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Chris Hedges on the task ahead: Will Biden surrender to plutocrats and paralysis?

Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States, whether Donald Trump will admit it or not. Biden won the 2020 election by at least 5 million votes, and received the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history. Joe Biden also won the highest percentage of the popular vote as a challenger since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election.

When Biden (presumably) takes office in January 2021, he will face formidable obstacles and lofty expectations.

Even now, he faces the resistance of the Trump regime and its supporters, who have refused to accept the fact that Donald Trump has clearly been defeated both in the popular vote and the Electoral College.

To that end, Trump is purging such figures as Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other senior national security officials and replacing them with loyalists. It is not clear whether Trump believes he can use this purge to conduct a slow-motion coup aimed at remaining in office or is trying to cover up the many crimes committed by the regime. Perhaps it is both.

Biden’s administration will also have to find ways to surmount Republican obstruction to his policies, as well as the reality that tens of millions of Trump’s followers now believe that the 2020 election was “stolen” from them. The probability of right-wing political violence remains very high, both while Trump remains in office and beyond.

The Biden administration will also have to take the first steps to remedy the social, cultural, institutional, political problems that made Trump’s neofascist movement possible, and nearly won Trump a second term. Of course, Biden’s most immediate problem is the coronavirus pandemic and the human and economic destruction it has caused.

In total, American democracy is sick. One of the most virulent of the diseases afflicting America is white supremacy. Today’s Republican Party, and the right wing more generally, are enemies of multiracial democracy and want to create a type of 21st-century apartheid state in which white people rule over nonwhites with impunity.

Writing at the Boston Review, Reed Hundt, chair and CEO of the nonprofit Making Every Vote Count, describes these underlying problems:

Racism and democracy are conjoined on the ballot. The majority of Americans don’t think that America should be a racist society or that race should be the defining parameter of either of the two major political parties. Yet a minority identifies partisan politics with racial attitudes, so for that minority the two are conjoined. Of course, you don’t have a box to check that says, “Are you for or against racism?” or, “Are you for or against democracy?”

But while it’s certainly true that voting has always been tribal, now we have a party that is almost exclusively identified with white people. That party also prefers minority rule, which the current system gives them a chance to fulfill. That’s the party of Donald Trump. It’s anti-majoritarian and it smacks of racism in all practical effect. And the way for Trump to win, it turns out, is to thwart democracy and to appeal to racist attitudes.

Democratic Party voters and other liberals, progressives and good Americans also have high expectations for Joe Biden’s presidency. Many members of the coalition that Biden assembled are deeply suspicious of the new president-elect, and fear he will surrender to his old habits of compromise. Matt McManus writes at Jacobin:

We should be under no illusions that the president-elect and his team will attack the inadequacies of a neoliberal status quo that was allowed to fester into the rot of Trumpism. At best we can hope that Biden will reverse some of the damage Trump caused. But while it would be foolish to put much faith in the Biden administration, socialists and progressives can do a lot to shift the political terrain under Biden and ensure the electoral options are better next time around. …

The real work of politics involves building new coalitions for progressive causes while entrenching support for our policies, rebuilding institutions such as labor unions that can serve as permanent power centers for the Left, and above all working to democratize both the broader culture and politics.

Biden also faces another challenge. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author, warns that if Joe Biden fails to rehabilitate America’s social democracy then the United States will become even more of a plutocracy dominated by racism and other forms of cruelty. Even worse, Hedges warns that if Biden’s administration cannot find ways to relieve the deeply felt pain and social alienation being experienced by wide swaths of American society then what follows will be a regime of racialized Christian fascism, quite possibly much more disciplined, more ideological and therefore more dangerous than Trump’s clumsy authoritarianism.

In our most recent conversation, Hedges explained why the mainstream American news media, many Democrats, and other observers were shocked by the 2020 election and the large growth in Trump’s support, which saw him win the second-largest number of votes in American history. Hedges is the author of several important books, including “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” and, most recently, “America: The Farewell Tour.”

You can also listen to my conversation with Chris Hedges on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States. I am glad that Trumpism has been stopped for now, assuming Biden is actually permitted to take office in January. But I do not feel like anything has been won. Is this what victory is supposed to feel like?

The only thing we have ensured happening, especially with Republican control of the U.S. Senate, is paralysis. Moreover, Joe Biden does not want to create great change anyway. If you look at his record throughout his entire career, he has been nothing but a tool for the credit card companies, the war industry and similar interests. Biden is not going to change. Biden must also confront the judiciary.

Donald Trump has appointed almost 20% of the federal judges. Trump has got six of the nine Supreme Court justices, who are right out of the Federalist Society. The Supreme Court has powers it should not over the political process. My fear is that what the Biden presidency sets up is a route for a competent fascist. Trump may instinctually be a fascist, but ideologically he’s empty. Trump does not have an ideology.

He’s just a narcissist. He can’t focus on anything. He’s his own worst enemy. He’s impulsive. He can’t even read three lines in a briefing book. But that phenomenon of Trumpism exists, with or without Trump.

The exit polls are very interesting in that regard. First, Trump had a small decline in support from white male voters. Trump received 26% of his votes from non-whites. He took a third or so of the Latino vote. He doubled his support among Black women, from 4% to 8%. Trump’s support among white women rose from 53% to 55%. Black men voted for Trump too, that number jumped from 13% to 18%.

All that happened even with Donald Trump openly catering to white supremacy, many accusations against Trump by women accusing him of rape and sexual assault, and Trump’s open misogyny. And even though Donald Trump rescinded some of the rights of LGBTQ people, his support among that community rose from 14% to 28%.

Polling also suggests that the only reason Donald Trump lost the election is because of the pandemic which was the top issue for a significant percentage of the voters who supported Biden. Those voters whose top issue was the economy voted for Trump.

Examining those figures, we need to then ask what they portend about the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

The divides in this country are not only about race. The dynamic is right-wing proto-fascist populism. There are also divides of geography. Sixty percent of the Trump vote was in rural areas. Such a divide is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia. This divide in America is also a function of the dislocation of the working poor and the working class, which was created by the two parties. The failure, which I expect, under the incoming Biden administration to address this dislocation, despair, alienation and rage — all of which are legitimate — is fertile ground for a competent fascist, one probably cloaked in Christian garb.

The errors with the polls reveal that we need more qualitative research, such as ethnography and focus groups, to get a real sense of how individuals and communities are thinking and feeling about politics. We also need pollsters and other researchers who are actually from the communities they are trying to understand. There should also be an asterisk on the exit polls, because Republicans were much more likely to vote in person, thereby skewing the answers. With those qualifiers having been noted, the next version of Donald Trump will be much more dangerous given his broadening base of support. There is something attractive about Trumpism, even for nonwhites.

It is the hyper-masculinity. That is the core essence of fascism. There is no coherent ideology with fascism. Fascism mutates and changes. In the lead-up to power, the Nazis were striking in Berlin, along with the communists. The Nazis put “socialist” in their name, The National Socialist Party, as a way of becoming more appealing. To reduce Trump’s version of fascism solely along lines of race is to miss the forces that are pushing people into the arms of the neofascists. Racism is an element in the form of mythologies about whiteness and self-exaltation, and the other myths about identity and origin. But what people who follow fascists are really looking for is a sense of empowerment.

Donald Trump fulfilled that role, not as a political leader, but as a traditional cult leader. Members of the cult want their cult leader to break all the rules. The power of the cult leader becomes an extension of the follower’s own identity and power. All moral autonomy is surrendered to the cult leader. That is the dynamic in this country with Donald Trump and his movement. Therefore, there are fewer ways in American society to communicate with one another across lines of politics and other identities. When Donald Trump, from the White House — in what was an absolutely remarkable moment — denounced the electoral process as fraudulent, what was really frightening is that there are tens of millions of Americans who believe him.

Will Trump be seen as a martyr? Will his time as president, even in defeat, be remembered as a noble cause by his followers?

The narrative will be that he and they were stabbed in the back. “The media, the liberals, Silicon Valley, they stabbed us in the back.” I am worried about violence.

The violence will be directed at mainstream Democrats such as the governors of Virginia or Michigan. Once that begins and the Pandora’s box is opened, control of the situation is lost. The United States is awash in weapons. People are going to be shot in acts of political violence. Then we as a country are in deep trouble.  

There is a developing narrative from some Democrats about the “white working class” vote, and the idea that they lost seats in the House and did not capture the Senate because the party is “too liberal” and “too far to the left.” Another developing narrative is that only Joe Biden could have defeated Donald Trump because anyone to the left of him would have been easily beaten. What is your response?

That is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The insiders who tell themselves such things are completely out of touch. Most of the people sitting around these newsrooms do not leave their studios. They might as well all be locked up in Versailles or the Forbidden City. They do not have a clue about the real suffering, pain and social and moral decay that has infected the lives of over half the country. That reality is never reported on because those people are looking for advertising dollars. They have rendered all of these suffering and struggling people in America invisible, which of course only adds to the anger and the deep distrust of the new media. Polling for the 2020 election did not capture what is really going on, woefully out of touch.

Of course this narrative exists in the context of how the Democrats have for the last 30 or so years been chasing the Republican Party farther to the right. Joe Biden played a role in embracing those corporate, gangster capitalist, neoliberal policies.

What was Joe Biden’s campaign strategy? It was to cater to neocon Republicans. It was a whole campaign devoid of ideas or real policy proposals. Joe Biden was going to save the soul of America. What Biden and the Democrats are going to do is just dig themselves deeper, and the consequences of that choice are going to be really extreme for the country.

Watching the reaction from the mainstream media has been very instructive. They appeared to be shocked by the deep levels of support for Donald Trump. The polling errors appeared to flummox them. For me, as a working-class black person in America, nothing surprises me about this country and its reservoir of white supremacy. I also grew up with these Trump voters. I know and understand them. How do the commentariat and mainstream media types convince themselves of things about America which are simply not true?

I know them. I hate to admit it. But I was at their prep schools as a scholarship student. I went to their elite universities. I’ve sat in their elite newsrooms. As a class they are smug, arrogant, self-referential and so out of touch. They look down on the entire working class, and that includes the white working class. The Democrats under Bill Clinton thought, “We’ll take the corporate money, because labor, and in particular people of color, do not have anywhere else to go. They are not going to the Republicans.” Democrats took those voters for granted, and as exit polls show, the Democrats have made a fatal mistake in that regard. The Democrats’ strategic calculation about those voters may have been true then, but it is not true anymore.

I think they were in fact really shocked. In many ways the elite class is clueless. The pundits and the commentariat and others in the establishment news media were just as off with their predictions as they were in 2016. They do not spend time in these communities. They do not speak to these people at all. They move from one exclusive bubble to another. They’re not in touch with the suffering and the angst.

Donald Trump, at least, is completely transparent as to who he is. He doesn’t hide it. He’s as repugnant as he looks. And yet all sorts of groups, including white women, voted for him. And I think they voted for him knowing full well who he is, but also confident in the fact that the two ruling parties — and in particular the Democratic Party, which at one time pretended to watch out for their interests — have sold them out.

The two main parties have lost credibility, the Democrats in particular. The press has lost credibility. And once democratic institutions no longer have any credibility left, then people just start believing whatever they want to believe. That is how you get conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Too many Americans do not have social and political institutions they believe in and see as trustworthy. On that point, they are not wrong. Ultimately, I do not see how where we’re going in the United States at present is anywhere good. The result will be a type of corporate totalitarianism.

There was this widely circulated image of three white women who were praying and laying hands on the door of one of the locations where the votes were being counted. There are also these “Christian” right-wing con men (and women) trying to summon angels to defend Donald Trump, their anointed and chosen savior. These people are widely mocked, as they should be. They are laughed at by rational people. But when I see such deranged behavior, I also take it seriously. Such people are deadly sincere in their beliefs. Trump’s followers view him as a deity.

As I learned doing research for and writing my book “American Fascists,” what happened in essence is that the world of “secular humanism,” as such people call it, almost destroyed them. It is deeply personal. “Secular humanism” destroyed them because they became alcoholics, or they became crack addicts or opioid addicts or gambling addicts, or they lost their jobs and were evicted. A number of women in the Christian right that I interviewed had also suffered either sexual or domestic violence. So they entered a world of magic, the figure of magical Jesus, what anthropologists call a crisis cult. One cannot try to free them from the cult by using rationality and reason.

The only way to break the back of such a movement is to reintegrate such people into the economy, to give them stable jobs, a place where they can have a sense that through work and their societal position they can have hope for themselves and their children’s lives.

And of course, the whole situation for such people has only gotten worse. Once they become hermetically encased in that ideology, you cannot really break them out of it unless you are going to create a society where they have a place, and rebuild the social bonds which were ruptured. That is not going to happen under Joe Biden. Such people on the Christian right, the praying-for-Trump types, will become more common especially as the country reels under the effects of a pandemic that is out of control and all the economic consequences of the crisis.

The other dynamic that the mainstream news media was not prepared for is that in places where the pandemic is worse, Donald Trump is more popular. This is an example of Trumpism and conservatism more generally being a type of political religion, a death cult. The more death and suffering that takes place in America, the more popular and powerful Trumpism and its variants will become.

It is a death cult. With the rupturing of social bonds and a sense of place within society, Trump’s followers and the Christian right invest their energy in self-destructive behaviors, both as individuals and societies. The sociologist Émile Durkheim made an astute observation about right-wing groups, that those types of groups which seek the annihilation of others are really at the core driven by a desire for self-annihilation.

We see that throughout American society with the opioid crisis, the suicides, which are highest among white middle-aged men, and other types of addictions such as morbid obesity and gambling and the like. Those types of behaviors are all in response to the breakdown of social bonds and a sense of place and meaning within a society.

What springs forth from this moment?

What springs forth is that half of this country, who to this point have been treated by the ruling elites, and tacitly by the liberal class, as if they are human refuse, are going to strike back. We have already witnessed them trying to do this. They have not been particularly successful. People in this country are going to start getting killed. It is going to get worse especially as the ruling elites display the kind of paralysis that I expect Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell to display.

Can Biden heal America when Trump and his allies don’t want it healed?

In case you missed the news, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. With almost all ballots counted, Biden has over 75 million votes and Trump some 71 million. The Electoral College isn’t even close.

But Trump still has not conceded and some leading Republicans say he shouldn’t. 

Senator Lindsey Graham warned on Sunday that Trump shouldn’t concede because “if Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.”

In other words, despite zero evidence of voter fraud, the GOP should attack the outcome of the election because a Democrat was elected president.  

The nation was already divided when Trump became president. But Trump exploited our divisions to gain and try to keep power. He didn’t just pour salt into our wounds. He planted grenades in them. 

And now he and his enablers appear willing to pull the pins. 

Elections usually end with losing candidates congratulating winners and graciously accepting defeat. They thereby demonstrate their commitment to the democratic system over the particular outcome they fought to achieve.

Apparently there will be no graciousness from Trump and his allies, and no concession from Trump. 

They don’t want America to heal. Evidently, they are not committed to the democratic system. They’d prefer continuous warfare because that’s the only way they think they can win.

It’s a nearly treasonous act: Destroy public trust in the system in order to retain power. 

Although Americans have strongly disagreed over what we want the government to do, we have agreed to be bound by the outcomes of our elections. This meta-agreement has required enough trust for us to regard the views and interests of those we disagree with as equally worthy of consideration as our own.

But Trump and his allies have continuously sacrificed that trust for partisan ends. And it looks like they won’t stop until they’ve destroyed whatever trust remains.

Trump will be president for another ten weeks. He is already mounting legal challenges and demanding recounts, maneuvers that could prevent states from meeting the legal deadline of December 8 for choosing electors.

If this continues, America could find itself in a situation similar to what it faced in 1876 when claims about ballot fraud forced a special electoral commission to decide the winner.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump, Graham, and Trump’s other Republican allies refuse to attend Biden’s inauguration. Maybe Trump stages a giant rally for himself instead, and Lindsey Graham introduces him as the “real” president. Trump sends firestorms of aggrieved messages to his followers – questioning Biden’s legitimacy as president and urging that they refuse to recognize his presidency.

This is followed by months of Trump rallies and tweets containing even more outlandish charges: plots against him and America by Biden, Nancy Pelosi, “deep-state” bureaucrats, “socialists,” immigrants, Muslims, or any other of his standard foes.

It could go on like this for years. Trump thereby keeps the nation’s attention focused on himself, remains the center of controversy and divisiveness, and makes it harder for Biden to heal the nation. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham and his ilk keep millions of Republican voters in a state of perpetual fury leading up to the midterm elections of 2022 and the presidential election in 2024.

