n the New York Times today, Amy Qin and Patricia Mazzei reported on the new Florida law that prohibits many Chinese citizens from buying property in Florida, especially near important infrastructure like airports, refineries, and military installations. Qin and Mazzei note that more than three dozen states either have enacted or are crafting laws to restrict the purchase of land, businesses, or housing by Chinese nationals, even if they have legal residence in the United States. The justification for the laws is that Chinese investment in the U.S. is a national security risk, although Chinese nationals own less than 400,000 acres in the United States.
It was an odd echo, for on this day in 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese workers, but not scholars, businessmen, or diplomats, from immigrating to the United States for ten years. This was the first federal limitation of voluntary immigration to the United States, and it would be extended for more than 60 years.
Chinese migrants had first come to California Territory after the discovery of gold there in 1848. Those who joined the rush to “Gold Mountain” were escaping the devastation of the First Opium War of 1839–1842, hoping to make money in America and then return to China, from which they could not legally emigrate. Expecting to go home again, they retained their languages, their culture, and their clothing. They tended to work the mines Americans had cleaned of their biggest deposits, focusing on meticulous reworking of the gravel, and they did better than native-born Americans thought they should.
With the sudden influx of miners to the region, Congress scrambled to turn California into a state. In 1850 a legislature charged with establishing the legal framework for the proposed state adopted the federal law enacted a half-century earlier, in 1802, that limited citizenship to “free white persons.” The state legislature then went on to impose a foreign miner’s tax on Chinese and Mexican miners; then, in 1854, the state courts agreed that Chinese nationals could not testify in court against white Americans. In 1855 the legislature tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by passing a $50 tax on shipmasters for each person ineligible for citizenship they brought to the state.
The creation of different legal systems for native-born Americans and immigrants in California mirrored the same distinctions in eastern states, prompting members of the new Republican Party like New York’s William Henry Seward and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois to worry that the principle of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was being left behind.
During the Civil War, congressmen were dismayed that European nations were not inclined to support the United States over the Confederacy, and they began to insist the U.S. must turn away from Europe and toward Asia for a new future. In 1867, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner suggested that increased trade with China would expand human freedom, but he was not blind to the commercial possibilities. “All are looking to the Orient…China and Japan, those ancient realms of fabulous wealth,” he said. “To unite the east of Asia with the west of America is the aspiration of commerce….”
In 1868 the United States ratified a treaty with China—the Burlingame Treaty—designed to promote the exchange of people and trade between the two countries. It recognized the right of Chinese to immigrate to the United States “for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”
Trade between China and the United States picked up, with new ships, called “Down-Easters,” speeding across the waters of the Pacific to bring coal, oil, mechanical equipment, and consumer goods to China and bringing back Chinese sewing chests, shells, and fans that decorated upper-class homes, as well as passengers. In 1869, in his annual message to Congress, President U. S. Grant noted that manufactures were booming. “Through the agency of a more enlightened policy than that heretofore pursued toward China,” he said, “the world is about to commence largely increased relations with that populous and hitherto exclusive nation.”
That vision of global prosperity spread across the East Coast, where shipping towns thrived as their workmen built the schooners that traveled the Pacific trade, but it did not reach to the West Coast.
The same year the Senate ratified the Burlingame Treaty, the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution should have overridden state discrimination against Chinese immigrants. But a loophole that confirmed as citizens “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” allowed western legislatures to fall back on the 1802 naturalization laws that limited citizenship to free white persons. Legislators assumed Chinese immigrants were excluded from citizenship, and in 1870, Congress bowed to that interpretation when it passed a new naturalization law.
A recession that hit California in the wake of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 exacerbated white inhabitants’ rejection of their Chinese neighbors. Railroad workers moved back to West Coast cities just as the connection to the markets of the East tanked prices in places like San Francisco and threw men out of work. At the same time, the Burlingame Treaty brought more Chinese immigrants to the same cities, convincing white men that they were losing their jobs to an influx of Chinese competitors.
