Shortly after midnight last night, the Justice Department released special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The 137-page report concludes that “substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump…engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”
The report explains the case Smith and his team compiled against Trump. It outlines the ways in which evidence proved Trump broke laws, and it lays out the federal interests served by prosecuting Trump. It explains how the team investigated Trump, interviewing more than 250 people and obtaining the testimony of more than 55 witnesses before a grand jury, and how Justice Department policy governed that investigation. It also explains how Trump’s litigation and the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprising determination that Trump enjoyed immunity from prosecution for breaking laws as part of his official duties dramatically slowed the prosecution.
There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.
It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.
Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.
The report explains why the Justice Department did not bring charges against Trump for insurrection, noting that such cases are rare and definitions of “insurrection” are unclear, raising concerns that such a charge would endanger the larger case.
The report explained that prosecuting Trump served important national interests. The government has an interest in the integrity of the country’s process for “collecting, counting, and certifying presidential elections.” It cares about “a peaceful and orderly transition of presidential power.” It cares that “every citizen’s vote is counted” and about “protecting public officials and government workers from violence.” Finally, it cares about “the fair and even-handed enforcement of the law.”
While the report contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies. There was no evidence that he won the 2020 election; to the contrary, all evidence showed he lost it. Even he didn’t appear to believe he had won. And yet, by the sheer power of repeating the lie that he had won and getting his cronies to repeat it, along with embellishments that were also lies—about suitcases of ballots, and thumb drives, and voting machines, and so on—he induced his followers to try to overthrow a free and fair election and install him in the presidency.
He continued this disinformation after he left office, and then engaged in lawfare, with both him and friendly witnesses slowing down his cases by challenging subpoenas until there were no more avenues to challenge them. And then the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.
The report calls out the extraordinary July 2024 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States declaring that presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts. “Before this case,” the report reads, “no court had ever found that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal immunity on the President.” It continued: “[N]o President whose conduct was investigated (other than Mr. Trump) ever claimed absolute criminal immunity for all official acts.”
The report quoted the dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noting that the decision of the Republican-appointed justices “effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”
That observation hits hard today, as January 14 is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the independence of the United States from Great Britain. The colonists had thrown off monarchy and determined to have a government of laws, not of men.
But Trump threw off that bedrock principle with a lie. His success recalls how Confederates who lost the Civil War resurrected their cause by claiming that the lenience of General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States toward officers and soldiers who surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 showed not the mercy of a victor but rather an understanding that the Confederates’ defense of human slavery was superior to the ideas of those trying to preserve the United States as a land based in the idea that all men were created equal.
When no punishment was forthcoming for those who had tried to destroy the United States, that story of Appomattox became the myth of the Lost Cause, defending the racial hierarchies of the Old South and attacking the federal government that tried to make opportunity and equal rights available for everyone. In response to federal protection of Black rights after 1948, when President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military, Confederate symbols and Confederate ideology began their return to the front of American culture, where they fed the reactionary right. The myth of the Lost Cause and Trump’s lie came together in the rioters who carried the Confederate battle flag when they breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is adamant about restoring the names of Confederate generals to U.S. military installations. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee began today.
The defense secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion. Hegseth has none of the usual qualifications of defense secretaries. As Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare pointed out today, he has “never held a policy role…never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers…never been elected to anything.”
Hegseth suggested his lack of qualifications was a strength, saying in his opening statement that while “it is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years…as President Trump…told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’...and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
The “dust on his boots” claim was designed to make Hegseth’s authenticity outweigh his lack of credentials, but former Marine pilot Amy McGrath pointed out that Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis and Biden’s defense secretary Lloyd Austin, both of whom reached the top ranks of the military, each came from the infantry.
Hegseth has settled an accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’ nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”
When Hegseth was in the Army National Guard, a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations. Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”
Wittes noted after today’s hearing that “[t]he words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up. The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed. By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’”
Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) spoke today in favor of Hegseth, and Republicans initially uncomfortable with the nominee appear to be coming around to supporting him. But Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee, and they made it clear that they will not make the vote easy for Republicans.
The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) said he did not believe Hegseth was qualified for the position. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) exposed his lack of knowledge about U.S. allies and bluntly told him he was unqualified, later telling MSNBC that Hegseth will be an easy target for adversaries with blackmail material.
