When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”
“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”
But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.
Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.
When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.
Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”
“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.
Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”
This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”
Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”
Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”
Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.
Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.
Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”
As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.
The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.
David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.
The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”
During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.
Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.
“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”
“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”
Fact:
Of the six American winners of science Nobels this year, three were born outside the United States.
In this century, the émigré fraction of U.S. Nobels in physics, chemistry and medicine now stands at 40 percent.
Continent’s other nationalist parties wary of echoing sentiments of US president due to his unpopularity
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has responded to US claims that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” by saying it backs efforts for a nationalist revival on the continent – but other nationalist parties in the EU are far more cautious.
“The AfD is fighting alongside its international friends for a conservative renaissance,” the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, Markus Frohnmaier, said on Wednesday, adding that he would meet Maga Republicans in Washington and New York this week.
The anti-immigration party, which leads nationwide polls, was “building strong partnerships with those forces that advocate national sovereignty, cultural identity and realistic security and migration policies”, Frohnmaier told AFP.
[...]
Far-right parties such as the AfD, the National Rally (RN) in France and Spain’s Vox have built their electoral campaigns around attacking alleged EU overreach and excessive non-EU migration, sometimes echoing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
The AfD in particular has actively sought closer ties with Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, said last month she expected to host about 40 AfD politicians in the US.
The AfD’s co-leader Tino Chrupalla attended Trump’s second inauguration in January and the tech billionaire Elon Musk, a major Trump donor, campaigned on behalf of the AfD candidate Alice Weidel before German elections in February.
However, other nationalist parties have been more circumspect, aware of polling showing Trump is hugely unpopular in Europe. Most Europeans – including many far-right voters – consider the US president to be a danger to the EU and want a stronger bloc.
Analysts have long noted the difficult challenge that Trump’s policies pose to nationalists in the EU: while they may agree with some of them in principle, Maga is “America first” – while they are “France first”, “Germany first” or “Spain first”.
Even Hungary’s illiberal government, the EU’s most disruptive nationalist force, has refrained from direct comment on the new US strategy, though the country’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said it was “working on a patriotic revolution to make Europe great again”.
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has post-fascist roots and who has long touted her ideological affinities with Trump’s Maga camp, has volunteered merely that she saw “no cracks” in the transatlantic relationship.
While broadly sharing Trump’s vision on migration and the EU, Jordan Bardella, the RN leader, told the Daily Telegraph: “I’m French, so I’m not happy with vassalage, and I don’t need a big brother like Trump to consider the fate of my country.”
To the BBC, he added: “It is true that mass immigration and the laxity of our leaders … are today disrupting the power balance of European societies.”
But the RN has so far been very wary of seeking to cultivate Maga contacts in the way the AfD has. Bardella has previously accused the US of engaging in “economic warfare” and said Trump was “a good thing for Americans, but a bad thing for Europeans”.
On Sept. 2, when American military aircraft targeted a boat in the Caribbean and reportedly followed it with a strike to pulverize the shipwrecked survivors, it was a new assertion of U.S. imperial impunity. But it was also a confusing one, given the obvious disproportionality between the world’s most expensive military force and the piddling target, which the Pentagon insisted, without offering evidence, was carrying drugs. Was this really what the Trump administration believed its newly rechristened Department of War should be doing?
On Thursday the Pentagon published its much-anticipated 2025 National Security Strategy and confirmed that the answer was, basically, yes. This is precisely what the Trump administration wants to be doing: withdrawing from the military’s conventional arenas, like preparing for possible conflict with rival great powers and instead fighting, with overwhelming shows of swaggering force, the kinds of battles prioritized by online reactionaries. It wants to be fighting those culture wars in other theaters as well, promoting right-wing politics across Europe and encouraging a clampdown on migration not just in the United States but globally.
Among President Trump’s most conspicuous breaks with D.C. tradition is his view of politics as a form of trolling. Whereas the federal bureaucracy usually extrudes texts that are guardedly bureaucratic, the Trump administration is often so needlessly confrontational, the statements seem fake. The scattered and self-contradictory strategy document follows this pattern, including swipes at diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and calls for the reshoring of American manufacturing, a war on the global climate agenda and more military spending by European powers (or else risk American abandonment).
