Bob Sheak, July 27, 2023
Introduction
This post continues my criticisms of Trump and his allies. Here, I compile evidence supporting the view that they want to undermine the political processes of the country in ways that will end any hope of strengthening liberal and progressive democracy and replace it with anti-democratic, autocratic (authoritarian, fascist) alternative. If they should succeed in the 2024 elections, America’s democracy will be eviscerated. Meanwhile, they will do their best to keep Biden and Congressional Democrats from winning legislatively, distract and frighten people with “cultural wars,” and disparage opponents.
Trump and his allies plan for an imperial presidency
Journalist Jeet Heer, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of a weekly Nation podcast, considers why a second Trump presidency would increase the chances that democracy would be replaced by an autocratic “unitary executive” or imperial presidency (https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-unitary-executive).
“According to the unified executive theory in its unvarnished form, the whole federal government serves at the command of the president, with neither Congress nor the courts having the right to check the president’s orders.”
Heer reports that in his first term as president, Trump’s authoritarian aspirations were tempered by inexperience and incompetence.” Now, however, there is “alarming evidence that Trump, and more importantly his GOP allies, have learned from his mistakes. If he gets a second term, one of his major goals will be to purge the people that stopped him from ruling like an autocrat the last time.”
Heer continues. While Trump’s first presidential term produced an unusually chaotic administration, with a rapid turnover in staff, a rush of badly designed executive orders that even Republican judges swatted down, and an inability to push through even a bare-bones agenda in Congress. Almost immediately, Trump’s willful rejection of rules got him entangled in political scandals, leading to the Mueller investigation and, by the end of his presidency, two impeachments.” Now he is facing indictments on a growing number of his actions.
Legislatively, Trump was unable “to repeal Obamacare, unable to overhaul the federal tax system, or unable to balance the budget. But Heer reminds us, he did help to achieve “a 6-3 supermajority in the Supreme Court as well as more than 200 federal judges.”
Along the way, “Trump forged a lasting alliance with the Federalist Society, one that has created a Supreme Court that gave the right major victories on abortion and affirmative action and rolled back LGBTQ rights. Further, in certain fields, Trump found advisers who were in fact able to execute his agenda: Stephen Miller undeniably made immigration policy much more cruel, something that the Biden administration has not fully undone. These victories solidified Trump’s status as the leader of GOP, remaking the party into a personality cult in which most Republican lawmakers publicly supported him even after his clownish coup attempt on January 6, 2021.”
Trump continues to have the support of his vast electoral base, including a large percentage of Republicans. The anti-democratic plan “is being developed by institutions and figures who have worked with Trump before, notably the Heritage Foundation and former White House personnel chief John McEntee.” The broad goal “is ‘to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition….” There would be only limited congressional and judicial checks, if any.
Trump’s potentially unchecked power will have massive impacts
“Currently,” Heer points out, “a president can make roughly 4,000 political appointments. In his second term, Trump’s plan would change the rules defining appointments to expand that number to 50,000. This would allow Trump to sweep the bureaucracy of anyone who opposes him. A new Trump White House would also revive the practice of impounding funds, giving the presidency complete discretion over the money allocated by Congress. A new imperial presidency would also assert presidential control over hitherto independent agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Controlling these powerful agencies, Trump could use the power of the state to reward corporate friends (say by approving licenses for TV stations) and punish political enemies (pursuing antitrust action against those who defy him).”
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Going after the Justice Department
Sasha Abramsky, a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis, delves into Trump’s and his GOP acolytes’ unfolding plan by focusing on how they want to end the independence of the Justice Department and other executive-branch agencies (https://truthout.org/articles/trump-attacks-on-the-legal-system-are-a-preview-of-how-he-plans-to-govern). The article was published on July 24, 2023. Abramsky provides some context.
“As Donald Trump’s legal perils mount and with a trial date now set for his mishandling of classified documents, the disgraced ex-president — and many of his GOP acolytes — are launching a full-court campaign against the independence of the Justice Department. They are hoping to turn the department into a scapegoat to cushion Trump in the public eye from the impact of prosecution, and also, ultimately, to turn it into a pliant tool of Trump and his henchmen so as to wage a relentless revenge war against his critics.
“Trump and his advisers frame this as simply restoring integrity to a department that he has convinced his followers is engaged in a ‘witch hunt’ against him. Their argument doesn’t carry water,” Abramsky contends. “In reality, the special counsel in charge of these investigations, Jack Smith, operates at a distance from Attorney General Merrick Garland, does not liaise and plot strategy with President Joe Biden and his team, and the indictments have been handed down not by political apparatchiks but by the ordinary people empaneled onto grand juries — the bedrock institution of the U.S. criminal legal system. Trump is facing not a show trial but a series of state and federal court proceedings in which, since he has pleaded not guilty, he will go to trial and be judged by juries of his peers.”
