Friday, January 17, 2025
MAGA Is Misreading Its Mandate
Time and time again one sees politicians and political movements believing that they have a post-election mandate only to see things fall apart and voters subsequently sending a strong "no" in the next election cycle. Ask current Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin who very much overplayed his hand and quickly became a lame duck as voters handed control of the Virginia General Assembly and stifled Youngkin's agenda. At the national level, Donald Trump received more votes that Harris, but still only received less than fifty percent of all votes. In short, he has no mandate regardless of how often he and his self-prostituting Republicans and tech giants say and act otherwise. Earlier this week I attended a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, a place where honor, duty, country still matter. All are unknown concepts to Trump who cares only about himself, is incapable of telling the truth and who sees members of the military either as suckers and losers or mere props for photo ops. I like to believe the majority of Americans still believe in these values and that Trump will over reach and create a backlash. The only question is one of how much damage will be done before the backlash hits. A piece in the New York Times looks at Trump/MAGA's delusion about having a mandate:
I’m growing increasingly amused by the overreaction to Donald Trump’s election.
I’m not talking about genuine concerns over Trump’s authoritarianism, incompetence and malice. . . . . I’m talking about something else. As we watch chief executive after chief executive pay homage to Trump and MAGA, with Apple, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI making identical $1 million donations to Trump’s inauguration, either through their chief executives or their corporate accounts, there is a sense that his election signals some sort of sweeping ideological “vibe shift,” a triumph of right-wing populism over all its foes.
It is no such thing.
The truth of the matter is that we don’t know whether Trump’s second victory will have an enduring ideological impact on American politics at all. If Trump fails, then all the ideas he supposedly vanquished, from “wokeism” to neoliberalism to Reagan-style conservatism may well come roaring back.
History is instructive here. Ever since George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, we’ve been in a period of unusual political instability. Many Republicans believed Bush’s re-election heralded a new era of Republican political dominance — right up until the Democrats swept Republicans out of power in the House and Senate in 2006 and took back the White House in 2008.
Barack Obama’s victory, combined with his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, represented a moment of Democratic triumph. . . . . That consensus also lasted all of two years, until the libertarian-minded Tea Party revolution wiped out the Democratic majority in the House and gave Republicans immense confidence that Obama would be a one-term president.
For those keeping score at home, by Trump’s inauguration, the presidency will have changed party control four times over the past 20 years, control of the House has also changed four times, and Senate control has shifted four times also.
Perhaps more significant, for the first time in more than 120 years, the incumbent president or party has lost three consecutive presidential elections.
Contrast this instability with the enduring party dominance of the recent past. Between 1968 and 1988, Republicans won five of six presidential elections. Democrats held the House for 40 straight years, from 1955 to 1995.
Both parties have high floors of support, and the few voters who flip back and forth (and decide presidential elections) aren’t embracing new ideologies; they’re rejecting the person or party they believe has failed to achieve the results they want.
Neither party has found an enduring answer to American discontent. Lincoln’s Republican Party solved the problem of Southern secessionism and earned the right to govern for decades. Democrats had the more effective response to the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt was indispensable to America’s triumph in World War II.
Another way of putting it is that when a party is seen as solving or addressing the key challenge of a generation, then it earns a generation’s worth of political success. Fail, and your rule is fleeting — no matter how decisive your initial victory.
What is our generational challenge? It’s a debatable question, of course, but I’d argue that it’s rooted in a national sense — cutting across races and classes — that our country just doesn’t quite work any longer, that a nation once capable of greatness is stagnant, mired in failure and incompetence — incapable of sustaining the American dream and handing it down to future generations.
Polling demonstrates an overwhelming sense of pessimism about our nation’s future. . . . It’s not just the big shocks (a lost war, a financial crisis, a deadly pandemic) that have shaken American confidence, it’s death by a thousand cuts. Why is it so hard to build new housing in so many American cities? Why can’t we reliably secure our southern border? Why are hundreds of thousands of people homeless in what is, despite everything, the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation?
