Saturday, March 16, 2024
Social Security and Medicare Are on the Ballot in November
A few days ago, the Biden administration released its budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year (which begins in October). Given that Republicans control the House, this budget isn’t going to happen, so it serves mainly as a statement of principles and intent.
But that doesn’t make the budget irrelevant. It clearly signaled Democrats’ vision for the future — in particular, their belief that we can preserve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare by raising taxes on high incomes rather than by cutting benefits. And it draws a stark contrast with the vision of Donald Trump, who appeared to say during an interview with CNBC that he would seek to cut those programs.
You might be tempted to dismiss Biden’s assurances on safety net programs as boilerplate — don’t Democrats always promise to protect Social Security and Medicare?
But Biden has staked out a significantly stronger position than that of Barack Obama, who, as president, all too often seemed to be in the intellectual thrall of those I used to call the Very Serious People, opinion leaders who a decade ago dominated inside-the-Beltway discourse and were obsessed with the need for entitlement reform — which effectively meant cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Obama’s 2014 fiscal year budget teased entitlement reform to the point that even John Boehner, then the Republican House speaker, was prompted to say Obama “does deserve some credit for some incremental entitlement reforms that he has outlined in his budget.”
Biden is saying that none of this is necessary. This is a significant move to the left — although it’s also a move to the center, in the sense that voters never agreed with the elite conventional wisdom that benefits must be cut and a majority consistently say the rich don’t pay enough in taxes.
What explains this toughening up of the Democratic position? For one thing, entitlement programs look a lot more fiscally sustainable than they used to.
A decade ago, projections of spending generally assumed that health care costs would continue their historical pattern of rising much faster than G.D.P., making Medicare and other health programs increasingly unaffordable. In fact, however, Medicare costs, in particular, have been rising much less than expected. . . . . cost reduction efforts in the Affordable Care Act probably played a role.
We still have an aging population, which means a rising ratio of retirees receiving benefits to workers paying taxes; the Congressional Budget Office expects combined spending on Social Security and Medicare to rise by about three percentage points of G.D.P. over the next 20 years. But this cost rise, while not small, is moderate enough that it could be offset with higher revenues.
At the same time, the Very Serious People have lost much of their influence. Their repeated predictions of fiscal crisis kept not coming true. The inflation surge of 2021-22 temporarily boosted the credibility of critics of government spending, but this credibility evaporated when dire warnings about persistent stagflation proved utterly wrong.
All of this has, I believe, encouraged Biden and his officials to stake out a firm position opposing cuts to America’s social safety net — indeed, calling for increased benefits, to be paid for with increased taxes on corporations and high-income individuals.
What about Trump? Here’s what he said: “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.” If you have trouble parsing that, it’s not you; it’s him.
And desperate follow-up attempts by the Trump campaign to insist that “cutting” didn’t actually mean, well, “cutting” weren’t convincing.
Incidentally, Social Security sees very little fraud, and if Medicare is very badly managed, how has it become so effective at cost control?
What that could mean in practice, however, is that if he[Trump] gets back to the White House, he’ll do for Social Security and Medicare what he did in his almost successful attempt to replace Obamacare: leave the drafting of legislation to right-wing ideologues who do understand how the programs work — and who want to gut them.
One final point: Trump’s plan for a draconian crackdown on immigration would be a disaster on many fronts, but one important consideration is that it would have a catastrophic impact on the future finances of Social Security and Medicare. Why? Because at this point, immigration is crucial for growth in the working-age population, whose taxes support retirees.
So will Social Security and Medicare be on the ballot this November? Definitely. Biden has a clear plan to preserve these programs; Trump, wittingly or unwittingly, would probably help wreck them.
Friday, March 15, 2024
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Trump's RNC Purge and Obsession with "Loyalty"
Donald Trump's infatuation with Adolf Hitler is both well documented and profoundly disturbing. What's often overlooked is how painfully stupid it is. The latest round of stories about this phenomenon underlines why: Trump doesn't seem to understand that Nazi Germany lost World War II. John Kelly, Trump's former White House chief of staff, told CNN in a recent interview that Trump praised Hitler for doing "good things," including that the Nazi dictator had "rebuilt the economy" and also the demonstrably false claim that German generals were "loyal" to Hitler.
