April 17, 2024 (Wednesday)
Yesterday on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, Miles Taylor wrote: “After 2016, I helped lead the US gov[ernmen]t response to Russia’s election interference. In 20... View MoreApril 17, 2024 (Wednesday)
Yesterday on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, Miles Taylor wrote: “After 2016, I helped lead the US gov[ernmen]t response to Russia’s election interference. In 2024, foreign interference will be *worse.* Tech[nology is] more powerful. Adversaries more brazen. American public more susceptible. Political leaders across party lines MUST UNITE against this.”
Taylor served as chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump.
Today, Catherine Belton of the Washington Post reported on a secret 2023 document from Russia’s Foreign Ministry calling for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures that attack “‘a coalition of unfriendly countries’ led by the United States. Those measures are designed to affect “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” of Russia’s perceived adversaries.
The plan is to weaken the United States and convince other countries, particularly those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that the U.S. will not stand by its allies. By weakening those alliances, Russian leaders hope to shift global power by strengthening Russia’s ties to China, Iran, and North Korea and filling the vacuum left by the crumbling democratic alliances (although it is not at all clear that China is on board with this plan).
According to Belton, one of the academics who advised the authors of the Russian document suggested that Russia should “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there,” increase tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, and “escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.”
The Russian document suggests that the front lines of that physical, political, and psychological fight are in Ukraine. It says that the outcome of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order.”
Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky told Belton: “The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss. This is an absolute misunderstanding.”
Media and lawmakers, including those in the Republican Party, have increasingly called out the degree to which Russian propaganda has infiltrated American politics through Republican lawmakers and media figures. Earlier this month, both Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned about Russian disinformation in their party. Turner told CNN’s State of the Union that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” When asked which Republicans had fallen to Russian propaganda, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”
That growing popular awareness has highlighted that House Republicans under House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have for six months refused to pass a national security supplemental bill with additional aid for Ukraine, as well as for Israel and the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. After the Senate spent two months negotiating border security provisions House Republicans demanded, Republicans killed that bill with the provisions at Trump’s direction, and the Senate then passed a bill without those provisions in February.
Johnson has been coordinating closely with former president Trump, who has made his admiration for Russia and his disregard for Ukraine very clear since his people weakened their support for Ukraine in the 2016 Republican Party platform. Johnson is also under pressure from MAGA Republicans in the House, like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who oppose funding Ukraine, some of them by making statements that echo Russian propaganda.
While the White House, the Pentagon, and a majority of both chambers of Congress believe that helping Ukraine defend itself is crucial to U.S. security, Johnson has refused to take the Senate measure up, even though the House would pass it if he did. But as Ukraine’s ability to defend itself has begun to weaken, pressure for additional aid has ramped up. At the same time, in the wake of Iran’s attack on Israel last weekend, Republicans have suddenly become eager to provide additional funds to Israel. It began to look as if Johnson might bring up some version of foreign aid.
But discussions of bringing forward Ukraine aid brought not only Greene but also Thomas Massie (R-KY) to threaten yesterday to challenge Johnson’s speakership, and there are too few Republicans in the House to defend him.
Today, Johnson brought forward not the Senate bill, but rather three separate bills to fund Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and Ukraine, with pieces that House Republicans have sought. A fourth bill will include other measures Republicans have demanded. And a fifth will permit an up-or-down vote on most of the measures in the extreme border bill the House passed in 2023. At the time, that measure was intended as a signaling statement because House Republicans knew that the Democratic Senate would keep it from becoming law.
Johnson said he expected to take a final vote on the measures Saturday evening. He will almost certainly need Democratic votes to pass them, and possibly to save his job. Democrats have already demanded the aid to Gaza that was in the Senate bill but is not yet in the House bills.
Reese Gorman, political reporter for The Daily Beast, reported that Johnson explained his change of heart like this: “Look, history judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now… I can make a selfish decision and do something that is different but I'm doing here what I believe to be the right thing.… I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.… I’m willing to take personal risk for that.”
His words likely reflect a changing awareness in Republican Party leadership that the extremism of MAGA Republicans is exceedingly unpopular. Trump’s courtroom appearances—where, among other things, he keeps falling asleep—are unlikely to bolster his support, while his need for money is becoming more and more of a threat both to his image and to his fellow Republicans. Today the Trump campaign asked Republican candidates in downballot races for at least 5% of the money they raise with any fundraising appeal that uses Trump’s name or picture. They went on: “Any split that is higher than 5% will be seen favorably by the RNC and President Trump’s campaign and is routinely reported to the highest levels of leadership within both organizations.”
Nonetheless, Greene greeted Johnson’s bills with amendments requiring members of Congress to “conscript in the Ukrainian military” if they voted for aid to Ukraine.
A headline on the Fox News media website today suggested that a shift away from MAGA is at least being tested. It read: “Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot. She is trying to wreck the [Republican Party].” The article pointed out that 61% of registered voters disapprove of the Republican Party while only 36% approve. That approval rating has indeed fallen at least in part because of the performative antics of the extremists, among them the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that made him the first cabinet officer to be impeached in almost 150 years. Today the Senate killed that impeachment without a trial.
As soon as Johnson announced the measures, President Joe Biden threw his weight behind them. In a statement, he said: "I strongly support this package to get critical support to Israel and Ukraine, provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and bolster security and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Israel is facing unprecedented attacks from Iran, and Ukraine is facing continued bombardment from Russia that has intensified dramatically in the last month.