Hegseth told the armed services committee that all the negative information about him was part of a “smear campaign,” at the same time that he refused to say he would refuse to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs or refuse an unconstitutional order.
After the release of Jack Smith’s report, Trump posted on his social media channel that regardless of what he had done to the country, voters had exonerated him: “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” he wrote, lying about a victory in which more voters chose someone other than him. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
It’s as if the Confederates’ descendants have captured the government of the United States.
The 24-country poll, which also included Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey, found that Switzerland, the UK, 11 EU nations surveyed and South Korea were alone in feeling Trump 2.0 would be bad for their country and for peace in the world.
and no byline so probably AI.And the 11 EU nations all joined the EU between 2004 and 2011 (which seems a weird subset to choose).
Euro-11 is the abbreviation for the (original) member states of the European Economic and Monetary Union: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.
It is somehow fitting that President Joe Biden’s farewell address to the nation, scheduled for 8:00 Eastern time tonight, was overshadowed today by the dramatic announcement that after months of negotiation backed by the United States and facilitated by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, negotiators from Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire and to exchange Israeli hostages taken on October 7, 2023, for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
From when he broke his foot playing with his dog shortly after he was elected in 2020 and opted to forgo time-consuming physical therapy to address the stiffness in his gait in order to focus on his work, to the day of his January 2021 inauguration when he went straight to the office, through his decision to negotiate the historic 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange involving 26 prisoners and at least five nations at the expense of his reelection campaign, to today’s focus on the long-awaited ceasefire rather than his final speech, Biden has approached the office of the presidency as an opportunity to work for the goals he thinks advance the interests of the United States of America and its people.
This afternoon, Biden appeared, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Good afternoon,” he said to the press. “And it’s a very good afternoon, because at long last I can announce a ceasefire and a hostage deal has been reached between Israel and Hamas. [After] more than 15 months of conflict that began with [Hamas’s] brutal massacre of October the seventh, more than 15 months of terror for the hostages, their families, the Israeli people, more than fifteen months of suffering by the innocent people in Gaza, fighting in Gaza will stop and soon the hostages will return home to their families.”
“The elements of this deal were what I laid out in detail this past May,” Biden said. That plan “was embraced by countries around the world and endorsed overwhelmingly by the U.N. Security Council.” It has three phases.
Phase one is a six-week ceasefire in which Israeli forces will withdraw from all the populated areas of Gaza and Palestinians can return to their homes. Hamas will release the women, elderly, wounded, and American hostages it holds. Humanitarian assistance will surge into Gaza.
“During the next six weeks,” Biden said, “Israel will negotiate the necessary arrangements to get to phase two, which is a permanent end of the war.” The ceasefire will continue throughout the negotiations, even if they take longer than six weeks. Once phase two begins, the remaining living hostages will come home and all remaining Israeli forces will be withdrawn from Gaza.
In phase three the final remains of hostages who have been killed will be returned to their families, and a major reconstruction plan for Gaza will begin.
Biden noted that he has worked in foreign policy for decades and that “[t]his is one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced.”
Tonight, Biden began his farewell address by reiterating that negotiators had reached a ceasefire deal. Although incoming president Trump has already tried to take credit for the deal, Biden said: “This plan was developed and negotiated by my team. And it will be largely implemented by the incoming administration. That’s why I told my team to keep the incoming administration fully informed. Because that’s how it should be. Working together as Americans.”
Biden then turned to his farewell message to the nation. He began by reflecting on the need to protect our institutions against the abuse of power. “Our system of separation of powers, checks and balances…may not be perfect,” he said, “but it’s maintained our democracy for nearly 250 years, longer than any other nation in history that’s ever tried such a bold experiment.”
“In the past four years, our democracy has held strong,” he said, “And every day, I’ve kept my commitment to be president for all Americans through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history.” He praised Vice President Kamala Harris as his partner, calling it the honor of his life to see Americans working together to come through a once-in-a-century pandemic, “standing up for our rights and our freedoms instead of losing their jobs to an economic crisis,” with “millions of entrepreneurs and companies creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products.”