Now is the time for other Republican leaders to exercise true leadership and ask the nation to unify behind Biden. 

Former President George W. Bush made a start. At the same time Graham was warning Trump not to concede, Bush phoned Biden to congratulate him, saying the race was “fundamentally fair” and “its outcome is clear.” In a subsequent statement Bush added, “I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won the opportunity to lead and unify our country.”

Kudos to Bush. 

The media (including Twitter, Facebook, and even Fox News) can also help. They have already begun to call out Trump’s lies in real time and cut off his press conferences, practices that should have started years ago. They should continue to tag his lies and those of his allies, and ignore their baseless claims.

It would be a fitting end to a reality-TV president who has tried to turn America into a reality warzone.

Trump’s false voter-fraud claims could blow GOP’s chances of holding Senate

Mitch McConnell never acted as if Barack Obama were a legitimate president. More than a decade later, the Senate majority leader has decided to the best use of Republican resources is to humor Donald Trump’s delusion that he won an election he clearly lost. McConnell’s desperate play appears to be a grift meant to fire up Republican voters ahead of a pair of critical Senate runoff races in Georgia. But what if that plan backfires? Trump’s attacks on America’s electoral system could just as easily depress GOP turnout.

Joe Biden is on track to win 306 Electoral College votes, the same number Trump received when he was elected four years ago. As Salon’s Roger Sollenberger has reported, none of the half-dozen or so lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign in states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia since Election Day have presented any evidence of systemic irregularities, or any information that could even hypothetically reverse Trump’s electoral defeat. So while our tax dollars are at work defending against meritless lawsuits by an outgoing president, the Republican civil war has suddenly reignited with a new round of finger-pointing and recrimination. 

McConnell took to the Senate floor on Monday to argue that “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” While several reports suggest that McConnell’s anti-democratic strategy is meant to appease Trump and fire up his base, there is already evidence that points to a real risk of depressing Republican voters. 

Trump’s campaign has seized on news that fewer than 400 ballots had not been scanned over the weekend in Atlanta to stir up cries of voter fraud. In reaction, Georgia’s two Republican senators, both facing Jan. 5 runoffs against Democratic challengers, have demanded the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican. Raffensperger has dared to deny allegations of voter fraud and pointed out some simple arithmetic: Biden leads by 11,595 votes in Georgia, and that’s highly unlikely to change in Trump’s favor with a recount. Georgia’s voter suppression tactics already mean that elections are heavily rigged in Republicans’ favor, so the Democratic turnout this year is all the more notable. 

“There have been too many failures in Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shined a national light on the problems,” Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue said in the statement, which did not list a single example of any such problems. “The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections.” All reports and indications suggest, however, that the Georgia election was clean and clear, with no major irregularities. 

Republicans are essentially calling the voters of Georgia cheaters and their fellow Republicans corrupt in pathetic attempts to align themselves with a president who refuses to accept their own votes. McConnell and the majority of the Republican Party are egging Trump on at the expense of their own voters. They are at once getting Republican voters’ hopes up for some miracle — and also convincing them their votes don’t count. Deflating the GOP base while riling up the Democratic base with Trump’s refusal to concede seems an ill-conceived strategy going into a crucial runoff race. 

Trump’s showing last Tuesday shows that many of his voters only come out to support him, not the GOP as a whole. While plenty of loyal Republicans will still come out in Georgia with control of the Senate on the line, I suspect a good number won’t bother now that the president GOP voters adore has said that America’s elections are rigged. Democrats, meanwhile, sense an unusual opportunity to turn out even more voters, including those who may not have voted on Nov. 3 because they assumed Georgia would remain red no matter what — and now they have an opportunity to reshape power in Washington.   

Take, for instance, the message from former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who posted a video to social media where she appealed to God to “SMASH the clay jar of deceit in America. SMASH the clay jar of delusion in the United States of America. SMASH the delusion, Father, that Joe Biden is our president. He is not.” Extremist rhetoric like that is likely why 70% of Republicans now say they don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair, compared to the 35% who held similar beliefs before the election.

On the other side of the coin, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, easily the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, has done multiple Fox News interviews to calm the fears of moderate voters who are reluctant to see Democrats control that body, promising to block any progressive agenda presented by Biden. As usual, Democrats and Republicans are simply not playing the same game. 

Trump, meanwhile, is simply playing aggrieved and trying to fleece the rubes one more time while he still holds office, telling his worshipers that the system is out to get him. It’s a distinctly odd thing for the president of the United States to say, but he continues to schedule rallies and raise funds — same grift, different day. All this will work just about as well as his “big, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border, his long-promised replacement for the Affordable Care Act and all the promises to throw agents of the “deep state” in prison. But even if Republicans lose in the short term, they’re setting the stage for new restrictions on voting in states they control by pointing to Trump’s false claims of fraud. Much the same thing happened after 2016, paving the way for the new voting rules that helped create the confusion of 2020. 

The unexpected benefits of thinking for yourself in an age of polling

One reason we love the news business is that things seldom turn out as expected. In the 2020 elections, the voting process went surprisingly smoothly, with record numbers of Americans casting their ballots in new ways. The big failure of 2020, it turned out, was the political polling, which was so wrong in so many places that some people are now arguing that it’s time to spend a lot less effort trying to divine how people will vote.

I think that argument misses the point. Polls have their uses, particularly when they are used to assess broad questions about what’s on voters’ minds or which issues resonated the most. They seem much less reliable in predicting the future, and that’s OK. It means that we have to treat politics more like other subjects, in which we draw on data, interviews and our past experiences to shape coverage. The rise of the pollster as seer of all matters political is a relatively recent development, a corrective to an era when the “boys on the bus” covered politics largely by anecdote and gut instincts.

Certainly, reams will be written in the coming months and years about why the work of opinion research turned out to be way more art than science when it came to this year’s balloting. The widely predicted blue tsunami was more like a modest midsummer swell. Many state polls were remarkably wrong; Republican Sen. Susan Collins trailed in every survey of Maine voters yet won handily. The estimated 8- to 10-point Joe Biden victory will more likely be 4% or 5% in the popular vote. The call on Saturday by The Associated Press and other major news organizations that Biden won the election was based on razor-thin margins in Pennsylvania and other states that were far closer than the preelection polls had indicated.

To be fair, there were some seriously extenuating circumstances this year. Polls are based on models drawn from previous experience, and modern America has never voted during a pandemic. Nearly every state changed something about its voting process, from drive-thru voting in Texas to the states that widely expanded voting by mail. Although it’s not proven yet, it seems likely that the phenomenon of the shy (or perhaps defiant) Trump voter is real; it’s not hard to imagine supporters of a candidate whose main appeal is distrust of political elites misleading or hanging up on researchers calling to ask their presidential preference.

The debacle of 2016, in which opinion researchers universally agreed that a Hillary Clinton victory was the likeliest outcome, prompted a lot of explanation from statistics-savvy journalists. They explained how the FiveThirtyEight forecast, which gave Clinton a 2 out of 3 chance of winning, could be read as giving her a 1 in 3 chance of losing, less likely but certainly possible. In baseball, batters who get a hit 33% of the time wind up in the Hall of Fame. Unlikely events happen. People win lotteries.

Some of this year’s explanations will likely focus on what the polls got right — a comfortable popular vote edge for Biden, a solid win in the electoral college — while nodding to the ways in which 2020 smashed previous models for turnout and participation.

I take a different lesson from the foibles of polling. The most important thing we can do as we think about covering and investigating government and politics in election years is to not assume any outcome. That’s psychologically harder than it sounds, even for professional journalists. In the summer of 2016, news organizations, including ProPublica, did less than they should have on the intricacies of the Trump family businesses in part because his victory was deemed so implausible. Why devote months of hard slogging to learning about a guy who’s headed to reality television by late November?

It’s difficult for reporters and editors to shut out the polls and work to put their hearts into pursuing stories on two outcomes, only one of which will turn out to be true. (I have a friend who was assigned to write a “How Michael Dukakis Pulled Off a Stunning Victory” piece in 1988 that would run on the front page of The New York Times if the polls were wrong. He felt like he was wasting his time; George Bush’s victory proved him right.)

Still, shutting out the noise and focusing on the evidence is the best way to avoid being part of the group-think that characterizes the coverage of many nationally fascinating stories. I always try to keep in mind the events of April 19, 1995, when a truck bomber demolished the federal building in Oklahoma City. CNN and other networks were quoting experts who said the attack had all earmarks of Middle Eastern terrorism. They reminded viewers that an Islamic radical group had tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 with an explosives-packed rental van. That speculation played in a nonstop loop in nearly every newsroom in America. I recall an angry argument at the Times’ Washington bureau between an editor in New York and a religion writer in Washington who adamantly refused to write a story about the ideology of the possibly Islamic terrorists.

One exception was a tiny organization, the Inter Press Service, which covered the developing world from a small room in the National Press Building and seldom turned on its television. (In fact, its reporters learned of the bombing when someone noticed footage of the smoking wreckage on a monitor in the building’s lobby.) Later that day, Inter Press was the first to focus on the possibility that the bombing had been done by far-right American extremists. One of the reporters, Jim Lobe, had been a lawyer in Seattle before becoming a journalist and was familiar with the militia movements of the Western United States. The story noted that the bombing had taken place on April 19 — the second anniversary of the deadly assault by federal authorities on the Waco, Texas, compound of a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians.

When the FBI arrested Timothy McVeigh and his motive for the attack was exactly as described, Lobe was asked how Inter Press got it right when so many others had not. It was simple, he replied. They knew generally what everyone was saying, but it didn’t make sense and so they did their own reporting.

I tracked down Lobe, a lawyer-turned-journalist, to check the details for this column. He chuckled at the memory. “We usually didn’t have CNN on at all,” he said. “I remember they had on all these commentators who said it was Islamic. It didn’t make any sense. We did the research, found out it was Patriot’s Day, talked to some people who were experts on the far right. Then, we put the story together.”

“It was just a matter of deduction. I had worked in the courts in Seattle and we had Posse Comitatus people coming regularly,” said Lobe, referring to the far-right movement of the 1980s. “It just didn’t make any sense to me that Islamists would blow up a federal building.”

In an era when polls keep getting it wrong, it feels like good advice. It’s not possible to entirely shut out what they’re saying, but it’s best to do your own critical thinking.

Texas’ GOP governor refuses to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect, calls for recounts

In his first comments on the presidential election since election night, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott avoided acknowledging former Vice President Joe Biden’s victory and said the process of vote counting and recounts should play out.

“Democracy depends upon fair and open elections. We all agree that every legal vote counts and that illegal votes do not. There are processes in place in each state to determine if any vote is legal, and we must respect those processes to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Abbott said in a written statement Monday evening.

Abbott’s statement comes days after major news outlets called Biden president-elect on Saturday as results indicated that he would win the swing state of Pennsylvania and secure enough electoral votes to ascend to the presidency.

Trump has not conceded, claiming the election was stolen and making unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. The sitting president’s campaign has filed legal challenges to contest the election results in battleground states. Judges in two of those cases — in Michigan and Georgia — tossed out the lawsuits because the campaign failed to provide evidence that laws were broken. Trump’s campaign has indicated that it will call for recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin, and recounts are also possible in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Still, experts say his odds of winning are practically impossible.

Former President George W. Bush, a fellow Republican and former governor of Texas, congratulated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory Sunday and called the outcome of the election “clear.” But many other Republicans have disputed or questioned the results, and some have parroted Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

Abbott avoided making such claims but said that election winners are “certified by designated governmental bodies, not by media outlets.”

“Resolving disputes over vote counts is not uncharted territory,” Abbott said. “It happens frequently, including in presidential contests like the one asserted by Al Gore. Regardless of party affiliation, or no party affiliation, all Americans must have confidence in the accuracy and transparency of our elections. That can be achieved, and must be done swiftly.”

The state’s senior U.S. senator, John Cornyn, made similar comments Monday when asked whether he’d seen evidence of voter fraud in the presidential election.

“That’s really not my, my role,” Cornyn, a Republican, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “There is a process that is available, and I don’t begrudge the president for availing himself of that process — but in the end, they’re going to have to come up with some facts and evidence.”

Abbott, meanwhile, has been quicker to congratulate winners in Texas elections, even though votes are still being counted and canvass deadlines have not arrived. Early Wednesday morning, Abbott congratulated state Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson, for winning reelection. Her opponent has not yet conceded and will be able to call for a recount if she chooses. As of Monday, Button was up by 223 votes, or about 0.3%.

Alex Samuels contributed reporting. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

Trump’s desperation play: Post-election rallies to feature obituaries of supposedly dead voters

In an increasingly flailing effort to undercut the legitimacy of his election loss at the hands of Joe Biden, President Donald Trump’s legal team and remaining campaign apparatus are preparing to hold press conferences and in-person rallies at which they plan to display the supposed evidence behind the incumbent’s thus-far baseless claims of widespread voter fraud—including obituaries of dead people who purportedly cast ballots.

Despite the lack of supporting evidence and fact-checks debunking them, claims that tens of thousands of ballots were submitted in the name of deceased individuals and counted have been proliferating in right-wing social media circles, outlets like Breitbart, and among Trump’s advisers since Election Day.

Characteristically declining to let the facts stand in the way of his false narrative that he is the victim of election theft, Trump “plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead—plus hold campaign-style rallies—in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results,” Axios reported late Sunday, citing four of the president’s advisers.

“Obits for those who cast ballots are part of the ‘specific pieces of evidence’ aimed at bolstering the Trump team’s so-far unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud and corruption that they say led to Joe Biden’s victory,” according to Axios. “Fueling the effort is the expected completion of vote counting this week, allowing Republicans to file for more recounts.”

Team Trump’s ongoing effort to challenge state vote counts in court has so far been a complete flop, as has its frequently laughable attempt to substantiate the president’s claims of a sprawling vote-counting conspiracy favoring the Democratic Party.

But with the president refusing to concede defeat and his party largely remaining silent or actively cheering him on, the Trump campaign—juiced by donations it is aggressively soliciting with numerous fundraising emails each day—has shown no indication that it plans to give up its likely doomed legal battle any time soon. (According to the fine print of the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee’s donation forms, 60% of contributions to the president’s legal defense fund will go toward paying off the Trump campaign’s debts.)

Axios reported Sunday that the Trump team is also “staffing a campaign-style media operation” that, according to an adviser, will churn out “regular press briefings, releases on legal action, and obviously things like talking points and booking people strategically on television.”

“They’ll also make a big play to raise money for their legal defense fund,” Axios noted.

While the campaign is likely to be an embarrassing spectacle—similar in style and substance to Trump fixer Rudy Giuliani’s comical press conference on the backside of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia over the weekend—observers urged the media not to give Trump allies a platform to spout their potentially dangerous lies.

“The Trump campaign’s strategy is basically to completely undermine faith in democracy,” tweeted Parker Malloy, editor-at-large at Media Matters for America. “TV bookers, know this: if you invite people from this campaign on to discuss their bogus claims, do it knowing this is the strategy.”

Dr. Rob Davidson, executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare, denouncedthe president for planning more in-person rallies as the coronavirus pandemic intensifies nationwide. As Common Dreams has reported, Trump’s campaign rallies have been linked to upticks in coronavirus cases in host counties across the country.

“Donald Trump plans to hold more rallies to throw fuel onto the pandemic fire. This is truly unconscionable,” Davidson tweeted. “Who will stop him from killing more people?”

Safety agency tied in knots in bid to prevent harm to children from powerful magnets

In May, a nine-year old girl was taken to an emergency room after swallowing three powerful magnets made by a company called Zen Magnets. According to a government report, which did not name the child, the magnets punched holes through her intestines.

Such tiny rare earth magnets were to have been banned several years ago to prevent just this kind of life-threatening injury. But the move was blocked by litigation between Zen and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which won an important round just weeks ago.

Rare earths are used in electronic devices, magnets and other products. Tiny magnets made of these minerals first appeared on the market in 2009. Often as small as BBs but significantly more powerful than refrigerator magnets, they’re sold in sets of hundreds and marketed to adults as novelty desk toys. But many parents buy them for children, too, not realizing that toddlers may swallow the tiny spheres, which resemble colorful candy. Even older kids can accidentally swallow them, sometimes by using magnets to mimic tongue or lip piercings. When two or more magnets enter the body, they can pinch together and inflict horrific injuries.

Over the past decade, thousands of children have been treated at emergency rooms after swallowing high-powered magnets, according to CPSC estimates. Parents and doctors reported cases of children who were hospitalized with injuries such as perforated intestines and bowels. At least two children in the U.S. have died.