Hitler-like ambitions?
“In a series of extraordinary speeches earlier this year, Trump told his supporters that he would be their ‘justice’ and their ‘retribution.’” Political scholars call
“this sort of coordinated power grab ‘autocratic capture.’ In practice, it means bending crucial institutions and governing systems to meet the personal whim of one person: the president. This is how countries such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and, to a degree, Narendra Modi’s India function; it is, in short, how democracies die, with loyalty to a constitution replaced by fealty to an individual. In German, the phrase for such a personalized loyalty test is the Führerprinzip, a central component of Hitler’s governing methodology. It is a vision of governance that in 1930s Germany led to the jackboot and the concentration camp. There’s no indication that under a vengeful Trump 90 years later it would be anything more benign. Such a program is, in brief, entirely incompatible with the notion of political pluralism and constitutional governance.
In plain view, Trump and the plethora of GOP candidates who need his base in order to win are crafting a program for autocratic capture.”
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More on the “plan”
New York Times political reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, provide further details on the autocratic/authoritarian designs of Trump and his Republican allies (https://nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html).
“Donald J. Trump and his associates are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.” They want
“to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.”
Here is some of what Trump hopes to achieve.
#1 – “Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
#2 – “He wants to revive the practice of ‘impounding’ funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
#3 – “He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda.
#4 – “And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”
“The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.
“Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election.”
Russell T. Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
“John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.”
The Heritage Foundation in the lead
“The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.”
Their legal “theory”
“The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them.”
Hoping to eliminate or subdue the “independent agencies” in the Executive Branch
The New York Times journalists elaborate.
Why independent?
“Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)”
Taking away that “independence”
“Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them ‘under presidential authority.’”
Impounding funds already authorized by Congress
“On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.”
Firing civil service employees at will with the implementation of “Schedule F”
“Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.
“The former president views the civil service as a den of ‘deep staters’ who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, ‘Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,’ that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.
“Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.”
“‘We will demolish the deep state,’ Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. ‘We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.’”
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Example of ongoing Efforts by the Right to subvert the federal government
#1 – Add poison pills to proposed legislation
Brett Wilkins, a staff writer for Common Dreams, reports on GOP’s adding “200 poison pills to House spending bills” (https://commondreams.org/news/republican-poison-pills). He writes,
“A coalition of advocacy groups on Monday sounded the alarm on the more than 200 so-called ‘poison pill’ riders attached by Republican U.S. lawmakers to House spending bills in recent weeks in a bid to block funding for a dizzying range of progressive policies and programs.” This evidence comes from the Clean Budget Coalition, “which is made up of nearly 260 advocacy groups.”
“‘Prior to the July 4th recess, it took two months for House Republican appropriators to add more than 100 new poison pills to draft spending bills marked up in committee,’ the coalition noted. ‘In the past week alone, the previous total has doubled to more than 217.’”
Examples
“‘Most of these measures are special favors for big corporations and ideological extremists that have nothing to do with funding our government and could not become law on their own merits,’ the groups added. ‘Some of them attack women’s health, some fuel political corruption, some harm our environment, and much more.’
Some of the riders tracked by the Clean Budget Coalition include measures to block proposed transportation safety rules and prohibit funding for the World Health Organization, climate mitigation, gender equality programs, and critical race theory education. Other riders target gas stove bans, funding for high-speed rail, pesticide warning labeling, wildlife protection, reproductive healthcare, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Wilkins quotes Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and co-chair of the Clean Budget Coalition.
“We cannot allow policy that harms regular people, threatens our rights, hurts the environment, and does any number of other terrible things to ride along with the appropriations package. We must put out this five-alarm fire by rejecting the inclusion of poison pills.”
In response, “the Clean Budget Coalition is calling on lawmakers to ‘pass clean spending bills’ by removing all poison pill riders and opposing passage of ‘any legislation that includes these unpopular and controversial special favors for big corporations and ideological extremists.’”
“David Shadburn, senior government affairs advocate at the League of Conservation Voters—a Clean Budget Coalition member—said earlier this month that ‘House Republicans continue using the same tired playbook: They’re hijacking must-pass bills with harmful poison pill riders that neither the public nor Congress support but benefit their polluter donors.’
“‘Just as Republican leaders held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to make it easier to pollute, now they are proposing riders to greenlight pipelines, block clean air and water regulations, stall clean energy deployment, and prohibit the federal government from addressing long-standing inequities.’”
