Saturday, September 28, 2024
America’s Hurricane Luck Is Running Out
From high above, Hurricane Helene’s swirling clouds seem to have taken a piece of the United States and swallowed it whole. Helene, which made landfall last night as a Category 4 storm, has drenched the Southeast from the tip of Florida all the way up to North Carolina. Even though it weakened to a tropical storm this morning, streets have transformed into rivers, dams are threatening to fail, and more flooding is still to come. At least 22 people have died in the Southeast. Millions are without power. Florida’s Big Bend region, where Helene came ashore, had never faced such a strong hurricane in recorded history.
Helene arrived during an Atlantic hurricane season that forecasters had predicted would be unprecedented, thanks to record-warm ocean temperatures proffering extra fuel for storms. Since Hurricane Beryl swept over the Gulf Coast in July, the season has been quieter so far than the most dire expectations—but still unusually intense for Americans living in hurricane country. On average, one or two hurricanes make landfall in the U.S. per season. Helene is the fourth to come ashore on the Gulf Coast this year. This has only occurred a handful of times since the mid-1800s, with six as the record for landfalls on the U.S. mainland in a single season. This season isn’t over yet, so topping that record isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Climate change isn’t to blame for where a hurricane touches down, or if it does at all. But Helene’s strength is a different kind of bad luck—a variety that we humans inadvertently engineered. Many of the hurricanes that do reach land these days are more intense because of oceans warmed by climate change. Decades ago, Helene might have become a medium-size storm—still destructive, but not a beast. This hurricane is a sign of America’s relentless hurricane seasons to come.
For months now, the waters in the Gulf of Mexico have been abnormally hot, spiking several degrees over the past decade’s average temperatures. “It is simply not within or even close to the range of natural variability to have water temperatures this far above normal in the Gulf, over this wide of an area, to that deep of a depth,” Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Florida who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger, told me. “When the other ingredients you need to form a hurricane are present, the results are explosive.” In Helene’s case, those other ingredients included the state of hurricane-slowing winds (low) and hurricane-bolstering moisture in the air (plenty) . . . .
The problem is that, when atmospheric conditions allow a storm to form, our warming, moistening world is poised to grow them into major threats. “Even 100 years ago, the Gulf would have been plenty warm to support a hurricane of Helene’s strength,” Klotzbach said. But in this century, the chances of this particular outcome are simply higher.
Global warming doesn’t dictate whether storms like Beryl and Helene exist, but as Earth continues to heat up, more and more of the disasters that arrive on our shores will bear our fingerprints. “You hope, when you go into these years where the forecasts are really high, that maybe we’ll luck out; maybe we won’t get the big hurricane hits,” Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist in Miami, told me. So far, the opposite situation is unfolding. And we still have two more months to go.
The more Atlantic storms make landfall as hurricanes, the greater the chances that each American town or city will face disasters shaped by a combination of natural misfortune and human-made blight. In our warming world, it seems that hurricane country won’t be able to catch a break.
MAGA Means Never Saying You’re Sorry
Back in 1999—the good old days—a Canadian band that called itself Great Big Sea released a wonderful song titled “Consequence Free.” It was a gentle poke at social conformity, guilt, and, yes, perhaps even what was then called political correctness. “Wouldn’t it be great,” the song goes, “if no one ever got offended? Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?” And then in a soaring plea: “I wanna be—consequence free!”
But I knew that I and these charming Canadian fellows were only engaging in wistful thinking about not being too hard on yourself. We were not daydreaming about how great it would be to fire off racial epithets or chest-thump about being Nazis.
How quaint that seems now.
Today, public figures say things that would have resulted in their disgracing and shunning 25 years ago, all while demanding to be relieved of consequences. Donald Trump, of course, is the poster boy for this juvenile insistence on a life without judgment or criticism. He has made a political career out of “telling it like it is,” which for Trump means saying things that are incendiary (and often untrue) and then pretending to be shocked that anyone could take offense at his guileless candor.
Trump has gotten away with this cowardly schtick for years, and he has built a following among Americans who take his hideous pronouncements as permission to be their worst selves. People now delight in shocking others the way toddlers who have learned their first swear words enjoy seeing the horror of adults around them. This, as the Never Trump conservative writer Rick Wilson once put it, is “performative assholery,” and it is everywhere.
