chait, jon

ntbcw haidt FIRE coddle

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AN 1 26

Donald Trump has historically performed well with various voter groups who, for one reason or another, view him as "anti-establishment," but now, according to a new analysis from The Atlantic, he faces a "shrinking coalition" as these voters increasingly see him as "the system" he once seemed to oppose.

Writing for The Atlantic on Monday, journalist Jonathan Chait outlined the numerous "reversals" of his past campaign promises that are now alienating his 2024 coalition. Despite claiming that he would only ramp up deportations of criminals, an idea Chait argued was resonant with Latino communities, his actual policies now see anyone and everyone in that community under fire by ICE. Despite pledging to end costly overseas military conflicts, he has now carried out a contentious strike against Venezuela and has eyes on deploying troops to seize Greenland. Once touting himself as a champion of free speech, Trump has instead "relentlessly cracked down on the speech that he opposes," including against people critical of Israel and of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk after his killing.

These and many other "reversals" outlined by Chait share one particular trait: "alienating anti-system voters because [Trump] now controls the system."

"His appeal lay in his opposition to established power, but now that he has it, he is flexing it gleefully," Chait explained. "He is the warmonger, the censor, the face of the Epstein cover-up. It is hard to remain an outsider while holding the world’s most powerful job."

Trump remained somewhat immune to this phenomenon during his first term, as despite his many betrayals of campaign promises back then, he faced much more pushback from the system designed to keep presidential power in check and suffered numerous high-profile political defeats. Chait argued that this made Trump seem, to these "anti-system" voters, like "an outsider within his own presidency," who "fought the law, and the law won."

"Trump is no longer making this complaint about the established forces working against him, because he has solved this problem," Chait wrote. "His presidency is filled with loyalists. He has largely overcome any reluctance that officials might have had in carrying out his most unethical or illegal demands. He can’t present himself as anti-system, because he has become the system... Trump seems to assume that voters share his own worship of power. His most intense fans may revel in his displays of dominance, but his least attached supporters — the ones who turned him from a loser in 2020 to a winner in 2024 — are recoiling."

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omg trio consistently, spectacularly and devastatingly WRONG! punditry at worst/lethal

jon chait

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/arthur-laffer-lawrence-kudlow-stephen-moore-public-health.html

no lnx

THE NATIONAL INTEREST APR. 25, 2020

The Fatal Calculations of the Economists Steering Our Public Health

By Jonathan Chait

One night in late March, President Trump, seized by one of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials, sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is again lurching toward the opposite pole — one anchored by Laffer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Lawrence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administration’s public-health wing because they have a particular competence of their own, honed over decades: persuading Republican officials to ignore experts.

Even before his current role, Laffer was perhaps the most successful policy entrepreneur in modern American history, at least if measured by political influence.In the 1970s, as an economics professor who had served in Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, Laffer developed a friendship with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, whose job had previously included defending Richard Nixon’s conduct in the Watergate scandal. The two came to believe that Laffer had developed a blinding insight with world-historical ramifications. A tax rate of either zero or 100 would yield no tax revenue at all, Laffer posited. Drawing a sloping, sideways curve between those points, he further hypothesized that reducing tax rates might increase revenue.

The “Laffer curve,” which at one point Laffer drew on a cocktail napkin for an impressed Dick Cheney (the Smithsonian now claims to display the original), formed the basis of what became known as “supply-side economics.” The doctrine held not only that tax cuts could increase tax revenue, but that changes in tax rates were the primary driver of all economic events. Republican economist Herb Stein coined the name as a term of derision, intending to highlight the absurdity of building a model entirely on one side of the economy instead of considering both supply and demand. Economic experts mocked Laffer’s notion that reductions in tax rates at existing levels could produce anywhere close to enough new economic growth to pay for itself.

And the experts … were completely right. After supply-siders converted Ronald Reagan and promised his tax cuts would pay for themselves, revenue hemorrhaged. Reagan’s non-supply-side advisers prevailed upon him to sign a series of tax increases for the purpose of “reducing the size of the nation’s fiscal disaster,” his budget director later admitted. When Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, supply-siders insisted he would kill the recovery and reduce tax revenue. Instead, revenue soared far higher than anybody had forecast.

