Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.”

LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.”

This could be interpreted as trash talk coming from a cocky campaign: If you thought Biden was in trouble before he bombed at the June 27 debate, imagine the trouble he’s in now. But I heard something different in LaCivita’s voice.

One of the two principals tasked with returning Trump to the White House, LaCivita had long conceived of the 2024 race as a contest that would be “extraordinarily visual”—namely, a contrast of strength versus weakness. Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel, less a bad guy than the butt of a very bad joke, America’s lovable but lethargic uncle who needed, at long last, to be put to bed.

As the likelihood of a Trump-versus-Biden rematch set in, the public responded to the two candidates precisely as LaCivita and his campaign co-manager, Susie Wiles, had hoped. The percentage of voters who felt that Biden, at 81, was too old for another term rose throughout 2023, even as the electorate’s concerns about Trump’s age, 78, remained relatively static. By the end of the primaries, the public’s attitude toward the two nominees had begun to harden: One was a liar, a scoundrel, and a crook—but the other one, the old one, was unfit to be president.

In the months that followed, Trump and his campaign would seize on Biden’s every stumble, his every blank stare to reinforce that observation, seeking to portray the incumbent as “stuttering, stammering, walking around, feeling his way like a blind man,” as LaCivita put it to me. That was the plan. And it worked. Watching Biden’s slide in the polls, and sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars for an advertising blitz that would punctuate the president’s visible decrepitude, Trump’s team entered the summer believing that a landslide awaited in the fall.

Only one thing could disrupt that plan: a change of candidates atop the Democratic ticket.

(...more, much more)

There was a lot of venting and complaining during those gatherings, but no stampede to dump Biden. The leadership is sticking with Biden. The CBC and CHC largely back the president, which is especially important in the House.

Biden is seemingly being undermined by a thousand small cuts from members of his own party.

How They Controversialized Joe Biden, or, Is This Really a Hard Choice?

It’s a good thing, I suppose, that we recently discussed controversialization. I gave you my own example—how pundits made me “controversial” for discussing incredibly minor, common sense things, reforms, like updating GDP, or voting systems, or what have you. A good thing, because they just did it to…

Joe Biden.

It’s a mess. You can see this explosion surrounding a massive, smoking crater. Should he run, or shouldn’t he? America’s mass media settled on a narrative—that means a kind of groupthink—over the last week or two, and went to the surreal extreme of penning a resignation letter for him.

Meanwhile, even Biden called out the podcasters who are relentlessly haranguing him.

I’m not a Biden super fan. I’m not super against Biden. My feelings are very, very simple. Pick a person, and run. Because the only way they get elected is if we come together, the side of sanity, just as the center and left in France built a National Front, and then a Republican Front, to stop the fanatics.

America’s going to have to do that, too.

But right now? You can see something ugly, strange, and surreal happening, which is that Biden’s been controversialized. Maybe you yourself have bought into this controversy. But my feeling is that it shouldn’t be one at all.

Is Biden really that controversial? Or is this all controversialization? Which is to say, the ginning up of false controversy, by a certain group, the pundit class, journalists, and so on, who are, of course, interested above all, in building their own brands, selling books, drawing clicks, making money, gaining followers.

Let’s try to think about all this together for a second.

How Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Fuel Social Collapse

The choice before America is pretty simple.

An old guy, who’s doing an okay job, and no, there’s nothing wrong with being old, or…a fascist with a 1000 page plan to literally turn society into a theocratic totalitarian state.

That’s not a complicated choice.

You can complicate that choice if you want, but it’s not in any way complicated. Anyone sane should say: I’ll take anyone over the guy who wants to shred democracy. The old guy. My plumber. My local librarian. Doesn’t matter.

Sane preferences here are incredibly clear.