But above all, the 2025 National Security Strategy is the most comprehensive articulation yet of how Trump sees Trumpism playing out on the world stage. It acknowledges the ideological incoherence of the president’s foreign policy instincts but tries to make it a virtue. Global Trumpism, the document asserts, “is not grounded in traditional, political ideology” but “is motivated above all by what works for America — or, in two words, ‘America First.’” The political scientist Henry Farrell called it “Groyper grand strategy cosplay.”
As you might expect if you’ve seen clips of solicitous secretaries at cabinet meetings or similarly sycophantic gatherings of tech chief executives, the text is worshipful toward the president — “President Trump has cemented his legacy as the president of peace,” it declares, as a flotilla sits in the Caribbean, possibly in preparation for a war of choice, and administration figures begin making the argument for attacks on or even an invasion of Venezuela.
It’s also disdainful toward the foreign policy and national security establishment Trump inherited in 2017 and now means to dismantle, offering a brutal if not quite wrongheaded critique of the conduct of America’s foreign policy blob since the end of the Cold War: that the country has indulged vague liberal platitudes rather than clearly defined national interests; endeavored to dominate the entire world, in part through shouldering the burden of open-ended forever wars; miscalculated the support for such projects among the American people; and committed to a kind of globalization that hollowed out aspects of midcentury American strength.
What does the Trump administration propose in its place? Not the now-familiar fantasy of a new cold war, as has animated the fever dreams of American hawks for nearly a decade, but a vision of geopolitics as a global culture war to capture the imaginations of online reactionaries: a fight for Western civilization conducted mostly within borders — between a kind of blood-and-soil nationalism and a permissive cosmopolitan liberalism — and viewed, to a large degree, racially. (Notably, the strategy document refers to God at several points.)
Both aspects of this turn are significant. On China, the strategy marks a shift from the Pentagon’s longtime focus on rivalry, and though it isn’t exactly a surrender to Beijing, it looks unmistakably like a priority downgrade — particularly after the climbdown at the recent trade summit, where tariffs were relaxed, and the shift on high-end artificial intelligence chips, which the United States now says can be sold to China (to which China has said, basically: Not so fast). The 2025 National Security Strategy neither lists China as America’s primary national security priority, as previous documents did, nor cites containment of the rival power as a central goal.
Though the document devotes many paragraphs to the competition between the two countries, the clear emphasis is on the economic aspects of that competition rather than the inevitability of military conflict. It feels almost like a plea that the world is big enough for two great powers, as long as we kind of stay out of each other’s marauding way. In other words, a spheres-of-influence arrangement, which confirms a pattern of engagement visible from the first days of Trump’s second term: a return to the great-power politics of the 19th century, when statesmen divvied up the map and went to work.
But overall, the emphasis of the strategy document is less on what America’s national security doctrine is shifting away from than it is on what it is shifting to. First billing goes to what it calls a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”: defining immigration flows and drug trafficking as core security concerns and asserting unilateral military authority over them throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Hence a “president of peace” presiding over 22 attacks (and counting) on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, unilaterally pushing regime change in Venezuela and treating migrants living peacefully and for decades within the borders of the United States with such violence and cruel indifference that it has inspired rebukes from the new American pope and the conference of American bishops, long seen as an implacably conservative force in U.S. politics. (Among the more head-spinning turns of the post-2015 era is how much the papacy has come to embody global liberalism, of all things, becoming perhaps the most stalwart progressive institution on the world stage for more than a decade, much to the chagrin of MAGA’s many Catholic intellectuals.)
Although the 2025 National Security Strategy is most consequential in its positioning on China and American hemispheric hegemony, the strategy document is spiciest — and probably most revealing — when it turns to Europe.
In February, less than one month into the job, Vice President JD Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference and delivered a blistering indictment of Europe on culture-war grounds, saying that a combination of large-scale immigration, self-undermining progressivism and a kind of acquiescent cultural weakness had brought a continent that was for many centuries the seat of global power to a position of increasing irrelevance.
