critical swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. At this point, it doesn’t seem like those polls will move significantly ahead of Election Day given that the biggest crises facing Americans — a pandemic that shows no sign of slowing down, an economic downturn, and a national reckoning over race — aren’t going away anytime soon.
It remains to be seen how much — or little — the Tuesday night debate and the three remaining shift those numbers.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Hence the continuing meltdowns. But criminality needs consequences, even if he got a bunch of money from daddy.
President Donald Trump walks away after he delivers an update on the nation’s Covid-19 testing strategy in the Rose Garden of the White House on September 28, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The presidency shields him from charges of tax fraud, campaign finance violations, obstruction, and more.
A surprising revelation in the New York Times story about President Donald Trump’s taxes is that the “audit” he’s long claimed prevented him from releasing his tax returns to the public is real. It turns out the IRS perked up when Trump claimed business losses during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. The losses were so large that they could be retroactively applied to previous years and cancel out millions of dollars’ worth of tax liability from his days as host of The Apprentice.
It’s legal to use huge business losses to offset other income (though whether it should be is another question), but it’s not at all legal to cook the books in order to generate paper accounting losses to avoid taxes. It’s not clear whether Trump broke the law, but the existence of the years-long legal battle over the audit suggests the IRS has reason to believe he did. And some of the accounting practices documented on his tax returns are extremely fishy — characterizing aspects of his lifestyle and wealth transfers to his heirs as business expenses.
While nothing about being audited prevents you from releasing your taxes, it would seemingly make it unwise to do so. The IRS is limited in its investigative capabilities, while journalistic and scholarly interests are eager to put resources behind hunting through Trump’s tax returns. What the Times story, and the paper’s previous reporting on Fred Trump’s taxes, showed is a lot of dodgy tax avoidance going on.
But as long as Trump is president, he can shield himself from accountability for any tax-related crimes. He can also likely shield himself from debt collectors, who seem to have significant claims coming due over the next four years. From obstruction of justice to sexual assault allegations to campaign finance law violations, Trump is counting on the fact that he’s president to stop the law from coming after him.
As he prepares to take the stage to debate former Vice President Joe Biden Tuesday night, he’s making a case not only for continuing his governance approach, but also for maintaining his personal immunity to legal liability. The tax matter raises the stakes in the election and gives a president who’s rarely been law-abiding more reason to bend and break the rules in his quest to maintain power.
Tax-free gifts to kids
One of the most intriguing revelations in the Times’s reporting on Trump’s long-hidden tax returns is that money he gave his daughter Ivanka was treated as a tax write-off.
The full details are not available on Trump’s tax returns. They show instead that his company once paid $747,622 to an unnamed consultant for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver. Payments to consultants can be legitimate business expenses, and there’s nothing unusual about deducting something like that. But in this case, the consultant appears to have been his daughter, whose own public financial disclosures show receipt of $747,622.
This is the kind of thing the IRS could easily overlook because it requires checking two different forms, realizing that the numbers match, and then seeing that the $747,622 payment was almost certainly to Ivanka. There’s nothing wrong with giving your daughter a six-figure gift if you are rich enough to do so. But when you receive gifts of this size, you need to pay a gift tax on them. If you structure your gift as a consulting fee, it passes to your heir untaxed. Taking what’s really a gift and pretending it’s a business expense is against the law.
Gifts as corporate payments are not without precedent in the Trump family. An earlier New York Times story about Trump’s father’s taxes showed that not only did the president inherit a vast fortune, he did so largely while avoiding paying estate taxes. Some of that involved aggressive use of avoidance strategists that experts say are legal. But one thing Fred Trump did was set his kids up as owners of a company called All County Building Supply.
All County gave building supplies — at inflated prices — to buildings owned by Fred Trump. This generated tax-free gifts for the Trump kids and deductible expenses for Fred, and was even used in applications to New York state housing regulators as a reason to raise rents on rent-stabilized units. By the time this story emerged, the statute of limitations had passed, so it was impossible to hold anyone criminally responsible. But Trump’s sister was a senior-status federal judge at the time, so a petition was filed to open an ethics inquiry into her potentially illegal conduct — conduct she would have shared with her brother. But the moment the ethics board agreed that an inquiry should move forward, she retired from her position.
It’s possible that a thorough investigation would show the payments to Ivanka were legit. But it’s also possible that it wouldn’t. Now that the returns are public, we know that an investigation is warranted. And that’s true of many of Trump’s claims.