“Together,” Biden said, “we’ve launched a new era of American possibilities, one of the greatest modernizations of infrastructure in our entire history, from new roads, bridges, clean water, affordable high-speed Internet for every American.” We brought back semiconductor manufacturing to the United States, “creating thousands of jobs.” We have given “Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for millions of seniors” protected children and families “by passing the most significant gun safety law in 30 years and bringing violent crime to a 50-year low,” and met “our sacred obligation to over one million veterans so far who were exposed to toxic materials and to their families, providing medical care and education benefits.”
“We’ve created nearly 17 million new jobs—more than any other single administration in a single term. More people have healthcare than ever before. And overseas, we’ve strengthened NATO. Ukraine is still free. And we’ve pulled ahead of our competition with China…. I’m so proud of how much we’ve accomplished together for the American people. And I wish the incoming administration success. Because I want America to succeed.”
Then Biden issued a warning that will stand alongside other prescient warnings outgoing president’s have delivered, like President George Washington famously warning about the dangers of foreign entanglements, and President Dwight Eisenhower warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
Biden warned the country of “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.” There are dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked, he said. “Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
Biden pointed out that a century ago the American people stood up to the robber barons and made them “play by the rules everybody else had to…. And it helped put us on a path to building the largest middle class in the world [and] the most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen.”
He and his administration worked to accomplish this plan for the last four years, he said, with legislation aimed at both “protecting the environment and growing the economy,” but “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.” He warned about “the concentration of technology, power, and wealth.”
While President Eisenhower warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex and “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” Biden said that six decades later he is “equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” he said, “enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling [or] disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit…. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”
Going forward, Biden said, “it’s going to be up to the president…, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces.” He called for reforming the tax code to make billionaires pay their fair share, and for getting rid of the flood of dark money in politics.
He called for ethics rules and an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, and for banning members of Congress from trading stock. He also called for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that no president is immune from crimes they commit in office. “The president’s power is not unlimited,” he said. “It’s not absolute.”
The concentration of wealth and power threatens democracy, Biden warned, by eroding “the sense of unity and common purpose,” noting that when people feel they don’t have a fair shot at success, staying engaged in the process becomes “exhausting and even disillusioning.” It is essential to democracy for people to feel like they can go as far as their hard work and talent can take them.
Biden noted the “short distance between peril and possibility” but promised that “what I believe is the America of our dreams is always closer than we think. It’s up to us to make our dreams come true.”
After thanking members of his administration, public servants and first responders across the country and around the world, U.S. service members and their families, Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and their family, Biden offered his “eternal thanks to you, the American people.”
“After 50 years of public service,” he said, “I give you my word: I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. A nation where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.
“Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith.
“I love America.
“You love it too.
“God bless you all.”
Nothing should be shocking after Jan. 6, 2021, when an American president’s scheming to overturn the legitimate results of a fair election culminated in the bloody breaching of the Capitol. Still, I’m aghast at the audacity of what Republicans here in North Carolina are up to.
They are following in their leader’s footsteps and trying to steal an election. And if such an effort no longer seems as strange and sinister as it did before Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene and took a torch to whatever scruples still existed, that’s all the more reason to examine it closely. We need to be clear about where things stand. With an election denier about to move back into the White House and his disciples emboldened, our democracy is in danger. That’s the moral of the North Carolina story. It’s much, much bigger than this state.
The details: On Nov. 5, a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court was up for grabs, and the first official vote count showed that Allison Riggs, one of two Democrats among the court’s seven justices, had won re-election by a slim margin. Her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, demanded recounts. All in all, three separate counts gave Riggs a victory by slightly over 700 votes.
Which, in a properly functioning democracy with candidates and elected officials who put civic order and basic decency above their rapacity for power, would be the end of it. Hah. Griffin won’t concede. He continues to contest the result, which is being litigated simultaneously in state and federal courts. There won’t be any resolution for weeks.
The nature of his complaint is especially insidious. Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party, which supports him, aren’t producing evidence of voter fraud or a botched count. They’re disputing the legitimacy of more than 60,000 ballots, principally because the registration forms of many of the voters who cast them lack either a driver’s license or Social Security number, as law requires.
But that doesn’t mean the voters did anything wrong. Some of them may have registered before that information became mandatory in 2004. Long after that point, North Carolina routinely accepted registration forms without it. It’s also possible that voters provided it but that it’s not present in the state database because of administrative error or faulty record keeping.
The bottom line is that most or all of these voters had no reason to believe there was any issue with their status or their ballots, and they aren’t being accused of malfeasance. They’re just pawns in Republicans’ last-ditch bid to reverse Griffin’s defeat however possible.