Consider GOP Representative Clay Higgins. If you are fortunate enough not to be acquainted with his political history, Higgins was a captain in a parish sheriff’s department in Louisiana who was forced to resign in 2016 after he referred to Black criminal suspects as “animals,” among other things, along with other unprofessional behavior.
Higgins might have been too racist for a Deep South police department, but not for the voters of Lousiania’s Third Congressional District, which includes Lake Charles and Lafayette, where he was first elected to the House in 2016. This week, Higgins got on the Trump campaign’s bandwagon of hatred directed at Haitians. . . . . Higgins fired off this post on X:
Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters … but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.
After enough of an uproar, Higgins deleted the post—and then doubled down on it anyway. “It’s all true,” Higgins told CNN yesterday.
Although Higgins is an odious racist, he is also clever: He knows that in the modern Republican Party, tribal loyalty means that political consequences for almost anything are rare. Not only will he remain in the good graces of his constituents, he even had the feckless House leader, Speaker Mike Johnson, covering for him.
The goal was to offend, to stir controversy, to rile up the MAGA faithful—and to get away with it. The whole episode was the very essence of the consequence-free GOP.
Which brings us to the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson.
Robinson apparently frequented some of the ickier parts of the internet, where he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and indulged in online behavior that need not be recounted here; in general, they were things one would not normally associate with a party that prides itself on family values and Christian morality.
Unlike Higgins, Robinson will almost certainly pay the price of an electoral loss. But amazingly, not only has he refused to withdraw from the race—which at least would have been an act of mercy to his party—but he won’t step down from his post as the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, either. After all, why should he? He’s the victim here, you see: He has denied the accusations and is even threatening to sue CNN for publishing these terrible things. (And yet, for some reason, when supporters offered to connect him with tech specialists to help investigate how all the stuff that seems to point to him ended up on the internet, he reportedly refused their assistance.)
Now, it’s true that the GOP does not have a monopoly on denial and huffy self-righteousness. Yesterday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was hit with a barrel of federal charges and his reaction was positively Trumpian: . . . .
Republicans, too, sometimes end up in court—Trump, after all, has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions and convicted in one so far—but for the MAGA base, it is almost a badge of honor when a Republican is charged with crimes. Trump and others have argued that the current Justice Department is merely a Democratic political weapon, but that’s an odd charge against a DOJ that has sought accountability not just from Adams but from disgraced (and convicted) former Senator Bob Menendez and many other Democrats, including President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
The GOP, meanwhile, so far can’t bring itself even to censure Higgins or to call on Robinson to step down from his office.
Higgins and Robinson, of course, do not belong in a courtroom: Being an offensive jerk is not a crime. But their behavior does raise the question of what, exactly, it takes to be ostracized by the Republican Party and its voters. When does so much racism, misogyny, and xenophobia finally become so toxic that Republicans join with other decent people in rejecting such behavior?
Right now, the limit for this kind of ghastliness does not seem to exist. And that is a tragedy for what’s left of the GOP—as well as for the civic health of the world’s greatest democracy.
Friday, September 27, 2024
Thursday, September 26, 2024
By His Own Standards, Trump's Presidency Was A Failure
Donald Trump’s best line in the September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris came near the end, when he sought to tie her to the unpopular president under whom she serves.
“She just started by saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that, she’s going to do all these wonderful things,” Trump said. “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years. They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”
The only problem with this attack is that it applies to another unpopular president as well: Trump himself. Time and again during the 2024 campaign, he’s promised to do something that he failed to do in his first term, that he didn’t bother to do during his first term, or is the opposite of what he did during his first term. Whenever he makes these claims, it’s worth remembering that Trump was president once—a fact he seems to hope you’ll forget. Maybe he doesn’t remember himself.
“The most optimistic outlook from his most ardent supporters is, ‘Well, I’m sure he’ll do better in his second term,’” Geoff Duncan, a Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, told me in August, shortly after he endorsed Kamala Harris.
The gap between what Trump says he’ll do in office and what he actually did runs through nearly every subject. Start with immigration, Trump’s favorite issue. He’s still promising to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. As president, he tried to do that, and found himself repeatedly frustrated; in the end, he was able to construct only small portions of a barrier, many of which have been easily breached. He keeps saying he wants to build the wall, but he hasn’t offered any new explanation for how he’d be able to do it this time.
