Biden Campaign Crisis Continues to Distract Media and Public From Menace of Trump, Supreme Court Radicalism

In the past couple days, and over the last day in particular, we’ve seen an intensification of speculation and coverage over whether President Joe Biden should step down as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. Of particular note was reporting from the New York Times, based on those who have interacted with Biden in recent months, that he has previously displayed episodes of mental disorientation similar to what we all saw on the debate stage last week. Given the seriousness of such observations, and the possibility that some of the anonymous interviewees have an axe to grind, I am taking them somewhat cautiously. However, they are given additional credence by recent episodes of confusion captured on video and described by the Times, such as the president’s difficulty recalling the name of his Homeland Security secretary at a recent event, and a couple different instances of Biden appearing confused at the G-7 meeting in mid-June. Reports that he is only reliably energetic between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. seem equally problematic, if to my mind deeply needing further corroboration.

I’m sympathetic with people who caution that the Times has long had demonstrable bias against Biden, including over questions about his age, but I don’t think this automatically leads to the conclusion that paper, or other outlets, are misreporting here. Questions as to Biden’s capacity were rightly raised by his disastrous debate performance, and are matters of great public interest. To be blunt, his issues on the debate stage were the sort of problems involving memory and cognitive abilities that many of us associate with aging. I think Zachary Carter puts it just right when he writes that, “This was not so much a bad debate as a devastating revelation.” This was not anything like President Barack Obama’s poor first debate showing against Mitt Romney in 2012, in which the president’s problems implicated not his memory or ability to think on his feet, but rather an appearance of disinterest in being there, along with a lackluster advocacy for his own reelection. And indeed, if anyone had had those doubts, they would have been put to rest by his next debate against Romney.

I wrote last time that Joe Biden needs to show the public he has a strategy for allaying their concerns. Yet, in the days since the debate, he has not adopted the obvious rebuttal strategy of putting himself out in public, in unscripted situations, in order to prove that the debate was a one-off. At a minimum, this shows a lack of sharp strategic thinking regarding his present peril; at worst, it provides more (indirect) evidence that he cannot be relied on to make less structured public appearances. Some 67% of Americans in a recent poll said they thought Biden is too old to be president; moreover, “53% of voters say they are more concerned about Biden’s age and physical and mental health, while 42% say they are more concerned about Trump’s criminal charges and threats to democracy.” This latter statistic speaks to the degree to which concerns about Biden based on his age are crowding out concerns about the true threat to America — Donald Trump and the GOP’s plans to remake the U.S. into an autocracy or dictatorship, which have now been supercharged by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling that the president is above the law, free to commit crimes without fear of prosecution.

The question I keep asking myself is a version of the one I’ve seen others expressing — how likely is it that Joe Biden will be able to dispel concerns over his age in the coming days and weeks so that he gains enough trust and space to pursue the necessary case against GOP authoritarianism, versus the likelihood that more information will come out concerning episodes of debility, or that we will witness in real time such episodes ourselves? To be blunt: I don’t see how Biden can win, even against a monster such as Trump, if the public becomes ever more concerned about his ability to do his job, particularly as such concerns will inexorably compete with coverage of Trump’s (even greater) unfitness for office. At some point, beyond all the talk of the dangers and possible chaos of the Democrats replacing Biden with another candidate, I think you need to let some common sense intrude into the discussion: Americans are rightly confused, angry, and disheartened by a choice between a dictator and a man who increasingly looks unable to do his job, including performance of the role of commander in chief. This is most definitely not a crisis that’s been created by malevolent media or back-stabbing allies (though of course all exist and play some part). Rather, people are reacting to reality, which, like it or not, encompasses how Joe Biden appears on TV during a debate as well as his stated prior interest in having such a debate and his campaign’s insistence that his appearance, contrasted with Trump’s predictably odious performance, would help shift the momentum of the race in Biden’s favor. I think Americans are probably puzzled as to why Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t take Biden’s place as the presidential candidate, as would happen if Biden died or were otherwise incapacitated in the course of his presidency (short answer: she can). 

The issue of Biden’s continued candidacy has obvious implications for the Democratic Party’s broader fortunes, but I think Democrats really need to look beyond the possible impact on the party’s ability to hold the House and Senate if they’re saddled with a presidential candidate who reaches a point of clear unelectability. The basic argument in Biden’s defense that people should disregard the evidence of their eyes and ears because people with a vested interest in protecting Biden’s interest (advisers, etc.) tell them he’s great behind closed doors swerves too close to comfort to the realm of Trumpian untruths (every rally is the biggest ever, the U.S. had the best economy ever when he was president, etc.). For me, the Democrats’ role as the sole remaining major party dedicated to protecting American democracy is deeply entwined with a fundamental commitment to the truth over lies and propaganda. Yes, politics — even democratic politics — is always about power, and there will be grey zones and compromises even in the most utopian of political systems. But the risks involved in telling the public that Biden is of sound mind and body when he is in fact not are far greater than wrecking his candidacy — they also threaten the public’s trust in the Democratic Party more generally to be relied on to tell the truth (a party which, in the most cynical telling, could be accused of propping up an octogenarian invalid as its best response to the country’s maximal point of peril since World War II or possibly even the eve of the Civil War). If they find out that Democrats lied to them about Biden’s health, would Americans be less likely to believe Democrats when they tell them that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country? And would the damage be compounded by the Democrats’ willingness to put forward a candidate who doesn’t actually seem fit enough to defend democracy, calling into question their claims that democracy is actually under threat?  I think the answer to these questions is a resounding “Yes.” As others have said, if we’re in a crisis, Democrats need to actually act like it. 

Likewise, Democrats should not underestimate the democratic legitimacy peril that Biden could put them in (and potentially already has, at least to some degree). Yes, Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries; yet against this you have consistent polls showing a strong majority of Americans saying that Biden is too old for the presidency, coupled with the uncomfortable fact that many Democrats voted for him without any great enthusiasm, and, more importantly, based on the understanding that he and his team were telling the truth about his abilities. Yes, we all knew that Biden was older and slower than four years ago — but I’d bet that very few people thought they were voting for someone who would prove unable to defend himself or democracy up on that stage last week. At some point — and some would say we have already reached it — the continued Democratic elite’s support of Biden against popular opinion begins to look not very democratic at all.

The state of play as I write this, around 5:00 on July 3, shows Biden and his campaign pushing back against reports today that he has told some confidants that he comprehends the gravity of his situation, and that, in the words of the New York Times, “understands that he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince voters that he is up to the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.” In response, the Biden campaign has stated that, “Reports suggesting they or the campaign are considering alternative scenarios are patently false.” Moreover, as the Times also reports, “In an emailed fund-raising message on Wednesday, President Biden reiterated to supporters that he’s staying in the race. ‘I’m running. I’m the Democratic Party’s nominee. No one is pushing me out.’” We’ll soon see if these statements are simply cover fire to buy the president time as he ponders his future, or the opening salvos of a campaign by the president to save his. . . campaign.

Post-Debate Biden Campaign Crisis Collides With Illegitimate Right-Wing Supreme Court Crisis

A few days on, I remain convinced that President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week has led to a crisis of his campaign, and by extension, of American democracy. The election of Donald Trump would, by both Trump’s own stated intention and past example, result in an unprecedented assault on the rule of law, basic freedoms, public safety, and national security. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity today guaranties that no guardrails remain to protect the country against his most outlandish plans for a second term. And beyond the disasters that Trump himself would unleash, his election would open the floodgates to all manner of reactionary mayhem by his right-wing allies in the GOP. There can be no question that just over four months from the election, Biden’s debate failures made Trump’s return to power more likely. The Biden campaign and Democrats should be spending every day reminding Americans of the danger of Trump and the authoritarian GOP, and of a positive alternative vision for the country; instead, we are bogged down with rightly worrying about Biden’s capacity to serve a second term. Such worries are a rational response to what we all saw last week. Saying that everyone has bad days does not cut it; a president doesn’t have the luxury to have some off days during which he can’t complete a sentence, express a thought, or adequately confront a dangerous adversary.

Biden’s performance was so upsetting for so many of us because it not only confirmed some of the severest doubts about his health and mental capabilities, it also raised the possibility of more disasters to come during the remainder of the campaign. Even if Biden manages to impress and reassure in upcoming appearances, his debate performance has planted a ticking time bomb of anger, disarray, and hopelessness in the Democratic base and larger public that’s primed to go off should there be a future display of similar ineptitude. A couple months of high-octane Joementum, chock full of town hall meetings, feats of age-appropriate derring-do, and spontaneous eloquence, could be blown to kingdom come by a single repeat of Debate Debacle 2024.

It’s not sufficient for his defenders to say that Biden simply had a bad night, or that a diminished Biden would make a better president than a hyperactive Trump, even if we accept that both are true. The Biden that we saw last week did not appear to be qualified to be president, full stop. Biden owes it to Americans to reassure them as to his ability to serve another four years. You cannot point to his record as proof, because the shortcomings in question have to do with his age and diminished abilities going forward. For his defenders, and for leaders in the Democratic Party, to essentially argue that it would be better to have an incompetent president than Trump is an insult to voters, and a recipe not just for disaster in November, but for public trust in the Democratic Party out into the future. I think that Ezra Klein is on to something when he writes, in response to the debate and its fallout:

[R]ather than act as a check on Biden’s decisions and ambitions, the party has become an enabler of them. An enforcer of them. It is giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it. Democrats like to say that democracy is on the ballot. But it isn’t. Biden is on the ballot. There are plenty of voters who might want to vote for democracy but do not want to vote for Biden.

While I disagree with Klein’s assertion that democracy isn’t on the ballot — though he is literally correct, this election is most certainly symbolically a referendum on whether the U.S. remains a democracy or slides into authoritarian, one-party rule — it is in fact not a tenable position for Democratic Party leaders to dismiss widespread, good-faith concerns that Joe Biden is not fit for another term. As Klein also rightly points out, the Democrats would be fully capable of replacing Biden if a specific health crisis forced him off the ballot. Does it really serve America’s pro-democracy party to ignore concerns that a president might not be able to do his job?

At least in political commentary, how one answers the question of whether Biden should make way for another candidate is largely tracking with individual views of how relatively destructive it would be for the Democrats to choose another candidate. I haven’t see any advocates of resignation say that this would be risk-free, though some, like Klein, argue that a contested convention could end up exciting the public and charging up a renewed Democratic campaign to stop Trump. On the other hand are those who warn of the dangers of such an unprecedented maneuver, pointing to the intraparty conflicts it could unleash, with frequent emphasis on the destabilizing effect if Vice President Kamala Harris were passed over or defeated as the substitute candidate. Some also note the lack of vetting the candidate would receive in comparison to Biden, laying the groundwork for savage Republican attacks on undisclosed or untested weaknesses. I would say that on balance, more of the people whose political instincts I trust the most are currently arguing that a Biden withdrawal carries too high a risk of chaos.

Personally, I remain in the camp of giving Biden another chance, along the lines I described before, at least in this interim period as we wait for polling to capture the extent of the hit Biden’s chances have taken due to his debate performance. I wrote that Biden must lay out a clear, convincing plan to demonstrate he is fit for another term. In a weekend column, E.J. Dionne gets more specific about what such a plan might look like:

He needs to do a series of televised interviews, including many in less than friendly settings. He’ll have to step up his campaign appearances, offering more speeches along the lines of his energetic performance in North Carolina on Friday.

He should make a major commitment to doing all he can to strengthen the campaigns of Democratic House and Senate candidates, the most vulnerable of whom have more reason than anyone to worry about the electoral impact of a weakened Biden. He needs to use last week’s demonstration of the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing activism to underscore the long-term impact of the choices voters will be making this November. If Democrats lose both the Senate and the White House, the damage to the judiciary over a generation will be catastrophic.

Dionne is on the right track here, which as I see it would have two major elements —providing reassurance that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job through public appearances, while simultaneously emphasizing that he understands that the stakes of this race are much bigger than him. My personal preference involves Biden making a particularly direct, honest pitch to younger voters, with particular emphasis on the environment, college debt, and the immorality of GOP white supremacism that directly threatens the social and economic prospects of America’s diverse upcoming generations.