Dubious deductions
The news that Trump deducted $70,000 worth of hairstyling expenses also raises a question of whether such a deduction is valid.
The law of personal appearance deductions is both vague and, at least in theory, fairly strict. Bench, a vendor of small-business accounting services, cautions that “hair care expenses only qualify as a tax deduction when they are specifically for work-related photo shoots or shows.”
“You can write off makeup used for stage or photo shoots, but not if you wear the same makeup during your normal day,” according to Chuck Sloan at Backpage, a trade publication for actors. “The same applies to your hair care costs.”
That doesn’t mean that abuse isn’t routine. Ryan Grim, DC bureau chief for the Intercept, reports that a particular tax accountant who is widely used by DC writers regularly recommends that clients who appear frequently on television claim these deductions.
The tax guy in DC who does a ton of media folks always recommends it. @jamieson and I were just talking about how annoyed he'd be at the low cost of our cuts and the lack of frequency. Just leaving money on the table!
That does not, however, mean it’s actually legitimate. The IRS rules for taking a home office tax deduction, for example, state that “you must regularly use part of your home exclusively for conducting business.” Plenty of people with home offices that sometimes serve as guest rooms or television-watching rooms or excess coat storage during a party nonetheless claim a deduction based on the fact that it’s hard to prove you’re lying about it.
But the rules are the rules. Much of Trump’s lavish lifestyle seems to deliberately blur the lines between personal and business expenses. If you own a luxury golf resort in Scotland, then flying on your private plane to Scotland and taking a week-long vacation could arguably be business as long as you discussed things with the property manager and had some meetings with local officials.
When someone says that Trump is rich, they likely mean he has lavish consumption habits. When Trump tells the IRS he’s “poor,” that doesn’t mean he’s “a bad businessman” who’s pretending to be rich. It means he’s managed to classify a large amount of lavish personal consumption — from haircuts to flights on his giant private jet — as business expenses.
Getting away with it
According to the FBI’s uniform crime reports, fewer than 14 percent of car thefts or burglaries are actually solved by the police. But in elite circles, the fact that it’s relatively easy to get away with these crimes does not imply that they’re not really crimes, that there’s no ethical problem with committing them, or that the difficulty of enforcing the law against stealing cars implies that the whole charade is pointless and car theft should be legalized.
Unfortunately, the kind of people who’d never countenance burglary often do not take this approach to tax cheating, where they tend to apply a “whatever you can get away with is fine” mentality. As Trump said four years ago of his tax avoidance, “that makes me smart.”
But there has also been a concerted effort to make it easier to get away with cheating on your taxes. Back in the day, the IRS routinely conducted so-called “lifestyle audits” when a person seemed to be living too high on the hog, but Congress banned the practice in the 1990s. Natasha Sarin and Lawrence Summers estimate that there’s about $1 trillion in uncollected taxes of rich people that the IRS could get its hands on with a larger enforcement budget. Instead, as Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger have reported for ProPublica, the agency’s budget was cut 20 percent after Republicans took control of Congress in 2010 — meaning there are plenty of people getting away with various kinds of abuses.
In other words, while it’s possible Trump’s meager tax payments are a situation where the real scandal is what’s legal, it’s also possible that he is simply one of the large number of wealthy Americans who’ve been cheating on taxes and getting away with it. Trump has appointed an IRS head and an IRS chief counsel with business ties to him, and a whistleblower within the IRS has told Congress that political appointees have interfered with the audit of Trump’s taxes. If true, this would be just one of several instances where Trump’s status as president is shielding him from the law.
If Trump had lost, he’d have dealt with the law
Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen is currently serving a prison sentence for three separate crimes, one of which — as my colleague Andrew Prokop has written — is “arranging six-figure hush money payments for two women alleging sexual encounters with Trump — well above the federal limit for a campaign contribution. The first of these was a payment to Karen McDougal from the National Enquirer’s parent company, and the second was a payment to Stormy Daniels from Cohen himself.”
These payments, according to sworn statements by Cohen accepted by prosecutors and the court, were made at the direction of Trump.
In a normal prosecutorial situation, that would mean the next investigative target would be the candidate himself. But it’s Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime, so the Southern District of New York prosecutors who made the case against Cohen simply dropped it. Similarly, in his report to Congress, then-special counsel Robert Mueller describes Trump as being guilty of the factual elements of obstruction of justice. But Mueller took the view that he should simply describe the facts and leave it up to Congress what to do with them.
