Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The Power of Magical Thinking

I realize that to note that Joe Biden is boring is not exactly breaking news. Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote more than a year ago that Biden not only kept his promise to be unexciting but also “over-delivered.” My friend Molly Jong-Fast this fall noted for Vanity Fair that “[Team Biden’s] superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves.” She places much of the blame on the media—a fair cop—but I think a lot else is going on that has less to do with Biden and more to do with the voters themselves.

The deeper problem is that America years ago entered a “post-policy” era, in which the voters simply stopped caring very much about the nuts and bolts of governing. Rather than policy, they care about politics as a spectator event—much like sports or reality television—and they want it to be exciting. They want to root for heroes and heels; they want to feel high charges of emotion, especially anger; they want their votes to express a sense of personal identification with candidate

Biden can’t fulfill any of those desires. That’s to his credit, but it’s killing him politically.

As strange as this is to realize, our political environment is the result not of bad times but of affluence. Most voters are accustomed to relatively high living standards—even in poorer areas—because the world around them is filled with technology and services that mostly just work, no matter who’s in the Oval Office. The days of knowing which politicians paved the roads are mostly in the past, and today voters mostly draw connections from their daily lives to their elected leaders only if something aggravates them: If gas prices are high, then it’s the president’s fault.

For voters to blame political leaders for almost everything is not uncommon, but as I explained in a recent book, this tendency has become extreme not just in the U.S. but in many democracies, where bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence. Donald Trump is the obvious American case, but think of Boris Johnson in the U.K., the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, and Javier Milei in Argentina. (And what is it about right-wing populists and their signature hairdos? I have to believe there’s a connection. But I digress.)

Biden’s critics might scoff at such an explanation, and counter that the president has sludgy approval ratings for good reason. James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page made this case in April, hanging inflation—then hovering near 5 percent—around Biden’s neck and noting that the president should have kept his campaign’s implicit promise to govern as a boring old guy but instead had been a radical in office. (Freeman also thinks that Biden should debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., so he might not be arguing this issue entirely in the name of good government.)

A Democrat, no matter how centrist, is never likely to find love in the arms of the Journal’s editors, but some Democrats themselves seem submerged in a kind of moral fogginess about what their own party represents. Last week, The New York Times published a discussion with a dozen Democratic voters about Biden and the future of their party. The Times asked these participants to explain what it means to be a Democrat:

Many hesitated or said the lines between the two parties had grown “blurry.” The participants said they held core values: tolerance, respect, an unshakable belief in the freedom to choose. They shared deep concerns about the divisions in this country. And they believed that Democrats were generally focused on the right problems—gun violence, student debt, climate change and homelessness. But they had little confidence that the Democrats could fix those problems.

Right off the bat: I cannot imagine anything less “blurry” than the difference between Democrats and Republicans. But on top of that, I admit to raising an eyebrow at the line that these voters, who ranged in age from 27 to 72, felt “betrayed” on student loans “more than any other issue.”

This was only one focus group. But a few weeks ago, the Times also spoke with Democratic voters who were more enthusiastic about Vice President Kamala Harris than about Biden, and the answers were equally incoherent. One respondent, a lifelong Democrat, said in the poll that “she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called ‘too old and a bit out of touch’ and ‘a bit of a doofus.’” By the end of the interview, she said she’d probably vote for Biden again, but “I’m just not happy about it.”

Voters rarely have ideologically consistent views, but they generally used to care about policy. In the post-policy era, they care about personalities. Abortion seems to be the one issue that has risen above the “post-policy” problem, but it is the exception that proves the rule: The Republican assault on abortion rights is now so extensive and relentless that voters can’t help paying attention to it. But even on that issue, Biden faces voters such as the one the Times interviewed who said that “she strongly supports abortion rights—and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him.” Once, we might have expected such contradictions among low-information voters, but when even partisans are confused, candidates face the problem that most voters are low-information voters—a natural advantage for Trump (whose voters rely on their emotional attachment to him) but an obstacle for Biden.

“He’s old” isn’t enough to explain all of Biden’s bad vibes. The president is only four years older than Trump, and he keeps a travel schedule that would grind me, nearly 20 years his junior, into the ground. Sure, he seems old. He speaks like an old man with a gravelly voice, instead of thundering and booming like Trump. And no doubt, the White House comms shop—with the notable exception of National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby—could be better at keeping Biden in the news for his policy achievements.

But voters’ obsession with bad news even when the news is good is a global problem, and one that predates Biden. Americans, in particular, are susceptible to what the political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called the “Green Lantern” theory of the presidency. The Green Lantern, for you non-nerds, is a comic-book hero with a ring that can manifest almost anything he imagines, as long as he concentrates hard enough. Trump cleverly promises such powers: He claims that something shall be done by his will, and his fans and base voters never care whether it actually gets done or not.

Biden, however, lives with this magical-thinking expectation from his own voters. If Biden only wanted to, he could forgive student loans. If he willed it, he could stop the Israel-Hamas war. If he so ordered, he could reverse all prices back to 2019 levels.

As America heads into the 2024 election, Biden has an enviable, and consequential, first-term record of policy achievements. The calls for him to step down make no sense other than as a frustrated surrender to the politics of celebrity. In that political contest—for the role of Entertainer in Chief—Trump has a distinct edge. Possibly only Trump’s mutation into an openly fascist candidate might change the dynamics of the race as voters focus more on the threat he represents—and decide, once again, that boring is better.

Florida state official lay collapsed for 24 minutes outside Ron DeSantis’s office

Peter Antonacci, the chief elections fraud official, died after a heated meeting in the governor’s office and slumped in the hallway

Ron DeSantis’s chief elections fraud official collapsed after abruptly leaving a “contentious” meeting in the Florida governor’s office, then lay dead or dying for almost half an hour in the hallway outside until he was found, an investigation published Monday has revealed.

Previously unreported details of the September 2022 death of Peter Antonacci in the Tallahassee capitol building appeared on the website of the Florida Bulldog, an independent online watchdog of the state’s politics and government.

The outlet, acting on a tip-off that Antonacci, 74, died after an argument with DeSantis, submitted a public information records request to obtain redacted documents from the Florida department of law enforcement (FDLE).

None of the 17 pages, which the Bulldog released online, confirm that DeSantis was actually present at the meeting in a conference room at his own office, attended by, among others, Florida’s secretary of state James Byrd and Mark Glass, the FDLE commissioner.