“The House must pass the package this week and the Senate should quickly follow. I will sign this into law immediately to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends, and we won’t let Iran or Russia succeed.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 16, 2024 (Tuesday)
On Sunday, April 14, 2024, Iran fired about 170 drones, more than 120 ballistic missiles, and more than 30 cruise missiles from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and areas controlled by Hez... View MoreApril 16, 2024 (Tuesday)
On Sunday, April 14, 2024, Iran fired about 170 drones, more than 120 ballistic missiles, and more than 30 cruise missiles from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and areas controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon toward Israel. The strike was in retaliation for a strike on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed two top commanders in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, along with other officials. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the Syrian strike, but officials from other countries believe Israel is responsible. Iran warned its attack was coming, and Israel and the U.S., along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and France, shot the missiles down. Israel sustained almost no damage. One Arab-Israeli girl was critically injured.
In the leadup to the attack, Arab countries shared intelligence and radar tracking, opened their airspace while closing it to Iran, and even supplied forces to withstand Iran’s attack. According to David S. Cloud, Dov Lieber, Stephen Kalin, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal, in March 2022, top military officials from Israel and Arab countries met in Egypt at the invitation of U.S. Marine General Frank McKenzie, then the top U.S. commander in the region, to discuss coordination against Iran’s growing military capabilities.
That prospective coordination had never been tested, but the fact that Arab states stood alongside Israel against Iran highlights changing dynamics in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the attack, a source connected to the Saudi royal family charged Iran with instigating the Gaza war to stop normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon are Iran’s proxies.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 250 others, President Joe Biden’s apparent top priority has been making sure the crisis doesn’t spread. On October 10, he warned: “to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.”
The U.S. moved two of its eleven carrier battle groups, which usually consist of an aircraft carrier, at least four other ships, and about 7,500 personnel, to the region. At the same time, while Biden has been careful to note that the U.S. cannot dictate policy to another country, he warned Israel against a planned preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The U.S. has also led the effort to stop Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen from attacking ships in the Red Sea. The attacks have disrupted global shipping, forcing ships to reroute around Africa.
Since the early days of the conflict, the approach of Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to destroying Hamas has caused a deepening rift with the Biden administration. While the U.S. supports Israel’s right to self-defense and “legitimate military objectives,” it has repeatedly called out mounting Palestinian civilian casualties. Then, while the administration has consistently called for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the plan for a postwar settlement Netanyahu finally proposed in February rejected that policy and instead called for Israel to maintain military control of Gaza indefinitely.
Increasingly, the Israeli government has rejected U.S. requests to protect civilian lives, including by allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza, where people are starving. After a brief humanitarian pause in fighting in November, efforts to achieve another pause to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza have failed repeatedly. Frustration in the U.S. over mounting civilian deaths and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has led to widespread protests against Biden as well as against Israel, and has led Democratic critics of Israeli policy to demand that the U.S. condition military aid to Israel on a ceasefire.
Tensions rose higher when Israel announced it would launch a ground offensive against Hamas in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, without a plan for protecting civilians. More than a million Palestinians have taken shelter there. In March, national security advisor Jake Sullivan said that the president would not support “a military operation in Rafah that does not protect civilians, that cuts off the main arteries of humanitarian assistance and that places enormous pressure on the Israel-Egypt border.”
Israel did not notify the U.S. when on April 1 it attacked the Iranian diplomatic complex in Syria, a strike U.S. defense officials believed put U.S. forces at risk. Also on April 1, Israeli forces killed seven aid workers—including individuals from Australia, Poland, and the United Kingdom, as well as a Palestinian and a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen—with the humanitarian aid group World Central Kitchen. The workers had coordinated with the military and were in three separate marked vehicles.
On April 3, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directly called out Israel’s silence about its attack on Iranian leaders in Syria in a telephone call to his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
On April 4, in a telephone call, Biden told Netanyahu that “the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable.” He said Israel must “announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.” He reiterated support for Israel but appeared to distinguish between Israel and its current government. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on the call, told a reporter: "The president made clear we will make sure Israel isn't left without the ability to defend itself. At the same time, if there are no changes to their approach, we are likely to change our approach.”
Israel has pointed to the inefficient distribution of aid within Gaza as a cause of hardship, but three hours after the call, Israel announced that it would open the Erez crossing into northern Gaza for the first time since October 7, use the Port of Ashdod in Israel as a hub for supplies, and allow more Gaza-bound aid trucks into Israel from Jordan. Days later, Israeli officials dropped the plan to open Erez, and the Ashdod port is not yet accepting aid shipments; Defense Minister Gallant said, “We plan to flood Gaza with aid and we are expecting to reach 500 trucks per day,” but he did not say when that would happen.
While this was taking place, according to the four Wall Street Journal reporters, the administration pressed Arab states for intelligence about a retaliatory strike from Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia shared intelligence, and Jordan allowed warplanes to use its airspace while also intercepting Iranian missiles with its own planes. The White House coordinated Israeli and Arab defensive measures. According to U.S. officials, officials from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council were “in constant, ongoing, continuous contact with Israelis, with other partners in the region, as well as Iran with a series of direct communications through the Swiss channel and other relevant players,” as well as with “Turkey and China,” “in anticipation of the events that transpired.”
This was the background when Iran attacked Israel on Sunday.
In the aftermath of the attack, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, “The matter can be deemed concluded.” The White House immediately gathered the leaders of the Group of 7 wealthy democracies, who issued a statement calling on all parties to “avoid further escalation.” Then Biden urged Netanyahu to “think very carefully and strategically” about retaliation and noted that Israel had “got the best of it,” as it had killed senior Iranian military commanders but lost none of its own leaders. Netanyahu is under great pressure from his right-wing coalition to retaliate, but some members of his war cabinet have stressed that they want “to establish an international coalition and strategic alliance to counter the threat posed by Iran.”
