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Monday, September 30, 2024

Vice-President Kamala Harris is endorsed for President by The New Yorker magazine!

The Vice-President has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Donald Trump.

Echo opinion published in The New Yorker by The Editors:

At the 1940, Republican National Convention, in Philadelphia, an uneasy affair marked by bomb scares, a British espionage scandal, and the imminence of global conflict, ten names were placed in nomination. On the sixth ballot, a corporate executive from Indiana named Wendell Willkie finally emerged as the challenger to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was running for a third term. 
Desperate to find a way to compete with F.D.R., a political colossus who had lately engineered the New Deal and ended the Great Depression, Willkie challenged him to a series of radio debates.

This was something new in American life. F.D.R. hardly feared the medium—he’d been delivering his homey yet substance-rich fireside chats to the nation since 1933—but he nonetheless dodged Willkie’s invitation, citing scheduling conflicts. In November, he crushed Willkie, and by the end of 1941, he was engaged in the struggle against fascism.
#VoteHarrisWalz The 2024, election also comes at a moment of national crisis. 

This time, however, the threat to the country’s future—to its rule of law and its democratic institutions, its security and its character—resides not in a foreign capital but at a twenty-acre Xanadu on the Florida coast. For nine years, Donald Trump has represented an ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States. As President, he amplified some of the ugliest currents in our political culture: nativism, racism, misogyny, indifference to the disadvantaged, amoral isolationism. 

Trump's narcissism and casual cruelty, his contempt for the truth, have contaminated public life. As Commander-in-Chief, he ridiculed the valor of fallen soldiers, he threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he emboldened autocrats everywhere, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán

When Trump lost to Joe Biden, in 2020, he tried every means possible to deny the will of the electorate and helped incite a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.

In contrast, the Democratic Party’s nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to build on the successes of the Biden Administration and to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Trump. 

Few, if any, of our readers will be surprised that we (The New Yorker) endorse Harris in this election—but many would have been surprised, earlier this year, that he choice would end up being between Trump and the Vice-President. The change in the Democratic candidate is the result, of course, of a debate of the sort that F.D.R. sidestepped.

During the past half century, these quadrennial confrontations have become a centerpiece of election season—a chance to glimpse the choice in real time, side by side. 

Aficionados may know the highlights of debates past: Ronald Reagan, at the age of seventy-three, joking nimbly that he would not “exploit” the “youth and inexperience” of his fifty-six-year-old opponent, Walter Mondale; George H. W. Bush glancing at his watch after Bill Clinton answered a question from the audience; Mitt Romney assuring the country that, far from being a sexist, he had, in fact, “whole binders full of women” he had consulted for his gubernatorial cabinet.

Yet no debates have been as unusual or as consequential as the two we have just witnessed. The first—on June 27th, in Atlanta, between Trump and President Biden—proved to be an unmasking. 

On a human level, Biden’s nationally televised disintegration was a poignant spectacle. Viewed more coldly, it was a gift. Had it taken place, say, after the Conventions, it might have been too late to force a reassessment.

It was hardly a secret that Biden has aged, growing markedly less robust, particularly in the past eighteen months or so. If he got through an interview or a (rare) press conference without incident, staff and supporters exhaled and treated it as a victory. 
But, rather than open the gate to a younger generation of Democratic candidates, Biden, his advisers, and the Party leadership stood in the way. They made it plain that a challenger would inevitably be defeated. 

Meanwhile, through spin and deft scheduling, the White House staff protected the President and hoped for the best. Tens of millions of voters, fearing another Trump Presidency, had little choice but to close their eyes and think of America.

But staying the course was, as the polls were suggesting, probably a
doomed strategy. In an attempt to invigorate the campaign, Biden and his team took the risk of challenging Trump to an early debate. Perhaps a forceful, coherent performance would diminish the doubts about the President’s capacity to govern well into his mid-eighties. It was not to be. 

In fact, the debate, broadcast on CNN, was a humbling. Biden’s resting expression of slack confusion was almost as unnerving as his faltering efforts to make a clear and vivid case for his reëlection.

When Jake Tapper asked him about the national debt, he delivered a wobbly reply that concluded, “Look, if—we finally beat Medicare.” After President Joe Biden gave a similarly jumbled response to a question about immigration, Trump said only, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.” By Trumpian (aka Trumpziism ❗) standards, this was a kindness. It was also the end of the Biden candidacy.

For the next twenty-four days, the President travelled a hard road from denial to acceptance. All of us face the assault of time, but few must reckon with mortality before the eyes of the world. Biden loves the job and thought he was uniquely positioned to defeat Trump once more. But finally, after absorbing discouragement from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Obamas, and others, Biden, in an act of grace, issued a letter concluding that it was “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.” In a separate message, he gave his endorsement to Kamala Harris.


The second Presidential debate, at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, was an unmasking of another kind. For some time, observers have asked whether Trump, who is now seventy-eight, has himself suffered from some form of decline. On a given day, it is hard to determine if a particular insult, lie, or rant represents his usual malevolence or something else. 

Not long before the debate, Trump took to speculating whether it would be preferable, in the event of finding oneself on a sinking boat, to die by shark attack or by electrocution from the boat’s battery. (“I’ll take electrocution every single time,” he assured a grateful nation.) 

Mean spirited as usually, there is nothing he will not say. 

When a group of Proud Boys were convicted of conspiracy last year, he warned that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were just getting started: “get smart america, they are coming after you!!!”

Trump has defied multiple legal gag orders, attacking judges and jurors, and has even blamed the latest attempt on his life, a deeply alarming event, not on the would-be assailant or the easy availability of assault weapons but on the Democratic ticket👿💢❗

For Harris, the debate presented an opportunity to expose Trump at his worst. All she had to do was to prick his vanity. 