But they did reveal other details that were until now not publicly disclosed, including that Antonacci died after a heated meeting in the governor’s office, rather than generically “at work in the Capitol building” as first stated; and that he lay undiscovered for 24 minutes after he collapsed in the hallway immediately outside.

During the meeting, the purpose of which was redacted from the papers, Antonacci became “agitated” and “frustrated” at various times, witnesses said.

The Bulldog does not allege criminal wrongdoing by any party and the documents paint a picture of frantic efforts to revive Antonacci, who had a history of cardiac problems, once he was finally found.

Its report, however, highlights the veil of secrecy that was thrown over the incident and its aftermath, including where it took place, who was present and why Antonacci might have become upset or angry during the meeting. The redactions on the paperwork hide the identities of all of the “10 to 15 people” reported to be present, while still images and video of the episode were withheld entirely.

The FDLE director Scott McInerney said Antonacci was “agitated” during the meeting and had “abruptly” risen from his seat and walked out, but had shown no sign of medical distress, the Bulldog reported.

Glass and the FDLE general counsel Ryan Newman attempted to revive Antonacci using CPR and an automated external defibrillator (AED) until paramedics arrived, the documents say, but the device “could not produce a shock”.

Antonacci, a former election supervisor in Florida’s Broward county, was DeSantis’s personal pick to lead a controversial new state office of election crimes and security, with unprecedented prosecutorial powers, in the wake of the 2020 general election.

On election night that year, the governor praised Florida’s safe and secure voting mechanism as an example for the nation, but quickly adopted the view that a crackdown was needed after Donald Trump falsely insisted his defeat to Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.

An obedient Republican supermajority in the Florida legislature rubber stamped DeSantis’s multimillion-dollar request for a team of electoral fraud investigators, but judges have since been largely dismissive of the prosecutions of citizens who voted after the state indicated they were eligible to do so.

DeSantis had insisted the voters, mostly ex-felons who believed their voting rights had been restored by the approval of a state ballot initiative, and who received voter registration cards, were “gonna pay the price”.

A succession of Republican state officials, including Byrd and Ashley Moody, the Florida attorney general, lauded Antonacci on his taxpayer-funded appointment in July 2022 to clamp down on election fraud that did not, by any discernible measure, exist in the state.

Antonacci’s cause of death was recorded by an emergency room physician at Tallahassee Memorial hospital as cardiac failure from a heart attack. No autopsy took place.

He was praised at his funeral as a decades-long public servant to Florida, having served the state in numerous roles including deputy attorney general and general counsel to DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott.

The Guardian has reached out to DeSantis’s office for comment.

The powerful political network led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch endorsed Nikki Haley for president on Tuesday, as it looks to stop Donald Trump from being the Republican nominee.

Americans for Prosperity Action, the network’s flagship political group, announced the group’s first endorsement in a presidential race.

“AFP Action is proud to throw our full support behind Nikki Haley, who offers America the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era, to win the Republican primary and defeat Joe Biden next November,” Emily Seidel, the senior advisor of the group, wrote in a memo. “Haley will have the full weight and scope of AFP Action’s unmatched grassroots army and resources to help her earn the support of Americans to become the next President of the United States of America.”

The endorsement comes as Haley, the former U.N. Ambassador and governor of South Carolina, has gained momentum in the Republican primary, and has in many ways surpassed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the top alternative to Trump. But the former president holds a commanding lead over the field.

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Elon Musk voiced support Tuesday morning for Pizzagate, the long-debunked conspiracy theory that led a man to fire a rifle inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant in 2016.

The far-right theory, a predecessor to QAnon, alleged that the Clintons and Democratic Party leaders ran a secret satanic child sex ring in a D.C. pizzeria known as Comet Ping Pong.

The theory, a mainstay of fringe supporters of Donald Trump’s during the 2016 presidential campaign, was labeled “fictitious” by D.C. police investigators.

On X, the social network formerly known as Twitter that he bought last year for $44 billion, Musk posted a meme alleging that the expert who debunked Pizzagate “went to jail for child porn.” Musk said that “does seem at least a little suspicious.” His post had been viewed 13 million times by early afternoon.

The meme is itself based on a fabricated headline that suggests Pizzagate was debunked by one person, the disgraced former ABC reporter James Gordon Meek, who pleaded guilty last year to possessing child sexual abuse images and was sentenced to six years in federal prison.

Meek covered national security and mentioned Pizzagate only once, in a 2017 report about Russian disinformation, according to a Reuters fact-check article in August. And a different James Meek, a British journalist, briefly discussed Pizzagate in a London Review of Books article in 2020.

Pizzagate has been thoroughly debunked by news organizations since it arose from the 4chan message board in 2016. No victims or evidence have ever been revealed.

Logan Strain, a researcher of conspiracy theories who uses the name Travis View on the podcast “QAnon Anonymous,” said the false connection between Meek and Pizzagate gained popularity this summer among fringe conspiracy theorists such as Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of QAnon’s central message board 8kun, who posted about it on X.

Strain said it’s “incredibly dangerous” that Musk was boosting a fringe theory that had already been cited in an act of violence. “It is very distressing that he’s validating a conspiracy theory that has radicalized people to destroy their lives and commit crimes,” he said.

Musk, X and a representative for X chief executive Linda Yaccarino did not respond to requests for comment.

I opened the news today, only to find this. It's exactly what I've been predicting, and we've been discussing.

💡

Quote:

"Even Most Biden Voters Don’t See a Thriving Economy"

A majority of those who backed President Biden in 2020 say today’s economy is fair or poor, ordinarily a bad omen for incumbents seeking re-election.

Now, as President Biden looks toward a re-election campaign, there are warning signals on that front: With overall consumer sentiment at a low ebb despite solid economic data, even Democrats who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 say they’re not impressed with the economy.

That’s how it seems to Kendra McDowell, 44, an accountant and single mother of four in Harrisburg, Pa. She feels the sting of inflation every time she goes to the grocery store — she spent $1,000 on groceries this past month and didn’t even fill her deep freezer.

A frequent theme of conversations with Democratic voters who see the economy as poor is that large corporations have too much power and that the middle class is being squeezed.

—NYT

The economy's turned into a major flashpoint. In the upcoming American elections—and around the world. So. How did I know?