In 2012, the agency filed an administrative complaint against Zen to force it to stop selling magnets, and followed up with a safety standard requiring magnets sold in sets to be less powerful and therefore less dangerous if swallowed.

But Zen, based in Denver,  fought the recall and magnet rule, sparking a marathon legal battle across administrative and federal courts that has allowed the magnets to stay on the market and cause more injuries. 

In 2016, the CPSC suffered a major setback when a federal appellate court vacated the magnet rule. That same year, an administrative law judge ruled that the agency hadn’t proven that warning labels alone would be inadequate to protect consumers. And in 2018, a federal judge ruled that Zen’s due process rights had been violated because one of the agency’s rule-making commissioners, Robert Adler, had made comments during a hearing that the court said had shown bias. 

Finally in August, a three judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision, stating in a unanimous ruling that there had been no violation of Zen’s rights and that the magnets could be recalled. But even now, the case may not be over; Zen has appealed for a hearing before the full court. Adler and a commission spokesman declined comment on the litigation, citing the Zen appeal. 

The CPSC operating plan for 2021 mentions possible re-consideration of a mandatory magnet rule. 

“It’s unfortunate because while the issues have lingered [in court], more children have been injured,” said Remington Gregg, an attorney with the advocacy group Public Citizen.

Many injuries could have been avoided with a safety standard, according to Bryan Rudolph, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City. In a study published last month, he and two co-authors found that magnet ingestions significantly increased in the years after the 2016 ruling that vacated the standard.

“Injuries are definitely going up,” Rudolph said. “Anecdotally, there is hardly a week that goes by now that I don’t hear from a colleague about another child who has been injured by these products.”

In December 2019, Rosalynd Darling and Gray Winslow rushed their seven-year-old daughter Amy to a New York City hospital after she accidentally swallowed several high-powered magnets while trying to pry them apart with her teeth. According to Darling, Amy got the magnets through a toy-swap with a friend at school.

“I wouldn’t have allowed her to have them if she’d been four, because you can’t have a toy like this,” Darling said. “But at seven, I wasn’t really concerned.” Amy recovered after doctors removed the magnets from her stomach through an endoscopy procedure.  

Children can also get hurt by magnets pinching their ears, noses and genitalia, said Dr. Carl Kaplan, chief of pediatric emergency medicine at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital on Long Island. 

“I had to remove one where the person swished them around in their mouth and they ended up on each side of the lingual frenum—the fleshy piece of tissue underneath our tongue,” Kaplan said. “That wasn’t easy because you have to pull the whole tongue out to get it out, which requires sedation.”

For their part, magnet companies, hoping to head off a mandatory standard, are developing a  voluntary standard requiring warning labels but no change in the strength or size of magnets. Zen’s owner, Shihan Qu, who has also been involved with another magnet company, said in an email to FairWarning that stronger warning labels will help prevent injuries, especially if accompanied by child-resistant packaging, similar to what is used for medical marijuana or pharmaceutical drugs.   

But even clear disclaimers and age recommendations have done little to stop consumers from purchasing magnet sets for children.  

Reviewers on a Qu website, Neoballs.com, routinely report buying magnets for children. One reviewer said her six-year-old niece used magnets to make bracelets for friends. Another who purchased Neoballs for a seven-year-oldsaid they liked buying from Zen because “I feel like I’m ‘sticking it to the man,'” apparently referring to the company’s years-long legal battle with the CPSC.

After FairWarning contacted Qu last month, his company posted responses to several reviews that mentioned buying magnets for children, cautioning that they are intended for people 14 and over. The review about the seven-year-old was deleted; in the one about the six-year-old, the child’s age was removed. 

FairWarning also found reviewers on Amazon who reported buying magnets for children made by Speks, a company co-founded by Qu that he left in 2018.

“My five-year-old loves this toy,” one Amazon reviewer wrote about a Speks magnet set. The Amazon listing included a warning that the magnets aren’t meant for children under 14.

Speks has warned some customers who mention children in their reviews, but appears to ignore others. In October 2018, the company even thanked a reviewer who wrote that her 12-year old daughter loved Speks magnets.  

Since 2018, consumers and physicians have filed three reports to a CPSC website about children who were hospitalized after ingesting Speks magnets. On Amazon, FairWarning found reviews about children swallowing Speks magnets. In its response to a recent review about a six-year-old who was hospitalized after he ingested several magnets, Speks said that its products are marketed and sold exclusively to adults.

Craig Zucker, the owner of Speks, told FairWarning that none of these incidents resulted in perforation injuries. Speks’ website advertises that the strength of its magnets is about 90 percent less than the ones the CPSC had sought to ban. In 2014, Zucker agreed to recall a different magnet product, Buckyballs, following reports of injuries.

Some public health experts like Bryan Rudolph doubt that small rare earth magnets can ever be safely sold to consumers.  

 “There are no good data to suggest what is a ‘safe’ magnet,” Rudolph said. He noted that the CPSC’s vacated standard mandated that magnets be relatively weak but that even weak magnets can become lodged in a child’s appendix or intestine because of their small size.

For example, in 2019 a five-year-old had to have his appendix removed after swallowing two magnets made by Speks, according to a report on a CPSC website that did not state where this happened. 

“The bar should be very high to remove a product,” Rudolph said, “but I think we’re well beyond the bar at this point.”   

Kamala Harris and the evolution of the birds: worldwide lessons

The United States has elected a woman – and a woman of color to boot – to the second highest office in the most powerful country in the world. 

What’s the big deal? You wonder, in having Kamala Harris as Vice President-Elect? After all, other democracies have long put women into the top political post in their country. 

A big deal

We women know it is a big deal because – for some reason – men have always, the world over, predominated in such positions of power. And in earlier times, other women – both in the U.S. and abroad – have failed to attain that power. 

Why is that so? Is there any biological, neurological and sociological reason that would explain that unequal development? 

Let’s take a truly intelligent look at this phenomenon by looking into it through the eyes of – stay with me – birds! 

Our guide in this journey is an ornithology professor at Yale. In his 2017 book, “The Evolution of Beauty, How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World” – part of my summer reading – he tells us that “being able to figure out what’s going on when it’s not obvious is perhaps the most fundamental advantage of intelligence.” (p.69) 

Richard O. Prum, whose full title is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University and the head curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, employs this “fundamental advantage of intelligence” to cast light on the behavior of birds and of human beings. 

Where the males are prettier than the female

You see, among the birds, the male is usually brighter in color and prettier than the female. Of course, that fact usually assumed some kind of male superiority. 

As it turns out, that’s just another failure of thought. Having to rely on being colorfulness means you are essentially the beggar, not the one in the power position. 

A feminist book, written by a feminist man

When I started reading this book, little did I know that the election of Kamala Harris, a woman of color, to the second-highest office in the United States was just months away. (It was long before Joe Biden announced his VP candidate).

And even more poignantly, I did not know that this is in some ways a feminist book, clearly written by a feminist man. 

It is probably significant that Professor Prum grew up with a twin sister and dedicated his book to his wife, also an ornithologist. 

There are big ideas in this book, presented against a complicated scientific background. Its reader, however, is in the hands of someone who knows the science so thoroughly that he can explain it clearly. 

For now, it’s best to start with a concrete example from the world of the birds which, lest you forget, are ex-dinosaurs. 

The beautiful yardman

The Great Argus, which lives in the Far East, is “one of the most aesthetically extreme animals on the planet.” (p. 54) Though living a largely bachelor existence, the male goes full throttle during courtship. The male Argus elaborately preps his court: 

Assiduously picking up all the leaves, roots, and sticks in the space he’s chosen…he carries them to the periphery of his court. Like a modern yardman…, he employs his huge wing feathers as a leaf blower by beating them rhythmically, sending all the remaining debris flying from his court until it is completely clear…Once his court is ready for the business of mating, all he needs is a female visitor. (p. 56) 

The female arrives

A female arrives in response to his carefully orchestrated calls and the male begins his amazing courtship ritual: 

…he rushes around her in wide circles with his wings hunched up at an angle that exposes their upper surfaces. Then, without warning, when he is just a foot or two away from the female, the male transforms himself instantly into an entirely different shape, revealing unimaginably intricate color patterns on his four-foot-long wing feathers…the male bows down to the female…In this extraordinary posture, the male tucks his head under one of his wings and peeks out at the female from behind the gap in his feathers…to gauge her reaction to his display. (pp.58-59) 

The even more amazing fact concerns the reaction of the female Argus. To this elegant, beautiful and precise display, the female’s response is “completely underwhelming, or even undetectable.” (p. 85) 

Take it from the birds: The female as the decider

Yes, unlike the humans watching this wonder, the female fulfills her role as the decider, the discerning, responsible and privileged holder of selection — aesthetic and sexual selection. 

In fact, the male’s display is so colorful and elaborate precisely because most males are not selected in this courtship process. 

The experienced, well-educated connoisseur

The female is “more like an experienced, well-educated connoisseur evaluating one of the many extraordinary works available to her scrutiny.” 

Further, she is “rigid with highly focused attention as she casts her discerning eye over the displaying male…it’s her cool-headed mating decisions over the course of millions of years that have provided the co-evolutionary engine that has culminated in the male Argus’s display…” (pp.63-64). 

Proving Darwin right once again

What is at play here is proof of a theory of mate choice that Darwin himself actually put forth but which he couldn’t really champion in his times and which other scientists since then have not wanted to embrace. 

Proof has come through the work of Prum and his like. 

As Darwin had intimated and scientists like Prum have now proved, aesthetic selection is critical to the progress of evolution and the choice lies with the female. 

Goethe and Darwin

Prum goes on to show more about male behavior and female response in other species of birds, never over-simplifying but helping us see in nature what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “das ewig Weibliche,” or the “eternal feminine” that leads us onwards: 

Darwin observed that in many of the most highly ornamented species the evolutionary force of sexual selection acted predominantly through female mate choice…it is female sexual autonomy that is responsible for the evolution of natural beauty. (p.27) 

One must not fail to point out another part of Prum’s account, namely, “the dynamic evolutionary history of penis morphology” (p. 244) and how female mate choice has contributed to the evolution of the human penis. 

It is interesting to note that the anatomical part so important to males’ identity and actions has evolved through choices made by the female of the species. If that story doesn’t cause you to read this book, nothing will. 

The dark side of bird sex

The story of bird sex is not an entirely pretty picture. Some avian species, particularly ducks, commit rape, even gang rape, such that females and evolution have had to work together to discourage such behavior and to stand on the side of female choice: 

“…sexual violence is a selfish male evolutionary strategy that is at odds with the evolutionary interests of its female victims and possibly with the evolutionary interests of the entire species.” (p.159)
Indeed. 

The story of Lysistrata

Prum recounts Aristophanes’s story “Lysistrata” in this context. This play of 411 BCE has it that women in the enemy states of Athens and Sparta withheld sex in order to restore peace to Greece. Prum muses: 

“So, in answer to the question ‘Under what conditions will males give up their weapons?’ “Lysistrata” teaches us that the most efficient way to fight back against male violence is to hit men where they are most vulnerable — below the belt.” (p.292) 

How to lower male aggression?

Prum concludes that desirable social behaviors like lower male aggression, cooperative social temperament and social intelligence are the result of females making their choice of mates through aesthetic sexual selection. (p. 292) 

Given that, one is led to conclude in general that the more female choice – that “cool-headed approach” — the more acceptable behavior among males. 

Women’s task: Keeping cool

Any woman who has attempted to occupy any place of influence knows that this process can be a rocky road. Keeping a cool head does not guarantee that there won’t be hot heads among one’s male counterparts. 

Hillary Clinton, for instance, ultimately kept a cool head and graciously conceded the election of 2016 to that ultimate hothead Donald Trump, who now refuses to concede the election of 2020, even to another man! 

The defenders of patriarchy have it wrong

Timely for our current human conundrums, Prum explains that all those people who defend patriarchy “mischaracterize feminism as an ideology of power.” That misses the point entirely: “feminism is not an ideology of power or control over others; rather, it is an ideology of freedom of choice.” (p. 555) 

In recent times we have witnessed, even in the supposedly advanced democracies, the age-old treatment of women as an underclass, as a threat, as a criminal, as a “monster.” 

Women and global crisis management

Women throughout the world bear the larger brunt of an international crisis like the pandemic.
And whether they are “important” people or ordinary people, they endure inappropriate treatment. 

U.S. vilifiers of women

In the United States, we have seen Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and many others, all unquestionably intelligent and competent, unjustly belittled and vilified. 

We witnessed sickening schadenfreude by powerful men about the death of one of the country’s great women and great jurists, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It goes on and on. 

Kamala Harris and a smile as evolutionary choice

Even so, like the sovereign female Argus and like the black women in the novels of William Faulkner, they endure. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence tried to verbally run over Kamala Harris in their debate, and President Trump called her a “monster” afterwards, but she won the debate. 

And she won in part with a method that was culturally derived, one may even say a product of evolution. As Michele L. Norris wrote in The Washington Post, “…she smiled as she held her ground – and of course they called it a smirk…But it was more than that. Harris gave Pence ‘The Look.'” 

Strong black women

Speaking of strong black women: 

Black women have elevated the ‘Mama don’t take no mess’ expression to a form of high art – a narrowing of the eye, a lift of the eyebrow, a tilt of the head. Sometimes there is a sideways arch of the neck, a molasses-slow movement of the jaw that says, without speaking, ‘You’ve got exactly 10 seconds to pick up your feet and run for the hills.’ 

Women’s sovereignty matters

The teachings of this fascinating book on the evolution of birds have parallels in human behavior. The sovereign female Argus dispassionately makes her evaluation of the most suitable mate for the sake of her children’s future, just as a sovereign American female politician skillfully employs a smile and “the Look” for the good of the United States. 

This is what most women want: Fairness for their children and others’ children, as for themselves. They want to be loving but also sovereign. They want to make their choices. They will insist on that.

Living with the legacy of my Trump-voting Vietnamese relatives

Would I mention at my grandparents’ funeral that they had voted for a white supremacist? If I had penned my late father’s obituary, would I have publicly denounced his anti-Blackness while listing his best qualities? I bring up such taboo ideas to suggest that we should live in a world where I can examine aloud the negative impact left behind by my loved ones.

Joe Biden is the projected winner to take the office of presidency from incumbent President Donald Trump. But so rooted is white supremacy in the foundation of this country that millions of Americans still voted for the Trump administration despite the racist rhetoric, the 240,000 deaths as a result of the administration’s mishandling of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and the family separation policies at the border. The Trump administration intensified the white supremacist structure in the USA, and white supremacy will not die out with Trump’s dethroning.

That means dealing with the knowledge that my neighbors and family members voted for Trump, civility be damned. Some of my friends are abandoning their Trump-voting relatives. As a first-generation Vietnamese American, I largely burned a bridge with my paternal grandparents, my Ông nội and Bà nội, over their support of Trump. According to my relatives, bombarding my grandmother’s private messages with information – the news surrounding Trump’s infidelities, the sexual assault accusations against him, the migrant family separation at the border, the Muslim ban – was toxic. When I saw my grandmother sharing a “Women for Brett Kavanaugh” video on Facebook, I also let loose a storm of articles focusing on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. What example was she setting for her granddaughters and grandsons by supporting Trump’s appointment of an accused rapist? 

My relatives tried to explain my grandparents’ unwavering support for the Trump administration. Due to centuries-long tensions with China and how Chinese military ships have terrorized and threatened Vietnamese fishing boats, many Vietnamese Americans gravitate toward the Trump administration’s anti-China stance. This is exacerbated by massive consumption of misinformation from right-wing sources on YouTube, through incendiary Facebook conspiracy posts, and Fox News. And unfortunately, the language barrier prevents them from accessing credible English-language sources to counter this barrage.

This Trump sympathy has created conflict across generations in Vietnamese American households, with progressive-leaning Vietnamese youths challenging their parents’ conservatism. “You’re smart and informed, Caroline, but grandmother is wiser,” my liberal-leaning aunts would tell me, holding me to the expectation that I unconditionally respect my elders. They’d insist I avoid talking politics to keep the peace.

But then my grandmother brought up her vote for Trump, stating blithely that he would undo the damage caused by Democrats. 

When I stated how undocumented immigrants deserve better treatment, my grandmother would just reply, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” believing we can just agree to disagree. You would think the argument, “If America took you in your time of need, why can’t others seek shelter here like you?” would sway certain Vietnamese elders’ sympathies for undocumented immigrants mistreated by Trump’s border policies, but it doesn’t. I have witnessed the dismissive attitudes of Vietnamese refugees toward the undocumented – or “illegals” as they call them – because they believe the latter did not get into the America the right “legal” way. Many Vietnamese perceive themselves as the immune “good immigrant,” despite many Vietnam War refugees facing deportation under the Trump administration. 