Now. Why does this choice appear complicated? Well, for one thing, Biden doesn’t satisfy the left, in the same Keir Starmer doesn’t satisfy the British left. Whether it’s foreign policy or taking on Big Capital or what have you. Let’s leave that aside, because this is the real world, and in this real world, societies like Britain and America aren’t nearly sophisticated enough in terms of values to really back social democracy yet. Just not going to happen. So our choices are bounded, as they often are, in real life.

The other way this choice gets complicated is when pundits bedevil it by making people afraid. When they say things like “that candidate’s unelectable!” And so a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy sets in. If enough people think said candidate is unelectable to other people, they’ll stop backing them, and the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

This is what pundits want the power to do. The form of power they want. Chomsky called it once upon a time, “manufacturing consent.” These days, a more accurate description might be: manufacturing controversy. If they can sow enough fear, they will reap fame and fortune. People will turn to them to essentially make decisions for them, and pundits will have the rush of ego, along with money, power, and fame.

But is that good for the rest of us?

Here’s how it all really works.

• If we all agree to back a candidate, they will win
• If we can’t agree to back a candidate, they will lose.

Read that again. It’s really that simple.

This is what France teaches us. Still, in America, which is far less sophisticated than France, the side of democracy easily outnumbers the authoritarian side. The problem comes with division. And division comes from the sort of fear sowed by pundits. That guy’s “unelectable,” don’t vote for him.

But nobody’s unelectable. Today? The side of democracy could agree to vote for Elmo, or Godzilla, and they’d win. All that has to hold is a “front,” in French terms, or to put it less formally, a sort of binding agreement, this is who we’re all going to vote for.

It’s that simple. The problem comes from pundits complicating the issue, by making people imagine what other people are going to do, or telling people what other should do. That’s a form of power—social power, the power to manufacture controversy, and what it’s doing isn’t democratic at all.

It’s distorting democracy.

Who Wouldn’t Get Controversialized? Or, Why Elites Reject Leaders Who Threaten Them

That’s not a way to endorse Biden. I don’t endorse any politician. I endorse disco, puppies, art, fashion, and true love. I’m just teaching you how to think clearly, and let me keep doing that, by asking what’s known as a “counterfactual” to us social scientists. That means: what would happen if.

In this case, the counterfactual is…who wouldn’t get controversialized in exactly the same way? By exactly the same parties calling for a different candidate?

Let’s take a pretty simple example, like Kamala Harris. A black woman. Are you kidding me? If you think that the New York Times would somehow take it easy on a black woman, I invite you to consider how they treated Hillary then, or AOC now. How about the pundits? They’ve never treated any minority or woman candidate as remotely an equal. Punditry is dominated by a certain kind of person, an Ivy League white dude, who dresses like they’re 65 even if they’re 35, for a very good reason: it’s a class.

And that class would engage in exactly the same controversialization if anyone were the candidate. We know that, because they’ve done it time and again. They did it to Hillary. They did it to Obama, for Pete’s sake. They did it, before that, to Al Gore, Howard Dean, Jimmy Carter, and a long, long list of others. They do it to anyone who doesn’t accept that they’re the ones who are the most powerful of all, and they don’t do it to Trump because as much as he insults them, he also gives them plenty of meat for the grinder, and sustains their position and status.

They do it over and over again, and we should know by now that because it’s what they do. And so it’s faintly absurd to say that they’d only do it to Joe Biden. It’s hardly just politicians. Remember how they controversialized, I don’t know, an athlete like Colin Kaepernick? While at the same time, for example, big media was running features—features!—on Nazis being friendly neighborhood types and philosopher kings? Controversialization is what the pundit class does, and so to imagine that it’s somehow Joe Biden’s fault is to make…

The Fundamental Mistake in American Thinking

There’s a sort of fundamental mistake in American thinking. It focuses on people, over systems. Personas, even. And so it’s easy to look at all this, and buy the controversialized line: Joe Biden’s old and weak! Hello, Trump is just a few years younger, and even if Biden’s old and weak, the points remain: wouldn’t they controversialize anyone? Why don’t they controversialist Trump, ever? And in what universe is pretty normal old guy not preferable to aspiring Hitler, who’s also an old guy?