That language returns here, even more pointedly, as though the backroom boys in the Pentagon had spent the intervening months sharpening their sentences by whetstone. The continent faces the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” the 2025 National Security Strategy declares, and the reckoning may be coming quite soon. In case the meaning was unclear: “Within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” “I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism,” Paul Krugman wrote. “‘Non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’”
In certain ways, on certain subjects, the document is relatively circumspect about American power, not only backing away from conflict with China but also seeming uninterested in South Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. “The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the 2025 National Security Strategy asserts, and strikingly, Russian officials have already praised the document for echoing their worldviews.
But on migration the document does not limit its vision to America, declaring as the very first foreign policy priority that “the era of mass migration is over” — not just in the United States but around the world. Across the West, it states, the experience of the past few decades is vindication for hard-line views about borders and national culture. It goes on, “We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage and human trafficking,” gathering a whole laundry list of agenda items for domestic politics as a new statement of purpose for national security strategy and the MAGA-era military.
In theory, it might have been even more extreme. Earlier drafts of the document focused on domestic missions for the military, Politico reported, around the time this fall that Trump spoke to the military about fighting the “enemy from within” and dispatched his Justice Department to identify anti-Trump activists as “domestic terrorists.” For now, at least, the 2025 National Security Strategy leaves that agenda to the side, seeking out similar fights abroad instead.
Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-seven years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved countries around the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.
“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”
They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.
They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”
They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”
They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”
They included the right to participate in art and science.
They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.
Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.
Indeed, today is the forty-first anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
Last year, under President Joe Biden, the White House celebrated Human Rights Day by recommitting to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” The State Department bestowed the Human Rights Defender Award on eight individuals who have defended migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, and democracy. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan.
The U.S. government did not recognize Human Rights Day this year.
Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern...that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”
The official did not tell Pamuk which of the administration’s actions its officials think the ICC would investigate, but said there was “open chatter” that the court might target administration officials. On social media, opponents of the administration have begun to refer to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “Hagueseth,” after The Hague, Netherlands, where the ICC holds its official meetings.
Legal analysts have expressed grave concern that the administration’s attacks on small boats in the Caribbean are unlawful, and many have called a September 2 strike that killed shipwrecked survivors from a previous strike either murder or a war crime.
Yesterday, Damien Cave, Edward Wong, and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times reported that lawyers for the Pentagon proposed sending two survivors from an October strike against a small boat in the Caribbean to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador, where prisoners previously rendered there reported widespread torture and abuse. Defense Department officials were keen to make sure survivors didn’t end up in a U.S. court where the administration’s insistence that the men were an immediate danger to the U.S. because they were trafficking drugs would come under legal scrutiny.
Shocked, lawyers for the State Department refused, and the two men were sent back to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.
Is A2K on the list?
[...]
Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, said: “The US government’s announced plans are profoundly unacceptable. Freedom of expression and the right to privacy are universal human rights. No football fan surrenders those rights just because they cross a border.
“This policy introduces a chilling atmosphere of surveillance that directly contradicts the welcoming, open spirit the World Cup is meant to embody and it must be withdrawn immediately.”
On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump kicked off his nationwide tour to assure Americans that the Republicans are focused on bringing down costs. Voters turned to Trump in 2024 in large part because he promised that his understanding of the economy would enable him to bring down the prices that had risen in the global inflation spike after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world economy.
Within weeks of the election, Trump began to back off on that promise, telling a reporter for Time magazine in December 2024 that “it’s very hard” to bring down prices. Then in April he launched a tariff war that began to raise prices, while his on-again, off-again tariff rates discouraged businesses from investing while they waited to see what made economic sense.
Americans are not impressed with Trump’s handling of the economy. A poll by AP/NORC, which stands for Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago—a very reputable polling collaboration—released today shows that only 31% of American adults approve of Trump’s management of the economy, with 67% disapproving. Among Independents, that number breaks down to 15% approving and 80% disapproving.