Trump’s rallies were boring, she suggested. Military leaders thought he was a “disgrace.” Foreign leaders ate his lunch, considered him weak, laughed at him. With growing rage, Trump began howling from a familiar hymnal. America is a “failing nation.” Migrants are pouring in from “prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” Indelibly, Trump picked up on a racist, J. D. Vance-endorsed conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants in Ohio and gave it his full voice:

In Springfield, (Ohio) they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.

Trump went on in this vein of fact-free bluster, bringing discomfort even to some fellow-Republicans. He had been calling Harris “dumb as a rock” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter” or even “put two sentences together,” while mocking her looks, her family, her racial identity, her personal life. He refused to pronounce her name correctly. Harris decided to flick all that lint from her shoulder. She left it to the moderators to correct Trump’s facts and the electorate to behold his lunacy. It was a performance that had the potential to lay bare Trump’s character for those voters who might not have been paying much attention. 

After the (failed❗) debate, Trump, of course, declared a “BIG WIN,” but he then issued a loser’s proclamation: “there will be no third debate.” Some days later, he had more to say about that night, particularly about an endorsement that came his opponent’s way minutes after the debate’s conclusion. 

On his social-media platform, he wrote, “i hate taylor swift!”

In the fall of 2016, the editors of The New Yorker published an enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House. The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we will welcome for its immense historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief. It will be especially gratifying to have a woman as commander-in-chief after such a sickeningly sexist and racist campaign, one that exposed so starkly how far our society has to go.


The lack of sufficient caution remains, well, an astonishment. We all learned a painful lesson. Trump has never won the national popular vote, and the elections of 2018 and 2020 were setbacks for the Republicans; in 2022, the anticipated “red wave” failed to materialize. And yet in rural towns, in struggling deindustrialized cities, in the South and the Midwest, his popularity is broad and deep. His strength among Black and Latino men has grown. 

Worse, Trump has the ardent backing of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, right-wing legal activists like Leonard Leo, and no small number of Wall Street executives whose highest priorities are to prevent regulation and changes to their tax status. Coming out of the Democratic National Convention, and then the September 10th debate, Harris made extraordinary inroads with the electorate; she’s got the “vibes,” as this year’s cliché has it. But the race remains very close. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump outperformed the polls. No responsible assessment of the contest has the luxury of focussing only on the imperatives for a Harris Administration and gliding past the ramifications of another Trump Administration.

There’s every reason to think that Trump II would be far worse than Trump I. Twice impeached, found liable for sexual abuse, convicted of thirty-four felony counts, and facing many more state and federal charges, Trump would return to the White House in a spirit of vengeance. He would immediately set about betraying his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution and wage battle against the independence of the Department of Justice in order to preserve, protect, and defend himself. 

Trump made it clear that he would also use the powers at his disposal to punish his opponents. And this time there would be no advisers who would rein him in.

Trump is a menacing presence in American life, and most of his former associates know it. Of his forty-two former Cabinet secretaries, only half have endorsed him. More than two hundred staffers for four previous Republican Presidents and Presidential candidates have endorsed the Democratic ticket. High-ranking officials who once surrounded Trump—including former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chief of staff John Kelly, the former national-security advisers John Bolton and H. R. McMaster, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—regard him as unfit, a threat to national security.

Trump’s campaign has centered on immigration. His first-term abominations included family separation, the Muslim ban, and the decimation of the refugee and asylum system. 

Now Trump and his (evil👾👽) advisors like Stephen Miller want to carry out mass deportations reminiscent of the Eisenhower Administration’s “Operation Wetback,” promising the creation of vast internment camps for undocumented immigrants. Such efforts would require the participation of the Department of Defense and the National Guard. These goals are not only unrealistic; they’re undemocratic.

There are more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States; at least sixty per cent of them have lived here for more than a decade. Under Trump, federal agents would target anyone they could, without clear guidelines or priorities. This policy would tear apart families, unleash fear in immigrant communities, and lead to racial profiling and discrimination.

A second Trump Administration also augurs economic disaster. His promised tax cuts would hollow out the government’s finances, especially if he manages to enact the escalating measures that he has promised while campaigning, such as making Social Security benefits tax-free. 
Then, there’s his plan to impose tariffs of up to twenty percent on imports, plus much higher duties on anything made in China. According to credible economic models, this would bring a resurgence of inflation, raising the cost of living for those least able to afford it.

Trump’s effect on the judiciary would be no less alarming. In his first term, he appointed three Supreme Court Justices, who played an essential role in eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. Twenty-two states have since either restricted the procedure or banned it outright, and states in the latter category (including Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi) ave somhe of the country’s highest rates of maternal and infant mortality.

Nor is this the only respect in which Trump’s judicial appointments have imperilled public health and safety. The judges he named to the federal bench have continued his campaign of regulatory sabotage. A series of recent Supreme Court rulings have invited polluting industries to challenge pretty much any rule, old or new, that they don’t like.

Despite such rulings—and despite a recklessly expansive opinion about Presidential immunity—Trump has sometimes complained that the Court remains insufficiently compliant. Three Justices are currently in their seventies; if Trump gets another round of picks, he is likely to make personal loyalty a deciding factor. 

Notwithstanding a constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” he has indicated that, once in office, he would dismiss federal criminal cases pending against him, and, with the help of a suitably pliable Attorney General, he would almost certainly fire the special counsel Jack Smith. “I have the absolute right to pardon myself,” Trump has said. A subservient Justice Department and judiciary could readily be enlisted in his vendettas: Trump—who has insinuated that Mark Milley should have been executed for disloyalty—has also said that he might well prosecute political opponents, including Joe Biden.

Trump’s record on the environment is the worst of any President in modern history. His Administration rolled back nearly a hundred regulations aimed at protecting the nation’s air, water, and wildlife. 

It dismantled Obama-era efforts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s Department of the Interior rushed to lease public lands for oil and gas drilling, and his Department of Energy worked methodically to weaken efficiency standards. A 2020 analysis by the Rhodium Group
estimated that the Trump Administration’s actions would result in the release of an extra 1.8 billion tons of CO2 by 2035, a planetarily disastrous outcome. And Trump has continued to scoff at climate science. Talking to Elon Musk, in August, he asserted that one impact of sea-level rise would be the creation of “more oceanfront property.”