Kudlow and Moore began ascending in the 1980s, shuttling between right-wing think tanks and media — especially the Journal editorial page, which remained the high temple of the supply-side cult. I first came across Moore when he was writing Journal columns arguing that the supply-siders had been right to predict Bill Clinton’s tax hike would reduce revenue. (A hallmark of supply-side thought has been to refuse to concede any error or complication in its analysis.) The supply-siders went on to insist that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would produce untold prosperity. Moore wrote a book called Bullish on Bush, and Kudlow wrote the foreword to The Bush Boom and a series of columns dismissing “pessimistas” who detected economic turmoil. “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong,” he wrote in December 2007.

In the spring of 2016, just after Trump had sewn up the nomination, Laffer, Kudlow, and Moore set out to meet the candidate at Trump Tower. Like many members of the conservative elite, they initially harbored reservations. But unlike foreign-policy hawks or social traditionalists, their concerns were devoid of any moral component, like a suspicion of dictators or philanderers. Their sole misgiving concerned Trump’s populist rhetoric and occasional campaign vows to raise his own taxes. The troika wanted to find out if he really meant it. To their relief, he didn’t. “He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get the government out of the way,” Kudlow recounted in the foreword to Laffer and Moore’s laudatory book, Trumponomics. “The three of us saw Trump in a whole new light.”

We’ll come out of this soon, the economy will reopen, the economy will restart. It will, I hope, take care of itself. Markets will take care of themselves over time.

— Larry Kudlow, optimistic as oil prices tanked, on April 22

Kudlow joined the administration as Trump’s chief economic adviser. Trump announced he would nominate Moore for the Federal Reserve Board, but the Senate killed Moore’s bid over a combination of embarrassing ignorance of the subject — just two years before, he’d admitted on a panel, “I’m not an expert on monetary policy” — and years of sexist comments, including an obsessive hatred of women working as play-by-play commentators on basketball games. He and Laffer instead served as outside advisers and allies to Trump, who last summer bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laffer.

Trump rewarded their confidence by implementing a large corporate tax cut, which was intended to encourage more corporate investment and therefore “would yield about the same revenue — and possibly more — than the current system,” Laffer and Moore wrote in Trumponomics. Naturally, it failed. Business owners got a windfall, but there was no corporate-investment boom and corporate-tax revenue fell by more than a third. Just as naturally, they acted as if events had proved them right.

And so, when the coronavirus struck, Trump had on hand a coterie of loyalists who would not hesitate to question legitimate experts.Kudlow forcefully endorsed Trump’s optimism that the virus would never spread. On February 25, Kudlow said it had been “contained … pretty close to airtight.” Even two weeks later, he was insisting, “I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”

When public-health officials persuaded Trump to abandon his denialism, the supply-siders formed the resistance. Applying Laffer’s old dictum, “All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” they reasoned that the problem facing the economy was not a deadly pandemic but, as ever, bad incentives imposed by government — in this case, restrictions on business and excessively generous unemployment benefits that “discourage work.” If the government just stopped suppressing incentives, the economy would spring back to life.

The Journal editorial page published some of the first pushback against the wisdom of lockdowns. As early as mid-March, Moore denounced on Fox News the first closings, in California, as “a very dangerous, almost Orwellian situation.” Trump began repeating the supply-siders’ warnings that he had ceded too much authority to scientists (“If it was up to the doctors,” he mused, “they might say shut down the entire world”). Trump relented to his public-health experts but, by early April, was again listening to the supply-siders. Moore began proposing May 1 as a deadline to reopen the economy, a timeline Trump endorsed soon thereafter.

The supply-siders’ struggle to tug Trump away from his medical experts has both public and private facets. Laffer and Moore promoted a new administration task force to focus on economic reopening, a counterweight to the coronavirus task force led by doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Moore encouraged anti-shutdown protests in several states to pressure governors to speed up their timetables for reopening businesses. “I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,” he explained, “They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties.”

In their book, Laffer and Moore fondly recall Kudlow’s instructing Trump to ignore budget forecasts that tax cuts would reduce revenue. “Don’t get stressed out by the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters,” he said. “They are always wrong.” The message today is largely unchanged. The main difference is that the experts they are urging the president to dismiss are counting lives. We’re the beans.

This article appears in the April 27, 2020, issue of New York Magazine

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Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate?

412 Comments

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

the national interest Sept. 12, 2024

Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate? An intriguing theory by Matt Taibbi.

By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.

In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump into an angry, frequently incoherent performance.

Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it so similarly? To Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there could be only one explanation: The entire news media was taking orders from the Democratic Party.

