A right-wing death cult

Bob Sheak, June 25, 2024

Introduction

We well know by now that Trump remains the undisputed leader of the Republican Party and seemingly has the unwavering support of an electoral base numbering in the tens of millions. His cult-like base seemingly accepts his statements as absolute truths, even when they contradict or ignore the relevant verifiable evidence. They believe his “big lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election, while the overwhelming evidence refutes it (https://thefulcrum.us/ethics-leadership/trumps-big-lie). They also believe falsely that global warming is a left-wing hoax.

Trump also has the support of large segments of the corporate community, including the Koch Brothers’ network. The network includes avid supporters and profitable beneficiaries of fossil fuels and right-wing politics generally. See Christopher Leonard’s book, Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, for an in-depth analysis (publ. in 2019). For example, Leonard writes: “In 2008, Koch Industries consolidated its [massive] lobbying operations into a single, newly formed company called Koch Companies Public Sector” (p. 405). According to Open Secrets, Koch Industries by itself has spent this political cycle $29.6 million on “contributions” and $3.5 million on lobbying (https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/koch-industries/summary?id=d000000186).

Right-wing response to Heat waves

The disinformation about global warming is reflected in how right-wingers responded to the unprecedented heat waves that recently affected billions of people around the world and millions across the United States. Trump, the Republican Party, and their myriad allies want to avoid a public discussion that recognizes the problem, let alone proposing potential solutions.

Production and profits first

They want to see an increase in the production and consumption of fossil fuels and to continue the export of liquified natural gas. They want to maximize profits from fossil fuels rather than phase them out. They assert that fossil fuels are necessary to U.S. economic prosperity and the country would fall into chaos if their views are not taken seriously and implemented.

The rub is that, if they continue to follow Trump’s existentially-threatening lead, they will suffer along with everyone else. Still, the Trump-led movement is unlikely to take such concerns seriously, especially if they are advanced by the Biden administration, climate scientists, and even if their views contradict the empirical realty.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close ally of Trump, takes an especially extreme position. Sarah Al-Arshani reports that Greene has claimed that climate change is a “scam,” and added that fossil fuels are “amazing,” in a tweet on Saturday [April 13, 2023].

“‘If you believe that today’s ‘climate change’ is caused by too much carbon, you have been fooled,’ she said.”

Effects of June 2024 heat waves

Sarah Kaplan and Scott Dance report that “billions of people” experienced the

scorching heat that occurred across five continents, set 1,400 records the third week in June, and “showed how human-caused global warming has made catastrophic temperatures commonplace” (https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/22/deadly-heat-wave-climate-change).

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity’s response to a warming world. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe. Twitter

Scott Dance is a reporter for The Washington Post covering extreme weather news and the intersections between weather, climate, society and the environment. He joined The Post in 2022 after more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun. Twitter

They give the following examples.

“Dozens of bodies were discovered in Delhi during a two-day stretch this week when even sundown brought no relief from sweltering heat and humidity. Tourists died or went missing as the mercury surged in Greece. Hundreds of pilgrims perished before they could reach Islam’s holiest site, struck down by temperatures as high as 125 degrees.”

“…in the past seven days alone, billions felt heat with climate change-fueled intensity that broke more than 1,000 temperature records around the globe. Hundreds fell in the United States, where tens of millions of people across the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard have been sweltering amid one of the worst early-season heat waves in memory.

“‘It should be obvious that dangerous climate change is already upon us,’ said Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“People will die because of global warming on this very day.” And, Kaplan and Dance write, “there are ominous signs that even more scorching conditions may still be on the horizon.”

Kaplan and Dance quote Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “We’ve got the highest greenhouse gas concentrations in the last 3 million years. Carbon dioxide traps heat, so the temperature of the planet is rising,” said Michael McPhaden, “It’s real simple physics.”

The effects are hardly simple. “For some 80 percent of the world’s population — 6.5 billion people — the heat of the past week was twice as likely to occur because humans started burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to data provided to The Washington Post by the nonprofit Climate Central.

“Nearly half that number experienced what Climate Central considers “exceptional heat” — conditions that would have been rare or even impossible in a world without climate change.”

“All week long, ‘exceptional’ conditions could be found across much of Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe and southeast Asia. Surging air conditioning demand crippled power grids in Albania and Kuwait. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the past week has seen more than 1,400 high temperature records fall around the globe.”

The burning of fossil fuels keeps rising, heat is trapped in the atmosphere, and the earth’s temperature keeps going up. Kaplan and Dance refer to the following facts.

“Since the start of the industrial era, human activities — mostly burning fossil fuels — have warmed the planet by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Earth’s temperature over the past 12 months has been even hotter, averaging about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.”

Kaplan and Dance quote Wehner again. “Climate change isn’t just making high temperatures and other extreme events more likely. It also makes every disaster that does occur more intense.

“Wehner’s research has found that heat waves like the one currently unfolding in the United States are now roughly 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter because of how humans have altered the planet. Strong hurricanes are at least 14 percent wetter because the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. And storm surges are unfolding in oceans that are in some places more than a foot higher than they were half a century ago — allowing floodwaters to reach heights never seen before.”

Trump must be defeated

The U.S. heat dome and accompanying heat waves are a warning about the 2024 election.

Paul Waldman, author and commentator, contends in an article on MSNBC, June 19, 2024, that the country will be worse off if Trump rather than Biden is elected in the November presidential election. Indeed, “there may be no policy area with a clearer divide between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump” (https://msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/us-heat-wave-trump-election-20224-rcna157819). Here’s some of what Waldman writes.

“…this week, a heat dome has descended on much of the United States. Over the next few days, ‘temperatures could reach as high as 25 degrees above normal in many areas,’ NBC News reported. The National Weather Service says 200 cities could see record highs.”

“The rising temperatures that scientists began warning about decades ago have become reality….In fact, every one of the last 12 months was the hottest ever recorded: the hottest May ever, the hottest April ever, the hottest March ever, and so on.

“Rising temperatures are becoming inescapable in a way some effects of climate change are not; depending on where you live, you might not be directly affected by more frequent hurricanes or rising sea levels, but you won’t be able to avoid a heat wave. They are three times more common now than in the 1960s, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, ‘and individual heat waves are lasting longer and becoming more intense.’ The consequences are fatal: 2,300 people died from extreme heat in the U.S. last year alone.”

Deny, dismiss, do nothing

“Yet,” Waldman writes, “for many politicians, climate change is perennially pushed down the agenda. In fact, inaction has become the position of many of those who used to be outright climate deniers. The idea that climate change is a ‘hoax’ is seldom spoken out loud anymore, even by the staunchest supporters of the fossil fuel industry. Instead of denying the incontrovertible truth that the planet is warming, they leave that question aside and focus on condemning efforts to address it. Every solution is too difficult, too costly or too inconvenient; instead, we should just keep drilling and pretend the planet isn’t warming.

“The result is that the Republican Party is now emphatically anti-anti-climate change (in the same way they’re anti-anti-racism). They don’t necessarily want climate change to worsen; they just oppose every means of confronting it.”

Waldman continues.

Climate extremism on the Right

“As always with Trump, his dark impulses become much more dangerous when there are people around him who will put them into action. Should he become president again, the haphazard rollback of environmental progress that characterized his first term will be replaced by focused and furious action. You can see it in Project 2025, the 920-page governing blueprint written by his allies as they prepare an assault on the federal government. The document contains 150 references to climate — sometimes described as ‘climate extremism’ — and proposes eliminating a range programs, offices and agencies devoted to addressing climate change. ‘The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,’ it says.”

Biden has done some positive things

The authoritarian dreamers at Project 2025 are right about one thing: Biden has been more aggressive on addressing climate change than any president before him. The Inflation Reduction Act, which he [Biden] signed into law in 2022, was the largest climate bill in history. It supports clean energy development, electric car adoption, energy efficiency upgrades, carbon capture, electrical grid improvements, sustainable agriculture and much more. In addition, according to The Washington Post’s tracker of Biden’s environmental policies, his administration has enacted over 100 new environmental policies and overturned an almost equal number of Trump-era policies. In a second term, Biden would build on what he has done so far, with the goal of the country reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.”

Global warming will meanwhile continue to increase

Waldman continues. “As time goes on, the effects of warming will become more concrete and visible, all year round but especially in the summer. The coming decades will likely see a huge wave of climate migration, as people leave areas where climate change has diminished their opportunities or even made life impossible. Just within the United States we could see millions of climate migrants. And as we know, large-scale migrations frequently produce backlashes.

“Even under the most optimistic scenarios, warming is going to get worse before it gets better. The response we used to hear from climate deniers — ‘It’s summer, it’s hot, what’s the big deal?’ — is no longer tenable. Now the voters have to decide whether they want to do anything about it.”

What will U.S. voters do in November?

Andres Oppenheimer addresses this question in an article for the Miami Herald, June 7, 2024 (https://miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article289090739.html).

“…even though the planet endured record-breaking heat waves in 2023, and this year is marking a new high, climate change is almost absent from the campaign for the Nov. 5 presidential elections. It should be the hottest issue — pardon the pun — on the agenda, but it ranks 18th among Americans’ priorities, way below the economy and immigration, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. What’s worse, presidential hopeful Donald Trump, a long-time climate change skeptic, is ahead in several polls and could win.”

Oppenheimer continues.

Trump

“Trump has repeatedly mocked climate change warnings and promotes fossil fuels, ignoring the scientific consensus that climate change is likely caused by man-made greenhouse emissions. As crazy as it sounds at a time of record heat waves, Trump is publicly vowing to reverse the Biden administration’s ambitious laws to combat global warming. According to the Trump campaign website, a second Trump administration would unleash a wave of oil drilling and speed up approvals of fracking permits in public lands.

“‘To keep pace with the world economy that depends on fossil fuels for more than 80% of its energy, President Trump will DRILL, BABY, DRILL,’ the campaign’s official website says. The Trump campaign website also says that, ‘from day one,’ the former president would kill hundreds of laws to combat global warming adopted by the Biden administration, including rules to reduce car emissions and subsidies for buyers of electric vehicles. Trump would also again order a U.S. withdrawal from the 2016 Paris Agreement to control climate change, which calls on countries to substantially reduce planet-warming emissions. Trump had pulled out of the Paris Agreement at the start of his term, but Biden later reversed that decision.

Trump offers bribes and counterproductive policies

“At an April fundraiser with oil company owners and executives at his Mar-a-Lago compound, Trump promised to go out of his way to help fossil fuel industries if they donated $1 billion to his campaign, The Washington Post reported. Trump specifically vowed to scrap current policies that encourage production of electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and other green power sources opposed by the oil industry, the Post said.”

“Trump’s main argument for dismissing climate change warnings is that the transition to green energies is too costly for industries, and is therefore an ‘industry-killing’ and ‘jobs-killing’ plan. Some of Trump’s fellow climate skeptics also point out, in this case with some reason, that electric vehicles will not solve the climate problems because we have not yet found the way to dispose of their batteries in ways that don’t harm the environment. But Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ policy is economic populism at its worst. Like populists of all stripes, Trump is offering instant economic relief at the expense of the gradual destruction of the planet. It’s an incredibly short-sighted and dumb non-policy, especially at a time when many of us are suffering record heat waves and scientists are reporting that glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and tropical storms are becoming more severe than ever in recent memory.”

Biden

Oppenheimer writes, “While Trump has called the concept of man-made climate change a hoax, Biden has described the climate crisis as an ‘existential threat.’ He reviews some of Biden’s accomplishments.

“In what may be one of his greatest achievements, Biden has passed a 2022 law that may amount to the most far-reaching strategy to fight global warming in U.S. history. Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which was misleadingly called that way in an effort to get it passed through Congress, includes more than 100 new regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, preserve public lands, and promote the use of solar, wind and other alternative energy sources. Biden’s IRA provides more than $300 billion in tax credits to speed up the transition to clean energy sources, including tax relief measures for people who buy electric cars or install solar roofs in their homes. It also provides billions to help industries to cut emissions from their factories. According to the prestigious Science magazine, Biden’s IRA, alongside his Bipartisan Infrastructure law, will reduce U.S. toxic emissions by 40% from 2005 levels by 2030.”

Scientists fear a second Trump term

Maxine Joselow and Scott Dance report on this issue (https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/12/trump-federal-scientists-climate-environment).

Their main point is this: “Several federal agencies are working to safeguard research, including climate science, from future political meddling.”

They give the example of the union representing nearly half of the employees at the Environmental Protection Agency. In June, the union employees

“approved a new contract with the federal government this month, it included an unusual provision that had nothing to do with pay, benefits or workplace flexibility: protections from political meddling into their work.

The protections, which ensure workers can report any meddling without fear of ‘retribution, reprisal, or retaliation,’ are ‘a way for us to get in front of a second Trump administration and protect our workers,’ said Marie Owens Powell, an EPA gas station storage tank inspector and president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238.

“The agreement signals the extent to which career employees and Biden administration officials are racing to foil any efforts to interfere with climate science or weaken environmental agencies should former president Donald Trump win a second term. Trump and his allies, in contrast, argue that bloated federal agencies have hurt economic development nationwide and that the Biden administration has prioritized climate science at the expense of other priorities.”

Trump’s record

“The Trump administration sidelined, muted or forced out hundreds of scientists and misrepresented research on the coronavirus, reproduction and hurricane forecasting, environmental advocates said. Now as an example of what’s to come, they point to a blueprint called ‘Project 2025,’ a plan for the next conservative administration drafted by right-wing think tanks in Washington.

“The plan calls for a sweeping reorganization of the executive branch, one that would concentrate more power in Trump’s hands. At the EPA, it recommends eliminating the office of environmental justice, which was created in 2022 to address the pollution that disproportionately harms poor and minority communities.”

“Career employees exited the Interior Department in droves during Trump’s four years in office. At the end of his presidency, there were 4,900 fewer employees at the agency than at the beginning, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.

“The exodus was especially large at Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees roughly 245 million acres of public lands. After Trump briefly moved the BLM’s headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colo., more than 87 percent of the affected employees either resigned or retired.”

Biden’s record

Soon after President Biden took office, his administration began imposing scientific integrity policies across the federal government, setting rules that protect research from political interference or manipulation. Many such policies are in place — though research advocates say they aren’t durable because they aren’t enshrined in federal law, and could be undone with new executive actions.”

“At the EPA, the new scientific integrity provision is part of a four-year contract with the agency. The provision ensures that workers’ complaints will be assessed by an independent investigator, rather than a political appointee.

“While any new president could quickly transform policies around scientific integrity through new executive orders, the union contract provision is one advocates had urged as a way to make the protections harder to undo without a legal fight.”

“EPA spokesman Remmington Belford said in an email that the agency is ‘pleased’ with the contract provision and “committed to ensuring the agency has a strong foundation of science that is free from political interference and inappropriate influence.”

“While helpful, the provision won’t be a panacea, said Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit advocacy group, which helped advise AFGE on the scientific integrity language.

“‘It will be impossible to fully Trump-proof any agency or protect any scientist if Trump wins a new term and either the House or Senate is in Republican control,’ Whitehouse said. ‘Then there will be absolutely no meaningful oversight.’

Interior Department braces for more cuts

“It remains unclear whether Trump wants to eliminate the Interior Department or merely reduce its budget and staffing levels.” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s 2024 campaign, did not directly respond to a request for clarification.

Trump ‘cut red tape and gave the [oil and gas] industry more freedom to do what they do best — utilize the liquid gold under our feet to produce clean energy for America and the world — and he will do that again as soon as he gets back to the White House,’ Leavitt said in an emailed statement.

Attempt to protect federal employees

In April, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule that will allow federal employees to keep their existing job protections and right to due process, including the right to appeal a reassignment or firing. The rule overturns a Trump directive, known as Schedule F, that allowed his administration to force out thousands of career employees by changing their status to at-will workers who could be fired without due process.”

“But as strong as the policies may be, they aren’t permanent, some critics note. Legislation introduced in the two most recent sessions of Congress would have codified a requirement that federal agencies adopt scientific integrity policies and could establish legal penalties for violating them.”

A National Climate Action Plan

John J. Berger considers “a national climate action plan” in the June 18 2024 issue of Tom Dispatch (https://tomdispatch.com/a-national-climate-action-plan). Here’s some of what he considers.

“It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand.”

“Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough.

“As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal — and should Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.

“To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency — 79% of the nation’s energy is now drawn from fossil fuels — a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.”

National Mobilization Amid Crisis

“What this country needs is a plan guided by scientific and technical analysis and based on an ambitious but attainable set of greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas. Its point would not be to override the climate agendas of any city, state, or group, or the aspirations of the Green New Deal (House Resolution HR 109). It would simply be to provide a reliable toolkit of measures and policies along with analyses of their costs and benefits — a compass for getting to negative carbon emission as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.”

The plan

“Call it America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future and imagine that it would build on previous authoritative studies, analyzing renewable-energy-generating and distribution technologies in terms of their costs, commercial readiness, resource constraints, and potential efficiency. It would formulate and model competing scenarios with clusters of complementary technologies, each requiring different policies for its implementation.

Regional advisory councils

“To build trust and engagement in the final plan, regional advisory councils made up of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and major stakeholder representatives should be created to offer recommendations on how best to adapt such a plan to conditions in each part of the country. The final policy roadmap would then be designated as the “optimal energy path scenario” for the nation and provided to Congress, so that it could use the findings as a basis for funding and implementing new climate legislation.

Political Action is necessary

“…a strong popular constituency must be built nationwide capable of exerting powerful pressure on Congress to ensure the creation of a climate plan and the appropriate legislation to make it functional. Otherwise, no matter how sound the PR campaign on its behalf, serious political obstacles would stand in the way of its adoption, even by a Democratic Congress.”

“The creation of a powerful, broad coalition of constituencies — environmental, labor, public health, faith-based, and even progressive elements of the business community — could serve as a popular countervailing force against the mighty fossil-fuel industry. But as a first step, that coalition would need support, guidance, and a common accepted platform both to stand behind and to mobilize the public. The American environmental community could produce that platform. Yet this would not be a simple matter, due to the way that community is siloed, with each major organization catering to its own constituency, interests, and funders.

“To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan. That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy transition — and how those roadblocks could be dismantled.”

Concluding thoughts

The recent heat waves are a harbinger of what is to come if too little is done. The problem of global warming is worsening. This post has emphasized that Trump, the Republican Party, and their followers ignore the problem and, out of stupidity or distorted self-interest, want to increase the principal source of the problem, namely, the production and consumption of gas and oil – even coal.

Biden and the majority of Democrats recognize the problem and have supported some policies that could, if fully implemented, slow greenhouse gas emissions. It requires a plan of action, the mobilization of expert and scientific researchers, honesty (not lies) in discussions with the public, and assistance for those communities that need support during such efforts. To do otherwise is disaster.

Trump is set on retribution

Bob Sheak, June 10, 2024

The forthcoming elections in November 2024, particularly the presidential election, may well determine whether American democracy will continue to exist or not. Trump, his Republican Party, along with his allies and followers are the most serious threat to democracy. In my last post, “The Specter of Fascism,” I analyzed the fascist thrust of Trump and the Republican Party.

Trump is the uncontested leader of the Republican Party and dominates the right-wing as a whole. Some, many in his “base,” even view him as a messiah with special spiritual power given him by God. This is an example of how extreme and nonsensical such Trump advocates have become. But, however outlandish, they are prepared to vote for him, give him donations, and, however the 2024 election goes, perhaps heed his call for retribution and violence against his opponents.

Trump’s links to right-wing evangelicals

In an article published in The New York Times, Michael C. Bender analyzes this supposed mystical connection

(https://nytimes.com/2024/04/01/us/politics/trump-2024-religion.html). Here’s some of what Bender writes.

“He is also the latest in a long line of Republican presidents and presidential candidates who have prioritized evangelical voters. But many conservative Christian voters believe Mr. Trump outstripped his predecessors in delivering for them, pointing especially to the conservative majority he installed on the Supreme Court that overturned federal abortion rights.

“Mr. Trump won an overwhelming majority of evangelical voters in his first two presidential races, but few — even among his rally crowds — explicitly compare him to Jesus.

“Instead, the Trumpian flock is more likely to describe him as a modern version of Old Testament heroes like Cyrus or David, morally flawed figures handpicked by God to lead profound missions aimed at achieving overdue justice or resisting existential evil.”

This belief is hardly linked to Trump’s record. Bender notes:

“He has been married three times, has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, has been convicted of business fraud and has never showed much interest in church services. Last week, days before Easter, he posted on his social media platform an infomercial-style video hawking a $60 Bible that comes with copies of some of the nation’s founding documents and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s song ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’”

Nonetheless, he has the support of right-wing evangelicals, probably Trump’s largest constituency. Bender adds the following.

“Even more than in his past campaigns, he is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity, telling a convention of Christian broadcasters that ‘just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord.’

“On his social media platform in recent months, Mr. Trump has shared a courtroom-style sketch of himself sitting next to Jesus and a video that repeatedly proclaims, ‘God gave us Trump’ to lead the country.

Trump’s fascist vision

He and his Republican Party have plans to create what amounts to a fascist social order, without checks and balances, with extraordinary influence (if not control) over the executive branch, with support from a right-wing Supreme Court, with support from a large swath of corporations, with support of the rich and powerful in general, and with a largely unquestioning and massive grassroots “base.” (See my last post, “The Specter of Fascism,” for additional analysis.)

He pledges to implement massive deportation and detention of undocumented residents and retribution, even death, against his critics.

Trump’s retribution will, he says, include the deportation or detention of over 11 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country, along with many center/left oriented citizens who have challenged his views and unlawful behavior. If realized, Trump’s re-election would end the rule of law and disregard or replace adherence the U.S. Constitution.

Kindler delves into this issue (https://dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/25/2242703/-What-Deporting-15-Million-People-Would-Actually-Look-Like). ….

“This time, we sure as hell better take Trump LITERALLY. When he says he intends to do something crazy as president, we need to let every voter out there know what his plans are and what they would mean in real life — to make sure he never gets the opportunity.

“So when a journalist or analyst does a great job delving into all the implications of a stated Trump policy, we need to spread such work far and wide – as I’m doing today with Radley Balko’s superb piece, “Trump’s Deportation Army,” a well-researched effort to calculate what the Trump/Stephen Miller promise to deport 15 million allegedly undocumented immigrants would actually entail.

“The answers Balko comes up with are stunning. Let me start with a few key points (most of which, as he explains in detail, are based on conservative estimates):

“15 million people [is] about the size of the three largest U.S. cities combined — New York, L.A., and Chicago — plus Pittsburgh.”

“The deportation army Miller and Trump want to assemble…would likely exceed the size of the U.S. Army itself.”

“According to the Center for Migration Studies, under Trump’s plan about 5.7 million U.S.-born, U.S. citizen children would lose one or both parents.”

“In 2017, ICE estimated that it cost an average of $10,854 to deport one person, or about $14,000 in today’s dollars. Under this calculation, Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people would cost about $210 billion, or about 14 percent more than the annual budget of the U.S. Army.”

“As of January, federal immigration courts were already working with a backlog of 3 million cases. Adding millions more cases would likely grind the system to a halt.”

“In short, Trump and his cheerleaders are promising us an unimaginably disruptive, devastating, expensive, resource-intensive and epically cruel operation, which would impact people in every corner of the country and leave the kinds of wounds in our society and across the world that may never heal.”

The logistics

“Trump’s deportation plan would mean identifying the undocumented people in virtually every decent sized city, town, and county in the United States, detaining those people in some regional facility, transporting them to a bus station or airport, then flying, walking, or driving them across the border.” […]

“Imagine the number of buses and [planes] you’d need, the number of holding facilities, and everything you’d need to staff and equip those facilities. You’d need security. You’d need medical staff and food services. You’d need bathroom and shower facilities. You’d need janitorial staff, bus drivers, and pilots.”

Kindler continues.

Stephen Miller is a proponent of this catastrophic vision. Here’s his synopsis.

“So you build these facilities where then you’re able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right.”

“On Thursday and Sunday are the flights back to different Asian countries. So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets. And that’s how you’re able to scale and achieve the efficiency.”

“Efficiency. Yes, that’s precisely the principle you should be following when breaking down the door of a suspiciously ethnic-looking person so you can tear them away from their children and send them to a detainment camp in the desert somewhere. Just make sure you do it efficiently!”

Diabolical

This would mean that Trump would have to “enlist both local police forces and National Guard troops in order to come anywhere near the manpower needed. But these people [Trump, Miller, et. al.] are so certifiably insane that they are actually talking about having red state National Guard soldiers invading blue states for this purpose – per Miller: ““And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby.”

As for the issue of where do you put 15 million detained people, Balko cites a Ron Brownstein article in The Atlantic: “Brownstein consulted with experts who made the dystopian suggestion of housing immigrants in warehouses and abandoned shopping malls.” Yeah, might as well put that shuttered Macy’s to use…

“Deportation, of course, will also require massive resources to send migrants to other countries — and those countries’ cooperation. Imagine how much that cooperation will break down, with enormous diplomatic consequences, when we start sending hundreds of thousands of people to them. Will airports become filled with homeless people with no country willing to accept them?”