Are you kidding me? When I put it that way, it’s all sort of ridiculous. Because now I’ve pointed out the fundamental mistake. None of this is about people, as in individuals, at all.

It’s about systems and institutions. Pundits amplify this critical mistake, and teach people to only think this way.

So on the one hand, we have a catastrophically bad institution, the pundit class. It engages a system of controversialization, which makes people afraid to back figures because they’re told other people won’t like them, which is what being “controversial" really is—even if none of that’s remotely true, because it’s all a self-fulfilling prophecy to begin with.

On the other hand, it has to be said, we have another failed institution, the Democrats. How did we get here? Because the Democrats aren’t a modern organization. They have failed systems for leadership, for transitions in it, for developing new leaders, for marketing, for branding, for sparking movements, for outreach, all of it.

What the Democrats Should Have Done, but Didn’t

I helped create modern marketing as you know it, and it’s shocking to me how poorly run the Democrats really are. Even a third rate company would…have…better…all the above than this. It was only the pundits lashed out at Biden that they started beginning to use media properly, for example.

So from the beginning, they should have focused on defining Biden’s brand. Because the sad truth is that’s the only way you can sidestep pundits. Ever notice how pundits never, ever challenge anyone or anything with a Big Brand? From companies to tycoons to products? That’s not because they don’t care—if there were enough clicks in it, it’d do—it’s because their brands are bigger, and the only thing pundits are really afraid of is a Bigger Brand.

We’ll talk more about that tomorrow. The Don Draper in me? I wish the Dems had talked to me, because I could have told them exactly how to brand a figure like Biden so that the pundits would never, ever have messed with him. Age and frailty? They can be incredible assets for an image, tremendously powerful things. Think of anyone from Dumbledore to Abraham himself, and while you might think I’m kidding, I’m not—age and frailty confer almost mythological powers upon people, and even now, in our youth-obsessed, proto-fascist world, they don’t always have to be negatives. But the Democrats don’t have people who are competent, let alone world-class experts at any of this, and so in that regard, they’ve failed too.

Still, for society? The choice is not a hard one, and that’s why people rejected all this furiously, many calling it a kind of soft coup by big media against a President.

Sure, Biden’s not an incredibly popular President. But the worst thing anyone can do right now? Is listen to pundits.

How the side of democracy wins this election in America is ultimately very simple. Through unity, like the French did, and I recommend all of you read my post about the French elections if you haven’t yet. By using a front-by front strategy. If we all agree to vote for…anyone…they’ll be the next President. But if we don’t, Trump will be.

Democratic lawmakers in safe seats are more likely to stay supportive of Biden, but there's no disputing that Biden's fallen behind, after inching ahead of Trump in some polls before the "debate". We shouldn't expect the media (or individuals) theissue[/url]

One of the biggest mistakes we make when judging or predicting the actions of politicians, judges and other people who possess power and influence is we forget that they’re human. In fact, in times of crisis, they respond exactly the way we’d respond: by turning away from critics and toward the people closest to them, the people who ostensibly care about them the most.

For ordinary people, this instinct is mostly healthy. Those in our inner circle not only know us the best, they should also have our best interests at heart. But for the most powerful people — including presidents — this instinct can be dangerous. The family members and close advisers of politicians and celebrities often depend on the politician or celebrity’s wealth and power for their own power and prestige.

Consider the example of President Biden. As age takes its toll, he’s isolating himself from everyone but those closest to him. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal published a disturbing report that described the way in which his “inner circle” had limited access to the president and concealed his true condition from the public.

“The White House has limited Biden’s daily itinerary and shielded him from impromptu exchanges,” The Journal reported. “Advisers have restricted news conferences and media appearances, twice declining Super Bowl halftime interviews — an easy way to reach millions of voters — and sought to make sure meetings with donors stuck to scripted pleasantries.”