Time and time again, good intentions are swamped by regulatory complexity and political horse-trading. . . . . Yes, red states are pulling residents from blue states — in part because local Republicans tend to limit taxes and regulations, rendering their states more business and builder-friendly. But they also benefit from blue state largess. Many Republican states are poorer than Democratic states, and they receive far more financial support from the federal government than they provide in tax dollars to the government.
Nine of the 11 states that receive the highest proportion of federal dollars relative to how much they pay voted for Trump last year.
At the presidential level, Americans have been frustrated with Republican and Democratic presidents alike, punishing Republicans for the Great Recession and the quagmire in Iraq, and Democrats for inflation and chaos at the border.
Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday was further evidence that Trump doesn’t understand the reasons for his own victory. The Pentagon is a vast bureaucracy, and the military is facing a complex strategic problem in responding to a rising China, an aggressive Russia, and a wounded Iranian regime that may well try to race to assemble a nuclear weapon.
To address that problem, Trump nominated a man whose chief qualification appears to be that he’s the most prominent (and loyal) MAGA veteran on television. The nation desperately needs competence, but, as The New Yorker reported, Hegseth was forced out of previous jobs for mismanagement, excessive drinking and “sexist” misconduct.
His probable confirmation is one of the most remarkable examples of “failing up” in modern American history. MAGA is mostly oblivious to this reality, in part because its single-minded focus on vengeance and culture war has shaped its definition of “competence.”
MAGA wants people who are competent at political combat — rooting out D.E.I., for example — but the nation needs people who are competent at strategy and management. Eliminating D.E.I. modules from annual training requirements won’t solve the nation’s shipbuilding bottleneck, prepare the military for the new era of drone warfare or address the shortcomings of our defense industrial base.
In fact, when you look at Trump’s nominees, he’s not replacing D.E.I. with meritocracy, but with something that looks a lot like a pure political spoils system, where the main qualification for high office is loyalty to Trump and hatred for his enemies. That is not an upgrade over D.E.I.
At the same time, Trump’s social media feeds demonstrate his economic ignorance, his commitment to personal vengeance and his bizarre trolling of allies. No, Canada is not going to merge with America. Denmark rejects the idea of selling Greenland. We’re not going to seize the Panama Canal. Why are these ideas part of the national conversation?
Make no mistake, it’s easier to aspire to competence than to achieve it — especially when partisans will actively block political solutions rather than permit their opponents to take credit for success.
One of the most recent (and shameful) examples of pure partisan obstruction happened last year when the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, blocked the bipartisan border bill negotiated by a Republican senator, James Lankford of Oklahoma, with his Democratic Senate counterparts.
There was nothing subtle about the right’s reasoning. As Senator Lankford told The Times, “I did have several folks, one just more blunt than others, saying: ‘I’ll destroy you if you do this. Because though I like you, I like President Trump better, and he’s got to be elected for the future of the country, and you can’t take this issue off the table.’ ”
Read that again.
That’s exactly the kind of reasoning that perpetuates our national crisis of confidence. . . . . There is only one way for Trump’s victory to herald a true American political realignment: He has to succeed. He has to be able to swallow his thirst for vengeance and tame his erratic mind enough to actually begin to restore American confidence.
If he won’t (or can’t), this MAGA moment will end the way every supposed realignment of the last 20 years has ended — in the agony of political defeat.
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Bracing for Trump 2.0 and Project 2025
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was an extreme failure for the United States as both a nation and a country. He has open contempt for democracy and the Constitution. He is publicly promising and threatening (and putting in place the means) to rule as the country’s first elected dictator on “day one.” Trump, like other such autocrats and authoritarians, means what he says both literally and figuratively.
A country consists of a defined territory and borders, founding documents, laws and institutions. The United States failed to protect its democracy by putting an autocrat and his larger authoritarian populist movement and cadre of kleptocratic allies in control of its governing institutions — including Congress.
One of the tenets of America as a nation is a belief in American Exceptionalism. Be it a “shining city on a hill” or “the world’s greatest democracy,” Trump's return to power further undermines America's self-image of greatness. The United States has now been brought down to the level of being common, and just another of many examples across the centuries, of how a failing and sick democracy succumbs to demagogues, strongmen and authoritarians and their false promises of renewed greatness and easy solutions to complex problems.