Instead, he’s spent more time in this election cycle talking about his plans for mass deportation—something that he usually says will apply to undocumented immigrants, though now he’s promising to deport Haitian migrants from Springfield, Ohio, even though they are in the United States legally. Any mass deportation would require a huge military mobilization, entail enormous brutality, and disrupt large portions of the American economy, which are a few reasons to doubt that Trump would do it. Another reason for skepticism is that he made a similar promise to kick all unauthorized immigrants out of the country in 2016. In the end, though, he deported fewer people than Barack Obama did in either of his terms. Joe Biden has also deported more people than Trump did.
The same gulf between promises and past actions exists on economic issues, too. One of Trump’s big new ideas this cycle is eliminating the federal income tax on tips. . . . But during his first term, Trump sought to allow employers to take tips that workers received. His vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, wants a $5,000 child tax credit, but Trump’s big 2017 tax bill—passed when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate—increased the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000, placing greater emphasis on slashing the tax rate for high earners. Nonetheless, Trump says that bigger tax cuts in his second term would lower the debt, though that’s not what happened when he cut taxes before.
Trump’s 2024 platform promises to “stop outsourcing, and turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower,” but he was no more successful at returning manufacturing jobs to the United States than Obama had been . . .
He and Vance are also campaigning as a pro-worker ticket, and he managed to wrestle the Teamsters to a non-endorsement. But his National Labor Relations Board was business-friendly, and judges he appointed have consistently ruled against workers, including blocking a rule against noncompete agreements and siding with a company arguing that the NLRB itself is illegal.
Trump also spent the 2016 campaign promising (as other Republicans did) to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Once in office, he tried, but did not succeed, in part because the GOP hadn’t managed to come up with something that would eliminate the law without being a huge political liability.
He has also tried to pull off a diametric shift on abortion. Having run promising to overturn Roe v. Wade and then appointed conservative Supreme Court justices who did just that, he is now trying to style himself as a defender of women’s rights. “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION,” he promised in a recent Truth Social post.
In the realm of foreign policy, Trump says that he will “strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world,” but after promising to increase the size of the military in 2016, he did not. He is critical of the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and said during the debate, . . . . But Biden only oversaw the withdrawal because Trump committed to exiting Afghanistan but then didn’t do it while in office.
As the election nears, Trump has warned, baselessly, that it may be rigged. He says he would “secure our elections, including same-day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship,” yet he did none of these things when he was president.
One of the curious things about the gap between record and promise is that in some cases, Trump is promising to do more than he did before (deport immigrants, build the wall), and in others, he’s promising to do less (give power to employers, limit abortion). Trump critics have been frustrated by a certain amount of amnesia among voters about how chaotic and unpleasant the Trump years were—not just by the critics’ standards, but based on popular impressions at the time. This amnesia depends in part on voters being willing to believe promises that cut directly against what he did as president.
[J]ournalists have been overly credulous as well. In July, Harris said that Trump would cut Medicare. Politifact ruled that “mostly false” because Trump has said on the trail this year that he would not cut the program—even though, as the fact-checkers acknowledged, “during his presidency, Trump released four successive annual budgets that proposed cutting Medicare.” Careful parsing of the words of a prolific liar, at the expense of his demonstrated actions, is an exercise in futility, and does little service to readers.
“I’m an open book,” Trump said during the debate. “Everybody knows what I’m going to do.” They certainly ought to. After all, he was president once.
Vote Blue in November.
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Trump’s Foreign Policy Was a Failure
Former officials of the Trump presidency appear to be on a campaign to whitewash his administration’s foreign policy record.
In recent weeks and months, there’s been a flood of articles and interviews from them that present versions of the same argument: Donald Trump’s foreign policy legacy is better than you think. The most prominent are by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser, and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but there have been others . . . .
The common purpose appears to be twofold: reassure a broader audience that a second Trump presidency would be more mainstream than many fear, and, by extension, to present his first administration as one of successes which restored American leadership on the international stage.
Having served almost three years in the Trump administration as ambassador and senior adviser to the secretary of State, I can say that both contentions are wrong.
