Saturday, October 05, 2024
Trump Is Lying About Disaster Relief
On Tuesday, I was part of a City University of New York event about economic perceptions, which was briefly disrupted by a protester yelling out that President Biden isn’t helping some of the areas afflicted by Hurricane Helene. The guy’s politics were unclear — he was also yelling something about Israel — but it was an indication that Donald Trump’s latest lie has gone viral.
In case you missed it, Trump has been trying to exploit the natural disaster for political gain, claiming he heard that the federal government — Biden — and North Carolina’s Democratic governor are “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” This claim has no basis: Major rescue and recovery operations are underway, and several governors of the affected states — including Republicans — have praised federal efforts. Trump said that Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.” On the contrary, Kemp said that Biden told him “that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly — which, I appreciate that.”
But then, at this point, Trump’s campaign rests heavily on made-up stuff. And he clearly seems to believe that he needs new material, because the old material seems to be losing some of its effectiveness. . . . he has also constructed a whole dystopian fantasy world, trying to persuade voters that America is a nation with a collapsing economy overrun by violent immigrants.
In reality, America has low inflation and low unemployment, and the average worker’s purchasing power is higher than it was five years ago. Yes, some Americans are struggling, but that was as true when Trump was president as it is now.
At the same time, violent crime, homicides in particular, which rose significantly during Trump’s last year in office, has come down and appears to be continuing to fall.
What’s new is that Trump’s vision of America-as-hellscape seems to be losing its political mojo. For example, a new Cook Political Report poll of swing states, while still showing Trump with some advantage on the economy, showed Kamala Harris tied on the issue of who can best deal with inflation and the cost of living, and barely trailing on who can best deal with crime and violence.
So it must be time to conjure a new fake source of fear and outrage.
Where does the insinuation that Biden is denying aid to politically unfriendly disaster areas come from? In part it’s projection: Trump was found to have done something akin to that when he was in the White House. In part it involves condemning Biden and Harris for not immediately visiting the stricken areas.
Biden and Harris, though, were just acting responsibly. In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, a high-profile political visitor with a huge security detail is the last thing you want . . . .accommodating their visit would divert personnel and equipment away from the urgent task of saving lives and restoring essential services.
The key to Trump’s tall tales is to tell his supporters that terrible things are happening somewhere out there, even if those things aren’t happening to them or where they can see them. He and JD Vance keep perpetuating claims that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio; not many people have been there themselves to see that this isn’t true.
He also says that immigrant “thugs” have taken over Aurora, Colo., and have taken over hundreds of towns and cities across America, “Including the big ones,” he says. “Look at New York.” Well, I look at New York — where immigrants are around 36 percent of the population — all the time, and what I see is consistent with official crime data: It’s one of America’s safest big cities, a place where people, including me, walk the streets and take the subway every day. But many Americans don’t experience daily life in New York and are prepared to believe that it’s a crime-ridden nightmare — part of a pattern in which people say crime is a serious national problem, just not where they live.
Until recently, Trump’s trash-talking of America appeared to be working politically. As I said, however, at this point his fear-mongering over crime and the economy seems to be losing traction. So now he’s claiming that he’s hearing the feds have abandoned hurricane victims, which may persuade voters who aren’t in a position to witness the huge efforts being made, under difficult conditions, to deliver essential supplies and restore communications.
Will it work? I have no idea. What I do know is that it’s more of the same. Trump is promising to rescue us from dire threats that exist only in his mind.
Friday, October 04, 2024
Kamala Harris: The Only Patriotic Choice
It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.
Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.
This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.
For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.
Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.
As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.
Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.
Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.
While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.
Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.
Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change . . . . Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.
As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.
Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.
Most notably, he [Trump] systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debate with Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.
His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats.
Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.
Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.
That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.
In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.
In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.
Kamala Harris is the only choice.