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#2 – Playing down the climate crisis
One of the tragic hallmarks of Trump and the Republicans is that they want an “energy” policy that maximizes the use of fossil fuels, the principal sources of the climate crisis and the terrible heat wave engulfing parts of the U.S. and world. Eve Ottenberg reports on the “climate denialists” who minimize or sideline policies that would address this growing existential-level problem (https://counterpunch.org/2023/07/21/as-earth-sizzles-climate-denialists-rearrange-deck-chairs). Right-wingers argue that humans are too puny an environmental and global force to heat up the planet or generate untold numbers of climate-related catastrophes. But the facts belie their arguments.
Human activity has changed the planet’s axis.
On this point, Ottenberg writes that it appears that ‘around the start of this century, the earth’s centerline moved, the New York Times reported June 28, and ‘earth’s spin started going off kilter.’ The cause? It’s twofold. First, polar ice sheet and mountain glaciers melting ‘changed the way mass was distributed around the planet enough to influence its spin.’ Second: ‘Colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.’”
Groundwater depletion
Between 1960 and 2000, ground water depletion “more than doubled, to about 75 trillion gallons a year.” That’s a lot of groundwater. It’s no wonder it shifted earth’s axis. “Variations in Earth’s gravity have revealed the staggering extent to which groundwater supplies have declined in particular regions, including India and the Central Valley of California.” At this rate, expensive ocean desalinization plants may well be the wave of the future. And, as the article notes, human activity and the global climate, which melt mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets, also shift the earth’s mass and hence its axis. So does impounding water behind dams.”
Temperatures soar on land
“That first week in July reached ‘the hottest global average since scientists began recording such data in 1979,’ Truthout reported on the fifth. ‘The global temperature was bumped up by a heat wave blistering across the U.S. with an estimated 57 million people exposed to dangerous heat…with at least 14 heat related deaths across Louisiana and Texas as of last week and at least 112 deaths in Mexico…In June, a heat wave in India killed at least 96 people, and record heat is gripping swaths of China, northern Africa and the Antarctic.’
“Meanwhile,” Ottenberg continues, “on July 10, Miami hit a 109-degree heat index. It was the thirtieth consecutive day with a 100 degree plus heat index, while ‘nearly 50 million Americans are set to face triple-digit temperatures this week,’ according to the Washington Post July 10. ‘Heat advisories are in effect in Florida, Texas and New Mexico, while excessive heat watches and warnings blanket much of Arizona, Southern California and Nevada.’ Temperatures were predicted to soar to 117 degrees in Phoenix. Ditto in Las Vegas, the weekend of July 15. As much of the nation sizzled, freak floods drowned New England and New York state. By July 16 the heat wave stretching from Florida to Oregon and covering everything in between had peaked, but that doesn’t mean things cooled down dramatically. And lest anyone wonder about the dangers of this extreme calefaction – in 2022 over 61,000 people died from record-smashing heat.
The oceans heat up
“On July 10 Colin McCarthy, an expert on extreme weather, tweeted: ‘A severe marine heatwave has emerged off the coast of Florida, as water temperatures have soared into the 90s. Multiple buoys in Everglades National Park are reporting water temperatures as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit.’ Worse is predicted for the planet’s oceans in August. That’s too hot. Such heat endangers marine wildlife and their ecosystems.
“It also means the ocean has difficulty acting as a heat sponge, which is, uh, a real problem. The oceans absorbed excess heat produced by us denizens of the capitalist west as we burned oil, coal and gas. Now, oceans begin to lose that capacity, and that spells trouble.
The release of methane in the Arctic
“To make matters worse, as the Washington Post headlined July 6, ‘Reeling Arctic glaciers are leaving bubbling methane in their wake.’ This is called a feedback loop, exacerbated by the albedo effect, which means in the absence of snow and ice, earth absorbs, rather than reflects back, more heat. As for the feedback loop, methane is the guilty party, being 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Melting glaciers, polar ice caps and frozen tundra all release methane, lots of it, which in turn warms the atmosphere even more, causing more melt and more heat.”
Scientists have long recognized the problem of “climate change”
“The problem is known. It has been known for generations, to scientists and to the oil, gas and coal companies who researched and then concealed the lethal effects of their product. Simply put, our social and political economy, structured around burning fossil fuels, heats the earth. The chief culprits in this profligate burning are wealthy countries and their massive organizations like the American military. Small, poor countries have small carbon footprints. This deadly pollution cannot be blamed on them or their so-called excessive birth-rate.”