Trump’s overall numbers are not much better. Just 36% of American adults approve of his job performance, with 61% disapproving. Among Independents, just 20% approve, while 74% disapprove. With them, he is underwater by an astonishing 54 points.
So Trump’s advisors have sent him off on a tour to convince Americans the administration shares their concerns about the economy.
On Tuesday, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed the question of affordability by telling the crowd, “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done.” He blamed higher prices on former president Joe Biden, confirming the observation of CNN’s Stephen Collinson that Trump’s answer for everything is to blame Biden.
Trump defended the tariffs that have raised prices by suggesting that the tariffs are protecting major items and that if people are feeling the pinch of higher prices, they “can give up certain products. You could give up pencils. That’s under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know, they don’t need that many. But you always need, you always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. But you don’t need 37 dolls. So, we’re doing things right.”
Otherwise, Trump delivered his usual rally speech. Rambling for more than an hour and a half, he attacked immigrants and confirmed that in 2018 he did, in fact, call Haiti and African nations “sh*thole countries.” He attacked the board of the Federal Reserve and, while boasting of his administration’s strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, said: “And now we’re going to do land, because the land is much easier.” Anthony Zurcher of the BBC noted that Trump told the crowd his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had told him to focus on the economy but boasted: “I haven’t read practically anything off the stupid teleprompter.”
After the speech, at 9:00 on Tuesday night, Trump’s social media account posted:
“There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me! My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best. I’ve stopped Eight Wars, saving many millions of lives in the process, created the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, brought Business back into the United States at levels never seen before, rebuilt our Military, created the Largest Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts, EVER, closed our open and very dangerous Southern Border, when previous Administrations were unable to do so, and created an ‘aura’ around the United States of America that has led every Country in the World to respect us more than ever before. In addition to all of that, I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks—Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results. I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country. In addition to the Medical, I have done something that no other President has done, on three separate occasions, the last one being recently, by taking what is known as a Cognitive Examination, something which few people would be able to do very well, including those working at The New York Times, and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know. I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all. Despite all of this, the time and work involved, The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am ‘slowing up,’ am maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true, and knowing that I work very hard, probably harder than I have ever worked before. I will know when I am ‘slowing up,’ but it’s not now! After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.’ They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it. They have inaccurately reported on all of my Election Results and, in fact, were forced to apologize on much of what they wrote. The best thing that could happen to this Country would be if The New York Times would cease publication because they are a horrible, biased, and untruthful ‘source’ of information. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Trump’s performance seems unlikely to reassure Americans that he is prioritizing their economic concerns.
Congressional Republicans are not helping. The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance bought on the Affordable Care Act market that subsidizes that insurance. Today, Senate Republicans voted against the Democrats’ measure to extend the premium tax credits for three years. The vote was 51–48, nine votes short of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. Only four Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska—voted yes.
Senate Democrats, joined by Rand Paul (R-KY), then voted against a Republican bill that would have let the credits expire but would have given adults who earn less than 700% of the federal poverty line access to $1,000 annually to put toward healthcare costs if they are under 50, and $1,500 a year if they are between 50 and 65, if they are on lower-cost ACA plans with an annual deductible of $7,500. The money could not be used for abortion or “gender transition procedures” and would require verification of immigration and citizenship status.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has rejected the idea of extending the premium tax credits but is facing a revolt from some members of his conference who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want to see the credits extended. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has launched a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring a bill to extend the credits to a vote. The measure would only pass with Democratic votes, making Johnson and other Republican leaders scramble to create their own plan. Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law fifteen years ago, a Republican alternative has remained elusive.
Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan, and Laura Weiss of Punchbowl News reported today that Johnson has said he will keep the fight over healthcare going into next year. They note that no Republican “thinks it’s a good idea for the [Republicans] to be talking about health care—their worst issue—during an election year.”
Democrats are likely to emphasize that the cost for extending the ACA premium tax credits—which benefit everyday Americans and which the Republicans did not extend in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act—would be about $350 billion over ten years. The cost for extending the 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations and which they did extend, will be more than $4 trillion over the same time period.