Suicidal Economics

Here are a few typically unexamined and disturbing economic consequences that are likely under the deportation plan, as noted by Kindler.

“Tens of thousands of mixed-status families would be plunged into poverty, as the average annual income of households with at least one undocumented family member would drop from $41,000 per year to $23,000. The plan would also put more than 1 million mortgages in jeopardy, destabilizing the housing market.”

“[Center-right think tank] AAF…estimated that [Trump’s 2017 immigration plan] would result in a 6.4 percent reduction in the labor pool, which over 20 years would result in a U.S. economy about 6 percent smaller than it otherwise would be, at a loss of $1.6 trillion…A more recent calculation of the 15 million deportation plan estimates that GDP would immediately drop by 1.4 percent, and by $4.7 trillion over the next 10 years.”

“If Trump manages even a fraction of his deportation goals, expect to see a more punishing surge in inflation, driven by an increase in the cost of groceries, services like childcare and elder care, and new home construction.”

Moral Stain

“The goal will be to deport as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, and purge anyone who tries to slow it down. Sticklers for legal restrictions or basic human rights will be quickly dismissed. If it costs too much or becomes to impractical to house and transport detained immigrants humanely, they’ll do it inhumanely. If it costs too much to afford them basic due process rights, they’ll ignore due process. If the immigration courts are moving too slowly, or if there just aren’t enough of them, they’ll just go around the courts.”

“Opposing undocumented immigration is one thing. Finding joy and glee at armed enforcers pulling people from their homes, cramming them into camps, and dumping them off in countries they barely know is diabolical.”

Mob rule

Michelle Goldberg argues that Trump’s rule would be abetted by “mob rule” (https://nytimes.com/2024/06/07/opinion/donald-trump-mob-maga.html).

“One of the more unsettling things about our politics right now is the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of lawlessness. Even as they proclaim Trump’s innocence, Trump and his allies revel in the frisson of criminality. At his rally in the Bronx last month, for example, Trump invited onto the stage two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, who are currently facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder and weapons possession. (They’ve pleaded not guilty.) During Trump’s recent criminal trial, his courtroom entourage included Chuck Zito, who helped found the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and spent six years in prison on drug conspiracy charges. (The Justice Department has linked his Hells Angels chapter to the Gambino crime family.) Trump, who has his own history of mafia ties, has repeatedly compared himself to Al Capone. MAGA merchants sell T-shirts — and, weirdly, hot sauce — showing Trump as either Vito or Michael Corleone from ‘The Godfather’ movies, with the caption ‘The Donfather.’”

Goldberg refers to points from the “new book by John Ganz, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” The book “offers a useful way to think about the value system undergirding MAGA’s romance with the mob. Ganz’s book excavates a prehistory of Trumpism in the angry, cynical period between the end of the Cold War and the full flush of the Clinton boom. You can see, in the rise of figures like David Duke, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, Trumpism in embryo. (The chapter on Duke, and the cultish loyalty he inspired, is particularly illuminating.) But the most revelatory section — some of which Ganz has adapted in a post for his Unpopular Front newsletter — involves the mystique around the mobster John Gotti and the Buchanan-style paleoconservatives who saw, in the mafia, an admirable patriarchal alternative to the technocratic liberalism they despised.

“Both Murray Rothbard, a co-founder of the libertarian Cato Institute, and Sam Francis, a white nationalist who has become posthumously influential among MAGA elites, found in ‘The Godfather’ novel and films a vision of a self-governing social order more admirable than our own.

“Francis used the German terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to contrast the values of the Godfather with those of liberal modernity. Gemeinschaft, he wrote, describes a culture based on ‘kinship, blood relationship, feudal ties, social hierarchy, deference, honor, and friendship,’ whereas Gesellschaft refers to a social world that is atomized, calculating and legalistic.”

“There’s a similar dichotomy between Trump and his enemies: He represents charismatic personal authority as opposed to the bureaucratic dictates of the law. Under his rule, the Republican Party, long uneasy with modernity, has given itself over to Gemeinschaft. The Trump Organization was always run as a family business, and now that Trump has made his dilettante daughter-in-law vice chair of the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party is becoming one as well.

“To impose a similar regime of personal rule on the country at large, Trump has to destroy the already rickety legitimacy of the existing system. “As in Machiavelli’s thought, The Prince is not only above the law but the source of law and all social and political order, so in the Corleone universe, the Don is ‘responsible’ for his family, a responsibility that authorizes him to do virtually anything except violate the obligations of the family bond,” Francis wrote. That also seems to be how Trump sees himself, minus, of course, the family obligations. What’s frightening is how many Republicans see him the same way.”

“It’s a sign that a culture is in the grip of a deep nihilism and despair when moblike figures become romantic heroes, or worse, presidents.”

Trump’s allies and followers also want retribution/revenge against opponents, especially after his guilty verdict in the “hush money” case in New York.

David Corn considers Trump’s obsession with revenge, pointing out that the “convicted felon has long hailed retaliation as a key to his success” (https://motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/trumps-obsession-with-revenge-a-big-post-verdict-danger). Here’s some of his evidence.

“Three days after a New York City jury turned Donald Trump into the first former president branded a felon, the onetime reality television host told Fox News, ‘My revenge will be success.’ Through much of his life, Trump ‘has exhibited an intense obsession with vengeance and seeking retribution against those he considers his foes and detractors.’” He is a role model for his allies in this regard.

Here is the crux of Corn’s analysis.

#1 – Trumps reaction to his guilty verdict

“Three days after a New York City jury turned Donald Trump into the first former president branded a felon, the onetime reality television host told Fox News, ‘My revenge will be success.’ This above-the-fray rhetoric was not to be believed, for Trump, through much of his life, has exhibited an intense obsession with vengeance and seeking retribution against those he considers his foes and detractors, including President Joe Biden.

#2 – Trump has a long record of vengeful rhetoric

Corn writes: “Trump has long had a love affair with revenge—to such an extent that this fixation should be added to the list of concerns reasonable people ought to have about a Trump restoration. If Trump, with his authoritarian impulses, returns to the White House, it is rather likely he will use his power to extract payback—for this conviction, the other civil and criminal cases filed against him, and all perceived slights and assaults. There will be a revenge-a-thon.”

#3 – His Republican followers in the Congress also called for retribution. “Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) tweeted, ‘Time for Red State AGs and DAs to get busy’—a clear demand for state and local prosecutors to target Democrats. Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon each called on Republican prosecutors to launch probes against Democrats. Mike Davis, a right-wing legal activist who’s been mentioned as a possible attorney general if Trump wins, told Axios that Republican prosecutors in Florida and George should initiate criminal investigations of Democrats for engaging in election interference by indicting Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson informed his Republican colleagues that he was plotting ways to punish the Justice Department and local jurisdictions that prosecute Trump.”

#4 – “Commenters on pro-Trump websites called for violence against the judge in Trump’s hush-money/election-interference case and against liberals in general. Trump supporters also tried to dox the jurors—setting them up as targets—and posted violent threats against the prosecutors. John Eastman, the indicted lawyer who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election (and whose law license has been suspended in California and Washington, DC), came close to justifying violence when he warned that if Trump is sentenced to prison, Trump supporters will be ‘taking matters into their own hands’ and ‘seeking remedies on their own.’”

#5 – “Before running for president, Trump gave many speeches and public talks in which he expressed his fondness for retribution. In 2011, he addressed the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia and explained how he had achieved his wealth and fame. He noted there were a couple of lessons not taught in business school that people aiming to be successful must know. At the top of the list was this piece of advice: ‘Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.’” In a 2012 speech, Trump said, “If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit ’em back five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even. Get even. And the reason, the reason you do, is so important…The reason you do, you have to do it, because if they do that to you, you have to leave a telltale sign that they just can’t take advantage of you. It’s not so much for the person, which does make you feel good, to be honest with you, I’ve done it many times. But other people watch and you know they say, ‘Well, let’s leave Trump alone,’ or ‘Let’s leave this one,’ or ‘Doris, let’s leave her alone. They fight too hard.’ I say it, and it’s so important. You have to, you have to hit back. You have to hit back.”

#6 – “And it was only a few months ago that the Washington Post reported that Trump and his allies ‘have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute.’ That list included people who had worked for Trump and became critics, including former chief of staff John Kelly, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Biden and his family. The article—headlined “Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term”—generated much reaction, with pundits pointing to it as more evidence of Trump’s extremism and authoritarian yearnings.

——————

Trump’s support includes “big tech”

Despite Trump’s poor record as president and his continuous attacks on opponents, he not only dominates the Republican Party and has the unquestioning support of the tens of millions of Americans who represent his “base,” he also has the support of many “big tech CEOs,” according to a report by Jo-han Jones for MSNBC (https://msnbc.com/the-reidout-blog/trump-fundraising-donations-tech-rcna155889). Ja’han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He’s a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

“This week’s “Tuesday Tech Drop” documented one aspect of that phenomenon, in which some influential figures in tech who previously donated to Democrats are now lining up behind Trump’s campaign. And last week, Reuters reported that the venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya are hosting a high-dollar event for Trump in San Francisco on Thursday, designed to show an outpouring of support from Silicon Valley leaders for the convicted former president. To the extent that this may come as a surprise, that may be rooted in a widespread misconception of Silicon Valley as a bastion of liberalism and not what it truly is: an epitome of crony capitalism, exclusion and white male elitism.”

“In reality, the public alignment of some tech executives with the Trump campaign is pretty easy to understand. Generally speaking, Silicon Valley leaders are overwhelmingly white and male — and disproportionately rich. Which is to say, they belong to a group that Trump and his allies have gone to great lengths to show they’ll defend in a second Trump term. And conversely, Joe Biden’s administration has taken steps to bring more equity and diversity to the tech industry and to ensure rich people pay their fair share in taxes, both of which could diminish the power of those who’ve already made a killing off of Big Tech.”

“Trump… is vowing to give a massive tax cut to the rich if elected. Judges he handpicked have ruled that efforts to diversify the tech industry amount to anti-white discrimination. And Trump himself has said he’d prioritize ridding America of ‘anti-white if he’s elected.

“Author Malcolm Harris’ book ‘Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World’ is a great read for anyone looking to disabuse themselves of the pollyannaish propaganda about Silicon Valley’s purported progressive bonafides. The history of how Silicon Valley (largely built on Ohlone land) and its roots intertwine with the development of nuclear weapons dispelled for me some of the more fanciful depictions that portray Silicon Valley executives as avatars of a progressive revolution.”

Under a second Trump presidency, the Department of Justice will become “the legal wing of the MAGA movement”

This is the thesis of Elie Mystal (https://thenation.com/article/society/project-2025-doj-justice).

“There has probably never been a president who was more ignorant of the government, the Constitution, and the laws of this country than Donald Trump was in 2017. The man came to power with a child’s understanding of civics and a mob boss’s understanding of power. Instead of using the power of government to effectuate his agenda, he thought he could simply bend the law to his will.

“Trump was wrong, and the Department of Justice showed him why.”

“It’s a lesson he will not have forgotten if he wins or steals a second term. Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 blueprint for an eventual authoritarian takeover of the federal government, contains a lot of dangerous proposals for how Trump and his ruling conservatives can remake the executive branch. The authors’ ideas for the Department of Justice reflect not only their lust for unchallenged power, but also a deep fear of the DOJ’s independence—and, more particularly, the way that independence might be used against them if the DOJ is not brought to heel. Put simply: The conservatives hope to use the DOJ to make their darkest desires legal, while at the same time taking away the best legal means to stop them.

“As a first step, the Project 2025 Mandate recommends hollowing out the FBI,” eliminating its independence.

“In order to accomplish this, Project 2025 proposes pushing Congress to demote the FBI, and its director, to a lower rung on the DOJ’s organizational chart and make the director report to a political functionary. It also wants Congress to eliminate the 10-year term of the FBI director to make it easier for the president to replace the director at will, like most other political appointees. Again, Trump got burned for firing Comey, and this proposal would make sure any future FBI director is sufficiently loyal.”

“The Project 2025 Mandate calls for renewing the bureau’s focus on ‘violent’ crime—and that word choice is important, because it leaves out nonviolent crimes like bank fraud, tax evasion, bribery, and document theft—you know, all the things that Trump or his business or donor-class friends are accused of doing. The document further suggests stripping the FBI of its legal workforce—the 300 or so attorneys employed by the bureau—which would turn the FBI into an even blunter weapon than it already is, completely untethered from the Constitution or civil rights.

“In line with the mission of hurting the ‘right’ people, Mandate’s chapter on the DOJ details big plans for resuming Trump’s campaign against immigrants. Those plans include deploying the power of the Justice Department against Democrats who govern in “sanctuary cities.” Indeed, there’s a whole paragraph devoted to the wild idea of using the DOJ to sue district attorneys who use their discretion in ways that the conservatives don’t like—including, though hardly limited to, refusing to help deport immigrants:

Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).

“That paragraph is bonkers (and its recommendations would be unconstitutional if the people behind Project 2025 hadn’t already secured a conservative Supreme Court to rubber-stamp their authoritarian plans). But it reflects a general trend in Mandate’s chapter on the DOJ to put the department on the offense against the favored targets of the MAGA movement: people of color, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.”

“When you break down what Project 2025 wants to do with the Justice Department, it’s chilling and terrifying, and yet I’m also struck by how petty and mean-spirited the tone of the document is. These people are consumed by their personal grievances (against Black people, against the media, against Hunter Biden and his laptop). There are multiple passages devoted to complaining that the DOJ has prosecuted people who threaten abortion clinics and parents who threaten school boards, as if being vile and hateful toward pregnant people and schoolteachers is their most precious “freedom.” Giving these people the DOJ is like giving a chimpanzee a gun: It’s inherently dangerous even when the chimp wields it like a crooked club.”

“Project 2025 is telling us exactly how the conservatives plan to take away the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. I beg the American people to believe them. This dystopian future isn’t a threat, it’s a certainty, should we give these people power again.

Trump is not fit to be America’s Commander in Chief

Maria Bautista argues that “As a convicted felon, Trump isn’t fit to lead America’s military as commander in chief”

(https://usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/06/06/trump-convicted-felon-comander-chief-military/73971641007). Marla Bautista is a military fellow columnist for USA TODAY Opinion.

“Former president and convicted felon Donald Trump should not become America’s next commander in chief. His criminal record and despicable behavior undermine national security as well as trust, leadership and morale among the men and women who risk their lives to defend our nation.

“Over the past three decades, Trump has been a defendant or plaintiff in more than 4,000 lawsuits, and last week a jury found him guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal or commit a crime. It was only the first of the criminal trials he faces.

“Trump’s lack of ethical standards and integrity goes against everything the U.S. military stands for. He has proved that under pressure, he will crack. If he were to become commander in chief again, he might well compromise our country by giving in to coercion or revealing secrets that could get Americans killed.”

“National security keeps our military members alive. Heck, it keeps us all alive. Allowing someone who flagrantly disregards the law and authority of any manner to lead our armed services would not keep our nation secure.”

Bautista continues.

“Cybersecurity and international espionage are a dangerous game, and for someone like Trump to have the cheat codes would be like showing your child how to use one tap to make in-app purchases, then telling them not to buy any games. America’s adversaries are watching and taking notes. They would welcome the former president’s tarnished moral compass because it could be used to weaken America’s national security.

“Trump as commander in chief would hurt America’s global credibility

“Former military leaders, such as retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, who served during the Trump administration have called him dangerous and unfit. Trump has injured relationships between the United States and its allies, and his actions on the international stage were seen as weak and unstable, directly harming diplomatic relations.”

“In Bob Woodard’s book “Rage,” Trump told a former adviser, “My f—ing generals are a bunch of p—ies.” It wasn’t the first or the last time he berated our military’s most revered leaders.

“Remember when he called service members who made the ultimate sacrifice ‘losers and suckers’? I do.”

Contrary to Trump’s views, “Strength and resilience are the glue that holds the military together, and our military leaders’ attention should be focused on mission readiness and defense, not mitigating Trump’s PR nightmares.

“The U.S. military prides itself on decorum, discipline, respect and an honorable reputation.

“Trump exhibits none of those qualities.

“Felons generally can’t serve in the military

“In the values and character section of the Go Army website, it states that a person convicted of a felony is generally not permitted to join the military. So how on earth should a felon be allowed to lead the entire military if he couldn’t join because of his criminal record?

Whether voters choose to embrace or ostracize the convicted former president will shape the image and culture of America’s military for decades to come.

As president, unstable and revengeful Trump could start a nuclear war

Adam Mount reminds us that “There’s Nothing Between an Unstable President and the Nuclear Button” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/united-states-nuclear-weapons-president-deterrence-law). Adam Mount is a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Mount writes as follows.

“In the latest sign of his fascination with using nuclear weapons, former U.S. President Donald Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city, like former President Harry Truman did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“As Trump consolidates the Republican Party nomination, it is past time to ensure that no president can authorize an unnecessary or illegal nuclear attack.

It’s important to remember how worried top U.S. officials were three years ago. As Trump was attempting to overturn the election results, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley about whether he could prevent ‘an unstable president’ from using nuclear weapons. For his part, Milley reportedly gathered senior officers to remind them not to act on orders unless he was involved, telling them, ‘no matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure.

“In fact, neither Pelosi nor Milley had any lawful authority to prevent a determined Trump from using nuclear weapons. The sole restriction on the president’s authority to order a nuclear attack is that members of the armed forces are obligated to refuse to carry out an order that violates the law of war. Among other things, officers must decline to conduct a nuclear strike that is not necessary to defeat an enemy as quickly and efficiently as possible or that would cause damage to civilians that is indiscriminate, inhumane, or disproportionate to the military objective.

“In 2017, as Trump was improvising nuclear threats to North Korea, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) made headlines by saying that he would not carry out an illegal launch order. Instead, Gen. John Hyten said he would inform a president that an order was illegal and then come up with “capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.”

“But it is complicated. The expected procedure is that a president considering nuclear use would convene a “decision conference” with senior advisors to consider options that are laid out in the football, a briefcase that follows the president everywhere. However, there is no logistical or legal requirement that a president convene a decision conference, engage with it in good faith, or take its advice seriously. In fact, the football can send a decision directly to the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which then generates an order and transmits it to U.S. forces.”

“It is also not clear how specific officials would interpret their obligations under the law of armed conflict. Who has standing to object to an order? What would they consider to be a legitimate military objective? Would they be able to evaluate nonnuclear options to determine that a nuclear weapon was the lowest effective level of force, as required? Exactly how would they calculate what number of incidental civilian deaths are proportionate to the military objective?”

“Before the election, President Joe Biden should put in place a defined, effective, rigorous, and legal procedure for preventing any president from issuing an illegal nuclear launch order.

“He can start by establishing a structure for the decision conference. If a president accesses the football, the NMCC should automatically convene a conference among a specified set of principals, including the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman, the Stratcom commander, and the relevant regional combatant commander who can advise on conditions in an ongoing conflict. Each of these principals should be accompanied by their primary legal counsel, who is prepared to assess the legality of a nuclear order.

When the president transmits a decision to use nuclear weapons, each principal should submit a decision to certify or not to certify that the order complies with U.S. obligations under the law of armed conflict. If the attending principals certify the legality of a presidential order, it can then become a valid order and is transmitted to the NMCC. Just as the NMCC authenticates an order as being from a president, it should also require certification of legality before it transmits that order to launch crews.”

“As a first step, Biden should declare that the United States would use nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances when there is no viable nonnuclear alternative for accomplishing vital military objectives. This would not only encourage planners to prioritize more credible conventional options, but also rule out the use of nuclear weapons to coerce or terrify enemies. The president could also state that the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would violate the law of armed conflict today and will never happen again.”

“Currently, the Defense Department’s law of war manual contains all of three sentences on the legality of nuclear operations. These presidential statements and guidance would help future officials interpret concepts such as necessity and discrimination and provide them with grounds to object to an unnecessary, unprovoked, or cruel launch order. Once in place, they would be difficult for an irresponsible president to walk back.”

“The current procedure for authorizing nuclear use both fails to inform a responsible president and could fail to constrain an irresponsible one from ordering or even carrying out an unnecessary nuclear attack. Before he leaves office, Biden should confine this system to the past and establish one that is more rigorous and more effective. At the presidential inauguration in January 2025, either way, he’ll be glad he did.”

Concluding thoughts

The evidence is compelling that, despite his recent conviction, Trump has tens of millions of Americans, including many of the rich and powerful, who are avid supporters. There appears to be hardly any limit on what they are prepared to do in November. Win or lose, his constituencies are ready to follow him. They appear to be energized by Trump’s call for retribution. The country has not faced such widespread political and moral extremism since the Civil War. But now, we have the capacity to blow up the world and the president has the authority to initiate such an apocalyptic war. Annie Jacobsen describes how such a war, once started, would end the world that as we know it in a matter of hours. See her book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario.”

Thom Hartmann argues that a top priority for rational voters in November 2024 is to vote for Biden, the only presidential candidate potentially able to defeat Trump (https://commondreams.org/opinion/stop-fascism-trump).

The specter of fascism

Bob Sheak, May 25, 2024

Introduction

The focus of this post is on the fascist aspects of Trump’s rhetoric and plans. It argues that, if Trump wins the presidency in November, he and his administration are likely to implement his anti-democratic vision.

Is he a fascist?

Federico Finchelstein has written extensively about fascism. In his most recent book, The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy (publ. 2024 by the University of California Press), he identifies “the four pillars of fascism,” including: (1) “violence and the militarization of politics; (2) “lies, myths, and propaganda”; (3) “the politics of xenophobia” and racism; and (4) dictatorship (pp. 16-17). He argues that Trump is not quite a full-blown fascist, but rather a “wannabe fascist because he has not yet become a “dictator.”

“Well before January 6, 2021,” Finchelstein writes, “Trump had already established (to some alarming extent) three of the four pillars of fascism: violence and the militarization of policies, racism, and lies. The element that Trumpism was missing was dictatorship. And then the attempted coup d’etat happened….Had his attempt succeeded, Trump would have most likely become a dictator. In that scenario, it would have been more appropriate to think of him as a fascist. Because he wavered and failed, I [Finchelstein] call him a wannabe fascist” (p. 18). This could all change if Trump wins the presidential election in November, 2024. The plans of Trump and the Republican Party are clearly anti-democratic and revolve around the idea of Trump as the permanent leader, a “one-person [with] absolute and permanent rule” (p. 152).

Trump’s rhetoric has become more fascistic

Robert Reich reports on May 22, 2024, that Trump’s rhetoric is “now openly embracing fascism” (https://robertreich.substack.com/p/but-seriously-is-trumpl-now-openly). Here’s some of what he writes.

“As I’ve noted, on Monday evening Trump posted a 30-second video on his Truth Social site featuring images of hypothetical newspaper articles celebrating his 2024 victory and referring to ‘the creation of a unified Reich’ under the headline ‘What’s next for America?’”

Reich continues.

“There have been indications of Trump’s fascination with fascism before this. Consider his uses of fascist language — calling immigrants ‘vermin’ who ‘poison the blood’ of America — and his repeated fascistic claims that ‘I am your voice. I alone can fix it.’

“Besides, the white Christian nationalism that Trump touts bears a remarkably close resemblance to Nazism.

“During his time in office, Trump reportedly claimed that Adolf Hitler ‘did some good things.’ Trump berated his generals with insults like, ‘you f—king generals, why can’t you be like the German generals … in World War II?’ according to the account of former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

But this Third Reich video is the first time Trump has explicitly embraced Nazi fascism.”

“The ‘Third Reich’ was the official Nazi designation for its regime from January 1933 to May 1945, as the presumed successor to the medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire of 800 to 1806 (which the Nazis designated the First Reich) and the German Empire of 1871 to 1918 (which they called the Second Reich). Hitler stoked resentment against the loss of the German Empire and against Jews, whom the Nazis often referred to as globalists.

This is not the first time. “In July 2015, during Trump’s first bid for the White House, his campaign’s official Twitter account posted — and then quickly deleted — an image featuring Nazi soldiers superimposed between the stripes of an American flag. At the time, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — a fellow named Michael Cohen — blamed the post on a ‘young intern’ who apparently ‘did not see very faded figures within the flag.’

“Trump’s defenders argue that there’s no valid comparison between Trumpism and Nazism, yet Trump and his campaign continue to invite the comparison.

“I don’t believe the Monday post was a mistake. I believe Trump is now moving to openly signal his embrace of fascism.”

A Trump “threat tracker”

A group of scholars have created the “American Autocracy Threat Tracker, including Norman L. Eisen, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Siven Watt, Andrew Warren, Jacob Kovacs-Goodman and Francois Barrilleaux (https://justsecurity.org/92714/american-autocracy-threat-tracker).