This campaign of concealment (combined, it seems, with wishful thinking) meant that millions of Americans were gobsmacked by the president’s performance in his debate with Donald Trump on June 27. According to The Journal, the president’s performance “stunned members of his party, including some White House staffers who rarely spend one-on-one time with Biden.”

And what happened after the debate? Biden turned inward even more. He did exactly what most of us would do in the midst of a personal and professional crisis: He leaned on his family. He sought their advice immediately after the debate, his son Hunter has reportedly joined meetings with top aides and “Shakespearean” tensions now simmer between the family and Biden’s closest aides.

Yet all these people, from Biden’s top aides to his closest family members, have profound conflicts of interest. There is no guarantee that they would have the same access to power with a different Democratic president. They may well be in the most influential positions of their professional lives. In fact, Biden’s decline may even grant them more power and autonomy than they’d have in a different Democratic administration with a more engaged and vigorous president. They set out to save the nation in 2020. Now they run it in 2024, and there is a strong temptation not to let go.

And while one would hope that Biden’s family members can set aside their own interests, we also know that Biden family fortunes have been tied to the president’s success. Hunter, for example, is a recovering addict who made vast sums of money trading on his family name, and now he’s a felon, convicted of serious gun crimes. Is this the person Americans want sitting in on meetings with the president’s closest advisers? Is this the person Americans want advising a declining president?

While Hunter’s situation is extreme, what we’re watching unfold in the White House is hardly unique. The inner circle problem is endemic whenever a single person amasses wealth and power. Over the last five years I’ve investigated and reported on several terrible scandals in powerful Christian institutions, and I repeatedly saw the same pattern: A key leader or celebrity is surrounded and protected by an inner circle (which often includes family) of people who depend on the leader for their own income, reputation and authority.

When I reported on the scandals and internal turmoil at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, I saw the pernicious effect of personal loyalty and dependence. Ravi Zacharias was once the most influential apologist in American evangelicalism. Shortly after he died, evidence emerged that he’d been a serial abuser of women, and when I interviewed insiders about the scandal one thing became quite clear: His family and closest advisers did not see the warning signs in part because they were so deeply and personally invested in Zacharias’s success.

They depended on him for their livelihoods. When they walked into churches across America, they were important because they worked for him.

This conflict was so obvious, I wrote that one of the clearest lessons from the scandal was “when family members of founders occupy the controlling heights of an organization, they are placed under immense strain and face an obvious conflict of interest when their father is accused of misconduct.”

There’s an additional complicating wrinkle. In times of crisis, members of an inner circle can enhance their influence (at least temporarily) by telling the powerful person exactly what he or she wants to hear. In the days after the Trump “Access Hollywood” recording threw the 2016 presidential race in turmoil, Steve Bannon not only solidified his standing in Trumpworld by standing squarely behind the candidate, he also used his loyalty to undermine his rivals and expose “who really had Donald Trump’s back.”

Healthy institutions recognize these obvious conflicts of interest and try to control for the frailties of human nature. That’s one reason some of the best corporations and ministries have truly independent boards, where the chief executive or ministry leader is accountable ultimately to peers, not to spouses, children or his or her own employees.

Thankfully, Biden doesn’t face anything like the corruption and abuse scandals I’ve covered in the American church, nor has he done anything nearly as vile as Trump’s worst abuses, but he does face a competence crisis. And he’s facing this crisis at a time when many of us would be at our most vulnerable: when we stare our own mortality and limitations straight in the face. When the strain is the greatest, it’s the most human thing imaginable to turn to the people we love the most.

But part of the price of being president — and the price of leadership more generally — is the understanding that doing the human thing can be the wrong thing. What might be wise for you and me is deeply unwise for a person who possesses true wealth and power. On their darkest nights, they can still have an inner circle for comfort, but for counsel they have to listen to other voices. Specifically, presidents have to listen to peers, not merely those closest to them.