There’s no getting around that this is an ugly, upsetting, and deeply absurd situation. Donald Trump must be stopped, along with the reactionary GOP that seeks to erase decades if not centuries of social progress and basic freedoms. It very much feels like pro-democracy forces are fighting with one hand tied behind their back as so much energy — much of it necessary, at least in the wake of the debate — is channeled into discussions of Biden’s future. The Biden campaign and Democrats, if they choose to retain Biden, must find a way to decisively change the dynamics of this race to focus on Trump’s perfidy, the GOP’s radicalism, the right-wing Supreme Court’s usurpation of power, and the racist, misogynistic forces that bind together the reactionary backlash fueling them all. As today’s Supreme Court ruling should make blindingly clear, the threat to American society and government comes not simply from Trump, but from an authoritarian Republican Party that sees the former president as its instrument of vengeance and control. The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has now cemented its role of not only as a defender of Trump’s coup attempt, but of all future crimes he commits in office, joining congressional Republicans in protecting him from the consequence of his anti-democratic actions. To the greatest extent possible, the election must be presented as a referendum on American democracy, not a referendum on Joe Biden.

As His Presidential Campaign Enters Into Crisis, the Future Is Up to Biden - and to America's Pro-Democracy Majority

Last Thursday night, millions of us experienced a traumatic and collective near-death experience — not of our own lives, but of American democracy. Within the first 10 minutes of the Biden-Trump debate on an Atlanta stage, we witnessed the man who tried to overthrow American government four years ago steamroll over our current president with lies, menace, and an aura of invincibility, while the latter struggled to form a single coherent sentence and appeared to reinforce even the most outlandish accusations that he is too old to be president. And though Biden’s performance improved from his checked-out start, it was deeply disorienting to watch the contrast between Trump’s firehose of lies and fascistic rhetoric, on the one hand, and Biden’s inability to defend American democracy and basic freedoms, much less himself, on the other. 

So many of us remain stunned in the aftermath not simply by Biden’s inability to perform at the rhetorical and intellectual level we should expect from a president, but because we perceive that he is all that stands between us and the volcano of hate, retribution, and destruction with whom he shared the stage. Even as Biden seemed to show that he isn’t up to the job — either in terms of convincing people of his overall fitness for office or of advancing the Democrats’ goals for America against Republicans’ demented vision — we also got a reminder of what a profound threat Trump poses to the country. Trump lied remorselessly about his accomplishments and Biden’s. He was in full sociopathic con man mode, telling America that up is down and black is white: that January 6 was the Democrats’ fault; that Trump actually opposes political violence; that America is being invaded by tens of millions of criminals and mental patients who intend to kill and rape us before taking our jobs; that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is not his fault but is also simply the return of common sense with which everyone but Biden agrees, and that also, Democrats abort babies after they are born.

So when we encounter the mass disorientation of Democrats and other supporters of democracy, it is not because we ever believed Biden to be perfect, but because the threat posed by his opponent is so very great, and because Biden showed — both symbolically but also substantively — that he may well be unable to counter this threat. Time and time again, Biden failed to forcefully or cogently defend basic aspects of American life and freedom from Trump’s lies and slanders. A few particular moments stand out to me:

First, Biden’s utter fumble of his defense of abortion rights, instead slipping into a near-non sequitur about women murdered by migrants, and soon after talking incomprehensibly about trimesters. There was also an unpleasant digression into incest which failed to make explicit that victims of incest could be denied abortions in some states.

Second, his inability to counter Trump’s misdirection about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a straightforward explanation of why the U.S. is backing that besieged country; this was particularly egregious considering the clear opening it held for reminding Americans of Trump’s sycophantic deference to Vladimir Putin, not to mention the fact that Trump was impeached the first time for tying Ukraine’s defense against Russia to its willingness to help Trump kneecap Biden’s first presidential run.

Third, it was appalling that Biden appeared to accept Trump’s lie that the country is being overrun by criminal and/or insane immigrants, and spoke so limply of border security, fumbling the potentially potent point that it was Trump who ultimately directed Republicans not to vote for a bipartisan border bill in order to provide Trump with an issue to run on. It is beyond comprehensible to me that Biden would not have an argument ready to refute such a predictable and slanderous point that is so closely tied to Trump and the GOP’s centering of racial hatred in the party’s appeal to voters. Those who have argued that Democrats have made a grave error in accepting GOP premises around immigration were vindicated, as Biden found no way to upturn the insane premises (brown people are coming to kill us all) and resulting insane solutions (expel 20 million immigrants from the U.S.) proposed by Trump.

Biden is ultimately responsible for his own performance, but you have to wonder about the advisors who were responsible for helping him prep for this debate, and who urged him to participate in it in the first place. Either they did not properly prepare him (including by having someone realistically role-play a vicious and implacable Trump), in which case the team is incompetent, or they did prepare him as much as possible, in which case Biden owns his poor performance all on his own. After all, Trump’s words and actions at the debate were wholly predictable, in line with his prior campaign appearances, and yet Biden seemed to have no plan to deal with his torrent of lies, to undermine Trump’s absurd claims to competence, or to make a case for himself in the face of Trump’s assaults. I hate to repeat a trope that the former president uttered last night, but in this case, it will indeed be a travesty if Biden doesn’t fire anyone for giving him bad advice that contributed to last night’s debacle. 

In the last few days, plenty of Democrats have been hitting the panic button, which for many turns out to be an eject button, wondering how they can jettison Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and get someone more electable in his place. I’ve been skeptical of the dump-Biden arguments up to now, believing that his objectively strong record and commitment to democracy earned him a run at a second term. There was also the not-insignificant fact that no credible alternatives chose to challenge him for the nomination during the primaries, with Biden emerging as the legitimate party choice. And he seemed to do fine and quell a lot of doubts with his strong State of the Union performance back in March.

But if his debate participation was meant to further reassure voters as to his mental and physical abilities while exposing Trump as the degenerate that he is, he failed in the first mission and badly fumbled the second. Instead of the subsequent public discussion being dominated by Trump’s repeated refusal to say that he’d accept the November election results (he hedged his answer in ways that make it clear that only a Trump victory will be acceptable), or by Trump’s lies about abortion rights, or by Trump’s total lack of engagement with questions around climate change, far too much oxygen is being taken up by what is ultimately a self-inflicted (and avoidable) wound on Biden’s part.

So that is where we are, whether we like it or not. But where we go from here is not just up to Joe Biden, but also to the millions of Americans who want to defend our democracy, defeat the fascistic movement behind Donald Trump, and move this country forward. For his part, Joe Biden needs to confront the damage he’s done to our confidence in him, and rapidly implement a credible strategy to regain public trust in his capacity to fight implacably for America’s future. He cannot simply ask the American people to ignore what they saw last week, because what they saw was terrifying and demoralizing, and seemed to validate the widespread concerns about his age held by voters from across the political spectrum. Not only does he need to signal that such a failure will not happen a second time, he will have to deliver on that promise. Even the rosiest possible take on Biden’s health and acuity — that debate night was a one-off, an uncanny convergence of cramming for the debate, a head cold, and the existential burdens of the presidency — must still conclude that his catastrophic performance and choice to participate ended up boosting the prospects of his deranged opponent. And if Joe Biden cannot reassure his prospective voters in the coming weeks, then those voters should feel free to make loud and clear their desire for Biden to step aside, and for the Democrats to choose a successor candidate, however messy and potentially dangerous such an unprecedented maneuver might be.

The country needs a candidate who can clearly illustrate the stakes of this election; it needs to be seen as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, not as a gamble between a declining senior and an energetic psycho. What happened on debate night was totally unacceptable — again, Biden walked into a trap of his own making. No one forced him to debate Donald Trump, and indeed, many have persuasively made the case that you can’t actually have a debate where one candidate has no commitment to either the truth or basic democratic beliefs like adhering to election results.

At the same time, all the millions of Democrats feeling at sea and disempowered need to face the fact that in-fighting, recriminations, and self-doubt will only make defeat in November more likely. For every conversation about Biden disappointing them, and for every call to their elected representatives urging that Biden step aside, I would ask folks to also remind themselves and others of how hideously Trump behaved on that debate stage. To me, the lack of remorse or accountability over his past catastrophes was by itself disqualifying. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that he is running for president primarily to escape accountability for the many crimes he committed before and during office. In this sense, his quest is utterly self-serving, even as his ascendance to the presidency would empower a reactionary cohort of Christian nationalists, white supremacists, anti-labor zealots, and open misogynists. This race is not simply, or even primarily, about Trump versus Biden, but about whether we continue to have a democratic, free society that defends equality and shared purpose, or an authoritarian one where insurrectionists run free, a deranged president jails political adversaries and guns down protestors, women and minorities are treated as second class citizens, and the world is left to burn as oil executives are allowed to write environmental policy. Whether or not Biden remains on the ballot, we must insist that these be the true terms of the debate.

Corrupt Supreme Court Has Inexorably Placed Itself at Center of 2024 Presidential Campaign

Since last month’s post about Justice Samuel Alito’s apparent addiction to treason-associated flags, there’s been a spate of developments related to both Alito’s personal corruption and the corruption of the right-wing Supreme Court majority more generally. It’s been enough that I want to start by reiterating a point I’ve made before: there are certain political dumpster fires where there is very little cost to Democrats in working to define a public narrative and agenda for action, in part because there is a near-certainty that fresh information will continue to come to light that will only reinforce the case they are trying to make.

The current Supreme Court is clearly vying to be the supreme example of my pet theory. In just the last month, we’ve had additional reporting that casts doubt on the Alitos’ public statements about the circumstances on why the pair of treason flags were flown at family residences (even as the judge has continued to place the blame for the insurrectionary symbols squarely on his wife). Beyond this, an investigative reporter infiltrated a Supreme Court shindig and recorded conversations with both Alitos that aren’t simply unflattering, but in the case of the justice, cast still more doubt on his ability to judge crucial cases without imposing his significant and severe personal prejudice. And apart from the Alitos, inquiries by Senate Democrats have resulted in revelations of even more undisclosed financial gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas, in this instance free flights on millionaire Harlan Crow’s private jet. 

As I’ve written before, the corruption of the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is in the first place inherently bad on various straightforward levels — anti-democratic in ways that align with the authoritarian Republican Party, anti-freedom in ways that reflect an Christian extremist bias, anti-civil rights in ways that reflects a fundamentally white supremacist vision of America, pro-plutocrat in ways that reflect adulation of the millionaire class. Together, these are more than reason enough to place Court reform at the center of the national agenda. As more and more people are recognizing and describing, the Supreme Court has effectively become an unelected GOP legislature, ruling on a host of laws in ways that consistently advance a far-right agenda that doesn’t have the votes to pass at the national level.

But though it is very good news that the Court’s malfeasance is coming to greater public attention, there is one enormous downside that I believe the Democratic leadership is struggling to navigate. The more the Court’s corruption and over-extended power comes to light, the more the public will reasonably ask what the Democrats are doing to correct this imbalance. And as we’ve seen in other areas of conflict with the Republican Party, many senior Democrats are conflict-averse when it comes to fully engaging with the GOP. With the Court, of course, there are understandable (if not fully defensible) reasons for hesitation. At the present time, it does appear impossible to believe that corrupt justices like Alito and Thomas might be impeached and removed from the Court — not with the GOP perfecting displays of “totalitarian unanimity” when it comes to defying the rule of law. But this perceived impossibility seems to be leading the Democrats to not even begin a process that might change public opinion and the country’s political dynamics in ways that might yet yield results, at least in the long term.

Not only is this counter-productive for anyone urging Court reform, it also threatens to implicate the Democrats in the very corruption the claim to oppose. If they do not seem to be trying to undo the corruption, then some might reasonably conclude that they’re actually OK with it. To me, this is a huge reason why action is required, even if that action can’t reasonably be expected to yield immediate results. Indeed, too many Democrats seem to assume that a Court and a GOP that defy common-sense reforms will make them look weak — but it seems equally possible that such defiance might help erode public support for the Court majority and its defenders. 