Both autocracy and fascism are concepts that identify an all-powerful dictator who controls government policies, with the support of the rich and powerful and a subservient grassroots movement. They are– fascism and autocracy – synonymous.

Such a government has multiple ways of suppressing any opposition that exists in the society, through control of the military, media, courts, education, and other important institutional sectors, as well as through economic and finance-related policies.

The authors of the Tracker provide a lengthy, continuously updated account of the anti-democratic, autocratic [and fascistic] aspirations and planning by Trump and his allies.

Here are the first pages of their critique of Trump’s “autocratic” aspirations.

“Former President Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator on ‘day one.’ He and his advisors and associates have publicly discussed hundreds of further actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy, the rule of law, as well as U.S. (and global) security. These vary from Trump breaking the law and abusing power in areas like immigration roundups and energy extraction; to summarily and baselessly firing tens of thousands of civil servants whom he perceives as adversaries; to prosecuting his political opponents for personal gain and even hinting at executing some of them; to pardoning some of the convicted January 6th rioters he views as ‘great patriots,’ ‘hostages,’ and ‘wrongfully imprisoned.’ We track all of these promises, plans, and pronouncements here and we will continue to update them.”

“We assess there is a significant risk of autocracy should Trump regain the presidency. Trump has said he would deploy the military against civilian protestors and his advisors have developed plans for using the Insurrection Act, said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to conduct deportations of non-citizens, continued to threaten legally-established abortion rights, and even had his lawyers argue that a president should be immune from prosecution if he directed SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political opponent. Trump also seeks the power to protect his personal wealth as he faces staggering civil fines, and to bolster his immunity as he faces 88 criminal charges in prosecutions in different parts of the country. He has predicted a ‘bloodbath’ if he is not elected (although his meaning has been contested, with some saying he was referring to violence and others that ‘Trump was talking about US automakers.’) At a Veterans Day rally last year, Trump said he would ‘root out’ political opponents who ‘live like vermin within the confines of our country’ warning that the greatest threats come ‘from within’ (words that, according to ABC News and others, ‘echoed those of past fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini,’ and alarmed historians.)

The fascist plan

“Trump’s dictatorial aspirations are complemented by an extensive pre-election plan to fundamentally alter the nature of American government: the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025). Created by Trump allies and staffed by those including his past and likely future administration appointees, it is in the words of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, a plan for ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’ Trump has returned the compliment, saying of Roberts (and Heritage) that he’s ‘doing an unbelievable job, he’s bringing it back to levels we’ve never seen … thank you Kevin.’

“Project 2025’s plans are set forth in an 887-page document entitled ‘Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise.’ It details a program to consolidate power in the executive branch, deconstruct the federal administration, and strip remaining agencies of their independence. It proposes to dismantle or radically overhaul the Departments of Justice and State; eliminate the Departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Commerce; radically repurpose other agencies; and eviscerate the professional civil service. Project 2025 is complemented by other 2025 planning efforts by, for example, the America First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, and the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Trump and his associates are reportedly discussing building an administration around loyalists who would ‘stretch legal and governance boundaries’ to accommodate an ‘aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch’ (in the words of Project 2025).”

Bribing big oil and gas companies

Among the most disturbing developments in Trump’s tirades is his deepening embrace of an environmentally-devastating, fossil-fuel-based energy policy. Trump wants the financial support of big oil and gas companies, in return for which he offers unregulated fossil fuel production, domestically and internationally. Such a policy would wreak havoc on the environment, producing rising greenhouse gas emissions, rising temperatures, warming oceans, an increasing number of severe weather events (e.g., wild fires, droughts, flooding), along with melting glaciers, the destruction of coral reefs, and massive dislocations of people. Abrahm Lustgarten considers the latter point in his new book, On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. Lustgarten writes,

“As the planet slowly cooks, people will do what they have done for thousands of years in response to changes in their environment: they will move.” He continues:

“…in the United States, a quiet retreat from the front lines of western wildfires and Gulf Coast hurricanes is hollowing out small towns. These are the subtle first signals of an epochal slow-motion exodus out of inhospitable places that will, as the climate warms further over the lifetime of today’s children, untold on a global scale.” He adds: “Scientists estimate that as many as one in three people on the planet will find the places they live unmanageably hot or dry by 2070” (pp. 5-6).

“In the United States, drought, coastal flooding, crop failures, intensifying hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires will begin to overlap and close in on the country from its edges, slowly making entire regions less attractive and even, in some cases, unlivable….Some places will be reshaped – or even erased. Others will limp through climate purgatory, roiled by stagnation and economic disruptions that will replace growth. And still other regions may thrive” (p. 6).

Lustgarten says that such changes are not inevitable, but it will take policies that reduce our use of fossil fuels. This would “require the United States and the rest of the world to adopt electric vehicles and appliances and electrify the rest of its infrastructure, to vastly expand renewable energy, and to shut down coal- and natural-gas fired power plants as quickly as possible. It will require shifting how land is used, to hold more carbon in the ground and preserve more forests, and it means, in general, toning down runaway consumption. We buy – and use – too much” (p. 265). Elect Trump, and we are sunk.

Trump is opposed to any policies that undermine production and consumption of oil, gas, and even coal. This is reflected in his recent meeting with “big oil execs,” as reported by Jake Johnson (https://commondreams.org/news/trump-oil-industry-donations). Johnson writes:

“Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made a straightforward offer to some of the top fossil fuel executives in the United States during a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club last month, which marked the hottest April on record.

“According to new reporting, Trump pledged to swiftly gut climate regulations put in place by the Biden administration if the oil and gas industry raises $1 billion for his 2024 presidential campaign.

“The “remarkably blunt and transactional pitch,” reported by The Washington Post, was Trump’s latest explicit statement of his intention to give the fossil fuel industry free rein to wreck the planet if he wins a second term in power. Executives from Exxon, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and other prominent fossil fuel companies reportedly attended the Mar-a-Lago dinner.

“Late last year, Trump said he would be a dictator on the first day of his second term, vowing to use his executive authority to ‘close the border’ and ‘drill, drill, drill’ for the fossil fuels that are driving global temperatures to catastrophic extremes and imperiling hopes for a livable future.

“The Post reported Thursday that Trump said a $1 billion investment in his run against Democratic President Joe Biden would be a ‘deal’ for Big Oil ‘because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.’

“‘The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark,’ the Post noted. “Biden has called global warming an ‘existential threat’ and over the last three years, his administration has finalized 100 new environmental regulations aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters. In comparison, Trump has called climate change a ‘hoax,’ and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies over four years.”

Trump is focused on “personal gain”

Robert Reich maintains in an article published on May 10, 2024 that “Trump Would Sell Anything for Personal Gain—Even Planet Earth” (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-big-oil-1-billion).

As examples, he refers to “the Trump Bible” (which also includes a copy of the U.S. Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights). And to “Trump shoes” (ranging from the nearly all-gold ‘Never Surrender’ high tops priced at $399 to the lower-cut ‘Red Wave’ and POTUS 45’).

Now, Reich reports, Trump is “selling the entire world.”

“When Trump sat down with some of America’s top oil executives last month at Mar-a-Lago, according to the The Washington Post, they complained of burdensome environmental regulations, despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

“Trump’s response? He would offer them a better deal.

“He told them to raise $1 billion to return him to the White House and he’d reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted (according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation).

“The $1 billion ‘deal’ would more than pay for itself, Trump told the oil executives, because of the taxes and regulations they would avoid thanks to him.”

“At that Mar-a-Lago dinner, the former president told Big Oil executives that they’ll have an even greater windfall in a second Trump administration — including new offshore drilling, speedier permits, and other relaxed regulations — if they sink a billion into his campaign.

“Trump promised to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports — a top priority for the executives. ‘You’ll get it on the first day,’ Trump said.

“Trump told the executives that he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, another priority for several of the executives. He railed against wind power. And he said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.

“Trump also promised that he would scrap Biden’s rules for electric vehicles. The rules require automakers to reduce emissions from car tailpipes but don’t mandate a particular technology such as EVs. Trump called the rules ‘ridiculous’ in the meeting with donors.”

Trump’s proposals would lead to devastating domestic and international consequences. Most climate scientists are horrified by trends

Trump pays no serious attention to the warnings of climate scientists. The scientists want a phase out of fossil fuels. Contrary to the dismissive views of Trump and his advisors, Olivia Rosane reports that “77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They’re Horrified” (https://commondreams.org/news/climate-scientists-2-5-world). Here’s more of what Rosane writes.

“Nearly 80% of top-level climate scientists expect that global temperatures will rise by at least 2.5°C by 2100, while only 6% thought the world would succeed in limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a survey published Wednesday by The Guardian revealed.

“Nearly three-quarters blamed world leaders’ insufficient action on a lack of political will, while 60% said that corporate interests such as fossil fuel companies were interfering with progress.

The survey on which these data are based was conducted by The Guardian‘s Damian Carrington, who reached out to every expert who had served as a senior author on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report since 2018. Out of 843 scientists whose contact information was available, 383 responded. “77% predicted at least 2.5°C and nearly half predicted 3°C or more.”

“The 1.5°C target was agreed to as the most ambitious goal of the Paris agreement of 2015, in which world leaders pledged to keep warming to “well below” 2°C. However, policies currently in place would put the world on track for 3°C, and unconditional commitments under the Paris agreement for 2.9°C.

“The survey comes on the heels of the hottest year on record, which already saw a record-breaking Canadian wildfire season as well as extreme, widespread heatwaves and deadly floods. The first four months of 2024 have also been the hottest of their respective months on record, and the year has already seen the fourth global bleaching event for coral reefs.”

“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” Gretta Pecl of the University of Tasmania told The Guardian. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”

Scientists are not giving up

“Despite their grim predictions, many of the scientists remained committed to researching and speaking out.

“‘We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn’t know,’ Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who works on climate modeling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Guardian. ‘We know what we’re talking about. They can say they don’t care, but they can’t say they didn’t know.’”

“Others found hope in the climate activism and awareness of younger generations, and in the finding that each extra tenth of a degree of warming avoided protects 140 million people from extreme temperatures.”

“Many of the scientists who still saw a hope of keeping 1.5°C alive pinned it on the speeding rollout and falling prices of climate-friendly technologies like renewable energy and electric vehicles. Also on Wednesday, energy think thank Ember reported that 30% of global electricity came from renewables in 2023 and predicted that the year would be the ‘pivot’ after which power sector emissions would start to fall. Experts also said that abandoning fossil fuels has many side benefits such as cleaner air and better public health. Though even the more optimistic scientists were wary about the unpredictable nature of the climate crisis.

“‘I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5°C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,’ Henry Neufeldt of the United Nations’ Copenhagen Climate Center told The Guardian. ‘But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.’

Several scientists gave recommendations for things that people could do to move the needle on climate. Humphreys suggested “civil disobedience” while one French scientist said people should “fight for a fairer world.”

“All of humanity needs to come together and cooperate—this is a monumental opportunity to put differences aside and work together,” Louis Verchot, based at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, told The Guardian. “Unfortunately climate change has become a political wedge issue… I wonder how deep the crisis needs to become before we all start rowing in the same direction.”

The publication of The Guardian‘s survey prompted other climate scientists to share their thoughts.

“As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make,” Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. “We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades.”

“Aaron Thierry, a graduate researcher at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, pointed out that The Guardian‘s results were consistent with other surveys of scientific opinion, such as one published in Nature in the lead-up to COP26, in which 60% of IPCC scientists said they expected 3°C of warming or more by 2100.”

Concluding thoughts

Trump and his allies, including the Republican Party, threaten America and the world with their quest for power. If they win in the November elections, they will be in position to implement and consolidate their fascist plans, Among the most calamitous effects would be the curtailment of Constitutional protections for most Americans, the creation of a highly regimented society, in which people pay homage to Trump the ”messianic leader,” and corporate-friendly policies that generate high-levels of inequality and environmental devastation. In such circumstances, Trump and his family, along with favored allies, will acquire massive wealth.

Challenging Trump’s anti-democratic vision

Bob Sheak, May 8, 2024

The anti-democratic thrust of Trump’s views, widely endorsed by Republicans, is continuously being modified. However, it is clear that if he is elected in November 2024, he wants to institute reforms that will end American liberal democracy, replace it with an illiberal political order, with the president in command, all the while looking for ways to diminish or eliminate the influence of his critics and Democrats.

Robert Kagan analyzes this threat in his book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism IS Tearing America Apart – Again. In effect, Trump wants the Republican Party to win absolute control, which would mean control by a “minority” of the voting population, particularly by the rich and powerful. Ari Berman delves into this issue in his new book titled “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People – and the Fight to Resist It.”

Autocratic confirmation

Trump also looks abroad for confirmations of his views, for example from authoritarian leaders in Russia and Hungary. His friendly relations with Putin are well known. Kate Sullivan gives some examples of the relationship (https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato/index.html).

“As president, Trump privately threatened multiple times to withdraw the United States from NATO, according to The New York Times. Trump has described NATO as ‘obsolete’ and has aligned himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to weaken the alliance. Trump has long praised Putin and went as far as to side with the Russian leader over the US intelligence community over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.”

Trump as messiah

Trump welcomes support for his power bid from wherever it comes. For example, he seems to welcome being thought of as a messiah, however outlandish the notion, because it helps to boost his ego and because it reflects support for him among Christian Nationalists, his most numerous constituency. (See Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism).

David French analyzes this fabrication and contends obviously that Trump is no savior and that a “significant part of American Christianity is spiraling out of control” (https://nytimes.com/2024/03/31/opinion/donald-trump-dune-savior.html). Here’s some of what he writes.

“The signs are everywhere. First, there’s the behavior of the savior himself, Donald Trump. On Monday of Holy Week, he compared himself to Jesus Christ, posting on Truth Social that he received a ‘beautiful’ note from a supporter saying that it was ironic’ that ‘Christ walked through his greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.’

“On Tuesday, he took to Truth Social to sell a $60 ‘God Bless the USA Bible’ (the ‘only Bible endorsed by President Trump’), an edition of the King James Bible that also includes America’s founding documents. ‘Christians are under siege,’ he said. The Judeo-Christian foundation of America is ‘under attack,’ Trump claimed, before declaring a new variant on an old theme: ‘We must make America pray again.’

“Two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, told a Christian gathering that Democrats ‘want full and complete destruction of the United States of America.’ Kirk is a powerful Trump ally. He has millions of followers on social media and is hoping to raise more than $100 million in 2024 to help mobilize voters for Trump.

“‘I do not think you can be a Christian and vote Democrat,’ Kirk said, and ‘if you vote Democrat as a Christian, you can no longer call yourself a Christian.’”

French continues.

“All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of so-called prophetic utterances that place Trump at the center of God’s plan to save America. According to these prophecies, Trump is God’s choice to lead America out of spiritual darkness, to save it from decline and despair. In this formulation, to oppose Trump is to stand against the will of God.

“There are Trump prophecy books and a Trump prophecy movie. The prophecies can be very strange. The prophet will speak as though God talked to him or her directly. In this widely watched video, for example, the prophet says, ‘Donald Trump will be in power once more’ and ‘he will reign again; it’s only a matter of time.’ In this prophecy, the prophet says there is ‘actually a scripture appointed for the day’ that Trump was born. As he explains the prophecy, the crowd applauds; its belief is palpable.”

There is a “method” underlying this belief in Trump’s spiritual lordship. French writes: “The MAGA method is clear. First, it whips up its people into a religious frenzy. It lies to convince them that the Democrats are an existential threat to the country and the church. It tells worried Christians that the fate of the nation is at stake. Then, just as it builds up the danger from the Democrats, it constructs an idol of Trump, declaring his divine purpose and spreading the prophecies of his coming return. He is to be the instrument of divine vengeance against his foes, and his frenzied foot soldiers are eager to carry out his will. They march eagerly to culture war, flying the flag of the House of Trump.”

French points out that Trump’s religiosity is hardly in the authentic Christian tradition. “Jesus was emphatic. In Matthew 25, Jesus said he would know his followers as people who served: ‘I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you visited me.’ And how do we serve Jesus in that way? Christ’s answer was clear: ‘Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

The fuller agenda

Certainly, there is much more to Trump’s anti-democratic and politically and existentially threatening agenda. Here are eleven examples.

believes he cannot be defeated in upcoming 2024 presidential election, unless the election is “rigged”
encourages the maximum production and consumption of fossil fuels, despite the steady rise of global warming
claims to be a job creator, though his record here is weak
appoints sycophants to his cabinet and staff, and eliminate civil service protections for thousands of executive-branch workers
pursues a draconian migration policy, including the detention and removal of millions of undocumented migrants living in the U.S. carried out with military troops – and extends the wall on the southern border
facilitates efforts to make voting more difficult, especially for lower-income and black and Latino Americans
keeps taxes low for corporations and the super-wealthy and support a regime of deregulation and privatization
diminishes the already fragile social safety net
supports efforts by the states to virtually end legal access to reproductive health care and abortion
encourages easy access to gun ownership
will promote violence against opponents when necessary to maintain social order

—————

#1 – The Big Lie

Trump has claimed over and over again that Biden’s presidential victory in 2020 was based on massive election fraud.

Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party. He unceasingly claims that he won the 2020 presidential election, despite the overwhelming evidence that he did not (e.g., The January 6 Report by the House January 6th Committee). The evidence. “In total, the Trump Campaign and allies of President Trump filed 62 separate lawsuits between November 4, 2020, and January 6, 2021, calling into question or seeking to overturn the election results. Out of 62 cases, only one case results in a victory for the President Trump or his allies, which affected relatively few votes, did not vindicate any underlying claims of fraud, and would not have changed the outcome in Pennsylvania.” Indeed, “In every state in which claims were brought, one or more judges specifically explained as part of the dismissal orders that they had evaluated the plaintiffs’ allegations or supposed proof of widespread election fraud or other irregularities, and found the claims to be entirely unconvincing” (p. 210).

The Big Lie is widely accepted by Republicans

Most Republicans in the U.S. Congress accept or go along with this false claim, as reflected in the vote on choosing a Speaker taken by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. The litmus test for House Republicans was that a Speaker should be someone who accepts Trump’s lies about winning the 2020 presidential election and his right-wing agenda. Marc Elias provides some information on the new Speaker Mike Johnson’s views and record (https://democracydocket.com/opinion/a-big-lie-ring-leader-becomes-speaker-of-the-house). The article was published on Oct. 30, 2023.

“The newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (La.) is no ordinary Republican election denier. He was a ringleader in one of the most dangerous efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He used his position as a lawyer and member of Congress to legitimize the fringe legal theory underpinning the ‘Big Lie.’ Other than former President Donald Trump, he is arguably the most culpable federal elected official in what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021.

Johnson “combines MAGA Republicanism with Christian nationalism. Shortly after becoming speaker, Johnson told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that anyone looking to understand his world view should ‘go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’

“When it comes to issues of democracy, Johnson is an avid vote suppressor and an accomplished election denier. He is best thought of as a cross between Jim Jordan and John Eastman.”

#2 – A retrograde climate/environmental policy

One of the most disturbing aspects of Trump’s discourse is his dismissal of the indisputable evidence on the climate crisis.

Lisa Friedman identifies “Five Major Climate Policies Trump Would Probably Reverse if Elected” (https://nytimes.com/2024/04/26/climate/climate-politics-trump-would-reverse.html).

1. Coal and Gas Power Plants

“The fossil-fuel-burning plants that keep our lights on or power our heat and air conditioning are responsible for a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the United States. Reducing them is key to Mr. Biden’s plan to tackle climate change.” For example, “Environmental Protection Agency regulations finalized on Thursday would force coal plants to either deploy technology to capture virtually all their emissions, or shut down. New gas plants constructed in the U.S. also would have to meet strict emissions standards.”

“Mr. Trump has deployed a mixture of truth and falsehoods when describing this policy. He has said it will force coal plants to shut down, which is likely accurate. He also said it will force gas plants to close, which is not true. And he has said that renewable energy cannot keep the lights on, also untrue.

“If elected, Mr. Trump said he will reverse the regulation on coal-burning electricity and ‘green-light the construction of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of brand-new, beautiful power plants that actually work.’”

2. Automobile Emissions Standards

“Mr. Biden has imposed limits on pollution from automobile tailpipes, rules designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.

“Mr. Trump has said those regulations will lead to a ‘blood bath’ in the U.S. economy, ‘kill” the auto industry and trigger an ‘assassination’ of jobs. He has pledged to reverse them.”

3. The Inflation Reduction Act

President Biden signed into law in 2022 the nation’s largest investment in fighting climate change. “It contains more than $370 billion in tax credits over 10 years to help shift the U.S. toward cleaner forms of energy, offering incentives to companies to make electric vehicles, batteries and to consumers to buy those vehicles, switch to solar energy and buy things like electric heat pumps to heat and cool their homes.

“Mr. Trump, who has called the I.R.A. ‘the biggest tax hike in history,’ is widely expected to try to gut much of the law.

“Incentives for people to buy electric vehicles, which Mr. Trump has called ‘one of the dumbest’ decisions he’s heard, would certainly be on the chopping block, Republicans said. So would measures to support businesses that install electric-vehicle charging stations.

“Tax credits for solar- and wind-power, could be in the cross hairs of his administration, as could incentives for consumers to buy heat pumps or make their homes more energy efficient.”

4. Oil and Gas Drilling

“If he wins a second term, Mr. Trump has promised to ‘unleash domestic energy production like never before.’ Primarily he is talking about coal, oil and gas, the three main fossil fuels.”

“Mr. Trump has promised to immediately lift that pause and greenlight pipelines and other energy projects.

“‘We’re going to drill, baby, drill, right away,’ Mr. Trump told supporters in January.” As president, Trump is expected to “revive drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the country’s premiere wildlife sanctuary. Mr. Biden canceled seven oil leases in the refuge last year.”

5. Global Climate Negotiations

“As president, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement, a 2015 accord in which all nations agreed to cut their greenhouse gases to keep global warming within relatively safe limits.

“Mr. Biden returned the U.S. to the global deal on his first day in office and has pledged to cut U.S. emissions roughly in half this decade, and to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere before 2050.

“Mr. Trump’s likely policies would add four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, according to a study by Carbon Brief, a climate analysis site.

“Many foreign leaders felt that the four-year absence of the world’s superpower during the Trump administration was a setback. They fear another American withdrawal would delay progress at a time when time is running short to avert the most catastrophic impacts from global warming.”

#3 – Hardly a big job creator

Lawrence Wittner analyzes Trump’s “empty promises on jobs” (https://counterpunch.org/2024/05/02/donald-trumps-empty-promises-on-jobs).

Wittner reminds us that in mid-2015, Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States and declared that he would “be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

“With Trump’s election, however, just the opposite occurred. During the four years of Trump’s presidency, the United States lost 2.7 million jobs. As a result, he was the only president since 1939, when the U.S. government began compiling such employment statistics, to preside over a net loss of jobs.

“Indeed, when it came to job creation, Trump was vastly outperformed by the other presidents. Bill Clinton oversaw the biggest gain, 23 million additional jobs, followed by Ronald Reagan (16 million), Joe Biden (14 million), and Lyndon Johnson (12 million)―all the way down to George W. Bush (1.4 million). During the presidency of Barack Obama, Trump’s much-reviled predecessor, the United States added 11.6 million jobs.

Trump’s defenders point to the disruptive effect the Covid-19 pandemic had on the American economy. Although the disease crisis certainly undermined employment during his presidency, it’s also true that his denial and mismanagement of the public health emergency deepened its human and economic impact in the United States. Furthermore, even before the pandemic hit, job creation during the Trump presidency was relatively weak. During Trump’s first 31 months in office, employment growth in the United States averaged 176,000 jobs per month. During Biden’s first 31 months in office, employment growth averaged 433,000 jobs per month.”

#4 – Plans to appoint sycophants and radical right experts to his cabinet and staff, and eliminate civil service protections for thousands of executive-branch workers

Bob Ortega, Kyung Lah, Allison Gordon and Nelli Black, report in-depth on Trump’s plan in a second term to purge the executive branch of workers who are not expressly committed to him (https://cnn.com/2024/04/27/politics/trump-federal-workers-2nd-term-invs/index.html). Here’s some of what they write.

“At one campaign rally after another, former President Donald Trump whips his supporters into raucous cheers with a promise of what’s to come if he’s given another term in office: ‘We will demolish the deep state.’

“In essence, it’s a declaration of war on the federal government—a vow to transform its size and scope and make it more beholden to Trump’s whims and worldview.

“The former president’s statements, policy blueprints laid out by top officials in his first administration and interviews with allies show that Trump is poised to double down in a second term on executive orders that faltered, or those he was blocked from carrying out the first time around.

“Trump seeks to sweep away civil service protections that have been in place for more than 140 years. He has said he’d make ‘every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States’ at will. Even though more than 85 percent of federal employees already work outside the DC area, Trump says he would ‘drain the swamp’ and move as many as 100,000 positions out of Washington. His plans would eliminate or dismantle entire departments.”