Taibbi’s post-debate column, headlined, “DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate Headlines,” advances a bold hypothesis. Taibbi amasses suspicious evidence of media collusion:

Conspiracies, pet-eating, and the “same old tired playbook” figured prominently in morning headlines. “Harris baits Trump over and over,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self,” was Salon’s take. “Harris Baits and Batters Trump,” wrote the Miami Herald. “Harris Baits Trump Into Arguments,” added CNN. “Harris Baits Trump: Inside their Fiery Debate,” was another Times headline, while The Wall Street Journal went with “Harris Baits Trump in Fiery Presidential Debate.” There were cheers that Harris was able to “bait him into defending himself rather than talking about issues.” And on and on. Instantly, bait everywhere. No wonder Jake Tapper talked about fishing after the event.

“As one of the last relics of the ‘Boys on the Bus’ era, I don’t recall campaign messaging being this crude, or politicians, press, and audience acting so overtly as a chorus,” he writes, “the DNC or RNC just backing up to the commentariat, dumping loads of phrases, and seeing them instantly converted to conventional wisdom, that’s new.”

Taibbi’s theory suffers from two serious flaws. The first lies in the linear nature of time. Taibbi seizes on a Democratic Party press release summarizing reactions to the debate and concludes that the reactions were implanted by the party into the media. But the news release came after the reactions. That is how it was able to quote them.

The simplest account of how this occurred, and one that comports with mainstream physics, is as follows:

The debate occurred.

Many observers, witnessing the debate, had more or less the same impression.

They recorded their impression on social or traditional media.

The Democratic Party’s media-relations staff read these accounts and shared some of them.

I believe this makes much more sense than Taibbi’s belief that the Democrats secretly instructed a wide array of journalists what to say happened at the debate.

The second flaw with Taibbi’s analysis is that the belief Trump looked terrible was shared by many people who could not possibly be controlled by the Democratic message machine. As the debate occurred in real time, online betting markets moved in Harris’s direction, and Trump’s scammy meme stock plunged.

What’s more, the conclusion that Harris effectively baited Trump into an incoherent performance was echoed by many observers who are sympathetic to Trump. “Trump Took the Bait. Harris Kept Her Cool,” wrote Eli Lake in The Free Press. “He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him,” moaned Brit Hume on Fox News. “She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set multiple traps so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years,” complained The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

If Trump’s performance was in any way flawed, Taibbi argues, it is only because the moderators rigged the contest in Harris’s favor. “The world of that debate contained no speech panic, no arrest of Pavel Durov, no assassination attempt, no cover-up of Biden’s health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of a half-dozen bizarre things that only just happened,” he insists.

Interestingly enough, Taibbi’s assessment of Trump’s performance is much more forgiving than that of Trump’s own advisers, who were apoplectic over his incoherent rants. “The [former] president was supposed to pivot but Trump blew it,” a campaign insider tells Marc Caputo. “He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t really happen.” Trump advisers unloaded to Axios, noting that Trump simply declined to exploit the opportunities given to him by ABC News. “He was told to hold her accountable for the deadly, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet when the moderators teed up that softball twice, he swung at other topics.”

So where a supermajority of the viewing public, investors, betting markets, numerous conservative pundits, and Trump advisers all saw the same thing, Taibbi discerned something totally different. The Donald Trump Taibbi watched was a lone voice of reason, much as Taibbi sees himself:

Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo …

They surrounded Trump with rigid consensus framing and watched him flail against it, which did make him look frustrated, old, and at times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? Not sure about that. If conventional wisdom says you’re crazy, that doesn’t make it true. What if it’s the other way around?

Yes, perhaps the only two sane people in the universe are Donald Trump and Matt Taibbi. Or maybe there is some other explanation.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/conservative-thought-on-college-campuses/

Eric Kaufmann published last month a perplexing account of ideological diversity on college campuses for National Review. He opens the piece by noting that, in a recent survey of female college students, only 6 percent said they would date a Trump supporter, which, as Kaufmann see it, "reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism." Kaufman then segues into an account of discrimination against conservatives and the problem of liberal over-representation. This, he maintains, like race-based discrimination, merits federal intervention. Solution? Mandating "viewpoint neutrality" in higher education.

Kaufmann's piece was roundly and rightly criticized for its troubling implications regarding free speech as well its bizarre inferences about dating and authoritarianism. I won't rehearse those arguments. But there is something else worth noticing.