The Punchbowl reporters note that Republican confusion over healthcare is just one more sign of trouble for Republicans in the House. “[W]e won’t say that the House is in total chaos,” they wrote this morning. “Total chaos is when members unleash censure resolutions against each other or a trio of House Republicans publicly claim Speaker Mike Johnson has no business running the chamber. That was last week.” They note that fear of Trump kept Republicans in line earlier in the year, but with Trump’s numbers falling and voters turning to Democrats, Republicans are either planning to leave the House or protecting their own political prospects.
Concerned about control of Congress after 2026, Trump and members of his administration are pressuring state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts in order to favor Republicans. In Indiana, Republican state senators have resisted their pressure, along with death threats, to pass a map that would give Republicans two districts currently dominated by Democrats, giving Republicans the entire congressional delegation.
Vice President J.D. Vance and Don Trump Jr. have jumped into the struggle, and today the lobbying arm of the right-wing Heritage Institute, Heritage Action, posted on social media that “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.” Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith confirmed that “[t]he Trump admin[istration] was VERY clear about this.”
Political observer John Collins commented: “Nothing shows confidence like threatening your own party.” Another Hoosier seemed unconcerned with the threat that Trump would illegally withhold federal funding, posting: “We know how to roll with potholes better than any other state,” with a laughing emoji.
This evening, the Indiana senate rejected the new gerrymandered congressional map by a vote of 31 to 19. The vote wasn’t close: Twenty-one Republicans—that is, a majority of the Republican senators—joined the 10 Democratic senators in voting no.
This evening, Megan Messerly and Myah Ward of Politico reported that the White House is looking to send surrogates like Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the road instead of Trump to carry the message of affordability to the American people, leaving Trump to focus on “motivating his die-hard supporters who might not otherwise vote when he isn’t on the ballot.”
Today former Alabama senator Doug Jones launched his campaign to become the state’s next governor. He announced on November 24 that he would enter the race, but said in a speech tonight that he chose today for the official launch because the date marks exactly eight years since he won a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate. In that election, voters tapped Jones, a Democrat, to fill the seat formerly held by Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat empty when he went to Washington, D.C., to be President Donald J. Trump’s first attorney general.
Jones’s election was an “earthquake,” Daniel Strauss of Politico reported at the time. For the first time in 25 years, the Senate seat Jones had won would go to a Democrat in what Strauss called “a huge political setback” to Trump. After he won, Jones told his supporters: “At the end of the day, this entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency.”
If Jones wins the Democratic primary for governor, he will likely face off for the governorship against current Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach who beat Jones to win the Senate seat in 2020 after then-president Trump strongly backed him. During the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the certified electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president, both Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Tuberville to get him to delay the counting of the votes.
Tuberville has remained a staunch Trump ally, embracing the increasing MAGA emphasis on protecting “western culture,” insisting that undocumented immigrants are, as Representative Michael Rulli (R-OH), said today, “terrorizing our people,” “killing our children,” “raping our women, just like they do in England,” and “destroying western culture.” That language is at the heart of the administration’s recent National Security Strategy, which advanced the idea that the U.S. and Europe must protect a white, Christian, “Western identity.” This week, Tuberville echoed it when he claimed that Alabama’s Muslims embrace an “ideology…incompatible with our Western values.”
The MAGA claim that white Christians in the United States and Europe are engaged in an existential fight to protect their superior race from being overwhelmed by inferior racial stocks has roots in the U.S. that reach all the way back to the fears of white southerners in the 1850s that if human enslavement could not spread to the West, the growing population of Black Americans in the South would overwhelm them, probably with violence.
The theory that race defined history got its major “scientific” examination in the U.S. in 1916 with a book by lawyer Madison Grant titled The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, “[e]fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”
Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant describing the book as “my bible.”
In this era it is easy to see the strand of American history that informs the worldview of someone like Tommy Tuberville. But Jones has also inherited a strand of American history.