But though the Democrats risk being tainted by the Supreme Court’s corruption if they fail to move to remedy it, it’s equally clear that Chief Justice John Roberts implicates himself in both Alito’s and Thomas’s corruption every more deeply as the days pass and he refuses to impose meaningful measures that might censure or curb their outlandish behavior. At some point, silence must be read as active complicity in the two men’s insurrectionary and anti-democratic projects. A more aggressive Democratic Party would be hounding Roberts’ failure to lead the Court in an ethical manner, which could in turn increase public pressure for meaningful change.

An underlying issue here is that institutionally-minded Democrats seem to genuinely worry about the Court’s legitimacy and the potential damage to the rule of law should the broader public no longer have faith in the Court’s rulings. This is an understandable concern, as the Court should ideally function as a trusted arbiter of disputes between the various interests and factions of American society. But only a fool would say that this is how the Court currently operates. Instead, it’s become the de facto legislator for imposing minority positions that lack support to ever pass Congress and be signed into law.

This means that when Democrats speak of restoring the legitimacy of the Court, but fail to speak of its legacy of corruption and political extremism that has subverted American democracy and freedom, they inadvertently position themselves as defenders of the Court’s long record of bad decisions. And so this leads Democrats to essentially tell the American majority that they need to effectively eat shit for the indefinite future — to accept as legitimate Court decisions that have been issued by a corrupt Court, in order to preserve public respect for the Court when it someday, somehow begins to issue more reasonable decisions.

But apart from other logical flaws I’ve pointed out, this runs into one gargantuan one: the fact that the Supreme Court is currently acting to subvert the democratic political system that provides the most viable path to checking the Court’s power and ensuring its rulings reflect reasonable interpretations of the law, not right-wing fantasies bent on social control and rule by the nation’s white Christian minority. The Court has attacked the democratic system in ways small and large, from gutting the Voting Rights Act, to signing off on unfettered gerrymandering that lets representatives choose their voters, to eliminating limits on the ability of millionaires and billionaires to buy political favors.

Michael Podhorzer makes this very case over at Weekend Reading, where his latest piece is a tour de force accounting of the various ways the Supreme Court has transformed into an unaccountable Republican power center that accomplishes what minority-status Republicans cannot. Unflinching and exhaustive, his indictment of the Supreme Court’s turn against American democracy in favor of partisan ends is breathtaking. Yet none of the Court’s prior attacks on the democratic system may be as consequential as the Court’s complicity in helping Donald Trump evade accountability for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As Podhorzer writes, “By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.” If the Court has over the last 20 years built a ticking time bomb to demolish American democracy and the rights that make our free society possible, its defense of Donald Trump constitutes a lighting of a fuse that may well cause that bomb to explode and blow our democracy to kingdom come.

Podhorzer characterizes the situation wrought by the Court majority around Trump’s immunity case as a “crisis,” as “We will face an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months).” But Podhorzer’s piece implicitly argues for an even broader crisis rooted in the Court’s abandonment of democracy and neutrality in favor of open partisan warfare, in which the Court’s effort to protect Trump represent the extreme, logical extension of the MAGA majority’s dark turn.

However, the intersection between the Court’s corruption and Trump’s re-election campaign represents not just a new nadir in the story of the modern Court, but a potential pivot point to restore American democracy by reforming the Court and combatting GOP authoritarianism. Podhorzer’s piece is the most recent exemplar of increasing journalistic attention on how the need to to rein in the right-wing Court majority is fusing with the 2024 election campaign. The groundwork for this convergence was set when the Court handed down the Dobbs decision in mid-2022, which remains a shocking repudiation of a basic right to bodily autonomy that most Americans took for granted, and focused public attention on the Court’s undeniable reactionary bent. But the Court’s recent interventions in the 2024 election shows how very broad the MAGA majority’s impact has become. The Court isn’t just handing down rulings that are erasing decades of social and economic progress — it’s also handing down rulings that kneecap our democratic government and thus render it difficult or impossible to act legislatively to reverse the Court’s rule by judicial fiat.

In putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s re-election campaign, the Court has left the Democrats no choice but to place questions of the Court’s corruption at the center of the 2024 campaign. As a matter of the Democratic Party’s own survival, it can’t allow to continue unchallenged a Republican power center that floats above even a modicum of democratic accountability. And as a matter of democracy’s survival, the nation can’t tolerate a Court that sides with one party over the other — particularly when its favored party increasingly holds majority rule to be the enemy of cherished reactionary goals. The logical argument for Democrats to make is that tangible reforms of the Court are urgently needed, including term limits and an expansion of the Court to re-balance away from the reactionary majority. Ignoring the Court’s transformation into a bastion of right-wing power would be tantamount to issuing a white flag of surrender.

In recent weeks, we have in fact seen some signs that this political reality is proving undeniable to the Biden campaign. In remarks at a fundraiser, President Biden noted that the next president would likely be able to appoint at least two justices — depending on who holds the presidency, this would result in either a continued MAGA lock on the Supreme Court, or a restored centrist-liberal majority. In this respect, Biden appears to be seeking a middle path, in which he stresses the importance of the Supreme Court to the 2024 election without urging possibly controversial and hard-to-implement structural reforms such as term limits or court expansion. Such signs of prioritizing the Court in his re-election bid are deeply encouraging, both because the Supreme Court is proving an impediment to pro-democracy and progressive reforms in a practical sense, and because the idea of an unelected group of right-wing ideologues setting our society’s course is inherently enraging and galvanizing. The more that Americans learn of the Court’s corruption and subversion of majority rule, the more they will rally to a president and a party that promises a re-balancing of the highest court in the land. Reminding Americans that Donald Trump stands ready to solidify a radical Supreme Court majority that rips away established freedoms while eviscerating our political paths to undoing the damage should be made central to Biden’s re-election bid. In politics, you are always at an advantage when you force your opponent to defend the indefensible; a strategy that highlights an out-of-control MAGA Supreme Court majority beloved of Trump and the GOP will do just that.

Proclaiming Trump Innocent and Democracy Guilty, GOP Flirts With Political Oblivion

The felony conviction of Donald Trump on all 34 counts related to his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels shows that the American justice system is capable of imposing meaningful sanctions on the lawless former president — if a trial actually manages to run its course. The verdict came despite a ceaseless barrage of propaganda from Trump and the Republican Party, including threats against the presiding judge, so that this outcome was hardly certain. Against significant odds, accountability has come for Trump, with the potential to unsettle what has been a neck-and-neck presidential race, and cause more Americans to grasp Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office. The former president’s felony status is disqualifying, and Democrats and others must invest time and effort into communicating why this is so (for a rundown of the arguments they can make, this recent piece by Brian Beutler is an excellent starting point). 

But just as important as the conviction itself is the contemptible and extreme Republican Party reaction that has exploded in its wake. For what most people view as the proper working of the justice system is being characterized by the Republican Party and Trump himself as a corrupt, rigged, and disastrous outcome that must be reversed at the earliest opportunity. More than this, though — the GOP is using the verdict to falsely proclaim that the entire justice system is corrupt, and as justification to plan radical measures to weaponize the justice system against their political opponents. In doing so, they show that they would rather burn down the entire edifice of the rule of law than see their party leader made subject to it.

We need to be clear-eyed about what these Republicans are saying, for they do not actually believe that the justice system is corrupt, and so to treat their claims in good faith is dangerous and self-defeating. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observes, the problem that Trump and the GOP have with the verdict is that the system is in fact not corrupt, and has truly brought the former president to justice. But because their leader is a criminal, they must re-define the rule of the law itself to be the actual problem. This is upside-down, authoritarian logic, which basically reduces to saying that the law is whatever the Republican Party says it is. It’s a mentality that we have seen in countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but which has now migrated to American shores, and been adopted by one of America’s two major political parties.

On top of this, the GOP is now using the verdict as an excuse to seek retribution against their Democratic “enemies,” even though the Democrats did not actually do anything wrong in the first place; rather, the Democrats are being scapegoated because the legal system itself worked as intended ! In other words, they intend to use the everyday, apolitical functioning of the justice system that held their criminal leader to account to justify the complete subversion of the justice system to achieve anti-democratic political ends, such as jailing opponents on false charges. Doubling down on a convicted Trump, the GOP has consciously made criminality and lawlessness central to the party’s political identity, a fact that if widely understood should rightly appall and alienate a vast swathe of the American citizenry.

This Republican reaction to Trump’s conviction — highly coordinated, relentless, and nihilistic — should provide final confirmation that the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian party that rejects democracy and all of its constituents — free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, equality under the law, the illegitimacy of political violence. Indeed, we should also understand that the extreme GOP unity in supporting a criminal president is in itself reason for alarm. As MSNBC host Chris Hayes remarked, “The lesson they learned is if you enforce this totalitarian unanimity, you can keep chugging along. And it is a wildly dangerous lesson. Because they will do this no matter what he does, and no matter how bad it gets.” We might say that “totalitarian unanimity” (what a great, if ominous, term!) is the GOP’s battering ram against democracy, their answer to the rule of law: stick together, say up is down, and seek power by tearing down America’s institutions while issuing a cloud of lies, propaganda, and violent threat. Another way of looking at is one that reveals the GOP’s increasingly fascistic tendencies, as we might say that the GOP is attempting to will itself into power through a unified embrace of lies and a mass subversion of the rule of law.

The GOP’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s conviction, with its accompanying assault on the rule of law, should be seen as on a continuum with Trump’s attempted coup following the 2020 election, the ever-broadening GOP refusal to accept adverse election results in 2024, and the GOP’s use of violent threat to achieve political ends (as Trump has done in threatening a “bloodbath” if he isn’t re-elected). Individually, each of these strategies can be called authoritarian and anti-democratic — but to properly understand, communicate, and confront their collective threat, we need to more precisely describe this GOP effort to overturn America’s democracy for what it is: an insurrection against the U.S. government.

In its denial of Trump’s conviction, the GOP is not simply aiming to overturn the verdict, but looking to overturn for all time the idea that any verdict can ever be considered settled if it goes against Republican Party interests. If they can undo this, they can undo the prospect that any other Republican leader can be held to account for breaking the law. Such a principle, once established, would render the United States not a democracy but a one-party state, where the GOP could engage in any manner of political behavior — lawless or even violent — with impunity. 

If we view the Republican war on the Trump verdict as the latest campaign in an ongoing GOP insurrection, the Democrats’ failure to date to fully amplify the verdict is not just self-defeating, but a dereliction of duty. As I said, not only does the verdict disqualify Trump, the GOP’s reaction to it is an equally — or even more important — disqualifying development. There is a fundamental error in thinking that this is just about Donald Trump, and that if the public simply hears about the verdict, it will form negative opinions about the former president and his capacity to return to the Oval Office. Such thinking ignores the fact that the GOP is actively trying to convince people not only that Trump isn’t guilty, but that American democracy is itself the problem! The GOP isn’t just engaging in aggressive politics — it’s engaging in an effort that, if successful, and in conjunction with the other insurrectionary efforts I noted above, would result in the transformation of the United States into an authoritarian, one-party state. For the Democrats to contest neither the Republican lies about the verdict, nor the accompanying effort to attack the rule of law, would be incomprehensible.

I do think that long-standing pathologies play a part in the Democrats’ reluctance to jump all over the verdict, a risk-averse approach to politics that has no faith in the Democrats’ ability to come out on top in partisan tussles (a point elaborated numerous times by political writer Beutler). But beyond this, I think that Democrats realize, consciously or not, that to paint Trump as a lawless felon who needs to drop out of the race would bring them into full and irreversible conflict with a radicalized GOP that refuses to back down on Trump’s purported innocence — a conflict that would in turn inexorably lead, through the force of logic, to full confrontation with the GOP’s other strategies of insurrection.