“While Trump’s plans are embraced by his supporters, policy experts warn that they would hollow out and politicize the federal workforce, force out many of the most experienced and knowledgeable employees, and open the door to corruption and a spoils system of political patronage.”

“But if, as promised, Trump were to change thousands of civil service jobs into politically appointed positions at the start of a second term, huge numbers of federal workers could face being fired unless they put loyalty to Trump ahead of serving the public interest, warn policy experts.”

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, told CNN making vast numbers of jobs subject to appointment based on political affiliation would amount to ‘absolutely the biggest change in the American public sector’ since a merit-based civil service was created in 1883.

“One of the architects of that plan for a Trump second term said as much in a video last year for the Heritage Foundation. ‘It’s going to be groundbreaking,’ said Russell Vought, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. He declined interview requests from CNN.”

“Vought focused on a plan he drafted to reissue Trump’s 2020 executive order, known as Schedule F. It would reclassify as political appointees any federal workers deemed to have influence on policy. Reissuing Schedule F is part of a roadmap, known as Project 2025, drafted for a second Trump term by scores of conservative groups and published by the Heritage Foundation.”

“Ostensibly, a reissued Schedule F would affect only policy-making positions. But documents obtained by the National Treasury Employees Union and shared with CNN show that when Vought ran OMB under Trump, his list of positions to be reclassified under Schedule F included administrative assistants, office managers, IT workers and many other less senior positions.

NTEU President Doreen Greenwald told reporters at the union’s annual legislative conference that it estimated more than 50,000 workers would have been affected across all federal agencies. She said the OMB documents ‘stretched the definition of confidential or policy positions to the point of absurdity.’”

“‘We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,’ Trump said in a video last year. ‘The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.’

Project 2025’s blueprint envisions dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI; disarming the Environmental Protection Agency by loosening or eliminating emissions and climate-change regulations; eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce in their entirety; and eliminating the independence of various commissions, including the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.”

#5 – Trump Again Vows Mass Deportations and Won’t Rule Out Political Violence

Michael Gold writes on this issue

(https://nytimes.com/2024/04/30/us/politics/trump-time-migrants-election.html).

“Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Former President Donald J. Trump told Time magazine in an interview published Tuesday morning that if elected in November, he would deploy the U.S. military to detain and deport migrants, hedged on the possibility of political violence after the 2024 election and said he would permit states to decide whether to prosecute those who violate abortion bans.”

“At one point, Mr. Trump told Time that he would be willing to deploy the military as part of an extreme deportation operation he has said he plans to conduct if elected, and that he would be willing to bypass a law that prohibits using American troops against civilians.

“‘Well, these aren’t civilians,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘These are people that aren’t legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country.”

Unlike Democratic leaders in Washington, D.C., “Republicans want to cut benefits despite overwhelming opposition from the American people,” Altman said of federal lawmakers and the former president. Additionally, “Trump plans to sharply restrict immigration. This would harm Social Security by reducing the number of workers paying in.”

#6 – Facilitate efforts to make voting more difficult, especially for lower-income and black and Latino Americans

Trump and his allies and followers want to advance the interests of white Christian supremacists. Ari Berman refers to the rationale in his book Minority Rule. He writes:

“To entrench and hold onto power, shrinking conservative white minority is relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic feature of America’s political institutions while doubling down on a wide variety of antidemocratic tactics, such as voter suppression, election subversion, dark money, legislative power grabs, immigration restrictions, census manipulation, and the whitewashing of history” (p. 9).

#7 – Tax policy for the rich

Jake Johnson, writes on how tax rates for big corporations fell by nearly half after Trump cuts and, if re-elected, Trump plans to extend the cuts (https://commondreams.org/news/itep-trump-tax-law).

Johnson writes: “Large, profitable U.S. corporations have seen their effective tax rates fall by more than 40% since Republicans and their presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, Donald Trump, rammed through an unpopular law that they want to preserve and extend.

“According to a new report published Thursday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the tax rates paid by big and consistently profitable corporations dropped from 22% to 12.8% after the enactment of Trump’s tax law, which slashed the statutory corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.”

“ITEP’s analysis examines 296 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies that were consistently profitable between 2013 and 2021. Even as the companies’ combined profits surged by 44%, they ‘paid $240 billion less in taxes from 2018 to 2021 than they would have paid under the effective rates they paid before the Trump law,’ according to ITEP.”

#8 – Diminish the already fragile social safety net

Trump and the Republicans want to limit the reach of Social Security and Medicare. Jessica Corbett writes that these programs must be defended. (https://commondreams.org/news/social-security-medicare). The article was published on May 6, 2024.

Corbett points out that these programs are financially viable for another 10 years at least due to the robust economy and high rates of employment. But Trump and the Republicans are attacking them and want to reduce benefits and access.

Corbett refers to the annual trustee reports that show that, contrary to right-wing criticisms, “Social Security is projected to be fully funded until 2035, a year later than previously thought, while Medicare is expected to be fully funded until 2036, five years beyond the earlier projection.” Nevertheless, “Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee to face Biden in November, ‘proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare every year he was in office, he’s said repeatedly he would cut them, his allies openly plan to target them, and just this weekend he dismissed them as bribes,’ noted James Singer, a spokesperson for the Democrat’s campaign.

“‘Let’s be clear, Donald Trump will steal the hard-earned Social Security and Medicare benefits Americans have been paying into their entire lives and he’ll use it to fund tax cuts for rich people like him,’ Singer warned. ‘President Biden keeps his promises. He has and will continue to protect Social Security and Medicare from MAGA Republican efforts to cut them—Donald Trump won’t.’”

Corbett continues.

“Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, said Monday that ‘current and future American retirees should feel confident about both Medicare and Social Security, which [are] stronger due to the robust economy under President Biden. But the future of these earned benefit programs depends on who is elected this fall—both as president and to Congress.’

“Fiesta highlighted that Biden’s latest budget ‘calls for strengthening’ the programs whereas Trump recently said that ‘there is a lot you can do… in terms of cutting’ them and ‘the Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes around 80% of House Republicans, stands ready to make cuts as well.’”

Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, also asserted that “Congress must act NOW to strengthen Social Security for the 67 million Americans who depend on it. We cannot afford to wait to take action until the trust fund is mere months from insolvency, as Congress did in 1983.”

According to Richtman:

Democrats in Congress “strongly support revenue-side solutions that would bring more money into the trust fund by demanding that the wealthy pay their fair share. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) has offered legislation that would do just that—by maintaining the current payroll wage cap (currently set at $168,600), but subjecting wages $400,000 and above to payroll taxes, as well—and dedicating some of high earners’ investment income to Social Security.”

“‘The Social Security 2100 Act is co-sponsored by nearly 200 House Democrats and would improve benefits across the board while extending solvency until 2066, while Donald Trump and House Republicans continue their calls to slash Americans’ hard-earned benefits!’ Larson said.”

“Social Security is the greatest anti-poverty program in history, and ensuring its solvency for future generations has been one of my top priorities in Congress,” Boyle said Monday, promoting the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, his bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). “Unfortunately, while Democrats and President Biden want to protect Social Security and Medicare, Republicans have made clear they want to tear them down.”

#9 – Support efforts by the states to virtually end legal access to reproductive health care and abortion

The Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022, giving the anti-abortion movement added vigor and justification to fight for further restrictions on access to abortion. The ruling allows states decide on whether to outright ban abortion. Anti-abortion activists want more, a national ban on abortion. Trump wants the individual states to decide, or so he says. But he also wants to placate the right-wing evangelicals, a crucial constituency, who would like to eliminate or severely limit access to abortion and have Trump, if president, issue a ban on abortion.

Public opinion is opposed to abortion bans

The anti-abortion movement has momentum in many states, but public opinion today is on the other side, supporting “choice.” Steven Shepard looks at some of the evidence (https://politico.com/news/2023/04/08/republican-party-abortion-trap-00091088).

He refers to a 2022 national exit poll that found “29 percent of voters believed abortion should be ‘legal in all cases,’ while another 30 percent thought it should be ‘legal in most cases.’ That left 26 percent who thought it should be ‘illegal in most cases and only 10 percent who said it should be illegal in all cases.’” That is,

“roughly six-in-10 voters supporting legal abortion in most cases — with the median voter supporting some restrictions — and just over a third who want it to be entirely or mostly illegal.” Another 2022 midterm exit poll in Wisconsin found

“a combined 63 percent of Wisconsin voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 34 percent thought it should be illegal in all or most cases.”

Republicans want to portray “Democrats as too permissive, willing to support ‘abortion on demand, for virtually any reason, up until the moment of birth,’ according to a press release from the Republican National Committee on Thursday [April 6, 2023].

“‘But” Shepard points out, ‘those attacks are largely falling flat. President Joe Biden has said repeatedly he supports the Roe v. Wade framework, which allowed states to impose modest restrictions on abortion later in pregnancies. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 1 percent of abortions in 2020 occurred after 20 weeks of pregnancy,” that is, after 5 months of pregnancy.”

#10 – Encourage easy access to gun ownership

The argument for gun regulation rests most fundamentally on the premises that the ownership of guns should be regulated, and that gun ownership is not an absolute, unlimited right of citizenship. It is commonsense for most people who think about gun rights and control to exclude children, those with violent criminal records, the certified mentally ill who are a danger to others, from the right to gun ownership, and, more controversially, to limit the places at which people can have weapons.

However, for decades since the early 1970s, opponents of gun regulation, most prominently the National Rifle Association (NRA), have used their political influence to foster a one-sided interpretation of the Second Amendment to keep the federal government and many states and local governments from adequately regulating access to guns (gun ownership) by private citizens. Trump is an outspoken supporter of the NRA and of maximum gun rights.

Meredith McGraw reports on Trump’s remarks at a meeting of the NRA on February 9, 2024 (https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/09/trump-promises-nra-that-if-elected-no-one-will-lay-a-finger-on-your-firearms-00140818). At the meeting, Trump promised that if elected “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” and he would roll back Biden-era gun restrictions. McGraw quotes Trump,

“‘Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,’ Trump said at the NRA’s Presidential Forum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

“The former president specifically said he would roll back the Biden administration’s ‘Zero-Tolerance’ policy that revokes federal licenses from firearm dealers that violate gun laws. And he said he would undo regulations on pistol braces, or stabilization devices that have also been used in gun massacres.”

“In a statement released ahead of Trump’s speech, John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety said, ‘With Trump recently telling Americans to ‘get over’ school shootings, we know what a second term would be like: The NRA would once again treat the White House like its clubhouse, and the bipartisan, life-saving progress we’ve made on gun safety will be in grave danger.’”

#11 – Violence against opponents may be necessary

Kenny Stancil cites research that “12 Million US Adults Think Violence Is Justified to Put Trump Back in White House” (https://commondreams.org/news/12-million-us-adults-think-violence-justified-to-restore-trump-presidency). The article was published on June 9, 2023. He writes,

“More than two years after the deadly January 6 insurrection, 12 million people in the United States, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe the use of violence is justified to restore former President Donald Trump to power, The Guardian reported Friday.”

“We’re heading into an extremely tumultuous election season,” Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor and CPOST director, told The Guardian. “What’s happening in the United States is political violence is going from the fringe to the mainstream.” [CPOST is the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats.]

“The CPOST survey conducted in April found that 20% of U.S. adults still believe ‘the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,’ down only slightly from the 26% who said so in 2021.

“‘What you’re seeing is really disturbing levels of distrust in American democracy, support for dangerous conspiracy theories, and support for political violence itself,’ Pape told The Guardian.”

“‘Once you have support for violence in the mainstream, those are the raw ingredients or the raw combustible material and then speeches, typically by politicians, can set them off,’ said Pape. ‘Or if they get going, speeches can encourage them to go further.’”

“Several right-wing candidates who echoed Trump’s relentless lies about President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory lost in last year’s midterms. But more than 210 others—including at least two who participated in the January 6 rally that escalated into an attack on the U.S. Capitol—won congressional seats and races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, underscoring the extent to which election denialism is now entrenched in the GOP and jeopardizes U.S. democracy for the foreseeable future.”

“The research center’s most recent survey found that ‘almost 14%—a minority of Americans, but still a significant number—believe the use of force is justified to ‘achieve political goals that I support,’ the newspaper reported. More specifically, 12.4% believe it’s justified to restore the federal right to abortion, 8.4% believe it’s justified to ensure members of Congress and other government officials do the right thing, 6.3% think it’s justified to preserve the rights of white Americans, and 6.1% believe it’s justified to prevent the prosecution of Trump.’”

“More optimistically, the survey found that over 77% of U.S. adults want Republicans and Democrats in Congress to issue a joint statement condemning any political violence.

“‘There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to political violence in the United States,’ Pape remarked, ‘but it is not mobilized.’

Meanwhile, the country is awash with privately owned firearms, according to political scientists Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware in their book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. They cite the research of American University scholar Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who estimates “at least 75,000 to 100,000 individuals are actively involved with white supremacist extremist groups, in addition to the 15,000 to 20,000 people who belong to militia organizations comprising some three hundred different groups….” (pp. 226-227).

Concluding thoughts

Trump wants power and, as the record indicates, will do anything to obtain it. The point is that to understand well what he and his supporters want and to reveal their anti-democratic intentions and subversive tactics. Such knowledge and understanding may not in the end by sufficient to prevent an illiberal and violence-tolerant movement from destroying American democracy, but they are absolutely necessary to help rouse citizens to become informed and active, and at least vote to keep the anti-democrats out of government.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel calls for a “bold, populist, popular, and progressive domestic agenda” that is reflected in the 2025 Congressional Progressive Caucus’s “Progressive Proposition Agenda (https://thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-progressives-election-congress). The CPC platform “details reforms vital to our nation’s security. It lays out the next steps in addressing the climate crisis. It calls for reforms vital to democracy—including instituting same-day voter registration, ending partisan gerrymandering, and curbing the role of Big Money in our politics. It would eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, ban congressional stock ownership and trading, and strengthen judicial ethics, while boldly demanding expansion of the number of Supreme Court justices.

“It also lays out a populist agenda to counter the choke hold of wealth and entrenched interests on our political economy—expanded anti-trust measures, higher taxes on stock buybacks, a minimum tax for the rich, and a crackdown on private equity and hedge fund rapaciousness, particularly in healthcare and housing.”

In 2024, the stakes are far greater than saving the Republic from Trump and his reactionary agenda. If Democrats take back the House, expand their majority in the Senate and keep the White House, reforms that can make a fundamental difference in the lives of all, especially poor and working people, are possible. In 1944, amid a war abroad, Franklin Roosevelt called for an economic bill of rights as central to the postwar recovery. With the Proposition Agenda, the CPC offers bold steps towards fulfilling that goal. And the CPC’s growing power adds credibility to that promise.

Too little action on the climate crisis

Bob Sheak, April 21, 2024

Introduction

The best evidence on the climate crisis indicates that emissions from fossil fuels continues to increase, global temperatures continue going up, the temperature of the oceans rises at an unprecedented rate, more and more communities across the earth suffer debilitating heat levels, and there are rising levels of suffering, massive emigration, and environmental degradation.

Military policies exacerbate the climate crisis

Wars and militarized foreign policies compound the problem.

(See, for example, Barry Sanders” book, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, or Neta C. Crawford’s The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War.)

Melissa Garriga considers the effects of war on the climate crisis in an article published on April 20, 2024, and titled “Don’t Let Warmongers Greenwash their Ecocide This Earth Day” (https://commondreams.org/opinion/ecocide-2667821672). Note that there is, by and large, bipartisan support for increasing the military budget. Here’s some of what Garriga writes.

“As Earth Day approaches, prepare for the annual spectacle of U.S. lawmakers donning their environmentalist hats, waxing poetic about their love for the planet while disregarding the devastation their actions wreak. The harsh reality is that alongside their hollow pledges lies a trail of destruction fueled by military aggression and imperial ambitions, all under the guise of national security.

“Take Gaza, for instance. Its once-fertile farmland now lies barren, its water sources poisoned by conflict and neglect. The grim statistics speak volumes: 97% of Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption, leading to a staggering 26% of illnesses, particularly among vulnerable children. Israel’s decades-long colonial settler project and ethnic cleansing of Palestine have caused irrefutable damage to the land, air, and water, consequently contributing to the climate crisis. In fact, in the first two months of the current genocide campaign in Gaza, Israel’s murderous bombardment, which has killed nearly 35,000 people, also generated more planet-warming emissions than the annual carbon footprint of the world’s top 20 climate-vulnerable nations. Yet, despite these dire circumstances, U.S. lawmakers persist in funneling weapons to Israel, perpetuating a cycle of violence and environmental degradation.”

Garriga continues.

“All of this destruction to the environment and acceleration of the climate crisis happen silently under the veil of ‘national security,’ while discussions on how the environmental toll of war is the most significant national security threat are absent in D.C. While the threat of nuclear annihilation and civilian casualties rightfully dominate headlines, the ecological fallout remains an underreported tragedy. The Pentagon is the planet’s largest institutional emitter of fossil fuels; Its insatiable appetite for conflict exacerbates climate change and threatens ecosystems worldwide. To make matters worse, the U.S. government wants to fund this destruction to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year while poor and low-wealth communities worldwide bear the brunt of climate catastrophes with little to no resources to protect themselves.

“At the heart of this destructive cycle lies a perverse economic incentive, in which war becomes a lucrative business at the expense of both people and the planet. The narrative of GDP growth masks the actual cost of conflict, prioritizing financial profit over genuine progress in education, healthcare, and biodiversity. However, instead of war-economy metrics such as the GDP, we could embrace alternative metrics such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)that reckon with the actual toll of war on our world. We can shift from endless growth toward genuine well-being by valuing air quality, food security, and environmental sustainability.”

Partisan deadlock

When all is said and done, there are significant differences between Biden and the Democrats and Trump and the Republicans. Right-wing politicians in the U.S. and around the globe refuse to support or even identify changes that could, at least, increase the chances of slowing down the climate-crisis problem. Indeed, Trump and his followers reject or ignore the scientific and empirical evidence documenting the problem and want unhindered domestic use and export of fossil fuels with no significant government regulatory barriers.

Democrats, moderates, and leftists accept the mounting scientific evidence that the climate crisis is real and growing threat to humanity and life on earth generally and do offer relevant policies, though their policies, not always environmentally good, have not yet had the effect of reducing the emissions of fossil-fuel-related conduct and operations.

There are three parts to this post, considering (1) the evidence, (2) Trump’s denialism, and (3) Biden’s mixed results. Then there are concluding thoughts on what surveyed Americans think and how some are actively protesting the lack of sufficient government action to curtail the climate crisis.

#1 – The evidence on the rising climate crisis

The numbers

Bill McKibben considers the “numbers on climate” in an article published by Common Dreams on April 12, 2024 (https://commondreams.org/opinion/not-fast-enough-on-climate).

“At the most fundamental level, new figures last week showed that atmospheric levels of the three main greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—reached new all-time highs last year. Here’s how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the figures:

“While the rise in the three heat-trapping gases recorded in the air samples collected by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML) in 2023 was not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years, they were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade.

“The global surface concentration of C02, averaged across all 12 months of 2023, was 419.3 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 2.8 ppm during the year. This was the 12th consecutive year CO2 increased by more than 2 ppm, extending the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases during the 65-year monitoring record. Three consecutive years of CO2growth of 2 ppm or more had not been seen in NOAA’s monitoring records prior to 2014. Atmospheric CO₂ is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.”

McKibben continues.

“Entirely unsurprisingly, the planet’s temperature has also continued to rise. Temperature rise is not as smooth as the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, because other factors—El Niños, volcanoes, and so on—can superimpose themselves on top of the greenhouse gas emissions to push temperatures slightly higher or lower. But at the moment, everything is coming up very very hot. March was the hottest March ever recorded globally, according to European monitors. As The Guardian reported:

“This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58°C above pre-industrial levels.

“This, at least temporarily, exceeds the 1.5°C benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement but that landmark deal will not be considered breached unless this trend continues on a decadal scale.

Brett Wilkins also refers to the numbers in an article published on April 6, 2024

(https://commondreams.org/news/greenhouse-gas-emissions-266771709).

“NOAA said the three most important human-caused greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide—”continued their steady climb during 2023.”

“While the levels of these heat-trapping gases did not rise “quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years,” the figures ‘were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade.’

“Global surface CO2 concentrations averaged 419.3 parts per million (ppm) last year, an increase of 2.8 ppm. It was the 12th straight year in which worldwide CO2 concentrations rose by more than 2 ppm.

“Atmospheric methane—which while not as abundant as CO2 is up to 87 times more potent over a 20-year period—increased by 10 parts per billion (ppb) to 1,922.6 ppb, while nitrous oxide rose by 1 ppb to 336.7 ppb.”

According to NOAA:

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7°F higher than in pre-industrial times, and large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.

“About half of the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to date have been absorbed at the Earth’s surface, divided roughly equally between oceans and land ecosystems, including grasslands and forests. The CO2 absorbed by the world’s oceans contributes to ocean acidification, which is causing a fundamental change in the chemistry of the ocean, with impacts to marine life and the people who depend on [it]. The oceans have also absorbed an estimated 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.

“‘Methane’s decadal spike should terrify us,’ Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist who heads the Global Carbon Project—which tracks global emissions but wasn’t part of the NOAA effort—told NBC News.

“Fossil fuel pollution is warming natural systems like wetlands and permafrost,” Jackson added. “Those ecosystems are releasing even more greenhouse gases as they heat up. We’re caught between a rock and a charred place.”

The oceans are becoming hotter

Delger Erdenesanaa reports on relevant research for the New York Times, April 10, 2024 (https://nuytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/ocean-heat-records.html).

“The ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year. And so far, 2024 has continued 2023’s trend of beating previous records by wide margins. In fact, the whole planet has been hot for months, according to many different data sets.

“‘There’s no ambiguity about the data,’ said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. ‘So really, it’s a question of attribution.’”

“Last month [March 2024], the average global sea surface temperature reached a new monthly high of 21.07 degrees Celsius, or 69.93 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a research institution funded by the European Union.

“March 2024 continues the sequence of climate records toppling for both air temperature and ocean surface temperatures,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said in a statement this week.

Coral Reefs are dying

Catrin Einharn, writes that scientists find that rising ocean temperatures negatively affect the ability of coral reefs to survive

(https://nytimes.com/2024/04/15/climate/coral-reefs-bleaching.html).

“Top of Form

Bottom of Form

The world’s coral reefs are in the throes of a global bleaching event caused by extraordinary ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and international partners announced Monday.

“It is the fourth such global event on record and is expected to affect more reefs than any other. Bleaching occurs when corals become so stressed that they lose the symbiotic algae they need to survive. Bleached corals can recover, but if the water surrounding them is too hot for too long, they die.

“Coral reefs are vital ecosystems: limestone cradles of marine life that nurture an estimated quarter of ocean species at some point during their life cycles, support fish that provide protein for millions of people and protect coasts from storms. The economic value of the world’s coral reefs has been estimated at $2.7 trillion annually.

#2 -Trump’s denialism

Trump doubles down

Scott Waldman offers documentation on how Trump had been dismissive and increasingly willing to reject the scientific evidence (https://politico.com/news/2024/01/12/trump-second-term-climate-science-2024-00132289). While president, Trump “pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists and claimed — against all scientific evidence — that the Earth’s rising temperatures will ‘ start getting cooler.’”

A second term would be worse

Waldman expects that “a second Trump presidency to show less restraint.

“Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.

“‘The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA,’ said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser who is well known for his industry-backed attacks on climate science.

Trump celebrates Iowa caucus win

“In his first term, Milloy said, Trump surrounded himself with too many people who were part of Washington’s political class and resisted dismantling parts of the government. ‘A lot of the people he appointed were unfortunately weak,’ Milloy said.”

“But as the GOP front-runner, he’s gone back to alleging that human-caused global warming is fake, is baselessly blaming whale deaths on wind turbines and said last month that if elected he would be a ‘ dictator for one day’ — in part so he could ‘drill, drill, drill.’”

Trump and his advisers are planning for more fossil fuels

“Meanwhile,” Waldman writes, “many of his former staffers are building out a comprehensive plan to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels. And Trump allies expect that the former president would fill his next administration with officials who are even more hostile to efforts to address global warming.”

“Dana Fisher, director of American University’s Center for Environment, Community and Equity, called the change in tone both notable and dangerous — showing that Trump is no longer concerned about reaching moderate and independent voters with his approach to climate policy.”

Plans to avoid “mistakes” of Trump’s first presidency if reelected

“Trump’s first term was defined by rolling back and weakening climate policy.

He gave energy lobbyists key positions of power, spent four years attempting to dismantle fossil fuel regulations and withdrew from the Paris Agreement. His appointees fought to keep coal-burning power plants open — even when utilities wanted to close them on economic grounds — and opened an antitrust probe of automakers that had volunteered to meet stiff clean-air standards.”