And who are Biden’s peers? Of course, there’s only one president, but there are powerful Democrats who do not depend on Biden for their careers or their influence. For example, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, will be a player in Democratic politics for decades after Biden retires. Neither Barack Obama nor Chuck Schumer nor Nancy Pelosi nor Jim Clyburn should feel any need to curry favor with Biden to secure their influence or their legacies.

It’s imperative that they speak to Biden in plain language. While it’s worthwhile to see Pelosi hint publicly that Biden could reconsider his refusal to leave the race, in private she and her Democratic peers should be giving Biden the same message that James Carville and George Clooney have given in public: We love and respect you, but it’s time to step aside.

There is some personal incentive here to speak truth to power. History has kind memories of the Republican intervention that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, sparing America an ugly impeachment fight. But the real incentive is national. The priority isn’t caring for Biden, though he should be treated with dignity and respect. The priority is presenting the best possible candidate to confront Trump, a man who is quite possibly the most dangerous presidential candidate since the antebellum era.

As each day brings new revelations of Biden’s limitations, his political ordeal is taking on a moral dimension. Given the conflicts of interest within his family and his core team of advisers, it’s not just unwise, it’s also actively wrong to lean on their judgment over the judgment of outsiders who can see Biden’s predicament more clearly. At least some of Biden’s advisers, though, do seem to be aware of the magnitude of the problem.

It’s Biden’s responsibility to seek advice from outside his inner circle, and it’s the job of those outsiders to speak the truth plainly and with compassion — even if that angers a man as powerful as the president of the United States. Otherwise, Biden’s inner circle problem becomes our problem, and we raise the risk of Trump’s triumphant return to the White House.

(...)

I want to keep this section pretty short, but it’s really key here to understand that all the forces I’m discussing that make American political life vastly different than most other first-world democracies interact in a system that is also vastly different than the parliamentary system most other developed democracies use to translate the will of their population into legislative action.

The United States uses a presidential system of governance, where states via the electoral college (and this is important - states, not people, states) elect the president while the people directly vote for their legislators.

This is very different than the common European parliamentary system where citizens elect their legislators and their legislators elect an executive.

Even in France - where the president is elected by the people and a separate prime minister is elected by the legislator - it’s still people directly voting for both.

In the U.S., however, there are two major institutions where a minority of people can still implement their will on the majority. The electoral college and the Senate.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of this further, but it is important to note that these imbalances that are unique to America make it so that even though the majority of Americans did not vote for Trump - he was elected in 2016. And even though it’s become increasingly rare for the majority of Americans to vote for Republicans they still maintain much more power than their public mandate.

This illustration from the economist in 2016 of what the US would look like with a parliamentary system does a good job of illustrating how different our global predicament would be if the US had a more representative form of governance - and why the GOP is doing everything in its power prevent reforms that would make the Presidential system more in line with the will of American voters.

As you can see, only 54% of American voters actually identify with one of the two major parties on the ballot in any election year.

(...)

Analysis by Dutch researchers shows coordinated activity in France, Germany and Italy in run-up to ballot

Coordinated networks of accounts spreading disinformation “flooded” social media in France, Germany and Italy before the elections to the European parliament, Dutch researchers have found.

After an in-depth analysis of disinformation on the platform X in four EU countries, the researchers concluded that many of the accounts had been set up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but were cranked up in the weeks and days before the vote, with growth in their numbers of followers rocketing.

Using specialist software, the consultancy studied 2.3m posts from 468,000 accounts in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. From that dataset, it identified 50,000 as accounts that spread disinformation.

In France, it found that of the more than 127,000 posts in its dataset mentioning Éric Zemmour, the founder of the far-right political party Reconquête, 20% had come from disinformation accounts.

In Germany, 10% of posts about Alternative für Deutschland in their dataset came from the disinformation accounts. The “actual percentage” was likely to be higher in both countries, the consultancy said.

It found no organised disinformation networks in the Netherlands and the accounts it studied in Italy were less concerned with the EU elections and more with controversies over migration or vaccination.