Kelly pushed back against Trump on the latter point, pointing out that German officers had conspired to assassinate Hitler on several occasions. Kelly also noted that Trump had apparently "missed the Holocaust," adding that it was "pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater." Hitler's leadership wasn't exactly a win for Germans who supported him either. Far from "rebuilding" the nation, Hitler left Germany in literal ruins with several of its cities reduced to rubble. Millions of German soldiers died in six years of devastating warfare, along with many civilians. Hitler ended by killing himself in an underground bunker rather than risking capture by the Soviets, a fact Trump also overlooks in mythologizing the man who started the deadliest war in history.
Trump's rejection of history isn't just about his apparent innate faith that fascism is more efficient. It's also a manifestation of his limitless narcissism and his obsessive belief that he is owed unquestioning loyalty from the people around him, although he'd happily throw every single one of them under the bus for a nickel. He publicly indulged this fantasy late last week, when hosting Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. Amid his slobbering praise of the Hungarian prime minister, Trump said, "He’s a non-controversial figure because he says this is the way it’s going to be, and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss."
Trump may believe that always watching your back and lashing out at anyone who questions you is "strength," but it's really a sign of a weak and pathetic leader. That's evident in this week's startling purge at the Republican National Committee. As Politico reports, "more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications and data departments will be let go." This comes is after Trump already pushed out the RNC leadership, replacing them with perceived loyalists, including Lara Trump, his own daughter-in-law.
Mind you, the former leadership of the RNC was already a bunch of Trump bootlickers. Former chair Ronna McDaniel literally dropped "Romney" from her surname to appease Trump, who views her uncle, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, as a mortal enemy. Lara Trump's public statements, along with complaints from other Republican sources, suggest that the main source of this intra-GOP conflict is money. Trump's escalating legal costs are straining his campaign coffers. McDaniel had suggested that she'd rather use RNC funds in the normal fashion, to support Republican candidates, than to pay Trump's lawyers. She learned her lesson the hard way: Never get between Donald Trump and someone else's money.
There's good news here for those who want to defeat Trump: His preference for sycophants means that he shuts himself off from actual feedback and sensible advice. That's evident when you look at his legal team, which is built around his hunger for flattery, instead of competent lawyering that might help him in court. During his first civil trial for the sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, Trump reluctantly took his lawyer's advice to stay away from the courthouse. In the second trial, he dumped that lawyer and went with Alina Habba, who barely even tries to win cases in court and endlessly indulges her client's desire to throw tantrums and preen for the cameras. . . . Trump's desire for ego-fluffing over legal competence is proving expensive.
Trump surrounds himself with losers like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and the clown car full of pillow pitchmen and conspiracy-mongers who tried to manage his coup attempt. These are people who have been shut out of power through their own failures, and try to glom onto it by becoming Trump's lackeys.
On the most recent episode of his Daily Blast podcast, host Greg Sargent made an interesting observation about how misleading it is for reporters to quote anonymous Trump campaign officials who claim that they're pushing Trump to "pivot" to less fascist rhetoric. These articles convey the false impression that maybe a second Trump term wouldn't be so bad, since he's surrounded by reasonable people who will somehow restrain him. But they don't, and they won't. On the contrary, his speeches are getting nastier by the day . . . . They know full well that their boss has a fragile ego. They're probably too worried about being fired to ever say anything to him that isn't sniveling agreement with every word.
Trump's tendency to value toadyism over competence may be a blessing in some regards. It's a big reason his coup failed, and it consistently undermines his legal strategy. Gutting the RNC staff is likely to damage the GOP's electoral chances this fall. But none of this is a reason to be complacent. Sadly, there are talented people working for Trump — not out of personal loyalty, since many of them hold him in contempt, but because they believe in the fascist cause.
Trump's narcissism has always been his Achilles heel. He prefers the illusion of power offered by genuflecting yes-men over the hard work involved in gaining real power and exercising it. That creates real opportunities for Joe Biden's campaign and other Trump foes to undermine the would-be despot's comeback by rattling his ego and sowing division amid his ranks. A thin skin and an unwillingness to take advice from others, after all, are common traits of "strongman" leaders that show how weak they really are.
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
The GOP's "Trickle-down Economics" is a Scam
Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. When Democrats deride tax cuts for the wealthiest as a budget buster and a vehicle for allowing the rich to get richer, Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.
The day after his State of the Union address, President Biden crowed about another 275,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of February. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. Now, our economy is the envy of the world,” he said in a written statement. “We added 275,000 jobs last month — nearly 15 million since I took office.” He concluded, “Across the country, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. The days of trickle-down are over.”
Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.