In total, the 2024 election and the extended Trumpocene embody a moral crisis and civic collapse for the United States. Donald Trump is a damning indictment of the country’s political culture.
"I think on the Republican side, there is no morality right now," former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger explained to Salon in a recent interview:
Is there room for it? Yes. I think there is still morality in the Democratic Party. One of the things that I've appreciated over the last four years is my new alliance with liberals, and what I call this is an alliance to defend democracy….. That's where we're at now. I think there is still morality left in the Democratic Party, and I think there has to be morality. Otherwise politics just becomes an exercise of power. . .
For many Americans — especially those White Americans who believed in the many lies of America’s inherent greatness and goodness, and that authoritarianism and fascism are something “over there” and not something with centuries of history in the United States in the form of such regimes as American Apartheid and Jim Crow, White on Black chattel slavery and other great crimes against nonwhite people — Trump’s return to power is shocking, unbelievable and a type of epistemic crisis.
James Baldwin spoke to these feelings in his 1965 essay “White Man’s Guilt”:
People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.
In an attempt to make better sense of our collective emotions (and tumult and upset) in these days before Trump’s return to power, reflect on the previous year and the election and what may come next, I recently spoke to a range of experts.
Once Merrick Garland allowed and facilitated Trump to skate on the worst acts imaginable not only against individuals but against our democracy and national security we were in deep trouble. The minute Trump was able to announce he was running for president it was clear it was to avoid prison. And Merrick Garland knew it. And enabled it.
Regrettably, few of us treated it as such or recognized the impact of the moment. We held onto the illusion (delusion?) that our democracy was intact, even though our Department of Justice and Merrick Garland had already by that time, ensured it was not. It was already slipping through our fingers like we were trying to hold onto a handful of water. "Disappearing" Trump's many crimes effectively took them off the table as impactful campaign issues for persuadable voters.
Since Election Day, we've seen our institutions that we already knew were floundering, now openly selling out to the coming fascism and the authoritarian Trump regime, with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski groveling their way down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and beg for mercy and with ABC News and George Stephanopoulos settling a defamation case brought by Trump.
Trump and his administration and agents and other enablers will crash the Biden economy — one of the best in decades — to "rebuild" it again — except they will only keep the first half of the promise. There will be no rebuilding. There will only be mass looting of our tax dollars, greasing of palms, favors to help the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the destruction of the middle class, further ensuring we cannot fight back.
Trump owns the domain of feelings politics: anger, resentment, outrage and even joy from revenge and winning.
I’m concerned that Republicans will implement Project 2025 and that it is going to trigger a recession similar to that of the early 1980s. I’m also bracing myself for having the news cycle revolve around Trump again. It’s mentally exhausting to follow and track the administration with the non-stop drama.
As for these being the “good times”? I agree. The Biden administration did some good things with the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. There are some good long-term investments in those acts. I don’t think we will see good policy for a while. Even if it’s just hyperbole, Trump’s obsession with immigration and the border is not a productive economic policy and doesn’t do anything for working people.
As the folk wisdom suggests, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. What was missing was the word “enough” – you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to get elected. And I don’t think it was just fooling people; Trump ran against a Black woman — meaning Harris already had two strikes against her when she came up to bat, but still almost won. I usually am much more mindful of America’s deep-seated racism and misogyny, but I lost sight of it along the way in the summer of 2024 and into the election.
[T]his time I feel resigned to bad news on a regular basis and don’t have the energy to respond to each Trump transgression. I will try to focus on those individuals and groups who are trying to do good work in defense of American democracy and human decency.
If we devolve into the nightmare that Trump’s return to power will mean for the country, we must try to keep a larger perspective. This means maintaining our relationships with friends and family and the larger community. We should strive to find those happy times amidst what will be so much darkness and pain.
I clung to the belief that the majority of Americans would understand the stakes — that electing Trump again would mean dismantling the architecture of democracy and reassembling it into something menacing and unrecognizable. Surely, I thought, voters could see the obvious: Trump was a fascist. But then, like a lightning bolt, it struck me —most Americans simply didn’t care.