The U.S. warned Israel it would not participate in any offensive counterstrike against Iran, although it has announced new economic sanctions against Iran. Matt Bradley of NBC News pointed out that an aggressive Israeli response would run the risk of dissolving the fragile cooperation between Arab states and Israel that helped to repel the Iranian attack. That cooperation illustrated that Iran is increasingly isolated, but as Oraib Al Rantawi, director of a Jordanian think tank, told Bradley, “Those Arab countries are in a very critical situation. There is no easy position to take….”
In the U.S., Republicans, including House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH) and Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, immediately said the U.S. should join Israel if it launched a retaliatory attack, saying they hoped to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. (David Sanger of the New York Times reminded readers yesterday that in 2015, in a deal with seven countries after two years of negotiations, Iran agreed to surrender 97% of its uranium, but Trump pulled out of that deal in 2018, and Iran returned to developing weapons-grade uranium.)
In the House, Republicans who have been refusing to pass the national security supplemental bill that provides additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, as well as the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid to Gaza, have suddenly snapped to and are demanding additional funding for Israel. A researcher at an Israeli think tank estimated the cost of Israel’s interception of the Iranian weapons on Sunday at more than $550 million.
The Senate passed the measure in February, and the House is expected to as well if House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) brings it up for a vote. But Johnson is facing a revolt from MAGA Republicans who are so adamantly opposed to aiding Ukraine they threatened to oust him as speaker if he tries to pass it. Yesterday, Johnson said he would break the measure up and try to pass it in four pieces. Extremists don’t like this either. Two Republicans—Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kentucky’s Thomas Massie—have said they will challenge Johnson’s speakership, meaning that Johnson will have to rely on Democratic votes not only to pass an aid measure, but also to keep his speakership.
The House is due to recess from Thursday, April 18, until Monday, April 29. This afternoon, House Intelligence Committee chair Turner and the top Democrat on the committee, Jim Himes (D-CT), released a statement: “We must pass Ukraine aid now,” they wrote. “Today, in a classified briefing, our Committee was informed of the critical need to provide Ukraine military aid this week. The United States must stand against Putin’s war of aggression now as Ukraine’s situation on the ground is critical.”
Today the House finally delivered impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate, two months after approving them, and demanded a full trial.
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 15, 2024 (Monday)
April 15 is a curiously fraught day in American history.
In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down a rebellion in the southern states.... View MoreApril 15, 2024 (Monday)
April 15 is a curiously fraught day in American history.
In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down a rebellion in the southern states.
In 1865, Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m., and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who adored the president, said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
In 1912 the British passenger liner RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m. after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
In 1920, two security guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, were murdered on this date; Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti would be accused of the crime, convicted, and, in 1927, executed.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color line in baseball’s major leagues.
In 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others.
And on April 15, 2024, the criminal case of The People of New York v. Donald J. Trump began in Manhattan.
For the first time in history, a former president is facing criminal prosecution.
The case has been dubbed a “hush money” case by the media, but it is really a case about election interference. In 2016, shortly after the Access Hollywood tape in which then-candidate Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women became public, Trump allegedly falsified business records of the Trump Organization to hide payments to individuals who possessed damaging stories about him, especially about his behavior with women, before the election.
Then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged she had had an affair with Trump, $130,000 through a shell company. He also set up a $150,000 payment from the publisher of the National Enquirer to Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also claimed to have had an affair with Trump. That money would give the National Enquirer exclusive rights to the story, meaning they could decline to publish it and she could not take it elsewhere. This practice is known as “catch-and-kill.”
Trump then allegedly falsified business records to reimburse Cohen for “legal expenses.” Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying those records. The case might last as long as 8 weeks.
In many ways, this trial is a vindication of the rule of law. Despite his many attempts to delay it, a former president is facing accountability for his actions just as any American should.
The trial schedule reflected that standard practice. Presiding judge Juan Merchan set out the terms of the trial, covering what information the jury can hear about Trump and reminding Trump that, per the laws of New York, if he fails to appear in court as required, a warrant will be issued for his arrest.
But as jury selection began today, it was also clear that this is no normal trial. The names of the jurors will not be released outside the courtroom out of concerns for their safety, underscoring the degree to which Trump has urged his supporters to violence. And the country is so deeply divided over Trump and his movement that more than half of the first batch of jurors were excused when they said they could not judge the case impartially. No jurors were chosen today.
Trump has used this case—like his others—to try to undermine the rule of law. Rarely arguing that he didn’t commit any of the offenses for which he was charged in four different cases—two civil, two criminal—he has insisted instead that he is being unfairly prosecuted. The Democrats have rigged the judicial system against him, he repeatedly claims, and enough of his loyalists have bought that idea that today some of them urged Trump supporters in the jury pool to undermine the rule of law by lying to get on the jury, then refusing to convict (a plea that observers noted sounded like jury tampering).
Trump’s effort to signal that he remains disgusted by the charges against him continued today. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted that “[s]hortly before court adjourned for the day, Trump’s campaign sent out a fundraising email falsely claiming he had just stormed out of court.” But it was notable that only a few dozen of his supporters showed up at the court today, and they did not stay long.
Trump has also refused to stop attacking the judge and other participants in the trial despite a gag order imposed by the judge. Today, even as prosecutors were asking Judge Merchan to find Trump in contempt for violating the gag order, Trump posted a video in which one of his allies attacked the judge’s wife as well as primary witness Michael Cohen.
Judge Merchan has scheduled a hearing on potential violations of the gag order for the morning of April 23.
Trump is trying to undermine the rule of law not only out of apparent fear of the outcome of his trials, but also because his appearance in court is likely to hurt his popularity. Last month an Ipsos poll showed that 32% of respondents said a conviction in this case would make them less likely to support Trump for the presidency. And that is before we have heard any of the new evidence that various sources have said we will hear, and which, by the nature of the case, is likely to be sordid.