“Dozens of conservative groups have banded together to write climate policy goals that would devastate virtually every regulation of the fossil fuel industry.

The Project 2025 effort, led by the Heritage Foundation and partially authored by former Trump administration officials, also would turn key government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, toward increasing fossil fuel production rather than public health protections.

“‘We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,’ Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, told E&E News for a story last year. ‘Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power Day 1 and deconstruct the administrative state.’”

May not be a winning election issue

“Seventy-three percent of U.S. adults want the government to do more to address climate change, according to a CNN poll released last month. Most want the government to cut emissions in half by 2030, including 50 percent of Republicans and 95 percent of Democrats, the poll found.”

Trump’s corporate support

Maxine Joselow and Josh Dawsey offer information on this point

(https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/12/oil-drilling-federal-lands-biden).

“On Thursday [April 11], Trump held a private dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Club and resort with about 20 oil executives from some of the country’s biggest firms, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Continental Resources, Chesapeake Energy and Occidental Petroleum, according to a guest list reviewed by The Washington Post. The effort was largely organized by Harold Hamm, an oil billionaire and Trump donor who runs Continental Resources and has helped recruit other donors to the Trump campaign.

“In recent months, Trump has also talked with energy executives about the need for fewer regulations on drilling and has asked the executives what they need to drill more oil, according to people who have heard his comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

U.S. continues to produce and consumer higher rates of fossil fuels

It’s not as though the U.S. was drilling less oil and gas. “The United States is now pumping more crude oil than any country in history, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The trend is inconvenient for Trump as he seeks to loosen regulations on the energy industry, and for Biden as he touts his ambitious climate agenda on the campaign trail.”

————-

#3 – Biden’s mixed results

Policy and spending initiatives are up

Oliver Milman reports that “Biden races to commit billions to climate action as election looms” (https://theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/11/biden-climate-change-policy-election).

“In recent weeks, large tracts of funding has been announced by the administration to help overcome some of the thorniest and esoteric challenges the world faces in driving down carbon pollution, seeding the promise of everything from the advent of zero-emissions concrete to low-pollution food production, including mac and cheese and ice-cream, to driving the uptake of solar panels and electric stoves in low-income households.

“‘We are seeing billions of dollars going into really tricky parts of the energy transition and if there’s momentum behind this we will be measuring the impacts many years in the future,’ said Melissa Lott, a professor at Columbia University’s climate school. ‘I would expect these investments to have knock-on impacts well outside the US’s borders.’

“The spending,” Milman writes, ‘is the most significant yet to come via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate bill, and the gusher of cash has a certain urgency.”

“Last week, $20bn was awarded under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a mechanism set up by the IRA, to non-profit groups [to green banks] that will provide low-interest loans for clean energy projects, such as installing solar panels on community centers, or heat pumps and induction stoves in households that couldn’t otherwise afford them.

Milman continues.

“The aim of these new ‘green banks’ will be to multiply this infusion – the EPA predicts that the private sector will increase the overall funding seven-fold to about $150bn, accelerating the replacement of polluting appliances with cleaner versions, greening public transit and boosting renewable energy going to the grid, particularly in low-income neighborhoods.

“Each small win will deliver new emissions cuts, culminating years beyond the next election term, as will the Biden administration’s other big recent announcement, of $6bn to drive the decarbonization of industrial processes such as making steel, creating aluminum, pouring concrete and even producing ice-cream and pasta.”

“The administration has also poured millions into climate adaptation. On Thursday, it announced $830m in grants to boost the resilience of transportation infrastructure to climate disasters and extreme weather. And last month, it awarded $120m to Indigenous tribes to prepare for climate impacts.”

Leasing reforms

This news is reported by Earthjustice and published on April 12, 2024 by Common Dreams (https://commondreams.org/newswire/earthjustice-applauds-overdue-reforms-to-federal-oil-and-gas-leasing-program).

“Today, the Biden administration unveiled long-awaited reforms that will hold the fossil fuel industry to more reasonable standards when operators seek to lease and develop oil and gas on public lands. The Bureau of Land Management’s new Oil and Gas Rule includes new provisions that will save taxpayers money, help ensure public lands are used for their highest value, and better protect communities and the environment.”

Maxine Joselow and Josh Dawsey also report on the “leasing” story (https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/12/oil-drilling-federal-lands-biden).

“A final rule from the Bureau of Land Management will require firms to purchase bonds of $150,000 per lease on federal lands, up from $10,000.”

“The Biden administration on Friday finalized a landmark rule that will require oil companies to pay at least 10 times more to drill on federal lands. The rule from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management represents the first comprehensive update to the federal oil and gas leasing program in more than 30 years, and is intended to generate more money for taxpayers.”

————–

Concluding thoughts

Despite laudable efforts by Biden and his administration, oil and gas production and consumption continue rising in the U.S. The evidence is compelling and has long aroused the concerns of scientists. Climate scientist Michael Mann concludes his recent book, Our Fragile Moment, as follows.

“Even under a business-as-usual scenario where we fail to build on climate policies already in place, the warming of the planet is unlikely to exceed 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit)….But at this level of warming, we can expect a lot of suffering, species extinction, loss of life, destabilization of societal infrastructure, chaos, and conflict.”

“That’s not a world in which we want to live, and it’s not a world that we want to leave behind for our children and grandchildren” (p. 240).

A majority of Americans, especially young adults, express concern about the climate crisis

While many in the public would not willingly sacrifice their economic positions to saving the planet, polls find that a majority of Americans have some worries. The Pew Research Center’s survey “of 8,842 U.S. adults conducted Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 2023, finds that 43% of Americans think climate change is causing a great deal or quite a bit of harm to people in the U.S. today. An additional 28% say it is causing some harm (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-read/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/#) ….

“Looking ahead, young adults ages 18 to 29 are especially likely to foresee worsening climate impacts: 78% think harm to people in the U.S. caused by climate change will get a little or a lot worse in their lifetime.”

“Despite widespread concern about future climate impacts there has been a slight decline in participation in forms of climate activism. The survey finds 21% of U.S. adults say they have participated in at least one of four climate-related activities in the last year, including donating money to a climate organization or attending a climate protest. This is down slightly from two years ago when 24% of Americans said they had participated in a climate-related activity.”

Other findings from Pew Research Center.

“…Americans are largely skeptical that climate activism builds public support for the issue or spurs elected officials to act. Just 28% think climate activism makes people more likely to support action on climate change and only 11% say it is extremely or very effective at getting elected officials to act on the issue.”

“Consistent with the slight decline in levels of climate activism, there has been no increase in personal concern on the issue in recent years. Overall, 37% say they personally care a great deal about the issue of climate change. This share is down 7 percentage points from 2018 and about the same as it was in 2016, the first time the Center asked the question.”

Partisan differences

The Pew research confirms that Republicans and Democrats have much different expectations for how climate change will impact their lives. “Just under half of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents expect to make no sacrifices in their everyday lives because of climate change. By comparison, 88% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expect to have to make at least minor sacrifices.”

“These partisan gaps are closely tied to differing expectations about national impacts: 86% of Democrats expect harms from climate change in the U.S. to get worse during their lifetime; just 37% of Republicans say the same.”

There are climate activists who are concerned about too little government action

As one example, Jessica Corbett reports on Sunrise protesters (https://commondreams.org/news/sunrise-movement-los-angeles). Here’s some of what she writes in this article published on April 15, 2024.

“Six young activists were arrested outside Vice President Kamala Harris’ Los Angeles home on Monday while calling on the White House to declare a climate emergency, according to the youth-led Sunrise Movement.””

“‘My generation is spending our teenage years organizing for climate action because people like Kamala Harris have failed us,’ said Adah Crandall, one of the activists arrested after blockading the street outside her California residence overnight.

“‘We’re ready to do whatever it takes to win a climate emergency declaration—we will camp out overnight, we will get arrested, we will mobilize our peers by the thousands to win the world we deserve,’ the 18-year-old continued. ‘The Biden administration are cowards for not standing with young people.’”

“The White House has been praised for climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act as well was a recent pause on liquefied natural gas exports. However, the president has also faced criticism for continuing fossil fuel lease sales, backing the Mountain Valley Pipeline and Willow oil project, and skipping last year’s United Nations summit.

“Just last week, the Biden administration approved a license for a pipeline company to build the nation’s largest offshore oil terminal off of Texas’ Gulf Coast—despite surging fossil fuel pollution that is pushing up global temperatures.

“Sunrise last week condemned the approval as ‘very disappointing’ and also joined with Campus Climate Network and Fridays for Future USA to announce Earth Day demonstrations intended to pressure Biden to declare a climate emergency.”

An international movement

Olivia Rosane writes on a “Youth Lead Global Strike Demanding ‘Climate Justice Now’ (https://www.commondreams.org/news/youth-strike-climate-justice). The article was published on April 19, 2024. Here’s some of what Rosane reports.

“Ahead of Earth Day, young people around the world are participating in a global strike on Friday to demand ‘climate justice now.’

“In Sweden, Greta Thunberg joined hundreds of other demonstrators for a march in Stockholm; in Kenya, participants demanded that their government join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; and in the U.S., youth activists are kicking off more than 200 Earth Day protests directed at pressing President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.”

“The first global youth climate strike, which grew out of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strikes, took place on March 15, 2019. Since then, both emissions and temperatures have continued to rise, with 2023 blowing past the record for hottest year. Yet, according to Climate Action Tracker, no country has policies in place that are compatible with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.”

“The global strikes are taking place under the umbrella of Friday’s for Future, which has three main demands: 1. limit temperature rise to 1.5°C, 2. ensure climate justice and equity, and 3. listen to the most accurate, up-to-date science.”

“Participants shared videos and images of their actions on social media.

European strikers also gathered in London, Dublin, and Madrid.

In Asia, Save Future Bangladesh founder Nayon Sorkar posted a video from the Meghna River on Bangladesh’s Bola Island, where erosion destroyed his family’s home when he was three years old.”

Also in Bangladesh, larger crowds rallied in Dhaka, Sylhet, Feni, and Bandarban for climate action.

“Young climate activists in Bandarban demand a shift to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels,” said Sajjad Hossain, the divisional coordinator for Youthnet for Climate Justice Bangladesh. “We voiced urgency for sustainable energy strategies and climate justice. Let’s hold governments accountable for a just transition!”

“In Kenya, young people struck specifically to demand that the government sign on to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“As a member of the Lake Victoria community, the importance of the treaty in our climate strikes cannot be overstated,” Rahmina Paullette, founder of Kisumu Environmental Champions and a coordinator for Fridays for Future Africa, said in a statement. “By advocating for its implementation, we address the triple threat of climate change, plastic pollution, and environmental injustice facing our nation.”

“Halting fossil fuel expansion not only safeguards crucial ecosystems but also combats the unjust impacts of environmental degradation, ensuring a more equitable and sustainable future for our community and the wider Kenyan society,” Paullette said.

“In the U.S., Fridays for Future NYC planned for what they expected to be the largest New York City climate protest since September 2023’s March to End Fossil Fuels. The action will begin at Foley Square at 2:00 pm Eastern Time, at which point more than 1,000 students and organizers are expected to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to rally in front of Borough Hall.

“‘The strike’ is part of a national escalation of youth-led actions in more than 200 cities and college campuses around the country, all calling on President Biden to listen to our generation and young voters, stop expanding fossil fuels, and declare a climate emergency that meaningfully addresses fossil fuels, creating millions of good paying union jobs, and preparing us for climate disasters in the process, Fridays for Future NYC said in a statement.”

“The coalition is planning events leading up to Monday including dozens of Earth Day teach-ins beginning Friday to encourage members of Congress to pressure Biden on a climate emergency and Reclaim Earth Day mobilizations on more than 100 college and university campuses to demand that schools divest from and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry.”

War over Peace

Bob Sheak, April 6, 2024

There was a terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. This took place in context of long-standing Israeli control of Gaza’s borders and illegal land takeovers in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s response has been to use massive bombing and ground forces in Gaza and to increase expansion of settlements in the West Bank. (For historical background, see Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.)

Amid the unfolding and devastating war carried out by Israel in Gaza, the Biden administration has continued to support Israel politically and militarily. Though, as of April 4, President Biden is finally warning Netanyahu that the killing of civilians in Gaza must stop. Up to this time, however, Biden and his administration have failed to have Israel allow meaningful-levels of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza or to institute at least a temporary cease fire. Hence, there is rampant hunger, even starvation, over 33,000 Gazans have been killed, over 70,000 wounded, and buildings, hospitals, and communities have been destroyed.

—————–

Israel’s brutal war – some effects

Nils Adler and Farah Najjar report for Aljazeera on the death and destruction wrought by Israeli forces on Gaza, bearing in mind that the conditions for the 2.3 million people living in Gaza grow increasingly desperate (https://2024/4/3/israels-war-on-gaza-live-condemnation-of-israel-over-aid-worker-killings).

Israel continues to block the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from bringing food and other aid into northern Gaza, the aid agency said.
Worldwide condemnation rises as Israel’s military stands accused of deliberately targeting charity staff bringing food to thousands of Gaza Palestinians facing imminent famine.
A UN-World Bank report estimates the infrastructure damage in the Gaza Strip at $18.5bn in the first four months of Israel’s devastating assault.
UN Secretary-General Guterres says the Israeli attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen staff brings the number of aid workers killed in Gaza to 196 – including more than 175 UN staff. “This is unconscionable.”
At least 32,975 Palestinians have been killed and 75,577 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s October 7 attack stands at 1,139 with dozens still held captive.

U.S. Complicity in Israel’s “Plausible” Genocide

Daniel Warner writes on U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocidal attacks on Gaza

(https://counterpunch.org/2024/03/29/u-s-complicity-in-israels-plausible-genocide).

Warner quotes Representative Ocasio-Cortez, a proponent for a cease fire in this war.

“‘Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing,’ Representative Ocasio-Cortez said on the floor of the House of Representatives on March 22. ‘We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer.’ ‘Facilitating mass killing’ and ‘responsibility’ could include United States legal complicity.” This is the position taken by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

“The ICJ ruled on January 26 that Israel was committing ‘plausible genocide.’ In addition, Warner continues, “in a March 25 Report to the Human Rights Council by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese wrote in the Summary: ‘By analyzing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.’”

The Oxford dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

The Genocide Convention

Voker Turk, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, writes that the “Genocide Convention is the first human rights treaty in the history of the United Nations, adopted on the eve of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“Seventy-five years later, the two foundational agreements remain closely interlinked.

“Despite the lessons of the Holocaust, and the ‘never again’ moment in history that led to the Convention, genocide occurred again and again ever since, inflicting intolerable harm and suffering. Preventing genocide, and bringing its perpetrators to account before all humanity, are imperative to fulfil our human rights.

“The Convention calls on all States, and all of us, to maintain vigilance, and push for action to prevent genocide, everywhere. In reality, genocide is never unleashed without warning. It is always the culmination of serious human rights violations: identifiable patterns of systematic discrimination – based on race, ethnicity, religion or other characteristics – which have been ignored.

“The prohibition of genocide is not an ordinary rule of international law: it is jus cogens – an overriding fundamental principle, at all times and without exception, for all humanity.

Turk urges “all States that have not yet done so, to ratify and accede to this most fundamental of treaties, to protect our common humanity, and advance our universal human rights.”

Complicity

Daniel Warner (cited above) points out that there are two types of violations to the Genocide Convention.

“The first violation is that the prevention of genocide is a legal obligation. If a state has knowledge that genocide is being committed and does nothing, if it has knowingly not prevented genocide, the state is complicit. The duty does not require a finding that genocide is occurring; rather, awareness of a serious risk of genocide places an obligation on all States to take whatever action possible and necessary to prevent its occurrence or continuation.” The ICJ’s decision on “plausible genocide” makes this point relevant for the United States as does the Report of the Special Rapporteur.

The second type of violation “describes a positive act of commission rather than the negative act of not preventing. If a state continues to support the state committing genocide…the supporting state may be held complicit in genocide’s commission.” The United States continues to supply weapons to Israel after October 7. quietly approving and delivering “more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing,” John Hudson wrote on March 6, 2024, in The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times confirmed this account of the Congressional briefing in similar reports.”

How, Warner asks, does the United States justify its continuing supply of weapons to Israel in violation of the Genocide Convention? “The U.S. Arms Export Control Act does permit exceptions for arms sales to close allies. The United States uses this loophole to continue sending weapons to Israel. But using this loophole to continue sending weapons does not exonerate complicity in genocide. In the least, it is hypocritical. Using the Arms Export Control Act ‘doesn’t just seem like an attempt to avoid technical compliance with US arms export law, it’s an extremely troubling way to avoid transparency and accountability on a high-profile issue,’ according to Ari Tolany, director of the security assistance monitor at the Centre for International Policy think tank….”

Biden supports the Israeli war on Palestinians, while ineffectively pushing for less Israeli violence and more humanitarian aid

Meanwhile, the Biden administration keeps sending arms to Israel

John Hudson reports on this issue (https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/29/us-weapons-israel-gaza-war). Here’s some of what he writes.

“The Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

“The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter. The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”

“The development underscores that,” as Hudson reports, “while rifts have emerged between the United States and Israel over the war’s conduct, the Biden administration has viewed weapons transfers as off-limits when considering how to influence the actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself,” said a White House official. “Conditioning aid has not been our policy.”

An Obscenity

Brett Wilkins writes on March 29, 2024, on the “obscenity” of the ongoing U.S. weapons transfers to Israel (https://commondreams.org/news/us-military-aid-to-israel-2667634511).

“Despite growing worldwide calls for an arms embargo, the Biden administration in recent days has approved the transfer of billions of dollars’ worth of new weapons shipments to Israel, including warplanes and 2,000-pound bombs that have been dropped on densely populated areas of Gaza with devastating results.

“The Washington Post reported Friday that the administration has ‘quietly’ authorized arms shipments including more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, as well as 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines worth approximately $2.5 billion. The transfers are the latest of more than 100 arms shipments authorized by the Biden administration since the October 7 attacks on Israel.

“‘Quietly,'” Palestinian American writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer scoffed in response to the report. ‘This is cowardly from the administration. If you are going to be full backers of genocide, own it. We see you and history sees you as well.’

“‘It is scary to think of the world U.S. support for Israel is creating. A world with no rules, no limits in war, where norms don’t exist, and where genocide is supportable,’ he added. ‘Good luck getting anyone to listen to you about international law after this.’”

According to the Post:

“The 2,000-pound bombs, capable of leveling city blocks and leaving craters in the earth 40 feet across and larger, are almost never used any more by Western militaries in densely populated locations due to the risk of civilian casualties.”

As of March 29, 2024, after 175 days of the war, 32,600 Gaza residents had been killed and over 75,000 wounded.

On April 4, 2024, Gaza’s health authorities say about 33,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, around 40 percent of them children, with thousands more bodies lost under rubble not recovered. More than 70,000 have been wounded, meaning around 5% of the population has been killed or injured, not counting deaths from hunger, unsanitary conditions and the collapse of health care (https://reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-war-after-six-months-what-are-the-issues-now-2024-04-04).

The Biden administration supports Israel at the UN Security Council

Marjorie Cohn considers the Biden administration support of Israel at the U.N. in an article published on Truthout on March 26 2024

(https://truthout.org/articles/israel-remains-intent-on-genocide-despite-world-court-orders).

“Israel is continuing its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza and hindering humanitarian relief efforts despite specific orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), or the World Court, to refrain from these very actions.”

Cohn continues. “On January 26, in response to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the ICJ ordered the following provisional measures be taken:

Israel shall prevent the commission of all genocidal acts, especially (a) killing Palestinians in Gaza; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza; (c) deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza;

Israel shall immediately ensure that its military does not commit any of the acts listed above and it should

punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
immediately enable urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza;
prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence; and
submit a report to the ICJ on all measures taken to carry out this order within one month.
Since the ICJ issued the order, Israel has consistently flouted its mandate.

Cohn adds: “One month after the ICJ’s ruling, Human Rights Watch reported that, “Israel continues to obstruct the provision of basic services and the entry and distribution within Gaza of fuel and lifesaving aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes and include the use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. Fewer trucks have entered Gaza and fewer aid missions have been permitted to reach northern Gaza in the several weeks since the ruling than in the weeks preceding it….”

Famine

Cohn writes: “‘The Israeli government is starving Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, putting them in even more peril than before the World Court’s binding order,” said Omar Shakir, who is Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. ‘The Israeli government has simply ignored the court’s ruling, and in some ways even intensified its repression, including further blocking lifesaving aid.’”

“On March 18, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s leading tracker of humanitarian crises, reported that a state of famine is ‘imminent’ in Gaza unless there is an immediate ceasefire and full access granted to protect civilians; provide food, water and medicine; and restore health, water, energy and sanitation services.”

South Africa Asks the ICJ to Order Additional Measures

“In light of Israel’s impending ground offensive in Rafah, South Africa returned to the ICJ on February 12 and requested additional provisional measures, according to Cohn. South Africa noted that Rafah [in southern Gaza] is generally home to 280,000 Palestinians. But as of February 12, 1.4 million people — more than half of Gaza’s population, about half of whom are children — were living there, predominantly in makeshift tents.

“Pursuant to Israeli military evacuation orders, these people fled to Rafah from their homes and areas that had been largely destroyed by Israel. The International Committee of the Red Cross said there is ‘no option’ for them.

On February 16, the ICJ refused to order additional provisional measures. But the court quoted UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who said that a large-scale assault against Rafah ‘would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences.’ The court concluded: “This perilous situation demands immediate and effective implementation of the provisional measures indicated by the Court in its Order of 26 January 2024, which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah, and does not demand the indication of additional provisional measures.”

South Africa presses its case against Israel’s war

On March 6, as the slaughter continued, South Africa once again returned to the ICJ and requested additional provisional measures “in order urgently to ensure the safety and security of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, including over a million children.” South Africa asked the court to order: “All participants in the conflict must ensure that all fighting and hostilities come to an immediate halt, and that all hostages and detainees are released immediately.

“South Africa also urged the court to order that Israel immediately and effectively ‘enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza.’ The measures South Africa requested would require Israel to (a) immediately suspend its military operations in Gaza; (b) lift its blockade of Gaza; (c) rescind all other existing measures and practices that directly or indirectly obstruct the access of Palestinians in Gaza to humanitarian assistance and basic services; and (d) ensure the provision of adequate and sufficient food, water, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene, sanitation requirements and medical aid.”

The ICJ has not yet ruled on South Africa’s March 6 request for additional provisional measures.

Israel attacks aid workers

On April 1, 2024, as reported by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, Israel attacked a World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy with three separate missile strikes while on a so-called “deconflicted” route in Gaza, killing seven of the aid group’s workers as they coordinated the delivery of hundreds of tons of food (https://democracynow.org/2024/4/4/israel_is_wielding_starvation_as_a). They add,

“The world-renowned chef José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen, who has worked in many conflict zones….said the convoy had coordinated their route with the Israeli military. He told Reuters, ‘They were target[ed] systematically, car by car…we were targeted deliberately, nonstop, until everybody was dead in this convoy.’”

“Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a timeline of the attack, describing at least three missile strikes. After the first strike, Haaretz reported, ‘some of the passengers were seen leaving the car after it was hit and switching to one of the other two…seconds later, another missile hit their car.’ Then, ‘the third car in the convoy approached, and the passengers began to transfer to it the wounded who had survived the second strike in order to get them out of danger. But then a third missile struck them.’”

“‘Of course,’ Goodman and Monihan continue, ‘these are not the only aid workers killed so far in Gaza. Jamie McGoldrick, the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, stated, As of 20 March, at least 196 humanitarians had been killed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since October 2023. This is nearly three times the death toll recorded in any single conflict in a year…There is no safe place left in Gaza.”

“The vast majority of those killed were Palestinians who worked for UNRWA, the UN’s principal relief agency in Gaza. +972 Magazine reported this week that the Israeli army has been using AI-driven targeting systems, one called ‘Lavender’ and another called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ that ‘systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present. Thus, entire families are wiped out.’”

Some context: Israel control and repression of Palestinians is decades old

Phyllis Bennis reviews evidence on the relevance of Israeli Apartheid in creating the repressive conditions under which Palestinians have lived in an article for In These Times, Oct 12, 2023 (https://inthesetimes.com/article/israel-palestine-apartheid-occupation-war-seige).

Bennis argues this: “The only answer to the horrifying violence is to change the conditions from which it sprang. The first step is an immediate cease-fire.

“The violence in Gaza and Israel is bringing horrifying new levels of human suffering to both Israelis and Palestinians.

“Both sides have committed heinous violations of international law, and all attacks on civilians must be condemned. But if we’re serious about preventing such horrors in the future, we have to go beyond condemnation.