Many commentators, including some on the left, have uncritically accepted two of the premises underlying Kaufmann's argument. One, that social justice is increasingly illiberal. Two, that ideological imbalance on college campuses is a societal problem.

For example, in his critique of Kaufmann, New York's Jonathan Chait writes, "Despite veering off immediately into absurdity, Kaufmann does identify a real problem. Many elite American institutions, most dramatically but not exclusively in academia, are becoming ideological monocultures in which commitment to progressive goals is becoming a formal or informal criteria for membership within the community."

This description of a "monoculture" echoes concerns previously voiced by writers from across the political spectrum. In 2019, Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Yet while I admire campus activism for its commitment to social justice, I also worry that it sometimes becomes infused with a prickly intolerance, embracing every kind of diversity except one: ideological diversity." Similarly, the signatories of the 2020*Harper*'s letter, ranging from leftists to conservatives, also critiqued the social left's "restriction of debate." In this same vein, George Packer's most recent piece in The Atlantic characterized current social justice in America as bordering on tyranny.

When writers—from the left, center or right—reference "ideological conformity" or "monoculture," they often offer little in the way of details. References to homogeneity of thought surely sound troubling. But it all remains very abstract. What's missing is concrete description. So let's unpack these claims a bit to see the box is empty.

Democracy relies on debate between citizens. This does not presume every debate is worthwhile, though. Nor does it imply ideological conformity is always bad. We should not, for example, be concerned about conformity concerning the tooth fairy or the shape of Earth. It's good to agree that the human body is made of cells, that Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and that 2 + 2 = 4. Conformity is often the result of the truth.

Some might protest. The problem of ideological conformity doesn't revolve around objective facts, some say; rather, it's about the lack of representation of conservative thought. OK, but be specific. What conservative thought has been silenced?

Critics of "monoculture" aren't concerned that the work of Milton Friedman or Frederick Hayek is excluded from economics courses—such a concern would be false. In 2021 alone, Google Scholar yields around 8,000 results for articles mentioning these authors. Nor should we worry that anti-capitalist sentiment is taking over college campuses, given the sheer number of works churned out extolling the merits of markets. Universities from Georgetown to Cornell to Texas Tech have whole institutes devoted to this subject. Libertarians, conservatives and liberals all participate.

So one has to ask, again, what conservative thought is being ignored exactly? More likely, the complaint is that college classrooms lack positive representations of the current political beliefs of the Republican Party. And herein lies a small problem: the political beliefs of the GOP are, in fact, diametric to the entire project of education.

Just to make a quick list: according to current Republican belief, climate change is, at best, a natural phenomenon unaffected by human behavior and hardly worth worrying about. More often, it doesn't exist. The party also continues to deny the results of a fair and secure democratic election. Republicans have also argued that masks are an ineffective public health measure, covid is just like the flu and George Soros, a Jewish billionaire, pays protesters who disagree with Republican Party policy. Within the party, doubts still remain about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States.

The list goes on. Just the past few weeks have seen Fox News run endless anti-vaccination commentary, including the assertion that guidelines are akin to apartheid. Breitbart featured headlines on the Marxist threat to Taylor Swift. The Federalist published deep dives into Obama's potential connections to critical race theory. The American Conservative published a piece arguing the mass graves of Native children in Canada were "good, actually" as they were a product of a "sincere concern for the salvation of their souls." In the Meantime, Claire Lehmann, the editor of Quillette, spent her week tweeting about Black women's nails as a signal of possible drug abuse.

Given all this, why exactly should we be worried about Republican thought being less well-represented on college campuses? Are we concerned that students won't learn enough falsehoods? That they won't be exposed to enough racism? That covid denialism isn't being taught in biology class? That psychologists aren't seriously considering debates over whether or not Black people are intellectually inferior?

Or maybe conformity really boils down to colleges and universities recognizing and promoting the scientific consensus that gender is fluid, which aligns with guidance from the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association? Is this the terrifying monoculture?

Look, colleges should be maximally permissive in order to protect academic freedom. They should do everything they can to be ideologically blind while hiring. No one should try to ascertain an applicant's ideology. Trump supporters should be hired just as readily as Biden supporters. No professor should be sanctioned for teaching conservative economic theories. Nor should any professor get in trouble for being skeptical of critical race theory or Marxism or any other intellectual framework. However, professors should be sanctioned when they fail to do the basic requirement of their job: education. Modern conservative thought is antithetical to this project.