It does not add up that many in the Vietnamese community continue to significantly back Trump against their own interests. Another example of this contradiction: The Vietnamese American community, including my grandparents, have high regard for John McCain, because he too experienced the traumas of the Vietnam War, and as a POW experienced torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese. But they still didn’t turn on Trump when he denigrated McCain, saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.”  

When voting for Trump, my grandparents support white supremacy by adjacency, unmindful of its impact. “They’re just naive to the atrocities of the Trump administration, but they’re not going to change their mind,” an aunt explained. My grandmother might have entertained the idea of me engaging in social justice for communities of color by assuring me she respects my efforts, but she and and my grandfather did not care to factor in social justice into their votes or consider that their votes made my work more difficult and emotionally straining. I haven’t seen them in person since.

My grandparents aren’t outliers among the Vietnamese American community. During Texas’ early voting week, Houston Chronicle reporter Zach Despart tweeted stats that revealed over 8,800 of voters with the “Nguyen” surname had already cast their ballots in Harris County. Some saw that number as a positive sign, bringing attention to Vietnamese Americans’ potential voting impact, but sirens went off in my head. According to a 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, 48% of Vietnamese Americans surveyed expressed support for Donald Trump. So many of those “Nguyens” who had voted early are likely the same ones to call me “communist” or “socialist” in my text-banking work and proceeded to bubble in “Donald Trump” on the ballot.

Another example of the bipartisan divide within the community occured earlier this year. In my home city of Houston with a population of about 120,000 Vietnamese, 50-year-old insurance agent Lê Hoàng Nguyên purchased a Black Lives Matter billboard to decry the police murder of George Floyd. His fellow Vietnamese Houstonians eviscerated him with criticism, death threats, lynching threats even. Anti-Blackness is rampant in our community.

The model minority myth inflames these divisions. Perceived Asian success (ignoring poverty rates among Asians) is weaponized against the perceived failure of Black and Brown communities. Vietnamese social media Facebook groups, run by vocal pro-Trump admins and moderators, will blame Black communities for the abuse they suffer at the hands of police. Users would post rhetoric like, “They shouldn’t commit crimes to get arrested.” Sanitized B&W photos of “peaceful” Civil Rights marchers were weaponized to denounce the assumed rioting associated with the Black Lives Matter movement (never mind that that 93% of the protests were peaceful and that fixation on rioting erases the social injustices that fuels desperation). A Houston Vietnamese group even circulated footage of George Floyd’s final moments and claimed the police were the real victims, and the media and Black Lives Matter marchers were overreacting to the killing.

For Vietnamese children who have the psychological energy to engage, you can try to foster better understanding with your loved ones. It prevents that burden from falling onto those who are most impacted by the Trump administration. Challenge them by discussing Black Lives Matter marches and how racism in America did not end with the Civil Rights Movement. Other methods include encouraging them to change their social media diet and abstain from misinformation-filled platforms like YouTube or Facebook, and recommend they read Viet Fact Check, which weighs out and debunks misinformation within the Vietnamese community by bridging the language barrier. It’s not easy. When Lê Hoàng Nguyên educated his mother about the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic injustice, his mother concluded, in his words, “If Black people know that Vietnamese people support them . . .  maybe then they will support us and not rob us anymore.” Using the lowest standards, his mother’s self-serving conclusion was progress.

More encouragingly, look to  Philippa PB Hughes, the cousin of ICE director Tony Pham, who challenged his loyalty to the Trump administration and pointed out the hypocrisy in his own “lawful path to citizenship” narrative that he used to uphold his model minority status. Furthermore, I’ve come across a few success stories in “Asian American with Republican Parents Support Group,” in which children have helped their older relatives understand the racial history that has haunted the country that accepted them as refugees.

Education doesn’t have to stop with current Trump supporters though. I would go so far as to advise being open about your family members’ conservative voting record and principles even after their deaths; put it on their obituaries. I could be accused of speaking ill of the dead, but although they’ve passed, the negative consequences of their actions haven’t. I could tell my hypothetical children and grandchildren that “my grandparents were resourceful and courageous in the face of adversity as refugees – but let it be acknowledged that they played their part in causing harm to other migrants.” I can honor my grandparents’ sacrifice and survival when they fled Saigon with nothing but the clothes on their back in 1975. I can thank my grandmother for the bowls of beef and chicken phở noodles. I can thank her for cash-filled red envelopes on Lunar New Year. But I cannot erase that her support enabled the blatant white supremacy that ripped apart migrant families. This is her legacy as much as the good she’s done. I would expect my hypothetical children and friends to do the same for me should I do or say anything against the grain of justice. Hold previous generations accountable in order not to repeat their mistakes. 

I say this because it would have helped if my father’s shortcomings were articulated to me when he died. My father, the only son my Bà nội raised, subverted strict Vietnamese mores — all while he simultaneously upheld it. He was an outspoken pro-Bush, pro-McCain Republican. At the advice of Bà nội, he had us light incense and pray on our knees to Buddha for John McCain to beat Barack Obama in 2008. Although my father never lived past 2010, he had once mentioned to me with disgust how Donald Trump wanted to run for president, not believing this man existed.

While I’d like to believe my father’s loyalty to the Republican Party would have never driven him to overcome his distaste for Trump, he left behind the burden of a reckoning with his anti-Blackness within my family. He was a father who lectured to me and my brother that N-word and the news reports of nooses in neighborhoods were racist, but I also remember how he snarled “the police officer was just doing his job,” when Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s wrongful arrest stirred outrage. He also commented, “college students vote for Obama because they don’t want to seem racist” and ranted, “when I said to the canvasser I wasn’t going to vote for Obama, two African-American women looked at me like I was useless.” As an impressionable middle-schooler who idolized him, I sided wholly with his grievances and absorbed these sentiments like a disciple, but time and experience later taught me otherwise. Discussing these uncomfortable truths allows me to evaluate what went wrong and how to identify microaggressive anti-Blackness in Asian spaces, like social media or other parts of my family circle.

Vietnamese-American activist holds a South Vietnam flag as he participates in a protest outside the White House

I haven’t completely withdrawn from my grandparents. I send Vietnamese-language letters — typing them in English, passing them to Vietnamese-literate friends for translation, then handwriting the Vietnamese — to them to inform them about my efforts to observe the grievances of the Vietnamese community and distribute information that bridges language barriers. Knowing my grandparents’ rationalization for supporting a figure like Trump challenges me to engage the nuances of my Vietnamese community and heritage. But I maintain personal distance. I ignore their pleas of “I miss you, please come visit” or even my relatives urging me to answer their calls. Letter-writing helps me process my thoughts better than phone calls since I cannot speak their mother language. Mainly, I am protecting my mental health. But I also wish that my grandparents absorb my absence as a consequence because they could not confront the consequences others must suffer under the Trump administration, which they supported.

My mother reports that as they age, my grandfather is barely eating and grandmother has memory lapses. Am I going to regret not seeing them again before their demise? I am ready to grapple with complicated emotions, but I will look back and understand my distance. After all, mourning a loved one should include mourning what a person could have been.

 

 

Reclaiming American idealism

As I lived through the nightmare of the election campaign just past, I often found myself dreaming of another American world entirely. Anything but this one.

In that spirit, I also found myself looking at a photo of my fourth-grade class, vintage 1972. Tacked to the wall behind our heads was a collage, a tapestry of sorts that I could make out fairly clearly. It evoked the promise and the chaos of a turbulent year so long ago. The promise lay in a segment that read “peace” and included a green ecology flag, a black baseball player (Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson, who had died that year), and a clenched fist inside the outline of the symbol for female (standing in for the new feminism of that moment and the push for equal rights for women).

Representing the chaos of that era were images of B-52s dropping bombs in Vietnam (a war that was still ongoing) and a demonstration for racist Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace (probably because he had been shot and wounded in an assassination attempt that May). A rocket labeled “USA” reminded me that this country was then still launching triumphant Apollo missions to the moon.

How far we’ve come in not quite half a century! In 2020, “peace” isn’t even a word in the American political dictionary; despite Greta Thunberg, a growing climate-change movement, and Joe Biden’s two-trillion-dollar climate plan, ecology was largely a foreign concept in the election just past as both political parties embraced fracking and fossil fuels (even if Biden’s embrace was less tight); Major League Baseball has actually suffered a decline in African-American players in recent years; and the quest for women’s equality remains distinctly unfulfilled.

Bombing continues, of course, though those bombs and missiles are now aimed mostly at various Islamist insurgencies rather than communist ones, and it’s often done by drones, not B-52s, although those venerable planes are still used to threaten Moscow and Beijing with nuclear carnage. George Wallace has, of course, been replaced by Donald Trump, a racist who turnedPresident Richard Nixon’s southern strategy of my grade school years into a national presidential victory in 2016 and who, as president, regularly nodded in the direction of white supremacists.

Progress, anyone? Indeed, that class photo of mine even featured the flag of China, a reminder that Nixon had broken new ground that very year by traveling to Beijing to meet with Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong and de-escalate the Cold War tensions of the era. Nowadays, Americans only hear that China is a military and economic threat; that Joe Biden and some Democrats are allegedly far too China-friendly (they aren’t); and that Covid-19 (aka the “Wuhan Flu” or “Kung Flu”) was — at least to Donald Trump and his followers — a plague sent by the Chinese to kill us.

Another symbol from that tapestry, a chess piece, reminded me that in 1972 we witnessed the famous Cold War meeting between the youthful, brilliant, if mercurial Bobby Fischer and Soviet chess champion Boris Spassky in a match that evoked all the hysteria and paranoia of the Cold War. Inspired by Fischer, I started playing the game myself and became a card-carrying member of the U.S. Chess Federation until I realized my talent was limited indeed.

The year 1972 ended with Republican Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over Democratic Senator George McGovern, who carried only my home state of Massachusetts. After Nixon’s landslide victory, I remember bumper stickers that said: “Don’t blame me for Nixon, I’m from Massachusetts.”

Eighteen years later, in 1990, I would briefly meet the former senator. He was attending a history symposium on the Vietnam War at the U.S. Air Force Academy and, as a young Air Force captain, I chased down a book for him in the Academy’s library. I don’t think I knew then of McGovern’s stellar combat record in World War II. A skilled pilot, he had flown 35 combat missions in a B-24 bomber, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for, at one point, successfully landing a plane heavily damaged by enemy fire and saving his crew. Nixon, who had served in the Navy during that war, never saw combat. But he did see lots of time at the poker table, winning a tidy sum of money, which he would funnel into his first political campaign.

Like so many combat veterans of the “greatest generation,” McGovern never bragged about his wartime exploits. Over the years, however, that sensible, honorable, courageous American patriot became far too strongly associated with peace, love, and understanding. A staunch defender of civil rights, a believer in progressive government, a committed opponent of the Vietnam War, he would find himself smeared by Republicans as weak, almost cowardly, on military matters and an anti-capitalist (the rough equivalent today of democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders).

Apparently, this country couldn’t then and still can’t accept any major-party candidate who doesn’t believe in a colossal military establishment and a government that serves business and industry first and foremost or else our choice in 2020 wouldn’t have been Trump-Pence versus Biden-Harris.

Channeling Lloyd Bentsen

As I began writing this piece in late October, I didn’t yet know that Joe Biden would indeed win the most embattled election of our lifetime. What I did know was that the country that once produced (and then rejected) thoughtful patriots like George McGovern was in serious decline. Most Americans desperately want change, so the pollsters tell us, whether we call ourselves Republicans or Democrats, conservatives, liberals, or socialists. Both election campaigns, however, essentially promised us little but their own versions of the status quo, however bizarre Donald Trump’s may have been.

In truth, Trump didn’t even bother to present a plan for anything, including bringing the pandemic under control. He just promised four more years of Keeping America Trumpish Again with yet another capital gains tax cut thrown in. Biden ran on a revival of Barack Obama’s legacy with the “hope and change” idealism largely left out. Faced with such a choice in an increasingly desperate country, with spiking Covid-19 cases in state after state and hospitals increasingly overwhelmed, too many of us sought relief in opioids or gun purchases, bad habits like fatty foods and lack of exercise, and wanton carelessness with regard to the most obvious pandemic safety measures.

Since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and especially since September 11, 2001, it’s amazing what Americans have come to accept as normal. Forget about peace, love, and understanding. What we now see on America’s streets aren’t antiwar protesters or even beat cops, but Robocopsarmed to the teeth with military-style weaponry committing indefensible acts of violence. Extremist “militias” like the Proud Boys are celebrated (by some) as “patriots.” Ludicrous QAnon conspiracy theories are taken all too seriously with political candidates on the Republican side of the aisle lining up to endorse them.

Even six-figure death tolls from a raging pandemic were normalized as President Trump barnstormed the country, applauding himself to maskless crowds at super-spreader rallies for keeping Covid-19 deaths under the mythical figure of 2.2 million. Meanwhile, the rest of us found nothing to celebrate in what — in Vietnam terms — could be thought of as a new body count, this time right here in the homeland.

And speaking of potential future body counts, consider again the Proud Boyswhom our president in that first presidential debate asked to “stand back and stand by.” Obviously not a militia, they might better be described as a gang. Close your eyes and imagine that all the Proud Boys were black. What would they be called then by those on the right? A menace, to say the least, and probably far worse.

A real militia would, of course, be under local, state, or federal authority with a chain of command and a code of discipline, not just a bunch of alienated guys playing at military dress-up and spoiling for a fight. Yet too many Americans see them through a militarized lens, applauding those “boys” as they wave blue-line pro-police flags and shout “all lives matter.” Whatever flags they may wrap themselves in, they are, in truth, nothing more than nationalist bully boys.

Groups like the Proud Boys are only the most extreme example of the “patriotic” poseurs, parades, and pageantry in the U.S.A. of 2020. And collectively all of it, including our lost and embattled president, add up to a red-white-and-blue distraction (and what a distraction it’s been!) from an essential reality: that America is in serious trouble — and you can take that “America” to mean ordinary people working hard to make a living (or not working at all right now), desperate to maintain roofs over their heads and feed their kids.

It’s a distraction as well from the reality that America hasn’t decisively won a war since the time George McGovern flew all those combat missions in a B-24. It’s a distraction from some ordinary Americans like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake being not just manipulated and exploited, but murdered, hence the need for a Black Lives Matter movement to begin with. It’s a distraction from the fact that we don’t even debate gargantuan national security budgets that now swell annually above a trillion dollars, while no one in a position of power blinks.

Today’s never-ending wars and rumors of more to come remind me that George McGovern was not only against the Vietnam conflict, but the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, too. Joe Biden, meanwhile, voted for the Iraq War, which Donald Trump also spoke in favor of, then, only to campaign on ending this country’s wars in 2016, even if by 2020 he hadn’t done so — though he had set up a new military service, the Space Force. Feeling the need to sharpen his own pro-war bona fides, Biden recently said he’d raise“defense” spending over and above what even Trump wanted.

If you’ll indulge my fantasy self for a moment, I’d like to channel Lloyd Bentsen, the 1988 Democratic vice presidential nominee who, in a debate with his Republican opposite Dan Quayle, dismissed him as “no Jack Kennedy.” In that same spirit, I’d like to say this to both Trump and Biden in the wake of the recent Covid-19 nightmare of a campaign: “I met George McGovern. George McGovern, in a different reality, could have been my friend. You, Joe and Donald, are no George McGovern.”

Prior military service is not essential to being president and commander-in-chief, but whose finger would you rather have on America’s nuclear button: that of Trump, who dodged the draft with heel spurs; Biden, who dodged the draft with asthma; or a leader like McGovern, who served heroically in combat, a leader who was willing to look for peaceful paths because he knew so intimately the blood-spattered ones of war?

A historical tapestry for fourth graders as 2020 ends

What about a class photo for fourth graders today? What collage of images would be behind their heads to represent the promise and chaos of our days? Surely, Covid-19 would be represented, perhaps by a mountain of body bags in portable morgues. Surely, a “Blue Lives Matter” flag would be there canceling out a Black Lives Matter flag. Surely, a drone launching Hellfire missiles, perhaps in Somalia or Yemen or some other distant front in America’s endless war of (not on) terror, would make an appearance.