“We can’t understand how we got here — or how to end the crisis — until we grapple with the immensity of Palestinian suffering. And for us in the United States, a big part of the equation means confronting the role our government and tax dollars play in enabling that oppression to continue.”

Bennis continues. “Since 2007, Gazans have lived under siege, prohibited from leaving their open air prison by a high-security militarized wall and platoons of Israeli soldiers.

“Well before the latest escalation, the transit of most goods was banned. Gazans couldn’t get construction materials to repair the apartment blocks, power plants, water treatment facilities, hospitals, school, mosques and churches that Israel bombed repeatedly — in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021.

“Emergency medical permits were often denied, leaving many Gazans to die without care.

“Electricity was already limited. A 72-year-old woman in Gaza told a reporter last January, ‘It is hard to imagine, but we used to experience 24 hours of electricity each day in Gaza; now we are lucky if we get six.’

“Water was already unavailable except by expensive purchases from Israeli water companies. And food has long been scarce — by the age of two, 20% of Gaza’s children are already stunted.

Now, Bennis reports, the Israeli war is causing even worse outcomes.

“On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called for a ‘total siege’ of Gaza. ‘No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,’ he said. For Gaza’s already impoverished and malnourished population, that’s not just collective punishment — it’s genocide.”

“Hospitals will be unable to treat patients. Families will starve or die of thirst.

Gallant is transforming an existing long-term risk of early death into an immediate, lethal threat. It’s a policy consciously and specifically designed to kill innocent children, babies, elders — everyone.”

“For decades, Palestinian resistance has taken overwhelmingly non-violent forms, including the Great March of Return in 2018-2019, a peaceful Gaza protest that was met with overwhelming lethal violence by Israeli forces. But the world didn’t hear — or if it heard, it didn’t answer. When the UN warned in 2012 and 2015 that by 2020 Gaza would be ‘unlivable’ without a ‘herculean effort’ by the international community, the world didn’t respond.

“This time the resistance took a violent form, including Hamas targeting civilians in horrifying ways that are illegal under international law. Those illegitimate acts must be condemned. But if we’re serious about preventing violence — all violence — we need to remember they didn’t come out of nowhere.”

Bennis continues. “We need to change the conditions from which this brutality sprang. Sending more bombs, warplanes, guns and bullets won’t solve the problem. We’ve been providing Israel billions of our tax dollars—supplying about 20% of Israel’s entire military budget—for years. And we’ve done it without putting any conditions on an Israeli military that’s enforced a brutal siege and is indiscriminately bombing Gaza today.

“That must end. We also need to stop protecting Israel from being held accountable in the International Criminal Court, and we need to stop vetoing virtually every UN resolution criticizing Israeli violations of human rights.

“We need an immediate cease-fire right now. And we need to hold our own government accountable — which includes stopping Washington’s enabling of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Israel’s apartheid regime

Israel’s 55-year occupation of Palestinian Territory is rooted in an Israeli enforced apartheid system. This is the basic point made by Michael Lynk for the UN, March 25, 2022 (https://ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-year-occupation-palestinian-territory-apartheid-un-human-rights).

A UN expert, Michael Lynk, called today on the international community to accept and adopt the findings in his current report, echoing recent findings by Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations, that apartheid is being practiced by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.

“There is today in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system that privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” said Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.

“Living in the same geographic space, but separated by walls, checkpoints, roads and an entrenched military presence, are more than three million Palestinians, who are without rights, living under an oppressive rule of institutional discrimination and without a path to a genuine Palestinian state that the world has long promised is their right.

“Another two million Palestinians live in Gaza, described regularly as an ‘open-air prison’, without adequate access to power, water or health, with a collapsing economy and with no ability to freely travel to the rest of Palestine or the outside world.”

The Special Rapporteur said that a political regime which so intentionally and clearly prioritizes fundamental political, legal and social rights to one group over another within the same geographic unit on the basis of one’s racial-national-ethnic identity satisfies the international legal definition of apartheid.

“Apartheid is not, sadly, a phenomenon confined to the history books on southern Africa,” he said in his report to the Human Rights Council. “The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court came into law after the collapse of the old South Africa. It is a forward-looking legal instrument which prohibits apartheid as a crime against humanity today and into the future, wherever it may exist.”

Lynk said that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory has been deliberately built with the intention of enduring facts on the ground – primarily through settlements and barricades – to demographically engineer a permanent, and illegal, Israeli sovereign claim over occupied territory, while confining Palestinians in smaller and more confined reserves of disconnected land.

This has been accomplished in part through a long-standing series of inhuman(e) acts by the Israeli military towards the Palestinians that have been integral to the occupation, he said. Lynk points to arbitrary and extra-judicial killings, torture, the denial of fundamental rights, an abysmal rate of child deaths, collective punishment, an abusive military court system, periods of intensive Israeli military violence in Gaza and home demolitions.

Lynk also refers to a number of recent reports and opinions issued by respected Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations that have come to the same conclusion on the practice of apartheid by Israel. He added that leading international personalities – including former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor and former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair – have also all called this apartheid.

The Special Rapporteur said the international community bears much responsibility for this present state of affairs. “For more than 40 years, the UN Security Council and General Assembly have stated in hundreds of resolutions that Israel’s annexation of occupied territory is unlawful, its construction of hundreds of Jewish settlements are illegal, and its denial of Palestinian self-determination breaches international law,” he said.

“To end the practice of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory, the Special Rapporteur called on the international community to assemble an imaginative and vigorous menu of accountability measures to bring the Israeli occupation and its apartheid practices in the occupied Palestinian territory to a complete end.”

Ecocide

Ecocide, Jake Johnson reports on March 29, 2024, is a ‘Critical Dimension of Israel’s Genocidal Campaign’ in Gaza (https://commondreams.org/news/ecocide-israel-gaza).

Analysis by a research group found that roughly 40% of Gaza land that was previously used for food production has been destroyed by Israeli forces.

The widespread destruction Israel’s military has inflicted on Gaza’s farmland and agricultural infrastructure amounts to a “deliberate act of ecocide,” according to a new investigation that uses satellite imagery to survey the extent of the damage.

“Released Friday ahead of Palestine’s Land Day, the analysis by the London-based research group Forensic Architecture (FA) shows that Israel’s ground forces—including tanks and other military vehicles—have advanced over half of Gaza’s farms and orchards, critical food sources that the besieged enclave’s population has worked tirelessly to cultivate in the face of decades of occupation.

“Since 2014, Palestinian farmers along Gaza’s perimeter have seen their crops sprayed by airborne herbicides and regularly bulldozed, and have themselves faced sniper fire by the Israeli occupation forces,” FA said. “Along that engineered ‘border,’ sophisticated systems of fences and surveillance reinforce a military buffer zone.”

Comparing satellite imagery from prior to Israel’s invasion and the present, FA found that roughly 40% of Gaza land that was previously used for food production has been destroyed by Israeli forces. Nearly a third of Gaza’s greenhouses have been demolished, according to the investigation.

“In total, Forensic Architecture has identified more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including farms and greenhouses, which have been destroyed since October 2023, often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks,” the group said. “This destruction has been most intense in the northern part of Gaza, where 90% of greenhouses were destroyed in the early stages of the ground invasion.”

“It is no surprise, then, that northern Gaza is currently experiencing famine conditions, with most of the population there at imminent risk of starvation as Israeli forces impede the flow of humanitarian assistance and continue their relentless bombing campaign.”

An expert panel convened by Stop Ecocide International has defined ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

Ecocide is officially recognized as a crime in at least 10 countries, including France, Ecuador, Russia, and Ukraine. Earlier this week, the European Council adopted new rules that include a provision criminalizing acts deemed “comparable to ecocide.”

FA’s analysis argues that Israel’s latest military assault on the Gaza Strip and the intentional targeting of the enclave’s agriculture is “a critical dimension of Israel’s genocidal campaign,” fueling both a humanitarian and environmental disaster.

“The targeted farms and greenhouses are fundamental to local food production for a population already under a decades-long siege,” the research group said. “The effects of this systematic agricultural destruction are exacerbated by other deliberate acts of deprivation of critical resources for Palestinian survival in Gaza.”

“These acts include the well-reported, catastrophic, and Israeli-made famine ongoing in Gaza, continued obstruction of humanitarian aid destined for Gaza, the destruction of medical infrastructure, the destruction beyond repair of other areas of civilian infrastructure, including bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, and cultural heritage sites,” the group added.

Concluding thoughts

The U.S. support for Israel with weapons and diplomatically goes back decades. Israel has subjugated the people of Gaza to periodic military onslaughts, ecocide, limited the ability of Gazans to leave this narrow strip of land, controlled access to food, water, health care resources, and left them increasingly desperate just to survive.

The current Israeli war in Gaza just makes their conditions ever-more life-threatening. These are well-known facts.

In offering unconditional support, the Biden administration is carrying out a long-standing morally corrupt U.S. pro-Israeli policy. It remains to be seen whether Biden will change any of this. If he goes on supporting this war, it does not bode well for his presidential campaign and there is a good chance that he will lose votes in the November presidential election.

At the same time, if Trump and the Republicans win in November, there will be no restraints on U.S. support of Israel’s genocidal policy. Julia Conley reports,

“U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg became the latest Republican lawmaker to openly call for the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, saying at a town hall that instead of sending humanitarian aid to starving civilians there, the U.S. should ‘get it over quick’ by dropping a nuclear bomb on the besieged enclave” (https://commondreams.org/news/tim-walberg-gaza).

What makes better sense is to support a cease fire and peace. This is the message that Ralph Nader and many others are sending to U.S. officials (https://commondreams.org/opinion/biden-give-peace-a-chance). Nader points to the large and active opposition to Biden’s policies.

“…public dissatisfaction with the dictatorial decision-making by the White House and the absence of congressional action is growing rapidly. More and more labor unions are now opposing Biden’s bombings, Jewish Americans working with Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now are brilliantly organizing demonstrations. Veterans for Peace’s 27 chapters around the country are in the streets peacefully demanding a cease-fire, cessation of weapons shipments, and major increases in humanitarian aid. They are mostly ignored by the corporate media, NPR, and PBS.

“Religious groups are beseechingly calling for peace. This week in the latest public letter, 140 global Christian leaders, organized by Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) called on President Biden ‘…to have the moral courage to end U.S. complicity in the ongoing violence and, instead, do everything in [his] power to…’ stop the ‘death and destruction’ in Palestine.”

The paradox of the white male working class

Bob Sheak, March 12, 2024

Introduction

One of the paradoxes of the U.S. political system is how an anti-democratic Trump can win the support of sections of the white male working class, despite Biden’s relatively strong economic policies in support of this class. The present post explores this paradox.

It may not make that much of a difference in the November presidential elections how these workers vote, but their vote totals are still significant because of the number of white male working class people. And it is worrisome that they are presently a major Trump constituency and have been influenced by his MAGA rhetoric, with its anti-immigrant, racist, anti-democratic, and pro-gun, rants as well as his strongman image. If the trends of the last few decades continue, whether Trump wins in November or not, their support of Trump appears, unfortunately, to be unwavering.

Biden’s State of the Union speech

In his State of the Union speech on March 7, President Biden spent some time lauding his record on jobs, on infrastructure and high-tech, and on a strong overall economy (https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/03/08/remarks-by-president-biden-in-state-of-the-union-address-3).

Here are some relevant excerpts.

“Folks, I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world.

“Fifteen million new jobs in just three years. A record. A record. (Applause.)

“Unemployment at 50-year lows. (Applause.)

“A record 16 million Americans are starting small businesses, and each one is a literal act of hope, with historic job growth and small-business growth for Black and Hispanics and Asian Americans. Eight hundred thousand new manufacturing jobs in America and counting. (Applause.)

The President continued.

“Where is it written we can’t be the manufacturing capital of the world? We are and we will. (Applause.)”

“On my watch, federal projects that you fund — like helping build American roads, bridges, and highways — will be made with American products and built by American workers — (applause) — creating good-paying American jobs. (Applause.)

“And thanks to our CHIPS and Science Act — (applause) — the United States is investing more in research and development than ever before. During the pandemic, a shortage of semiconductors, chips that drove up the price of everything from cell phones to automobiles — and, by the way, we invented those chips right here in America.

“Well, instead of having to import them, instead of — private companies are now investing billions of dollars to build new chip factories here in America — (applause) — creating tens of thousands of jobs, many of those jobs paying $100,000 a year and don’t require a college degree. (Applause.)

“In fact, my policies have attracted $650 billion in private-sector investment in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of jobs here in America. (Applause.)

“And thanks — and thanks to our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, 46,000 new projects have been announced all across your communities.”

An example of Biden’s proposed pro-worker legislation

Biden’s administration showed its pro-worker, pro-union stance early in his presidency.

At a presidential press briefing on March 9, 2021, President Biden introduced the
“Protecting the Right to Organize” (PRO) Act of 2021, strongly encouraging the
House to take up and pass the legislation and stating that it would be a major
step, if and when approved, “in dramatically enhancing the power of workers to
organize and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working
conditions” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases-2021/03/09/statement-by-the-president-joe-biden-on-the-house-taking-up-the-pro-act).

You can access the full proposal at https://joebiden.com/empowerworkers.

Biden believes that the conditions and prospects of ordinary workers starts with
rebuilding unions. He states: “The middle class built this country, and unions
built the middle class. Unions give workers a stronger voice to increase wages,
improve the quality of jobs and protect job security, protect against racial
and all other forms of discrimination and sexual harassment, and protect
workers’ health, safety, and benefits in the workplace. Unions lift up
workers, both union and non-union. They are critical to strengthening our
economic competitiveness.”

And there are almost “60 million Americans [who] would join a union if they get a
chance, but too many employers and states prevent them from doing so through
anti-union attacks.” There is the precedent of strong action by the federal
government in support of unionization, that is, the National Labor Relations
Act, passed in 1935 despite unified business opposition. The president pointed
out that the NLRA “said that we should encourage unions. The PRO Act
would take critical steps to help restore this intent.”

U.S. House of Representatives passes Pro Act

Don Gonyea reports on NPR that on March 13, 2021, House Democrats approved
the Pro Act by a 224-206 vote, “with five Republicans joining Democrats in
favor of it.” Union leaders supported it. The Senate did not (https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975259434/house-democrats-pass-bill-that-would-protect-worker-organizing-efforts).

Gonyea lists five provisions of the Pro Act.

“1. So-called right-to-work laws in more
than two dozen states allow workers in union-represented workplaces to
opt out of the union, and not pay union dues. At the same time, such workers
are still covered under the wage and benefits provisions of the union contract.
The PRO Act would allow unions to override such laws and collect dues from
those who opt out, in order to cover the cost of collective bargaining and
administration of the contract.

“2. Employer interference and influence in union elections would be forbidden.
Company-sponsored meetings — with mandatory attendance — are often used to
lobby against a union organizing drive. Such meetings would be illegal.
Additionally, employees would be able to cast a ballot in union organizing
elections at a location away from company property.

“3. Often, even successful union organizing drives fail to result in an agreement
on a first contract between labor and management. The PRO Act would remedy that by allowing newly certified unions to seek arbitration and mediation to settle
such impasses in negotiations.

“4. The law would prevent an employer from using its employee’s immigration statusagainst them when determining the termsof their employment.

“5. It would establish monetary penalties for companies and executives that violate
workers’ rights. Corporate directors and other officers of the company could
also be held liable.”

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, described the
Pro Act as a potential “game changer,” saying it would a major step in
correcting the “wages and wealth inequality, opportunity and inequality of
power.”

Biden’s record has little influence

Despite this record, Biden remains slightly behind Trump in recent polls, though they are hardly definitive since we are still many months away from the November presidential election. At the same time, white working-class workers are one of the groups that have been unrelenting and increasingly in support of Trump and his MAGA movement. We explore why this is so.

#1 – Recent polls

Rebecca Picciotto considers some of the recent polls (https://cnbc.com/2024/03/04/biden-may-be-losing-his-favorability-advantage-over-trump-new-polls-suggest.html).

“In four separate surveys released over the weekend by The New York Times/Siena College, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and CBS News/YouGov, Trump’s lead ranged from two points to five points among registered voters.

“The Fox News and Wall Street Journal surveys both showed Trump with a two point lead over Biden, 49-47 and 47-45, respectively. This was within their 2.5% margins of error.

“In the CBS News/YouGov poll, Trump led by four points, 52-48, outside the poll’s 2.8% margin of error.

“The Times/Siena survey showed a slightly larger lead for Trump of five points, 48-43, also outside the poll’s 3.5% error margin.

“Taken together, they paint a picture of a race that is extremely tight, but one where Trump’s advantage is solidifying.

“In addition to the hypothetical matchup lead, the surveys also hinted at a deeper shift in voter perceptions of two men who have been campaigning against one another on and off for the past five years: They suggest Biden may be losing is long-held likability edge over Trump.”

“Across all four polls, Trump had a higher favorability rating than Biden did with respondents, although some were within the surveys’ margins of error.”

“Biden has been fighting tooth and nail to convince voters that the economy’s post-Covid recovery is the result of his economic agenda, which aides have dubbed Bidenomics. But voters, still feeling the inflationary squeeze on their budgets, have yet to give Biden credit for the objectively strong economy, even as they get more optimistic about its trajectory.”

#2 -The pervasiveness of low-wage jobs

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, leader of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, offers “the true state of the union,” published in The Nation on March 7, 2024 (https://thenation.com/article/society/the-true-state-of-the-union). Here’s some of what he writes.

“No one can say that we haven’t seen good and important progress in the state of our union over the past four years. But we would betray the work of the people who’ve struggled to make that possible if we did not tell the truth about the injustices that continue to plague us.

“The true state of the union is not limited to one administration; it reflects the systemic reality that nearly a third of the workforce—52 million Americans—work for less than $15 an hour. Poverty wages, combined with a steep increase in cost of living, have left 135 million of our neighbors poor or low-income, even as unemployment is at a record low. This doesn’t simply mean that some of us are struggling to get by or learning to ‘do without’ luxuries we’d prefer. Poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death—more deadly than obesity, diabetes, or firearms. Low wages are killing people, but Congress has not acted to raise the minimum wage since 2009. We face a crisis of poverty; we know what could fix it, but our political leaders have failed to act.”

Barber continues.

“Poor and low-wage voters in the US today make up a third of the electorate; they are almost 40 percent of eligible voters in every swing state. As a group, these voters have historically participated at a rate 20 percent lower than their wealthier neighbors. If they were to fully engage, they are the single largest group of swing voters in the country.”

“America’s growing inequality over the past four decades has made us increasingly vulnerable to extremist attempts to divide the nation. When people know from their everyday experience that things aren’t working, it’s easy to play on our worst fears and pit Americans against one another. But at a moment when nearly half of the country is poor or low-income, it’s also possible for everyone who’s been left out and rejected to come together as a powerful force for transformative change. Since 2018, I have been working with the Poor People’s Campaign to mobilize a moral fusion movement of people from every race, religion, and region to change the narrative about what is possible in our public life. On March 2, thousands of us gathered at 32 statehouses and in the District of Columbia to declare that our votes are demands for a Third Reconstruction. We are launching 40 weeks of action in our communities to mobilize 15 million poor and low-income voters for this November’s election. Our political representatives have failed to act, but we are taking direct action to change the balance of power and right the ship of state. No captain can save a ship on his own; to make it through this storm, we need all hands on deck.”

#3 – Corporate anti-worker policies

Steve Early, a union rep for 30 years, addresses this issue in his review of two new books, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It, (Chelsea Green, 2024) by Les Leopold and Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half Truths that Protect, Power, and Wealth in America, (New Press, 2023) by Donald Cohen, Nick Hanauer, and Joan Walsh

(https://labornotes.org/blogs/2024/02/27/book-reviews-fighting-wall-streets-war-workers-and-corporate-bs-protects-it).

Here are excerpts from one of the books, “Corporate Bullsh*t.”

“When workers try to win collective bargaining rights, employers conduct propaganda campaigns to spread every imaginable falsehood about the union. Once forced into negotiations, management shows up at the bargaining table with a new line of BS about not being able to afford union wage demands or agree to a grievance procedure. And in the legislative-political arena, corporate interests have long used disinformation to thwart labor campaigns.”

“Don Cohen, co-author of Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half Truths that Protect, Power, and Wealth in America, is a former Los Angeles Labor Council staffer who now helps government workers around the country oppose privatization. His collaborators are Joan Walsh, a Nation correspondent, and Nick Hanauer, a wealthy Seattle entrepreneur who has become a critic of income inequality.”

“…Corporate Bullsh*t debunks all the modern-day arguments against job safety and health laws, national health insurance, equitable taxation, climate change legislation, and business regulation, in any form.

“Plutocrats in any era employ politicians from both major parties as their shills and mouthpieces. So Corporate Bullsh*t also dissects the alarmist claims made, now and in the past, by business-backed legislators opposed to stronger legal protections for workers and consumers, homeowners and tenants, or the environment. Corporate America still attempts to discredit even the most modest liberal reforms as failed ‘socialist’ schemes imported from abroad.

In what the authors call our ‘post-fact’ society, the ‘truth purveyed by the wealthy and powerful prevails far too much of the time.’ They warn that corporate elites and their allies have ‘perfected a rhetorical style that relies on deception, fear, and demonizing their opponents.’ The result is a loss of public confidence not only in government, but also in the electoral process itself—and even in essential working-class institutions like unions.”

#4 – The war on workers continued

The title of Les Leopold’s new book says it all: Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed are Destroying the Working Class and What To Do About It (publ 2024). The evidence is clear. The percentage of white workers voting for Democratic presidential candidates has fallen from 52.3% for Carter in 1976 to 36.2% for Biden in 2020 (p. 19).

Leopold focuses on “mass layoffs,” “defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistic as fifty or more workers losing their jobs at a single company during a five-week period” (p. 4). According to the BLS, “more than 30 million of us have experienced mass layoffs” and “even more have felt the pain and suffering as our family members lost jobs” (p. 6). This is occurring because corporate elites prefer buying back the stock in their companies to raise the price of these stocks and stock bonuses. This accrues to the benefit of top management and stockholders, to the stripping of productive assets in these corporations, and to the dismissal of workers. One consequence: “Working people – especially rural white working people in the border states as well as in the North and Midwest – are walking away from the Democratic Party, their historic champion. And if nothing is done to provide more stable employment, they may walk away from democracy as well” (pp. 6-7).

Leopold defines “white working class as those who identify themselves as white, are in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution, and have less than a four-year college degree” (p. 7). There “are about 52.8 million workers in the white working-class” (p. 42).

Here is more from Leopold’s book

“From 2010 to 2019, an astronomical $6.3 trillion went into stock buybacks, largely benefiting the rich” (p.35). The gap between top CEOs and their average worker has now reached 800 to 1 (p. 76). Corporate debt has risen, ballooning in the 1970s “and accelerating “as the deregulatory policies of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years kicked into high gear” (p.103).

“In the early 1980s, corporate raiders (today called private equity and hedge fund managers) set about buying up company after company using borrowed money” (p. 105). They often use cheap contingent or even prison labor when they can (pp 110-112).

#5 – Why workers are turning away from Democratic Party?

Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol analyze this question in their book, Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party (publ. 2023). In addressing the question, they focus on two unions in western Pennsylvania, The United Steel Workers (USW) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). Here the focus is on the USW, which has suffered major job losses in western Pennsylvania – and elsewhere.

The steel mills have suffered from trade policies that encourage companies to invest abroad to take advantage of low-wage and unregulated labor, and have done their best domestically to avoid or curtail unions, cut wages and benefits, and paid new workers lower wages and few benefits than other workers. But they have done more than that. US Steel eliminated its support of social and recreational activities for workers. Without such activities and when faced with an authoritarian corporate bureaucracy, workers are now turning to other sources of identification and participation, which have political effects.

Workers have shifted from support of the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Newman and Skocpol put it this way. “Whereas in the mid-twentieth century unions with many locals tied to workplaces and surrounding neighborhoods provided the underlying structure that made taken-for-granted social and political loyalties plausible, today the old ties and structures are mostly dissolved. They have been replaced by gun clubs that now serve as a communal hub, functioning both as gathering places and as centers where displaced white men can assert physical dominance and familial superiority,” and by mega-churches that focus on right-wing cultural issues. They write: “Activities that local union halls once hosted in industrial communities now may happen at gun clubs or in conservative churches that similarly structure social life for many workers’ families” (p.232). Trump and the Republicans have been the political beneficiaries.

#6 – Despite the risks of unemployment, strikes increased in 2023

Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder reports on Dec. 28, 2023, for U.S. News on why there were so many strikes in 2023 (https://usnews.com/why-were-there-so-many-strikes-in-2023-and-what-does-it-mean-for-2024).

“More than half a million workers staged nearly 400 strikes during the first 11 months of 2023, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker.

“‘I think it’s fair to say that, relative to the rest of the 21st century, this is quite a big uptick,’ says Johnnie Kallas, the project director of the tracker.”