So do I fear this liberal monoculture in academia? No. One, academia is actually quite ideologically diverse. Two, in cases where "ideological conformity" does exist—such as "the earth is round" and "racism is bad"—perhaps we shouldn't be that fearful of it.

Overall, if analysts are concerned by the lack of representation of conservative ideology, they should be more explicit about which ideas within the Republican potpourri of falsehoods and bigotry should be adopted in college curricula.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/crt/

I think it's good that people who know what they are talking about when they talk about critical race theory (CRT) are coming forward to talk about it publicly. If MSNBC's Joy Reid wants to put a CRT expert on every night, more power to her. It's good for the health of the public square for knowledgeable people to speak about ideas and topics they are authorities in for the benefit of democracy and the common good.

But a republic that depends, for its future viability and therefore its freedom, on the quality of information available in the public square, there are limits to this behavior. The American public square does not privilege knowledge. It does not give the benefit of the doubt to truth-tellers. It takes pleasure in heat more than light, conflict more than understanding, and gross characterizations more than explicit fact. So when it comes to critical race theory, we need to do more than explain what it is and is not.

We need to go on the offensive.

Before I go on, let me remind you what all this anti-CRT stuff is about. First, it's not about CRT. Its critics, who include Republicans but also white anti-left liberals like Jonathan Chait(and, I suppose, Andrew Sullivan), don't care what critical race theory is. They don't care what anti-racism or wokeness or whatever is. All they "know" is that they already "know" everything they need to know, which is that CRT is either anti-white, from the perspective of GOP fascists, or that it's anti-liberal, from the perspective of white anti-left liberals who insist the politics of the 2020s is the same as the politics of the 1990s and who are otherwise drifting toward political irrelevance.

This anti-CRT stuff is a reaction to a breathtaking confluence of forces no one had witnessed before. I mean the merging of anti-fascists (anti-Trumpists) with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by white cop. Not only did those energies become the greatest voting coalition ever seen—one that defeated an incumbent president, something that has rarely happened in our history—but the merging of these political energies sparked a much-needed and healthy reckoning over the country's history of anti-Black racism. What happened last year (and during and after the election) was an amazing leap forward for this country. Whenever that happens in American history, there's usually a white backlash, though.

And that's what all this anti-CRT stuff is.

But it's more than that. The tell is what's happening in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia and others. In those states, Republican lawmakers are exploiting the former president's supporters, who say they believe he is still the rightful and legitimate president, to enact an agenda they wanted to enact but did not have the opportunity to enact it until the former president lost in what appeared to be, to the former president's supporters, a democracy escaping their ability to control it.

That antifascists (anti-Trumpists) merged with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter last spring and last fall to defeat an incumbent president, something that rarely happens in our history, is proof,to the former president's supporters, that election itself was illegitimate. Why? Because, to them, the Black Americans who constitute the foundation of the current president's base of power are illegitimate.

So when state Republican lawmakers (and the useful idiots among white anti-left liberals) allege that critical race theory is running amok in our public schools, colleges and universities—when they accuse institutions of learning of "indoctrinating" children, or even "brainwashing" them into hating white people—what they are really doing is fighting the great leap forward that we all witnessed last spring and last fall when white voters allied with Black voters to save the republic, an event that sparked a last-ditch attempt to cancel the will of the American people by way of insurrection.

This isn't how we go on the offensive though. We go on the offensive by accusing the Republicans of what is plain to see but many won't see because the former president is no longer on the scene, which is fascism. For some reason, Donald Trump's absence has meant all talk of GOP fascism is now déclassé, leaving white anti-left liberals like Chait, Sullivan and others enough room to continue their years' long crusade against anti-racism on college campuses, giving ideological cover to the full-on fascists in state governments who are now policing free speech, free thought and free inquiry.

That's the conclusion we must draw from Republican state laws written to "ban" critical race theory from classrooms and schools but written so vaguely as to cover virtually anything related to race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, the history of slavery or even unkind interpretations of American history. In a very real sense, we are just a few small steps from "banning" ideas to burning books. It's not enough to just explain what critical race theory is, because while we're doing all this explaining, the republic's enemies are in the early stages of forming state and local thought police.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-and-his-cronies-must-be-brought-to-justice-but-more-will-be-required/

no lnx

trump and his cronies must be brought to justice — but more will be required

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 15, 2020

Over the weekend, David Atkins wrote a piece titled, “To Save Democracy, Democrats Must Hold Trump Officials Accountable.” He ended by noting that “people have to go to jail for what has happened, or there probably won’t be a democracy worth saving for long.”