Discussion about foreign policy in this election season has been, as always, limited at best. Trump’s pronouncements are either flip (“I don’t give a shit about nato”) or dismaying in both their specifics and their evasions. With respect to the horrific events of the past year in the Middle East—the Hamas attack on October 7th, in which twelve hundred people were killed and more than two hundred taken hostage, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, which has left more than forty thousand Palestinians dead and countless people displaced—Trump’s response is that it “would have never happened” if he had been in office. When he was in the White House, he presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords, which promised a new era in relations between Israel and more of its Arab neighbors but paid almost no attention to the rights and the future of the Palestinian people.

In the (one and only 😧) recent debate, Trump was asked simply if he wanted Ukraine to prevail against its invader, Putin’s Russia. Trump, who appears to prefer aggressive Russian authoritarianism to Ukraine’s evolving democracy, could not bring himself to answer in the affirmative and convey support for Ukraine’s struggle to preserve its sovereignty and independence. Indeed, Trump radiates contempt for Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who failed to deliver on Trump’s thuggish demand, in 2019, that, in exchange for weapons shipments already earmarked for Kyiv, he investigate the Biden family. Putin, who has shredded nascent democratic institutions and procedures in his own country to create a system based solely on his authority, is more Trump’s style.

Trump is no more assuring when it comes to China policy. Xi Jinping, whom Trump has recently praised as a “brilliant guy” who “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist,” believes that the world is undergoing a realignment—“changes unseen in a century.” Once again, Trump seems uninterested. 

In fact, Trump suggested that he might even leave Taiwan to fend for itself in the event of a Chinese attack. The island should “pay us for defense,” he said. Trump warns of another world war, and yet here, too, his policies seem designed to encourage aggression and destabilize the international order.

In every arena, there is little question that a Harris Presidency promises far greater sanity and far greater humanity. 


As recently as three months ago, the Washington cognoscenti cast aspersions on her political skills. These quickly evaporated as Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the shrewd and appealing governor of Minnesota, have rapidly proved to be effective campaigners. Their swift transformation of the Democratic Party’s prospects for November has been astonishing. Harris deserves enormous credit for stepping fearlessly into the role that fate has dealt her. In the face of a malign opponent, she has behaved with poise, conviction, and intelligence. Of course, her ability to carry out her policy ambitions would improve immeasurably with the election of Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. But, whatever the circumstances, her positions on the critical issues are rational, undergirded by a basic sense of decency, and often compelling.

Where Trump promises mass deportations, she has expressed support both for boosting border enforcement and for opening avenues that would lead to legal immigration. The refugee program, which is both a moral imperative and a pragmatic tool of U.S. foreign policy, has grown substantially during the Biden-Harris Administration. The government has also tempered interior enforcement, allowing the large undocumented population, particularly those with families and deep ties to local communities, to live without constant fear of arrest and deportation.

The Biden-Harris record on asylum at the border is mixed, partly because the policy solutions are far 
more complex. 

Harris said that she would support a bipartisan Senate bill that drastically curtails asylum, and, in the current climate, support for that bill is politically expedient. But there is good reason to believe that, if elected, Harris could be pushed to combine increasing vigilance at the border with more policies that would provide relief to those in desperate need. She has been clear that she would protect undocumented families and find ways to bring a sense of compassion to the immigration system. Congress, to be sure, has been a barrier to any meaningful efforts at immigration reform; conservative courts, together with Republican state attorneys general, would try to limit what Harris could do by executive order. But the alternative is unimaginably bad.

On the subject of economics, Harris’s proposals have sometimes lacked detail, but they thoughtfully address concerns of working-class and middle-class Americans, with a particular focus on the cost of housing. President Biden, for his part, has made a concerted effort to reëstablish the Democratic Party’s bond with blue-collar voters. He has been unusually pro-union and pro-manufacturing. There’s a reason that, after the disastrous first debate, some of the most diehard Biden loyalists were on the Party’s left. The inflation that rose earlier in his term—and that his political adversaries have used to define his economic record—has now abated, while 
Biden can be credited with passing programs that directed federal spending toward badly needed infrastructure projects and green-energy projects. The U.S. is currently leading its peers in the rate of economic growth.

Owing to Senate opposition, Biden struggled to follow through on his ambition to bolster the “care economy,” through paid family leave, child tax credits, and other measures. 

Although Harris has pulled back from Biden’s positions in certain areas—she favors, for example, a more modest corporate tax increase—these family-relief programs are the part of Biden’s agenda that she is most enthusiastic about. She will push hard for them, alongside her initiatives aimed at easing the housing crisis.

For the Harris campaign, the most emotionally galvanizing issue has been abortion. This will be the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Close to ninety million women have registered to vote this November, and historical data show that women have favored Democrats over Republicans in every general election since 1992. As Vice-President, Harris has emerged as a leading voice on abortion, framing it powerfully as a matter of bodily autonomy and a right to health care. 

Vice-President Harris called for concrete policy changes, such as reinstating federal protections for abortion, and has never shied away from making forceful statements on the issue. In March, Harris toured a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota, becoming the first Vice-President to make a public appearance at an abortion provider.

Leaders in the field of women’s health have praised her directness and see it as a welcome change from Biden’s wavering stance. (In this year’s State of the Union address, he failed to say the word “abortion” once, even though it was included in his prepared remarks.) As a senator, she sponsored bills designed to improve maternal health and guarantee access to contraception. 

In 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, she memorably asked him, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

She also sought to limit a state’s ability to ban abortion unilaterally. “If there are those who dare to take the freedom to make such a fundamental decision for an individual, which is about one’s own body,” Harris said of abortion rights at a campaign fund-raiser in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, “what other freedoms could be on the table for the taking?”