In San Francisco, Irish-born drayman Denis Kearney had built a successful business moving goods around the city by wagon. But he could go only so far because the leading businessmen who ruled San Francisco controlled the freight-moving business, and they refused to fix the street’s potholes. In 1877, Kearney began to organize workingmen, urging them to rise up. Initially, Kearney praised Chinese workers, but he quickly began to blame them for white workingmen’s economic problems. He began to demand that employers fire all their Chinese workers, using the slogan: “The Chinese must go.”
In 1879, Republican senator James G. Blaine, who had an instinctive sense of which way the political winds were blowing and a desperate hunger for the presidency, backed the idea of ending Chinese immigration. Fellow eastern Republicans lambasted him for giving up on democratic principles of human equality, but the 1880 presidential election shocked them into his camp. Republican James Garfield won the election, but by only slightly more than 8,000 votes out of more than 9 million cast. Party leaders had to figure out how to win more states in 1884, and California was a good place to start. Garfield had lost there by only 144 votes out of 164,218 cast.
In 1882, Republicans bowed to western sentiments and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Harper’s Weekly lamented Republican willingness to prohibit “the voluntary immigration of free skilled laborers into the country, and…to renounce the claim that America welcomes every honest comer.” In the following years, western states passed laws prohibiting intermarriage of Chinese with whites and prohibiting “aliens” from owning property.
In 1885, Chinese immigrant Saum Song Bo wrote a letter for a missionary magazine explaining his outrage upon being asked to contribute money to the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. “[T]he word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese,” he wrote. “I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a statue of Liberty. That statue represents Liberty holding a torch which lights the passage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about everywhere free from the insults, abuse, assaults, wrongs and injuries from which men of other nationalities are free?”
It was not until 1943, in the midst of a war in which China and the U.S. were allies, that the U.S. Congress overturned the Chinese Exclusion Act to permit quotas of Chinese immigrants to come to the U.S.
Today, lawmakers justify laws against Chinese property ownership on the grounds of national security, and the Chinese government is indeed known to use espionage to weaken its geopolitical rivals. But New York Times reporters Qin and Mazzei note that national security experts say “that the specific threat posed by Chinese people owning homes has not been clearly articulated.”
For his part, University of Florida professor Zhengfei Guan, a Chinese national with lawful permanent residency in Florida, is suing the state over another new Florida law, this one banning state universities from working with people from “a country of concern,” including China. The law has created “a culture of fear,” a faculty member told Siena Duncan of Politico, and, if he loses his lawsuit, Guan is thinking of leaving. “My thought is this is not a place for me anymore,” he said.
The past two days of former president Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, to silence her before the 2016 election have been illuminating in different ways.
Yesterday, witnesses established that the paper trail of payments to Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who forwarded the money to Daniels, had been falsified. That paper trail included invoices, checks, and records. Witnesses also established that Trump micromanaged his finances, making it hard to believe he didn’t know about the scheme.
That scheme looked like this: Former Trump Organization employee Jeffrey McConney said that Trump’s former financial chief Allen Weisselberg, who has gone to jail twice in two years for his participation in Trump’s financial schemes and is there now, told him to send money to Cohen. Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 from a home equity loan in 2016 to buy her silence about a sexual encounter with Trump. Cohen received 11 checks totaling $420,000 in repayment, including enough money to cover the taxes he would have to pay for claiming the payments as income for legal services, and a bonus.
Nine of those checks came from Trump’s personal bank account. His team sent the checks to him at the White House for his personal signature.
A number of observers have suggested that the evidence presented through documents yesterday was not riveting, but historians would disagree. Exhibit 35 was Cohen’s bank statement, on which Weisselberg had written the numbers to reflect the higher payment necessary to cover Cohen’s tax bill for the money. Exhibit 36 was a sheet of paper on which McConney had recorded in his own hand how the payments to Cohen would work. The sheet of paper had the TRUMP logo on it.