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Reaching a similar conclusion, Jonathan Chait has a piece in the latest edition of New York Magazine titled, “Lock Him Up? For the Republic to survive Trump’s presidency, he must be tried for his crimes. Even if that sparks a constitutional crisis of its own.”

Trump’s reversals of Obama-era police reforms and his open contempt for the law send a signal about whom the law constrains and whom it protects. The fashioning of a more equal society means sending a different message: The rule of law must bind everyone, just as it protects everyone. A world where the power of the state can be brought to bear against a person who was once its most famous symbol of wealth is one where every American will more easily imagine a future in which we are all truly equal before the law.

Even with that conclusion, Chait raises important considerations. One of them is that, along with everything else, Trump has politicized crime. As Chait suggests, “crimes has ceased to denote violations of written law and become instead a catchall description for any anti-Trump activity.” That provides the kind of closure mechanism the president’s supporters use to not only wall themselves off from facts, but reinforces the narrative of Trump being the victim of lawbreakers out to get him. It must, therefore, be taken as a fact that approximately 40 percent of the population will view prosecution of Trump and members of his administration as political payback from the opposition, regardless of its grounding in evidence.

That leads to the major dilemma Chait outlined.

The prospect of an electorally defeated Trump, though glorious, would immediately set off a conflict between two fundamental democratic values: the rule of law and mutual toleration. The rule of law is a banal yet utterly foundational concept that the law is a set of rights and obligations, established in advance, that apply equally to everybody…

Mutual toleration means that political opponents must accept the legitimacy and legality of their opponents. If elected leaders can send their opponents to prison and otherwise discredit them, then leaders are afraid to relinquish power lest they be imprisoned themselves…

If the government is run by lawbreakers, though, the state faces a dilemma: Either the principle of equal treatment under the law or the tradition of a peaceful transition of power will be sacrificed. It’s hard to imagine any outcome under which the rule of law survives Trump unscathed.

This president’s criminality means that we will be forced to choose between two foundational principles of democracy: the rule of law or mutual toleration. Chait makes the case that protecting the rule of law is more important, recognizing the threat that poses to a peaceful transition of power.

What I appreciate about Chait’s analysis is that he takes what would otherwise be the unintended consequences of his position into consideration. Those are the kinds of difficult choices that, more often than not, don’t present us with clear options of right vs wrong or good vs evil.

But given that both Atkins and Chait frame their arguments in terms of what will be required to save democracy, it is important to also recognize that, should Biden win in November, prosecuting Trump and members of his administration will be necessary, but not sufficient to complete the task.

Many of the ways that Trump has corrupted our democracy don’t constitute crimes that can be prosecuted in court. Some of those could be addressed for the future by passing new laws, such as requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns and a more complete requirement for divestment from business interests.

Others, however, involved the breaking of norms that have developed over decades and don’t lend themselves to legal remedies. As an example, one of the major contributors to the erosion of the rule of law is the breakdown of independence between the president and the attorney general. Even cases that could be prosecuted have been covered up by Bill Barr, such as Trump’s obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation.

It becomes difficult to imagine how that wall can be constructed via legislation, and yet the way that expectation has been destroyed over the last few years threatens the rule of law even more profoundly than it would be if Trump isn’t prosecuted after leaving office. When the attorney general turns a blind eye to a president who violates the Constitution, this country is in serious jeopardy.

Of course, we might not even be having this discussion if Republican senators hadn’t dismissed the evidence against Trump that was produced during the impeachment trial. Having a major political party that is willing to embrace lawlessness in order to stay in power is perhaps the biggest threat to democracy that we face today. There is no easy remedy to that one.

The rather pessimistic conclusion therefore, is that, even if Biden wins and the Trump administration is held legally accountable, our democracy will remain imperiled. It always has been. It’s just that we can now see how.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-gops-distrust-of-science-has-made-the-us-a-petri-dish-of-infection-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-journalist/

Some Republican governors have been as proactive as their Democratic counterparts in responding to the coronavirus pandemic — including Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. And while President Donald Trump is the Republican who is criticized the most when it comes to coronavirus, journalist Jonathan Chait, but in a lengthy essay published in New York Magazine on July 20, stresses that Trump is hardly alone when it comes to handling the crisis badly. As Chait sees it, the United States’ COVID-19 death count is an indictment of the GOP in general and underscores its “anti-science” tendencies.