In either case, the House could have impeached Trump, but Democrats decided that doing so would be politically unwise. The fact remains, however, that it’s not unusual for a person to be charged with obstruction of justice or campaign finance crimes even in the absence of a larger conspiracy. Trump is skating by because it’s DOJ policy not to indict the president, not because the material isn’t there for an indictment.
Trump also has hundreds of millions in debts that are coming due over the next four years — debts that banks are much more likely to take a lenient view on if the debtor is also the president.
6. Trump is personally responsible for loans totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.https://t.co/wAZnwT02Ap
Trump, in other words, may not be able to afford defeat.
Trump is in a very dangerous place
Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush both left office defeated and unpopular. But they departed without complaint and swiftly rebuilt their reputations, becoming widely admired figures as former presidents whose children went on to have careers in public life.
Trump’s prospects as a former president are not nearly so bright.
He is the target of investigations into multiple financial crimes, and the potential target of campaign finance and obstruction of justice charges. Separately, he is facing civil litigation and the bill is coming due for his substantial debts. As president, he wields significant powers that can be used to block accountability on all these fronts. And as president, he commands the loyalty of the Republican Party, which has taken the view that holding Trump accountable would undermine their larger partisan and ideological projects. Even if a Biden administration chose to look forward rather than back on the loose threads from the Mueller and Cohen cases, the rest of these charges are unlikely to magically vanish.
This is all relevant context to the president’s various musings about how a “ballot scam” may give him reason to refuse to concede defeat in November. Nobody likes to lose. But Trump has reasons that go far beyond pride, bad manners, or even lust for power.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Trump speaks in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Trump is layering lie upon lie to rewrite the history of his encouragement of Russian hackers.
Trump accused reporters this weekend of mischaracterizing comments he made in July 2016 publicly encouraging Russian hackers to attack Hillary Clinton. But the way he described those comments is completely at odds with reality, and there’s video to prove it.
“Do you remember when I said, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, find her emails,’ or whatever the hell I said? ‘Find her emails,’ and then we all laughed together, 25,000 people in a stadium,” Trump said at a rally in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. “They cut it off exactly before we all started to laugh together, right? And for two years they’ve been saying, ‘He dealt with Russia. He asked Russia to please get her emails,’ or whatever the hell we were asking ... the whole place cracks up with me ... this is how dishonest these people are.”
This is no doubt part of his never-ending effort to discredit the media.
Watch:
Trump lies and says his infamous July 2016 call for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton happened in front of "25,000 people in a stadium," when in fact it happened at a news conference. pic.twitter.com/P1GsqVLUSY
Trump made the remarks in question during his first campaign, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
But Trump did not say this to a cheering and laughing crowd at one of his rallies. He actually said it in front of a handful of reporters during a news conference at his Doral property in Florida. That news conference wound up being his final one before the election, in large part because of the negative stir his remarks generated.
Furthermore, nobody laughed when Trump said it, and his comments are just as bad in context as they are when the “Russia, if you’re listening” line is considered on its own. Here’s the footage:
Jim Acosta of CNN, the reporter who asked the question that prompted Trump to say “Russia, if you’re listening” at the July 2016 news conference, tweeted on Tuesday morning that “the reporters at the news conference didn’t laugh. And Trump didn’t appear to be joking.”
The president seems to be trying to turn reality on its head, even though there’s tape to prove otherwise.
Trump is spitting on his supporters and telling them it’s raining
Retconning the incident has become a staple of Trump’s campaign speeches. On September 19 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for instance, Trump brought it up and claimed “everybody laughed” and “it was a joke,” then added the lie about it happening at a rally for the first time over the weekend.
Even if Trump didn’t mean for his comments to be taken seriously, Russian hackers apparently did. According to Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officials, on the same day Trump made those comments, Russian hackers “attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provided and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”
Trump has made clear in the years since that he doesn’t think foreign interference in American elections is a bad thing, insofar as it helps him. In October 2019, Trump flatly told reporters that he thought the Chinese and Ukrainian governments “should investigate the Bidens.” Those comments were widely condemned but were defended as just a joke by Republican members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy and Roy Blunt, even though footage of the comment showed Trump was serious.
REPORTER: What exactly did you hope the Ukrainian president would do about the Bidens?