In his speech tonight, the former senator talked about the economic concerns of people in Alabama, noting the administration’s $40 billion support for Argentina’s president Javier Milei while American farmers lose markets, the loss of access to healthcare, the skyrocketing cost of energy, and the inability of young people to find a job that pays the bills.
But he also talked about history. He talked about his earlier election, when Alabama proved it could transcend partisan labels and stand up for the values that made Alabama great. Jones rejected the administration’s “attacks on democracy, on freedom of speech and freedom of religion; attacks on minorities and the media, attacks on the rule of law where political adversaries are targeted and political cronies are pardoned; proven science is cast aside, placing our health at risk; policies and executive orders that only benefit the tech bros and billionaires while working folks struggle to make ends meet, farmers are losing their markets and forced to take handouts to survive….”
Instead, Jones called for reinforcing Alabama values of “hard work,” “fairness,” “looking out for your neighbor, even when you don’t agree on everything,” “telling the truth—even when we don’t want to hear it,” and believing “that every person deserves dignity, respect, opportunity, and a voice.” “Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values,” he said. “They’re Alabama values.”
Jones’s campaign launch today built on his 2017 senatorial win, but his career reaches back from that. Jones is perhaps best known for his successful prosecution of two Ku Klux Klan members for their participation in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls. The local Ku Klux Klan had not been able to stomach the organization of the Birmingham community for Black rights and had responded by bombing the church that was the heart of community organizing. President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997, and Jones’s support for charges against church bombers Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry brought a jury to a guilty verdict after the two men had walked away from accountability for their actions for almost 60 years.
Jones came to be in the position of U.S. attorney that would enable him to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had killed four children after law school because as a second-year student in 1977 he had watched former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley prosecute Robert Chambliss for his participation in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Jones had skipped class to be present at that trial because, in a chance encounter, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had encouraged him to go to courthouse trials to see good lawyers in action. Jones took Douglas at his word and watched as Baxley brought the first of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers to justice. “It had a profound effect on me,” Jones later recalled. “Not only did I witness a great trial lawyer and learn from him, I also witnessed justice and what it means to be a public servant.”
The encounter between Justice Douglas and Jones came about because Douglas had been invited to speak at the University of Alabama Law School, where Jones was a student, in 1974 on the twentieth anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in the public schools to be unconstitutional.
Justice Douglas was a member of the Supreme Court when it issued its unanimous Brown v. Board decision overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In 1896, the court had said segregation was constitutional so long as the facilities provided to Black people were equal to those provided to white people. The Brown decision exposed “separate but equal” as a lie. It concluded that “[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thereby launched the modern era of desegregation.
Douglas worked to protect Americans’ civil liberties from a powerful government. He once told New York Times court reporter Alden Whitman that he had gone into the law after working summers as a migrant farmhand. “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I[ndustrial] W[orkers of the] W[orld] who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”
Douglas took his seat on the Supreme Court in 1939 following the retirement of Justice Louis Brandeis, who had personally recommended to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Douglas should take his place. The first Jewish justice, Brandeis had taken his own seat on the court in 1916—the same year Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race—and, with the help of his sister-in-law Josephine Goldmark, pioneered the concept of basing the law on the actual conditions of life in the United States rather than on previous legal opinions. On the bench, Brandeis was a crusader for social justice against the nation’s established powers.
Brandeis was the son of immigrants from Prague who were abolitionists, opposing the American institution of enslavement. His uncle was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president.
Progressivism is as deeply rooted in American history as reaction.
In his speech tonight, Jones noted that Alabama politicians “love to say they are running to protect our values” and encouraged voters to make it clear to elected officials what those values are. He urged people in Alabama to rise above the current political divisions and build a government not for the powerful, but—as Lincoln said—a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
“On that election day in 2017 we gave the people, not just in Alabama but across this country, something even more significant,” Jones said. “We gave them hope for a stronger democracy. And today, eight years later, we’re rekindling that hope, that optimism, that enthusiasm. Let’s face it,” he added, “there is a greater urgency for hope today than there was in 2017.”