“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”
This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015 . . . . “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”
But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.
[W]hat about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”
But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data
A 2022 update by Hope and Limberg reiterated, “Our findings on the effects of growth and unemployment provide evidence against supply side theories that suggest lower taxes on the rich will induce labor supply responses from high-income individuals (more hours of work, more effort, etc.) that boost economic activity.” Instead, they confirmed there is “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Given that experience, Biden entered office determined to deploy targeted investments (e.g., infrastructure, chip manufacturing), tailored tax increases on rich individuals and corporations that had been paying no taxes, cost controls on items such as prescription drug prices, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Robust immigration and energy production further boosted growth. Biden also canceled billions in student loan debt, freeing up consumer spending. The result has been a record recovery from the pandemic and real wage growth adjusted for inflation.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me after the State of the Union: “There’s a solid, empirical body of research confirming this. Tax cuts for the rich just make them richer, exacerbating both the deficit and economic inequality.”
One type of tax credit has worked spectacularly well. “The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children.
Biden now proposes a tax increase for billionaires. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” he told the country during the State of the Union. “You know what the average federal tax rate for these billionaires is? 8.2 percent!” He argued, “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse! That’s why I’ve proposed a minimum tax of 25 percent for billionaires. Just 25 percent.”
There is no evidence that doing this would impair the economic recovery Biden has presided over. It, however, would help pare down the deficit (something Republicans used to pretend to care about).
Sold as a prosperity booster, trickle-down tax cuts for the very rich do not increase prosperity, growth or employment for the average American. This sop to the rich does increase the deficit and income disparity. By contrast, restoring the child tax credit and enacting a billionaire’s tax would continue to narrow the gulf between the very rich and everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is a scam. Renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Sex Trafficking, Racism and Republican Lies
On Thursday, Katie Britt, the junior senator from Alabama, delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union address. Her overwrought performance has been widely mocked; that’s OK for late-night TV, but I’m not going to join in that chorus.
What I want to do instead is focus on the centerpiece of Britt’s remarks, a deeply misleading story about sex trafficking that she used to attack President Biden. Her use of the story — which turns out to have involved events in Mexico way back when George W. Bush was president — wasn’t technically a lie, since she didn’t explicitly say that it happened in the United States on Biden’s watch.
That’s a clear attempt to mislead — the moral equivalent of a lie — and the careful wording actually suggests that she knew she was being misleading, and wanted an escape hatch if someone called her bluff.
To really understand the significance of her de facto lie, however, we need to put it in political context.
Over the past few months, there’s been a palpable shift in Republican rhetoric away from attacks on the Biden economy and toward dire warnings about “migrant crime.”
This shift has in part been forced by the fact that the Biden economy is actually doing very well these days, with inflation receding while unemployment remains near a 50-year low. In political terms, the narrative of a bad economy seems to be fading.
If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be especially worried about the changing tone of news coverage. The San Francisco Fed maintains a daily index of “news sentiment.” In the summer of 2023, although the economy was arguably already performing pretty well, this index was roughly as low as it was in the depths of the Great Recession. Since then, however, it has shot up to levels roughly comparable to those that prevailed on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republicans, then, need a new issue. And there really does seem to have been a surge in illegal attempts to cross our southern border. So there are strategic reasons for Donald Trump and his party to hype the dangers of migrant crime — and for Trump and his allies to maximize the fear factor by blocking bipartisan legislation that would have helped secure the border.
My guess, however, is that Trump’s rants about migrant crime aren’t purely strategic. He has a history of being obsessed with alleged crimes by dark-skinned people, going all the way back to his demand, after the arrests of the Central Park Five, who were eventually exonerated, to reinstate the death penalty. And his claims about the dangers posed by migrants are so extreme that they may well be self-defeating.
The other day, for example, he declared, “I will stop the killing, I will stop the bloodshed, I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.” Which towns and cities, exactly, have been sacked and plundered?
Yes, figuring out how best to secure our borders is a real issue, but the data just doesn’t show that there’s a crisis of migrant crime.
So what do you do when the numbers don’t support your dystopian fantasies? You zero in on the most horrific individual stories.
Without question, the killing of Laken Riley, for which an undocumented immigrant has been charged, is devastating. But in a country as big as ours, it’s almost always possible to find examples of unspeakable tragedies involving individual members of whatever group you name.
Based on the available evidence, however, immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.