TRUMP: "I would think that if they were honest about it, they'd start a major investigation ... they should investigate the Bidens ... China likewise should start an investigation." pic.twitter.com/gLVBjmSs3q
Trump’s comments about the July 2016 news conference were especially shameless, but they were far from the only brazen lie he pushed in Middletown. He told his supporters that just prior to the coronavirus hitting the US, “we were coming together ... I was getting calls from stone-cold, hard-line Democrats,” even though in reality he had just been through an impeachment trial. He claimed 35,000 people attended his Friday evening rally in Newport News, Virginia, but local reports indicate there were around 4,000. And he appeared to fabricate stats about excess mortality in order to mislead people about how hard the US has been hit by Covid-19.
Trump once advised his supporters in 2018 to “just remember — what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He’s not subtle about it.
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Six senior officials at the U.S. Agency for Global Media have filed a whistleblower complaint with the State Department’s inspector general and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, alleging that they were retaliated against for raising concerns about the new political leadership installed earlier this year by President Donald Trump.
The 32-page complaint, obtained by POLITICO and being shared with Capitol Hill, accuses top officials at the taxpayer-funded media group of abusing their authority, violating the law and mismanaging the organization.
In perhaps the complaint’s most explosive allegation, its authors say one of them was told the media group’s CEO Michael Pack or one of his aides ordered a senior USAGM official to conduct research on the voting history of at least one employee at the media agency — a violation of laws protecting civil servants from undue political influence or reprisal.
“[T]he research was to be utilized in evaluating career civil servants’ abilities to carry out the duties of their positions,” the complaint reads.
The complaint says that Grant Turner, who was pushed out as USAGM’s chief financial officer in August, three months ago started telling the State IG that the media group’s CEO Michael Pack and top lawyer Mora Namdar were violating the law in pressuring his office to withhold congressionally appropriated money from USAGM’s Office of Cuba Broadcasting in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act, a law that prohibits agencies from spending money that they don’t properly have on their books.
Turner, who testified in front of Congress last week, also alleges that Pack “crossed the firewall” that is meant to protect the journalistic independence of USAGM’s news networks from political interference, including by removing an Urdu journalist who had done a piece on former Vice President Joe Biden. All six of the officials who filed the whistleblower complaint were removed from their posts on the same day in August but remain at the agency on “investigative leave.”
The complaint also details concerns former chief strategy officer Shawn Powers raised internally about how a freeze on spending was putting the organization’s journalists in danger.
“Mr. Powers raised urgent concerns regarding the impact that Mr. Pack’s spending freeze was having on USAGM’s ability to support internet freedom tools in Hong Kong amidst the ongoing Chinese crackdown and takeover of local governing authorities,” the complaint says. “Mr. Powers specifically pointed out that the spending freeze was placing USAGM’s journalists at grave risk, and that the funds needed to be released to ensure that both USAGM’s journalists and its audience were safe from surveillance and persecution. Mr. Pack’s failure to support the internet freedom tools created a specific physical danger to USAGM journalists.”
Powers also made a “protected disclosure” to a staffer for Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, about how Pack’s reorganization had led to a “substantial reduction” in his duties without first providing a mandatory 14-day notifcation to Congress. Powers, who was worried about reprisal for disclosing this information to Congress and was in fact removed from his job in August, also told the Menendez staffer that he feared Pack was going to circumvent a congressional hold on $7 million in appropriations in order to cover expenses for the Cuba broadcasting office.
Another of the six officials who filed the complaint, Marie Lennon, who was director of management services, alleges that the Office of Personnel Management had said that USAGM had exceeded its authority in trying to hire four new staffers for temporary positions and that she was worried that Pack was bringing these people on board to “politicize” USAGM.
After she raised concerns about this to Cullo and USAGM chief of staff Emily Newman, Lennon says, she lost her access to classified information in a “clear and explicit retaliatory action.”
Controversial hires have continued despite the criticism. The latest example is Robert W. Patterson, who recently started in the White House liaison’s office at the agency, according to a USAGM official. Almost a decade ago, Patterson, who has worked in the Social Security Administration, wrote that condoms deprive women of semen’s “remarkable chemicals.”
"The pill-popping young lady in search of a husband is more likely to end up marrying the wrong kind of man from a biological and reproductive standpoint — and a guy she may no longer be attracted to after she goes off the Pill,” he wrote in 2011. “If this weren’t enough, now comes evidence revealing how another contraceptive device, the condom, also works against the health and well-being of women.” NPR first reported the hire.
Asked for comment on the whistleblower complaint, USAGM, in an unsigned email sent from the agency's main public affairs account, said in a statement to POLITICO: "The allegations listed in the complaint are without merit and completely false. All actions taken by the U.S. Agency for Global Media are in accordance with the law."