Vice-President Harris has a reasonably strong environmental record, even, if in recent months, she has chosen to give it only modest attention. As California’s attorney general, she pursued several high-profile cases against polluters, including one against Conoco Phillips for endangering water supplies. 

In 2016, she sued the Obama Administration over a plan to allow offshore fracking in the Santa Barbara Channel. (A federal judge sided with Harris, and an injunction remains in place.) In the Senate, she promoted electric school buses and was an early co-sponsor of a resolution calling for a Green New Deal. Running for President in 2019, Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” said that she would ban fracking for oil and gas. She has since reversed that position, but, as Vice-President, she cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new spending and tax breaks for clean-energy projects.

On foriegn policy, Harris, who has spent many hours in national-security briefings, speaks the language of liberal internationalism, echoing Biden’s policies, from Ukraine to the Middle East. 

But Harris is of a different generation than Biden. We can reasonably hope that, as she maintains his commitment to traditional allies and alliances, she will also employ American leverage when those allies are acting heedlessly. With respect to Gaza, she has voiced support for two states for two peoples; she has reasserted Israel’s right to security while at the same time evoking the “heartbreaking” suffering of the Palestinian people, and calling for an immediate end to the war, with a resolution that would enable Palestinians to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” 

Vice-President will also need to act decisively in the United States’ interest when dealing with someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, who has frequently given American Presidents the back of his hand while benefitting immensely from American support.

With regard to China, Vice-President Harris is likely to extend President Biden’s posture of watchful, skeptical competitiveness.

A former prosecutor, she often views foreign policy through the lens of international law, and she has rebuked China for expanding its territorial footprint. In 2022, shortly after her first meeting with Xi, when some leaders might have attempted to send reassuring signals, Harris did the opposite: during a visit to the Philippines, she vowed America’s support “in the face of intimidation and coercion in the South China Sea.”

Four years ago, in our endorsement of Joe Biden, we said that, while he was leading in the polls, we hoped he would displace Trump “by a margin that prevents prolonged dispute or the kind of civil unrest that Trump appears to relish.” 

In retrospect, we now know what happened: the margins, in four decisive states, were extremely narrow, and Trump refused to concede. Instead, he levelled wild accusations and filed dozens of lawsuits. When those failed, he called on his MAGA believers to march on the Capitol. This time around, the Trumpzi campaign and various right-wing groups have already deployed deny-the-vote efforts around the country, particularly in swing states like Georgia,Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. There is every likelihood that, if Trump loses, the drama could go on for weeks or months after Election Day. He has made no secret of the fact that he is willing to use every lever, deploy every dirty trick, political and rhetorical, to bring the country to the brink once more.

And so the choice is stark. The United States simply cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump. He is an agent of chaos, an enemy of liberal democracy, and a threat to America’s moral standing in the world. Kamala Harris—who has shown herself to be sensible, humane, and liberal-minded—is our choice for the Presidency. At the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, a few weeks ago, the American people were able to see both the stakes of this election and the vast differences between the candidates. The right choice—the necessary choice—is beyond debate. 

Published in the print edition of the October 7, 2024, issue, with the headline “Harris for President.”

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Sunday, September 29, 2024

Michigan voters support hope with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to protect democracy

Echo opinion letter published in The Oakland Press a Michigan newspaper:

I’ve never been so fired 😊up about a Presidential and Vice-Presidents- the likes of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. #VoteHarrisWalz2024

I had the opportunity (Aug. 7) to attend the Harris/Walz rally along with 18,000 other individuals in an airhanger overlooking Detroit Metro Airport’s McNamara Terminal. The sun was beating down but the slight breeze ushered in winds of change. This rally was the cherry on top of 2 weeks of advocacy – coming home from long days at work in the automotive industry only to join 2-3 hour Zoom calls with my husband after the kids went to bed – including White Women for Harris, Veteran Families for Harris, and White Dudes for Harris – which collectively raked in over 💲4 Million dollars into the estimated over 💲300 Million they’ve brought into the campaign since Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside to let Kamala Harris shine.


Governor Tim Walz and Vice-Presidential candidate attending the Michigan vs Minnesota football game on Septpember 28, 2024

We stood shoulder to shoulder for hours and listened to almost every significant Democratic leader from the State of Michigan speak at the rally, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, House of Representatives Hillary Scholten, Debbie Dingle, Elissa Slotkin, Shri Thanedar, and Haley Stevens, Senator Debbie Stabenow, and Governor (Big) Gretchen Whitmer. Their messages were peppered with inspirational one liners, humor, some cuss words (Gretch), but overall message of unity. They highlighted their misalignment with the opposition with facts on policy and change instead of hate and derision – even when small groups tried to gain momentum with chants of “Lock Him Up” they quickly waned in favor of “VOTE!”
Most of us stood there for hours, tirelessly shifting in our place amongst fellow like minded thinkers waiting for a glimpse of history in the making. Then Tim Walz took the stage to much fanfare as America’s Dad. A man who’s evolution from farmer to Governor is what the American Dream is made of. As a former Republican myself, he is the moderate we’ve been searching for – military background and pro-Gun (with smart gun laws) – he used his state’s surplus of tax revenue to invest in education and free breakfast and lunches for all school age children. He’s a candidate whose policies we could (and should) all get behind. He’s an example of not only how we can do better but we can be better. And he’s pivoted the narrative of the traditional Democratic ticket.

We all sat eagerly holding onto every word of their message. At the end of the day I came home with layers of sweat, a bad back, sore feet but a full heart and a feeling of optimism for America’s future. I’ll tell my kids about this experience as it was one for the books as we continue to fight for our democracy, for our voice, for our votes. As we came back into the bright sunshine of the tarmac at the end of the rally, we were bid farewell by the sun setting behind Air Force Two, a physical symbol of democracy.

From Theresa Osbourn, in Rochester Hills, in Michigan


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Saturday, September 28, 2024

Donald Trump enables Nazi sympathizers- he is an evil creature not qualified to lead - declared bankruptcy six times!