The promise is that a now-experienced “Trump the Realist” will be even better for America. O’Brien, using Orwellian doublespeak, suggests we could see “a Trumpian restoration of peace through strength” and seeks to recast in glowing terms a dark period for American foreign policy that did lasting damage to global stability and America’s leadership in it. [I]it’s important to remember the reality of what Trump’s foreign policy actually was and actually did. And to recognize that nothing in the interim has changed for the better in his worldview. In a vastly more complex global landscape than when he was first president, a second Trump term could do real harm to America’s international economic, diplomatic and security interests.
At least initially, the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy wasn’t just the product of an unorthodox president, it was also a response to an unsettled period of American history. As I have written elsewhere, by the time he was elected in 2016, the U.S. had spent 15 years consumed by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the country was also undergoing significant political, economic and social polarization exacerbated by the lingering effects of the 2008 recession. Globally, U.S. dominance was being challenged by emerging middle powers as well as Russia and China.
[H]owever, there were the serious negative consequences of the policies the Trump administration pursued.
On the economic front, the decision to drop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which was the strategic counterweight to China’s expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, shook the confidence of our East Asian allies and reduced our influence in the region; the TPP’s successor excludes the United States as does the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which includes East Asia, Australia — and China. It is not surprising that Chinese exports to the region have soared. Trade frictions with some of our closest partners arose over the arbitrary imposition of tariffs. Negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union came to an end as concerns about protectionist America deepened, concerns which are very much alive about a second Trump presidency.
Trump administration policies also undermined our strategic rationale for working inside broader security collectives. This weakened commitments to the alliances that had kept the United States secure. Trump’s transactional approach to NATO and open questioning of the alliance’s Article 5 commitment to mutual defense lessened faith in America’s steadfastness. In East Asia, Trump’s insistence on greater burden-sharing with South Korea and Japan pushed the bilateral relationships near the breaking point. Allied concerns have been resurrected by the prospect of a second Trump administration.
The list goes on. A complex relationship with Mexico was reduced to one issue: immigration. Trump’s exploitation of Ukraine for domestic political gain in the U.S., and pulling out of arms control agreements with Russia, may have helped give Putin the impression that there would be no consequences for an invasion of Ukraine — which he subsequently launched. Abandoning the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 corroded any leverage the U.S. might have in Tehran . . . In Afghanistan, Trump’s order to accelerate the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces after he lost the 2020 election was not implemented by his military commanders. But it surprised allies, and almost certainly emboldened the Taliban as they prepared to take Kabul in 2021.
Key allies in Europe and East Asia began to re-think whether close ties with the U.S. could be sustained and, with the possibility of Trump’s reelection, are adopting a wait-and-see approach. African and Latin American nations increasingly realized they factored even less in American foreign policy calculations than they had in prior administrations. The withdrawals from multilateral institutions diminished U.S. influence on climate change, human rights, nuclear proliferation, trade, and in mobilizing a response to Covid-19. Jan. 6 cast doubts on America’s status as the standard-bearer for world democracy.
At the end of his four years in office, Trump had frayed both America’s alliances and the international rules-based order that was still largely in place when he took office. Rather than look to the U.S. as the ultimate arbiter of a fairer global order, Washington was now seen by many countries as another great power to be balanced against its rivals. And, critically, America’s strategic adversaries saw opportunities they could now exploit.
On the economy, Lighthizer proposes to build on Trump’s first administration by weakening the dollar and imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports into the United States, which could have serious ramifications for both the American and global economies. On China, Trump’s advocates, including O’Brien and former State Department special representative Dan Negrea, pocket Biden’s already robust policies on China, and propose, among other things, cutting off all commercial ties with China, preparing for war in the Taiwan Strait, pursuing regime change in China and resuming nuclear tests.
Given the record of his first term, there is no need for a crystal ball to discern what a reelected President Trump’s priorities would be. He would return to the destructive, nationalist, inward-looking, transactional policy of his first administration — except he is far readier now to pursue it. A second Trump administration would also seek to completely politicize the security and foreign affairs agencies and departments, a process that was well underway in the time I served as senior adviser to Pompeo.
To be fair, O’Brien and company may genuinely believe the former president they served achieved great things — but we can’t let them fool the rest of us in this most consequential of presidential election years.