Seeing Trump treated like any defendant is almost certain to damage his brand as a man who commands his surroundings. Today, Haberman noted: “One thing that is striking: Trump has used the previous court appearances in other cases to project an image of grandeur. That is hard to do in this dingy courtroom, which smells slightly off and where he is an island amid a sea of people.”
Further, the public nature of this trial will make it harder for Trump to present himself only through carefully curated appearances. Haberman also noted that Trump, who has repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” appeared to fall asleep during today’s proceedings. “Repeatedly, his head would fall down,” Haberman said. “He didn’t pay attention to a note his lawyer…passed him. His jaw kept falling on his chest and his mouth kept going slack.” (While Trump was nodding off in court, President Biden was meeting in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Mohammed Shyaa al-Sudani of the Republic of Iraq, and then with Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic.)
Outside of this case, Trump’s image as a wealthy man is also crumbling. Today was the day by which Trump’s lawyers needed to prove that the $175 million appeals bond he posted against the $454 million judgment in the fraud case would really secure the judgment. Late tonight, his lawyers filed their justification of the bond, insisting it was secure and saying there was no need for the hearing about it, scheduled for April 22. Legal analysts on social media immediately found errors in the document.
Trump’s lawyers also filed paperwork today with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue more than 20 million more shares of common stock in the Trump Media & Technology Group. The price of the company’s stock has been dropping since the spike after the initial public offering of March 26. Upon today’s news it dropped another 18%. It has dropped 62% since public trading began.
Although news from Manhattan took up most of the oxygen today, the Commerce Department also made a major announcement: through the CHIPS and Science Act it is investing up to $6.4 billion in a Samsung Electronics chip manufacturing and research cluster in Taylor, Texas. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the two proposed factories will create at least 17,000 construction and 4,500 manufacturing jobs.
In addition to its historical significance, April 15 is also Tax Day. Biden reinstated the tradition of voluntarily releasing tax returns after Trump ended it, and today Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff all released their taxes, revealing that their salaries make up most of their income.
Ken Thomas and Ashlea Ebeling of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump campaign did not answer questions about whether Trump would release his tax returns.
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 14, 2024 (Sunday)
Today, on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Ha... View MoreApril 14, 2024 (Sunday)
Today, on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting former president Trump.
“Just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said, “You support [Trump] for president even if he's convicted in [the] classified documents [case]. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”
Sununu answered: “Yeah. Me and 51% of America.”
Aside from its overstatement of Trump’s national support, Sununu’s answer illustrated the triumph of politics over principle. Earlier in the interview, Sununu explained that he could swallow all of Trump’s negatives because he wanted a Republican administration. “This is about politics,” he said.
Sununu is part of the Republican faction that focuses on cutting taxes and slashing regulations. Trump has promised further tax cuts, while Biden has said he will raise taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations to make sure the nation does not have to cut Social Security benefits and Medicare. Republicans have suggested they will make those cuts to balance the budget, although at least 90% of the current budget deficit is not due to emergencies like Covid, but is a result of tax cuts under George W. Bush and Trump.
Sununu may be embracing Trump for his fiscal policies. But there is possibly another dynamic at play in the shift of Republican leaders behind Trump. As Thomas Edsall outlined in the New York Times on April 10 in a piece about donors, they appear to be afraid of retaliation if they don’t join his team. Certainly he has worked to instill that fear, warning in January that anyone who contributed to Haley’s campaign “from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”
Trump has been very clear that he intends to use the power of the state to crush those who he feels have been insufficiently supportive of him. There is every reason to take him at his word, as he tried to do exactly that during his presidency. He used the Internal Revenue Service to harass former FBI director James Comey—who refused to kill the investigation into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives as Trump demanded—and Andrew McCabe, who took over as acting FBI director after Trump fired Comey.
He demanded investigations and indictments of former president Barack Obama and then–former vice president Joe Biden, former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as well as a Democratic lawyer. Former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, whom Trump appointed after he fired Preet Bharara, recalled: “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining—in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
That dynamic already appears to be at work as people are obeying in advance. On April 10, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Hume Kennerly resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation after his fellow trustees declined to present the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of concern that a future President Trump would retaliate against the organization by taking away its tax-exempt status.
”The historical irony was completely lost on you,” Kennerly wrote. “Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.”
Harking back to Ford’s service in the World War II Navy, Kennerly wrote: “Did [Lieutenant] Gerald Ford meet the enemy head-on because he thought he wouldn’t get killed? No. He did it despite that possibility. This executive committee, on the other hand, bolted before any shots were fired. You aren’t alone. Many foundations, organizations, corporations, and other entities are caught up in this tidal wave of timidity and fear that’s sweeping this country. I mistakenly thought we were better than that. This is the kind of acquiescent behavior that leads to authoritarianism. President Ford most likely would have come out even tougher and said that it leads directly to fascism.”
As Princeton sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppele told Edsall, those still operating under the impression that they will curry favor with a dictator are painfully unaware of how dictators actually operate: like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, if he is returned to power, Trump will use the power of the state to squeeze the wealthy as well as his political opponents, threatening them with investigations, audits, regulation—even criminal charges—unless they do as they are told.
But Sununu’s cynical announcement that he would destroy American democracy if it meant his party could stay in power is not only a misguided approach to trying to appease a dictator. It is a profound rejection of the meaning of American democracy: that we all are created equal and have a right to a say in our government. Throughout our history, Americans have found those principles so fundamental to human self-determination that they have given their lives for them.
It’s hard to miss that Sununu’s statement fell on the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who stood at the cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where those who had died to defend the United States in July 1863 were buried and asked his fellow Americans to rededicate themselves “to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 13, 2024 (Saturday)
There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his f... View MoreApril 13, 2024 (Saturday)
There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.