“Many union contracts happened to be up in 2023. But it was more than just that. Workers felt empowered by other highly visible and successful strikes (or threats to strike) and a tight labor market, emboldening them to ask for higher pay and other benefits as inflation claimed more money from their pockets.

“‘It really is the first contract many of these unionized workers are negotiating since the beginning of the pandemic, and I think a ton has changed since the beginning of the pandemic’ Kallas says.

“It’s especially true for health care workers who were in the front lines of the pandemic and who may also be dealing with feelings of burnout and seeking better working conditions. Kaiser Permanente workers, for example, walked off the job in October in the largest strike of health care workers in U.S. history.

“‘Then you combine that with pay increases that certainly pretty much anywhere haven’t kept up with inflation over the past few years, and you have a situation where workers are – in a lot of ways, rightfully so – demanding much more in these current contract negotiations,’ Kallas says.

“To be sure, the level of strike activity – while high relative to the 21st century – is significantly lower than it has been in the past. In the 1970s, about 5,000 work stoppages involved more than 2 million workers each year on average.

“Now, Kallas says that employers are ‘much more resistant to both union organizing and strikes than maybe they were in the mid 20th century.’

And it shows. The rate of union membership has declined from 20% in 1983 to 10% last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Still, unions have the backing of President Joe Biden and potentially most of the public.

“According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published in September, the majority of Americans regardless of party affiliations say that labor unions have improved the quality of life for working Americans. They also expressed support for the United Auto Workers strike and the Writers Guild of America strike.

“I think the alliance of the public and the labor movement has a potential to influence these dynamics even more in 2024 than we saw in 2023,” says Sharon Block, a professor at Harvard Law School and the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy.

“The moves, however, come with risks. While the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects most workers’ rights to strike for better working practices or wages, striking workers can potentially be permanently replaced at their workplace.”

#7 – What can be done to buttress Biden’s re-election?

Leopold has some answers. He refers to what an equitable and democratic solution would be for workers generally and one that might attract more voters who are white, male, and with less than a college education, writing:

“For democracy to endure, our nation must provide stable livelihoods for working people. Stock buybacks must be eliminated. Corporate raiders must be removed from boards of directors and replaced by employees and their representatives. Workers should be free to join labor unions without corporate interference. And the federal government needs to create jobs as it did through the New Deal programs and the Marshall Plan. That is what it will take to revive communities and regions that have been left behind, from industrial and coal-mining counties to depressed urban areas” (p. 10).

Leopold also supports four reforms proposed by Professor William Lazonick: (1) end stock buybacks; (2) “prohibit shareholder activists from serving on boards of directors; (3) “Change the way top corporate officers are paid”; and (4) “Place worker and public representatives on the board of directors” (pp. 164-165). Then he offers additional ideas on reform.

Follow North Dakota’s example and create public banks.
Make sure that contingent and gig workers are “considered employees and receive all the benefits enjoyed by regular employees.”
“Limit corporate debt”
“Prevent Corporate-Focused Trade Deals”
Create “a Marshall Plan for Victims of Mass Layoffs”
“Make Unionization Easier and Simpler” (pp. 166-172)

Concluding thoughts

The reform proposals offered by Leopold and Lazonick would make a world of difference if passed by the U.S Congress. But Biden and the Democrats won’t go that far. Still, they have an agenda that is pro-worker, pro-union, and pro-democracy. The question is whether some of the white male working-class can be swayed to support Biden over Trump. They can, but it will take luck, imagination, education, wise use of the media, continuous improvement in the economy, and vigorous election campaigns. If successful, they might curtail the trend of white male workers supporting Trump’s authoritarian MAGA plans.

At the same time, of course, Trump and his supporters represent a powerful political force. Biden faces a Trump-led Republican Party that can use procedural rules in the House (the votes of Republican MAGA extremists) and Senate (e.g., the filibuster) that make it hard to get a budget passed, let alone advancing workers’ rights. And they face corporate boards and executives who would spend vast sums to lobby and advertise against any such reforms, strip companies of assets, use strikebreakers, and move or threaten to move facilities to other places.

If Trump and the right-wing forces that support him prevail in 2024, we can expect
that an increasing proportion of the US population will find themselves
economically insecure, marginalized, and/or poor. They will continue to be
without union representation, and burdened with inadequate employment options,
with jobs that pay low wages, provide no benefits or affordable benefits (e.g.,
health insurance; pensions), and provide little or no job security. In these circumstances, right-wing ideology would have trumped secure and equitable employment.

The escalation of right-wing violence and intimidation

Bob Sheak, Feb 24, 2024

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 an anti-democratic, autocratic (authoritarian, fascist) alternative. Their efforts are intensifying. If they should succeed in the 2024 elections, America’s democracy will be seriously, perhaps irreparably, corrupted. Meanwhile, they will do their best to keep Biden and Congressional Democrats from winning legislatively, distract and frighten people with cultural wars, and generally attack their opponents.

What Trump and his allies want

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 grievances and conspiracy diatribes that reflect the worst aspects of America’s history and society.

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 important issues such as the climate crisis, corporate power, poverty, civility in public discourse. They have no regard for the common good or the civic norms of fairness.

Little regard for verifiable evidence

They also live in a post-truth world (see Lee McIntyre’s book Post Truth or Cass R. Sunstein’s book, Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception). McIntyre describes Trump’s no-viable-evidence “strategy” as follows.

“1. Raise questions about some outlandish matter (‘people are talking,’ ‘I’m just reporting what I read in the newspapers’), for instance, Obama was not born in the United States or that Obama had Trump wiretapped.

“2. Provide no evidence (because there isn’t any) beyond one’s own conviction.

“3. Suggest that the press cannot be trustedbecause they are biased.

“4.This will lead some people to doubt whether what they are hearing from the press is accurate (or at least to conclude that the issue is ‘controversial’)

“5. In the face of such uncertainty, people will be more prone to hunker down in their ideology and indulge in confirmation bias by choosing to believe only what fits their preconceived notions.

“6. This is the ripe environment for the proliferation of fake news, which will reinforce items 1 through 5.

“7. Thus, people will believe what you say just because you said it. Belief can be tribal” (p. 15). Indeed, the Republican Party, led by Trump, has become the party willing to use any means, including violence and intimidation, to achieve their anti-democratic goals. Power, not truth, is the ultimate goal.

Trump’s electoral base

Trump’s political power in the Republican Party is based on his electoral base of millions of voters, perhaps at present representing 30-40% of the Republican electorate. Without its support, Trump’s power evaporates.

Trump has so far been able to unify disparate right-wing forces into an unquestioning populist base of support for himself. This populous base includes advocates of unfounded and conspiratorial views of society, some committed to the use of violent methods to achieve their goals, along with overlapping special interest groups devoted to maximum gun rights, closed borders, Christian nationalism, white supremacy.

This is a population that generally takes Trump’s word as definitive, while rejecting the views and evidence from scientists, experts, the “dark state” of government civil servants, and the “fake news.” Emotions and ideology trump evidence. Indeed, some see Trump as chosen by God. They love his admonitions invoking “law and order” and his disparaging statements on the “black lives matter” movement and immigration. And, of course, his continues to rant about “the big steal,” referring to his misbegotten, discredited, view that he won the 2020 presidential election.

Many of the Trump supporters accept the idea that the Democrats are “radical socialists” and electing them will take the country down a path where all individual “freedoms” are lost.

Trump’s base is motivated less by economic distress than by ideological commitments and special interests. Robert A. Pape, political-science professor at the University of Chicago and Keven Ruby, Senior research associate of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, find that “a closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more ‘normal’ Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election” (https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/the-capitol-rioters-arent-like-other-extremists/617895).

A quick overview of their goals

Trump, his massive electoral base, the Republican Party, and their allies push or go along with policies that are anti-democratic, even unlawful, including:

(1)a strong unitary executive; (2) the disregard or hollowing out of the rule of law; (3) the political cleansing, curtailment, or elimination of programs advanced by Democrats or other opponents; (4) the institution of a xenophobic border policy; (5) the forced removal or imprisonment of undocumented residents; (6) the creation and support of alternative media based on right-wing partisan goals and values; (7) the support of programs that disproportionately benefit the rich and power; (8) the criminalization of dissent; (9) the use of the military to deal with dissenters (use of the insurrection act); (10) alliances with Putin and other autocratic leaders, and (11) an end to US participation in NATO

In this post, I will focus on domestic issues that show the anti-democratic thrust of Trump and his allies.

#1 – A dictatorship where the ends justify the means

If Trump wins the presidential election, he says that he wants to create a dictatorship – a goal with fascist overtones.

Robert Reich argues that the Republican Party is already a fascist party (https://commondreams.org/opinion/the-united-states-now-has-a-fascist-political-party). Here are key points from Reich’s article.

“I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism.”

Reich continues. “We are witnessing the logical culmination of win-at-any-cost Trump Republican politics — scorched-earth tactics used by Republicans to entrench their power, with no justification other than that they can.

“Democracy is about means. Under it, citizens don’t have to agree on ends (abortion, health care, guns, or whatever else we disagree about) as long as we agree on democratic means for handling our disagreements.

“But for Trump Republicans, the ends justify whatever means they choose —including expelling lawmakers, rigging elections through gerrymandering, refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and denying the outcome of a legitimate presidential election.”

“Without two parties committed to democratic means to resolve differences in ends, the one remaining (small-d) democratic party is at a disadvantage in seeking ends it deems worthy. The inevitable result: Eventually it, too, sacrifices democratic means to its own ends.”

Reich concludes: “I don’t believe Trump alone is responsible for the birth of modern Republican fascism, but he has legitimized and encouraged the vicious rancor that has led much of the GOP into election-denying authoritarianism.”

#2 – Trump’s anti-democratic record and rhetoric

At a campaign reception in Boston on December 5, 2023, Biden spent part of a speech making a case against Trump’s threat to U.S. democracy. It is a useful summary (https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/01/05/remarks-by-president-biden-at-a-campaign-reception-weston-ma). Here’s some of what the president said.

“Listen to what he’s [Trump’s] actually saying these days. He’s saying it out loud. He says, ‘2024 is the final battle.’ He goes on to say, ‘I am your retribution.’ He talks about, quote, ‘We’re a failing nation.’ He goes on to say — and these are all quotes — ‘Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.’“Trump proudly proclaims himself an election denier. You know, he’s the only losing candidate in American history to — not to accept the will of the American people.”

“The same man who encouraged supporters to go to the Capitol on January 6th, who for hours sat in the private dining room I have off the Oval Office watching him threaten his own vice president who refused to break his oath to the Constitution.

“And now, the same man promising pardons to those convicted felons and insurrectionists — ‘if I’m elected’ — he’s going to pardon them. That’s what he says. “The same man who said it was time for, and I quote, ‘termination of all rules, regulation, and articles, even those… in the Constitution.’ This guy means it, and he’s saying it out loud. “Now his supporters are saying he should invoke the Insurrection Act — you know, the use of the U.S. military on domestic soil — against political opponents to — and in American cities.” “If — he said — if he’s returned to office, he said he’ll go after those who oppose him and root out what he called the ‘vermin.’ American vermin. A phrase you may recall from history used in the ‘30s in another country — a specific phrase with a specific meaning, and it echoes the language you’ve heard in Germany in the ‘30s. “And it wasn’t the first time he used the language of the ‘30s. Trump also said — and he talked about, quote, ’the blood of our country is being poisoned…. What in God’s name is going on?” “Trump’s new Speaker supports a national ban on abortion under any circumstances. And as we’ve just seen, radical bans in states all across America have been supported by them.”

“And Trump has vowed again to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would mean 40 million Americans would lose their health insurance, parents couldn’t keep their kids on their insurance plans up to — under age 26, and 100 million Americans with pre-existing conditions could be denied health insurance. It’s the 51st time they will have tried it. Not a joke.

“Extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress will not support the essential assistance to Ukraine unless we fi- — we follow the most draconian actions possible to keep immigrants out of America, building walls and the like. On my very first day, I sent a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress asking for a significant increase in the number of — of folks at the border — a significant increase in all the security we needed in terms of hi-tech [high-tech] stuff. But the Republicans refused to act. They wouldn’t act — they won’t act on it. I don’t think they want to solve it. I think they want to keep it as a problem without the tools to make it any better.
#3 – Trump’s reelection would mean chaos for the country

There has been some reporting on how Trump says he wants to be a “dictator.” Contrariwise, William Cooper argues that his presidency is more likely to produce “chaos” than a dictatorship (https://cnn.com/2023/12/11/opinions/trump-elections-2024-dictator-cooper/index.html).

“Trump himself is on the bandwagon, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday night that he would be a dictator, though only on ‘day one’ of his presidency. ‘We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling,’ he said. ‘After that I’m not a dictator.’ Last month, he used the rhetoric of history’s worst dictators against his political opponents, vowing to ‘root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.’”

Cooper argues that, while Trump as president will have the power to cause social, economic, and political chaos, he will not be a dictator, even for one day.

“The widespread fear that Trump will actually be a dictator, however, is misplaced. If Trump wins the 2024 election, American democracy might be suspended, at least temporarily. But it won’t be replaced by a dictatorship, which is a coherent and recognizable system of government. Instead, if Trump wins, my view is that American democracy will be replaced by American ‘chaosracy’ — an incoherent, volatile and unpredictable mix of some government institutions that function democratically and some that don’t.”

For example, “The federal bureaucracy can’t simply be ‘purged.’ Valid federal legislation authorizes and funds government agencies — and powerful unions protect their workers — so the courts won’t allow federal employees to be fired en masse absent duly enacted legislation. Republican presidents have long tried to shrink the administrative state. They’ve failed miserably.

“Trump-appointed judges, all confirmed by a majority of the Senate, have shifted the federal courts sharply to the right. But they have also shown their independence and ruled against Trump repeatedly. The Supreme Court allowed a New York prosecutor to receive Trump’s tax returns, denied Trump’s effort to end DACA and rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“The Senate, furthermore, still has to confirm, by majority vote, all executive-level presidential appointments (including at the Department of Justice). Trump can’t just appoint, for example, Rudy Guliani as attorney general, Steve Bannon as secretary of defense or Michael Flynn as secretary of state. And pardons only apply to federal offenses, offer no protection under state law and may be voided in court if they are preemptive and not specific. They are hardly a license to go about committing major crimes. Just look at Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump in his border wall case and later convicted for refusing to cooperate with the January 6 committee in Congress.

“Unlike a dictator, Trump wouldn’t control most government activity — at the federal, state or local level. If the Democrats take the House in 2024, would Trump control how they vote on legislation? Would he force state court judges to govern how he wants them to? Local school boards?”

“Given his historic unpopularity ratings, the resistance to a second Trump term will likely be fierce at every level of government.”

But, Cooper writes, “[t]he one way Trump could actually achieve a dictatorship is if he commandeered the military to use force — or its threat — throughout the country on his behalf. But there’s no reason whatsoever to think he could pull that off. Trump has long had strained relations with military leaders, including his secretaries of defense John Mattis and Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

“As we saw with Milley — who actively opposed Trump’s attempt to reverse the 2020 presidential election results — military leaders won’t just obey Trump’s illegal initiatives. The military doesn’t ‘take an oath to a wannabe dictator,’ Milley said in his departing speech last September. ‘We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America — and we’re willing to die to protect it.

#4 – MAGA’s violent threats are warping life in America

David French compiles evidence on how “MAGA’s Violent Threats Are Warping Life in America,” involving attacks on Democratic – and indeed all – opponents with the goal of driving them out of politics so that Republicans, led by Trump and other reactionaries, can dominate the political system at all levels (https://nytimes.com/2024/02/18/opinion/magas-violent-threats-are-warping-life-in-america.html).

French refers to examples at all levels of the socio-political system.

At the national level

He refers to a new book by journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman titled Find Me the Votes, in which they “report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, ‘Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?’

French adds: “Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.”

French also points out that “Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.”

He continues. “The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats afterit ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.

“Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.”

At the sub-national level

“In2021,” French writes, “Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers. In 2022, it followed up with another report detailing threats against local school boards. In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, ‘We know who you are’ and ‘We will find you.’

“My own family has experienced terrifying nights and terrifying days over the last several years. We’ve faced death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists.” [Doxing is a form of cyberbullying that uses sensitive or secret information, statements, or records for the harassment, exposure, financial harm, or other exploitation of targeted individuals.] People have shown up at our home. A man even came to my kids’ school. I’ve interacted with the F.B.I., the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement. While the explicit threats come and go, the sense of menace never quite leaves. We’re always looking over our shoulders.”

This intimidation “is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.”

The ominous result. “The threats drive decent men and women from public office. They isolate and frighten dissenters. When my family first began to face threats, the most dispiriting responses came from Christian acquaintances who concluded I was a traitor for turning on a movement whose members had expressed an explicit desire to kill my family.”

#5 – Trump and allies plot militarized mass deportations, detention camps

Heather Cox Richardson offers this summary in her missive of Feb 19, 2024.

Trump has promised his supporters that in a second term he would launch ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.’ To deport as many as ten million of what he called ‘foreign national invaders,’ Trump advisor Stephen Miller explained on a November podcast, the administration would federalize National Guard troops from Republican-dominated states and send them around the country to round people up, moving them to ‘large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,’ that would serve as internment camps.”

Isaac Arnsdorf, Nick Miroff, and Josh Dawsey also delve into the immigration issue (https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/20/trump-mass-deportation-immigration).

“As president, Trump sought to use military planes and bases for deportation. Now, he and his allies are talking about a new effort that current and former officials warn could be impractical and dangerous.”

“Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.’ As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as ‘Operation Wetback,’ using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.”

Arnsdorf and his colleagues continue. “Throughout his current campaign, the former president has exerted his influence on the immigration policy debate on several fronts. He pressured congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan compromise to expand enforcement funding and powers, arguing that it would give the Democrats a political victory and that it was not restrictive enough. He has also escalated his use of dehumanizing language to describe migrants, accusing them of ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and calling the record unauthorized border crossings an ‘invasion,’ an ‘open wound’ and a source of imminent terrorist attacks.

“But his deportation proposal is one part of his emerging platform that experts, current and former government officials and others described as especially alarming, impractical and prone to significant legal and logistical hurdles.

“‘You’re talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula. Then what do you do with those families?’ said Jason Houser, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of staff from January 2022 until March 2023. ‘Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore and start tugging people out of communities? That’s what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk.’

“Reflecting on the ideas Trump and his team discussed during his presidency, Houser said, ‘Their ideas were psychotic.’”

“While advisers agree on border security, building a wall on the southern border and deporting migrants who have committed crimes after entering the country as winning political issues, one adviser expressed concern that promising to deport massive numbers of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime could hurt Trump in a general election campaign. Trump’s language and proposals are already under heavy criticism from the Biden campaign, as well as pro-immigration and civil liberties groups.”

“The Trump campaign has also said he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States. The idea of challenging the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship would be sure to draw a court challenge. The proposal has been raised by Trump and Miller before, but the specific promise of an executive order indicated the campaign has put further effort into fleshing it out.”

“The pool of potential deportees is large. There are about 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal status, according to the most recent estimates. Nearly 7 million of those are known to ICE, which maintains a vast database of people eligible for deportation whose asylum claims and immigration cases are still pending.

“A smaller subset of that caseload — about 1.3 million people — remain in the United States despite having received a deportation order from an immigration judge. These potential deportees, if taken into custody, are the easiest for the government to send home, because they have already received due process. But ICE often doesn’t know where they are.

“Beyond those challenges, there are other major logistical and operational obstacles to the kind of mass deportations Trump has promised. The first is available personnel: ICE only has about 6,000 deportation officers nationwide. The amount of time it takes to recruit, hire, screen and train a new deportation officer is about two years, according to current and former ICE officials.

“Detentionspace is also squeezed. The Biden administration is using about 38,000 beds at immigration jails and other facilities that hold migrants awaiting deportation. During the Trump years, the number exceeded 50,000, but never reached the kinds of capacity levels necessary for the kind of mega-deportation system Trump envisions.

“Some ICE officials said the agency could find more available beds in county jails. But Trump surrogates have gone further, suggesting they would put migrants in “camps” or “tents.”

“To arrest and deport families with children, the preparations are even more time-consuming. An operation targeting 20 to 30 families for arrest takes two to three weeks of planning, said Houser, the former ICE chief of staff. For ICE to reach a target of 300,000 to 500,000 deportations per year — a far more modest goal than Trump’s — Houser said the agency would need two to three times as many deportation officers as ICE has.

“‘You’re talking about building a major logistics apparatus that would still have to meet court and legal requirements for health care and child care,’ he said.

ICE officers and staff are burned out by the pace and intensity of their work over the past several years, according to a veteran DHS official who was not authorized to speak to reporters. For other law enforcement agencies, the drain on their resources would come at the expense of other legitimate priorities, the former DHS official said, and the operation would have to be continuous to deter new arrivals.

“‘It feels shortsighted, stupid and an enormous waste of money,’ the official said.

Another problem is so-called ‘recalcitrant countries’ that limit or refuse to take back deportees. Nations such as Venezuela and Cuba are already under U.S. economic sanctions, leaving Washington with reduced leverage to compel them to take more deportation flights.

“Even other nations that remain U.S. allies in Latin America set conditions on the number of flights and deportees they’re willing to accept. Passenger manifests have to be sent several days in advance. It’s not as simple as loading hundreds of people into a military transport plane and dropping them off wherever the president wants.”

“Trump pledged to immediately deport 2 million to 3 million people after his 2016 win but never came close to hitting those targets. At his administration’s high-water mark in 2019, ICE carried out 267,258 deportations and returns, Department of Homeland Security data show.”

“As the number of people in ICE custody jumped 22 percent in Trump’s first two years, the DHS inspector general uncovered ‘egregious violations of detention standards,’ including inadequate medical care, expired food, lack of recreation, moldy bathrooms and inadequate clothing and hygiene supplies. A separate inspector general’s investigation found ‘dangerous overcrowding’ in an El Paso facility, where a cell built for 25 people held 155.

“In June 2018, reporters and human rights activists toured a facility in McAllen, Tex., where children slept under foil sheets surrounded by chain-link fencing, after DHS acknowledged separating children from their parents at the border. Public outrage over an audio clip of a sobbing child forced Trump to halt the practice. DHS later identified 4,227 separated children, 3,147 of whom were reunited with their parent as of November 2023.

“Asked in 2023 whether he might reimpose family separation as president, Trump declined to rule it out and defended the policy. ‘I know it sounds harsh,’ he said in a CNN town hall. When you say to a family that if you come we’re going to break you up, they don’t come. And we can’t afford to have any more.’”

“As the president’s top adviser on immigration matters, Miller advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act to mobilize the Department of Defense, according to the former officials. Pentagon officials balked at the idea of using military bases and planes, current and former officials recalled, citing concerns of getting mired in an open-ended commitment or compromising troop readiness.”

#6 – Trump’s second presidency would mean more gun violence

Brett Samuels takes up this issue in an article for The Hill on Nov 2, 2023

(https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4319050-biden-trump-gun-violence-2024). Samuels refers to a memo the Biden campaign shared with the public. The memo, titled “Trump’s America in 2025: More Guns, More Shootings, More Deaths,” cites past Trump comments to argue the Republican front-runner would allow more firearms in schools and push for a national concealed carry law.”

“In a speech at an annual NRA meeting earlier this year, Trump vowed to protect the Second Amendment and argued the rise in school shootings was a result of widespread mental health problems in the country.

“He said if elected, he would support putting more guns in schools to protect them from future shootings, proposing a new tax credit to reimburse any teacher for the cost of a concealed carry firearm and training from a qualified expert.

“Trump also said he would ask Congress to pass a bill to create “national concealed carry reciprocity.”

At the same time, “President Biden has repeatedly pushed for congressional action on gun control and has taken executive action to try and address the problem, giving his campaign a clear contrast with what it views as a record of inaction from Trump.

“Since taking office, the president has signed executive actions to target the proliferation of ghost guns, which are difficult to track, and to bolster background checks. Biden in September established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus specifically on the issue of mass shootings. He has repeatedly called on Congress to reimpose a ban on assault weapons.”

Biden in 2022 signed bipartisan legislation that enhanced background checks for gun purchasers between the age of 18 and 21, made obtaining firearms through straw purchases or trafficking a federal offense and clarified the definition of a federally licensed firearm dealer, among other measures.”

The president has the backing of major gun safety groups for his 2024 reelection, including Everytown for Gun Safety, Brady and Team ENOUGH, Community Justice Action Fund and Giffords.

“Joe Biden is, hands down, the only candidate in this race who has both the track record and the guts to stand up to the gun lobby and protect Americans from gun crime,” Peter Ambler, Giffords co-founder and executive director, said in a statement.”

Concluding thoughts

Trump and his allies want to undermine U.S. democracy. If they win control of the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, they will have ample opportunity to do this.