“It’s rare to see folks put the key to a criminal conspiracy in writing,” legal analyst Joyce White Vance wrote in Civil Discourse, “but here it is. It’s great evidence for the prosecution.”
Today, Daniels took the stand, where she testified about how she had met Trump, he had invited her to dinner but greeted her in silk or satin pajamas, then went on to describe their sexual encounter. The testimony was damaging enough that Trump’s lawyers asked for a mistrial, which Judge Juan Merchan denied, noting that the lawyers had not objected to much of the testimony and must assume at least some responsibility for that.
The case is not about sex but about business records. But it is hugely significant that the story Daniels told today is the one Trump was determined that voters would not hear before the 2016 election, especially after the “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” statement in the Access Hollywood tape, which was released in early October 2016. While his base appears to be cemented to him now, in 2016 he appeared to think that the story of him having sex with an adult film star while his wife had a four-month old baby at home could cost him dearly at the ballot box.
The other election-related cases involving Trump indict him for his determination to cling to power after voters had turned him out in 2020. This case, from before he took office, illuminates that his willingness to manipulate election processes was always part of his approach to politics.
Joyce White Vance is right that it’s rare to see folks put a criminal conspiracy in writing, but it is not unheard of. In our own history, the big ranchers in Johnson County, Wyoming, organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, decided in 1892 to clear out the smaller cattlemen pushing their animals onto the federal land and the railroad land the ranchers considered their own. They hired 50 gunmen in Texas to kill their competitors, and they gave them a written list of the men they wanted dead.
The gunmen killed four of the smaller cattlemen after cornering them in a cabin, but outraged settlers surrounded the gunmen and threatened to hang them all. Local law enforcement sided with the small cattlemen, and the Wyoming Stock Grower’s Association appealed to the governor for help in restoring order. The governor, in turn, appealed to President Benjamin Harrison, who sent troops to rescue the stock growers’ men from the angry settlers and lawmen. The expense of keeping the stock growers’ men imprisoned nearly broke the state.
Witnesses became mum, and the cases against the Texas gunmen fell apart. The stock growers had first intimidated and then killed those who tried to challenge their monopoly on the Wyoming cattle industry. Then, thwarted by local lawmen, they called in the federal government, and those stock growers involved in the Johnson County War actually got away with murder.
This evening, Judge Aileen Cannon vacated the May 20, 2024, trial date for the criminal case of Trump’s retention of classified documents and declined to set a new date. With so many remaining issues unresolved, she wrote, it would be “imprudent” to set a new trial date.
This is the case in which the U.S. government accuses Trump of retaining hundreds of classified documents that compromised the work of the Central Intelligence Agency, which provides intelligence on foreign countries and global issues; the Department of Defense, which provides military forces to ensure national security; the National Security Agency, which collects intelligence from communications and information systems; the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which provides intelligence from imagery; the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates satellites and reconnaissance systems; the Department of Energy, which manages nuclear weapons; and the Department of State, including the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which provides intelligence to U.S. diplomats.
These are the documents the Federal Bureau of Investigation later recovered from Mar-a-Lago, where they were stored in public spaces, including a bathroom, after Trump first retained them, then denied he had them, and then tried to hide them.
The U.S. government charges that “[t]he classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Today, Trump's trial for his retention of these classified documents is indefinitely postponed.
Trump appointed Cannon to the bench, and the Senate confirmed her after he lost the 2020 presidential election. She has seemed to be in no hurry to bring the case to trial before the 2024 election, a case that, if he is reelected, Trump will almost certainly quash.
During Wednesday’s press briefing, former Trump adviser and known election denier Cleta Mitchell, without any evidence, implied that noncitizens have already been hard at work devising a plan to disrupt November’s election.
“Wherever they are, wherever they may be,” Mitchell said, “whatever the plan is to try to manipulate this year’s election with illegals voting in our elections, this bill is essential to make sure that we put a stop to that.”
Mitchell, and other supporters of the legislation, however, failed to mention that not only is there no evidence that noncitizens have been or will vote en masse in the upcoming election, but there are major incentives in place to discourage non citizens from registering to vote, as TPM has previously reported.