The better question is: how could anyone not know? We've discussed here many of the hair-raising statistics to have come out recently. 70% of people feel "financially traumatized." The same number think the economy, money, etcetera, is a significant and serious source of stress. Those are numbers that are like nine-alarm fires to the economist in me.

Let me put it to you bluntly. Hold on while I put on my bona fide World's Top 50 Thinkers Beret. The economy sucks. Sucks.

Now. Why don't politicians—with the exception of demagogues, unfortunately, get it? Why do they appear to go on gaslighting the rest of us and telling us things are fantastic? They look at traditional indicators. The numbers that I've highlighted for you above are about people's lived experiences. Traditional indicators are about average, aggregate abstractions—growth, "job creation," and so on. Lived experiences are about well-being. And what else do we know? In this age in history, we're experiencing a massive crash in well-being. The economy sucking is part and parcel of that.

So. Why does the economy suck? There are three answers, and I'm going to take you through them, step by step. They apply to America, the world, and our civilization, in that order.

America. Why does it's economy suck—in such surreal, weird ways that I've described it as the world's first poor-rich country? The vast majority of people are distressed by the economy, struggle to make ends meet, live in perpetual debt and so on. Not good. Shouldn't happen. So what went wrong here?

America never developed a modern social contract. Instead, thanks to a legion of crackpots, more or less—Newt Gingrich, his ilk, various economists you've never heard of who don't really matter, the only thing you need to know is they had cuckoo theories—it attempted a Grand Social Experiment. It tried to become the only nation in the world without public goods.

So today it doesn't have them. Americans famously—or infamously—don't enjoy any of the basic public goods Canadians or Europeans or even by now people in middle-income countries do. Universal healthcare, retirement, affordable higher education, transport, media—it's long, long list. Those things are rights in much of the rest of the rich world, and so of course institutions were created to enact them. Think of the way altering the French pension system became a flashpoint for Emanuel Macron.

Thanks to this Grand Social Experiment, in America, everything that should be a public good is privatized. Abstract jargon, but think of the effects. Americans now have to pay eye-watering amounts for...the basics. Healthcare's the most globally famed example—half of Americans struggle with medical bills or medical "debt." But by now, even getting a foot on the "housing ladder" is an immense challenge for many.

So think of an American life. You're born, if you're lucky, your parents have money, and send you to a good university—which costs more than buying a home. Then you perhaps do a graduate degree, on your own, and enter the labour market, laden down with debt. As you age, those medical bills begin to mount. You have to educate your own kids. The price of a home never goes down. And then there's the elusive dream of retirement. All of that's privatized in America—to the point that it has weird institutions which don't exist elsewhere, like "401Ks" or "medical billing departments" or vast student debt and so on.

Now. That's not to say that private stuff is bad or wrong or evil. Not at all. But. Privatizing public goods to this extreme, and it is an extreme, is what's a big mistake. That's not my opinion, it's not a matter of theory anymore, even. Now, we have the evidence of America's Grand Social Experiment before us, the results, and they're pretty cataclysmic. No matter what happens, for most people, the economy still sucks, and keeps sucking.

So this Big Idea—Let's Not Have a Modern Social Contract—didn't work. Empirically, factually, in practice. It just created a Darwinian, dog-eat-dog society, in which people are seriously and perpetually distressed, by having to compete, over and over again, for what should be universal basics. And young people, amid this mess, who bear its brunt, are falling apart in shocking ways. Meanwhile, in places like Canada, people are happy, society's more stable, and life is generally pretty good, precisely because modern social contracts...work.

That's why the American economy sucks. It's not a short term problem. It's a long term consequence. Without a modern social contract, you're limited to this level of human development, well-being, this set of life experiences—distress, despair, anger, ripping across society, as life become a bitter, brutal struggle. Just the basics are perpetually out of reach, because of course, when maximum profit is to be gained from them....why would they be provided fairly or universally or adequately?

There's a very interesting example of all this which we'll discuss in its own little post—DC just filed a lawsuit against a company which it alleges basically uses an algorithm to manipulate the housing market, and keep prices artificially high.

That's level one: the American economy. But it's not just America. It's the world. Look at The Netherlands—there, ignoring the warnings of history, sadly, people just elected the far right. Why? Economic concerns were among the top issues. The same happened, too, in Argentina.

We live in a what's come to be called a "global cost of living crisis." In plainer English, we're now in an age of stagflation. Stagnation and inflation. I often warn they're the two worst things that can happen, and now they're happening at once. On the one hand, prices have skyrocketed, and on the other, our economies are stagnant in real terms—even if there's "growth," it's mostly just an illusion: people struggle to get by, the lion's share of gains go to the ultra rich, and incomes have fallen.

This is a more zoomed out picture of why the economy sucks. The global cost of living crisis is very real. But politicians and leaders don't often remind people of it. that gives the far right, demagogues, crackpots, lunatics, the opening they need. Instead of saying to people, "this is a problem across the globe, and we're all going through this together—it's not just about our country, or anything we did, it's much, much bigger than that, it's about the world," what happens? Leaders in the center and on the left pretend the economy's not an issue. So of course, the far right can move in, and employ its scapegoating tactics: now, "our" economy sucks because it's the fault of those dirty subhumans, whomever they are, immigrants, refugees, the LGBTQ, women, journalist, professors, just choose a target.

The global cost of living crisis is about the globe. It's got nothing, zero, zilch to do with any set of scapegoats. How could it? Think about the world. Trump scapegoats immigrants, who are experiencing it in their own countries. Britain scapegoated Europeans, who are now turning around and finding their own scapegoats. None of this folly is constructive, true, or illuminating in the slightest. It's a fool's game, because of course, our economic woes, if they're global, as they are—that means it can't be any particular scapegoat's fault. These troubles apply to the world, and so blaming them on this group in this country or that group in that country—it's as staggeringly short-sighted as it appears to be.

That's level two, and it's really important that we all understand it—because our leaders on the center and left do an Absolutely Terrible Job with this issue. Instead of acknowledging it, as I've explained, they deny it and ignore it and minimize it, more or less driving people into the arms of the far right. It's just a Politics 101 Level Mistake: the IMF and World Bank literally focus relentlessly on this issue, because it's one of the biggest in modern history, and yet here we are, supposed to pretend that a global cost of living crisis isn't happening. Who benefits from this stance of willful ignorance? Only the far right, which is more than happy to offer people an answer, even if it's a foolish one, nationalism, bigotry, hate, rage.