In any case, the migrant crime wave — the “plunder of our cities” Trump seems to endlessly decry — is a myth. But it may be a myth Trump believes in, and the possibility that in this instance he may actually be sincere is alarming.
Why? Because if Trump really believes migrants are an existential threat, if he wins in November, as president he might go through with his plan to engage in sweeping raids and mass deportations, very likely catching up many people who simply look as if they might be undocumented immigrants.
So don’t wave away Britt’s remarks as a mere example of bad acting. They may be the harbinger of a reign of terror that will wreak havoc in America.
Monday, March 11, 2024
The GOP’s Increased Radicalization
The notion that the United States is “polarized” into two conflicting, equally stubborn and extreme camps infects much of the mainstream news coverage and everyday chatter about politics. . . . . Such mealy-mouthed language masks a stark dichotomy: Democrats have to move to the center to get bipartisan support; Republicans have become radicalized and unmovable.
This is not “polarization.” It is the authoritarian capture of much of the GOP by a right-wing movement bent on sowing chaos. Turkey, Hungary and other countries with autocratic strongmen are not polarized; democratic forces try their best to prevent their country’s ruin and collapse into total dictatorship. Our political scene, sadly, has come to resemble the global authoritarian assault on democracy.
[I]t’s fashionable . . . . to blame both political parties.
The bipartisan border compromise . . . . was sunk by Republicans. Republicans in the House overwhelmingly opposed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly known as the “Bipartisan” Infrastructure Bill (which President Biden modified to get bipartisan support); almost every Republican voted against the Chips Act, they all voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, and some even voted against the Pact Act, which would have helped veterans.
The assertion that hyper-partisanship, chaos and nihilism (e.g., threatening to shut down the government, egging on a default and refusing to even vote on Ukraine aide) is equally divided amounts to an outright fabrication — or utter cluelessness.
That’s the same tommyrot one hears from No Labels. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported that No Labels has resorted to “accusing Biden of having politically toxic positions he does not actually hold.” Well, if you are asking for millions to run a quixotic third-party race, it sounds better to make him out to be just as extreme as Trump; alas, it is just not true. . . . To cook up an equivalence, you have to misrepresent Biden’s record.
Biden has actually stood up to the far left in his own party when it lionizes Hamas or demands Medicare-for-all. The left blasts him for being too accommodating, too courteous to Republicans and too hands-off with a listless Justice Department. Biden remains in step with the vast majority of Democrats.
The party’s center-left orientation was evident throughout the primaries. On Super Tuesday, California voters chose moderate Rep. Adam Schiff (D) over progressive Rep. Katie Porter (D) as one of two candidates to run to fill the Senate seat opened by Dianne Feinstein’s death. In Texas, moderate Rep. Colin Allred won the Senate Democratic primary by a mile and avoided a runoff.
Meanwhile, Republicans nominated for North Carolina governor not a “fiery outsider,” as the New York Times would have us believe (the headline was subsequently changed), but Mark Robinson, who called transgender and gay people “filth” and said gay people are equivalent to “what the cows leave behind” (also “maggots” and “flies”). He has made a series of shocking an inflammatory comments about women and Jews (even quoting Hitler), remains a staunch election denier and wants to ban all abortions (a view about 90 percent of Americans reject). Hate speech of the type Trump and Robinson utter would be disqualifying in the Democratic Party.
Congress has also fallen under the grip of a right-wing bastion that cannot govern itself. The GOP speaker of the House is a Christian nationalist who thinks he was chosen by God and takes direction from the Bible, not the Constitution. No Democrat compares to the likes of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) or Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).
Worst of all, Republicans are on the verge of nominating someone literally out on bail, who dines with neo-Nazis, talks about blood purity and invites Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack NATO. Virtually every elected Republican has fallen in behind him — the most extreme, racist candidate since the Civil War. (Even Sen. Barry Goldwater knew Moscow was the enemy.)
Responsible reporting should not cover for Republicans. The MAGA Republican Party has become shockingly irrational and radicalized, fully embracing totalitarianism, white nationalism and radical isolationism.
America is divided not by some free-floating condition of “polarization” but by one party going off the deep end. And that’s a threat to all of us.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Why Haley Voters Should Support Biden
Last Wednesday, a day before he delivered a rousing State of the Union address, Joe Biden issued an invitation to the roughly 30 percent of Republican primary voters who had voted for Nikki Haley in the G.O.P. presidential primaries before she dropped out. The message was simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want you, but we do. After all, Trump said on Truth Social that anyone who made a “contribution” to Haley would be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Biden, by contrast, acknowledged differences of opinion with Haley voters but argued that agreement on democracy, decency, the rule of law and support for NATO should unite Haley voters against Trump.