I've believed in the resilience of the American electorate and its capacity to discern the dangers of demagoguery. By 2024, that belief was shattered. Surely, by now, they should have seen through Trump. But they hadn’t — or worse, they had, and it didn’t matter.
With Trump’s personalist rule and its cronies and incompetent nominees to run the administration and the looming betrayal of Ukraine by Trump in its war for survival and freedom against the Russian invaders, it feels as though the country stands on the brink of an uncharted precipice, every concession, every acquiescence, nudging us closer to the abyss. In the face of this chaos, I find myself desperately searching for any fragile foothold, any sense of stability, though none seem to exist. I haven’t felt this unmoored since the dark days of 2016.
When Trump spoke of a publicly televised trial for Liz Cheney over the January 6 report, my mind raced to darker places, conjuring the ghost of Roland Freisler, the venomous voice of the People's Court in Nazi Germany.
I won’t watch the Inauguration. I’m sure Trump will bask in his glory, proclaiming the crowd size is the largest in presidential history. And later I’ll follow stories about how world leaders sucked up to Trump. And there will be emails from friends and colleagues worldwide offering their condolences to me for having to live through more Trump years and offering their solidarity which I will appreciate.
Monday, January 13, 2025
Sunday, January 12, 2025
House GOP Puts Medicaid, ACA, Climate Measures on Chopping Block
House Republicans are passing around a “menu” of more than $5 trillion in cuts they could use to bankroll President-elect Donald Trump’s top priorities this year, including tax cuts and border security.
The early list of potential spending offsets obtained by POLITICO includes changes to Medicare and ending Biden administration climate programs, along with slashing welfare and “reimagining” the Affordable Care Act.
The people, granted anonymity to discuss closed-door negotiations, said that the list originated from the House Budget Committee, chaired by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas). Republicans involved in the reconciliation plans have been generally targeting the listed programs for several months, but internal GOP fights over trillions of dollars in potential cuts are just beginning.
The overall savings add up to as much as $5.7 trillion over 10 years, though the list is highly ambitious and unlikely to all become law given narrow margins for Republicans in the House and Senate.
Cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the country’s largest anti-hunger program would spark massive opposition from Democrats and would also face some GOP resistance. House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford any Republican defections if he wants to pass a package on party lines.
Even proposed cuts to green energy tax credits, worth as much as $500 billion, could be tricky — as the document notes, they depend “on political viability.” Already 18 House Republicans — 14 of whom won reelection in November — warned Johnson against prematurely repealing some of the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are funding multiple manufacturing projects in GOP districts.
In addition to Medicaid and ACA cuts, the document floats clawing back bipartisan infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Act funding.
One senior GOP lawmaker, asked if there were any particularly controversial spending offsets dividing Republicans, replied: “They all feel pretty controversial.”
The policy menu suggests Republicans could capture major savings from Medicaid — up to an estimated $2.3 trillion. The list includes so-called per-capita caps on Medicaid for states, meaning the program would be paid for based on population instead of being an open-ended entitlement, and would institute work requirements in the program.
The list also includes a policy to equalize payments in Medicaid for able-bodied adults with those of traditional Medicaid enrollment — those with disabilities or low-income children, which would save up to $690 billion.
It would “recapture” $46 billion in savings from Affordable Care Act health insurance plan subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year, setting up a major policy battle. It would also limit eligibility for plans based on citizenship status.
It also finds $146 billion in potential savings from so-called site-neutral payment policy in Medicare, a bipartisan target that has been discussed as a potential pay-for in reconciliation. They’re also eyeing repealing significant Biden administration health care rules, which could include ending a rule requiring minimum staffing levels at nursing homes.
Also on the chopping block are President Joe Biden’s climate policies, which are estimated to yield as much as $468 billion. That includes Trump’s repeated promise to repeal Biden’s “EV mandate,” as well as discontinuing “Green New Deal” provisions from the bipartisan infrastructure law and green energy grants from the IRA.
The green energy cuts could be particularly tricky from a political perspective. GOP lawmakers have long backed some technologies supported under the climate law, including supporting hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture.
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