So. Why is there a global cost of living crisis? Now we come to the crux of the issue, the real issue. We are out of steam. Out of juice. The old paradigm doesn't work anymore. Growth rates have been falling for decades. And if we actually calculate what the economy delivers, it's not enough. One thing we're going to release shortly at my little consultancy is a Green GDP, which subtracts the costs of carbon from GDP. What does it show? In real terms, there is no growth.

So what we have in real terms is something like this. No real growth. Meanwhile, somehow, the wealthy grow immensely wealthier, while the average person's caught in the monstrous teeth of the crises above—the cost of living crisis, the crisis of human well-being, and so on. If there's no real growth, that can only be because wealth is being extracted. That's the point that Thomas Piketty often makes, too. In formal terms, we call that, sometimes, "looting."

And that tallies with how it feels. What do people think about the world, intuitively, about their lives, societies, place in the economy? That the game is rigged, that no matter how hard you work, it never seems to pay off fairly, that the venal and cunning get ahead, and there's no real point to playing by the rules. Again—a clear setup for the far right, no? That's precisely the pitch it gives people. That feeling, sadly, is more or less correct.

Let me now put that in formal terms. What we have is a lack of civilizational surplus. Because looting's taken the place of long-term investment. That's crucial. Surplus is what made civilization in the first place. Agriculture created a surplus that allowed specialization, ie, everyone not being a subsistence farmer, and ultimately, all the stuff of civilization developed—libraries, universities, hospitals, markets, town squares, art, literature, medicine, science. Everything depends on surplus.

But we're now at a critical turning point in human history. We appear to have crossed a line from surplus into the red, if you like. How did we do that? We're overshooting planetary boundaries, and meanwhile, financial debt levels are off the charts, let alone when you factor in ecological footprints. Industrialization led to climate change, and now it's not so easy to generate a surplus, because the low-hanging fruit has been picked off, and meanwhile, every dollar of profit or income for an economy comes with a higher and accelerating risk of calamities. See the way insurers just pulled out of California and Florida? The world's wealthiest organizations can't bear the risks and costs of catastrophe now. That's what a lack of surplus means in hard terms. Systems begin to fail and crash.

So how do we develop a surplus again? Well, by now you should know. Probably we need to rebalance the scales of immense wealth, and pour that capital back into investment, which would create the industries and jobs and careers we so desperately need, instead of the low-quality dead end side hustles and gig work of today. Surplus comes from investment, just like it did in the days of agriculture. As you sow, so shall ye reap. Only we haven't been sowing enough for quite a while now, decades, and right about now, as the world turns cruel and embittered, lashing out instead of cooperating and investing, all we're really sowing is dust and famine and drought.

All of that's why the economy sucks. Nationally. Globally. Civilizationally. You should understand it at all these levels. The world's in chaos, everything seems like it's breaking, melting down, crashing around us. There's a reason for that. The old paradigms and models don't work anymore. We need to reinvent them. But we can't do that until and unless we understand how all of this is connected. It's not some kind of coincidence that the economy sucks this much in this many places for this many people, driving them mad with distress, rage, fear, and despair. It's a relationship. The economy sucks because it's failing. Our challenge is to reinvent it, but you don't solve a problem at the level it was created—so to do that, we're going to have to rethink a...lot of things. Who we are. What our organizations are here for. What kinds of societies we want. What kind of civilization we should have.

And as we grapple with those tough questions, we must remember the first lesson of all. Everything we think of as civilization comes from surplus, invested back into the common good. Without that? We see what happens, in the dire days of this rising dark age. When what should be a surplus for all is skimmed off by the powerful and the wealthy, for the sake of vanity, hubris, to cheat death, to divide, to acquire—progress halts, and the project of civilization begins to implode.

On this fifth day of the pause in the fighting between Hamas and Israel, Hamas released 10 Israeli and dual-national hostages and two Thai nationals; Israel said it released another 30 Palestinians from imprisonment. An Israeli official told the Washington Post that they expect another two or three days of the pause and hostage-prisoner exchanges, “after which we either resume operations in Gaza or potentially reach a follow-on agreement.”

Central Intelligence Agency director William J. Burns arrived in the city of Doha, the capital of Qatar, today to meet with Qatar’s prime minister and Burns’s counterparts from Israel and Egypt: David Barnea, chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, and Abbas Kamel, director of Egyptian General Intelligence. They will discuss a broader deal for a longer truce between Israel and Hamas.

Also today, the U.S. airlifted more than 54,000 pounds of United Nations–provided medical supplies, food, and winter clothing to Egypt for delivery to Gaza. The administration took credit for the humanitarian aid transfers underway, noting that when Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel on October 16, Israeli policy was that it would shut Gaza off from water, fuel, and supplies until Hamas released all the hostages.

Blinken cut a deal for aid before Biden arrived two days later—the deal was a condition of his visit—and trucks began to travel into Gaza on October 21. Since then, deliveries have ramped up to 240 trucks a day of medicine, shelter, food, and supplies to keep infrastructure functioning. This is still not enough, an official told reporters: it is imperative to get commercial contractors back in service in Gaza. Fuel, which is crucial for purifying water to prevent disease, among other things, is also making it into Gaza, but not in the quantities required.

The pause in fighting has enabled supply deliveries to ramp up significantly. A White House official acknowledged that “from the President on down, we understand that what is getting in is nowhere near enough for normal life in Gaza, and we will continue to push for additional steps, including the restoration of the flow of commercial goods and additional basic services.”

Here at home, the 2024 presidential campaign is heating up. This morning, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News broke the story that former vice president Mike Pence had offered to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office new details about Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Pence allegedly said he had told Trump that they had lost the election, but Trump turned to those lawyers who would tell him otherwise.

Pence also allegedly decided—briefly—that he would not attend the January 6 counting of the electoral votes because it would be “too hurtful to my friend,” Trump. But his son, a Marine, later reminded him that they had both taken the same oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” making Pence reconsider his plan to avoid the ballot counting.

Also on the topic of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election was a story by Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb, and Elizabeth Stuart of CNN about a forthcoming book by former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). The trio obtained an early copy of the book, which will be released on December 5, and say it outlines the many lawmakers and media figures who knew Trump had lost the election but lied about it.