A Way Out
Ottenberg points to “solutions that maybe even plutocracy could accept,” though there is little evidence of this. “Like solar panels on every building in the world and massive investment in wind power. Also, we could speed up the switch to electric vehicles. Promoting sustainable, organic, peasant farming to replace industrial, pesticide-dependent agriculture would help too. That’s just a start, because there’s lots more.”
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#3 – A counterproductive public land leasing policy
Josh Axelrod and Valerie Cleland report on a GOP environmental appropriations bill that “is a major giveaway to the Fossil Fuel Industry (https://commondreams.org/opinion/house-appropriations-bill).
Josh Axelrod is a senior advocate for the Nature Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Valerie Cleland is a senior ocean advocate with the Nature Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Cleland advocates for policies that protect and restore our oceans.
They argue that, in their latest attack on the climate, “the Republican majority in the House has written a bill that is so detrimental to our environment and communities, it may rank as the worst appropriations bill in decades.” Why?
“Instead of recognizing that federally managed lands and oceans host a myriad of uses and industries and contribute in countless ways to the national economy, the House majority seems to view them as having one purpose: unabated production of oil, gas, and coal.”
According to the report, “The Republican majority’s latest in a series of attempts to hand over our public lands and waters to Big Oil, this bill strips away the Department of Interior’s land and ocean management discretion. In doing so, it tips the scales toward congressional control of the oil and gas leasing process, dictates the number of lease sales the administration must offer, and overrides any commonsense considerations as to which areas should or should not be leased.”
For example, House Republicans propose this: “A new mandate that each five-year leasing program include at least two offshore oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico every year. This requirement has the effect of removing authority from the agency [the Bureau of Land Management, BLM] to decide the amount of lease sales needed to ‘best meet our national energy needs,’ a requirement of existing law.” Additionally,
“…requirements to offer all un-leased areas that aren’t strictly off limits—regardless of impacts to endangered species, sensitive habitats, vulnerable ecosystems, or other conflicts—further restricting the discretion of the agency to decide which areas to include in a lease sale.”
Biden’s ambivalent policy on leasing
Coral Davenport considers the Biden administration’s policy on drilling on federal lands (https://nytimes.com/2023/07/20/climate/biden-drilling-federal-lands.html).
She points out that “royalty rates paid by oil, gas and coal companies for the right to drill and mine on land owned by the public have not changed since 1920.” On July 20, 2023, the administrationTop of FormBottom of Form “proposed a rule that would raise the royalties that fossil fuel companies pay to pull oil, gas and coal from public lands for the first time since 1920, while increasing more than tenfold the cost of the bonds that companies must pay before they start drilling.
“The Interior Department estimated that the new rule, which would also raise various other rates and fees for drilling on public lands, would increase costs for fossil fuel companies by about $1.8 billion between now and 2031. After that, rates could increase again.
“About half of that money would go to states, approximately a third would be used to fund water projects in the West, and the rest would be split between the Treasury Department and Interior.
“Interior officials characterize the changes as part of a broader shift at the federal agency as it seeks to address climate change by expanding renewable energy on public land and in federal waters while making it more expensive for private companies to drill on public lands.”
“Some of the changes were mandated by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which directs the Interior Department to increase the royalty rates paid by companies that drill on public lands to 16.67 percent from 12.5 percent, and to increase the minimum bid at auctions for drilling leases to $10 per acre from $2 per acre, among other provisions. The 12.5 percent royalty rates have been in place since 1920.
“The law also orders the agency to set a minimum rental rate of $3 per acre on public drilling leases in the first two years after a lease is issued, rising to $15 per acre after 10 years, and to establish a new fee of $5 per acre for companies to formally register their interest in leasing public land for drilling.
“But the Interior Department’s new rule would go even further than Congress required: It would dramatically raise the cost of the bonds that companies must guarantee to pay to the federal government before drilling on public lands, which has not increased since 1960. The department wants to use those funds to remediate damage left by abandoned uncapped oil and gas wells, so that the cost is borne by companies rather than taxpayers.
“The new rule proposes to increase the minimum bond paid upon purchasing an individual drilling lease to $150,000 from $10,000. The cost of a bond required upon purchasing a drilling lease on multiple public lands in a state would rise from $500,000 from $25,000. The changes would eliminate an existing national bond under which companies can pay $150,000 as insurance against damaged, abandoned wells anywhere in the country.”
Falling short
“As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised ‘no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.’
“But since Mr. Biden took office, his administration has continued to sell leases to drill, compelled by federal court decisions. The Biden administration approved more permits for oil and gas drilling in its first two years (over 6,900 permits) than the Trump administration did in the same period (6,172 permits). Major oil and gas companies saw record profits in 2022.”