Echo opinion by David Mastio published by Kansas.com in The Witchita Eagle newspaper:
This week, it became clear that the sickness among Republicans and conservatives who have been enthralled by Donald Trump is not going to end when he loses the presidential election. The disease will continue its course. Indeed, it is possible things will get worse. This week, Tucker Carlson, a man who had a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican Convention where he sat next to Trump, invited Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper onto his streaming show and into the lives of millions of his fans to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler as a spurned peacemaker who was pushed into Jewish genocide by a war-mongering Winston Churchill. This is insane.

Carlson is bringing his fascist apologia show to T-Mobile Center in Kansas City. Some people are paying more than $100 to get close. The next day, Carlson will be speaking before thousands more in Wichita at InTrust Bank Arena. I don’t think this is what T-Mobile and InTrust had in mind when they paid for naming rights to these venues. Carlson is no fringe figure. As a Fox News commentator, he had an audience of millions five nights a week. When he became too extreme for Fox to stomach, millions followed him to his internet platforms where his commentary and interviews have only grown in popularity. His work has been shared by billionaire X social network owner Elon Musk. Similarly, the guests who will be sharing the stage for his two shows, Megyn Kelly, a defrocked journalist, and Charlie Kirk, head of conservative group Turning Point USA, have millions of their own followers. Locally, Pete Mundo of KCMO has interviewed Carlson on his show.


Right now it is unclear if this descent into shilling for a long-dead dictator 💀responsible for the deaths of some 20 million people is enough to get Kelly, Kirk and Mundo to back away. 

Shilling for dictators is a growing pastime for those in what remains of conservative media if this week’s other news is any indication. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted two employees of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda organization for funneling $10 million to a Tennessee firm, called Tenet Media, to pay conservative influencers Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin — also with their own millions of followers — to spew Kremlin propaganda to credulous conservatives skeptical of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. 

A commentator for Blaze Media, a site co-founded by conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Mark Levin, was fired by that organization for her involvement in the scheme. Johnson, Pool and Rubin claim to be victims in this fiasco that was part of a larger Russian effort to influence the 2024, elections in favor of Trump. 

As of now, they are unindicted, so it may be true that they were unwitting tools or, maybe more accurately, fools👺👹 for Putin.
Fools for evil Putin

But, let me tell you why Johnson, the worst among the three, is willing to take millions from unknown benefactors: He has no other choice because he is unemployable. The serial plagiarist has been fired over and over again for his shady dealings.

It is not fair to say that all conservative media have been overtaken by edge-lord fascism fluffing. National Review, The Washington Free Beacon and The Dispatch, among others, provide solid reporting, untainted by Russian boodle, and commentary by writers unimpressed with Trump and his acolytes. 

But, unfortunately, millions of Americans are reading, listening and viewing “news” that appears to be from a conservative perspective but is untethered to reality by (junk❗) “journalists” who are willing to defend whatever garbage💩 behavior or half-truth is convenient that day.

As long as that is the case, Trump’s legacy😢 will be with us. 

Writer David Mastio is a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star opinion correspondent.

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Friday, September 27, 2024

DonOLD is a deeply flawed draft dodger and failed employer who "stiffs" contractors

"defeat this dreadful man"....

Echo opinionl letter published in The Chronicle in Centralia Washington: 

Republican speakers at the failed RNC Milwaukee convention raised the idea that *God*❓ saved DonOLD Trump from assassination so that he could become the future U.S. president.

Really❓

As Christians who overlook Trump’s many shortcomings well know, the man they hope will advance their agenda is deeply flawed. 

Trump is a serial adulterer and divorcer. A draft dodger. He stiffs contractors, taking their work but not paying for it (lawyers, even).

He is a liar. When he says he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban bill, he’s lying. He tweets savage social messages that stir up hatred and death threats to those who inconvenience him — while pretending not to know that. He is a convicted felon, guilty of business fraud and subverting an election. He created a fake cash cow university and a fake cash cow charity. As president, he pardoned convicted cronies and extorted the president of Ukraine. As president, Trump sabotaged our country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — touting bleach and hydroxychloroquine as cures, resisting vaccination (while secretly getting one himself) and leaving nearly a million Americans dead before President Biden put the brakes on the epidemic. Out of office, he used his MAGA stooges in Congress to block passage of a tough, humane immigration policy, earlier this year.

There’s more, none of it good.

In God We Trust. To intervene on behalf of Trump❓ No, rather to bring out the best in all American people — to enable us to show our basic decency, defeat this dreadful man by a landslide vote, defeat his plans to riot himself back into the White House, and punish him by making him a loser.

From David Milne, in Thurston County,  the state of Washington 

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Thursday, September 26, 2024

Springfield Ohio is a tragically sad example of how an evil lie travels around the world "before truth gets its boots on"

Echo opinion with chilling imagry published in the Albany Herald, a Georgia newspaper, by Gene Lyons:

The formal term for what the *Trump Cult* has visited upon the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, is "blood libel." 
Trump campaign's newest evil nonsense constitutes a blood libel
Although foreigners and outsiders have doubtless been blamed for everything from droughts and floods to outbreaks of disease throughout human history, conspiracists have traditionally blamed Jews.

Historians generally trace the *evil👿👺💀* term to the year 1144 in Norwich, England, when the corpse of a 12-year-old child was found. As part of a campaign to establish the dead boy as a martyr and the church where he was buried as a (profitable) pilgrimage site, an enterprising monk wrote a series of tracts blaming local Jews for his ritual murder.

And so it has gone for centuries: a totally imaginary slander kept alive by bigots and crackpots from Russia to Southern California.

"You are not forgotten, Simon of Trent," wrote a gunman who shot up a synagogue near San Di
ego in 2019, referencing a slain toddler allegedly martyred in 1475.  Medievil horror
🏰🗡️⚔️⚔🐴🗡🛡⚜🏹👑🐲🤺🛡️💢👹
"The horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven."

Events in Ohio demonstrate that anti-Semitism is far from the only form of racist scapegoating in America today. 