And here are some others: surely, the flag of China, this time representing the growing tensions, not rapprochement, between the two great powers; surely, a Trump super-spreader rally filled with the unmasked expressing what I like to think of as the all-too-American “ideal” of “live free and die”; surely, a vast firenado rising from California and the West, joined perhaps by a hurricane flag to represent another record-breaking year of such storms, especially on the Gulf Coast; surely, some peaceful protesters being maced or tased or assaulted by heavily armed and unidentified federal agents just because they cared about the lives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others.

And I suppose we could add something about sports into that collage, maybe an image of football players in empty stadiums, kneeling as one for racial equality. Look, sports used to unite us across race and class lines, but in his woebegone presidency, Donald Trump, among others, used sports only to divide us. Complex racial relations and legacies have been reduced to slogans, Black Lives Matter versus blue lives matter, but what’s ended up being black and blue is America. We’ve beaten ourselves to a pulp and it’s the fight promoters, Donald Trump above all, who have profited most. If we are to make any racial progress in America, that kind of self-inflicted bludgeoning has to end.

And what would be missing from the 2020 collage that was in my 1972 one? Notably, clear references to peace, ecology, and equal rights for women. Assuming that, on January 20th, Joe Biden really does take his place in the Oval Office, despite the angriest and most vengeful man in the world sitting there now, those three issues would be an ideal place for him to start in his first 100 days as president (along, of course, with creating a genuine plan to curb Covid-19): (1) seek peace in Afghanistan and elsewhere by ending America’s disastrous wars; (2) put the planet first and act to abate climate change and preserve all living things; (3) revive the Equal Rights Amendment and treat women with dignity, respect, and justice.

One final image from my fourth-grade collage: an elephant is shown on top of a somewhat flattened donkey. It was meant, of course, to capture Richard Nixon’s resounding victory over George McGovern in 1972. Yet, even with Joe Biden’s victory last week, can we say with any confidence that the donkey is now on top? Certainly not the one of McGovern’s day, given that Biden has already been talking about austerity at home and even higher military spending.

Sadly, it’s long past time to reclaim American idealism and take a stand for a lot less war and a lot more help for the most vulnerable among us, including the very planet itself. How sad that we don’t have a leader like George McGovern in the White House as a daunting new year looms.

Copyright 2020, William J. Astore

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Nadiya Hussain’s slow cooker mushroom lasagne is perfect for a chilly weeknight dinner

Sometimes we like to go meat-free during the week, and that’s when mushrooms are my saving grace. They are deep in color and rich in flavor — they give off the aura of meat, but they are not. That’s why we love them, and it means we can have a meat-free lasagne too. This is the kind of thing you want to put in the slow cooker just before popping out, knowing you will have dinner ready for when you get back and another ready to go in the freezer (if you only want to make one, halve all of the ingredients). 

* * *

RECIPE: Slow Cooker Mushroom Lasagne 
Serves 4 now and 4 later 
Active time: 40 minutes 
Total Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes

½ cup vegetable oil 
8 cloves of garlic, crushed 
2 medium onions, diced
2 teaspoons salt 
2 heaped teaspoons cumin seeds
2 x 1 lb 6 oz packages of button mushrooms, roughly sliced, or 4 x 10 oz cans of mushrooms 
4 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 
2¼ cups mascarpone
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons whole milk 
14 oz Cheddar cheese, grated
Cooking oil spray
12 lasagne sheets

1. Put the oil into a medium pan on high heat and as soon as it is hot, add the garlic. When it’s golden, add the onions and salt and cook until soft. 

2. Add  the  cumin  seeds,  then  add  the  mushrooms  and  keep  cooking  on  high  until  they  have  really  reduced  in  size.  Stir  in  the  black  pepper  and  cook until most of the moisture has evaporated, then take off the heat. 

3. To make the easy white sauce, mix together the mascarpone, milk, and cheese. Lightly spray some oil on the inside of your slow cooker pot, and have a medium lasagne dish at the ready.

4. Put  a  quarter  of  the  mushroom  mixture  into  the  slow  cooker  and  the  other  quarter  into  the  lasagne  dish,  then  make  a  layer  of  3  sheets  of  lasagne in each, breaking the pasta up where necessary to fit.

5. Layer  on  a  quarter  of  the  mascarpone  sauce  in  the  slow  cooker,  and  another quarter in the lasagne dish, followed by the rest of the mushroom mixture and the remaining lasagne sheets, half in each. 

6. Finally, spread the rest of the mascarpone mixture on top. Set the lasagne dish aside to cool. Cook the lasagne in the slow cooker on low for 2 hours. I like to serve this with garlic bread and salad. 

7. When  the  lasagne  in  the  dish  has  cooled,  cover  with  foil  and  freeze.  When ready to use it, bake from frozen in a 375°F/200°C oven for 1½ hours. Remove  the  foil  and  continue  baking  until  the  sauce  is  bubbling  and  the  cheese is browned.

If you love this recipe as much as we do, order Nadiya Hussain’s “Time to Eat.”

What to know about ACA at the Supreme Court — again

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments in a case that, for the third time in eight years, could result in the justices striking down the Affordable Care Act.

The case, California v. Texas, is the result of a change to the health law made by Congress in 2017. As part of a major tax bill, Congress reduced to zero the penalty for not having health insurance. But it was that penalty — a tax — that the high court ruled made the law constitutional in a 2012 decision, argues a group of Republican state attorneys general. Without the tax, they say in their suit, the rest of the law must fall, too.

After originally contending that the entire law should not be struck down when the suit was filed in 2018, the Trump administration changed course in 2019 and joined the GOP officials who brought the case.

Here are some key questions and answers about the case:

What are the possibilities for how the Court could rule?

There is a long list of ways this could play out.

The justices could declare the entire law unconstitutional — which is what a federal district judge in Texas ruled in December 2018. But legal experts say that’s not the most likely outcome of this case.

First, the court may avoid deciding the case on its merits entirely, by ruling that the plaintiffs do not have “standing” to sue. The central issue in the case is whether the requirement in the law to have insurance — which remains even though Congress eliminated the penalty or tax — is constitutional. But states are not subject to the so-called individual mandate, so some analysts suggest the Republican officials have no standing. In addition, questions have been raised about the individual plaintiffs in the case, two consultants from Texas who argue that they felt compelled to buy insurance even without a possible penalty.

The court could also rule that by eliminating the penalty but not the rest of the mandate (which Congress could not do in that 2017 tax bill for procedural reasons), lawmakers “didn’t mean to coerce anyone to do anything, and so there’s no constitutional problem,” University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley said in a recent webinar for the NIHCM Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund and the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism.

Or, said Bagley, the court could rule that, without the tax, the requirement to have health insurance is unconstitutional, but the rest of the law is not. In that case, the justices might strike the mandate only, which would have basically no impact.

It gets more complicated if the court decides that, as the plaintiffs argue, the individual mandate language without the penalty is unconstitutional and so closely tied to other parts of the law that some of them must fall as well.

Even there the court has choices. One option would be, as the Trump administration originally argued, to strike down the mandate and just the pieces of the law most closely related to it — which happen to be the insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions, an extremely popular provision of the law. The two parts are connected because the original purpose of the mandate was to make sure enough healthy people sign up for insurance to offset the added costs to insurers of sicker people.

Another option, of course, would be for the court to follow the lead of the Texas judge and strike down the entire law.

While that’s not the most likely outcome, said Bagley, if it happens it could be “a hot mess” for the nation’s entire health care system. As just one example, he said, “every hospital is getting paid pursuant to changes made by the ACA. How do you even go about making payments if the thing that you are looking to guide what those payments ought to be is itself invalid?”

What impact will new Justice Amy Coney Barrett have?

Perhaps a lot. Before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, most court observers thought the case was highly unlikely to result in the entire law being struck down. That’s because Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold the law in 2012, and again when it was challenged in a less sweeping way in 2015.

But with Barrett replacing Ginsburg, even if Roberts joined the court’s remaining three liberals they could still be outvoted by the other five conservatives. Barrett was coy about her views on the Affordable Care Act during her confirmation hearings in October. But she has written that she thinks Roberts was wrong to uphold the law in 2012.

Could a new president and Congress make the case go away?

Many have suggested that, if Joe Biden assumes the presidency, his Justice Department could simply drop the case. But the administration did not bring the case; the GOP state officials did. And while normally the Justice Department’s job is to defend existing laws in court, in this case the ACA is being defended by a group of Democratic state attorneys general. A new administration could change that position, but that’s not the same as dropping the case.

Congress, on the other hand, could easily make the case moot. It could add back even a nominal financial penalty for not having insurance. It could eliminate the mandate altogether, although that would require 60 votes in the Senate under current rules. Congress could also pass a “severability” provision, saying that, if any portion of the law is struck down, the rest should remain.

“The problem is not technical,” said Bagley. “It’s political.”

What is the timeline for a decision? Could the Court delay implementation of its ruling?

The court usually hears oral arguments in a case months before it issues a decision. Unless the decision is unanimous or turns out to be very simple, Bagley said, he would expect to see an opinion “sometime in the spring.”

As to whether the court could find some or all of the law unconstitutional but delay when its decision takes effect, Bagley said that happened from time to time as recently as the 1970s. “That practice has been more or less abandoned,” he said, but in the case of a law so large, “you could imagine the Supreme Court using its discretion to say the decision wouldn’t take effect immediately.”

If the court does invalidate the entire ACA, Congress could act to fix things, but it’s unclear if it will be able to, especially if Republicans still control the Senate. If the justices strike the law, Bagley said, “I honestly think the likeliest outcome is that Congress runs around like a chicken with its head cut off, doesn’t come to a deal, and we’re back to where we were before 2010,” when the ACA passed.

Trump is defeated. Trumpism is more alive than ever

Back in 2016, I attended a debate watch party in San Jose hosted by the Santa Clara County Republican Party. The event was hosted at a Round Table Pizza — the kind of uninspiring corporate pizza chain that was almost too apt for the Bay Area’s blandest political demographic. As infiltrators, my girlfriend and I pretended to be fellow Republicans, though we didn’t actively try to goad anyone on their views as Sacha Baron Cohen might have. I was just there to write a story about the pro-Trump locals, to try to better understand who exactly these people were who lived among us in the ultra-liberal Bay Area.

At that point in 2016, Trump and his supporters were a poorly understood phenomenon, and Trump still seemed likely to lose the general election. I was not a Hillary Clinton supporter, nor a Democrat — I was far to the left of them — which gave me something of an outsiders’ perspective. I considered Clinton a glaringly weak candidate, but still she seemed to have a far more organized operation than an undisciplined outsider like Donald Trump. Even back then, he clearly seemed to suffer from a personality disorder, which I assumed (wrongly) would be an impediment towards victory. 

The memory from this evening is seared into my mind — not for anything shocking perpetuated by the Santa Clara County GOP, nor for the mediocre pizza — but rather for the crowd’s reaction to the Clinton-Trump debate. It would prove to be a harbinger of politics for years to come. 

Throughout the debate, whenever Clinton would be interrupted by Trump, the crowd would laugh and holler. When he belittled her or mocked her, the crowd would hoot. And so on. That crowd of Bay Area Republicans absolutely loved it when Trump would say something cruel to Clinton, or bully her in a performative way. 

I’d never seen anything like this. Debate “zingers,” in my experience, were supposed to be factual ripostes: one candidate debunks or fact-checks another, to applause from their team. (Sometimes the facts are false or exaggerated, sure; but the format was usually, here’s-a-fact, here’s-a-counter, and so on.) Clinton spouted political facts and figures at Trump plenty of times that night, but he didn’t really do that to her. Instead, he would just mock, belittle and interrupt her. This debate wasn’t about normal political repartee to him, not really. It was just about being an asshole. 

His behavior was repellent and somewhat shocking to me, but the GOP crowd lapped it up. They hooted and hollered at the set each time Trump mocked her. I didn’t have any sympathy for Clinton’s formless neoliberal politics, but from a personal perspective the sexist undertones were clear. 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this would prove to be a harbinger for the future of politics — and a clue to understand the way that the right has changed in the past four years as the Republicans have become the party of Trump. Now, just over four years almost to that day, Trump’s supporters still react to his epic owns — his gloating and belittling and bullying behavior, his sadism towards those who oppose him. His entire presidency was, in his eyes, a battle of us versus them, where everything he did was righteous, and his enemies deserved violence or incarceration. His rallies, the apotheosis of his politics, were both rhetorically meaningless and politically crucial: it was where you could see his politics most clearly, as an arena of mocks, brags, and boasts. It was the political equivalent of a DJ Khaled track — a series of boasts about one’s wealth, awesomeness, and superiority over one’s haters.

In his day-to-day governing, though, Trump, like his predecessor Republicans, employed a fairly standard right-wing playbook, meaning he essentially did the bidding of one or two right-wing think tanks. He was quite comparable to Bush in that sense. What was astonishing, though, was that he had somewhat more of a mandate to do whatever he pleased (from his base at least) by virtue of his rhetorical signaling. Unlike Bush I or II, or Reagan, or any GOP politician prior, Trump’s support was built on the joy that his followers derived from his sadism. And they were willing to let him do or say anything as long as that spectacle would continue. Even when he abandoned them — when, say, he left his ardent supporters to die of hypothermia after a Nebraska rally, necessitating medical treatment for at least thirty — they did not abandon Trump. There are many stories of Trump supporters whose family members died of coronavirus, yet who still possess admiration for Trump, though he enabled the virus’ uncontrolled spread. 

Perhaps Trumpism, and its specific articulation of an us-versus-them mentality, is not unprecedented in American politics. But  rhetoric is only half of what Trumpism is. The other half is just standard deregulation, privatization, and upward wealth redistribution — the kinds of neoliberal policies that move wealth upwards to the top 1% of society. Trump seems to have stumbled into this formula, the realization that sadism is the specific key towards continuing this right-wing, semi-authoritarian neoliberal agenda. 

Hence, aside from a single measly $1,200 check, Trump delivered few observable material improvements to the lives of his supporters, who are largely not of the super-rich variety who benefited from, say, his tax reform bill. Rather, many of his policies have hurt them. His supporters love him, paradoxically, because we live in an epoch in which so many of us have completely given up on politics: we no longer believe politics is capable of materially improving our lives. This applies to both Democrats and Republicans. And if you believe politics can’t actually do anything for you, it makes sense perhaps that it would become an arena in which you get emotional satisfaction from absorbing the president’s epic owns, with no material effect on your own life.

That means Trumpism is not merely Trump’s creation. It is also the creation of the Democrats, who have become such a thoroughly neoliberal party, whose actual politics are steeped in the tea of corporate donors and billionaires, that their hands are tied when it comes to any kind of real reform that might dig into the pocketbooks of the latter. The Democrats don’t employ the same kind of sadistic rhetoric, but a huge number of online liberals have become similarly obsessed with getting in epic owns against their political enemies. (Just scroll through the replies on any Trump tweet.) 

Thus, the Democratic Party has cynically settled to push social issues that will have no effect on corporate bottom lines: issues that are undoubtedly incredibly important to civil rights, but not to any great degree that would challenge the status quo or redirect wealth. To the contrary — the party actively fights to repel any change to the socioeconomic status quo. Joe Biden’s infamous remarks to that room of rich donors, where he assured them “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were president, are key to understanding the Democratic shift; as is Kamala Harris’ facile student debt relief plan, which would forgive debt for almost no one. They can’t offer much to the lives of anyone, and the weak material reforms they do offer are performative: they are widely praised by the professional-managerial class liberals, and difficult to access by the working class.

Obamacare was key in this regard: a thoroughly capitalistic, neoliberal “solution” to healthcare that relied on the for-profit private healthcare industry to “solve” a crisis that continues to spiral out of control. The idea for Obamacare quite literally came from the right-wing Heritage Foundation; it was prototyped by Republican Mitt Romney when he was Massachusetts governor. 

Professional middle-class liberals often defend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a worthy reform, on par with Social Security or other New Deal social programs. If it really were as accessible and successful as those, however, the rural red parts of this country would have lit up blue out of gratitude for seeing such a real material improvement in their lives, and become an important part of a new coalition. Yet Medicare for All it is not. I’ve had an ACA plan before, back in the early 2010s; and while I was glad to have any form of health care, the $70 copays were difficult to manage and discouraged me from seeing a doctor at all. Because of bureaucratic confusion, I had to pay $2,000 in taxes at the end of the year, in a year in which I made less than $32,000. I regret not just merely paying out of pocket, and I regret that the Democratic Party was too wed to the inefficient mores of capitalist accumulation to challenge the healthcare industry in a material way. I fled the party as a result, and have not voted for a Democrat for president since 2008 — opting for the third-party, more lefty candidates instead. The national Democratic Party offers me nothing, and will get nothing from me in return. 