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
MAGA Scrambles to Defend Mark Robinson
How did such a person become a GOP rising star and the apple of Trump’s eye? Robinson is not just a MAGA-style conservative. He is also a Black man. This is hardly the first time Trump and the Republican Party have vaulted an inexperienced, unvetted African American into prominence — and then had reason to regret it.
The GOP seems unable to resist the allure of a Trump-friendly Black conservative. Republicans seem to think that the very existence of such individuals rebuts the allegation that the party is, at best, indifferent to the concerns and aspirations of African Americans — or, at worst, simply racist. Robinson is practically from central casting.
Now, with the full extent of Robinson's craziness - and hypocrisy - MAGA Republicans are scrambling to defend Robinson who is lamely trying to claim all of the revelations were AI generated. Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that Robinson's online activities included additional sites and that much of the usage tracked to an IP address in the area where Robinson lives. It would almost humorous if this was the first time the GOP was sucked in by a Black candidate from whom they should have run screaming. A piece in The Atlantic looks at MAGA world's gyrations to defend Robinson:
Mark Robinson is pointing a finger at artificial intelligence amid the recent revelations about disturbing comments he allegedly made on a porn site. Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is now the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee, suggested that the comments in which he apparently called himself a “black NAZI,” yearned for the restoration of slavery, and enjoyed reading Mein Kampf could have been artificially generated.
Robinson’s claims of fakery—AI or otherwise—are extremely unlikely. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, the CNN report linking Robinson to the porn site known as “Nude Africa” was “robust,” exposing “a digital trail that would be all but impossible to create artificially.” And not everyone in the GOP is buying Robinson’s excuse. Much of his senior staff has resigned, and the Trump campaign is reportedly distancing itself from Robinson, although Donald Trump’s endorsement of Robinson still stands.
But the existence of AI aids Robinson in his shoddy defense: Not only can the technology make fake stories believable, but its existence helps those who want to make true stories seem unbelievable. In this election, invoking AI is yet another tool for some Americans to alter facts so that they align with their desired reality. . . . . To be sure, many fake images of politicians—including Donald Trump—proliferate online, some of which use AI, but because this technology sows doubt about reality, it can also provide a convenient dodge for politicians confronted by uncomfortable facts.
Insinuating that AI played a role is just one of the tactics that Robinson and his defenders are using. Others have argued that the allegations are a targeted political attack without identifying exactly how such supposed lies were created. The GOP’s candidate for North Carolina attorney general, Dan Bishop, called the CNN report “a meticulously timed and coordinated character assassination.” The North Carolina Republican Party released a statement hours after the report was published, citing Robinson’s denial and accused “the Left” of “trying to demonize him via personal attacks.”
Others are using vague language to avoid taking a stand. Consider, for example, this tangled double negative from J. D. Vance when he was asked about Robinson’s denial: “I don’t not believe him; I don’t believe him—I just think you have to let these things play out sometimes in the court of public opinion.” Lindsey Graham also toed a careful line, although with clearer language. “The charges are beyond unnerving. If they’re true, he’s unfit to serve for office,” Graham said. But he seemed to leave the door open to the possibility that the story was false.
Then there are those who simply don’t care about the allegations. At a Trump rally in North Carolina over the weekend, The New York Times found that while few in attendance believed the story—many blamed the untrustworthiness of the media, according to the Times—some would support Robinson even if the reports of his racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic, and obscene posts were real. . . . . The calculation was simple, Mr. Faulcon said: policy over character.”
Indeed, if these allegations mattered to [Republican] voters, they would not have nominated Robinson in the first place, would they? This is, after all, someone who called the Holocaust “a bunch of hogwash,” referred to transgenderism and homosexuality as “filth,” and suggested this summer that “some folks need killing.” North Carolina’s GOP voters had ample evidence of who he was, and they chose him anyway. While some of the MAGA faithful have grabbed onto convenient manipulations of the evidence in front of them, these voters’ approach seems to be acceptance.
Monday, September 23, 2024
Can Democrats Expand the U.S. Senate Map
Republicans’ acute Senate candidate-quality problem has come back to haunt them. In a cycle in which Democratic-held seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Montana were up for grabs, the GOP managed to field candidates ranging from mediocre to dismal (e.g., Kari Lake in Arizona) and is in deep trouble in all but one. These Republican cranks are proving no match for wily incumbents such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and talented House members making a run for the Senate (e.g., Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona).