“The biggest single reason not to vote when you’re a non-citizen is that not only is there a serious criminal penalty attached, and not only is there potential for a serious fine attached, but you can be removed from the country,” Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Law School, previously told TPM in an interview.
And yet, Johnson insisted on Wednesday that the issue is widespread.
“We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” he said.
The reason why there is no number to support this claim? Because states lack the mechanisms to prove it, Johnson said.
“We don’t have that number,” he said. “This legislation will allow us to do exactly that. It will prevent that from happening and if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful and the states will have a mechanism to prove whether they are or not.”
Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers.
Microsoft has also partnered with Gateway Technical College to train and certify 200 students a year to fill new jobs in data and information technology. In addition, Microsoft is working with nearby high schools to train students for future jobs.
Speaking at Gateway Technical College’s Racine campus, Biden contrasted today’s investment with that made by Trump about the same site in 2018. In that year, Trump went to Wisconsin for the “groundbreaking” of a high-tech campus he claimed would be the “eighth wonder of the world.”
Under Republican governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin legislators approved a $3 billion subsidy and tax incentive package—ten times larger than any similar previous package in the state—to lure the Taiwan-based Foxconn electronics company. Once built, a new $10 billion campus that would focus on building large liquid-crystal display screens would bring 13,000 jobs to the area, they promised.
Foxconn built a number of buildings, but the larger plan never materialized, even after taxpayers had been locked into contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrading roads, sewer system, electricity, and so on. When voters elected Democrat Tony Evers as governor in 2022, he dropped the tax incentives from $3 billion to $80 million, which depended on the hiring of only 1,454 workers, reflecting the corporation’s current plans. Foxconn dropped its capital investment from $10 billion to $672.8 million.
In November 2023, Microsoft announced it was buying some of the Foxconn properties in Wisconsin.
Today, Biden noted that rather than bringing jobs to Racine, Trump’s policies meant the city lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs during his term. Wisconsin as a whole lost 83,500. “Racine was once a manufacturing boomtown,” Biden recalled, “all the way through the 1960s, powering companies—invented and manufacturing Windex…portable vacuum cleaners, and so much more, and powered by middle-class jobs.
“And then came trickle-down economics [which] cut taxes for the very wealthy and biggest corporations…. We shipped American jobs overseas because labor was cheaper. We slashed public investment in education and innovation. And the result: We hollowed out the middle class. My predecessor and his administration doubled down on that failed trickle-down economics, along with the [trail] of broken promises.”
“But that’s not on my watch,” Biden said. “We’re determined to turn it around.” He noted that thanks to the Democrats’ policies, in the past three years, Racine has added nearly 4,000 jobs—hitting a record low unemployment rate—and Wisconsin as a whole has gained 178,000 new jobs.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have fueled “a historic boom in rebuilding our roads and bridges, developing and deploying clean energy, [and] revitalizing American manufacturing,” he said. That investment has attracted $866 billion in private-sector investment across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs “building new semiconductor factories, electric vehicles and battery factories…here in America.”
The Biden administration has been scrupulous about making sure that money from the funds appropriated to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing base has gone to Republican-dominated districts; indeed, Republican-dominated states have gotten the bulk of those investments. “President Biden promised to be the president of all Americans—whether you voted for him or not. And that’s what this agenda is delivering,” White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian told Matt Egan of CNN in February.
But there is, perhaps, a deeper national strategy behind that investment. Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.
“When folks see a new factory being built here in Wisconsin, people going to work making a really good wage in their hometowns, I hope they feel the pride that I feel,” Biden said. “Pride in their hometowns making a comeback. Pride in knowing we can get big things done in America still.”
That approach might be gaining traction. Last Friday, when Trump warned the audience of Fox 2 Detroit television that President’s Biden’s policies would cost jobs in Michigan, local host Roop Raj provided a “reality check,” noting that Michigan gained 24,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and May 2023.