The Republicans, on the other hand, do just the opposite. They offer their supporters less than nothing — a live of more immiseration — with the promise that their supporters will learn who their enemies are, and then see their enemies get “owned.” Epic bullying and a public display of cruelty that makes them feel good, like they’re part of some kind of “in” crowd.

These lessons of Trumpism — be obstinate, gloating and sadistic, and your followers will become zealots, freeing you to keep redistributing wealth upwards — are already visible in the newest crop of Republican candidates. Republican Madison Cawthorn, the 25-year-old incoming House Representative for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, celebrated his victory with this Twitter message: “Cry more, lib.” A common pro-Trump banner seen around the country during the election read “TRUMP: F**K YOUR FEELINGS.”

Amid the empty posturing of the Democrats and the sadistic posturing of the Trumpist GOP, a huge swath of this country is flailing. 8 million additional Americans have fallen below the poverty line since July 2020. Student debt is approaching $2 trillion. Medical debt is being aggressively collected despite the pandemic.

The only liberal antidote to Trumpism is actually doing something material to aid those who’ve fallen for it — giving them something in their lives to noticeably improve their social welfare, redistributing wealth downwards. Franklin Roosevelt absorbed this lesson, as evidenced by the New Deal Coalition; it is unclear if a Biden administration is capable of doing the same. Indeed, if Biden’s administration doesn’t do anything to materially improve the lives of millions of working voters, Trumpism is apt to get stronger, not weaker, in the next four years. 

Trump’s last attempt to steal the election won’t work

Joe Biden has won. He will be our next president. 

Normally, the loser of the race would give a gracious concession speech, and accept the results. 

That won’t happen this time around, because Donald Trump is a pathological narcissist who will never admit defeat. But there’s no legal requirement for the losing candidate to formally concede — it’s just another tradition Trump will choose to ignore. 

He can bluster and protest all he wants, but like it or not, the Constitution and federal law establish a clear timeline of how electoral votes are processed, and when the new president takes office. Here’s how that process normally plays out, how Trump might try to undermine it, and why he is unlikely to succeed.

The first date to look out for is December 8th. After Election Day, states have until this date, called the “safe harbor” deadline, to resolve any election disputes. Each state has a unique process outlined in its state constitution for this, and the federal deadline was created so that state electoral disputes don’t drag on endlessly.

Next is December 14th. This is when the electors meet in their states, and cast paper ballots for president and vice president. And then governors certify the electors’ votes. 

The governor sends these certified results to Congress by December 23rd.

On January 6th, 2021, the newly sworn-in Congress meets in a joint session to officially accept each state’s Electoral College votes and count them. This is normally a ceremonial event in which the already-settled results of the election are simply made official. This is when the presidential race formally ends.

Lastly, on January 20th, the president and vice president are inaugurated.

Normally, no one pays much attention to this process before Inauguration Day because it goes off without a hitch. But we’ve seen that Trump will do anything to hold onto power. It’s important to know how and when he might try to undermine this process, and also understand how unlikely it is he’ll succeed. 

Trump backers are trying to push Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint their own slates of Trump electors. That’s why the campaign has launched empty legal challenges to perfectly normal vote counts — trying to sow enough doubt to give the state legislatures political cover to appoint their own electors. 

This isn’t likely to happen. It would be challenged as an unconstitutional power grab, since state legislatures have almost always deferred to the results of the state’s popular vote in assigning electoral votes. And not to mention, it would spark massive public outrage.

Thankfully, it doesn’t look like Republican legislators in any of the key swing states want to expend their political capital defending a failed president, and some have even explicitly come out against this plan.

All this is to say, be patient, keep the faith, and don’t fall into Trump’s cry for attention. We must see this for what it is: A final attempt of a desperate, bitter man to cling to power. 

Joe Biden will be our next president.

Why voters of color were decisive for Biden despite Democrats’ missteps

Like many voters, Yuritzi Aguirre, 20, was paying close attention to this year’s election. Growing up in Texas as part of a large, working-class, Mexican-American family with mixed immigration status, Aguirre wanted to make her voice heard on behalf of her relatives who can’t vote.

But despite her demographic importance in this election, no one from Joe Biden’s campaign ever reached out to her. Neither did President Donald Trump’s campaign.

“There hasn’t been anything that sticks out to me as reaching out to Latinx voters,” Aguirre said. “We weren’t empowered or motivated to vote.”

Her experience is illustrative of a broader pattern. Neither political party can claim they are behind 2020’s record-high turnout of voters of color, experts told Capital & Main. Rather, grassroots groups across the United States are responsible for expanding the electorate through localized efforts, despite ineffective outreach from the Democratic Party and active suppression by the Republicans.

“The Democratic Party hasn’t put a lot of investment into our communities. It’s why we’ve built independent vehicles to reach our folks,” said Tania Unzueta, the political director for Mijente, a national network focused on engaging eligible Latinx voters in battleground states, including North Carolina and Georgia.

The new generation of voters of color activated by these on-the-ground efforts may have tipped the scales in key states this election, and are likely to shape future races, whether or not the parties decide to engage with them.

* * *

The Democratic Party’s path to victory in this election hinged heavily on the fast-growing demographics of eligible voters of color, said Dorian Warren, the president of Community Change, a national network of grassroots political organizers. (Note: Warren serves on Capital & Main’s advisory board.)

In past elections, white voters have been more likely to be registered to vote, and to turn out to vote, than other racial or ethnic groups. But now, their share of the electorate is shrinking. Voters of color have accounted for more than three-quarters of the growth of the U.S. electorate since 2000.

This year’s elections marked the first time that eligible Latinx voters, who tend to show less partisan loyalty than other groups, surpassed Black voters to become the largest non-white voting bloc.

Despite the fact that most Blacks, Latinx, Asians and Native Americans lean progressive, the Democrats’ leadership may have decided against making investments to reach out to those groups because the party takes communities of color for granted, Warren said.

Instead, the party followed its longtime playbook, which aims to shift existing white voters rather than engage new voters of color, he added. (The majority of white men and women of all ages voted for Trump, according to multiple polls, the only racial or ethnic group to do so.)

“It’s much easier to just hire some fancy white guys to cut an ad. It’s much harder to invest in communities of color,” Warren said. Registering and engaging voters of color requires time-consuming and expensive on-the-ground work, including knocking on doors and having repeated conversations that are not limited to election cycles.

The Democrats’ strategy ignores important lessons from recent political history, said Sonja Diaz, who directs the University of California, Los Angeles, Latino Policy & Politics Initiative.

“The 2020 Democratic primary showed both political parties and all future candidates the playbook to win,” Diaz said, pointing to the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, which emphasized meeting voters where they are through an issues-based platform built around substantive rather than descriptive representation.

These organizing techniques have proven successful in some recent congressional races. Progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib all handily won re-election, and will be joined in the House of Representatives by two more progressive women of color: Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Latina who won in New Mexico, and Cori Bush, the first Black woman to represent Missouri in Congress. All of these women built relationships with grassroots groups that helped ensure that their support within the communities was reflected at the polls.

Otherwise, big wins anticipated by Democrats didn’t materialize, and party members vehemently disagree about where to place the blame, with some admonishing the left and others like Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington arguing that progressives “turned out huge numbers of young people, brown and Black people … who will ultimately save the day in the race for the White House.”

The Democratic National Committee didn’t respond to a request for comment.

* * *

The Republican Party, unlike the Democrats, has implemented a coordinated and sophisticated two-pronged strategy of suppressing and misinforming voters of color, said Jennifer Epps-Addison, a political organizer who directs the Center for Popular Democracy, a network of state-based groups focused on building the political power of marginalized communities.

Although voters of color have been “subjected to incredibly aggressive campaigns of voter suppression, disenfranchisement and misinformation” throughout U.S. history, Epps-Addison said, Republicans have abjectly disenfranchised this electorate since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. For example, many states and municipalities have enacted stricter voter ID laws, shut down polling places in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods and discarded absentee ballots from voters of color at higher rates than white voters.

Since the GOP lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, the party has mainly sought to eke out wins by mobilizing its declining white and often Evangelical base through strategic racism, Warren said.

But in the 2020 elections, the Trump campaign effectively used misinformation tactics to peel off a few percentage points from voters of color, predominantly Black and Latinx men. For example, Trump repeatedly made claims that he had done more for Black communitiesthan any president since Abraham Lincoln, and leaned on endorsements from prominent celebrities like rappers Lil Wayne and Ice Cube. Trump also appealed to key voting blocs of Cuban and Venezuelan Americans in the swing state of Florida through disinformation that painted centrist Biden as a socialist.

Trump’s campaign also started running Spanish-language ads earlier than Biden’s did, and was outspending the Democrats up until the final months of the election. These ads, tailored to specific Hispanic nationalities and bolstered by disinformation on platforms frequented by Latinx voters, may have tipped the scales in some battleground states. The GOP may have also had a leg up because it continued door-to-door canvassing efforts throughout the election cycle, whereas the Democrats ordered campaigners to stop knocking to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

* * *

With Democrats largely ignoring voters of color, and Republicans mainly suppressing them, organizations on the ground ran the most effective voter engagement, said Aimee Allison, the founder and president of She the People, a national network elevating the political power of women of color.

In recent election cycles, independent political funders like Way to Win have stopped funneling money through Democratic Party committees, which distribute resources based on “a playbook that’s not going to work,” Allison said. Instead, they’re directly funding local and state-based organizations focused on expanding the electorate. Groups funded through these models, such as New Virginia Majority and Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, helped secure wins for Biden in swing states like Virginia and Wisconsin, according to Allison.

The clearest example of how discriminatory policies can mobilize voters of color came in Arizona, which proved a key state for Biden, Diaz said. Just as a racial uprising and anti-immigrant policies led communities of color to start building progressive coalitions in California almost 30 years ago, ultimately turning the state solid blue, Latinx voters in Arizona organized their political power in opposition to the draconian enforcement of immigration laws by then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“The maturation and fruition of invisible, day-to-day organizing” by activists, volunteers and grassroots leaders who serve as the trusted messengers in their communities helped flip Michigan and Pennsylvania blue and kept Biden competitive in states like Georgia and North Carolina, Warren said.

Voting is habit forming, so the winning strategies centered mainly on tapping into bases that hadn’t been encouraged to participate in the past, which is sure to transform the electorate for years to come, Warren added.

That rings true for Yuritzi Aguirre, who has voted in every election since she came of age. She was activated by her brother, Sheridan, who works with United We Dream Action PAC, a national immigrant youth-led lobbying and advocacy group focused on building political power around multi-ethnic, intersectional issues like immigration, health, racial justice and LGBTQIA rights.

Although Aguirre was initially worried that something bad could happen at the polls, everything went smoothly for her voting on the University of Texas at Austin campus. She plans to stay engaged in local and national politics.

“This is only the first step and I’m hoping that this can lead to more people then feeling empowered to know that they deserve better,” she said. “We just need to give the mic to those people who are actually interacting with our communities to take office and to be the voices that we need in the future to come.”

Copyright 2020 Capital & Main

Trump’s sore winners make even worse losers: Why his loss is inflaming an already delusional base

Shortly after the 2016 election, a funny thing happened. Rather than celebrate the victory of their candidate, Trump supporters took on the position of aggrieved victims. When they should have been happy, they were angry. When they should have been confident, they were insecure. When their votes showed that they had power, they felt marginalized. And, even though they won, they felt that the process had been unfair. 

Their mood was vengeful and their attitude was combative. And that was when they won.

Now that their candidate has lost fair and square, we need to brace ourselves for their predictably vicious response.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has pointed out, even if Trump had won, we knew we would need to be prepared for the inevitable crybaby response of his supporters. As she puts it, the key word to describe Trump’s base is “bitter”: 

Turn on Fox News any random night, and it’s a full blown whine-fest about how alleged “elites” are trying to control them and ruin their lives. The fact that their party controls most state governments, the White House, the Senate and the federal courts never factors in. The narrative is one of perpetual victimhood.

If you feel like you are a perpetual loser, even when you are winning, then things will only get worse when you actually do lose.

And let’s face it. Trump didn’t just lose; he flamed out. For a man who has consistently avoided being held accountable for his failures, this loss will sting hard. Trump lost to epic proportions. As Eve Fairbanks writes for the Washington Post, Trump did far worse than anyone expected, and that’s considering his poor poll numbers before Election Day. Given his status as an incumbent, Trump’s “reelection campaign was a historic failure.” 

The failure registers even more so for the fact that in Trump’s universe he simply always wins. As he once put it, “I win, I win, I always win. In the end I always win, whether it’s in golf, whether it’s in tennis, whether it’s in life, I just always win. I tell people I always win, because I do.”

But here’s the thing. Even with all the winning, Trump has been obsessed with the notion that he has been treated unfairly. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.” This was Trump in a 2018 commencement address to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, yet again using a moment when he should have been paying attention to others to narcissistically talk about himself.

And that’s one of the uncanny hypocrisies of the sore winner. Because actually the sore winner is always already a loser. You can’t be a victim and a winner. You can’t claim that you have been mistreated, discriminated against and maligned if you always get everything your way.

Or can you?

If you think back on the days immediately following the 2016 election, what stands out is the overwhelming sense of anger and the ongoing desire for retribution over a system in which Trump had always, only been — according to himself — successful. 

And lest we think that this sort of contradiction was uniquely Trumpian, recall that his supporters have long followed suit. The same people who whine that they are being forced to give up their guns only manage to stockpile more. The same people who hysterically claim that the Black Lives Matter movement is racist have only become more openly white supremacist. The same people who moan about biased media have only picked up even more media power.

The same people who claim that the liberal left is a bunch of sniffling snowflakes never seem to be able to stop whining themselves. Their identities are locked into an endless screeching over the various ways that they believe the system is rigged against them at the same time that they continue to reap successes from that very same system.

We’ve spent so much time parsing the faulty logic, delusional rhetoric and twisted thinking of Trump and his supporters that it is now no longer news to claim that what he and his base think makes absolutely no sense. 

So now that the sore winners are losers, you might wonder if that will somehow shift things — if the sore winners will change in the face of their losses. 

The quick answer is no. There is no reason whatsoever to think that anything about the right-wing identity of the privileged victim is going to change other than to become more agitated and more aggressive. Going back as far as the presidency of Richard Nixon, the right has been casting itself as a victim of U.S. society. What’s more, this idea that they are strong, powerful, morally superior, highly patriotic, successful victims is only likely to take on greater urgency during a Biden-Harris administration.

The problem that we have to confront is the fact that this “successful loser” mentality actually does win, and that despite Trump’s humiliating loss, the GOP overall did pretty well in the 2020 election. At the core of this mindset is a sense of justified outrage. It is centered on a deep conviction that the right is the aggrieved party and deserves to be angry about it. It is equally centered around a sense of confidence that their views are right and their ideas are not just better, but the very best.

The fundamental hypocrisy of the winning victim might be mind-melting, but you have to admit it sells well. It offers its proponents a chance to take absolutely no responsibility for themselves while also occupying a position of self-righteous superiority. You get to take no blame, bully and harass, spew hate-filled bile and still cry about how everything is unfair and everyone is out to get you.

Much will be said in the days to follow about how to reach across the aisle and build a unified nation. We will watch the left twist itself up in its characteristic capitulating fashion, finding ways to actually blame a divided nation on the left’s own failings to engage in dialogue. 

But that’s the wrong model. This is not a scenario where we envision two equal parties that need mediation to move forward. This, instead, is a case of a nationwide right-wing temper tantrum. And just in the same way we learn to treat a misbehaving child, the only way to handle these sore losers is to ignore them.

As the famous pediatrician Dr. Spock once taught us, just because children get angry doesn’t mean we should give them free rein to express themselves. And angry children should not be allowed to bully or intimidate. Our response to them should not be to back down or to give up. “Occasional fits of anger are normal,” Spock explained, “but if a child is frequently or easily enraged, she may be sending a signal for help.”  Maybe it’s time for us to help Trump supporters grow up by giving them all a time-out.

Hey, political reporters — get lost! This is not your moment

Our top political reporters must be exhausted. I suggest they take some time off — like a year or two.

They are the worst people in the world to be setting the tone for a new presidency at a time of unparalleled challenges.

What the country needs now is a clean-slate, expertise-respecting, evidence-based, thoroughgoing examination of the policies required to address the pandemic, the crashed economy, climate change, systemic racism, crippling health care costs and our collapsing infrastructure — just for starters.

But political reporters hate writing about policy, because that demands actual knowledge of the subject matter. They also think it’s boring, that readers don’t care about it, and that it can come dangerously close to the dreaded “taking of sides.”