“It’s inexcusable,” Heath Clay, a Republican city councilman in Summerfield, N.C., whose ballot is among those 60,000, said in a recent article in The Times by Eduardo Medina and Michael Wines. He in fact voted for Griffin but accepts that North Carolinians “have spoken” and that Griffin lost, and he considers Griffin’s attempt to invalidate his and others’ ballots “a direct attack on the voters.”
Clay’s appearance on the list of voters whose ballots are in dispute demonstrates that Griffin and his Republican allies can’t even be certain that a new count subtracting those votes would benefit them. But many of those votes were cast with mailed ballots, and mailed ballots generally favored Riggs.
Last week, the Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked state election officials from certifying Riggs’s victory, thus keeping alive the possibility that Griffin could join their ranks and give them a 6-to-1 advantage over Democrats, versus the current 5-to-2. That increases the chances of Republican control of the court for many years.
Which matters not only in principle but also in practice: The court’s Republican majority has abetted Republican lawmakers’ aggressive gerrymandering of North Carolina, whose current U.S. House delegation, for example, contradicts the state’s political complexion. Although North Carolina has roughly equal numbers of registered Republicans and registered Democrats and just elected a Democratic governor, Josh Stein, by a nearly 15-point margin, it has only four Democrats among its 14 members of the House. It’s in some ways a paradigm of unrepresentative democracy.
And of Republican ruthlessness. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Andrew Dunn, a conservative who has worked as a Republican strategist and now produces a political newsletter in which he recently wrote: “I’ve spent years pushing back against the left’s tendency to go scorched earth in their rhetoric against N.C. Republicans. Everything is a ‘state of emergency,’ or ‘threat to democracy’ or ‘war’ on a beloved institution. Most of the time, it’s dishonest nonsense. Not this time.”
Dunn added that the North Carolina Supreme Court would destroy its credibility if it rewarded Griffin’s machinations.
Perhaps one of its own five Republican justices, Richard Dietz, agrees. In a dissent from his colleagues’ ruling that Griffin’s complaint should be heard, he wrote: “Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief.”
And incredible distrust of, and disgust with, the whole system. Except “incredible” isn’t the right adjective. I’m outraged without being the least bit surprised, and I’m almost sure of this: The fight over Riggs’s court seat is less anomaly than omen.
The Author of the Piece you posted clearly believes that Biden's
approach to the Presidency was one of self-sacrifice...
Will Biden's claim to the (so far apparently) sucessful Hamas agreement with respect to their hostages go the way of former President Carter's corresponding issue with Iran several decades ago?
Biden's address started with what appeared to be somewhat overdone assertion that the Hamas settlement was indeed his achievement...
...his supposed achievements over the past four years, that, all things considered, appears to be contradicted by available poll data on public perceptions of the current Administration and the direction in which the country is headed under it.
The Democrat obsession with "Misinformation" (= facts or allegations that contradict the Democrat script) may itself be losing its former effectiveness in silencing the opposition.
The Democrat [sic] Party has in voting fact become the party of wealthy, as is amply illustrated by the local deatails of the election rresults throughout the country...
The recent spectacle of Biden's Presidential Pardons of many violent murderors and other criminals...
Overall, my impression of the speech is that it was the words of an inept, unsuccessful leader, angry at the party that used him as a willing puppet for four years, now desperately seeking undeserved justification and revenge.
In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.
That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.
But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.
Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.
Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.
News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was "the single most important economic issue of the day." But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.
There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.
It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.
In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”
Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”
Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.
But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.
During his four years in office, Joe Biden notched significant legislative victories with the narrowest of majorities in the Senate. He presided over a virtuoso rollout of the COVID vaccines, the rapidity of which saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and he invested billions in the preservation of an independent Ukraine, which helped stymie the fulfillment of Russia’s revanchist dreams. America’s primary adversary, China, is measurably weaker than when he assumed the job. The U.S. economy is measurably stronger. The sum total of achievement is enough that it might someday tempt historians into declaring Biden an underrated president.
But such revisionism will never be convincing. As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracy’s defender at the republic’s moment of greatest peril. Battling autocracy was the stated rationale for his foreign policy—and the same spirit infused his domestic agenda. He said that he’d designed his legislative program as a demonstration project, to show that “our democracy can still do big things.”