I wonder if another concept might help explain this underlying Democratic reluctance. The term “ontological shock” refers to the idea of one’s worldview being overwhelmed and undone by new, radical information that simply can’t be integrated into what one knows about how things work; a fun example is the earthquake that would be inflicted on people’s sense of reality if a UFO landed on the White House lawn. It may be that the Democratic Party leadership, including President Biden, is simply incapable of emotionally and intellectually processing the idea that the Republican Party has become authoritarian, bloody-minded, and relentless in its quest to overturn American democracy and our free society. Yet I think any fair-minded assessment of the GOP’s reaction to Trump’s conviction would have to conclude that the Republican Party has decisively, and irrevocably, broken with democracy and its most fundamental bulwark, the rule of law. If the GOP reaction to the verdict is the latest moment of ontological shock for the Democratic Party, then party leaders must quickly work through their trauma, grasp the new reality, and act to defend the United States against an obvious threat to the survival of the republic.

Perhaps my greatest frustration due to the Democrats’ inability to fully internalize and aggressively act against an insurrectionary GOP — after the obvious necessity of preserving American democracy — is that so much of the Republican Party’s quest for power depends on efforts to bluster and conjure alternate realities into being. Certainly this has been a key part of Trump’s power and appeal, in his case the promotion of the idea that he is subject neither to daily norms, nor to the sternest of laws. But now the effort is far more comprehensive, as the full firepower of the broader GOP has been brought to bear on presenting the party’s lawlessness as redemptive and justified — as being a truer expression of right than the law itself. For this strategy to work, though, the Republican Party must be able to overcome the Democrats’ ability to appeal to basic truth and reality — in this case, the idea that Trump’s trial wasn’t rigged, that Trump has been convicted through the judgment of 12 ordinary Americans, and that for many reasons his felonies disqualify him from the presidency.

It seems to me that the Democrats are being cowed by what is in part an epic bluff by the GOP, both in the case of the Trump conviction and with other insurrectionary strategies, such as the preemptive refusal to accept the 2024 election results. In fact, the Republican Party is far, far out on a brittle limb in terms of advancing ideas that are alien and bizarre to the American majority — for instance, the idea that the entire judiciary is part of a plot to “get” Donald Trump, or that Democrats only ever win elections through the illegal votes of millions of undocumented immigrants. To put it in more Trumpian terms, we could say that the GOP is advancing a high-stakes pyramid scheme, in which at each step the American public is being asked to provide the party with ever more outrageous deposits of credulity (this may be a major reason why Trump, with his history of such schemes, has synched up so easily with the GOP’s fascistic forms of politics).

The fact that the GOP might yet succeed, in large part by convincing enough citizens of objectively insane and anti-American ideas, should clue Democrats into the fact that this insurrection is being fought in the realm of ideas and emotions, not through guns and bombs (even as Trump continues to intimate terrible violence to come should he lose in November). And though the movement challenging America is far wider than Trump, Democrats can leverage the former president to inflict devastating damage on the entire GOP and the anti-democratic movement it embodies. So many Republican politicians have mortgaged their reputations to the former president, hoping that his victory in November will be worth it. But by chaining himself to his criminality over the years, and particularly in the wake of this verdict, they have made themselves vulnerable to public opinion swinging decisively against a felon chief executive, with all the burning red flags that his criminal status raises.

The GOP’s reaction to the verdict — to basically declare that Trump, and by extension the GOP, is actually above the law — is equally damning and disqualifying, showing that the GOP would rather abandon democracy than abandon their criminal leader. Trump is the deranged avatar of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist movement to overturn and replace U.S. democracy with a system that serves an ever-shrinking, self-serving, and radicalized minority of the population. The Democrats need to drive home the true story of his soul sickness and resultant criminality, why this means a second Trump presidency would be a nightmare for the country, and how the GOP’s identification with his sordid values renders the Republican Party unworthy of holding power at any level.

Alito's Treason Flag Addiction Is Far More Than a Generic Ethical Lapse

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack, an inverted American flag was viewed flying at the residence of Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. The news was genuinely shocking, as the upside-down American flag had by that point been seized upon as a symbol by both the insurrectionists who sacked the U.S. Capitol and by more run-of-the-mill election deniers who falsely claimed the presidency had been stolen from Donald Trump. In response, Alito indicated to the Times that, “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs” — but as many quickly noted, this doesn’t fully explain the striking deployment of a symbol sympathetic to insurrectionists in the days following an actual insurrection, Alito’s apparent indifference to the appearance that his household might be in sympathy with the stop-the-steal movement, or the appearance (at a minimum) of judicial conflict of interest given that Alito has sat in judgment in January 6-related cases.

But subsequent reporting by the Times revealed that the Alitos have flown at their home yet another flag (this time at their summer residence in New Jersey, in the summer of 2023) associated with anti-government and insurrectionary behavior — the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that originated in the Revolutionary War, but which has subsequently been re-appropriated by far-right movements. As the later article notes, the Appeal to Heaven flag “is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.” The article further reports that according to ethics experts, “it ties Justice Alito more closely to symbols associated with the attempted election subversion on Jan. 6, and because it was displayed as the obstruction case was first coming for consideration by the court.” The timing of the flag’s display in relation to the obstruction case feels particularly damning, suggesting the possibility of a consciousness of intent by Alito, as if he might be telegraphing his intentions.

But to whom, exactly, would Alito have been signaling via appropriated Revolutionary War semaphore? To its credit, the Times provides a revealing history of the Appeal to Heaven Flag (also known as the Pine Tree Flag), which in recent years has been particularly embraced by the bizarrely named right-wing activist Dutch Sheets “as a symbol of his ambitions to steep the country and the government in Christianity.” Sheets is “a prominent figure in a far-right evangelical movement that scholars have called the New Apostolic Reformation,” and has apparently made a habit of gifting the flag to Republican politicians, including former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Sheets was heavily involved in stop-the-steal campaigns following Trump’s election loss in November 2020, and the Appeal to Heaven flag was subsequently displayed by multiple insurrectionists on January 6. The Times remarks that, “By that day, scholars say, the flag had become popular enough to sometimes be used by a few other groups, including militia members. But most often, they said, it is tied directly to Mr. Sheets, his contemporaries and adherents and their vision for a more Christian America.”

And this is where the connections between the flag, the movement that’s taken it as a symbol, and Alito get interesting — and disturbing:

[Sheets] placed the high court at the center of his mission. In 2015, the court’s ruling that states must allow same-sex marriage had galvanized the movement and helped it to grow. In a speech three years later, he said, “There’s no gate that has allowed more evil to enter our nation than that of the Supreme Court.”

But Mr. Sheets and fellow leaders described Justice Alito, the member of the court most committed to expanding the role of faith in public life, as their great hope: a vocal defender of religious liberty and opponent of the right to abortion and same-sex marriage.

It strains credulity that in flying the Appeal to Heaven Flag, Justice Alito was not aware of its connection to Sheets’ movement, and that in doing so, he was not implicitly or explicitly sending a message of sympathy to Sheets’ anti-democratic cause.

***

At a minimum, the display of the two flags at two different Alito residences cuts deeply against the notion that judges aren’t supposed to show even the appearance of bias regarding the cases they hear. Interviews of ethics experts and other judges reveal the degree to which Alito’s conduct is beyond the pale for a Supreme Court justice. Though the Supreme Court is at this point unbound by any sort of credible ethics regime, such basic notions as appearing unbiased are bedrock enough that Alito surely doesn’t need to reference an official ethics code to know how outrageous the flying of insurrectionary flags might appear.

But we need to think very carefully before we slot Alito’s behavior into simply a generic violation of “ethics” — though it certainly is that as well. Well-meaningly but misleadingly, many have concluded that the flag incidents prove that the Supreme Court requires tougher guidelines to follow, and that Alito’s offenses can in this way somehow be remedied. But this attitude badly understates the depth of his offenses. The indication of sympathy for forces attempting to either overthrow the United States government in open insurrection, or for a movement trying to influence judges with the goal of transforming the United States into an undemocratic, Christian nationalist entity, are not simply ethically wrong. In the display of both the Appeal to Heaven and inverted American flags, Alito has demonstrated the appearance of sympathy for causes that run directly against democracy and the rule of law, of which the Supreme Court is supposed to be a primary defender.

In doing so, he has rendered himself unfit not only to hear cases directly bearing on such issues — such as those involving Donald Trump’s immunity from prosecution and the propriety of certain charges against January 6 defendants — but also any cases involving issues that implicate the rule of law and American democracy. That latter category, of course, involves literally every other possible case that might come before him, for all depend on the rule of law and the government’s legitimacy in promulgating laws. The problem is not that Alito made an error in showing the appearance of bias — which in general terms might indeed be unethical — but what he’s specifically seems to be biased about: the question of whether American democracy should continue. 

The far more serious problem, though, and which also transcends mere ethical considerations, is that these appearances of bias may in fact reveal Alito’s actual sympathies and beliefs. Such beliefs can’t be mitigated by an ethics code, for they’re disqualifying qualities in a Supreme Court justice. To determine whether Alito meets this threshold, congressional investigations are called for; depending on the outcome, impeachment should absolutely be on the table. You can be an insurrectionist, or you can be a Supreme Court justice, but you certainly can’t be allowed to be both in a democratic United States.

As Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote in the wake of the first treason flag revelation, Alito’s jurisprudence on the Supreme Court marks him as a thorough and unremitting hack for the interests of the Republican Party, rather than a staunch and neutral defender of the law as his originalist pretensions would have us believe. In case after case, Millhiser shows how Alito has placed loyalty to the GOP over loyalty to legal precedent or consistency, essentially switching his positions on issues like free speech or criminal rights depending on the ideology of those affected (it is also worth noting that even prior to the flag-flying incidents, Alito displayed very little restraint in voicing his partisan sympathies regarding the GOP). 

With such a track record, it’s worth asking whether Alito’s shows of sympathy with insurrectionist causes (January 6, the Christian nationalist effort to impose sectarian rule on the United States, Donald Trump’s quest to return to office despite having attempted a coup to remain in office) are merely instances of the justice going rogue — or evidence as well of his long-standing habit of aligning himself with core Republican interests. After all, to be a Republican politico in good standing nowadays, it’s necessary to adhere to Donald Trump’s position that the 2020 election was stolen from Republicans. Such a party position seems not to be a bridge too far for Alito, given his apparent willingness to have his homes display iconography linked to the stop-the-steal movement. Likewise, at recent oral arguments regarding Trump’s claims of absolute presidential immunity, Alito appeared startlingly sympathetic to the former president’s claims. In one incredible exchange, the justice went so far as to suggest that a president may need to be free from prosecution lest his successor decide to prosecute him for crimes, which could lead to the offending president committing even more crimes in order to remain in office. The idea that a president should be considered above the law in order to preserve the existence of democracy and the rule of law is an argument that only an authoritarian-minded zealot could love — and yet Alito seemed to be making it.

All of this leads me to a contrarian conclusion as to whether Alito acted wrongly in displaying flags associated with rebellion and treason. Rather than acting in an unethical manner that merits a simple reprimand or a promise not to repeat the offense, anyone who supports American democracy needs to understand that Justice Alito has in fact done us all a tremendous favor. By flaunting the symbols of his sympathies for all to see, Alito has shown us who he truly is and what he truly believes. In doing so, he has made the case more graphically and publicly than America’s sharpest pundits ever could that he’s not to be trusted by the democratic majority, and is certainly unfit to serve on the Court. So-called ethics reforms that would ban the treason flags but keep in place the treason justice who yearns to hoist them miss the point entirely, to our collective peril.

Already Refusing to Accept Election Results, Trump Renders His Candidacy Illegitimate

The refusal of not only Donald Trump, but of increasing numbers of elected Republicans, to commit to accepting a 2024 presidential election loss may just be the biggest story in American politics. It’s certainly as important as the intertwined phenomena of the GOP’s evolution into a party of authoritarianism and its increasing comfort with threats of violence to achieve political ends. Advance rejection of adverse election results is a scandal, a crisis, and a challenge to the pro-democracy American majority, pointing to a breakdown in U.S. politics as the Republican Party embraces open defiance of majority rule and the rule of law.