The Trump Cult has gone downright medieval on undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump himself calls them "vermin" 🐍who are "poisoning the blood" of (white) Americans. 

During his catastrophically bad debate with Kamala Harris, the former president charged Haitian immigrants in Springfield with unspeakable crimes.

"In Springfield, they are eating the dogs," Trump said as the split screen broadcast showed Harris looking on incredulously. "They're eating the cats," Trump continued, repeating an internet conspiracy theory that local police call totally unsubstantiated. They attribute the rumors to a Facebook post citing its source as a "neighbor's daughter's friend."

The author has herself admitted that she has no idea if it's true, and regrets posting it online.

Challenged by debate moderator David Muir, Trump doubled down. "But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there."

Would it shock you to learn that no such firsthand accounts exist? Not even on Fox  (Fake❗)News, presumably because nobody in Ohio can be found who's willing to endorse so crazy a story even for the sake of the orange messiah. It would turn their lives upside down.

For most Americans, kidnapping and cooking a family pet would be a more shocking crime than, well, pretty much anything I can imagine. That's what makes it a blood libel: a false accusation that seeks to render its targets subhuman. Beneath contempt.

It follows that anybody who would endorse it deserves nothing but scorn. For all the predictable whining of his supporters about how terribly unfair it was of ABC moderators to correct this grotesque lie, the simple truth is that Trump hurt himself.

"You stupid mf'ers just got Trump to repeat your lie about the pets," right-wing talk radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. "Congrats on setting the news stories tomorrow by lying so Trump picks it up."

Yeah, well, nobody made him do it. The combination of Trump's own ignorance, credulousness and bigotry caused him serious political harm.

So, it's only fitting that the worst vice presidential candidate in recent American history, J.D. Vance, not only  doubled down on the libel, but went on national TV and bragged about it❗

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D. Vance? The reason he endorsed the anti-Haitian scare stories, he said, wasn't that they are true, he admitted to CNN's Dana Bash, but to correct news media bias.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people," Vance said, "then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast."


Incredulously, the normally unflappable Bash emphasized that Vance had just admitted the whole pet-eating business was a 🤥 
made-up story. (IOW- lies❗)

The candidate - Marine Corporal Vance.... didn't deny it.

"I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it," he insisted.

Meanwhile, the kinds of MAGA cranks who appear to see Trump as semi-divine and incapable of error sprang into action. The small city of Springfield was besieged by bomb threats and warnings of impending violence that led to school, hospital and university closings. Predictions of mayhem caused panic among the Haitian community.

They are legal immigrants actively recruited to the community to fill factory jobs that had gone begging, as local authorities, business leaders and Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine emphasized. 

It's all nonsense, a classic blood libel blaming the Haitians for the panic some benighted Ohioans feel at their black faces and Creole-accented voices. To Trumpers, poor deluded fools, that makes them frightening and evil.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000).

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Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Donald Trump owns the end of Roe V Wade is responsible for preventable deaths caused by his cruelty

Echo Letter to the Editor of the Albany Herald in Albany Georgia:

Trump's Abortion Ban❗😡

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Trump's actions make him guilty of murder By Joe DeMarco news@albanyherald.com
Updated Sep 23, 2024

Donald Trump said, "For 54 years they were trying to get Roe V. Wade terminated, and I did it and I am proud to have done it."

Two women recently lost their lives after they couldn't get legal abortions,. One of the women was bleeding in a parking lot.

All this because Trump thought he was being a hero by getting Roe V. Wade nullified. In my opinion, Donald Trump is guilty of murder.

Kamala Harris has vowed to reinstate Roe V. Wade when she is elected president. That is why I am voting for Kamala Harris.

Joe DeMarco in Jay, N.Y.

Joe DeMarco is a World War II veteran.

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Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Kamala Harris "Rocks"- 2024 presidential debate's star! She is ready to lead!

“IN SPRINGFIELD, THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!”
Yes, America, a once and (God forbid❗) possibly future president of the United States made that bizarre, baseless, possibly delusional statement Tuesday night. #VoteHarrisWalz2024 
Sometimes the word (J.D. Vance❗)  “weird”👿👹 just isn’t enough.

Before millions of TV viewers watching this election’s only scheduled presidential debate, Donald Trump warned us that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio town — the vast majority of them legal immigrants, mind you — are not only eating local dogs but cats, too.

They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what is happening,” he said. Wait until the childless cat ladies hear about this!

Repeating a meme from the right-wing recesses of social media and shared by the likes of his vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance (as well as our own - 'Cruz to lose❗'- Ted Cruz), Trump insisted it was true; ❓he saw it on television.😲😦😩 The man who wants the nuclear codes saw it on television.📺


Only there was little heart in what Trump was saying and selling. There never is.😒 As such, Harris stealthily invited Americans to attend one of Trump’s rallies so they could observe not just the crowds leaving early out of exhaustion and boredom but how little Trump talks about you, us, We The People, in his droning monologues.

Donald Trump, rambling and raving, proved that he’s the same old Donald Trump, only worse. Trump’s humane society public service announcement was far from the only bizarre statement he made. 

Among the more memorable:

Transgender operations “on illegal aliens that are in prison."
• “She’s a Marxist; everyone knows she’s a Marxist."
• ‘We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.’ Adolph Hitler, who reportedly drew 700,000 at Nuremberg in 1934, would surely disagree.
• Some states allow “abortion” after the baby is born. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he claimed. Of course, no state allows infanticide.
• He called himself “a leader on fertilization IVF." 
👺
• His model for an effective head of state continues to be Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban.
• He will magically end Russia’s war with Ukraine and Israel’s war with Hamas. How? He won’t say.His Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, could only smile and shake her head. “Talk about extreme,” she said. She had obviously gotten under his skin.

Growing stronger and more assured as the debate unfolded — and as Trump grew increasingly agitated and unhinged as he took her rhetorical bait — Harris proved to doubters and to those who just didn’t know much about her that she is quick-witted, controlled and thoughtful enough to be the next president of the United States.