“So strong is the lure of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump,” Cheney says. She notes that now-chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-OH) didn’t appear to care about rules or legal processes surrounding the election results. “The only thing that matters is winning,” he told her.

Cheney wrote of how she and then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi came to respect each other over their common defense of the Constitution, a nonpartisan stance that foreshadows her conclusion that Trump is dangerous to the country. “Every one of us—Republican, Democrat, Independent—must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated,” she writes. “This is the cause of our time.”

Still, MAGA Republicans are defending the former president, in part by trying to launch an impeachment case against President Joe Biden. But that effort took a hit today. Representative Lisa McClain (R-MI), who sits on the House Oversight Committee that is out front on the impeachment effort, admitted on Fox Business that the committee has found no evidence that President Biden changed any policies after what Republicans claim was a bribe from China.

Also today, the lawyer for the president’s 53-year-old son Hunter responded to a subpoena from Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the Oversight Committee, for Hunter Biden’s testimony in what Republicans insist is business corruption (there is no evidence of such wrongdoing by either Hunter Biden or his father).

Although his lawyer noted that the committee appeared to be ignoring the business activities of the Trump family, whose members were actually in office whereas the younger Biden is a private citizen, he said that Biden agreed to testify but that he would do so in a public hearing, not in the closed-door session Comer wanted.

“We have seen you use closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and mislead the public,” Biden’s lawyer wrote, and indeed, Comer did not even attend the July closed-door deposition of Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer but nonetheless went on television to misrepresent Archer’s denial that Hunter Biden’s father was involved in the business. “If, as you claim, your efforts are important and involve issues that Americans should know about, then let the light shine on these proceedings,” the lawyer wrote.

Comer, whose previous hearings have tended to blow up in his face as well-prepared Democrats tear into the Republicans, rejected the idea of holding a hearing in public.

“Let me get this straight,” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the committee, said. “After wailing and moaning for ten months about Hunter Biden and alluding to some vast unproven family conspiracy, after sending Hunter Biden a subpoena to appear and testify, Chairman Comer and the Oversight Republicans now reject his offer to appear before the full Committee and the eyes of the world and to answer any questions that they pose? What an epic humiliation for our colleagues and what a frank confession that they are simply not interested in the facts and have no confidence in their own case or the ability of their own Members to pursue it.

“After the miserable failure of their impeachment hearing in September, Chairman Comer has now apparently decided to avoid all Committee hearings where the public can actually see for itself the logical, rhetorical and factual contortions they have tied themselves up in,” Raskin said. “The evidence has shown time and again President Biden has committed no wrongdoing, much less an impeachable offense. Chairman Comer’s insistence that Hunter Biden’s interview should happen behind closed doors proves it once again. What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth.”

MAGA Republican lawmakers’ defense of Trump ran into another snag today as Americans for Prosperity Action, an anti-Trump super PAC backed by billionaire Charles Koch, announced it was backing former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. A memo from AFP Action said Haley offers “the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era.”

The AFP Action endorsement is a window on the reaction of pro-business Republicans to the party’s recent shift to embrace Christian nationalism. Today’s party rejects small government and a market economy, which was the rallying cry of the Reagan Revolution, in favor of laws based on right-wing religious ideology. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis showed with his attack on Disney for supporting LGBTQ+ rights, this ideology would require businesses to ignore market forces and instead bow to the will of a strong government.

AFP Action stayed out of the presidential races of 2016 and 2020, but now, saying that Haley’s policies are close to AFP Action’s free-market ideology, it is taking a stand against the MAGA movement. Even if Haley doesn’t win the nomination—and that looks unlikely considering Trump’s commanding lead—weakening Trump so he is defeated in the general election would get rid of the MAGA base and enable libertarian-leaning business leaders to regain control of the Republican Party.

The AFP Action endorsement is a window on the reaction of pro-business Republicans to the party’s recent shift to embrace Christian nationalism. Today’s party rejects small government and a market economy, which was the rallying cry of the Reagan Revolution, in favor of laws based on right-wing religious ideology. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis showed with his attack on Disney for supporting LGBTQ+ rights, this ideology would require businesses to ignore market forces and instead bow to the will of a strong government.

AFP Action stayed out of the presidential races of 2016 and 2020, but now, saying that Haley’s policies are close to AFP Action’s free-market ideology, it is taking a stand against the MAGA movement. Even if Haley doesn’t win the nomination—and that looks unlikely considering Trump’s commanding lead—weakening Trump so he is defeated in the general election would get rid of the MAGA base and enable libertarian-leaning business leaders to regain control of the Republican Party.

Henry Kissinger is dead.

Al Franken@alfranken
40m
Kissinger called SNL once late on a Friday night looking for tix for his son. The Stones were playing that week. I told him that if it hadn’t been for the Xmas bombing, he’d have the tickets.

Career Over Country

Breaking up, Neil Sedaka told us many years ago, is hard to do. But it shouldn’t be impossible. When a Republican governor describes Donald Trump as a “three-time loser,” warns that the party will lose “up and down the ballot” if Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, and calls the former president “******* crazy,” it’s easy to imagine a responsible politician who has packed his bags and is waiting on the steps of the GOP’s Delta House for his taxi back to the world of sensible adults.

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, however, is not such a politician.

Sununu gained a lot of media attention and applause from the Never Trump Republicans for being one of the former president’s most brutal critics. But now that Trump is all but inevitable as the GOP nominee, Sununu is bashing Joe Biden and embracing Trump as the lesser of two evils. “Did you see [Trump’s] last visit to New Hampshire?” Sununu said to reporters earlier this month. “He was comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and talking about Jesus Christ being speaker of the House—it was kooky talk … He sounds almost as bad as Joe Biden.”

Almost as bad as Joe Biden? I will be the first to note, as I did here, that Biden’s reputation as a walking gaffe hazard is well deserved. He gets carried away, embellishes, and remembers things that didn’t happen (a sign, I think, more of his penchant for self-important Irish blarneying than of his age). He spent his life as a senator; senators talk a lot, and sometimes they say dumb stuff.

But to compare Biden’s blunders to Trump’s derangement is inane. Trump’s mind often slips the surly bonds of Earth: He has claimed that he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, invented people who invariably call him “sir,” lied endlessly about an astonishing number of things, embraced the QAnon conspiracy theories, and, as Sununu himself admits, compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”

So why is Sununu going to vote for Trump? Because Republicans have to win. That’s it. “I just want Republicans to win,” Sununu told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a podcast released yesterday. “That’s all I care about.”