At this point, Democrats are feeling comfortable (although not complacent) about all but Montana. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), running for his fourth term, managed to stay afloat in a deep-red state even in 2012,when President Barack Obama ran double digits behind Mitt Romney there. This cycle, however, polling at the end of August showed Tester down several points, prompting several analysts to shift the race to “Lean Republican.”
And Montana looms large in this cycle. With Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-W.Va.) leaving the Senate, Democrats will lose control if Tester loses, even if they hold all of the other Republican-targeted states — unless they can pick up another seat somewhere else.
Democrats have some big decisions to make. Tester famously closes strongly and certainly could still win. Spending heavily on TV ads and turnout might be enough. But some analysts and party activists are looking for backup paths to the majority.
Remarkably, Senate GOP incumbents in Florida, Texas and Nebraska have only tiny leads in recent polls (e.g., two percentage points in deep-red Nebraska), a shocking result in states that have voted strongly Republican in recent years.
Incumbent Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), a lackluster candidate who has not had a serious challenger, now faces independent candidate Dan Osborn. She is breaking a promise to serve just two terms. Osborn is “a union leader and Navy veteran hoping that a nontraditional background can help him overperform in the state’s rural areas and with blue-collar voters,” according to the Cook Political Report. Moreover, “The super PAC Retire Career Politicians — which is backed by the Democratic group Sixteen Thirty Fund — has already spent nearly $1.4 million on TV ads, which goes a long way in an inexpensive state like Nebraska,” Cook explains. “Their first ad in early August emphasized Osborn comes from the working class and pitches him as uniquely positioned to fight for economic relief.”
Two other races are dicier. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has a slight lead in most polls over Rep. Colin Allred (D-Tex.) — a dynamic candidate, a hawk on the border and fourth-generation Texan — whom former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) endorsed. A recent Morning Consult poll had Allred up by one point.
“You can’t trust Ted Cruz,” Cheney said in an interview with ABC’s local TV station. “He’s going to say whatever he has to say to serve his own political purpose. But I’ve worked with Colin. We were on different sides of the aisle, different sides of the issues, but at the end of the day, I know he has the interest of the people of Texas first and foremost.” While Vice President Kamala Harris is not expected to win in Texas, she surely will run much closer to former president Donald Trump than she will in Montana.
The problem with Texas: It’s a large state with several expensive media markets. Democrats likely would need to make an eight-figure investment (which Republicans could counter) to make a real difference. Allred’s best chance remains a stronger-than-expected showing from Harris, which would pull young, Black and Hispanic voters to the polls.
That brings us to Florida, where Republican Sen. Rick Scott faces Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. The latest Emerson poll shows her down by just one point, another by just four points. Both are in the margin of error. And those polls come at a time when Scott is vastly outspending her.
Two issues weigh in Mucarsel-Powell’s favor. “Politicians across the political spectrum agree: The Florida property insurance market is catastrophically dysfunctional,” the Tampa Bay Times reports. “Politicians can’t agree about how to fix it — or whose fault it is.” She says, “Florida’s insurance woes started under Scott.” And she has made it a top issue in her campaign.
Abortion is the other major factor. It appears, along with marijuana legalization, on the ballot in the form of a state constitutional amendment. A recent poll shows 58 percent of voters, just shy of the 60 percent requirement, favor it. Whether it hits 60 percent or not, the abortion measure serves as a huge magnet, drawing younger voters and women to the polls.
Like Texas, however, Florida is a large state where TV ad time is expensive. So far there is no sign of a major investment in the Senate race. However, massive third-party spending for the abortion measure is the next-best thing. That continues to pour in.
The bottom line: The contest for control of the Senate is nip and tuck. The good news for Democrats is the multiplicity of states where they are unexpectedly running well against MAGA incumbents. If Democrats prevail, it will be one more sign of Trump’s malignant influence on the GOP.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Trump’s Second Term Agenda on LGBTQ Issues Is Alarming
Penny Nance slid a form across the table to Donald Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. Her Christian nonprofit, Concerned Women for America [a certified hate group], wanted Trump to pledge in writing that a person’s “gender identity” doesn’t “overrule their sex,” and that if he becomes president again, “all federal agencies will be directed to uphold this fact in every policy and program at home and abroad.”