We’ll add intuitive to the list since her strategic facial expressions — most notably, the stern squint and the mix of pity and incredulity conveyed in her fabulously furrowed brow — were quite effective. 

Texas translation: Bless his heart.

As usual, he was the high priest of hyperbole: “We have a nation that is dying.”… “We’re going to end up in a Third World War.”… Joe Biden was “the worst president in the history of our country.” Harris “goes down as the worst vice president.”… “Israel will not exist within two years from now.”

Earlier this week, we expressed a bit of impatience with scoring a debate as a performance, and yet Harris “performed” about as well as any presidential aspirant in the past half century. Seven weeks after a debate dramatically changed the course of American politics, Harris may have done it again — albeit in a positive way.

Harris’ triumph was a 90-minute indictment of a man who has absolutely no business getting anywhere near the White House again. A sharp and unrelenting prosecutor, she reminded voters of the criminal convictions he faces. “Donald Trump actually has no plan for you,” she said, speaking directly to viewers, “because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you.”

She reminded Americans of the horrors of Jan. 6 and Trump’s Nero-like role in that debacle. She accused him of being obsessed with himself and no one else (and certainly not the nation). Despite his denials, she left him anchored to the now-notorious Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration. She called him a threat to the future of the country if voters buy into his tired doomsday schtick.

In arguably her most effective indictment, she tied Trump to the worst of the results of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. He was responsible, she charged, for women “bleeding out” in parking lots, for women with problem pregnancies having to flee to other states to get the medical care they desperately needed, for forcing a 12-year-old victim of rape to carry a child to term.

She also outlined her policy positions more effectively than she had done during a CNN interview last month, including some of the more liberal positions she held during her presidential run in 2019. She said she no longer supports a ban on fracking or a Medicare-for-all program. She also reminded viewers that she supported a tough, bipartisan immigration bill, one that Trump forced his Republican congressional allies to kill.

“My values have not changed, and what is important is that there is a president who actually brings values and a perspective that is about lifting people up and not beating people down and name-calling,” she said. 

Harris proposed lowering housing prices in part by working with the private sector to increase supply by “3 million homes” in her first term. She also proposed a $6,000 child tax credit and a $50,000 tax deduction for start-up small businesses.

We do wish Harris would have been clearer about the economy and not dodged the hard questions such as why the Biden-Harris administration kept some of Trump’s Chinese tariffs in place. Blaming Trump for leaving a flailing economy without mentioning the pandemic is as disingenuous as Trump blaming Biden for inflation without mentioning the pandemic. Trump may have to mislead to win. Harris doesn’t. Doing so risks losing some of the higher ground in this race. Meanwhile, Trump still refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election to President Biden. He refused to say that he wanted Ukraine to win its devastating war with Russia, refused to say whether he would veto a national abortion ban. He did say he has “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act but still no plan. 

Harris reminded viewers — and Trump — that he had been “fired” by 81 million people in the last election. “We cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts as he did in the past to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election,” she said. 

After the 2024 presidential Tuesday night’s debate, here’s what we know:

• The American people deserve better than Donald Trump. “We don’t have to go back,” to quote Harris. “Let’s not go back.”

• Kamala Harris is prepared to be president.⭐۞

• “They” are not eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

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Monday, September 23, 2024

Republicans somehow wrongly believe that shutting down government will support election integrity

AOL.com reports:  "With just over six weeks until Election Day, the poll finds Vice-President Kamala Harris with a 5-point lead over former President Donald Trump among registered voters, 49% to 44%. While that result is within the margin of error, it’s a clear shift from July’s poll, when Trump was ahead by 2 points before President Joe Biden’s exit."
Echo opinion published in The Washingon Post by the Editorial Board:

Threatening a shutdown, Trump reminds voters what his first term was really like:  Republicans threaten to hold up funding the government unless Congress makes voting harder.

OMG! The country is again hurtling toward a government shutdown on Oct. 1 and, instead of helping, former president Donald Trump is showing voters he intends to govern in a second term much like he did in his first — chaotically.

At issue is whether Republicans should make the passage of a restrictive voting measure a condition for funding the government. “I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it,” Mr. Trump said on a podcast two weeks ago. “It should be in the bill, and if it’s not in the bill, you want to close it up.”

But, 😡😩House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) plans to do just that. So,  he intends to hold a vote on a funding bill that includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which is supposed to crack down on illegal voting in national elections, despite scant evidence that this is a problem. 


Noncitizen voting is already a serious crime — punishable by prison, removal from the United States and a permanent bar on admission to the country. The legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship for people to register and cast ballots, including mail-in voting. This would add a barrier to electoral participation that would probably result in many legitimate voters being deterred and legitimate votes not being counted.

The act, which already passed the Republican-controlled House as stand-alone legislation a few months ago, would require states to purge their voter rolls and even let individuals sue election officials who register voters without first checking their documents.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1996 already requires states to use a common voter registration form, which includes attesting, under penalty of perjury, that the applicant is a U.S. citizen. Violators can and should be prosecuted.

Given the penalties, it’s not surprising that noncitizen voting in federal elections is rare. The Heritage Foundation has spread deceptive videos that suggest rampant illegal voting by noncitizens in swing states such as Georgia, but the think tank’s own database shows just 23 documented instances of noncitizens voting in federal elections from 2003 to 2023 across the entire country. (We have consistently opposed noncitizens voting in municipal elections, including the District of Columbia, but national legislation concerning federal voting would not stop that.)

Without any evidence, Mr. Johnson claimed this spring that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.” After winning in 2016, Mr. Trump claimed that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast in states such as California, denying him a popular vote victory. (He could never answer: Why wouldn’t these illegal votes have been cast in the battleground states that decided the election?) A commission Trump appointed in 2017, failed to discover any proof before disbanding. Gut feelings — particularly ones that line up with political interests — do not substitute for evidence.