Perhaps if Sununu had been forced from office or personally threatened by Trump supporters, he might feel differently—or at least be less inclined to stand for such mindless hyper-partisanship.

Or perhaps not. Peter Meijer, the former GOP representative from Michigan who was primaried out of Congress and harassed because of his vote to impeach Trump a second time, has endured far worse than Sununu, and yet he, too, is backing Trump again. Meijer is running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, and he seems to be trying to mollify the MAGA church long enough to carry a statewide election. Meijer, like Sununu, is laying his more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick on the incumbent: “My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president,” he told Adam Wren at Politico.

We could mine the statements of other Republicans for similar pyrite nuggets of shiny Trump criticism that amount to nothing. (Even Nikki Haley can bring herself to say only that Trump was the right guy at the right time—but now is the wrong time.) None of them, I would argue, really believes that Biden is a worse president than Trump was, and they all know the danger of a second Trump term. So why would they bend the knee one more time?

The Republicans coming back to Trump are driven by two factors: ambition and delusion.

Ambition is the easiest motive to explain. Mitt Romney, at 76 years old, is retiring: He can afford to say that he might vote for a Democrat rather than enable Trump again. He’s had it with his Republican colleagues and he wants to go home. But Haley is 51, Sununu is 49, and Meijer is 35. None of these people is ready, in Washington vernacular, to go spend more time with their family. They all probably expected Trump to be disgraced and driven from public life by now, and they had plans for their own future. They did not grasp that disgrace, in today’s GOP, is a fundraising opportunity, not a disqualification from office.

Numbed by opportunism, many Republicans will simply hunker down and try to survive the next five years. They’re all sure that, after that, it’ll be their time, and they will triumphantly cobble together a new GOP coalition out of independents, moderate Republicans, and what’s left of the MAGA vote, gaining that last group by assuring Trump’s base that no matter what they may have said about their idol, at least they never went over the fence and voted for a Democrat.

But these ambitious Republicans are also under a self-serving delusion that the next Trump term will be something like the first Trump term. They assume that adults will somehow restrain Trump and that the nation will function more or less normally while Trump goes off to his beloved rallies. They are committed to the fantasy that four more years of a mad king will be akin to weathering one more passing storm. (They have also likely convinced themselves, as Haley did while working for Trump, that they can best limit the damage by being in the mix of GOP politics, rather than by being excommunicated.)

This dream narrative ends with the normal Republicans emerging from their tornado shelters, surveying some limited and reparable damage, and restoring the center-right, conservative kingdom. President Haley or Senator Meijer will get the GOP back to cutting taxes and erasing government regulations, all while mending fences with millions of people who were horrified by the violence and madness of Trumpism.

None of that is going to happen.

Trump has made it clear that he has no regrets about any ghastly thing he did as president, that as president again he will bring a legion of goons and cronies with him into the White House (including seditionists and rioters whom he will pardon and release from jail), and that he fully intends to finish the job of burning down American democracy. Politicians such as Sununu or Meijer know all of this, but they apparently think they will remain untouched by it. They have put their party and their personal fortunes over their allegiance to the Constitution, perhaps hoping that they will at least have a chance to rule over whatever is left in the ashes of the republic.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is not currently running for president. But that's not stopping him from facing off in a debate Thursday evening with a governor who is waging a 2024 presidential campaign: Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

A gag order placed on former President Donald Trump is back after it was temporarily lifted earlier this month.

Associate Justice David Friedman ruled to temporarily lift the gag order earlier this month while deciding whether to accept an appeal from the Trump legal team.

The gag order, which was issued by New York Judge Arthur Engoron during the first week of Trump's civil fraud trial, prohibits either party from commenting about Engoron's staff.

According to court filings, Engoron's legal clerk has received dozens of calls to her cell phone, as well as social media messages and e-mails. Engoron has said since the start of the trial, his chambers have received hundreds of threatening calls, letters, and packages.

Engoron has argued the order is to protect his staff.

Trump's lawyers have argued the order is unconstitutional.

Trump has already been fined twice, totaling $15,000, for violating the order.

Trump was first fined $5,000 for violating the gag order after a Truth Social post about the judge's clerk was made and stayed on the Trump campaign website.

Trump was fined $10,000 and called up to the witness stand for comments he made to reporters outside the courtroom arguing that not only was the judge partisan, so was someone sitting "alongside him." Engoron took this to mean his law clerk, who sits to his right.

"I am very protective of my staff," Engoron said during a court hearing several weeks ago, and threatened future "severe sanctions."

It was my lovely wife, the doctor, who sent me the news. Here's how CNN puts it.
💡
"Suicide deaths reached a record high in the US"

More people died from suicide in the United States last year than any other year on record, dating to at least 1941, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

—CNN

Terrible stuff. But the hardest of hard data. We're going to interpret it in just a second, but first. As I delved into these statistics, I was absolutely staggered by the details. Everyone should be, I think. We are seeing what can only really be described as an historic explosion in deaths of despair.
💡
Suicide deaths are increasing fastest among people of color, younger individuals, and people who live in rural areas. Between 2011 and 2021, suicide death rates increased substantially among people of color, with the highest increase among AIAN people (70% increase, from 16.5 to 28.1 per 100,000), followed by Black (58% increase, from 5.5 to 8.7 per 100,000), and Hispanic (39% increase, 5.7 to 7.9 per 100,000) people (Figure 3). The suicide death rate also increased in adolescents (48% increase, from 4.4 to 6.5 per 100,000) and young adults (39% increase, from 13.0 to 18.1 per 100,000) between 2011 and 2021 (Figure 3).

—Kaiser Family Foundation

So as you disaggregate the data from the average, a truly shocking picture begins to emerge. Suicide rates are up by 50% in adolescents over the last decade, for example. Think about that for a second. Or how suicides among Black people are up by 60%.

This is utterly catastrophic stuff. I can't emphasize that enough. Let's talk about basic social stats for a second before we interpret all this. We should almost never see double digit changes. Of any kind. Those are explosions. Social stats should rise and fall gently, and reflect a situation of stability and tranquility. Obviously, that's not the age we live in. And so here what we see is a world in chaos reflected in suicide stats.