While these two stories are related, they are not the same.
For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone.
But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.
But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.
Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill.
But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Republican senators declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.
The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists.
It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time.
That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable.
He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.
Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.
Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced.
Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 12, 2024 (Friday)
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor.
Attacking the fort seemed a logic... View MoreApril 12, 2024 (Friday)
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor.
Attacking the fort seemed a logical outcome of events that had been in play for at least four months. On December 20, 1860, as soon as it was clear Abraham Lincoln had won the 1860 presidential election, South Carolina lawmakers had taken their state out of the Union. “The whole town [of Charleston] was in an uproar,” Elizabeth Allston recalled. “Parades, shouting, firecrackers, bells ringing, cannon on the forts booming, flags waving, and excited people thronging the streets.”
Mississippi had followed suit on January 9, 1861; Florida on January 10; Alabama on January 11; Georgia on January 19; Louisiana on January 26; and Texas on February 1. By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven southern states had left the Union and formed their own provisional government that protected human enslavement.
Their move had come because the elite enslavers who controlled those southern states believed that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marked the end of their way of life. Badly outnumbered by the northerners who insisted that the West must be reserved for free men, southern elites were afraid that northerners would bottle up enslavement in the South and gradually whittle away at it. Those boundaries would mean that white southerners would soon be outnumbered by the Black Americans they enslaved, putting not only their economy but also their very lives at risk.
To defend their system, elite southern enslavers rewrote American democracy. They insisted that the government of the United States of America envisioned by the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence had a fatal flaw: it declared that all men were created equal. In contrast, the southern enslavers were openly embracing the reality that some people were better than others and had the right to rule.
They looked around at their great wealth—the European masters hanging in their parlors, the fine dresses in which they clothed their wives and daughters, and the imported olive oil on their tables—and concluded they were the ones who had figured out the true plan for human society. As South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues in March 1858, the “harmonious…and prosperous” system of the South worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond dismissed “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal.”
On March 21, 1861, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, the newly-elected vice president of the Confederacy, explained to a crowd that the Confederate government rested on the “great truth” that the Black man “is not equal to the white man; that…subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Stephens told listeners that the Confederate government “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Not every white southerner thought secession from the United States was a good idea. Especially as the winter wore into spring and Lincoln made no effort to attack the South, conservative leaders urged their hot-headed neighbors to slow down. But for decades, southerners had marinated in rhetoric about their strength and independence from the federal government, and as Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana later wrote, “[t]he prudent and conservative men South,” were not “able to stem the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it…. It is a revolution...of the most intense character…and it can no more be checked by human effort, for the time, than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.”
Southern white elites celebrated the idea of a new nation, one they dominated, convinced that the despised Yankees would never fight. “So far as civil war is concerned,” one Atlanta newspaper wrote in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” White southerners boasted that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed” in establishing a new nation. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina went so far as to vow that he would drink all the blood shed as a consequence of southern secession.
Chesnut’s promise misread the situation. Northerners recognized that if Americans accepted the principle that some men were better than others, and permitted southern Democrats to spread that principle by destroying the United States, they had lost democracy. "I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” Lincoln had asked in 1858.
Northerners rejected the white southerners’ radical attempt to destroy the principles of the Declaration of Independence. They understood that it was not just Black rights at stake. Arguments like that of Stephens, that some men were better than others, “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said. “You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
Northerners rejected the slaveholders’ unequal view of the world, seeing it as a radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 to put down the rebellion against the government. He called for “loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.”
Like their southern counterparts, northerners also dismissed the idea that a civil war would be bloody. They were so convinced that a single battle would bring southerners to their senses that inhabitants of Washington, D.C., as well as congressmen and their wives packed picnics and took carriages out to Manassas, Virginia, to watch the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. They decamped in panic as the battle turned against the United States army and soldiers bolted past them, flinging haversacks and rifles as they fled.
For their part, southerners were as shocked by the battle as the people of the North were. “Never have I conceived,” one South Carolina soldier wrote, “of such a continuous, rushing hailstorm of shot, shell, and musketry as fell around and among us for hours together. We who escaped are constantly wondering how we could possibly have come out of the action alive.”
Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two-thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two-fifths of the livestock— horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for food— were dead. Over half the region's farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.
On March 4, 1865, when a weary Lincoln took the oath of office for a second time, he reviewed the war’s history. “To strengthen, perpetuate and extend [slavery] was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it,” he said. “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
“Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish,” he said.
“And the war came.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 11, 2024 (Thursday)
When Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addressed a joint meeting of Congress today, he tried to remind lawmakers of who Americans are. “The U.S. shaped the internationa... View MoreApril 11, 2024 (Thursday)
When Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addressed a joint meeting of Congress today, he tried to remind lawmakers of who Americans are. “The U.S. shaped the international order in the postwar world through economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power,” he reminded them. “It championed freedom and democracy. It encouraged the stability and prosperity of nations, including Japan. And, when necessary, it made noble sacrifices to fulfill its commitment to a better world.”
He explained the bigger picture. “The United States policy was based on the premise that humanity does not want to live oppressed by an authoritarian state, where you are tracked and surveilled and denied from expressing what is in your heart and on your mind,” he said. “You believed that freedom is the oxygen of humanity.”
Keenly aware that MAGA Republicans have rejected the nation’s role in protecting freedom and democracy and are standing between Ukraine and U.S. aid, Kishida said: “The world needs the United States to continue playing this pivotal role in the affairs of nations.”