Cullo, Newman and Namdar didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
And Trump still can't bring himself to condemn white supremacy. His party keeps supporting him no matter what. Fucking pathetic.
Senate Republicans spent much of Wednesday pressing President Donald Trump to denounce white supremacy, with few in the GOP willing to explicitly defend his refusal to do so during Tuesday’s presidential debate.
Given a direct opportunity by moderator Chris Wallace to condemn the nation’s domestic terrorist groups, Trump instead told them to “stand back and stand by,” prompting far-right groups like the Proud Boys to quickly seize on the comments.
Trump attempted to clean up his remarks Wednesday afternoon after the barrage of criticism, saying he did not know who the Proud Boys are but that “they need to stand down.” However, it was far from the clear denunciation members of his party had been seeking.
In a series of interviews and public statements Wednesday, Senate Republicans pushed Trump to clarify his comments, with party leaders and the rank-and-file eager to put distance between themselves and the president’s stance.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that he shared the same views as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the only black GOP senator, who urged the president to correct his comments.
“He said it was unacceptable not to condemn white supremacy,” McConnell said. “And so, I do so in the strongest possible way.” Scott on Wednesday suggested the president may have misspoken but added: “If he doesn't correct it — I guess he didn't misspeak.”
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, also aligned himself with his South Carolina colleague, tweeting that he agrees with "President Trump needing to make it clear Proud Boys is a racist organization antithetical to American ideals.”
The president's refusal to rebuke hate groups once again dragged his history of racist remarks back into the national spotlight, creating another unwelcome headache for Senate Republicans as they try to keep their majority in November. The comments are poised to become one of the few crystallizing moments from a debate otherwise marred by bickering, cross talk and personal insults.
But McConnell said Trump’s performance in the debate wouldn’t hurt his efforts to keep the Senate: “I don’t know of any of my colleagues who will have problems as a result of that.”
Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Wednesday that Trump seemed to believe he'd already condemned white supremacy: "In his mind he did." But Thune prodded Trump to “clear it up.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said Trump should “unequivocally condemn white supremacy,” while Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) , a frequent critic of the president, responded that "of course" Trump should have denounced white supremacists.
Other GOP senators did not criticize Trump directly, but instead reiterated their own personal denunciation of white supremacy.
“I condemn white supremacy, all extremist groups. I think that all of these groups are equal, and I condemn them on the strongest terms and we need to remain one nation under God," said Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.).
Some GOP lawmakers came to Trump’s defense.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), argued that the president said recently he would designate the KKK a terrorist organization.
“He has been very clear that there is no place for racism in this country,” Loeffler said.
Meanwhile, Democrats and anti-racism advocates were outraged by what they characterized as essentially a dog whistle from Trump to hate groups.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) decried Trump’s comments, calling it a “sad night for our country.”
“I lost a lot of sleep last night over that one fact,” she said in an interview on MSNBC. “But I did know he has never respected the dignity of his office, and he demonstrated that last night. I think one thing he did present was the authenticity of who he is.”
Other surrogates for Trump worked to defuse the fallout before Trump himself offered a new take on hate groups. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, downplayed the alarm many had to the president’s remarks, saying on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he “heard it differently.”
Pressed by "Good Morning America" anchor George Stephanopoulos on the president's "stand by" directive, Christie reiterated that he “didn’t read it that way, but if you want to read it that way that’s your prerogative.”
Christie, who along with ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, helped prep Trump for the debate, said that Trump needed to quickly go out and clear up any confusion on the matter.
“The way to do that is the next opportunity the president has to clarify that answer because folks like you and others are confused by it, then he should do that,” Christie said.
Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director, meanwhile told Fox News that "I don't think that there is anything to clarify" from Trump's comments the night before.
"He's told them to stand back," she said, pointing to the president's efforts to tamp down violence in cities across the country.
The president, typically loathe to admit an error, has fumbled such attempts in the past — most notably his declaration that there were good people “on both sides” during the deadly 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist demonstration and counter protests.
Other observers typically sympathetic to the president seemed to recognize the potential ramifications of Trump’s debate response. “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said Trump “ruined the biggest layup in the history of debates” and, like Christie, urged the president to make amends.
“That’s like [asking] ‘are you against evil?,'” Kilmeade said. “Why the president didn’t just knock that out of the park, I’m not sure.”
Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Wednesday said that Trump's conduct during the debate was a "national embarrassment" and warned hate groups rallying around the president's remarks to "cease and desist."
"That's not who we are. This is not who we are as Americans," Biden said at a campaign stop in Alliance, Ohio.
White supremacist party supporting the nomination of a white supremacist president. What could possibly go wrong?
Senate Republicans say they can get Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court by Election Day, no problem. But to do so will require essentially a perfect confirmation process featuring almost no errors from Barrett and no slip-ups in the Senate.
Though Supreme Court vacancies have been filled more quickly, Barrett’s would be both rapid by historical standards and the closest ever to a presidential election. Add to that a president that’s on the ropes in his reelection campaign and a close race for Senate control and it’s easy to see why the White House and Senate GOP are taking every precaution necessary.
On Tuesday, in between quick meetings with Barrett, Senate Republicans said they were on track to install her before the Nov. 3 election — and they had few, if any, qualms about doing so.
“If Hillary Clinton were president right now and Chuck Schumer were majority leader, the odds that the Senate would vote on a Supreme Court nomination are 100 percent,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who met with Barrett.
The elaborate rituals of a Supreme Court nomination, which usually unfold over weeks or months, are being compressed to mere days under the Republican schedule. On Tuesday, Barrett held nine meetings with GOP senators, and she is expected to hold a similar number on Wednesday, meaning she’ll have met with roughly a third of the Senate GOP in just two days. The FBI background check on Barrett is expected to be completed before her Senate Judiciary Committee hearing begins on Oct. 12, according to a Republican aide.
If Barrett can stay on track, she will likely receive a committee vote on Oct. 22 and then a floor vote just days after. Even a short delay could push the confirmation past the election, which would be a major blow to Republicans. The Senate GOP’s 53-47 majority could be narrower in a lame duck session if Republicans lose the Arizona special election. There would be a huge political backlash if the party loses on Nov. 3 and then follows through on the lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
“The idea of doing it after the election, even though we would still be in our term and the president would be in his term and we’d be in the majority? I just think doing it before the election offers some political accountability,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Additionally, the Supreme Court is slated to hear a challenge to the Affordable Care Act right after the election and Trump wants to have Barrett on the bench. Trump and Republicans have also insisted the court needs nine justices in case it needs to weigh in on a contested election. Of course, they were far less concerned with the eight-member court in 2016 when Barack Obama was still president and Trump and Hillary Clinton were locked in a razor-tight battle for the White House.
On Tuesday, Barrett’s responses to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire were also released, an extraordinarily fast turnaround. Barrett disclosed that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows contacted her about the vacancy on Sept. 19, the day after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and that two days later Trump offered her the job.
Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has left little doubt that Barrett already has the support needed on the panel to move to the floor. Democrats can delay the nomination in committee for just a week.
“I want to give her a full, challenging hearing, but if they start playing games, we’ll just move on,” Graham said. “We have decided. I have decided. The hearing is for the benefit of the public. I’m going to vote for her.”
Democrats said they could find no precedent for the speed with which this nomination is being pushed through the committee. And they fear the timeline could result in a committee vote before Barrett even completes senators’ written follow-up questions.
“This is not normal. To have a vote on a confirmation days before the election is crazy. Right?” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told reporters Tuesday.
Democrats can make life difficult for the GOP, but there’s ultimately little they can do to delay or stop the nomination if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can put up 50 votes.
Barrett, meanwhile, has already started preparing for the hours of questioning she will undergo during her confirmation hearing, according to a White House official. Those sessions include preparations on both substantive issues such as Obamacare and abortion rights, as well as character issues. This includes whether Democrats question her about her membership in People of Praise, a majority-Catholic group of charismatic Christians, or her ability to separate personal religious beliefs from judicial decision-making.
Republicans are trying to portray Democrats and progressive advocacy groups as “anti-Catholic,” a claim that may be hard to uphold when the party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is a Catholic as well. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said plainly on Tuesday that “not a single Democrat will make these attacks or make personal religious beliefs an issue.”
Female Republican senators are discussing holding a news conference to highlight Barrett’s personal story, according to two GOP aides. Such an event would be intended to soften the image of a judge Democrats say will scuttle the ACA, threaten abortion rights and rule in favor of Trump if the election is disputed.
The White House Counsel’s office and communications shop spent much of the weekend mapping out a schedule for Barrett, who has two weeks to undergo refresher courses on everything from antitrust and privacy jurisprudence to how past nominees have responded to questions on divisive social issues.
The rapid timeline is a major change for the Trump White House, which had nearly two months to prep Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh before their confirmation hearings.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who chaired the Judiciary panel during those confirmations, said Barrett’s 2017 confirmation as an appeals court judge made a truncated timetable appropriate.
“Look at what’s been done recently. You got [John Paul] Stevens in 19 days, you have [Ginsburg] in 42 days. This is about 40 days. What’s magic about it?" Grassley said.
And after recruiting former Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) to aid Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, respectively, the White House is instead using White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Meadows as Barrett’s “sherpas” on Capitol Hill — helping her navigate meetings with senators that can range from congratulatory to confrontational.
One or both of them are expected to be in every meeting Barrett holds on Capitol Hill. Though Barrett is starting with GOP senators that are sure to vote to confirm her, she may eventually meet with moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia or Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. An aide said Sinema plans to meet with Barrett. Some Democrats announced they won’t sit down with Barrett after Obama nominee Merrick Garland was denied even a hearing in 2016.
Following her courtesy meetings on Capitol Hill this week, Barrett will spend each evening examining her own body of work, including past judicial opinions, law journal submissions and speeches, and discussing potential questions and responses with White House counsel’s office staffers and personal advisers. Several of Barrett's Notre Dame law school colleagues have offered personal support to her during the process or volunteered for media appearances focused on promoting her legal scholarship.
White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah and deputy press secretary Brian Morgenstern have taken the lead on all Barrett-related messaging from the West Wing, while Julia Hahn, a former Breitbart writer who now leads surrogate and coalition communications for the White House, is overseeing an internal rapid-response operation that will fact-check claims about Barrett and develop talking points for outside allies.
Barrett’s husband and children may also be briefed on the confirmation process in the coming days — a conversation that would likely include advice on how best to support Barrett and withstand attacks that could be leveled against them. While the families of nominees typically refrain from speaking publicly throughout the process, an exception was made for Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley, when the couple sat for an interview with Fox News to refute sexual assault allegations leveled against him.
Revelations that President Donald Trump paid no federal income taxes for years could energize Democratic efforts to hike taxes on the wealthy, should former Vice President Joe Biden capture the White House in November.
But Democrats on Capitol Hill don’t plan to go after the tax provisions that allowed Trump to pay virtually no taxes — instead they plan to focus on using Trump as the poster child for why Washington needs to hike taxes on the rich, and to push the IRS to crack down on the president and other wealthy taxpayers who they believe are clearly abusing the system.
“One of the key lessons that has to come out of this is about the need for enforcement to prosecute precisely this kind of avoidance, which probably slides into evasion,” said Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who was Biden’s top economic adviser when he was vice president and is now a campaign adviser.
A debate over a particular preference Trump has used to escape taxes “is a distraction,” Bernstein said.
Top Democrats on the Hill have largely echoed those thoughts, pointing to years of budget cuts at the IRS forced by Republicans, particularly during the Obama administration.
“Funding key priorities for middle-class families like health care depends on cracking down on wealthy tax cheats like Donald Trump, and that will be one of my top priorities if Democrats retake the Senate,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said after the New York Times’ disclosures about Trump’s taxes.
Wyden’s statement notably didn’t delve into any tax policy changes he would seek because of the revelations that Trump paid little or nothing in taxes for most of this century.
After decades of largely playing defense on tax policy, Democrats have been pushing aggressive plans to boost taxes on the wealthy to fund programs for lower- and middle-income people, and they’re betting that Trump’s tax practices will allow them to press that message.
Biden has floated trillions of dollars in new taxes on the rich to pay for policies like student debt forgiveness and expanded childcare for middle- and lower-income people. His biggest-ticket items include boosting the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent, from 37 percent, for those earning more than $400,000, and the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent.
He also wants to boost payroll taxes for higher earners and tax capital gains and dividends at the same rate as ordinary income for those making more than $1 million.
In all, the conservative Tax Foundation says that Biden’s tax plan would raise around $3 trillion over a decade.
Still, there are some Democrats itching to piggyback on the news about Trump’s tax practices to roll back the ability of businesses to use losses from one year to offset profits in another — a tactic that Trump has leaned on heavily.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, both Democratic tax writers, were the loudest critics of provisions in March’s bipartisan coronavirus relief package that gave businesses a greater ability to use losses to lower their tax bills.
Doggett successfully pushed to include a repeal of those preferences in the House’s latest pandemic response measure, and both he and Whitehouse now say that the new details about Trump’s tax history only add urgency to their efforts.