We talk about that a lot—the world in chaos, social collapse, the planet on fire, and so forth. And you know that those of us who are concerned get dismissed. Trivialized, ignored, marginalized. Things are OK, cry pundits and leaders and politicians. Never been better! But the data paints a very, very different picture. And just as our societies are growing illiterate with science, so too, Major Social Issues like the one above are neglected and ignored. This is what an age of collapse is, in the hardest statistical terms: suicide rates explode off the charts.

Let me emphasize it again. We should never, ever see social stats of any kind, let alone those of disrepair, let alone those of suicide, increase by double digits over a decade, let alone increase by significant double digits, like 40, 50, 60%. And remember, suicide statistics are generally understated. Something is going seriously, badly wrong here.

What is that something?

Recently, I called it the Modern Crisis of Being. We discussed what I call the Most Important Chart of the 21st Century, which shows happiness flatlining or falling, while unhappiness explodes, over the last decade. In other words, human flourishing is crashing and burning. Here, we have stark confirmation of that, in even more visible terms, perhaps—explosions in suicide rates, particularly among social groups who bear the brunt of collapse most and hardest, and find their well-being most negatively affected.

This is what the Modern Crisis of Being is. It's not exactly hard to see a clear link between happiness falling, and unhappiness exploding...leading to...a devastating explosion in deaths of despair. We don't need to a full-blown regression analysis, really, to understand that these two trends are intimately linked to one another—cause and effect.

But what's the deeper cause?

We often discuss the way that life's fallen apart over the last decade or two or three. Life? What is it now? A bitter, brutal struggle for existence. Material existence: the vast majority of people struggle to make ends meet, pay the bills, live paycheck-to-paycheck, and accumulate debt. That struggle for material existence turns into one for social existence, as people turn to demagogues, who scapegoat innocents, and promise to take their rights away, erasing them as social and political and economic agents, robbing them of personhood.

All of this is very real, these statistics say. It's not just some kind of idle theory I've cooked up—it's something that classical sociologist from Durkheim to Weber long predicted about societies which turned predatory, and in which hypercapitalism ran off the rails. When we see suicide rising particularly among groups who struggle the most for all these kinds of existence—material, social, political—it tells us that something has gone wrong with our model of life itself.

What do I mean by that? In all the above, the central idea is that of a Darwinian society. The strong survive, the weak perish, and that's just, fair, and righteous. Because the "weak" are liabilities, subhumans, parasites. Meanwhile, the strong are called on to prove their "strength" by subjugating the "weal." Power, advantage, gain—the only points to human existence. Exploitation and profit—the only points to organizational existence. And in these statistics, we see stark, dire confirmation of just such a model of life—a Darwinian one. What else do you call when suicides, for example, among young people are exploding?

And worse...that appears to be...OK? You see, we speak in numinous, vague terms of a "mental health crisis," but this is much more than that. Something far deeper has gone wrong here. Young people or minorities or rurals aren't committing suicide at these explosive rates just because they can't get therapy, though that'd surely help—but because they're in utter despair, feel failed, abandoned, betrayed, and as if there's no future. A model of life itself has failed. Or succeeded, if dog-eat-dog Darwinism was the aspiration.

Let's go back to what the APA recently discovered about young people.
💡
"Gen Z adults and younger millennials are 'completely overwhelmed' by stress"

Younger people report the deepest consequences of stress. In the survey, about two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds said stress makes it hard for them to focus (67%) and feel as though no one understands how stressed they are (66%). That age group was also most likely to say that most days, their stress is “completely overwhelming” (58%), that it renders them numb (50%), and that most days they are so stressed they can’t function.

—APA, "Stress in America 2023"

Think about those shocking stats. They can't function. They're numb. Is it any wonder that deaths of despair have exploded? Again, of course not—there's a clear link here. And yet that link holds a deep meaning. Our model of life is failing. What else do you call it when half of young people feel numb and can't function? Can anyone seriously say that means a model of life is working?

So what do I mean by "a model of life"? Think about the idea above—a Darwinian-Nietzschean society, where the strong are to dominate the weak, because power over is all that matters. Now contrast it with...I don't know...whatever you think life should be. Just life...should be.

Most of us here, thoughtful and sane people, would probably agree on quite a few basics. People should have basic set of rights—even advanced ones, like healthcare, education, income, retirement. They should have bodily autonomy, and be free from harm, in advanced and sophisticated ways, emotional, mental, social harm, trauma, despair. Life should be a thing of stability, peace, happiness, nonviolence, where human flourishing unfurls through the generations, living standards rise, and the thread of civilization weaves itself through history.

A model of life. What's ours? Do we have one anymore? Whatever we have, it certainly isn't that. In this age, the only remaining idea appears to be that people should be degraded and dehumanized, by those with power and resources, because that is what is to be done, in the name of sheer spite, cruelty, abusiveness itself. All that, of course, is a way to cheat and deny death, to say: look how powerful I am. A flimsy defense mechanism—and yet this is the age of the sadist, isn't it?

Think about degradation with me for a second. So there are young people, suicide rates exploding. Meanwhile, how are they treated? Did you hear about the recent scandal—another one—coming from Big Tech?
💡
"Meta products designed to prey on teenage vulnerability says US lawsuit"

Unredacted documents show Meta designed products to prey on teenagers’ vulnerabilities, according to a lawsuit filed in the US. An internal Meta presentation in the filing acknowledges that “teens are insatiable when it comes to ‘feel good’ dopamine effects,” and “every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit.”

Meta says it didn’t design its products to be addictive for teens.

—Tortoise

Startling stuff, no? The US is alleging that Facebook deliberately addicted kids...by targeting them with dopamine hits. Dystopia writ large. And yet this is how we've allowed young people to be treated. To be degraded. Because of course being turned into an addict is just that—a form of degradation, dehumanization, the loss of agency, dignity, meaning, worth, especially for a young person. If young people were turned into addicts, what does that make Big Tech?

I'm not just trying to establish some kind of line of causality between screen time and despair, though certainly, obviously, there is one. I'm making a larger point. About institutions, systems, people. About what I call a model of life. If as I've argued our model of life is predatory and degrading, cheating people of agency, worth, meaning, and purpose, Darwinian-Nietzschean only-the-strong-survive stuff—then here's a very clear example of just how that model of life comes to life all around us.