“Freedom and democracy are currently under threat around the globe,” he said. “Climate change has caused natural disasters, poverty, and displacement on a global scale. In the COVID-19 pandemic, all humanity suffered. Rapid advances in AI technology have resulted in a battle over the soul of AI that is raging between its promise and its perils. The balance of economic power is shifting. The Global South plays a greater role in responding to challenges and opportunities and calls for a larger voice…. China's current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge, not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large.”
In the midst of all this dramatic change, Kishida said, “the leadership of the United States is indispensable. Without U.S. support, how long before the hopes of Ukraine would collapse under the onslaught from Moscow?” he asked. “Without the presence of the United States, how long before the Indo-Pacific would face even harsher realities?”
He noted that Japan has pledged $12 billion to Ukraine and “will continue to stand with” the vulnerable country. In this fraught hour, he said, “[t]he democratic nations of the world must have all hands on deck. I am here to say that Japan is already standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States. You are not alone. We are with you.”
As Kishida gently warned lawmakers that the United States is abdicating its role in world affairs by its apparent abandonment of Ukraine, Russian forces last night destroyed the largest power plant in the Kyiv region. U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink reported that “Russia last night launched more than 40 drones and 40 missiles into Ukraine…. The situation in Ukraine is dire; there is not a moment to lose,” she wrote.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) surely knows the situation in Ukraine is dire; he has held up U.S. aid for six months. The Senate passed a national security supplemental bill that would provide aid to Ukraine back in February, but while Johnson has said he would bring the supplemental bill to the House floor, where it will certainly pass, somehow it has never been the right time.
American refusal to support Ukraine is causing global concern. When British foreign secretary David Cameron came to the U.S. this week, he not only met with lawmakers and State Department officials, but also traveled to Florida to meet with former president Trump at Mar-a-Lago in hopes of persuading him to support additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine. That Johnson refused to meet with Cameron when he returned to Washington, D.C., the next day suggests that Cameron’s effort achieved little.
Johnson is facing pressure from extremists in his conference like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who oppose aid to Ukraine and who are threatening to challenge his speakership if he brings the bill to the floor of the House. Those extremists fired another shot across his bow today when they blocked a law to extend a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after Trump urged them to kill it.
When the measure failed, security expert and former Trump administration official Miles Taylor wrote: “The House’s failure to renew FISA is *BAD.* If these powers lapse, it would be like blind-folding U.S. spies and tying their hands behind their backs as they try to protect Americans from China, Russia, terror groups & beyond. Get it together, Congress.”
To enable Johnson to ignore the extremists if it means getting aid to Ukraine, Democrats have thrown Johnson a lifeline, if only he will use it. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) suggested today that Democrats would vote against a challenge to Johnson’s speakership, keeping him in place. Jeffries said: "If the speaker were to do the right thing and allow the House to work its will with an up or down vote on the national security bill, then I believe there are a reasonable number of Democrats [who] would not want to see the speaker fall as a result of doing the right thing."
But instead of actually doing the people’s business and passing a measure the White House, Pentagon, and a majority of Congress think is vital to our national security, MAGA Republicans appear to be consumed by the effort to get Trump back into the presidency.
Today the House Rules Committee got a new chair as Michael Burgess (R-TX) took the reins from Tom Cole (R-OK). Burgess will oversee his first hearing on Monday as the committee meets to examine six bills that appear to be designed to feed the Republicans’ culture wars by denying the secretary of energy’s power to establish new energy conservation standards. Those bills are the “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act,” the “Liberty in Laundry Act,” the “Clothes Dryers Reliability Act,” the “Refrigerator Freedom Act,” the “Affordable Air Conditioning Act,” and the “Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act.”
Johnson is also in on the act. He is scheduled to visit Mar-a-Lago tomorrow to promote a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting. This is purely political theater: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Trump seems eager to push the idea of “election integrity” to bolster his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 election will be too, evidently trying to chum up distrust of American elections.
Under its new co-chairs, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Trump loyalist Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee last week sent out a robocall to voters’ phones saying that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the 2020 presidential election and that “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” This is a straight-up lie, of course—Trump and his loyalists have never produced any evidence for their accusations and lost more than 60 court cases over it—but Trump clearly intends to make it a centerpiece of his campaign.
While Republicans are pushing the Big Lie, in The Bulwark today, conservative commentator Mona Charen noted that Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky this week warned the U.S. that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia’s aggression if it does not get U.S. aid.
“Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history,” Charen wrote. “If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the [Republicans] than anyone other than Trump…. [T]hey mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin,” she said, “must be pinching himself.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 10, 2024 (Wednesday)
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and his wife, Yuko Kishida, are in Washington, D.C., tonight at a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden... View MoreApril 10, 2024 (Wednesday)
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and his wife, Yuko Kishida, are in Washington, D.C., tonight at a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. The dinner is part of a state visit, the fifth for this administration.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked to strengthen ties to countries in the Indo-Pacific to weaken the dominance of China in the region, and Japan is the key nation in that partnership. “We celebrate the flourishing friendship between the United States and Japan,” Dr. Biden said Tuesday. “Our nations are partners in building a world where we choose creation over destruction, peace over bloodshed, and democracy over autocracy.”
During talks today, Biden and Kishida committed to strengthening the defense and security frameworks of the two countries so they can work together effectively, especially in a crisis. The new frameworks include intelligence sharing, defense production, satellite cooperation, pilot training, cybersecurity, humanitarian assistance, and technological cooperation. Affirming the ties of science and education between the countries, the leaders announced that two Japanese astronauts would join future American missions and, Biden said, “one will become the first non-American ever to land on the moon.”