Trump himself has tried to hedge his refusal by qualifying that he would accept the results “if everything’s honest,” but that “[i]f it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” As we’ve already seen, though, the former president conjures accusations of electoral dishonesty out of thin air, spouting lies about fake votes, illegal votes, immigrant votes, and the like nearly as fast as fact-checkers can debunk them. Let’s not be naive: there is no standard of proof that Trump would accept if he loses in November. To think otherwise is to ignore the evidence of his behavior over the last decade. The rabid elephant in the room, of course, is that Trump not only lied in 2020 about the election being stolen from him, but used that fiction as the basis for both violent and pseudo-legal attempts to undo the election results and so topple American democracy as we know it.

By echoing his 2020 refusal to commit to accepting the upcoming presidential election results should he lose — a refusal that we can see with the benefit of hindsight was the predicate for the first presidential coup attempt in American history — Donald Trump is broadcasting his intention to reject an unfavorable 2024 outcome as well. But he is not doing so out of some self-defeating interest in outing his own insurrectionary intent (although he is in fact making clear this intent). Instead, he’s talking about the need to reject “dishonest” election results in order to sow doubt among his supporters now, to prepare the ground for the same efforts to overturn the results that we saw in 2020. The plan for power in 2024 remains the same as before: Crooked legal maneuvers and incitement of violence.

But a second element that was mostly latent in 2020 is more overt this time around. By intimating that he will not accept the election results if he doesn’t win, and by suggesting he will incite a repeat of the post-election maneuvers and violence of 2020 (for example, in his statement that America will experience a “blood bath” if he loses), Donald Trump is using the threat of future violence to sway Americans’ votes in the present and running up to November — a threat given complete and utter credibility by his staging of a coup attempt in 2020-21. He is telling the American people that he will unleash violence on this country, just as he did before, if they don’t act as he commands them. Too many people are misinterpreting Trump’s threats as lying in the future — they are in fact acts of intimidation meant to operate right now to alter Americans’ opinions and votes.

It is difficult to conceive of a higher crime against American democracy than such threats, short of a second coup attempt by Donald Trump. Threatening the American citizenry to vote for Trump lest they suffer untold horrors is a story that any news organization worth its salt should be pursuing, constantly, key to communicating the darkness of Trump’s refusal to commit to respect the election results. Likewise, the political danger of a president refusing to accept election results, preparing the ground for violence should he lose, and using that threatened violence in the present to sway votes together form a catastrophe in the making that the Democratic Party should highlight, condemn, and confront at every opportunity.

Trump’s attempts to subvert faith in the election preparatory to overturning a November result that goes against him, coupled with his active intimidation of American voters in the present day, should be understood by all reasonable observers to disqualify him from the presidency. This is not a question of specific laws being broken, but of a clear intent to subvert Americans’ trust in democracy, sway the election through intimidation, and lay the groundwork for future violence and sedition by recruiting gullible citizens and dishonest politicians to his insurrectionary cause. He has rendered his candidacy illegitimate.

The menace emanating from Trump is made still worse by the fact that so many of the GOP’s elected officials are either actively or tacitly complicit in his attempts at electoral intimidation and subversion. Those who echo his refusal to accept the election results no matter the outcome, like vice-presidential hopefuls Representative Elise Stefanik and Senator Tim Scott, have made Trump’s cause their own, happy to aid his destructive and violent-minded path to the presidency. But those Republican officials who simply refuse to criticize him are little better, shirking the minimum duty required of elected officials to defend American democracy by affirming its most basic tenet — that when you lose, you accept that the other side has won. By behaving as if Trump’s words and intent are normal, they provide through their silence essential cover to an authoritarian politics that has no place in the United States. In this way, the GOP has been poisoned by the insurrectionary spirit that animates Trump’s campaign for the presidency.

I would hazard that this increasingly widespread, even lockstep, Republican position is a major — perhaps even the central — reason why neither the media nor the Democratic Party have responded to the GOP refusal to recognize presidential election results with the appropriate levels of focus and intensity. With Republican pols closing ranks, the media and Democrats imagine that a basic defense of democracy will now appear too “partisan.” But at the risk of repeating myself: in no way can Trump’s campaign be considered legitimate under the most basic understanding of American democracy.

Unfortunately for the political health and even survival of the country, a failure to truly engage the topic of Trump’s relative legitimacy or lack thereof may very well be having the opposite effect — like those Republicans who stand silent while Trump threatens a “blood bath” if he loses, too many in the media and the Democratic Party are normalizing behavior that isn’t just abnormal, but a direct threat to American democracy and the free society it makes possible.

For both the media and the Democrats, fear of taking a firm stand on Donald Trump’s illegitimacy also seems rooted in a reluctance to avoid what might be perceived as unnecessary or extreme conflict with Donald Trump, with the Republican Party, and by extension with the tens of millions of voters who support them. Yet the GOP has no compunctions about seeking escalation on its own terms, with the goal of delegitimizing both the free press and the Democratic Party.

Regarding the media, a hallmark of Trumpism — one which the GOP has eagerly adopted — has been to deny any legitimacy to mainstream news sources. Instead, Republicans now actively label them as “enemies of the state,” deserving of scorn and, if necessary, physical violence. Nor do Trump or the GOP any longer appear to consider the Democratic Party legitimate, or its voters to even be real Americans. In just the last couple weeks, we’ve been witness to no less a personage than House Speaker Mike Johnson suggesting that millions of illegal aliens are voting, in line with right-wing propaganda that such voting has been key to Democratic victories. Stop to consider how very shocking this is: the highest-ranking elected Republican is pushing legislation — and signaling to Republican voters — that the Democrats only hold power through fraud and deception, that the party is in fact a criminal enterprise at war with the intent of actual American citizens. Consider as well that this line of attack is of a piece with Donald Trump’s propaganda about stolen elections, so that Johnson is in fact helping Trump make his case that rejection of election results and violence may well be required for a Republican to return to the White House.

Wishing to avoid an escalation of conflict with the GOP, the Democrats’ refusal to make a reality-based argument for the lack of legitimacy of any Republican candidate who encourages or refuses to condemn political violence, and for the necessity of accepting democratic election results, has helped create a tilted playing field that allows the GOP to engage in an anti-democratic form of politics at little or no cost to its prospects. At its most extreme, and most self-sabotagingly for the Democrats and for our democratic system, this helps make it seem reasonable for the nation to go along with the results of an election won by Republicans if the party and its candidates use threats and actual violence to gain victory.

To the contrary: no American is obligated to accept election results that effectively come at the barrel of a gun. In fact, any decent American citizen is obligated to defy and reject such results. Once a political party becomes convinced that winning through threats and violence will secure it power, and that it will suffer no significant political cost through operating in such an authoritarian manner — as the GOP under Trump appears to have convinced itself — then it has every incentive to do just that. Under such circumstances, such a strategy must be exposed, excoriated, and delegitimized by the democratic majority.

I’m no scholar of authoritarianism, but in this situation, it seems a pretty sorry strategy for the pro-democracy party to preemptively signal to the authoritarian party that if the latter can intimidate its way into winning the next election, they will be considered America’s rightful rulers tomorrow and forevermore. It also seems an impoverished approach to worry more about provoking the authoritarian opposition to say bad things about you than about the dire importance of rousing the American majority to understand the threat it faces, to vote accordingly, and, yes, to deny any grant of legitimacy to GOP politicians who gain office on the basis of threats and outright violence. It has to be asked: Does the Democratic Party as a whole have a plan to defeat Republican authoritarianism? Do enough of its leaders grasp what a watershed it is for the Republican Party to have as a central pillar its refusal to accept any presidential election it does not win, and to suggest that any such loss will be redeemed through violence?

As I said before, Republicans are already laying out the case that Democrats are inherently un-American, anti-American, and all around non-American, never to be trusted with power. The Democrats badly need to come to grips with the nature of their existential conflict with the GOP, and to act in ways that energize the American majority to express its rejection, now and in the future, of those attempting to impose authoritarian rule on the country.

I could say that Democrats are doing a “grave disservice” to America’s citizenry, or some such high serious profundity, but it’s more to the point to say that it feels like the Democrats are unable to accurately grasp the risk/gain calculus. They seem to only see downside risk (i.e., they fear they will destructively escalate tensions with the Republican Party) when the truth is that anything the Democrats do, as long as it’s in defense of democracy and political norms, will always be twisted by the GOP into an argument for why the Democratic Party is actually a gang of godless Mexican drug cartels or some such nonsense. The GOP will always push back when Democrats defend democracy, because that is what an authoritarian party does. Democrats can’t avoid escalating the crisis of American democracy when they directly expose and confront GOP perfidy and bloody-mindedness; this may strike some Democratic politicians as risky, but the alternative of allowing the GOP to continue to wrap itself in the guise of normalcy is simply too dangerous.

At bottom, the Democrats are committing an enormous error by proceeding as if the political stakes and rules have not changed, and that they are simply engaged in regular democratic competition with the Republican Party as in years past, where the rules of the game mean that defeat this year might be reversed by victory in the next election cycle. The Republican Party is very clearly trying to engineer a victory in 2024 that will allow it to cripple the American political system to ensure permanent Republican rule, starting with a president who has signaled, quite openly, that he intends to rule by force and personal fiat.

Again, a big part of the reason we know this is because Trump and the GOP are using strategies incompatible with democracy right now in order to win in November (and also because Trump’s advisors and political allies are laying out second-term plans that are essentially a vision of lawless and unchecked governance, even as the Republican-dominated Supreme Court issues ruling after ruling decimating democratic accountability and basic freedoms). In doing so, they are showing us how they intend to rule. And in behaving as if the Democratic Party and its many millions of voters lack legitimacy, they have left the Democrats no choice in return but to engage in a high-stakes competition on legitimacy grounds, in which the goal is to illuminate and discredit the Republican Party for its war on democracy and embrace of violence to gain political power. Such politics means not simply beating the GOP in the next election, but systematically discrediting and delegitimizing it as a political entity.

A Court Supremely Indifferent to America's Democracy Crisis

I wrote last week about how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has put its thumb on the scales of justice in favor of Donald Trump and the indictments he faces for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. At a minimum, by ostentatiously and unnecessarily doing a deep dive into questions of presidential immunity, the Court is ensuring that Trump’s trial will not conclude — nor very possibly even begin — prior to November’s election. This would deny the American public a verdict as to whether the president indeed engaged in criminal activity; nearly as destructively, it would hide from view the evidence that Justice Department prosecutors have amassed around the former president’s attempted coup that in itself should be available to voters.

But in appearing to entertain the most outrageous claims of presidential power made by Trump’s lawyers, the conservative justices demonstrated sympathy for concepts that would transform the president into an unchecked king — able to assassinate rivals, defy court rulings, and disregard Congress. Instead of concentrating on the case at hand — Trump’s attempt to discard the election results — they expressed concern over theoretical future presidents who might be unduly constrained by the possibility of future prosecution. This line of thinking led to Justice Samuel Alito’s nonsensical but ominous musings that future presidents might have an incentive to commit crimes to remain in office in order to avoid prosecutions once they’re out of power, and so maybe it would be better to simply give them license to abuse their power in the first place lest they be tempted to abuse their power.

Ladies and gentlemen, the keenest legal minds of the land at work! It is perhaps best that mere citizens try not to look too closely at the glory of their insights, lest the celestial brilliance make us go blind.

Peer beneath the gobbledygook, though, and you see a more straightforward logic: justices grasping for a rationale to help a president of their own party regain the White House, and to aggrandize his powers once he does. Put in the harshest possible light, you might say that the conservatives on the Supreme Court appear interested in joining the insurrection which Donald Trump started after he lost the election, and which he’s never fully abandoned. But even if you cut them a little slack, and allow for argument’s sake that the Court really is interested in higher principle and not at all in sweeping an attempted coup under the rug, you can plainly see how the conservative majority is helping to structure and re-interpret settled law in order to help Trump back into power. They are providing the legalistic cover for a campaign that needs to obscure the president’s criminality from the American people in order to maximize his chances of regaining the White House. In doing so, as I pointed out previously, the Court has made clear that defense of American democracy will require major reforms of the Court to curb the power of a conservative majority whose allegiance is not to American democracy, but to Republican rule.