Is Biden correct? Is there an argument that could persuade a meaningful number of Haley conservatives to vote for Biden? In ordinary times the answer would be no. It still may be no. Negative polarization is the dominant fact of American political life. . . . . They’re going to do it only as a last resort, when they truly understand and feel the same way about the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan felt when he departed the Democratic Party: He didn’t leave the party. The party left him.
Now, however, it’s the G.O.P. that is sprinting away from Reagan — and from Haley Republicans — as fast as MAGA can carry it. The right is not just mad at Republican dissenters for defying Trump; it has such profound policy disagreements with Reagan and Haley Republicans that it’s hard to imagine the two factions coexisting for much longer. . . . . for the foreseeable future traditional conservatives will face a choice: conform or leave.
It’s likely that most people will conform. But they ought to leave. If a political party is a shared enterprise for advancing policies and ideas with the hope of achieving concrete outcomes, then there are key ways in which a second Biden term would be a better fit for Reagan Republicans than Round 2 of Trump.
Take national security. Even apart from his self-evident disregard for democracy, Trump’s weakness in the Ukraine conflict and his hostility to American alliances may represent the most dangerous aspects of a second term, with potential world-historic consequences similar to those of American isolationism before World War II.
Biden’s continuing support for NATO, by contrast, has made America stronger. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has added their potent militaries to the Western alliance. The strategic Baltic Sea is now a “NATO lake.” Biden was smart to start his State of the Union address by contrasting Reagan’s demand to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall with Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries who “don’t pay.”
There is no fiscal conservative in the race. Trump had a higher deficit each successive year he was in office, for example. But Biden’s economic stewardship has been sound. Inflation is easing, the stock market has reached record highs, unemployment is below 4 percent, and the median net worth of the American family increased by 37 percent between 2019 and 2022, even controlling for inflation.
Last year, The Economist published a comprehensive economic analysis demonstrating that “on a whole range of measures American dominance remains striking. And relative to its rich-world peers its lead is increasing.”
Let’s also look at the rule of law. Trump took office promising to end “American carnage,” but it skyrocketed on his watch. Between 2019 and 2020, America experienced the “largest single-year increase” in the murder rate in “more than a century.” Under Biden, by contrast, in 2023, “The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent,” a number that would represent “the biggest national decline on record . . . . Violent crime “is near its lowest level in 50 years.”
Moreover, the Biden administration didn’t defund the police, but MAGA might. Last Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, promised to “cut 3 percent from D.O.J., 7 percent from the ATF, 6 percent from the F.B.I., and 10 percent from the E.P.A.,” and, he said, “that’s just a start.”
The most fraught issue for many conservatives considering crossing the aisle is abortion. That’s certainly the most difficult issue for me. But while Trump nominated the justices who helped reverse Roe v. Wade, he also failed on the most important metric of all: the number of abortions performed in America. Although Barack Obama was very much a pro-choice president, the abortion rate decreased by a remarkable 28 percent during his two terms, . . . By contrast, there were 56,080 more abortions by the end of Trump’s presidency in 2020 than there had been in 2016, and the abortion rate rose for three consecutive years, in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Compounding the problem for anti-abortion conservatives, the MAGA-dominated G.O.P. has been an electoral disaster. . . . . The MAGA ethos of corruption and cruelty is a poor fit for a movement that’s supposed to be dedicated to loving the most vulnerable among us.
I raise these issues not to argue that Reagan Republicans have a true home in a Biden-led Democratic Party. . . . But Reagan (and Haley) Republicans also have such profound differences with MAGA that it is genuinely debatable which party now better advances their preferred policies.
But here’s what’s not debatable: While the ideological alignments of the two parties are in a state of flux, only one party is nominating a man who’s been impeached twice, indicted in four criminal cases, found liable for systemic financial fraud, and found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming his victim. He is a man who inspired and gave at least tacit support to a violent assault on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an American election.
Reagan conservatives don’t just need reasons to vote against Trump. They also plainly need reasons to vote for Joe Biden. In 2024, we have two presidential records to compare. And this time it’s the Democrat who can say that he’s tougher on Russia and better on crime, and overseeing an economy that’s the envy of the world. That’s a case for conservatives. The question is whether it’s a case they’re willing to hear.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)