Trollrensics said the scale of disinformation networks meant they could and did “take over an entire debate by just flooding X with posts, reposts, comments and likes”.

Accounts were shown to be “densely connected” and probably run by humans rather than AI, said the Trollrensics co-founder Richard Odekerken.

One X account used in Germany named 888_leila and belonging to a Leila Ruth 888 also posted in Russian.

Analysis showed there were 13 different accounts belonging to a Leila Ruth 888 from user-stated locations around the world including Brazil, Ohio, Finland and Uganda.
[...]
Robert van der Noordaa, another co-founder of Trollrensics, said: “If you are surrounded on whatever social media platform by accounts from the same country, posting in the same language and they are all saying ‘vote for this guy’, that probably works far better than Coca-Cola saying ‘drink Coca-Cola’.”

Yesterday, Raw Story reported that Ivan Raiklin, Trump’s self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” has compiled a “Deep State target list” of 350 people he wants to see arrested and punished for “treason” if Trump is reelected. The list includes Democratic and Republican elected officials, journalists he considers to be Trump’s enemies, U.S. Capitol Police officers, and witnesses against Trump in his impeachment trials and the hearings concerning the events of January 6, 2021.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story: “His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Raiklin said the list was just the beginning. “This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?”

Former president Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has tried to distance himself from the radical extremist blueprint outlined in Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Today, videos surfaced of Trump cheering the project on from the start. At a Heritage Foundation dinner in 2022, Trump, slurring his words, said: “Our country is going to hell…. This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do...when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”

On a right-wing podcast yesterday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said that Trump’s agenda and Project 2025 have “tremendous” overlap. “There are some quibbles and differences of opinion here and there, which not only is okay, but it's actually good,” Roberts said. “I mean, we're gonna be able to sort those out once the presidential administration declares what their priorities are.” He said that Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the project was “a political tactical decision.” Media Matters uncovered a video in which Project 2025 director Paul Dans said that Trump is “very bought in with this.”

The Heritage Foundation, the key author of Project 2025, is a sponsor of the Republican National Convention.

Today the Heritage Foundation preemptively accused the Biden administration of cheating in the 2024 election and warned that Biden might try to hold the White House “by force.” It said that Biden and his administration could “circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president.”

There is no indication that Biden, who has repeatedly said he will accept the election results, will try to launch a coup against the United States government. In contrast, Trump, who has refused to say he will accept the election result unless he agrees with it, has already done exactly what Heritage is trying to pin on Biden: Trump tried to stay in office against the will of the voters in 2021.

Trump is currently under criminal indictment for that attempt, although the Supreme Court’s eye-popping July 1 decision in Trump v. U.S. declaring that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” means Trump can challenge those indictments. Indeed, in the wake of that decision, Trump’s lawyers have filed a motion to vacate the jury’s conviction of Trump on 24 felony counts related to the falsification of business records in his attempt to skew the 2016 election, and to dismiss the indictment.

While the U.S. and our allies celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Erin Banco of Politico reported yesterday that Trump advisors have told foreign officials that Trump plans to scale back U.S. cooperation and support for NATO, including reducing the sharing of intelligence with NATO countries.

This seems likely to be related to the news that the U.S. intelligence discovered a series of Russian plots to assassinate executives from European defense companies that are supplying arms to Ukraine. Americans took that intelligence to Germany and foiled a Russian plot to kill the chief executive officer of a German arms manufacturer.

Trump has stayed home playing golf for the past two weeks, but on Tuesday he held a rally at his Doral golf club outside of Miami, where he kept the audience waiting outside in 90-degree heat before he showed up an hour late. His 75-minute speech was, as The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reported, “full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US ‘most of their prisoners’; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.” He also claimed that Biden had quadrupled the price of bacon and said, “We don’t eat bacon any more.”