When Biden issued his public warnings about the system’s fragility, he tended to deliberately avoid mentioning Donald Trump by name, but the implication was clear enough. The inability to stave off a second Trump term, and the stress on democracy that it would inevitably bring, would be the gravest catastrophe of them all. By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that he’d promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return, and for his own spectacular failure.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadn’t made the selfish decision to run for reelection? What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier? That makes for a grim parlor game.
The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running? The absurd premise of the Biden reelection campaign, that it made sense for the nation to trust itself to a president who would finish his term at the age of 86, invites conspiratorial explanations.
And in the age of conspiracies, these theories will gain wide purchase. They posit a broad cover-up hatched by aides bent on preserving their own power. In this imagined scenario, as Biden aimlessly wandered around the White House in a state of near-dementia, unable to perform the essential functions of the presidency, his inner circle suppressed the evidence of his decay, and a cabal of Democratic pols and corrupt journalists abetted them.
But turning this into a story about nefarious elites both oversells and underplays the scandal. It oversells it by baselessly suggesting that Biden’s age prevented him from carrying out his constitutional duties. And it underplays the scandal because his advisers and protectors are guilty of one of the greatest lapses of common sense in political history. A cabal intent on preserving its own power would never have blundered in such tragically self-defeating fashion.
When Biden came into office, I chronicled his first two years for a book about his White House. You didn’t have to be Bob Woodward to see that the president was an old man. I heard stories about him failing to conjure names; he confused the current Virginia Senator Mark Warner with the late Virginia Senator John Warner. In conversations, his anecdotes would meander excruciatingly into cul-de-sacs. His schedule didn’t begin until late in the morning, which suggested a deficit of stamina.
I also interviewed hundreds of aides and politicians who spent extended time with Biden. As I learned about his management style, I didn’t encounter evidence of a president who was catatonic. I heard stories about his temper, how he snapped at aides who failed to bring him the information he wanted, how he raged against pundits who disparaged him. As his advisers told it, he would micromanage them, sometimes unproductively, and overprepare for meetings—a product of his deep insecurities.
Aides and lawmakers almost always noted his age. Oftentimes, they did so with admiration. One of the virtues of an old president is experience, and the wisdom that comes with it. During the most impressive stretch of his administration, he leveraged his long history of working in the Senate and traveling to foreign capitals. He didn’t need on-the-job training. His closest political confidantes, most of whom have worked with him for decades, regarded Biden as a father figure, which meant that they suffered from a very human problem: the difficulty of judging the decline of an aging parent.
Decline is a matter of perception, and those perceptions are sometimes tainted by wishful thinking, by the hope that a parent still has a few hurrahs left in them. (Now that Biden is a political loser, insiders will rush to publicly say that they saw evidence of his decline before the rest of us did.)
Perceptions are also tainted by a lifetime of memories. Every human has their foibles, which tend to grow exaggerated with age but remain consistent with familiar patterns. So when Biden would get lost in stories, it was possible to say: That’s just Uncle Joe, always reminiscing about the good old days, always a bit verbose. When he fumbled for words, well, that was his childhood stutter rearing its head.
What’s undoubtedly true is that, over the past four years, Biden’s aging accelerated, because that’s what happens in the White House. When members of an administration leave the West Wing, it’s as if they have been subjected to a biological experiment that wrinkles their skin and whitens their hair, compressing 20 years of biological deterioration into four. Biden would have been a supernatural being if his body had resisted these changes. He absorbed the stresses of managing multiple wars and the toll of a presidential campaign (albeit a sclerotic one).
All that said, I have never seen evidence that he made bad decisions because of his age. I’ve never seen evidence that his aides were actually dictating policy without his consent. At worst, his flagging energy undermined his credibility as a leader and projected weakness to his adversaries, at home and abroad, although those cautious tendencies arguably predated his decline.
There’s no need to go searching for hidden scandals, however, because the visible one is sufficiently terrible. Democrats ignored a cascade of warning signs. The evidence that Biden wasn’t fit for a second term was abundantly clear in his public appearances—and in the public appearances that he studiously avoided. Advisers knew that Biden’s instinct was always to invest faith in his own capacities, but they never made a concerted effort to talk him back from his decision to run, until it was far too late. Donald Trump is their legacy too.
We were talking about the worst president - not the worst politician.