Our top newsrooms should be focused on questions like: What are Biden’s plans? Will they work? If they seem likely to work, what and who is standing in their way?

Instead, the nation’s top political reporters — addicted to conflict and gamesmanship — find comfort only in storylines where there are two sides they can roughly deem equivalent.

So during the Trump years, they normalized a highly abnormal presidency — covering him as if he were not wildly incoherent, irrational, racist, thuggish and incompetent. Recognizing the truth would have been tantamount to taking sides against him and the party he had so successfully coopted.

In order to even the playing field between two parties that have wildly asymmetrical relationships with reality, political reporters hold Republicans to essentially no standards whatsoever. By contrast, some of the standards they set for Democrats are impossible.

So now their storyline is that if Joe Biden doesn’t unify the nation, he will have failed.

Case in point: The latest installment of Washington Post chief correspondent Dan Balz’s master class in the failed school of modern political reporting (more examples here) headlined “Biden promises to unite the country. After this election, is it even possible?“

Balz’s article started off with lip service to the actual policy challenges Biden faces:

The issue agenda alone is crushing, from the coronavirus pandemic to a weakened and unequal economy, to the threats posed by climate change, to cries for an overdue reckoning on race and justice. Those are just the top layer of the president-elect’s inbox and together they could consume most of his initial term in office.

But that’s not what really interested him. Biden “ran promising to overcome almost exactly what he will now inherit — both deep division among the people and toxicity in the body politic,” Balz wrote.

“If he fails in this overriding objective, his presidency could end up in disappointment and stasis.”

Again, later: “Biden faces a series of obstacles that threaten his ability to unite the country and therefore govern successfully.”

Balz grudgingly noted that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might have a bit of a role here: “The posture McConnell adopts toward Biden will go some ways in determining whether the president-elect can begin to make good on his pledge to repair a broken government and show a way out of the rancorous politics of the day.”

But Balz also warned gravely of the threat from the progressive left, and how Biden will have to “referee an internecine battle at a moment when the president-elect will need as much unity and harmony within the party as possible.”

Similarly, Associated Press Washington bureau chief Julie Pace set a tone for her stable of reporters with her analysis: “Biden claims a mandate that will quickly be tested.”

And over at McClatchy, under the headline “Biden delivered on defeating Trump. But the honeymoon will be short,” reporters David Catanese and Alex Roarty focused on conflict and optics and process, empty of substance. They wrote:

Following Joe Biden’s drawn-out and hard-fought victory over President Donald Trump, he will immediately face pressure from the left and right about his proposed agenda and the roster of personnel he’ll surround himself with as he prepares to govern a bitterly divided country.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen called out some of the problems with the “healing divisions” narrative:

Author Rick Perlstein gave CNN anchor Jake Tapper props for not buying into it:

Indeed, here is Tapper’s full quote from Saturday evening:

I don’t think we need to bend over backwards and pretend that the country moving on and MAGA nation moving on depends upon what Joe Biden does. Like Joe Biden is going to do what he can. And if a chunk of the leaders of the Republican Party want to drag the nation down with them, that’s up to them. … But he’s going to be governing and they can either join him or get out of the way.

Author Anand Giridharadas was presumably tweeting about the cable news pundit class here, but I think his critique fully extends to political reporters (some of whom, of course, are also cable news pundits). By “not taking sides,” they too often are essentially siding with inertia. And this is no time for inertia.

Beat reporting, please

The people we need to hear from are the beat reporters who know what they’re writing about.

The most urgent challenge, of course, is the pandemic. Biden’s appointment of a heavy-hitting task force on Monday made headlines everywhere, but health writers like Lev Facher at STAT News have been digging into Biden’s plans and writing about them evocatively:

Instantly, he will shoulder several herculean tasks, including a massive testing scale-up, restoring the credibility of government scientists, and overseeing the eventual distribution of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. Perhaps most daunting, in a country plagued by apathy and misinformation: Biden will need to earn the buy-in of the American public.

Much of the work has already begun. In interviews with STAT, several Biden health advisers described a forthcoming effort to court skeptical mayors and governors, select and vet leaders for key public health agencies, and set a new tone for the nation’s pandemic response, even in the 10 weeks before he takes office. …

“There are some things he’s going to do right off the bat,” said Nicole Lurie, a Biden campaign adviser who served as the Obama administration’s top pandemic-preparedness official. “He will reach out to Tony Fauci. He will declare his intent to be an active participant in the WHO and in the world. And I believe that in very short order, he’ll be in touch with governors and mayors around the country, listening to what it is that they’ll need to pivot this response.”

(I should point out that fully eight months ago, I called for political reporters and editors to cede pandemic coverage to journalists who cover health and science, to better serve the public’s need to understand what needs to be done rather than who’s winning the narrative.)

Here is AP economics writer Josh Boak laying out the problem on his beat:

The once robust recovery has shown signs of gasping after federal aid lapsed. Ten million remain jobless and more layoffs are becoming permanent. The Federal Reserve says factory output dropped.

Parents cannot return to work as childcare centers have shuttered. Restaurants and local retailers are draining whatever cash reserves are left — with many owners wondering if the next week might be their last. One in six restaurants was already closed in September, according to an industry survey.

The difficulty Biden faces:

He is expected to somehow inject enough aid to sustain workers, businesses and state and local governments, without necessarily having enough congressional partners who share his concerns.

And the possible outcome:

“The risk is that the recovery goes into reverse,” said Gregory Daco, an economist for the consultancy Oxford Economics.

New York Times economic policy reporters Alan Rappeport, Jeanna Smialek, Ana Swanson and Jim Tankersley explored a number of steps Biden could take without congressional support:

That includes providing student debt relief, which Ms. Wong said would work as a sort of stimulus by removing the burden of those payments. Mr. Biden could direct the Education secretary to forgive student loans up to a certain amount. …

The administration could also use executive authority to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour, she said, providing a pay boost for many thousands of workers.

And here you have three Washington Post environmental reporters — Juliet Eilperin, Dino Grandoni and Darryl Fears — writing about Biden’s climate change plans:

While some of Biden’s most sweeping programs will encounter stiff resistance from Senate Republicans and conservative attorneys general, the United States is poised to make a 180-degree turn on climate change and conservation policy.

Biden’s team already has plans on how it will restrict oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters; ratchet up federal mileage standards for cars and SUVs; block pipelines that transport fossil fuels across the country; provide federal incentives to develop renewable power; and mobilize other nations to make deeper cuts in their own carbon emissions. …

The new administration may be able to broker compromises with key industries that have experienced regulatory whiplash in the past decade, including the auto industry and power sector, while offering tax breaks for renewable energy that remain popular with both parties. And Biden can rebuild diplomatic alliances that will spur foreign countries to pursue more-ambitious carbon reductions.

Obviously, there are some political loose ends here and there that still need to be tied up, so maybe we can keep a few political reporters on call. But it’s time to stop obsessing over the stupid questions Trump has been raising for the last four years, and start addressing the real ones.

As Mother Jones writer Ari Berman tweeted:

 

Why did so many white women vote for Trump?

One unresolved mystery of the relative closeness of the presidential election has been the vote among women, particularly white women.

Listening to the elation in the streets about having our first woman vice president in Kamala Harris and the supportive calls of healing from Joe Biden, you might have thought this was evident in the voting patterns.

But despite Donald Trump’s long record of misogynistic statements, policies and personal acts:

  • While women voters backed Biden, it was by the same proportion as in 2016, a 13% majority.
  • More than half of white women voted for Trump, according to exit poll data. So did white men.
  • Black women voted much more for Biden, even more strongly than Black men.

From all the polling information and actual campaigning before the election, it seemed certain that women were expected to reject Trump in large numbers.

What analysis there has been says Joe Biden won votes from all women by about the same proportion as had Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In other words, in the Centennial year for white women’s suffrage, there was no tidal wave among women voters here for the slate that had a woman vice-presidential candidate.

Now, exit polls are rough – this year even shakier with changes in voting shifts and pandemic. They combine in-person interviews with Election Day voters and telephone polls of mail voters and early voters. Still, they give us some information toward understanding the who and why.

It appears that other factors, including partisan orientation, rural vs. urban location, race and age showed more variation than did gender. There appears to be a slightly lower gender gap in the presidential vote, though the variation better reflects changes in voting by men.

So, we’re left with a conundrum: Over a lifetime, Trump regularly demeaned and insulted women, he faces multiple charges of assault, he has paid off porn stars for sex, he campaigned by telling suburban women he would find jobs for their husbands, he promoted policies attacking women of color, Muslim women, immigrant women.

Women mobilized with pink pussy hats and huge protests.

But on Election Day, a majority of white women ignored that and voted Trump.

Institutional Bias

So, is it engrained white entitlement—the public shaming of “Karens” too quick to call the police for minor or no issues involving Black passersby—or are we confusing the efforts to categorize voters? How do we explain voting behavior from what people say they care about?

Charles Blow, The New York Times columnist, was direct here:

“Let me be specific and explicit here: white people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters. It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists… In any case, white women vote for Trump at higher rates than all other women, despite the fact that Trump has spent his first term, indeed his whole life, denigrating women.”

Political analysts offer some other thoughts here: Year after year, political party shows itself a stronger force in presidential politics than gender, for example—partisan identity, as it were. And voting patterns among women, or white women, move less over years than male voters for reasons that are not obvious.

These questions about understanding votes by women presage wider questions for Democrats, who already are showing the pressures of just how progressive this new administration will prove to be, how assertive about structural ills.

The Trends; the Campaign

This year’s campaign focused a lot on suburban voters, who had been said to be moving toward Biden. That cut both ways: Trump appealed directly to white suburban women with messages of fear and property loss, arguing Democrats want to destroy suburbs with more affordable housing.

College-educated white women and white men were split fairly evenly between Biden and Trump, with more women leaning toward Biden.

However one defines it, a majority of white women voted for Trump to protect what they have – status, income, tax advantage, whatever – despite Trump’s anti-woman attitudes and record. That is the exact thought at the center of the many books, training classes and symposiums going on across the nation about the nature of institutional racism.

Meanwhile, Black women got the vote out in urban centers, in particular, making for the close results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states. Black women went for Biden in a slightly greater proportion than Black men; there were similar numbers among Latino voters. Black women organized communities to vote.

For historical note, women narrowly have backed the Democratic candidate in every election since 1996. On average, women have been 8% more likely than men to support Democrats since 1980, according to the Pew Research Center.

Studies have suggested that causes for the gender gap in the last several decades are almost never issues like abortion rights and sexual harassment, as much as feelings about government involvement in care and education. The economy and likely coronavirus would be more at the center of votes for women, a Pew analyst wrote.

But apparently not if one candidate could label those ideas socialism, toss in a lot of fear and salt it all with debasing invective.

In voting, white women apparently ignored insults to their personal dignity.

Biden says he wants to focus on healing rifts that Trump widened. One way to start is to stop insulting half of Americans who are women. But another is to persuade all of us to recognize how deep the racial divide runs through all of our social institutions.

How many different ways will Trump poison the ground on his way out the door?

I don’t think anyone who has been following Donald Trump’s administration for the past four years can say they’re surprised that he is refusing to concede defeat after the election, or that nearly all Republican elected officials are either backing him to the hilt or quivering in the corner like a bunch of cold chihuahuas. I predicted this puerile reaction some time ago, which wasn’t exactly a great feat of prognostication since Trump was doing everything but running full-page ads in every newspaper in the country announcing his intentions.

Two days before the election, he said on camera, “As soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” This was after months of nonstop attacks on mail-in voting, accusations of cheating in states run by Democrats and declarations that the only way he could lose the election is if it were rigged. How could anyone be surprised that he is doing exactly what he told us he would do?

There’s a lot of speculation about what Republicans have to gain by doing this. As I’ve hypothesized earlier, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has good reasons to keep Trump voters engaged in the state of Georgia, so keeping all this going for a while may be useful there. It’s certainly possible that Republicans are afraid if they buck Trump publicly he will turn on the party, calling them traitors to the cause, and his fervent followers will stay home for the two Georgia Senate runoff elections in January. And there’s always the financial incentive — the cash Trump is raking in for his “legal defense fund” can be spent to retire some of his campaign debt.

And, needless to say, Trump has his own incentives. He needs to be able to say that he isn’t a loser which, to his mind, is the worst thing you can say about anyone. But in the end, unless the courts throw out entire state elections and disenfranchise 75 million people on his behalf, he will have no choice.

Since he loves campaigning more than anything, I have long assumed that Trump would be happy to start a new campaign revenge tour, and at least tease his ecstatic followers with the idea that he’ll be back in four years. (He can certainly drive all other potential GOP contenders nuts for a while anyway.) He’s already considered how to make money while doing that. The Washington Post reported last summer that the Trump Organization had applied to trademark the word “telerally” for “organizing events in the field of politics and political campaigning” — the first time Trump’s business operation has explicitly tied itself to political activity. This suggests they’ve been thinking about how to monetize a political campaign for a while.

Anyway, this whole chaotic post-election mess was long anticipated, and Trump has more than fulfilled everyone’s expectations. It’s a clown show of epic proportions that will only be exceeded if he starts taking the advice of the hardcore right-wingers who are agitating for him to burn the place down on his way out the door. The Federalist, for instance, suggests that Trump should lay metaphorical landmines throughout the government, set to explode on the Biden administration should America be so craven as to actually allow him to become president.

Among other helpful ideas, that article suggests that that Trump should release all “Spygate” documents immediately, fire FBI Sirector Christopher Wray and Dr. Anthony Fauci, have every political appointee start taking the names of disloyal and “corrupt” federal employees, publicly release all government documents regarding potential Biden appointees and staff, along with all alleged information about “Planned Parenthood trafficking in human body parts,” and “accelerate the wall and prepare for caravans.” Oh, and bring all overseas troops home by Christmas, which would be nice.

As absurd as nearly all of that is, there actually is some activity taking place, a bit more under the radar, whose purpose is not clear. We know the administration is withholding all money and cooperation from the Biden transition and that Trump has ordered his budget staff to keep working on next year’s budget, even though it will be thrown in the trash as soon as the new president is sworn in. That sort of thing can probably be chalked up to Trump wanting to maintain the illusion that he has won, and also to fulfill his vengeful promise not to have what he calls “a friendly transition” because, as he claims, the Obama administration spied on his campaign “and got caught.”

But what’s he doing with the Intelligence services and the Pentagon? The Washington Post reported on Monday that the administration had installed Michael Ellis, a hardcore right-wing operative best known as one of California Rep. Devin Nunes’ top henchmen, as head lawyer at the NSA. (You may remember Ellis as one of those involved in the infamous “midnight run.”) This job is not a political appointment, which means Ellis will now have career government employee protections and be more difficult to move out.

This is a practice known as “burrowing,” in which an outgoing administration moves some of their cronies into permanent jobs. In Trump’s case this is particularly concerning because his cronies are such overwhelmingly unethical loyalists and partisan hacks. Considering their characters and vocation, it’s hard to believe they don’t have a hidden agenda. And we have no idea how many of these people are being placed within the government at lower levels.

Even more concerning than Ellis at NSA is what Trump is doing at the Pentagon. We knew he had a short list of people he wanted to fire after the election and Defense Secretary Mark Esper was at the top of this list. They had apparently clashed repeatedly and Trump couldn’t stand him, even giving him a nickname of “Yesper,” which is somewhat baffling since Trump’s principal complaint was that Esper didn’t lick his boots with quite the enthusiasm required. He’s been replaced with Christopher Miller, a counterterrorism specialist who Trump likes for whatever reason.

But Esper wasn’t the only one canned. Trump also fired three other highly regarded civilian leaders and replaced them with notorious Trump loyalists, two of whom were also Nunes acolytes. The third is this fine fellow:

That nut is now in a high-level position at the Pentagon.

CNN reports that the Pentagon in turmoil over the loss of steady hands. Esper delivered a scathing parting interview, denying that he’s a yes man and warning against what might happen if Trump got a defense secretary who would actually carry out his wishes. His last words were, “And then God help us,” no doubt prompting many, especially in the rest of the world, to wonder what exactly he meant.

If you saw all this happening during a fierce election dispute in another country, one run by a man who had repeatedly said the should be allowed to remain in office for many years beyond his legal term, what would you think was likely to happen? 

Lindsey Graham admits that making voting more accessible renders GOP victories impossible

In a Monday night appearance on Fox News, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the quiet part out loud—twice.