“In addition to learning that President Trump was a failed businessman, his tax returns show he’s exploited loopholes to avoid paying taxes while maintaining a life of luxury,” said Whitehouse. “In particular, he used a loophole to use his enormous business losses in certain years to cancel out the taxes he owed in the few years he made money.”
But there are plenty of tax experts who believe that it would be a policy mistake for Democrats to go after the tax provisions employed by Trump, which are a long-standing part of the tax code and help businesses even out profits and losses from one year to the next.
“I don't think there is anything too obvious one could change about the income tax that would have a meaningful impact on Trump's taxes or taxpayers in a similar situation,” said Kyle Pomerleau of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
It’s perfectly reasonable to give companies more latitude to spread around their losses, he said, especially in down times like after the 2008 financial crisis and during the current pandemic.
Trump, in fact, did benefit after the 2009 stimulus, which Biden played a big role in crafting and gave businesses more ability to use red ink to get a break on their taxes.
For many of the party’s tax writers, the stories about Trump’s low tax bills and questionable accounting methods also point more to the failures of IRS enforcement than any particular holes in the tax code. Democrats and a range of experts believe more funding for the IRS would help to squeeze more revenue out of rich people who might be too aggressive with their tax planning.
“There’s no magic formula to stop people from putting in fake [deductions] that are personal” expenses, said Daniel Shaviro, a law professor at New York University. “Auditing is the response to that.”
“The systemic scandal here is that people just aren’t being audited,” he added.
In fact, the IRS’ audit rate has plunged in recent years, falling to 0.33 percent for individuals in 2017 from 1.01 percent in 2010. For corporations, the rate dropped to 0.44 percent from 1.55 percent.
The amount of revenue agents has tumbled as well, down from almost 14,000 in 2010 to 8,500 in 2019.
Welcome to hell: the President of the United States giving a new motto and neww recruitment for a violent fascist group
Whenever Donald Trump tells a story in which someone calls him “sir,” it’s always an indicator that he’s lying. But as it turns out, there really is someone who gives Trump that sort of reflexive respect. Unfortunately, that someone is the leader of the white supremacist group Proud Boys.
Every moment of Trump’s performance at Tuesday night’s debate was a shocking stew of bullying, lies, personal attacks, rudeness, lies, and … lies. But the most disgusting exchange of a night where Trump had all the appeal of a rabid skunk, was when Fox News moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump to condemn whites supremacists and tell them to stop bringing violence to American cities. Instead, Trump addressed one of the worst of these groups, and rather than tell them to stop, he gave them a new motto; one that the group has already slapped on shirts. Thanks to Trump, white supremacists are “celebrating.”
Asked by Wallace if he was willing to tell white supremacists to stop, Trump, excluding an oleaginous smugness that could only be cut with a chainsaw, said he would. But then, rather than telling Proud Boys and similar organizations to stop invading cities and generating violence, the best Trump could manage was this:
Trump: “I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing. I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace.”
Wallace: “Well, then do it.”
Trump: “Who would you like me to condemn? The Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by.”
Actually, even that doesn’t capture the moment. Because Trump couldn’t complete a sentence without making it clear that he wanted groups like to Proud Boys to keep acting as his de facto storm troopers. Before anyone could even react to Trump ordering racists to remain at the ready, he made his position even more blindingly white clear.
Trump: “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s gotta do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem.”
So, asked outright to tell white supremacists to stop, Trump instead ordered them to be prepared to attack “the left.” And it’s very much worth noting that Trump correctly identified the Proud Boys as members of the right. It’s also worth noting that he didn’t seem at all confused by the idea they would accept his orders. He seemed in no doubt about his role as their actual leader.
The immediate response from the leaders of Proud Boys was … jubilation. Within seconds, Trump’s “stand back and stand by” has been adopted as the group’s new motto. Within minutes it was being sold on T-shirts. Overnight, the Proud Boys claimed a surge in recruitment.
There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV
Trump arrives in Duluth on Wednesday. | Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Far-right protesters jeer at members of Antifa during protests organized by the far-right group the Proud Boys. | LightRocket via Getty Images
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The new Supreme Court term begins on Monday. | Al Drago/Getty Images
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Courtesy of the Institute for Justice
President Donald Trump at the first presidential debate. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
President Trump speaks during the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 29, 2020. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Kamala Harris participates in the Democratic presidential debate at Tyler Perry Studios November 20, 2019, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump walks away after he delivers an update on the nation’s Covid-19 testing strategy in the Rose Garden of the White House on September 28, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Trump speaks in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
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