So how would I interpret these stats? As a sign of collapse. Collapse doesn't hit everyone equally. It hits the vulnerable first—young people, minorities, those at risk. And so here we see exactly what we'd expect to see in a situation of collapse. Think again about young people. They're told by pundits and politicians twice, thrice their age that everything's fine. How would you feel hearing that while the world's on fire? It'd probably turn your fear into terror, and your numbness and "I can't function anymore" into outright overwhelming despair.

A modern tragedy is unfolding around us. As ever, the question is opening one's eyes to bear witness. Because change, as ever, begins there, in that temple of truth, mercy, and grace, which we call the human soul.

Back in mid-2021, when it was clear that conservatives were mobilizing against the Covid vaccines, I remember asking a prominent doctors’ group if they were worried that their attacks on the new shots would undermine confidence in routine childhood vaccinations—the kind that prevents potentially deadly, contagious childhood diseases like measles, polio, and whooping cough. They reassured me that parents’ skepticism was limited to Covid vaccines—which made sense because those shots were still new and these others had been around for decades. The rest of the immunizations were still just as popular as ever. Phew.

That was then.

Today, just two and a half years later, the situation appears to have shifted. The percentage of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated declined from 95 percent in the 2020-2021 school year to 93 percent in 2021-2022—below pre-pandemic levels. Since schools still require routine vaccinations, more families than ever before are asking permission for their school-aged children to skip the shots, as well. Requests for exemptions increased in 41 states, and in 10 states, more than 5 percent of parents made such requests. That exemption rate is significant, because when more than 5 percent of a given population is unwilling to be vaccinated, “herd immunity” is compromised and outbreaks are possible. That was the news last week from the Centers for Disease Control, which tracks rates of childhood immunization every year.

This latest development is no random statistical blip—actually, I’ve been dreading it for a while now. What started as a campaign by a small group of influencers who exist in the nexus of wellness culture and rightwing politics has entered the national conversation as a major talking point of powerful conservative politicians.

As a reporter who has been covering vaccine hesitancy for a decade, I’ve documented the alarming rise in misinformation about immunizations since the onset of the pandemic. In 2020, California naturopath and anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook explained in a video on his website, Medical Freedom Patriots, how his thinking evolved on spreading his anti-vaccine message since the days when skepticism around vaccines was thought to be a quirk of the natural-lifestyle corner of the far left. “The Democrats are actually the ones pushing the vaccine mandate agenda,” he said. “I am of the opinion that now, especially with Covid-19, the Republican elected officials are going to get hit really, really, really hard to capitulate to vaccine mandates.” He explained that his “target demographic” was “pro-Republican,” “pro-President Trump,” and “QAnon friendly.” Cook had hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook before Meta removed his account in 2020 for violating its misinformation policy. Even before the release of the lifesaving Covid vaccines in 2021, influencers were laying the groundwork for widespread confusion, posting in parents’ groups about the supposed dangers of vaccines—along with the pedophilia-obsessed QAnon conspiracy theory that preyed on parents’ myriad anxieties about their children.

That year, the nascent conservative antipathy toward Covid vaccines collided with the burgeoning parents’ rights movement, which railed against school closures and mask mandates, and then against racially diverse and LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, books, and programming. Last year, at the inaugural summit of the influential parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty, I watched Florida governor Ron DeSantis crow to the crowd about his anti-vax credentials. He said he had heard that families were moving to Florida because they were worried their states would require children to be vaccinated against Covid in order to attend school. “It’s very important that we were not allowing government to come in and force that on people,” he said. The moms went wild with approval.

Since then, DeSantis, now a presidential hopeful, has repeatedly disparaged Covid vaccines in order to position himself to the right of Donald Trump on the campaign trail. “They lied to us about the mRNA shots,” he told a crowd in a speech last year. “They said, ‘If you take it, you will not get Covid.’”

Not to be outdone, Trump, who previously held up Covid vaccines as one of his administration’s greatest accomplishments, now falsely accuses DeSantis of having mandated Covid vaccines in Florida. “Florida sort of had a mandate because they were giving the vaccine, they were demanding everybody take the vaccine,” Trump told former Fox News host Megyn Kelly in September.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has been joining DeSantis on the campaign trail, has built his political career on unsubstantiated claims about Covid vaccines. Last year, Ladapo falsely informed Floridians that Covid vaccines were dangerous for children; this year he upped the ante, recommending against the latest Covid boosters for anyone under age 65—this guidance stands in stark contrast to medical consensus.

DeSantis and his administration’s anti-vaccine efforts have influenced the thinking of Floridians. Just 53 percent of Florida Republicans plan to get the new Covid booster, according to a poll conducted in September by the University of South Florida and Florida Atlantic University. One in four people surveyed said they believed the shots alter DNA. Last year, the statewide vaccination rate for two-year-olds was a meager 81 percent—down from 93 percent in 2020.

No discussion of the mainstreaming of vaccine hesitancy could be complete without mention of another presidential candidate: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who traffics in vaccine misinformation along with his famous family name. Kennedy, who founded the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, somehow over the last decade has been transformed from an effective environmental crusader into a full-blown vaccine conspiracy theorist. He loudly and frequently repeats the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism. “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” he said in a 2021 podcast. Kennedy’s group seems especially intent on eroding vaccine confidence in the Black community. In 2021, Children’s Health Defense released a movie called Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, which inaccurately claims that Black children have more robust immune responses and that they are therefore being “overdosed” with certain vaccines.

The fact that Kennedy’s own family members have denounced his views does not seem to stop legions of deep-pocketed investors from donating to his campaign, which he is now running as an independent.

As unlikely as it is that DeSantis or Kennedy will be our next president, the nation’s declining vaccination rates nonetheless show that the damage they have inflicted on public health in the United States will likely far outlast their presidential ambitions. Last year, I talked to Florida pediatrician Mobeen Rathore, who had worked on a highly successful campaign in the early aughts to raise the state’s abysmal childhood vaccination rates. They eventually managed to raise the rates among two-year-olds from 77 percent in 2002 to 98 percent in 2019, so he was dismayed to see his hard work being undermined by a few power-hungry politicians. “Of all the things that government mandates, [childhood vaccines are] the simplest, and the most useful one,” he told me. “I just don’t know why we have to politicize healthcare, especially for children.”