At Gateway Technical College, Biden thanked Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and Racine mayor Cory Mason, both Democrats, as well as Microsoft president Brad Smith and AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler.
The picture of Wisconsin state officials working with business and labor leaders, at a public college established in 1911, was an image straight from the Progressive Era, when the state was the birthplace of the so-called Wisconsin Idea. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the country reeled under industrial monopolies and labor strikes, Wisconsin governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his colleagues advanced the idea that professors, lawmakers, and officials should work together to provide technical expertise to enable the state to mediate a fair relationship between workers and employers.
In his introduction to the 1912 book explaining the Wisconsin Idea, former president Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, explained that the Wisconsin Idea turned the ideas of reformers into a workable plan, then set out to put those ideas into practice. Roosevelt approvingly quoted economist Simon Patten, who maintained that the world had adequate resources to feed, clothe, and educate everyone, if only people cared to achieve that end. Quoting Patten, Roosevelt wrote: “The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. He demands measurable results and reaches them by means made available by economic efficiency. Only in this way is social progress possible.”
Reformers must be able to envision a better future, Roosevelt wrote, but they must also find a way to turn those ideals into reality. That involved careful study and hard work to develop the machinery to achieve their ends.
Roosevelt compared people engaged in progressive reform to “that greatest of all democratic reformers, Abraham Lincoln.” Like Lincoln, he wrote, reformers “will be assailed on the one side by the reactionary, and on the other by that type of bubble reformer who is only anxious to go to extremes, and who always gets angry when he is asked what practical results he can show.” “[T]he true reformer,” Roosevelt wrote, “must study hard and work patiently.”
“It is no easy matter actually to insure, instead of merely talking about, a measurable equality of opportunity for all men,” Roosevelt wrote. “It is no easy matter to make this Republic genuinely an industrial as well as a political democracy. It is no easy matter to secure justice for those who in the past have not received it, and at the same time to see that no injustice is meted out to others in the process. It is no easy matter to keep the balance level and make it evident that we have set our faces like flint against seeing this government turned into either government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. It is no easy matter to give the public their proper control over corporations and big business, and yet to prevent abuse of that control.”
“All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote in 1912.
“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”
In a Truth Social post, Trump attacked Biden − and Hamas − by accusing the president of "taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses."
Last night, 163 Democratic representatives joined 196 Republicans to stop far-right Republicans from removing House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene led the effort to remove Johnson, but her motion received only 43 votes: 32 Democrats and 11 Republicans. Twenty-eight representatives either did not vote or voted present.
Greene promptly excoriated the “uniparty,” saying that “the Democrats now control Speaker Johnson. That was something that everybody’s suspected all along. They just voted to save him.”
But the majority of the House Republican conference appears to be tired of the chaos in their ranks that has made this Congress one of the least productive in American history. Jordain Carney and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported today that House Republicans who are not aligned with Greene and her cohort want to change House rules to create punishments for the extremists who keep stopping House business by, for example, voting against letting bills come to the floor of the House.
Greene and Thomas Massie (R-KY), her main ally in trying to oust Johnson, urged their colleagues to bring it on. Massie said that anyone trying to stop them was going to “take an ass-whooping from their base.”
Since the 1990s, right-wing media hosts have directed the Republican base, telling them what to think and urging them to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to do what the media hosts wanted. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was so influential in the 1990s that when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1995 for the first time since 1954, they made him an honorary member of their incoming congressional freshman class. And what Limbaugh did for radio, Fox News Channel hosts like Bill O’Reilly did for television.
But Limbaugh died in February 2021, and after the Fox News Channel (FNC) had to pay a $787 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for the lies the network’s hosts told about the company’s voting machines in the 2020 election, it let go of main host Tucker Carlson. There are indications that FNC founder and former chair Rupert Murdoch hoped to center Republican messaging around young activist Charlie Kirk, but Kirk has slid into MAGA extremism, too.