That cooperation both takes advantage of and builds on economic ties between the two countries. In a press conference with Kishida on Wednesday, Biden noted that Japan is the top foreign investor in the U.S., and the U.S. is the top foreign investor in Japan. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have announced investments of $2.9 billion, $1 billion, and $15 billion respectively in Japan over the next several years, largely in computer and digital advances. Japanese corporations Daiichi Sankyo, Toyota, Honda Aircraft, Yaskawa Electric Corporation, Mitsui E&S, and Fujifilm announced investments in the U.S., primarily in manufacturing.
In a press conference, Kishida told reporters that “[t]he international community stands at a historical turning point. In order for Japan, the U.S., the Indo-Pacific region, and, for that matter, the whole world to enjoy peace, stability, and prosperity lasting into the future, we must resolutely defend and further solidify a free and open international order based on the rule of law.”
“This is the most significant upgrade in our alliance…since it was first established,” Biden said. While he noted that lines of communication with China remain open—he spoke with Chinese president Xi Jinping last week—the strengthening of ties to Japan comes in part from concern about the Chinese threat to Taiwan, a self-ruled island that the Chinese government considers its own. Leaders are increasingly concerned that the Republicans’ refusal to fund Ukraine has emboldened not only Russia but also China.
Tomorrow, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., of the Philippines will join Biden in a bilateral meeting before Marcos, Biden, and Kishida join in the first trilateral meeting of the three. Kishida will also address a joint session of Congress.
Kenneth Weinstein of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, suggested today that Japan “has quietly become America’s most important ally,” “playing a central role in meeting our nation’s principal strategic challenge: the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China, especially the defense of Taiwan.” Weinstein also notes that Japan’s longstanding engagement in Southeast Asia means it has “forged relations of deep trust” there among countries that often eye the U.S. with deep distrust.
Outside of news about the Japanese prime minister’s visit, U.S. news today was consumed by reactions to yesterday’s decision by the Arizona Supreme Court to permit the enforcement of an 1864 law that is currently interpreted as a ban on all abortions except to save the mother’s life.
President Biden issued a statement condemning the “extreme and dangerous abortion ban,” calling it “a result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom.”
“Vice President Harris and I stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose,” he continued. “We will continue to fight to protect reproductive rights and call on Congress to pass a law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade for women in every state.”
Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Tucson, Arizona, on Friday to respond to the ruling. According to Hans Nichols of Axios, she had been planning to travel to Arizona anyway but quickly shifted her visit to make it a campaign trip, allowing her to comment more freely on Trump and the Republicans who were responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the imposition of abortion bans since.
Harris has been out front on the issue of reproductive rights, meeting more than 50 times with groups in at least 16 states since the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion. This year, on the January 22 anniversary of the Roe decision, she announced a “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour.
“Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies,” she said. “I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body—not the government.”
Yesterday illustrated what the overturning of Roe v. Wade has wrought. The Republicans who were celebrating that overturning two years ago are now facing an extraordinary backlash, and they are well aware that Arizona is a key state in the 2024 presidential election. Former president Trump has boasted repeatedly that he was responsible for nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, supported a national abortion ban, and even called for women who get an abortion to be punished.
But today he swung around again, telling reporters that he would not sign a national abortion ban if it came to his desk. To be sure, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t sign such a bill, but the fact he is denying that he would and is running away from the issue shows just how much it hurts the Republicans with voters.
Harris’s trip, along with Biden’s constant travel, shows a willingness to crisscross the country to meet voters that dovetails with new statistics out about the Biden-Harris campaign. While Trump has largely stayed at Mar-a-Lago, has fewer than five staffers in each of the battlefield states, and has closed all the offices that made up the Republican National Committee's minority outreach program, the Biden-Harris campaign has 300 paid staffers in 9 states, and 100 offices in regions crucial to the 2024 election.
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 9, 2024 (Tuesday)
Yesterday, former president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control mean... View MoreApril 9, 2024 (Tuesday)
Yesterday, former president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control means. With the federal recognition of the constitutional right to abortion gone since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, old laws left on state books once again are becoming the law of the land.
In a 4–2 decision, the all-Republican Arizona Supreme Court today said it would not interfere with the authority of the state legislature to write abortion policy, letting the state revert to an 1864 law that bans abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. “[P]hysicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” the decision read.
The court explained: “A policy matter of this gravity must ultimately be resolved by our citizens through the legislature or the initiative process…. We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature’s judgment, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens.”
The idea that abortion law must be controlled by state legislatures is in keeping with the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. But it’s an interesting spin to say that the new policy is protecting the will of the citizens.
The Arizona law that will begin to be enforced in 14 days was written by a single man in 1864.
In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases.
And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the Civil War.
In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.
The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.
In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”
The next section warns against cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or “rendering…useless” someone’s arm or leg.
The law that Arizona will use to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.
Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.
The Arizona Territorial Legislature in 1864 had 18 men in the lower House of Representatives and 9 men in the upper house, the Council, for a total of 27 men. They met on September 26, 1864, in Prescott. The session ended about six weeks later, on November 10.
The very first thing the legislators did was to authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to prepare a code of laws for the territory. But William T. Howell, a judge who had arrived in the territory the previous December, had already written one, which the legislature promptly accepted as a blueprint.
Although they did discuss his laws, the members later thanked Judge Howell for “preparing his excellent and able Code of Laws” and, as a mark of their appreciation, provided that the laws would officially be called “The Howell Code.” (They also paid him a handsome $2,500, which was equivalent to at least three years’ salary for a workingman in that era.) Judge Howell wrote the territory’s criminal code essentially single-handedly.
The second thing the legislature did was to give a member of the House of Representatives a divorce from his wife.
Then they established a county road near Prescott.
Then they gave a local army surgeon a divorce from his wife.
In a total of 40 laws, the legislature incorporated a number of road companies, railway companies, ferry companies, and mining companies. They appropriated money for schools and incorporated the Arizona Historical Society.