Governance-minded Republicans recognize the strategic folly of  Johnson and Trump’s brinkmanship. Staffers for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have warned privately that forcing a showdown on voting in a government funding debate could open the door for Democrats to tack on their own voting-related legislation. Another twist is that Republicans under Trump might wind up discouraging Americans who would have voted for the GOP.

Republicans’ preoccupation with clamping down on voting access stems from a time when they benefited from suppressing the vote, particularly among minority voters. For their part, Democratic leaders favor passing federal legislation, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act, that would increase voting access.

Yet spending much time sorting out who would gain politically from this or that voting bill risks missing the principles at stake. Regardless of who would net votes, making it harder to cast ballots is wrong absent some urgent threat to voting integrity. To the extent there is such a threat, it is on the part of politicians who sow doubt about the nation’s electoral system — and propose new rules that would burden millions of Americans.

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Sunday, September 22, 2024

Project 2025 is the Republican "deep state" 900-page document with step-by-step instructions to create a fascist government

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Ezra Klein:

In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.

That, after all, is what Project 2025, was actually meant to be. The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. 

But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025, and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.

But Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders. It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees — nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government — trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done. They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.

Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. Part of this reflected Trump’s erratic leadership style and the constant conflict between the warring factions inside his White House: the traditional Republicans clustered around Mike Pence and Reince Priebus; the MAGA types led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller; the foreign policy establishment that spoke through H.R. McMaster and Nikki Haley; the corporatists led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. 

Read any book on the Trump presidency, and you will be buried in examples of Trump’s top appointees trying to foil each other — and him.

But some of it reflected a federal bureaucracy that resisted Trump and the people he appointed. In a presentation at the 2024 National Conservatism conference in Washington, Katy Talento, who oversaw health care policy on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, described the obstacles she faced:

There’s like a handful of political appointees at an agency with hundreds of thousands of employees and maybe one or two of those appointees is sufficiently experienced to write regulations. They can’t seek any help from experienced but hostile bureaucrats that surround them, or those drafts get leaked, or bad advice gets provided, and poison pills get put into regs, drafts get slowed down or scuttled all together. So this dramatically limits the productivity potential of a Republican administration.
This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing. There is an online portal that, even now, invites applicants to apply for inclusion in “the Presidential Personnel Database.” It goes on to say that “with the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”

To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” writes Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in one of its chapters. Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

This, I would say, is the unifying theory of a second Trump term. Purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, said in July.

By all accounts, Trump and his campaign are furious that Project 2025 has been hung like a millstone around his neck. But there are two reasons their disavowals have counted for little. The first is that the campaign has treated Trump’s policy plans like a secret the public can only be let in on after his victory. His issues page is a joke, his official platform a Delphic collection of all-caps aphorisms backed up by the occasional bullet point.

The next Trump administration will do far more than the Trump campaign is describing, and Project 2025 — which was produced with input from more than 100 conservative organizations that see themselves as part of the MAGA-governing coalition — filled the void that Trump himself has left. He did not tell us what he was going to do, so Project 2025 did.

The second is that Trump’s 2024 campaign differs from his 2016 campaign in a fundamental way. In 2016, Trump ran as the destroyer of the existing Republican coalition. He won by humiliating the politicians who had held power before him, but he did not, during that campaign, attempt to replace them. And so Trump presided over a kind of uneasy coalition government with the Republican Party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. His major domestic policy projects reflected that coalition: Repeal of Obamacare was what united congressional Republicans in 2016, so that’s what the Trump administration attempted in 2017. Cutting corporate taxes is what got Speaker Ryan out of bed in the morning, so that is what the Trump administration turned to next.

But now Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump. But Trump is not temperamentally suited to the work of managing a coalition and he has not elevated a trusted ideological consigliere to do it for him. He is a diffident, distracted ruler, and the result is dozens of groups competing for his favor and unsure of how to win it.

The Heritage Foundation was one of these groups and Project 2025 their signature effort. In 2021, Roberts took over Heritage and retooled it into an organization dedicated to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He sought centrality through both scale and publicity: Project 2025 was a vast undertaking, and Roberts promoted it relentlessly. This is now seen as folly, but it is easy enough to follow the original logic: Heritage has experience putting together governing documents for insurgent candidates, going back to the Mandate for Leadership that Ronald Reagan relied on in 1981, and Trump often rewards the loyalists he notices fighting for him in public. But Roberts went too far.

“The problem, which I had always suspected, was that very few plans survive contact with Donald Trump,” said Matthew Continetti, the author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.” “He always wants to maintain maximum flexibility and maximum maneuverability in order to improve his position at any given moment. So he was not just going to turn around and say, yes, Project 2025 is exactly what my program will be, and it’s exactly who I plan to have in my administration.”

But if Trump wins, he will need plans and he will need people. And so the problems that Project 2025 has caused for Trump in the campaign would also bedevil his presidency.

The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.

Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is, but MAGA is whatever his movement becomes. This is why JD Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment. It is telling that it is Vance, not Trump, who wrote a glowing forward to Roberts’s forthcoming book. Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.

Trump’s problem in the 2024 election is that he can no longer run as if he is a man alone. Everyone knew Mike Pence did not represent Trumpism. But Trump chose Vance to be the heir of the MAGA movement. A Trump administration would be full of people like Vance pursuing the agendas they believe in. In the Talento presentation I mentioned, she describes the Biden administration as “a federal leviathan that is killing our babies” and argues that “every cabinet secretary who comes into a new, hopefully Republican administration will have a pro-life agenda that they must enact.” This is not Trump’s election-year message but it would be his administration’s reality.

Another Trump administration would be filled with people pursuing agendas like this at every level, and properly so: That is what coalitions do when they win elections. But this is why Trump’s disavowals ring so false: He is denying a reality of his second term that everyone else can plainly see. Project 2025 is not a perfect guide to that second term, but it the closest thing we have to one. It was all so much easier when the deep state was something Trump could complain about, rather than something he had to manage and own.

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