A recent piece by Michael Podhorzer provides a timely overview of what’s gone wrong with the Supreme Court and the urgent need to address this crisis, charting (very literally, in this case, as he makes use of multiple graphs to illustrate his argument) the growing partisan nature of the Court, as the extremist Federalist Society has been increasingly successful in getting its approved judges appointed to the nation’s highest Court. In doing so, Podhorzer helps us shake off an all-too-easy myopia that overly views the Court in the context of Donald Trump’s past and future presidencies, and reminds us of the longer-term battle going on over the shape and direction of American society. As he puts it, “While it’s accurate to say that the Court is protecting Trump, doing so misses greater stakes, and obscures the motivations of at least a few of the Federalist Society justices, which is to secure for at least a generation what could eventually be called the Dobbs Court.” In other words — as much as the Court is acting to protect Trump, the conservative majority sees Trump as a means to its own political ends. Such ends include the pro-business, pro-Christian agenda of the Federalist Society, and would more broadly advance a reactionary vision of America shared by millions of conservative (and overwhelmingly white) Americans who may well never even have heard of the Federalist Society, but who would agree with its objectives if they had.

Podhorzer rightly identifies the Court’s increasing position as a power center that evades democratic accountability and usurps the roles of our elected branches of government:

Since the Federalist Society was founded in 1982, the Court has transformed from an imperfect arbiter of genuine controversies to an agenda-driven, unelected lawmaking body whose decisions have systematically been opposed by the majority of Americans [. . .] Federalist Society majorities have acted with ever-increasing impunity to leverage the power granted to them by an ever-diminishing proportion of Americans, as reflected by the presidents who nominate them and senators who confirm them. Thus, it’s long past time to stop covering the Court as if it is anything other than an unaccountable super-legislature enacting an unpopular revanchist agenda.

Addressing the Court’s interest in protecting Trump and advancing him to the presidency, Podhorzer notes that a second Trump administration wouldn’t just advance the politics the Court majority is interested in merely in a general sense. Rather, the conservative majority understands that the Court’s own continued power to deeply shape American politics will require a Republican president to appoint conservative successors to the one or more justices statistically likely to retire or pass over the next four years. As he puts it, “It’s difficult to believe that the Federalist Society justices delaying the J6 trial were ignorant or indifferent to the fact that the success of their life’s project is on the line in November.” It’s worth stopping for a moment to consider how truly shocking this observation is. Not only is the Court acting in a blatantly political way — looking to protect its own political goals and aggrandize its own power — it is openly willing to pervert its interpretation of the law in order to achieve these ends. If the Court’s efforts succeed, and the conservative majority provides the margin of victory for Trump, then it’s vital to remember that long after Trump is gone from the scene, an ultra-conservative Court may well endure. If this isn’t corruption, then nothing is.

Immunity to Common Sense

Though a ruling is still some time off, last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court regarding Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity showcased a conservative majority intent on allowing the former chief executive to evade trial and accountability prior to the November elections. As others have noted, conservative justices went out of their way to set aside the actual crimes of which Trump has been accused, and to engage in abstract discussions that demonstrated a lack of interest in confronting the true matter at hand — a lawless former president who attempted a coup and now seeks the presidency a second time, apparently in large part to defeat the various legal efforts to hold him accountable for his many crimes. 

The proceedings provide a flashing alert that Donald Trump, three years out of office, continues to crash through democracy’s guardrails. For those who who sincerely believed that he would surely be prosecuted for his insurrectionary activities at least before the next election (and I count myself among them), they are a dark reminder that the justice system — in toxic combination with a slow-footed and overly deferential U.S. attorney general — is simply failing in its responsibility to protect vital public interests. 

We got a stunning inside look at the lack of concern over Trump’s insurrectionism from the judiciary’s highest court — certainly confirmation that the conservative majority sees no urgency in letting play out, one way or another, the devastating allegations in special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump. Never has a president been accused of such dire offenses against the rest of us. And yet several justices seemed sincerely interested in considering the question of whether a U.S. president might actually be immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office — despite the fact that such a position is tantamount to annointing the president as a dictator. Adam Serwer summarizes the consequences of such thinking:

Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

And yet, despite these absurdly anti-democratic implications of Trump’s legal arguments, Vox’s Ian Millhiser concludes that “the striking thing about Thursday’s argument is that most of the Republican justices appeared so overwhelmed by concern that a future president might be hampered by fears of being prosecuted once they leave office, that they completely ignored the risk that an un-prosecutable president might behave like a tyrant.”

Whether that sort of worst-case ruling comes to pass (i.e., presidents are actually kings!), readers of Supreme Court tea leaves like The American Prospect’s Harold Myerson saw in the direction of other questioning that “the Republican justices are likely to send this case back to the federal district court whence it originated, requiring the judge there to rule which of the charges brought against Trump pertain to his presidential duties and must therefore be dismissed, and which do not.” In other words — a delay likely to push the president’s trial past the November election. This will not just deny the public a verdict that could demonstrate, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the GOP nominee is a treasonous insurrectionist under the judgment of the law and not just under the plain reading of the facts and common sense. As Greg Sargent points out at the New Republic, such a delay would also prevent the public from learning, via the trial, various crucial facts about Trump’s efforts to steal the presidency that Jack Smith has collected during his investigation, which in themselves could have a profound effect on the election.

And this gets us to what needs to be stated plainly: a Supreme Court majority that delays Donald Trump’s trial until after the election is a Supreme Court that is at a minimum aiding him in his cover-up of damaging information. But I think we can go a step farther and say that in assisting Donald Trump, the conservative majority would be making his victory more likely — the result of which would undoubtedly be Trump’s dismissal of the charges against him, whatever corrupt actions that might require. Their ultimate opinion, when it arrives, must be judged in this light.

I’ll ante up here and say that the damage is already done, at least as far as the current Court’s at-least-theoretical role in defending democracy. As David Kurtz writes in a damning piece at Talking Points Memo recounting the broader failure of U.S. institutions to hold Trump to account:

The conservative justices had an opportunity to rally to the defense of democracy, to gird the system against further attack, to righteously defend the rule of law, and to protect its own prerogatives and powers against a wannabe tyrant who is counting on them to be his supplicants. They could have drawn a sharp line. They could have summoned indignation and outrage. They could have overlooked their partisan priors in favor of principle – or more cravenly in favor of self-preservation. With the possible and limited exception of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, they did none of that.

They failed in the worst possible way at the most crucial time.

I absolutely share Kurtz’s bitter assessment — the conservative Court’s behavior, in this instance and so many others, represents an outrage upon the American public. Its corruption is dispiriting and gut-wrenching. At the same time, the Court’s bare display of complicity with the Trump-GOP authoritarian project may yet become a crucial pivot point, as its public meaning is not yet solidified. As a first step, I would say that it’s far better to be aware of the reality of where the Court stands in the fight for democracy than to mistakenly rely on it for future defense.

Not only this — in allowing Trump’s lawyers to argue in favor of nonsensical and hideous powers like the president’s ability to assassinate political opponents, and in broadcasting uncanny indifference to Trump’s actual insurrection, the Court has delivered the democratic majority a powerful shock to the system — a shock that should encourage citizens to understand the clear stakes of the 2024 elections. People need to vote, and get their friends and neighbors to vote, and make sure elections officials are given the maximum protection from right-wing extremists seeking to bully and disrupt vote counts.

The Court’s apparent willingness to abet an insurrectionist in his return to the White House might not feel as dramatic as the evisceration of Roe v. Wade, but it broadens our sense of the threat its conservative majority poses — not just overturning fundamental rights, but working to prevent Americans from electing leaders who might defend and restore those rights (a point New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has made in this piece and elsewhere). And so the Court’s behavior here can also be used a cudgel to fight a mounting anti-democratic tide on the right more generally, as it illuminates how the GOP’s antipathy to democracy extends far beyond Donald Trump, to encompass even the supposedly above-it-all Supreme Court and a GOP establishment that has thrown in with his quest for power at all costs, majority rule be damned.

But it’s not enough for individual citizens and organizations to craft a narrative of a ruthless GOP willing to set aside democracy itself to regain power and order American society according to its preferred medieval and racist view of the world. As America’s remaining major pro-democracy party, the Democratic Party, too, has not only tremendous incentives, but an overriding obligation, to call out the Court for its apparent intention to aid Trump’s re-election campaign and to lay the groundwork for a lawless second Trump presidency.

Brian Beutler has been arguing for years that the Democrats need to be far more confrontational in their political battles with the GOP, and he urges the same around the immunity case, writing that, “Democrats [. . .] are the presumptive victims of Supreme Court corruption—the goal of delaying Trump’s trial is to help the GOP in the election—but they are also, at least in theory, the only people in the country with the power to impose consequences on the justices if they ride to Trump’s rescue and he loses anyhow.” Not only would this alert the public to the stakes, it would also stand some chance of letting the Supreme Court majority know that their outlandish, pro-authoritarian behavior will be met with pro-democratic consequences, up to and including expansion of the Supreme Court to balance out the GOP hacks who constitute its majority.

Beutler also points out that Democrats can throw their weight around more without pressing the Court to reach a certain conclusion, opining that, “It’d be worthy of Democrats to point out that Republicans are serving up lies to exempt Trump from accountability. This would in no way obligate Democrats to opine on the correct verdict. All they need to do is establish that delay equals coverup.” Such positioning would be a win-win for Democrats: in the best case by thwarting the most dangerous Supreme Court ruling, and in the worst, by setting the public stage for excoriating and ultimately rolling it back (Beutler elaborated some of these points in a subsequent piece that can be found here).

Again and again, though, Democrats and the Biden administration have shied away from a more aggressive approach to the Republican Party, even as the GOP has openly transformed into an authoritarian juggernaut. It’s fair to ask if that approach still makes sense (if it ever did) when the GOP presidential candidate has literally argued before the Supreme Court that presidents have dictatorial powers — a position which would not only absolve Donald Trump of his many prior crimes, but that showcases his lawless vision for a second term. It’s also fair to ask whether that restrained Democratic approach makes sense when an extremist right-wing Supreme Court listens to such assertions with apparent sympathy and signals that it would be no more than a rubber stamp for whatever deranged actions Trump might take if he returns to office. With the next president facing fair odds of being able to appoint one or more justices to the Court, rarely if ever has there been such a proper time to make the case for Republican extremism and the centrality of the Supreme Court to that extremism.

Will a Growing Pro-Choice Tsunami Turn November Into a Blue Wave?

This past week should go far to settling the question of whether the issue of abortion rights will play a dominant role in the November elections. With the Arizona Supreme Court upholding a draconian 1864 state anti-abortion law (passed at a time when women couldn’t even vote), we’ve seen Donald Trump and other Republicans openly flail about to avoid a growing backlash against restrictions that the GOP itself has long worked to impose. But as Paul Waldman writes in a deeply clarifying essay about how abortion politics and public opinion have evolved since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the GOP has ended up making real the previously more abstract stakes of the abortion rights struggle. He observes that, “[i]n practical political terms, there are only two paths to take on abortion, one toward securing rights and one toward undermining them. The “middle” position means more restrictions that ultimately lead to abortion being outlawed. And we all know it.”

The reason “we all know it,” as he goes on to describe, is because powerful elements of the GOP have used the Dobbs decision to impose extreme limits on abortion, with real-world, devastating impacts on women’s health in multiple states. If before Dobbs the GOP could seek to gain advantage by rousing its base with promises to end abortion even as those in the middle and on the left had trouble believing that this right would ever go away, the aftermath of the Court decision has introduced the reality principle to American’s pro-choice majority.

And as this Washington Post analysis by Aaron Blake notes, Donald Trump’s attempt to find a safe space by averring that states can now do what they want on abortion and that what they do is always right is not exactly a brilliant strategic move. Rather than clearing Trump of responsibility for abortion restrictions, this position essentially links him to whatever bonkers limits that GOP state governments decide to impose. For instance, when Trump was asked if doctors should be punished for abortions, Trump said that it would be up to the states. It is difficult to believe (and this is backed up by polls) that Americans are eager to start jailing physicians around the country, yet Trump’s “states’ rights” logic leads him to take no clear stand on such a damaging question for himself and the GOP. As Blake writes, “It’s one thing to say states should handle policy; it’s another to provide basically no judgment on what is acceptable policy [. . .] The fact is that leaving this to the states — some very red — is likely to lead, and has led, to policies that the national Republican Party would rather not account for.”