The Republican extremists no longer have a centralized messaging center. Instead, as CNN’s Oliver Darcy noted today, Murdoch’s outlets themselves—the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post—stood behind Johnson.
Yesterday, FreedomWorks, the right-wing organization that was backed by the Koch family at its start in 2004 and that was behind the Tea Party movement, abruptly shut down. FreedomWorks attacked Democratic measures for business regulation and social welfare because it embraced libertarian principles. Its revenue had dropped by half since 2022, its president, Adam Brandon, told Luke Mullins of Politico. But in the end, what did the organization in was the party’s split over Trump.
That split was crystal clear in Tuesday’s Republican primary election in Indiana. Trump won that election, but with only 78.3% of the vote. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who suspended her campaign in early March and has not campaigned since, won 21.7%.
Before the Indiana primary, on May 2 political statistician Tom Bonier debunked the idea that Haley’s support came from Democratic-leaning voters flooding the primary vote to hurt Trump. Crunching the numbers in North Carolina showed that Haley voters there “were not substantially younger than the GOP voters (41% over 65 vs 45% among reg[istered Republicans]). They were overwhelmingly white (94% of Ind[ependent]s vs 97% of [Republicans]), and were actually more likely to be men (51% of Ind[ependent Republican] primary voters vs 50% of [Republicans]).” In short, he wrote, “[e]very indicator suggests these Independents voting in [Republican] primaries are more likely [Republican] voters. They just don't like Trump.”
Political commentator Chris Cillizza today called attention to the numbers that landed before Tuesday. On March 12, Haley won 13.2% of the vote in Georgia (or 78,000 votes). On March 19 she won 17.8% of the vote in Arizona (111,000 votes), 3.9% of the vote in Florida (155,000 votes), and 14.4% of the vote in Ohio (161,000 votes). On April 2 she won 12.8% of the votes in Wisconsin (77,000 votes). And on April 23, Haley won 16.6% of the votes in Pennsylvania (158,000 votes).
If Biden picks up even one in five of these votes, Cillizza noted, “it matters bigly.”
Three high-level Republicans this week told media they would not vote for Trump, helping to pave an off-ramp for other Republicans. Former House speaker Paul Ryan told Yahoo Finance that he would write in another Republican rather than vote for Trump. “Character is too important to me,” he said.
Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also cited character when she said she would not vote for Trump. “I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I would absolutely consider voting for Joe Biden this upcoming November because he will not seek to destroy our nation [or] our Constitution, and he has the statesman character that we need in an elected official.”
Georgia’s former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan went further on Monday night, endorsing Biden, whom he had called in an op-ed a “decent person I disagree with on policy,” over Trump, whom he described as “a criminal defendant without a moral compass.” “Sometimes the best way to learn your lesson is to get beat, and Donald Trump needs to get beat. We need to move on as a party. We need to move on as a country,” he said.
Meanwhile, as Khaya Himmelman noted in Talking Points Memo, MAGA Republicans are already blaming a potential loss in 2024 on illegal voters. On Wednesday, Speaker Johnson and other Trump Republicans held a press conference to promote their new bill to make it illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.
This is a political stunt: It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence that this is happening. In 2017, Trump created a commission to root out the illegal voting he claimed had affected the 2016 election; less than a year later, he disbanded it when it could find no evidence of his claims. Johnson admitted there was no evidence of voting by undocumented immigrants when he told reporters: "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it's not been something that is easily provable. We don't have that number."
Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles retorted: “People terrified of contact with government because they don’t want their lives destroyed by deportation don’t register to vote illegally and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes.”
For his part, Trump appears to have tried a more direct approach to reelection. According to Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post, last month at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told about two dozen top oil executives that if they gave him $1 billion to get reelected, he would immediately reverse the environmental regulations the Biden-Harris administration has put into place and stop any new ones. A $1 billion gift would be a “deal,” according to Trump, because the tax cuts he plans to enact and the regulatory cuts would be worth far more than that. Since then, Ben Lefebvre wrote yesterday in Politico, oil executives have been drawing up executive orders that Trump can sign as soon as he takes office.