Such a promise would have wide-ranging implications, the form emphasized, affecting schools, prisons, shelters, health-care providers, the military and more. But it was an easy sell, Nance recalled of her June 2023 conversation, and Trump soon signed the pledge. On the trail a few days later, Trump marveled aloud at the crowd’s standing ovation for his promise to crack down on “transgender insanity.”
The former president, who has shifted his position over the years on LGBTQ issues, is planning to lead the GOP charge on gender identity if he returns to the White House, according to his campaign and interviews with allies, testing the legal limits of federal action as the Supreme Court also takes up the issue. He says he wants to kick providers out of Medicare and Medicaid for offering gender transition care to minors, such as hormone therapy and surgery; pull federal funding from schools if officials suggest a child “could be trapped in the wrong body”; and purge anything in the federal government deemed to promote transgender identity. The moves would go against the advice of leading medical groups.
He has said far less about gay rights, an issue where he is sometimes out of step with his most conservative Christian supporters. . . . But the first Trump administration fought efforts to extend anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation, and social conservatives are eager for Trump to pick up where he left off. Trump is also expected to try to appoint more conservative judges on the federal bench who could influence future landmark decisions on LGBTQ issues.
Civil rights groups are already raising alarms and preparing to challenge Trump’s agenda in court. A detailed memo the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released in June argues many of Trump’s proposals are illegal or unconstitutional. The group’s lawyers see many opportunities to push back but also say it’s hard to predict how courts might rule, especially after the former president’s success pushing the federal judiciary to the right.
“I think a lot of folks feel if they live in a so-called blue state, they’re safe from whatever impact a second Trump administration can have, and that’s just not true,” said Leslie Cooper, deputy director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. The Trump team, she said, is “saying what they would try to do.” She added: “I think we should believe them that they mean it.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has also promoted LBGTQ rights as Republican-led states pass laws restricting gender transition care and discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools.
Republicans who were on the defensive for years on same-sex marriage have turned much of their focus to gender transition and found public support for some restrictions.
Polls show Americans support same-sex marriage by big margins, and a Washington Post-KFF poll last year found that large majorities support laws prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in workplaces, education, the military and other settings.
Trump regularly portrays transgender people as a threat to women in his campaign speeches, mocking their participation in women’s sports before laughing crowds. Last month at a Washington, D.C., summit for the activist group Moms for Liberty, Trump misrepresented the process of gender transition for minors, falsely suggesting schools rather than parents consent to a child’s medical “operation.”
Trump’s plans, if successful, would have enormous impact. Pulling Medicare and Medicaid eligibility for health care providers that offer gender transition care to youth could effectively halt most of that treatment across the country, experts said, building on laws restricting the procedures for minors in more than 20 states.
Advocates for LGBTQ rights say denying those options is cruel, and note that major medical organizations support the procedures. Some are urging state officials to set aside their own funding for gender-affirming care to blunt potential loss of access under a Trump administration.
Trump’s “Agenda 47” videos, which promote his policy plans, dwell on trans issues at length without discussing sexual orientation. But civil rights groups say they anticipate a second Trump term would be consequential for gay rights, as well.
In Trump’s first term, multiple federal agencies quietly removed references to sexual orientation from anti-discrimination guidelines, and the administration argued in court against interpreting discrimination law to cover sexual orientation.
In the summer of 2020, Trump appeared to publicly accept a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, written by Trump appointee Neil M. Gorsuch, that concluded a federal ban on sex discrimination in employment extends to bias against gay and transgender people. “They’ve ruled, and we live with the decision,” Trump said.
But Trump’s Department of Justice suggested a narrow interpretation of the high court’s ruling, emphasizing potential exceptions for religious views and First Amendment rights and saying in a memo the justices’ interpretation did not necessarily translate to areas besides employment.
Roger Severino, who led the Office of Civil Rights in the Health and Human Services Department under Trump. . . . argues for reversing the Biden administration’s assertion that the Affordable Care Act bans federally-supported health programs from discriminating based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
[T]he 2022 Supreme Court ruling striking down the long-standing right to abortion — and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion at the same time that gay rights cases need reexamining — has made the LGBTQ community nervous that other precedents could fall, especially if Trump makes more judicial appointments.
Severino’s chapter in the Project 2025 policy book encourages the next Health and Human Services secretary to endorse the idea that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure.”
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