I don’t doubt that the Trump campaign and the broader GOP will continue to cast about for an abortion message that they believe will minimize the damage to the party’s election prospects. But not only are they fighting against an actual reality they themselves created (as Waldman makes clear), they are also stuck with a uniquely tarnished party leader where this issue is concerned. Not only is Donald Trump the person most responsible for the destruction of abortion rights — a responsibility which Trump himself has repeatedly and loudly proclaimed — he is also obviously untrustworthy on this topic and thus likely unable to sway pro-choice opinion even if he stumbles upon the ever-elusive right thing to say. Both Jamelle Bouie and Josh Marshall hammer this point home in recent pieces, which when paired with the undeniable fact of abortion restrictions the GOP itself is implementing around the country simply leaves the party very little room to maneuver.

But why should Republicans even expect to have room to maneuver? The GOP accomplished its long-time anti-abortion policy goal of overthrowing Roe v. Wade through a combination of persistence and Supreme Court norm-breaking, and have made it a part of our shared reality, to the great detriment of the causes of freedom, equality, and women’s bodily autonomy. The problem for Republicans is that their success is deeply, seismically unpopular, and in fact is likely to grow still more unpopular as stories of pregnant women suffering and dying due to lack of abortion access become more widespread. The basic truth of the matter is that religious extremists, on and off the Supreme Court, have imposed on millions of Americans a theological vision of life and reproduction, with predictably catastrophic consequences for ordinary Americans. It does not help the Republican cause that major elements within the GOP want to further restrict abortion access, with the ultimate goal of federal legislation that would effectively outlaw the procedure, with all the compounding chaos such “success” would produce. 

I don’t think we should underestimate the amount of damage the GOP’s immoral anti-abortion position may yet inflict on the party — a vulnerability that has been hidden to date by an unhealthy mainstream media focus on horse race presidential polling that tells us very little about how things will shake out in November. Not only has the Republican Party’s success shown itself to in fact be unpopular and repressive, but the GOP is ultimately at the mercy of a man who has no compunctions about lying and dissimulating about the abortion issue. The GOP’s continued attempts to scam its way out of the abortion trap it has set for itself seem just as likely to produce the opposite of the intended effect, leading Americans to turn even more strongly against the evisceration of women’s reproductive rights as the GOP shows that it doesn’t even have the fortitude to stand by its own policy wins. 

In turn, the fact that GOP gains on the anti-abortion front are actually a tremendous liability for the party should remind us that while it is still likely that the November presidential election will be close, it is also within the realm of possibility that the party is vulnerable to a more significant loss at the presidential and other levels. The Biden campaign’s apparent understanding that they must implacably tie Trump to the Dobbs decision and the mayhem that has followed signals that the president understands this vulnerability and is more than willing to exploit it.

But this fight goes beyond political maneuvering and the scoring of points, which is why it’s both so important that Democrats press the pro-choice attack and unsparingly condemn the GOP’s medieval attitudes. The attack on abortion rights reveals a larger GOP animus towards women, a view of them as fundamentally second-class citizens whose control over their own bodies must yield to the judgment of men who know better. In vowing to restore the right to abortion torn away by the evisceration of Roe, the Democrats are also fighting for a fundamental equality among Americans, regardless of gender. Most Americans intuit this point; the Democrats only stand to gain by making it more explicit and denying the GOP the false piety in which the party cloaks its misogynistic anti-abortion crusade.

Will Anti-Abortion "Success" Help Pop the GOP's Long Propaganda Con?

Here at The Hot Screen, we’re always on the lookout for analyses that help Americans understand the underlying dynamics and stakes of our political conflicts — to use one of my favorite metaphors when talking about this topic, we’re basically flying blind if we try to process the daily blasts of news and propaganda without a proper context for understanding it. Over at Flux, Matthew Sheffield has written a timely essay that fits this bill — not only does it provide a succinct overview of long-standing Republican strategies for advancing their unpopular political goals, but it also argues that the party’s apparent success in overturning Roe v. Wade is now threatening these heretofore successful strategies.

Sheffield discusses two basic strategies that the GOP has long relied on to advance its unpopular ideas and defeat the Democrats’ more popular ones — painting the Democrats as “extreme” while lying about the GOP’s own goals to hide the party’s radicalism. Meanwhile, “moderate” Republicans are trotted out to represent the GOP in the media, even as they are in fact far from the radicalized heart of the Republican Party. At the same time, the GOP pushes the few items for which it does plausibly have majority support — such as immigration — while otherwise relying on a conservative judiciary to implement policy goals it can’t pass through majority votes.  This rule-by-judicial-fiat approach has grown into a staggering success as a Supreme Court with a conservative super-majority has embarked on rolling back long-standing precedents that could never have been reversed legislatively. The most notable of these, of course, is the recent Dobbs decision that eliminated a federal right to an abortion.

But this is where the plot thickens and cracks begin to appear in the GOP’s interlocking political strategies — because, as Sheffield reminds us, GOP-controlled state governments around the country have now imposed draconian bans on abortion that fully embody and advertise the GOP’s extremism in a way that can’t really be dissembled away. This state-level campaign against abortion is happening even as the congressional GOP has so far refrained from pressing for new anti-abortion legislation at the federal level. In this way, we can see the GOP’s attempts to obscure its anti-abortion extremism starting to come apart at the seams, with state Republican parties lacking any compunction about letting their anti-abortion freak flags fly. Indeed, this open extremism has already led to a real-world backlash, as multiple red states have passed ballot initiatives protecting abortion rights (there is also good evidence that concern over abortion rights helped the Democrats exceed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections).

And as Sheffield describes, recent events in Arizona acutely demonstrate how previously-successful GOP tactics meant to hide the party’s anti-abortion extremism continue to falter in the post-Dobbs world:

In anticipation of the Dobbs ruling, state Republicans passed a bill in March of 2022 which banned most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy which included language explicitly stating that it did not repeal a much older 1864 law, enshrined in Section 13-3603 of the state code, which banned the procedure in all circumstances except to save the life of a mother.

[. . .] Arizona Republicans were trying to follow the national model in getting unelected judges to impose their most radical viewpoints on the public without having to actually legislate them. On Tuesday, the Republican-dominated state supreme court gave them exactly what they wanted in a ruling that correctly noted that the 2022 law “does not independently authorize abortion,” meaning that the original 1864 provision would be enforceable.

Republican legislators in Arizona used long-standing GOP tactics of employing the courts to insulate themselves from their extremism — but as anyone who’s been following recent news can attest, the strategy has backfired this time, as it simply looks like the Arizona GOP consists of anti-abortion zealots whose extremism has led them to support a crackpot law passed so long ago that women couldn’t even vote yet.

Not insignificantly, the Arizona dust-up also tripped up Donald Trump, as he opined that in the post-Dobbs world, particular abortion restrictions are at the discretion of each individual state. In other words, as many observers have pointed out, abortion restrictions can now be as strict as Republican legislators choose to make them — a situation that Trump is trying to play up as a just and perfect scenario of states’ rights triumphing, but which most American will rightly see as a license for extremism that directly implicates the GOP. Strikingly, gone is the cover of “the courts made the decision and we are just following their wise strict constructionism”: we are now in a world where, in the words of the GOP’s own presidential candidate, state legislators can do whatever they want where abortion is concerned. 

Sheffield notes that Trump is still engaging in the pre-existing GOP tactic of lying about Democratic extremism (Democrats want to abort babies even after they’re born) even as he tries to whitewash whatever extremist legislation GOP-controlled states pass as the essence of democratic justice. It’s worth remarking that this sort of GOP propaganda is likewise faltering in the face of the post-Dobbs reality, where Americans are able to see with their own eyes that it is Republican laws that are causing real-world mayhem, not fictional Democratic laws causing imaginary harm. In such a situation, Republican propaganda can even become self-defeating, as the distance between the party’s claims and obvious reality becomes grotesquely wide. Canny opponents of the Republican agenda should emphasize this gulf, which not only can help reveal actual GOP positions but also the party’s deep contempt for the average voter, who is conceived of more as a mark to be manipulated than a fellow citizen to be persuaded.

In a broader sense, this growing space between GOP lies and American reality is an object lesson in why it would behoove Democrats to describe Republicans’ strategies of dissimulation and slander far more frequently, in order to prime ordinary citizens to find for themselves examples of this GOP strategy in action. Once seen, I believe, its workings can’t be easily unseen. In the realm of abortion rights and women’s equality, for instance, GOP insistence that Democrats are murdering unborn children sounds increasingly absurd in light of the growing number of real-world examples of women whose health has been put at risk due to Republicans’ frenzy of new abortion restrictions. Absent a media apparatus sufficient to counter the massive bullhorn of the right wing, Democrats should at least invest more effort into helping the public understand the workings of GOP propaganda.

As Sheffield concludes, abortion isn’t the only issue where the GOP is wildly out of step with majority opinion, but it’s a crucial one, arguably one of the central political conflicts of our time. Abortion has long been a proxy for fights about gender equality, as well as the role of religion in public life, and so has ramifications far beyond the already vital question of whether a woman is able to exercise autonomy over her own body. Expose the GOP’s lies and propaganda around this issue, and the ensuring clarity may help illuminate many of the Republican Party’s other unpopular initiatives as well.

The Alpha and Omega of the Case Against Trump

Over and over again during the past few years, I’ve tried to describe how Donald Trump’s orchestration of the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol renders him permanently unfit to hold any level of power in this country (and not just me - this has been an unwavering aim of many reporters, writers, and politicians since then). For myself, this has branched into dissections of a growing authoritarianism throughout the Republican Party, the failure of the Democratic Party to adequately confront the GOP’s violent threats, and criticism of the media for underplaying the dangers facing the United States.

I’ll admit that throughout this time, I’ve been plagued by a sense that if I and others could just write clearly and directly enough, it could change the public dialogue and bend the nation markedly away from the dangers of Trumpism. A recent letter from the editor at Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer has reminded me that this is not just a pipe dream — that despite the passage of time and the constant efforts by the GOP and the right to propagandize away Donald Trump’s insurrection, there are still effective ways to talk about that day and why he should never be president again.

Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn wrote his piece in response to reader criticisms of the paper’s coverage of Donald Trump — essentially allegations that the paper is unfairly reporting on Trump and downplaying allegedly worse behavior by President Biden. After making clear that his intent is not to anger or belittle such readers by writing his response, Quinn lays down the line:

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo zeroed in on, Quinn’s appeal to the evidence of our own senses is the burning core of his letter. In doing so, Quinn provides an essential reminder that the reality of Donald Trump’s offense against America is as plain as the hand that each of us holds up before our face. On January 6, we all literally saw an insurrection play out in real time, complete with Donald Trump as the warlord of the marauding white nationalist hordes who refused to withdraw until Trump reluctantly commanded them to do so. Americans don’t even need opinion columnists or politicians to tell them what happened. It was as obvious as a thing can be.

There are dozens of potent arguments for why Donald Trump is unfit for power. But I think Quinn reminds us, as much as anyone possibly can, that there is a stark and overriding simplicity to the choice facing the American people. We all saw Donald Trump try to violently overthrow our government (this is of course in addition to the many illegal and nonviolent efforts he undertook to reverse the election results). You can either accept this, or deny it. But those who deny it are doing so by denying reality, or because they agree with Trump’s attempted coup to install himself in power against the will of America’s voters.

Behind Quinn’s plain statement of the facts is the proposition that most Americans, perhaps even a decisive majority, can be trusted to believe the evidence of their own senses when faced with an undeniable rupture in the nature of our government and society. Propaganda can try to dissuade people, or cloud their perceptions, but it can only do so much against the vivid facts of that day. Trump’s actions are so self-incriminating, so damning, that at some level, no more really needs to be said except to remind people to trust themselves. Fundamentally democratic and deeply moral, it is difficult to improve on Quinn’s appeal.