Thursday, October 03, 2024
How the North Carolina Legislature Left Homes Vulnerable to Helene
The amount of rain that Tropical Storm Helene unleashed over North Carolina was so intense, no amount of preparation could have entirely prevented the destruction that ensued.
But decisions made by state officials in the years leading up to Helene most likely made some of that damage worse, according to experts in building standards and disaster resilience.
Over the past 15 years, North Carolina lawmakers have rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, which might have reduced the number of homes lost to landslides; blocked a rule requiring homes to be elevated above the height of an expected flood; weakened protections for wetlands, increasing the risk of dangerous storm water runoff; and slowed the adoption of updated building codes, making it harder for the state to qualify for federal climate-resilience grants.
Those decisions reflect the influence of North Carolina’s home building industry, which has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher, more expensive standards, according to Kim Wooten, an engineer who serves on the North Carolina Building Code Council, the group that sets home building requirements for the state.
“The home builders association has fought every bill that has come before the General Assembly to try to improve life safety,” said Ms. Wooten, who works for Facilities Strategies Group, a company that specializes in building engineering. She said that state lawmakers, many of whom are themselves home builders or have received campaign contributions from the industry, “vote for bills that line their pocketbooks and make home building cheaper.”
In 2009 and 2010, lawmakers from the state’s mountainous western region wanted statewide rules to restrict construction on slopes with a high or moderate risk of landslides. Their legislation failed in the face of pushback from the home building and real estate industries, according to Pricey Harrison, a state lawmaker who supported the restrictions.
The push to build on hillsides reflected the growing demand in North Carolina for mountain retreats that would attract tourist dollars, according to Robert S. Young, a professor at Western Carolina University who focuses on climate resilience.
“Everybody wants a view in their vacation home,” Dr. Young said in an interview. “It’s really hard to shut off that kind of economic activity in a small local community.”
Efforts to weaken building standards in North Carolina picked up steam after Republicans won control of both houses of the state legislature in 2010.
In 2011, lawmakers proposed a law that limited the ability of local officials to account for sea-level rise in their planning. The comedian Stephen Colbert panned the change, quipping: “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”
Two years later, lawmakers overhauled the way North Carolina updates its building codes. That change attracted far less attention than the sea-level rule — but would be more consequential for Helene.
Every three years, the International Code Council, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., issues new model building codes developed by engineers, architects, home builders and local officials.
Most states adopt a version of those model codes, which reflect the latest advances in safety and design. But in 2013, the North Carolina legislature decided that the state would update its codes every six years, instead of every three.
The change proved important. In 2015, the International Code Council added a requirement that new homes in flood zones be built at least one foot above the projected height of a major flood. . . . . the state stripped out the new flood-prevention standard. Rather than make elevation mandatory in flood zones around North Carolina, the state decided that the requirement should only apply if local officials chose to adopt it.
The decision most likely left more homes exposed to flooding, according to Chad Berginnis, executive director of the national Association of State Floodplain Managers.
The Republican legislature took other steps that may have exacerbated flooding.
In 2014, lawmakers passed laws to weaken protection for wetlands, which can help reduce flood damage by absorbing excess rainfall, according to Brooks Rainey Pearson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Three years later, the legislature made it easier for developers to pave green spaces, increasing the risk of flooding caused by heavy rains, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The legislature passed a law that blocked the state from adopting new building codes until 2031. The law also included smaller changes, such as preventing local building inspectors from ensuring that home builders correctly install protective sheathing on homes exposed to winds of 140 miles per hour or less.
Governor Cooper vetoed the bill, saying it would “wipe out years of work to make homes safer.” But Republicans overrode his veto.
Building standards will help determine how well that new construction fares against future disasters, which are becoming more frequent and severe because of climate change.
Ms. Wooten, the engineer on the building code council, said she was not optimistic that the damage from Helene would change how North Carolina approached building codes.
“Money talks,” Ms. Wooten said. “Politicians want to get re-elected, and they are going to go where the money is.”
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
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