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#4 – Threatening to shutdown the government
Caitlin Emma and Jennifer Scholtes report how Republicans in the U.S. House are gearing up to have a government shutdown if their demands are not met https://politico.com/news/2023/07/24/republicans-budget-funding-shutdown-00107611
“Looming just a few months away, on Sept. 30, is a potential government shutdown.
“Across the Capitol, senators are waiting to see how the House drama plays out — with their bipartisan funding talks running behind McCarthy’s go-it-alone strategy.”
One question is whether Speaker McCarthy can unify his caucus. For him, one of the biggest hurdle in the funding debate is a bloc of House Freedom Caucus members who want even deeper reductions to the spending bills….” .
“Teeing up partisan spending bills this summer will also challenge nearly every House Republican to vote for controversial social policies like denying abortion access to veterans, stripping funding from organizations that serve LGBTQ people and barring young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children from filling federal government jobs.”
“To avoid a shutdown, House and Senate leaders will have to band together to extend current funding levels to a later date, while wrestling with additional needs like a rapidly dwindling pot of federal disaster aid and the polarizing issue of more aid to Ukraine.”
“When lawmakers return to session in September, the House’s top Democratic appropriator predicted ‘chaos’ in the race to fund the government before Oct. 1.
“At worst, the trajectory is to shut the government down,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said. “And there are some who think that’s OK.”
DeLauro added that House GOP leaders are bending “to a small group of people who don’t vote for” spending bills anyway.”
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Will the right-wing plan come to pass?
Jim Jones argues that the “GOP is rushing headlong into huge election losses in 2024” with Trump as its presidential candidate (https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4114318-the-gop-is-rushing-headlong-into-huge-election-losses-in-2024). It appears now that there are no viable opponents in the Republican Party to overtake Trump’s popularity or to reverse his political prospects.
“There are other presidential candidates. But the ‘main problem for most of the party’s presidential contenders is sheer cowardice. Other than former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Trump’s top-tier opponents cannot muster the courage to take him on, to make the case that he is a clear and present danger to American democracy, as well as the future of the Republican Party. They merely tiptoe around Trump, while making throw-away comments about the ‘weaponization of government.’ Such comments trivialize Trump’s criminal conduct, strengthening his grip on the GOP base.”
Despite this, Jones contends that Trump “can’t and won’t win another term. He is wrong on the issues, he has no vision for a second term other than trying to establish an autocracy, and he will likely be convicted in one or more of the criminal cases that are currently in the works. The majority of American voters are still swayed by important issues, and Trump is wrong on most of them. Abortion extremism and gun safety will be major issues in 2024. Neither issue favors Trump and down-ballot Republicans.”
Abortion
“Abortion is particularly tricky for Republicans because they have doubled down on tighter restrictions, even though a majority of Americans disfavor that position. Trump has equivocated on abortion, claiming credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade but cautioning Republicans against supporting further restrictions.”
The unfolding climate crisis
“In past years, Republican climate deniers were able to convince enough voters that global warming was not a looming disaster. They pointed to snowstorms as proof that climate scientists were wrong — a bona fide snow job. With the catastrophic weather that has been wreaking death and destruction across the U.S. and around the globe this year, that will no longer work to assuage the electorate.”
“Tornadoes have become more widespread across the country and more destructive. Biblical downpours have ravaged Texas, California, Vermont and a host of other states. Historically high temperatures are plaguing a great portion of the country. This issue will likely have a major influence on the 2024 elections because the heat next year, as one scientist predicted, ‘will probably leap to a whole new level.’ If that turns out to be the case, voter demand to combat global warming will also leap to a whole new level.”
Jones offers this conclusion: “Republicans will lose the presidency by a wide margin, whoever the party’s candidate might be, the Democrats will end up with a House majority of at least 20 members and the Senate majority could go either way by one or two members.”
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Concluding thoughts
Democracy in the United States is being threatened by a far-right Trump and Republican Party. The Republicans want a society in which there is a strongman leader and have been steadfast in their support of Trump, the Republican Party, and seemingly content to be driven by hateful cultural issues that reflect the worst aspects of America’s history and society.
With Trump, they want revenge against their Democratic opponents, appear little interested in supporting democratic institutions, are willing to live with political chaos as long as they or their leaders have political power, and dismiss or reject policy proposals that address real important issues such as the climate crisis, corporate power, poverty, civility in public discourse. They live in a post-truth world. They have no regard for the common good or the civic norms of fairness.
Despite all this, dedicated and informed citizens led by democratic leaders can give us a less divided and more honest political system.
Vital issues - challenging pol and econ power 