There are undoubtedly many reasons why Donald Trump has placed intimations of violence at the center of his re-election campaign — so much so that I’ve been arguing he’s not running a re-election campaign so much as a second insurrection — but a central reason he is doing so is because of the non-deniability of his January 6 attempt to overthrow the government. At a basic level, he knows that we know what happened that day — and like fellow thugs across time, his response has been to double down on his previous threats, to essentially tell us that he will happily engage in violence once again in order to try to get his way. Trump doesn’t even bother to pretend that he didn’t engage in violence before; in this way, he further confirms Americans’ understanding of what happened on January 6, while demonstrating that he will unleash more violence if Americans once again reject him.

Learning to Play Offense on Immigration

Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch’s column on the Baltimore bridge collapse is a fantastic snapshot of how this tragedy reveals so much about the contemporary state of American society and politics. He notes how many on the right immediately re-purposed the accident to attack familiar targets like diversity equity inclusion policies, the purported incompetence of any minority group member who happens to hold a position of power, and immigration. If nothing else, such a reaction from the right helps confirm what’s been a central focus of The Hot Screen for years now — the centrality of white supremacist thinking to the contemporary, MAGA-fied GOP. This is a party and a right-wing media machine primed to vomit out the message, over and over and over, that American is under assault by darker-skinned citizens as well as dark-skinned immigrants, and that these groups should be blamed for basically every bad thing that ever happens.

Bunch rightly takes a scalpel to the surfeit of MAGA mud to reveal a contradictory truth settled inside the plain reality of the accident — the 6 immigrant men who tragically died in the accident put a spotlight on the central role that immigrants play in sustaining the larger American economy. And taking a humanizing look at those who were killed provides a potent reminder that the average immigrant to the U.S. is someone who works their ass off, makes sacrifices most native citizens could barely conceive of, and works for the common good in a way that is frankly incomprehensible to the right-wing commentators who can only think to divide and undermine the United States.

Bunch’s coverage helps remind us that the Republican’s anti-immigration stance is largely one long con, using lies about immigrants stealing American jobs and being inherently criminal in order to support a racist vision of American where only white citizens are to be considered fully legitimate. GOP sabotage of the recent bipartisan immigration bill has, as many have pointed out, revealed the party’s fundamental lack of interest in actually solving any issues at the border or with immigration administration more generally, as the party instead prefers to foment a sense of crisis that neatly supports extremist, Great Replacement theory rhetoric that the U.S. is being invaded by Latin hordes seeking to displace white (true) Americans.

Of course, Bunch doesn’t have a patent on telling the truth about immigration. Democrats could tell a similar history as he does if they were so inclined, instead of too often seeing defense of immigration as a liability where their best hope is to fight the GOP to a draw or acceptable loss. It should be clear at this point that the Republicans are not basing their opposition on reality, but on an irrational though motivating story that ultimately needs to be countered by a positive, reality-based narrative about immigration’s benefits to America. 

Republican National Committee Interview Question Makes Insurrectionism a Sinister Job Requirement

A Washington Post headline calls it “an unusual turn,” but the fact that interviewees for jobs at the Republican National Committee are reportedly being asked if they think the 2020 election was stolen may be one of the least surprising facts of this news week. But though it’s unsurprising, it’s no less ominous, as it’s further evidence that Donald Trump is not running a presidential campaign so much as an insurrection disguised as a presidential campaign. By making his lies about purported Democratic treason in 2020 a litmus test for joining the RNC, Trump aims to make insurrectionism central to the party’s formal structure. It should never be considered anything but utterly disqualifying that Donald Trump has placed at the center of his re-election campaign the idea that he did nothing wrong in attempting a coup to stay in office based on the lie that the presidency was stolen from him. The myth of a stolen election is the fantasy on which his stance of innocence rests; by claiming an imaginary crime against America (and against himself), Trump licensed himself to commit any manner of real-world crimes (including violence) to re-gain power. January 6 and its accompanying offenses is the prime example of such criminality, but it would be naive to think that he isn’t prepared to commit even more in order to re-gain the White House and avoid the accountability that is still coming for him.

While asking prospective employees the question about a stolen election is also clearly a way for Trump to try to assure himself that the RNC only hires MAGA loyalists (or that those hired know they must adhere to even the most extreme tenets of the MAGA line), we can’t ever lose sight of the basics here. Those who reject the 2020 election results despite any evidence of fraud are not misinformed or blindly partisan: they are rejecting the results of a democratic election while offering the flimsiest veneer of plausible deniability. 

At this point, unquestioning acceptance of the conceit that millions of Americans truly believe the 2020 election was stolen has become a central way for the media and Democrats to avoid reckoning more directly with the more ominous situation it hides: that millions of Americans have decided they don’t accept election results when they disagree with them. While not openly insurrectionary, as the vast majority of these people don’t reject Joe Biden’s authority as president (for instance, refusing to obey laws that he’s signed), it is nonetheless more than a matter of supposedly believing lies. When an ordinary person chooses to believe something to be false, when that thing has been established to be true by long-established, transparent standards, then that person is simply choosing to reject reality. In this case, of course, the reality being rejected is the idea that the presidential candidate who wins the Electoral College then becomes president. For an ordinary (i.e., non-politician) citizen, this is a lazy person’s insurrectionism, enabling a posture of righteous opposition to democratic rule without its adherents having to reckon with, or act on, the full consequences of their position. But for true insurrectionists like Donald Trump, it is nonetheless an enormous assist, providing mass support for truly heinous actions rooted in lawlessness and a will to power.

How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Explanatory Framework of Deep Political Conflicts

I recently shared my excitement about a formulation by Michael Podhorzer that the “2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a de facto constitutional referendum.” Podhorzer was pointing to the decisive choice that faces Americans in November: whether to vote for a president who will maintain and defend American democracy as most of us have experienced it, or to vote for a man dedicated to tearing down constitutional government in the name of both personal aggrandizement and the regressive goals of the right-wing MAGA coalition. Among other things, this framework reminds us that the stakes of this election are far starker than whether or not to reward the incumbent with another term in office, and that it goes far beyond individual personalities to the basic question of what sort of country we wish to be. This is a perspective, I believe, that can grab Americans’ attention and swing votes to the Democrats.

In recent weeks, two other keen observers of American politics have detailed similar views of the 2024 elections. At the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that, “Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.” Bouie describes the Democratic coalition as wanting “what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.” In contrast, he writes of the Republican coalition that, “Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics [. . .] if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others.”

I think Bouie is right about the drive for domination behind the MAGA coalition, but he doesn’t go into detail in this piece about who composes this coalition or what they want, although he crucially suggests a connection between Trump’s plans to subordinate the federal government to his personal whims and this larger movement’s desire to subordinate the American majority to its predilections. But historian Thomas Zimmer provides a great complementary take to Bouie’s, writing that “the election in November is effectively a referendum on whether the experiment of multiracial, pluralistic democracy – however flawed it may still be at this current moment – should be allowed to continue or be aborted entirely.” He elaborates a little later: “Should the democratic experiment be continued and America be pushed towards realizing its promise of egalitarian multiracial pluralism – or should a radicalizing minority of white reactionaries be allowed to impose its vision on the country with the help of a vindictive autocrat in power?” Here and elsewhere, Zimmer is explicit that the threat comes from a movement of white Christian reactionaries who will oppose democracy itself for the sake of maintaining traditional hierarchies of power.

To be crystal clear: Democrats and other opponents of Trump and the MAGA movement should be talking about the fundamental racial, religious, and economic conflicts of American society because they form so much of the underlying reality that has led to Republican radicalization, so that you literally cannot understand American politics without acknowledging these fissures. Among other things, they clarify why the 2024 election is fundamentally a contest between those who want to destroy democracy in favor of right-wing beliefs and those who believe that the majority should be able to steer the country forward based on majority values. But talking about what is real and fundamental also has all sorts of beneficial, practical consequences that we can easily trace. 

For instance, with Biden’s popularity uncomfortably low and many otherwise loyal Democrats worried about the president’s ability to run a sufficiently vigorous re-election campaign, the argument that this election is much bigger than either candidate should benefit the Democrats to the degree that it helps take lingering focus off of Biden’s imperfections, persistent frustrations over inflation, and a vague post-pandemic social malaise. This doesn’t mean that Democrats should stop trying to highlight Trump’s personally authoritarian goals, but it does mean that they should make an effort to connect Trump’s plans to dominate the federal government with the many ways he would use that corrupt power to further the ends of religious extremists, Christian nationalists, and others (a topic I wrote about recently here). The goals of his right-wing supporters under a second Trump administration would surely include measures to attack the freedoms and dignity enjoyed by millions of Americans viewed as outside the social contract, whether they be non-Christian, female, gay, or non-white. Trump’s delusions of power are scary; the entire MAGA movement’s delusions of power on top of Trump’s are scarier still. Americans can certainly process the fact that Trump is both corrupt on his own and the willing enabler of the toxic movement that supports him; making the contest overly about Trump could needlessly exclude vast additional reasons to support the Democrats in the upcoming elections.

I’m struck once again by how much the MAGA movement is aided by awareness of its own unity, its own common goals. This is not something that I’d want the left to emulate in its specifics — after all, this unity is based on white supremacism, Christian chauvinism, and a fascistic belief in Trump as a strongman figure who will bring redemption through violence and retribution. But it would go some way to righting this imbalance if the American majority were to become more fully aware of the conflict that the right sees so clearly. After all, despite the right’s supposed obsession with freedom, what the MAGA movement ultimately seeks is to exercise its own controversial notions of freedom and morality by taking away actual freedom from other Americans. In a dizzying twist, the ability of Americans who compose the country’s majority to live their lives as they see fit is to be opposed, on the grounds that their free choices are actually an infringement on the freedom of the MAGA constituents. When this consequence of America’s fundamental clash of values becomes better understood, and the mentality that leads to MAGA gunning for millions of American simply trying to live their lives becomes more prominent in the national conversation, I think MAGA may start to finally understand that they’re not the only people who value being left alone to go about their business.

I’ve been emphasizing a cultural or values clash between the reactionary MAGA movement and the more modern-minded American majority that plays out in the realm of civil rights, but I want to end by revisiting Jamelle Bouie’s observations about the contrasting economic visions of the GOP and the Democrats. In the piece I quoted above, Bouie notes that a second Trump administration wouldn’t just involve an authoritarian centralization of power, but “would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.” This would come about not only through efforts to cut taxes for the rich, but also by attempts to gut programs like Medicaid and even Social Security. Bouie contrasts this with traditional Democratic coalition interest in “government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.”

But rather than being a wholly separate conflict, these opposing economic goals overlap and reinforce the cultural clash we are experiencing. While the Republican obsession with cutting taxes for the rich and doubling down on trickle-down economics reflects that the GOP is in important ways a coalition between the wealthy and social conservatives, we also need to acknowledge that the GOP’s quest to starve the government of resources runs in tandem with its wish for a government deeply limited in its capacity to actually improve Americans’ lives in concrete, material ways. Indeed, one of the reasons I’d argue that the GOP’s turn to authoritarianism has deep precedents in more “traditional” Republicanism is the way the party has long made the case that the government — our own democratically elected government — is actually the enemy of the American people, to be viewed as a hostile bureaucratic entity somehow divorced from majority rule.

Today, GOP opposition to policies that help Americans in their daily existence — whether it’s health care, debt relief for college students, or childcare funding — should be seen not only as symptoms of a “small government” ideology, but as also how Republicans materially undermine Americans’ ability to be free to live their lives as they see fit. On so many fronts, without government support, Americans are left to fend for themselves, or avail themselves of market solutions they can ill afford. And so graduating seniors must choose between self-fulfillment through college degrees and the life-hampering burden of massive debt; budding entrepreneurs hesitate to found new companies lest they lose their health care coverage based on their current employment; and women who wish to work find they can’t afford the childcare that would allow them to pursue their professional dreams. Yet long-standing GOP fears that disfavored groups (non-Christian, non-white) might benefit from government programs helps lead the party to oppose policies that would help all Americans, MAGA supporters as well as dyed-blue Democrats — plus, of course, more spending on ordinary people means fewer tax cuts for the rich. If the wrong people might be more free, then none should be more free.