The U.S., Chait writes, is “a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June — after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic — the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, accounted for 25% of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and the European Union combined…. The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.”

Anti-science attitudes, Chait laments, were plaguing the GOP long before Trump was sworn into office in January 2017.

“The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation,” Chait explains. “But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself."

chait emphasizes that Republicans weren’t always anti-science, noting that the Environment Protection Agency was created under President Richard Nixon. But more and more, Chait writes, a disdain for science has plagued the GOP in recent years — and that anti-science attitude makes its presence felt whenever Republicans rail against Dr. Anthony Fauci (who is part of Trump’s coronavirus task for) or refuse to wear face masks in public.

“The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore,” Chait writes. “From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trump-is-trying-to-change-course-and-hoodwink-us-all-and-the-media-shouldnt-let-him-get-away-with-it/

no lnx

Trump is trying to change course and hoodwink us all — and the media shouldn’t let him get away with it

Written by Cody Fenwick March 17, 2020

After continually downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic for nearly two months, President Donald Trump dramatically changed course this week and has shifted his tone to reflect the dire circumstances. But as he pivots his public relations strategy, he’s also clearly and deliberately trying to rewrite his own history to claim — falsely — that he knew it the outbreak was bad and has been working hard to stop it.

“I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic,” Trump told the media on Tuesday in the White House press briefing room. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

And on Monday, I reported that Trump’s rhetoric on the outbreak had clearly turned the corner — and had begun more closely reflecting reality. He acknowledged that the infection is particularly contagious and dangerous, that the pandemic could stretch into late summer or longer, and that it may trigger an economic recession.

Some have cheered this change of pace.

“This is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint, from a human standpoint,” said CNN’s Dana Bash. “He is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today and yesterday. In tone, that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty.”

Lis Power

@LisPower1

Dana Bash: "This was remarkable from the president of the United States. -- This is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint, and from an human stand point -- he is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today and yesterday."

Embedded video

But while it’s important to acknowledge that Trump really has changed the way he talks about the coronavirus, Bash gave the president far too much credit. Because even though it’s good that Trump is now conveying the level of threat the virus poses to American society — and thus may be reversing some of the damage he wrought by spreading doubt about the need to fight it — he’s still not being the leader the country needs. He’s incapable of that.

He proved as much when he was asked on Friday about his administration’s decision to shut down the White House pandemic office, which may have managed the situation much more effectively. Trump told the reporter who asked about the closure that it was a “nasty question.” And he flatly denied that he holds any responsibility for his administration’s galling failure to adequately test for cases of the infection in the early days of the pandemic, which likely contributed to the proliferation of the virus. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said.

And even now as he acknowledges how bad the outbreak could be, he’s still lying. He says he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” but this contrasts starkly with the record of his own public comments.

On Jan. 22, for instance, Trump was asked if he was worried about a pandemic.

“No. Not at all,” Trump said. “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

On February 28, Trump lashed out at Democrats for raising alarm about the virus, calling it their new “hoax.”

And as recently as Sunday, Trump was sounding a similar note about the virus being under control.

“It’s a very contagious virus,” he said. “It’s incredible. But it’s something we have tremendous control of.”

This comment stood out to many people because it is clearly not under control, and on Monday, Trump was asked about it again. And he lied, claiming he hadn’t said the virus was under control, but only that the response was under control:

Well, when I’m talking about control, I’m saying we are doing a very good job within the confines of what we’re dealing with. We’re doing a very good job. There’s been a — there’s been a tremendous amount of the way they’re working together. They’re working hand-in-hand. I think they’re doing, really, a great job. And from that standpoint, that’s what I was referring to. … [The virus is] not under control for any place in the world.

Jonathan Chait pointed out that Trump introduced another major lie on Monday, saying: “We have a problem that, a month ago, nobody thought about.”

Chait rebutted this point:

Uh, well, no. In January, two former Trump administration officials wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed pleading with Trump to take the coronavirus seriously. Almost two months ago, Joe Biden wrote an op-ed demanding a more forceful response. Trump spent this entire period relentlessly denying the United States faced any danger at all. (David Leonhardt has a timeline of Trump’s delusional public commentary.)