These 27 men constructed a body of laws to bring order to the territory and to jump-start development. But their vision for the territory was a very particular one.
The legislature provided that “[n]o black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.”
And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).
So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as ten able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man.
And in 2024, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.
Now, though, women can vote.
Before the midterm elections, 61% of Arizona voters told AP VoteCast they believed abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 6% said it should be illegal in all cases. A campaign underway to place a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on November’s ballot needs to gather 383,923 verified signatures by July; a week ago the campaign announced it already had 500,000 signatures.
It seems likely those voters will turn out in November to elect lawmakers who will represent the actual will of the people in the twenty-first century.
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
April 8, 2024 (Monday)
On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Ru... View MoreApril 8, 2024 (Monday)
On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Turner was being questioned about an interview in which Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Russia specialist Julia Ioffe that “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul blamed right-wing media. When asked which Republicans he was talking about, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”
Catherine Belton and Joseph Menn reviewed more than 100 internal Kremlin documents from 2022 and 2023 obtained by a European intelligence service and reported in the Washington Post today that the Russian government is running “an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment.” Kremlin-backed trolls write fake “news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions” while claiming that “Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”
Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly warning that Russian propaganda has fouled their party. Blake notes that Russia specialist Fiona Hill publicly told Republicans during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump that they were repeating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” but Republicans angrily objected.
Now Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Cornyn (R-TX) and a top aide to Senator Todd Young (R-IN), as well as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and even Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, have warned about the party’s ties to Russia. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the Republican Party now has “a Putin wing.”
Trump has hinted that he has a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post on the details of that plan: he would accept Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the Donbas region. He refuses to say how he would negotiate with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that Ukraine will not give up its territory to an invader, or Russia president Vladmir Putin, who has claimed all of Ukraine, but after meeting with Trump last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Trump told him he would accomplish “peace” by cutting off funds to Ukraine.
Trump’s team said Orbán’s comment was false, but it is worth noting that this plan echoes the one acknowledged by Trump’s 2016 campaign director Paul Manafort as the goal of Russian aid to Trump’s campaign.
Fiona Hill told the Washington Post reporters that Trump’s team “is thinking…that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing…rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order.”
Trump’s MAGA loyalists in the House of Representatives have held up funding for Ukraine for six months. Although a national security supplemental bill that would fund Ukraine has passed the Senate and would pass the House if it were brought to the floor, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. The House returns to work tomorrow after a two-week recess but is so backed up on work that Johnson is not expected to bring up the Ukraine measure this week.
Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told the Washington Post’s Belton and Menn: “The impact of the Russian program over the last decade…is seen in the U.S. congressional debate over Ukraine aid…. They have had an impact in a strategic aggregate way.”
The Trump loyalists echoing Russia who have taken control of the Republican Party appear to be hardening into a phalanx around the former president, but even as they do so, Trump himself appears to be crumbling.
In the week since Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond, halting the seizure of his properties to satisfy the $454 million judgment against him and the Trump Organization, multiple problems with that bond have come to light. It is possible the bond isn’t worth anything at all, and New York attorney general Letitia James has filed papers to require Trump’s lawyers or the bond underwriter to show that it’s good within ten days. A hearing is set for April 22.
Meanwhile, Trump’s trial for election interference in 2016, when he paid people with damaging information to keep quiet before the election and falsified business records to hide those payments, is set to begin on April 15. Evidently very worried about this trial, Trump has already tried eight times to delay it until after November’s election, and today his lawyers tried yet again by requesting a delay so he could fight to get the trial moved to a different venue, but an appeals judge rejected the attempt.
Aside from Trump’s personal problems as a presidential candidate, the Republicans face strong headwinds because of their deeply unpopular opposition to abortion rights. Trump has openly bragged about being the instrument for ending the rights recognized in the United States since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since then, abortion bans are galvanizing opposition, and the Republicans are trying to find a message that can bring back angry voters without antagonizing the antiabortion white evangelicals who make up their base.
After months of waffling on the issue, Trump today released a video trying to thread that needle by echoing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump said in the video that states will decide the issue for themselves, a statement that simply reflects the Dobbs decision.
This was a dodge. In the video, Trump appealed to the antiabortion loyalists by telling the ghoulish lie that women are “executing” their babies even after birth. He also ignored that Republicans are already calling for a national ban, extremist antiabortion Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has tried to take the common abortion drug mifepristone off the national market by challenging its FDA approval, and legislatures in many Republican-dominated states are refusing to implement the will of the people to protect abortion rights even after they have voted for such protections.
Still, antiabortion leaders, including Mike Pence, immediately slammed Trump’s statement.
The video did, though, make an enormously interesting and unintended point: Trump is communicating with voters outside his carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as important as abortion. At rallies, his speeches have become erratic and wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in carefully curated settings, like this apparently heavily edited video.
The Trump takeover of the Republican National Committee (RNC) also appears to be in trouble. This weekend, Trump claimed to have raised $50 million in a single night from billionaires, but that number is conveniently a little more than double the new record of what President Joe Biden raised at an event last week with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and it is long past time for everyone to stop believing anything Trump says about money.
More to the point, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported today that the RNC’s aggressive purge of the staff to guarantee that positions are held only by Trump loyalists means that “the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.” Lowell notes this lack is especially apparent on the RNC’s data team, which is being moved from Washington, D.C., to Palm Beach, Florida, near Mar-a-Lago.
And yet Trump loyalists continue to block aid to Ukraine, threatening the existence of the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent war since World War II. Last week, even Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned Speaker Johnson against “abandoning our Allies at this time of great need, when they are staring down enemies of the free world.”
-Heather Cox Richardson
-PhD of Political History
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