Trump did not mention his vice presidential pick. For the first time since 1988, it appears the Republicans will go into their convention without knowing who that pick will be.

Luscombe reported that the crowd “appeared mostly subdued,” yawning and playing on their phones.

Today, the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Trump is “the only candidate in the race who is patently unfit for office—any office—and an imminent threat to democracy.” “If the [Republicans] had any decency left,” it wrote, they would dump him. Voters, the board said, must see the election as “a referendum on our 248-year democracy, and a choice between a trustworthy public servant who upholds American values and a serial liar who wants to push the country into authoritarianism.”

Almost two weeks after calling for Biden to step out of the 2024 race for the presidency, the editorial board of the New York Times also said that Trump is unfit to lead the United States of America, and urged voters “to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it.”

There was continued good news today about the American economy. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had collected more than $1 billion in overdue tax bills from millionaires. That crackdown was possible thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which funded an initiative to pursue high-income, high-wealth individuals who have an income of more than $1 million and owe more than $250,000 to the IRS.

Republicans have repeatedly tried to cut the funding that made this enforcement possible.

Today’s inflation report for June showed that inflation continues to cool, falling in June for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It declined in June by –0.1%, as gas and electricity prices dropped and as rent had its smallest monthly increase since August 2021. Statistics also show that workers’ wages continue to grow more quickly than prices.

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO executive council voted unanimously to reaffirm its support for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, saying: “Unions have never wavered in our support of them because they’ve never wavered in their commitment to working people.” The Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers Union quoted that statement and added: “BAC is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters across the labor movement in supporting the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.”

In a press conference this evening, Biden championed the economic boom his policies created for the middle class and reminded attending journalists that “none of you thought that would happen.”

In that press conference, held after he presided over the three-day NATO summit and thus focused on foreign affairs, Biden answered press questions directly and fully, not only on his health but also on foreign affairs. He reiterated the importance of NATO and reminded reporters that he was key to reinforcing the alliance after Trump weakened it, then went on to talk about foreign affairs more broadly. He also noted that “I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other president,” adding: “And by the way I handed in my notes.” This was a reference to the fact that in an unprecedented move, Trump infamously refused to disclose the notes from one of his conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

At the same time that Biden was holding a press conference that focused on NATO and foreign affairs, Trump was meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Putin ally Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. On social media this evening, Trump indicated that he is trying to conduct his own foreign policy, although the Logan Act prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, and reiterated his support for Putin’s call for “peace” in Ukraine. Their plan calls for giving Putin the western regions of Ukraine that were central to his 2016 support for Trump; Trump’s 2016 campaign manager promised Trump would look the other way as Putin absorbed them.

Orbán, who has openly called for Trump’s reelection, posted: “Peace mission 5.0[.] It was an honour to visit President [Trump] at Mar-a-Lago today. We discussed ways to make [peace]. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”

By AFP

A court in Ukraine's Russian-controlled Donetsk region on Friday jailed a member of the OSCE monitoring mission to Ukraine for "espionage" in a judgment condemned by the European security organization.

The Supreme Court of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic found Vadym Golda, 56, guilty and sentenced him to 14 years in a strict-regime penal colony, Russia's Prosecutor General's Office said in a statement.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) condemned it as "a grave violation of participating states' commitments under international law" and called for the immediate release of Golda and two other jailed OSCE officials.

Three Ukrainian nationals who were members of the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine — Golda, Maxim Petrov and Dmytro Shabanov — have been in detention in Russian-controlled Ukraine since 2022.

The OSCE ran a special monitoring mission in Ukraine from 2014 until shortly after Russia's 2022 military intervention when Moscow blocked its extension.

The unarmed civilian mission was tasked with observing and reporting on the security situation and facilitating dialogue between parties in the conflict.

The OSCE has issued several reports on possible crimes linked to the conflict and alleged crimes against humanity that the Russian Armed Forces are accused of committing in Ukraine.

Shabanov and Petrov were sentenced in September 2022 to 13 years in prison for alleged treason after closed-door trials in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic.

The OSCE has repeatedly called for the men's release from "illegal detention," stressing they "still enjoy their functional legal protection as OSCE staff" and their detention "is incompatible with OSСE commitments arising in respect to Russia," which is a member.

OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid said Friday: "I will not relent in my efforts and do everything possible to bring Vadym, Maxim and Dmytro back home to their families and loved ones."

Russian prosecutors said Golda, a security assistant to the mission, "carried out reconnaissance activities in the interests of foreign intelligence."

The statement on social media claimed he "gathered data on industrial facilities that were subsequently hit with missile strikes, causing damage amounting to almost 100 million rubles ($1.1 million)."

The Donetsk court also "confiscated" 43 armored vehicles used by the mission, prosecutors said.

Trump...reiterated his support for Putin’s call for “peace” in Ukraine. Their plan calls for giving Putin the western regions of Ukraine that were central to his 2016 support for Trump; Trump’s 2016 campaign manager promised Trump would look the other way as Putin absorbed them.

Orbán, who has openly called for Trump’s reelection, posted: “Peace mission 5.0[.] It was an honour to visit President [Trump] at Mar-a-Lago today. We discussed ways to make [peace]. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”

Quote:

At the same time that Biden was holding a press conference that focused on NATO and foreign affairs, Trump was meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Putin ally Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. On social media this evening, Trump indicated that he is trying to conduct his own foreign policy, although the Logan Act prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, and reiterated his support for Putin’s call for “peace” in Ukraine. Their plan calls for giving Putin the western regions of Ukraine that were central to his 2016 support for Trump; Trump’s 2016 campaign manager promised Trump would look the other way as Putin absorbed them.

Orbán, who has openly called for Trump’s reelection, posted: “Peace mission 5.0[.] It was an honour to visit President [Trump] at Mar-a-Lago today. We discussed ways to make [peace]. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”

Remake the federal workforce to be political: Instead of nonpartisan civil servants implementing policies on everything from health to education and climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists. “It is necessary to ensure that departments and agencies have robust cadres of political staff,” the plan says. That means nearly every decision federal agencies make could advance a political agenda — as in whether to spend money on constituencies that lean Democratic. The project calls for cutting LGBTQ health programs, for example.

Cut the Education Department: Project 2025 would make extensive changes to public schooling, cutting longtime low-income and early education federal programs like Head Start, for example, and even the entire Education Department. “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” the plan reads.

Give Trump power to investigate his opponents: Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms like the FBI, directly under presidential control. It calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the FBI and go over its investigations with a fine-toothed comb to nix any the president doesn’t like. This would dramatically weaken the independence of federal law enforcement agencies. “There’s going to be an all-out assault on the Department of Justice and the FBI,” said Galston, of Brookings. “It will mean tight White House control of the DOJ and FBI.”

Make reproductive care, particularly abortion pills, harder to get: It doesn’t specifically call for a national abortion ban, but abortion is one of the most-discussed topics in the plan, with proposals throughout encouraging the next president “to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.” It would do this by prosecuting anyone mailing abortion pills (“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the plan says). It would raise the threat of criminalizing those who provide abortion care by using the government to track miscarriage, stillbirths and abortions, and make it harder to get emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance. It would also end federal government protections for members of the military and their families to get abortion care.

Crack down on even legal immigration: It would create a new “border patrol and immigration agency” to resurrect Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send out the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally (including dreamers) — a deportation effort so big that it could put a major dent in the U.S. economy. “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized,” the plan says.

Slash climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It would increase Arctic drilling and shutter the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change departments, all while making it easier to up fossil fuel production.

Ban transgender people from the military and consider reinstating the draft: “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service,” it reads. The author of this part of the plan led the Defense Department at the end of Trump’s presidency, and he told The Washington Post that the government should seriously consider mandatory military service.

Look at the US Congress, not a lot of 3rd party reps there.