Here at AlterNet, we began running stories about the virus in January. On January 31, we ran a story warning that “the increasing risks brought about by the spread of the coronavirus” could add to the “ingredients for an incipient global economic calamity.”

So Trump’s tone has changed, but he can’t stop lying. And while it’s better that he acknowledges that the coronavirus is a genuine threat to the American people, this change was only forced on him by the changing of circumstances — he’s not becoming a better leader. He’s incapable of that, and he should resign as president as soon as possible.

Since that won’t happen, the media should do whatever it can to avoid falling into the trap of believing he’s turned over a new leaf. He’s just trying to rewrite history and hoodwink us all once again.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-why-trumps-incessant-vendetta-against-obama-is-a-losing-proposition/

no lnx

Here’s why Trump’s incessant vendetta against Obama is a losing proposition

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly February 19, 2020

Barack Obama took advantage of an anniversary on Monday to poke at one of the lies being repeated by his successor.

Barack Obama

@BarackObama

Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.

Since his administration began, Trump has attacked Obama’s record of job creation and touted his own. Perhaps long-time readers here at the Washington Monthly will enjoy the fact that I intend to expose that lie based on information provided by Steve Benen and Kevin Drum. Here’s Benen:

As we discussed after the release of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Trump has now been in office for three full years (36 months), and during that time, the economy has created 6.56 million jobs. In the final full three years of Obama’s presidency, the economy created 8.08 million jobs.

Of course, Drum put the specifics into a chart.

It will surprise no one that data means nothing to Trump.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Did you hear the latest con job? President Obama is now trying to take credit for the Economic Boom taking place under the Trump Administration. He had the WEAKEST recovery since the Great Depression, despite Zero Fed Rate & MASSIVE quantitative easing. NOW, best jobs numbers....

As the saying goes, Obama has taken up residence in Trump’s head—rent-free.

Jonathan Chait recently documented another way that Trump’s efforts to undo Obama’s legacy are failing.

One of the Obama administration’s most effective climate initiatives was tightened regulations of auto emissions, which will reduce carbon emissions by billions of tons. Trump, of course, is trying to roll it back. The good news is that he is almost certainly too incompetent to pull it off in his first term.

When regulatory agencies write new rules, they have to follow some fairly complicated legal procedures, which often have to hold up under judicial scrutiny. Historically, agencies win about 80 percent of the time against legal challenges. But Trump’s regulations lose about 90 percent of the time, because his administration is staffed with incompetent hacks.

The courts will soon be fighting over Trump’s plan to weaken auto-emission standards. Trump is highly likely to lose, because, as two new reports show, the incompetence of his regulators reached almost mind-boggling proportions.

The reports Chait referred to come from an article by Robinson Meyer that details how the Trump administration’s attempt to kill the auto-emission standards has been a “complete debacle” and one from Coral Davenport predicting a dead end for Trump’s efforts.

What also caught my eye was the fact that Trump’s regulations (or attempts to roll back Obama’s regulations) have failed in court about 90 percent of the time. That number comes from the Institute for Policy Integrity, which has been tracking this administration’s record in the courts. Of the 70 cases they have followed, Trump has won four and lost 66. As Chait points out, typically federal agencies have won about 80 percent of the time, so this administration’s record is worse than abysmal.

In writing about the effort to roll back Obama’s fuel-efficiency standards, Davenport identified the problem.

In January, administration staff members appointed by President Trump sent a draft of the scaled-back fuel economy standards to the White House, but six people familiar with the documents described them as “Swiss cheese,” sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked “text forthcoming.”

The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain. And, because the new auto pollution rule lacks the detailed technical analyses required by law, the regulations would be unlikely to withstand court challenges…

More basic issues holding up the regulations point to another problem: the skeleton crew of inexperienced political appointees who are heading the drafting process may not be up to a job that would usually be handled by career federal workers with decades of expertise.

As Chait rightfully suggested, Trump’s actual goal of humiliating Obama can’t be included in the analysis. So his incompetent staff are left with trying to manipulate the numbers and the science, which don’t support the president’s goals.

For Trump, things like math, science, and expertise are anathema. His only concern is to prop up his own narcissistic ego and demean anyone he views as a threat. That is why Trump’s vendetta against Obama’s legacy will always be a losing proposition. His incompetence overshadows his malevolence.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.