First, he attempted to delegitimize the results of the 2020 election, accusing the Democratic Party of cheating to win—by making voting more accessible through mail-in ballots—and second, he admitted that improving the quality of democracy in the United States would render future GOP victories all but impossible. 

“Republicans win because of our ideas and we lose elections because [Democrats] cheat,” Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity. 

On social media, reporter Andrew Feinberg noted that “this is not something that is said by a person who actually wants to represent people in a democracy.”

“Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee telling an audience of several million hardcore Republicans that any election loss for their party is by definition illegitimate [is] insanely dangerous stuff,” said Matthew Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog that monitors conservative misinformation in the U.S.

Later in his remarks, Graham claimed that “if we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”

Jacobin’s Luke Savage paraphrased Graham with acerbic wit, tweeting that the implication of Graham’s statement is that “if America were actually democratic, we’d never stand a chance in hell.”

Savage’s comment about how the Republican Party benefits from the anti-democratic nature of the U.S. political system, which progressives have pointed out has generated long-term “minority rule” by an unpopular GOP, builds on his analysis of how the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the Senate—described as “arguably the most unrepresentative legislature found anywhere in the democratic world”—together have produced presidents and justices who were not supported by a majority of voters. 

 

This “trifecta,” Savage said, “functions as a constitutionally embedded check on popular and majority rule,” on top of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other assaults on civil rights. 

Just how undemocratic are these “counter-majoritarian” institutions?

Savage noted that, thanks to the Electoral College, President Donald Trump won the White House in 2016 despite receiving 2.8 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, “a president chosen by a minority of voters place[d] no less than three justices with lifetime appointments and the power to strike down legislation passed by Congress… onto the Supreme Court,” he continued. 

Furthermore, Savage added, the Senate’s “principle of equal representation regardless of population gives wildly different weights to individual votes and effectively empowers a small minority to overrule the rest of the electorate,” a situation that, when combined with filibuster rules, means that “lawmakers representing less than 11% of the population can block any bill from coming to a vote on the floor.”

David Daley, author of the national bestseller Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and the forthcoming Unrigged: How Americans Fought Back, Slayed the Gerrymander, and Reinvented Democracy, recently interviewed several GOP operatives for The New Republic, including Bill Kristol, whom he described as “the neoconservative force behind a generation of Republican policy positions, who has turned Never Trumper.”

Kristol told Daley that the GOP “lost faith in democracy. We lost faith that we could compete for votes and win elections. Therefore, you’ve got to start restricting the electorate.”

“First we’re going to gerrymander. Then we’re going to suppress the votes in inner cities. Then we’re going to discredit mail-in voting,” Kristol said, detailing his party’s strategy to win in spite of its lack of popular legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of voters. “It’s all of a piece in terms of the unwillingness to value a fair, open, and legitimate intellectual process.”

“That’s very bad for democratic principles and very bad for a political party,” Kristol acknowledged. 

Will Joe Biden’s foreign policy team be warmongers — or genuine peacemakers?

People all over this pandemic-infested, war-torn and poverty-stricken world were shocked by the brutality and racism of Donald Trump’s administration, and now anxiously wonder whether Joe Biden’s presidency will open the door to the kind of international cooperation that we need to confront the serious problems facing humanity in this century. 

For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that “another world is possible” has sustained us through decades of greed, extreme inequality and war, as U.S.-led neoliberalism has repackaged and force-fed 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. The Trump experience has revealed, in stark relief, where these policies can lead. 

Joe Biden has certainly paid his dues to and reaped rewards from the same corrupt political and economic system as Trump, as the latter delightedly trumpeted in every stump speech. But Biden must understand that the young voters who turned out in unprecedented numbers to put him in the White House have lived their whole lives under this neoliberal system, and did not vote for “more of the same.” Nor do they naively think that deeply-rooted problems of American society like racism, militarism and corrupt corporate politics began with Trump. 

During his election campaign, Biden has relied on foreign policy advisers from past administrations, particularly the Obama administration, and seems to be considering some of them for top cabinet posts. For the most part, they are members of the “Washington blob” who represent a dangerous continuity with past policies rooted in militarism and other abuses of power. 

These include interventions in Libya and Syria, support for the Saudi war in Yemen, drone warfare, indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo, prosecutions of whistleblowers and whitewashing torture. Some of these people have also cashed in on their government contacts to make hefty salaries in consulting firms and other private sector ventures that feed off government contracts.

As former deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser to Obama, Tony Blinken played a leading role in all Obama’s aggressive policies. Then he co-founded WestExec Advisors to profit from negotiating contracts between corporations and the Pentagon, including one for Google to develop artificial intelligence technology for drone targeting, which was only stopped by a rebellion among outraged Google employees.

Since the Clinton administration, Michèle Flournoy has been a principal architect of the U.S.’s illegal, imperialist doctrine of global war and military occupation. As Obama’s undersecretary of defense for policy, she helped to engineer his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and interventions in Libya and Syria. Between jobs at the Pentagon, she has worked the infamous revolving door to consult for firms seeking Pentagon contracts, to co-found the military-industrial think tank called the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and now to join Tony Blinken at WestExec Advisors. 

Nicholas Burns was U.S. ambassador to NATO during the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2008, he has worked for former Defense Secretary William Cohen’s lobbying firm The Cohen Group, which is a major global lobbyist for the U.S. arms industry. Burns is a hawk on Russia and China and has condemned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “traitor.”  

As a legal adviser to Obama and the State Department and then as deputy CIA director and deputy national security adviser, Avril Haines provided legal cover and worked closely with Obama and CIA Director John Brennan on Obama’s tenfold expansion of drone killings. 

Samantha Power served under Obama as UN ambassador and human rights director at the National Security Council. She supported U.S. interventions in Libya and Syria, as well as the Saudi-led war on Yemen. And despite her human rights portfolio, she never spoke out against Israeli attacks on Gaza that happened under her tenure or Obama’s dramatic use of drones that left hundreds of civilians dead. 

Former Hillary Clinton aide Jake Sullivan played a leading role in unleashing U.S. covert and proxy wars in Libya and Syria.  

As UN ambassador in Obama’s first term, Susan Rice obtained UN cover for his disastrous intervention in Libya. As national security adviser in Obama’s second term, Rice also defended Israel’s savage bombardment of Gaza in 2014, bragged about the U.S.’ “crippling sanctions” on Iran and North Korea, and supported an aggressive stance toward Russia and China.

A foreign policy team led by such individuals will only perpetuate the endless wars, Pentagon overreach and CIA-misled chaos that we — and the world — have endured for the past two decades of the War on Terror.

The alternative: Making diplomacy “the premier tool of our global engagement”

Biden will take office amid some of the greatest challenges the human race has ever faced — from extreme inequality, debt and poverty caused by neoliberalism, to intractable wars and the existential danger of nuclear war, to the climate crisis, mass extinction and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

These problems won’t be solved by the same people, and the same mindsets, that got us into these predicaments. When it comes to foreign policy, there is a desperate need for personnel and policies rooted in an understanding that the greatest dangers we face are problems that affect the whole world, and that they can only be solved by genuine international collaboration, not by conflict or coercion. 

During the campaign, Joe Biden’s website declared, “As president, Biden will elevate diplomacy as the premier tool of our global engagement. He will rebuild a modern, agile U.S. Department of State — investing in and re-empowering the finest diplomatic corps in the world and leveraging the full talent and richness of America’s diversity.”

This implies that Biden’s foreign policy must be managed primarily by the State Department, not the Pentagon. The Cold War and American post-Cold War triumphalism led to a reversal of these roles, with the Pentagon and CIA taking the lead and the State Department trailing behind them (with only 5% of their budget), trying to clean up the mess and restore a veneer of order to countries destroyed by American bombs or destabilized by U.S. sanctions, coups and death squads.  

In the Trump era, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has reduced the State Department to little more than a sales team for the military-industrial complex to ink lucrative arms deals with India, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries around the world.  

What we need is a foreign policy led by a State Department that resolves differences with our neighbors through diplomacy and negotiations, as international law in fact requires, and a Department of Defense that defends the United States and deters international aggression against us, instead of threatening and committing aggression against our neighbors around the world.

As the saying goes, “personnel is policy,” so whomever Biden picks for top foreign policy posts will be key in shaping its direction. While our personal preferences would be to put top foreign policy positions in the hands of people who have spent their lives actively pursuing peace and opposing U.S. military aggression, that’s just not in the cards with this middle-of-the-road Biden administration.  

But there are appointments Biden could make to give his foreign policy the emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation that he says he wants. These are American diplomats who have successfully negotiated important international agreements, warned U.S. leaders of the dangers of aggressive militarism and developed valuable expertise in critical areas like arms control. 

William Burns was deputy secretary of state under Obama, the No. 2 position at the State Department, and he is now the director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As undersecretary for Near Eastern affairs in 2002, Burns gave Secretary of State Colin Powell a prescient and detailed but unheeded warning that the invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns also served as U.S. ambassador to Jordan and then Russia.

Wendy Sherman was Obama’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, the No. 4 position at the State Department, and was briefly acting deputy secretary of state after Burns retired. Sherman was the lead negotiator for both the 1994 Framework Agreement with North Korea and the negotiations with Iran that led to the Iran nuclear agreement in 2015. This is surely the kind of experience Biden needs in senior positions if he is serious about reinvigorating American diplomacy.

Tom Countryman is currently chair of the Arms Control Association. In the Obama administration, Countryman served as undersecretary of state for international security affairs, assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, and principal deputy assistant secretary for political-military affairs. He also served at U.S. embassies in Belgrade, Cairo, Rome and Athens, and as foreign policy adviser to the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Countryman’s expertise could be critical in reducing or even removing the danger of nuclear war. It would also please the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, since Countryman supported Sen. Bernie Sanders for president.

In addition to these professional diplomats, there are also members of Congress who have expertise in foreign policy and could play important roles in a Biden foreign policy team. One is Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who has been a champion of ending U.S. support for the war in Yemen, resolving the conflict with North Korea and reclaiming Congress’ constitutional authority over the use of military force. 

Another is Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who is chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and also of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Human Rights, and International Organizations. 

If the Republicans hold their majority in the Senate, it will be harder to get appointments confirmed than it may be if Democrats win the two Georgia seats that are headed for runoffs — or than it might have been had they run more progressive campaigns in Iowa, Maine or North Carolina and won at least one of those seats. But this will be a long two years if we let Joe Biden take cover behind Mitch McConnell on critical appointments, policies and legislation. Biden’s initial cabinet appointments will be an early test of whether our new president will be the consummate insider or whether he is willing to fight for real solutions to our country’s most serious problems. 

U.S. cabinet positions are positions of power that can drastically affect the lives of millions of Americans and billions of our neighbors overseas. If Biden is surrounded by people who, against all the evidence of past decades, still believe in the illegal threat and use of military force as key foundations of American foreign policy, then the international cooperation the whole world so desperately needs will be undermined by four more years of war, hostility and international tensions, and our most serious problems will remain unresolved. 

That’s why we must vigorously advocate for a team that would put an end to the normalization of war and make diplomatic engagement in the pursuit of international peace and cooperation our No. 1 foreign policy priority.

Whomever President-elect Biden chooses to be part of his foreign policy team, he — and they — will be pushed by people beyond the White House fence who are calling for demilitarization, including cuts in military spending, and for reinvestment in our country’s peaceful economic development. 

It will be our job to hold Biden and his team accountable whenever they fail to turn the page on war and militarism, and to keep pushing them to build friendly relations with all our neighbors on this small planet that we share. 

Lawyers at firms representing Trump worry suits “lack evidence,” may “undermine” election: report

Attorneys at two major law firms representing President Trump and his allies in election lawsuits have expressed concern that they are pushing baseless allegations that help “undermine the integrity of American elections,” according to The New York Times.

Jones Day, one of the biggest law firms in the United States, has represented Big Tobacco and the family of Osama bin Laden, but its role in Trump’s crusade to sow doubt in the 2020 election without any evidence has alarmed some senior attorneys. Some Jones Day lawyers told the Times they have had to endure “heckling from friends and others on social media” over their work, even though the firm has represented Trump for years.

Lawyers at the firm, which represents the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, worry “about the propriety and wisdom” of working for the president, according to the Times. Some of the firm’s senior lawyers are “worried” that Trump’s lawsuits are “advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections,” nine partners and associates told the outlet.

In one case, where the campaign pushed for late-arriving ballots in Pennsylvania to be segregated, the firm’s lawyers said, “given the small number of late-arriving ballots involved in the litigation, and the fact that they already had been segregated, the main goal of the litigation seemed to be to erode public confidence in the election results.”

One attorney told the outlet that the firm “risked hurting itself by taking on work that undermined the rule of law.”

“To me, it seems extremely shortsighted,” the lawyer said.

One lawyer at another firm representing the Trump campaign — Porter Wright Morris & Arthur — has reportedly quit in protest of the firm’s work for Trump and the GOP, according to the report. Attorneys at the Ohio-based firm have held internal meetings to express concerns about the work.

Some attorneys at the firm, which has earned at least $727,000 from its work for Trump and the Republican National Committee, were “dismayed” to learn that they would be representing Trump and worried they would be asked to try to delay the election.

The two firms are involved in at least four legal challenges in Pennsylvania. Porter Wright’s latest lawsuit, filed on Monday night, seeks to prevent the state from certifying any results over numerous alleged irregularities. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the lawsuit was “meritless” and sought to challenge the result of an election that was “overseen by bipartisan election officials and was lawful, fair and secure.”

“For months, the vast majority of these lawsuits have been dismissed and found to have no merit by Courts at all levels, and this one is no different,” Shapiro said.

Trump’s former White House counsel, Don McGahn, who became a key figure in the Russia investigation, recently returned to his position at Jones Day. Some senior attorneys at the firm had “objected to working closely for a polarizing presidential candidate” in the 2016 election and “grimaced at the sight” of McGahn standing alongside Trump after he won the New Hampshire primary that year, according to the Times. But the firm has since worked on 20 lawsuits involving Trump, his campaign or the Republican Party and worked for the campaign in the Russia investigation. The firm has received more than $20 million in fees from the campaign, Trump-aligned groups and the RNC, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Former Jones Day attorney Noel Francisco was also picked as Trump’s first solicitor general and fellow former partner Eric Dreiband was tapped to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

The firm’s attorneys have had to “reassure clients” that their work for Trump would not influence the rest of their caseload but “partners generally swallowed their concerns about the close relationship,” according to the Times.

Nine legal experts told USA Today that Trump’s Pennsylvania challenge is “dead on arrival.”

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School, told the outlet that the challenge “fails to allege facts sufficient to support a conclusion that the relief sought would alter the election’s result — a key difference between this complaint and the submission leading the Supreme Court to intervene in the state recount in Bush v. Gore.”

Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican Party lawyer at Jones Day who left the firm in August, warned in a Washington Post op-ed last week that the party was “destroying itself” to advance Trump’s “multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters.”

“This is as un-American as it gets,” wrote Ginsberg, a key attorney in the 2000 Florida recount. “This attempted disenfranchisement of voters cannot be justified by the unproven Republican dogma about widespread fraud. Challenging voters at the polls or disputing the legitimacy of mail-in ballots isn’t about fraud. Rather than producing conservative policies that appeal to suburban women, young voters or racial minorities, Republicans are trying to exclude their votes.”

Cohen says Trump would throw his daughter under the bus: “Ivanka will go to prison before Donald”

President Donald J. Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen spoke with MSNBC Tuesday about his thoughts on spending time in jail – and why his former boss will send his own children to the slammer before admitting guilt himself.

“I believe Trump does go to jail and if it’s not Trump, he’ll push one of the kids, probably Don, Jr. before Ivanka . . . definitely, Eric before Ivanka, but Ivanka will go to prison before Donald because that’s just who he is,” Cohen said. “There is enough actions. Look, I’m suing Donald Trump right now and the Trump Organization. There is so much litigation that will come. All of the people who probably aren’t watching the show, the Republicans and the followers of Donald Trump, don’t give him your money so he has a slush fund to use your money to pay for his dirty deeds. I don’t understand what people are thinking.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Mike Pompeo: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday said that he wold ensure a “smooth transition” to a “second Trump administration.”

During a press conference at the State Department, Pompeo was asked whether any efforts are underway to engage with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team.

“There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Pompeo said with a smile. “Alright? We’re ready. The world is watching what’s taking place. We’re going to count all the votes. When the process is complete, there will be electors selected. There’s a process. The Constitution lays it out pretty clearly.”

“The world should have every confidence there will be a transition necessary to make sure the State Department is functional today, successful today and successful with a president who is in office on January 20th a minute after noon.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter: