Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Arguably no public figure in American history has gotten worse press, and for longer, than Trump. This is not because journalists are out to get him, but because a straightforward rendering of the facts stacks up so overwhelmingly against him. For decades now, reporters have documented his racism, sexism, lies, hypocrisy, bellicosity, vulgarity, business flameouts, authoritarian tendencies, and criminality. Much of what we know to be true and indisputable about Trump has been a result of journalistic efforts.

What will he think and say if Trump wins this election and when all of the predictable and catastrophic consequences of that victory come to pass?

I've maintained that the press should not be attacked for failing to function as an arm of the Democratic Party.

The press has provided an accurate representation of Trump's malignant nature.

Yet half of the electorate still seems to like him.

After bomb threats today, officials had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, and move the students to a different location. They had to close a middle school altogether. This is the second day bomb threats have closed schools and public buildings after MAGA Republicans have spread the lie that Haitian immigrants there have been eating white people's pets. Haitian immigrants, who were welcomed to Springfield by officials eager to revitalize the city and who are there legally, say they are afraid.

Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo today explained where the lie had come from and how it had spread. More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city.

On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city. Right-wing social media posters pushed the story, usually with “witnesses” to events in the city coming from elsewhere.

In late August, posting in a private Facebook group, a resident said they had heard that Haitian immigrants had butchered a neighbor’s cat for food. Vance reposted that rumor to attack Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, on whom he is trying to hang undocumented immigration although it was Trump who convinced Republicans to kill a strong bipartisan border bill this spring. Springfield police and the city manager told news outlets there was no truth to the rumors.

Nonetheless, on September 10, Vance told his people to “keep the cat memes flowing,” even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.

Trump repeated the lie at the presidential debate that night, claiming, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Today, President Joe Biden demanded Trump stop his attacks on Haitian-Americans, but Trump doubled down, promising to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield if he is elected, although they are here legally.

The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate.

Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration.

Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate.

McConnell became Senate majority leader in 2015 when voters gave Republicans control of the Senate, and when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. McConnell’s justification for this unprecedented obstruction was that Obama’s March nomination was too close to an election, but the underlying reason for the 2016 delay was at least in part his recognition that hopes of pushing the Supreme Court to the right, especially on the issue of abortion, were likely to get evangelical voters to the polls.

Trump won in 2016, and Republicans got control of the Senate. In 2017, when Democrats tried to filibuster Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s long-empty seat, then–majority leader McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. The end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees meant that McConnell could push through Trump’s nominees Brett Kavanaugh, with just 50 votes, and Amy Coney Barrett, with just 52 (in late October 2020, with voting for the next president already underway).

Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion.

Controlling the country through the courts was the plan behind stacking the courts with Republican nominees and weaponizing the filibuster to stop Democrats from passing legislation. In March 2024, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that McConnell “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

When he took office, President Joe Biden went to work putting his own mark on the federal judiciary. Almost two thirds of his appointees are women, and 62% are people of color. He appointed the first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court. But now, Republicans are hoping to retake the Senate to make sure that those appointments will stop, along with any more legislation. Their right-wing appointees to the courts will take the business of lawmaking out of the hands of American majorities.

Republican leaders are throwing everything they’ve got at the Senate races in Montana and Ohio, where they hope they can pick up the seat they need to take control of the Senate.

Attacks on immigrants in Ohio might move that needle.

In 1890, Republicans faced a similar problem. They had lost the popular vote in 1888, although they installed Republican president Benjamin Harrison in office through the Electoral College, and knew the Democrats would soon far outnumber their own voters. So they set out to guarantee that they could never lose the Senate, which should enable them to kill popular Democratic legislation.

But they misjudged the electorate, and in the 1890 midterm election, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats by a margin of two to one, and control of the Senate came down to a single seat, that of a senator from South Dakota. In those days, state legislatures chose their state’s senators, and shortly after it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on that South Dakota seat, U.S. Army troops went to South Dakota to rally voters by putting down an “Indian uprising” in which no people had died and no property had been damaged.

Fueled on false stories of “savages” who were attacking white settlers, the inexperienced soldiers were the ones who pulled the triggers to kill more than 250 Lakotas on December 29, but the Wounded Knee Massacre started in Washington, D.C.

This situation we are in is unique. Normal behaviors and normal codes of journalistic conduct will not do. They are insufficient.

I think the answer to that question’s more difficult than just proclaiming that Kamala won. And sure, if you want me to say it again, so you don’t get scared, yes, she won, to people like us. But we are small, however you define us, the rational, the empathic, the future-facing, the wise, those who still read Real Books, etcetera.

It's all true – but I don't know what can be done. Papers have been exposing Trump as a shithead for forty years. How many times can they run columns and articles pointing out that Trump is "unfit for office" and expect to be effective when the people who need to be informed of this don't pay attention?

The real takeaway from Umair is that we have dog and pony shows and not a sense of a debate. I certainly wish they'd turn it back over to the League of Women Voters.

Trump ‘likelier winner’ unless Harris tackles two failings, says ex-ambassador
Kim Darroch says the Democratic nominee must focus on US swing states and avoid repeating Hillary Clinton’s errors

Donald Trump will remain the “likelier winner” of the US presidential election on 5 November unless the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, addresses key failings in her campaign, a former British ambassador to Washington says on Sunday.

Kim Darroch says that despite clearly getting the better of Trump in last week’s televised head-to-head debate, Harris risks making two crucial mistakes in the final weeks of campaigning, which mean the former Republican president is still the favourite.

With a Trump return to the White House on the cards, Lord Darroch says it is important that the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who met US president Joe Biden and other leading Democrats in Washington on Thursday, should also now be seeking a meeting with Trump and his team before polling day, so he has built links with both sides.

“It is important that if Starmer meets one, he meets both,” Darroch says in an article for the Observer. “It will be noticed and resented by the Trump team if he doesn’t.”

Darroch was UK ambassador to the US from 2016 to 2019, when he resigned in a row over leaked confidential emails in which he criticised Trump’s administration as “clumsy and inept”. Darroch’s position became untenable after Boris Johnson, then involved in the Tory leadership contest to succeed Theresa May, failed to give the ambassador his unequivocal backing.

Darroch, who remains a respected figure in diplomatic circles on both sides of the Atlantic, says Trump is now “a less formidable campaigner” than in 2016, “down on energy, more liable to become confused, with a mind cluttered with grievances. And he remains a policy-free zone.”

“But,” he adds, “he is still capable of connecting with the ‘left behind’ to a level few others can match, a talent which ensures a devoted and enduring support base in a country where one in three workers say they live paycheck to paycheck.”

Darroch argues that the Democratic campaign is at risk of making two hugely important errors. Urging Harris to be “laser-focused” on voters in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin won by Biden in 2020, Darroch warns that they may drift back to Trump unless Harris is able to offer “some crisply worded, specific, targeted policies to bring jobs and hope back to these blighted neighbourhoods”.

The second error is that Harris appears to be hiding from the media, repeating a mistake made by Hillary Clinton. “Back in 2016, Trump was ever-present. He would accept any and every invitation. He would even, unbidden, phone the morning news shows to offer his views on the day’s issues. By contrast, Hillary Clinton locked the media out – and lost.”

Harris, he claims “seems to have adopted the Clinton playbook”.

Darroch says the UK embassy in Washington will no doubt be advising Starmer to try to meet Trump, perhaps taking time out from a meeting of the UN general assembly this week to do so.

“There is a lot to discuss with him, starting with his views on Ukraine. And however badly Trump performed in the debate, however visible his personal decline, he remains for many of us the likelier winner.” Last week, Starmer’s former pollster Deborah Mattinson met Harris’s campaign team in Washington to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”, further strengthening contacts with the Democratic side.

Five years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:

“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”

I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.

Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.

And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”

“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”

Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.

And so these Letters from an American were born.

In the five years since then, the details of the Ukraine scandal—the secret behind the whistleblower complaint in Schiff’s letter—revealed that then-president Trump was running his own private foreign policy to strong-arm Ukraine into helping his reelection campaign. That effort brought to light more of the story of Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign, which until Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine seemed to be in exchange for lifting sanctions the Obama administration imposed against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The February 2022 invasion brought renewed attention to the Mariupol Plan, confirmed by Trump’s 2016 campaign advisor Paul Manafort, that Russia expected a Trump administration to permit Russian president Vladimir Putin to take over eastern Ukraine.

The Ukraine scandal of 2019 led to Trump’s first impeachment trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, then his acquittal on those charges and his subsequent purge of career government officials, whom he replaced with Trump loyalists.

Then, on February 7, just two days after Senate Republicans acquitted him, Trump picked up the phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained, and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting the economy.

More than a million of us did not live through the ensuing pandemic.

We have, though, lived through the attempts of the former president to rig the 2020 election, the determination of American voters to make their voices heard, the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd, the election of Democrat Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the subsequent refusal of Trump and his loyalists to accept Biden’s win.

And we have lived through the unthinkable: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob determined to overrule the results of an election and install their own candidate in the White House. For the first time in our history, the peaceful transfer of power was broken. Republican senators saved Trump again in his second impeachment trial, and rather than disappearing after the inauguration of President Biden, Trump doubled down on the Big Lie that he had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.

We have seen the attempts of Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress to move America past this dark moment by making coronavirus vaccines widely available and passing landmark legislation to rebuild the economy. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act spurred the economy to become the strongest in the world, proving that the tested policy of investing in ordinary Americans worked far better than post-1980 neoliberalism ever did. After Republicans took control of the House in 2023, we saw them paralyze Congress with infighting that led them, for the first time in history, to throw out their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

We have watched as the Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with religious extremists, has worked to undermine the proven system in place before 1981. It took away the doctrine that required courts to defer to government agencies’ reasonable regulations and opened the way for big business to challenge those regulations before right-wing judges. It ended affirmative action in colleges and universities, and it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.

And then we watched the Supreme Court hand down the stunning decision of July 1, 2024, that overturned the fundamental principle of the United States of America that no one is above the law. In Donald J. Trump v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties.

We saw the reactionary authoritarianism of the former president’s supporters grow stronger. In Republican-dominated states across the country, legislatures passed laws to suppress Democratic voting and to put the counting of votes into partisan hands. Trump solidified control over the Republican Party and tightened his ties to far-right authoritarians and white supremacists. Republicans nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 2024 to advance policies outlined in Project 2025 that would concentrate power in the president and impose religious nationalism on the country. Trump chose as his running mate religious extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance, putting in line for the presidency a man whose entire career in elected office consisted of the eighteen months he had served in the Senate.

In that first letter five years ago, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”

And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters, and in this election where the issue is not policy differences but the very survival of our democracy, we are working to elect Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.

If you are tired from the last five years, you have earned the right to be.

And yet, you are still here, reading.

I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.

And so I write.

But I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.

To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals (!), and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.