Yesterday, in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, President Biden said the U.S. would continue to supply defensive weapons to support the Iron Dome over Israel, but it would not send offensive weapons to Israel if it went forward with its controversial invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter from Israeli strikes. The administration has publicly opposed that invasion since Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced it. “If they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah,” Biden said. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.”
Trump and other Republicans promptly accused President Joe Biden of “taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses.”
“We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” Biden told Burnett. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”
One of the few ways in which Donald Trump has improved American politics is in making explicit what was once veiled in implication or euphemism. During the 2016 election, for example, he said what everyone knew but no politicians would acknowledge: That wealthy donors bought access and fealty with their contributions.
These blunt statements have endeared him to supporters who see Trump as a rare figure willing to speak about how special interests and corporations conspire with politicians to screw over ordinary Americans. And because he is a billionaire, they see him as immune to these pressures, wealthy enough to not be beholden in the same way as typical politicians.
That brings us to a Washington Post article this morning. At a Mar-a-Lago meeting in April, oil executives complained that despite pouring hundreds of millions into lobbying the government, the Biden administration had pursued stronger environmental regulations. “Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House,” the Post reports. In exchange, Trump vowed to roll back current regulations and freeze future ones. He told them that, given the savings, a billion bucks would be a “deal” for them.
What Trump was offering is entirely legal and absolutely corrupt. (Or to borrow a phrase: very legal and very uncool.) Thanks to Trump’s bluntness, there can be no hair-splitting about what’s going on here, and that’s good for public understanding. Trump asked special interests for an eye-popping fee in exchange explicit favors. Trump and the oil companies might argue (dubiously) that their preferred regime would actually be better for consumers, but they are cutting “the people” out of the discussion entirely, subverting democracy. The deal is getting done between Trump and the suits, behind closed doors. It’s a good reminder that Trump’s claim to being an outsider is a sham.
American politics would be healthier if all politicians were so transparent about such deals (though, of course, it would be better were they not making such deals at all). Everyone might “know” that politicians are cutting deals for powerful interests, but they seldom know what exactly those deals are, so it’s hard for them to take it into account when voting. (This is one reason the federal indictment of Senator Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, is so riveting: The alleged trades are all laid out so plainly.)
Trump, however, has said he’s different. Many people took his frankness about how the system works to mean that he wouldn’t act the same way as the politicians he excoriated. What this report shows is that he’s no different. Trump was describing transactionalism, not critiquing it, and the idea that Donald Trump would ever object to transactionalism is absurd. He’s a grandee in good standing of the Leopards Eating Faces Party.
In fact, he’s arguably worse. An ordinary politician might have approached this situation with a touch more finesse. First, he’d listen to the executives’ concerns. Then, he’d lay out his agenda on energy. Finally, a campaign aide would hit the executives up for donations. That offers a little bit of deniability, which in turns gives a politician in office some wiggle room. It’s not like donors can call him up and say, You made an explicit promise to do this for me! That would be unseemly. If the oil suits produce $1 billion and Trump wins, however, they can do exactly that, since he’s offered an explicit quid pro quo. Not only is he just as beholden to special interests as anyone else, here he’s going out of his way to make himself beholden.
One final tawdry thing about Trump’s offer is the implicit threat it contains. If they don’t pass the hat to produce the cash, Trump might not pursue the same policies—and, as he notes, that could cost them dearly.
Trump runs a real risk to his reputation, as well as his election, by being quite so direct about what he’s offering. One of the biggest scandals in American political history was Teapot Dome, which involved federal officials trading favors to the oil business in exchange for cash. It’s one reason that Warren Harding, the president at the time, has often been ranked among the very worst by historians. (Trump has surpassed him in some recent surveys thanks to his attempt to steal the 2020 election.)
Voters just don’t like corruption very much, and Trump’s offer here is not only plainly corrupt but cuts to the center of the political persona he has cultivated. Trump is a bold truth-teller sometimes about the system, but seldom about himself.