U.S. history is, at least in part, a history of violence against indigenous people, people of color (especially, African-Americans), immigrants, workers and unions, women’s rights, and others. It is reflected in the Civil War, as southern white plantation owners and their government and grassroots supporters fought a losing and bloody war to expand slavery in the west. Adam Hochschild recaptures the government’s suppression of war opponents, socialists, and trade unions during WWI in his book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. Kevin M. Krouse and Julian E. Zelizer edit a collection of essays by historians “to take on the biggest legends and lies” in American history. The book’s title: Myth America. Dana Milbank analyzes the “twenty-five year crack-up of the Republican Party” in his book, The Destructionists. Dan Pfeiffer focuses his book on the “big lie” promoted by right-wing media (Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the Mega Media are Destroying America). Among the most troubling books is the book by Malcolm Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency.

Malcom Nance does not mince words. He is a globally renowned expert on terrorism, extremism, and insurgency and best-selling author. He offers the following description of Trump’s electoral base in his book titled They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency (publ. 2022). This base is anti-democratic and willing to accept violence if necessary to achieve their goals.

“The Trump worshipping base has become an openly fascist movement. It endangers the nation with near constant threats to take up arms and create political instability through violence. The goals of TITUS [Trump Insurgency in the United States] are not just to alter and coopt the national dialogue but to dismantle the framework of government and the Constitution itself. They openly advocate the destruction of America’s diversity, multiculturalism, and equality. They continue to demand that an unelected dictator be put back into office. They want a strongman who will impose the will and ideology of forty million misguided people over the voices and lives of all other Americans” (p. 241).

The immigration conundrum

Bob Sheak, Feb 12, 2024

In the U.S. Congress, the Democrats and Republicans have been unable to reach an agreement on immigration policy governing the southern border. This is so even though the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally has risen to record levels. This post offers an explanation of the policy stalemate and what an alternative, less restrictive and less punitive policy would contain.

Current picture

Katherine Bucholz reports on the number of “migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border for fiscal years 2023 and 2024. These include

“both migrants apprehended and those asking to enter legally but deemed inadmissible. Their numbers rose to almost 2.5 million in FY 2023 and stood at 785,000 three months into the new fiscal year, which would constitute another record if extrapolated” (https://statista.com/chart/20397/number-of-migrants-apprehended-at-us-mexico-border).

While President, Trump’s efforts to control the border

Bucholz continues. “Because a majority of people seeking to enter the United States recently have come from Central and South America and more have been applying for asylum, the Trump administration in 2019 overhauled its application process, making many asylum seekers wait in camps on the Mexican side without assistance. The Biden administration tried to end the policy around 1.5 years into its term, in mid-2022, but was ensnared in legal battles. Remain in Mexico was implemented after another system overhaul – the separation of families in U.S. custody and the tendency to release fewer immigration detainees on bail – had caused chaotic scenes at detention centers and an international outcry during Trump’s time in office.”

Attempted compromise

In recent months, the Biden administration has come to support a conservative proposal aimed at deterring immigration.

The Senators most responsible for the bill, “the product of months of bipartisan negotiations” involved “a trio of senators – Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, one of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans.” But, as already noted, “former President Donald Trump and [Mike] Johnson attacked the border deal as too weak, and their opposition, along with McConnel’s opposition, was sufficient in the end to defeat the bill (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-negotiators-defend-bipartisan-border-deal-fire-house/story?id=106959887).

However, Trump has opposed even this measure, arguing that, if passed, it would give Biden and the Democrats an opportunity in November 2024 to claim a win on the immigration issue. Trump wants to be known as the only person who can fix the problem. Senate Republicans have fallen into line and have voted to reject it. The House Speaker, Mike Johnson, has followed suit and decided not to put the compromise bill to a vote.

The number of migrants wanting to enter the U.S. will likely continue to increase

While there is little progress in Congress on border policy, Georgina Gustin points out that “the World Bank projects that border problem is going to grow, as nearly 4 million people from Central America and Mexico could become climate migrants by 2050” (https://insideclimatenews.org/98072019/climate-change-migration-honduras-drought-crop-failure-farming-deforestation-guatemala-trump).

In recent years, immigrants trying to enter the U.S. through the southern border have come not only from Mexico and Central America but from many other countries as well, even from China. They are fleeing violence, war, poverty, corruption, the environmental devastation accompanying global warming, as well as seeking opportunities for a “better life.” In short, there’s no good reason to believe that the flow of immigrants seeking entrance to the U.S. will subside.

Then there is internally generated migration, a subject analyzed by Jake Bittle in his book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (publ. 2023). The issue of forced internal migration is not part of the current political debate, but it will be growing problem. Bittle writes:

“By the end of the century, climate change will displace more people in the United States than moved during the Great Migration [from the 1920s to the 1970s] (p.xvi).

Trump opposed compromise bill

Stephen Groves and Mary Clare Jalonick delve into this question for Associated Press (AP)in an article published on Feb 4, 2024 (https://apnews.com/article/senate-border-package-asylum-ukraine).

They write: “Senators have come out with a carefully negotiated $118 billion compromise that pairs tens of billions of dollars in wartime aid for Ukraine with new border laws aimed at shrinking the historic number of people who have come to the U.S. border with Mexico to seek asylum.

“While President Joe Biden has worked toward the deal with Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate, it faces a difficult, if not impossible, path to passage. Echoing opposition from their House counterparts, Republican senators have said the border policy doesn’t go far enough and questioned additional aid to Ukraine. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called it “an easy NO.”

They also point out, “[T]he package has also drawn strong opposition from Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee in November 2024.”

What was in the compromised legislation?

Groves and Jalonick also consider what’s in the bill.

There will be $20 billion of the 118 billion for immigration enforcement, “providing money to hire thousands more officers to evaluate asylum claims, add hundreds of more Border Patrol agents and help stop the flow of fentanyl.”

The “asylum process” will be toughened. “Under the proposal, migrants would have to show during initial screenings that they have a reasonable possibility of being granted asylum. Migrants would also be barred from making an asylum claim if they are found to have a criminal history, resettled in another country or could have found safety if they had resettled in their home country.”

“Migrants who pass the new screening would then receive a work permit, be placed in a supervision program and have their asylum case decided within 90 days. And migrants who seek asylum in between ports of entry would be put into detention while they await the initial screening for an asylum claim. The proposal calls for a large growth in detention capacity.”

“If the number of migrant encounters tallied by Customs and Border Protection reaches 4,000 a day over a five-day average across the Southern border. Once the number of encounters reaches 5,000, expulsions would automatically take effect. For context, border encounters topped 10,000 on some days during December, which was the highest month on record for illegal crossings.”

“The legislation would also authorize sanctions and anti-money laundering tools against criminal enterprises that traffic fentanyl into the U.S. And it would provide 50,000 visas for employment and family-based immigration each year for the next five years.

“However, the bill does not contain broad immigration reforms or deportation protections for unauthorized immigrants that were foundational to previous Senate deals.”

“The provision would eventually enable qualified Afghans to apply for U.S. citizenship and adjust the status of eligible evacuees to provide them with lawful permanent resident status after vetting and screening procedures.”

Trump’s influence

Chris Lehmann quotes Trump. “The former president came out against the deal while its details were still being finalized, proclaiming on TruthSocial that ‘I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!’ In trademark mob boss argot he added, ‘I have no doubt that our wonderful Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, will only make a deal that is PERFECT ON THE BORDER” (https://thenation.com/aticle/politics/border-deal-senate).

Johnson submits to Trump

Lehmann continues. “Johnson, whose short tour as House speaker has already served as a miniature documentary on the multivalent meanings of the word ‘quisling,’ wasted little time in showing his serially indicted, resort-bound Svengali that the message was received….When the Senate deal debated over the weekend, the speaker took to the Sunday talk shows to pronounce the agreement ‘dead on arrival’ in the House.

“But these are all policy matters, and the GOP leadership could not be more militant in advertising its collective hostility to policy. Here, too, they follow the incoherent, tantrum-throwing example of their maximum leader. Trump greeted the news of the Senate package with another TruthSocial tirade. ‘Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill, which only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day, when we already have the right to CLOSE THE BORDER NOW, which must be done,’ Trump fumed. ‘This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats, and a Death Wish for The Republican Party. It takes the HORRIBLE JOB the Democrats have done on Immigration and the Border, absolves them, and puts it all squarely on the shoulders of Republicans. Don’t be STUPID!!!’ In short order, Republican senators began falling over themselves in the act of backing away from their lovingly crafted border package.”

Trump’s record on the border while president

Lehmann reminds readers, “Beyond the considerable weight of historical precedent, however, Johnson’s argument was so laughably threadbare on its own terms as to be pitiable; all one had to do to dispel it was to consult the 400-plus harsh and gruesomely unethical border policies that the Trump White House introduced by executive fiat, which did nothing to reduce the volume of immigration at the country’s southern border.”

Trump’s “wall”

Wikipedia gives a useful account of Trump’s build-the-wall saga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_wall). Trump promised to construct a much larger border wall than the one that existed during his 2016 presidential campaign, “claiming that if elected he would ‘build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.” This would be a wall, in Trump’s view, that would extend the entire almost 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. The President of Mexico at the time, Enrique Pena Nieto, stated that his country would not pay for the wall. And, up to the present, this has been the unwavering position of the Mexican government.

On January 25, 2017, after being elected, “Trump signed Executive Order 13767, which formally directed the US government to begin attempting wall construction along the US border with Mexico using existing federal funding,” though “actual construction did not begin at this time due to the significant expense and lack of clarity on how it would be funded.

“Trump continued to grapple with Democrats in Congress through 2017 over funding and threatened at his rallies and through his tweets to shut down the government if Congress did not approve funding. Congress refused and Trump did partially shut down the federal government for 35 days, from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019, and insisted that he would ‘veto any spending bill that did not include $5.7 billion in border wall funding.’ This turned out to be the longest government shut down in US history. In the end, Trump lost this battle and did not get the funding he wanted.”

Nonetheless, the persistence of Trump on obtaining funding from Congress for the border wall continued (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-29/judge-blocks-trump-s-funding-plan-for-more-sections-of-the-wall).

Congress did authorize $1.4 billion for border security, but that did not satisfy the president. On February 15, 2019, he “signed a Declaration of National Emergency, saying that the situation at the Mexico-United States border is a crisis requiring money allocated for other purposes to be used instead to build the wall.” Following this, “Congress passed a joint resolution to overturn the emergency order, but Trump vetoed the resolution.” This led Trump to say that he would go ahead and transfer already authorized funds for other purposes (e.g., military funds) to be transferred to wall building projects. Up to the present, July 2019, this effort has been stopped by the courts However, the Supreme Court then ruled to allow Trump to shift $2.5 billion from other agency budgets to border security (July 26, 2019).

According to the US Customs and Border Protection agency, as of July 2019, construction “had begun to replace old fencing [but] no new wall had yet been built” with government money. Republicans want to re-start the effort.

There are currently “a series of vertical barriers” along the border, “a discontinuous series of physical obstructions variously classified as ‘fences’ or ‘walls’” (https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-obliterating-the-right-to-asylum).

In January 2019, there were 580 miles of barriers in place, according to US Customs and Border Protection. There are also other security measures [many in place before Trump], “provided by a ‘virtual fence’ of sensors, cameras, and other surveillance equipment used to dispatch United States Border Patrol agents to areas where migrants are attempting to cross the border illegally. Legal expert Marjorie Cohn points out that Trump was” increasing his illegal militarization of the southern border by deploying 2,100 additional troops to join the 4,500 military personnel already there”

Other Trump policies designed to reduce migrant entry to the U.S.

In addition to the Trump wall, Trump and his administration adopted other policies designed to keep migrants from entering the country. When one policy didn’t work or is met with public outrage, Congressional opposition, and/or legal challenges, another one with the same intent is concocted. They wanted to make conditions so bad that word among migrants would get back to others in their home countries that the costs of migration to the US-Mexico border are too great to justify the arduous and dangerous trek of over a thousand miles from Central America, through Mexico, to the border with the US. In advancing such policies, they ignore or dismiss the deteriorating and unsafe conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and other countries that compel them to migrate.

Make processing of refugee and asylum claims complex and designed to fail

Immigration lawyer Jennifer Harbury provides further details in an interview on Democracy Now on the process by which migrants seek “legal resettlement,” or legal entry, into the U.S. It’s complex that requires asylum seekers provide not only considerable documentation but must satisfy other requirements as well. And it was subverted by Trump (https://www.democracynow.org/2018/7/9/human_rights_lawyer_jennifer_harbury_on). Here is some of what she wrote.

“…under 8 U.S.C. 1225, [a person] goes up to the port of entry, knocks on the door and literally says, ‘I’m in danger. I need to apply for asylum.’ And as I said earlier, they then go to a credible fear interview [no criminal record] and then to a detention center, initially, and they’ll be put in proceedings before an immigration judge… if they’ve got perfectly good identification, they’ve never committed a crime, they’re not a threat to anyone, they’re just on the run from the cartels, and they have legal status relatives, citizen or LPR [legal permanent resident of the U.S.], who will take them in and sponsor them and pay all their expenses.”

At that point in the process, a person or parent and children who satisfied all these requirements would pre-Trump have “always been released” on conditional approval of resettlement. Trump contemptuously calls this a “catch and release” policy that he was determined to end and contended that most migrants under these circumstances did not return for scheduled court appearances. The evidence indicates otherwise. Caitlin Dickerson cites information from Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center that case management programs used in the past to ensure immigrants show up for court have proven to be “both cheaper than detention and have a proven track record of near universal court compliance (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/immigration-detention.html).

Trump succeeded in reducing legal, asylum requests

In an article published on Nov. 20, 2020, for the Migration Policy Institute, Muzaffar Chishti and Jessica Bolter make four points about “the Trump effect” on legal immigration Levels (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/trump-effect-immigration-realty). The say that the Trump policies had “immediate and dramatic effects.”

(1) “The administration has sharply lowered refugee admissions, arguing that refugees pose a national security threat and impose a significant financial burden on federal and local governments. In FYs 2018 and 2020, the Trump administration admitted the lowest numbers of refugees since the current U.S. refugee resettlement program began in 1980: 22,491 and 11,814 respectively. This was a significant drop compared to the 84,995 refugees resettled in FY 2016.”

(2) “The administration has also significantly narrowed eligibility for asylum in the United States, for example by eliminating certain grounds for asylum and making it almost impossible to be granted asylum or, more recently, even apply for it at the border. These changes have led many to conclude that the prospects for receiving asylum in the United States have largely ended.”

(3) Despite the attempts to reduce successful asylum claims, the number of asylum seekers whose claims were approved actually increased during the Trump years—to the highest level since at least 1990. This is partly because there have been many more asylum applicants in recent years, and the backlog has been growing for several years. In many instances, applications that were approved while Trump was in office were filed during the Obama administration.

(4) “At the same time, asylum denials have increased even more than approvals, meaning that although the number of asylum grants increased, the approval rate has concurrently decreased, from 43 percent in FY 2016 to 29 percent in FY 2019. Furthermore, the Trump administration’s dramatic narrowing of opportunities to apply for asylum has contributed to fewer new applications being filed. Since these applications can take a long time to process, it is likely that, absent major policy reversals, the number of approved asylum cases will fall substantially in coming years.”

The number of immigrants seeking entry to US will likely continue to rise

According to an article by Georgina Gustin, “the World Bank projects that nearly 4 million people from Central America and Mexico could become climate migrants by 2050” (https://insideclimatenews.org/98072019/climate-change-migration-honduras-drought-crop-failure-farming-deforestation-guatemala-trump).

The Causes

US military interventions

It has been well documented by historians that the countries of Central and South America have been ruled much of the time, certainly over the two hundred years, by authoritarian and self-serving government that siphon off foreign assistance money, promote foreign investment to extract resources, exploit cheap labor, and enable land grabs and unregulated treatment of corporations. And the US has been instrumental in fostering such conditions. Historian Greg Grandin provides an in-depth analysis of the US involvement in creating this system in his book, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006).

Legal scholar Majorie Cohn provides a concise summary, as follows.

“The history of U.S. intervention in the Northern Triangle countries has destabilized them and exacerbated the migrant crisis. “[W]e must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States,” (https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-obliterating-the-right-to-asylum).

Examples

Alison Bodine and Tamara Hansen point to how the relationship between U.S. intervention in Latin America and the severe problems in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala “is most clearly expressed by the 2009 U.S.-backed coup in Honduras” (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/07/23/imperialist-made-crisis-migrants-and-refugees).They elaborate: “10 years ago, the United States backed a right-wing overthrow of the elected government of Manuel Zelaya. Since then, political repression, state violence, and increasing poverty in Honduras have escalated, creating structural and institutional vacuums, along with deep instability throughout the country. After the U.S. supported coup Honduras ended Manuel Zelaya’s presidency, a country with a prospect of political and economic development became a failed state.”

Trump and right-wing forces in the US frequently refer to the gangs, like MS-13, throughout the region, and how gang members are said to join migrants on their way to the US-Mexico border (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019//07/23/imperialist-made-crisis-migrants-and-refugees).

There is little evidence that gangs are a large segment of the migrant flow to the U.S.-Mexico border. That said, gang violence is a prominent reason in causing the flight of migrants out of Central America. An often-overlooked part of the story is that the gangs, or many of them, were created in the US. On this point, Bodine and Hansen say the gangs “were first formed in U.S. prisons, and then transplanted to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala when people were released from prison and then deported.” The cite UNHCR reports to illustrate some of the consequences, and write: “Current homicide rates are among the highest ever recorded in Central America. Several cities, including San Salvador, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, are among the 10 most dangerous in the world. The most visible evidence of violence is the high rate of brutal homicides, but other human rights abuses are on the rise, including the recruitment of children into gangs, extortion and sexual violence”

Diminishing opportunities

For the people in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, there are presently a growing number of farmers who cannot grow enough food to feed themselves, let alone a surplus with which to buy essentials. There are many others living in urban areas who, amid high levels of unemployment, can only find low-wage work, insecure work. And corrupt governments there offer too few and inadequate public assistance, while promoting policies that disproportionately benefit foreign corporations and their own wealthy classes. These are systemic problems.

Hannah Holleman documents in her book, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Polices and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism, that farmers not only in Central America but around the world have been locked into an agricultural system imposed by rich, capitalist countries that drive them into debt, degrades the soils and depletes water sources. This unsustainable situation is combined and made worse by the intensifying effects of climate disruption, reflected in increasing periods of drought and other extreme weather events.

The effects of climate disruption

Oliver Milman, Emily Holden, and David Agren address how climate change is increasingly figuring into the mass migration from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/30/migrant-caravan-causes-climate-change-central-america). They report that “[w]hile violence and poverty have been cited as the reasons for the exodus, experts say the big picture is that changing climate is forcing farmers off their land – and it’s likely to get worse.” They confirm what so many others have found that most of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, “the three countries devastated by violence, organized crime and systemic corruption, [have roots] which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts.” Now people in these countries also being increasingly afflicted by climate change.

According to experts interviewed by Milman, Holden, and Agren, climate change “is likely to push millions more people north towards the US.” The journalists quote Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, says, “‘The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture – which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,’ And Albro continues: “‘The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.’” Albro adds: “Migrants don’t often specifically mention ‘climate change’ as a motivating factor for leaving because the concept is so abstract and long-term…. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes.”

Alternatives

Julia Conley identifies “faith groups” that want “a just and humane policy” in an article for Common Dreams on Feb 7 2024

(https://commondreams.org/news/border-deal). Here’s some of what she writes.

“As the U.S. Senate voted down a $118 billion bipartisan national security supplemental bill Wednesday, more than 800 faith groups and leaders called on lawmakers to completely reconsider legislation regarding the border and ‘pursue effective, fair, and compassionate alternatives’ to the bill ‘that respect the sacred dignity of all people.”

“Led by the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, 662 faith leaders and 155 faith-based organizations said the federal government must consider “just and humane solutions, like those offered by our faith communities” in the coalition’s “priorities for [fiscal year 2024] funding legislation.”

“While we recognize the need to improve the humanitarian protection system, we firmly reject the proposed measures,” said the coalition, which includes Faith in Action, Hope Border Institute, and Jewish Women International. ‘This legislation would exacerbate the humanitarian and operational challenges at the border, place obstacles that severely restrict the right to seek protection, undermine the right to due process in immigration proceedings, and expand immigrant detention, deportations, and the militarization of the border to unprecedented levels.’

The bipartisan bill included provisions that would allow President Joe Biden to effectively shut down the border if crossings by undocumented immigrants reach a certain threshold, expand capacity to detain migrants, restrict screening standards for people claiming asylum, and expede the asylum process—making it harder for refugees to seek legal counsel.”

Interfaith Immigration Coalition Interfaith Immigration Coalition expresses its opposition. “The cruelty at the border needs to stop. The provisions outlined in the appropriations bill, purporting to automatically shut down the border and expel individuals seeking safety, are not only a failed attempt to secure the border but are also a catalyst for increased chaos on both the U.S. and Mexican sides,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of Hope Border Institute, ahead of Wednesday’s first vote. ‘Any policy that fails to acknowledge the complex realities of migration and prioritizes enforcement over compassion is fundamentally flawed. We call on policymakers to reject these harmful provisions and instead work towards comprehensive solutions that honor our nation’s commitment to human dignity and justice.’

“The coalition pointed to its legislative priorities that would ensure: ‘safety and dignity for asylum-seekers’ by recognizing that refugees have a right under international and domestic law to seek safety in the U.S.; international assistance to reduce forced migration of people affected by climate catastrophe, violence, and poverty; and refugee protection.

Specific proposals from the coalition include:

Increasing funding and oversight of the immigration Shelter and Service Program, for which the White House requested $1.4 billion in grants for 2024;
Funding the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for employment authorization and other application processing, backlog reduction, and integration, for which the White House requested $755 million;
Sufficiently funding Customs and Border Protection to process asylum claims at ports of entry;
Eliminating regulatory barriers like the “180-day asylum clock” that restricts asylum-seekers from applying for work authorization;
Funding bilateral assistance to Latin American and Caribbean countries, the International Disaster Assistance Account, and the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Account; and
Funding the Office of Refugee Resettlement and its programs for unaccompanied children.

Conley quotes Susan Krehbiel, associate for migration accompaniment ministries at Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. Krehbiel denounced the White House and senators for supporting a provision that would have shut down asylum services at the border once crossings by undocumented immigrants surpassed 5,000 people per day over a five-day average.

“‘When thousands of people come to you seeking protection from danger, the moral response is not to slam the door in their faces,’ said Krehbiel. ‘There are 110 million forcibly displaced people globally, but the leaders of one of the richest countries in the world believe that taking in 5,000 asylum-seekers per day is too many. The U.S. is failing to fulfill its responsibility to accept people seeking safety from violence and persecution.’

“‘Policymakers need to stop pretending that asylum-seekers will just disappear if they turn a blind eye,’ she added. ‘Policies of deterrence haven’t worked in the past and won’t work now. We urge Congress to invest in border policies that actually work on the ground and to receive families seeking asylum with justice and kindness.’”

Anika Forrest, legislative director for domestic policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation had this to say.

“‘Any policy that fails to safeguard respite, protection, and peace for communities fleeing violence and persecution promises tragedy and turmoil,’ said Forrest. ‘U.S. political leaders insist on chaotic and cruel policies that function as impenetrable walls and abandon asylum-seekers. Migration management as well as humane, safe, and orderly processing at the border deserve effective and modern solutions.’” Neither of these proposals were included in the Senate bill.

The elements of a comprehensive immigration policy on asylum seekers

One can imagine progressive and radical alternatives that, if implemented, would in various combinations, reduce the suffering of migrants and increase the number who are permitted to enter the US. It would adhere to international and national laws on refugees, while expanding the criteria that define a legitimate asylum claim. It would decriminalize those who are caught trying to enter illegally. It would expedite the asylum process so that migrants who satisfy the criteria can enter the country without long waits. There would not be the dreadful detention facilities that exist under Trump, rather there would adequately-resourced and humanely managed facilities for those who have crossed the border illegally or who are waiting for an asylum decision by an immigration judge. Children would not be separated from their parents and unaccompanied children, those who come without a parent or legal guardian, would be housed in appropriate facilities until homes were found for them. Those permitted to relocate in the US would be provided with transitional assistance, unless that had relatives or other sponsors who were able to assist them.

And, ideally, the conditions in their home countries that drive people to immigrate would be mitigated. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) has some suggestions, as follows (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/border-migrants-central-america.html).

“Mr. Biden should engage the leaders of the Western Hemisphere for a summit that identifies shared responsibilities, challenges and opportunities. Engaging Northern Triangle countries, fully restoring the Central American Minors program (which allows children to apply for refugee status in their home countries) and reinstating aid (practices curtailed by former President Donald Trump) is a good start. But a multilateral approach must include our Canadian allies and address the causes of the migration coming not just from Central America but from Mexico as well. We need a shared plan with a focus on security to combat crime and persecution that includes cracking down on gangs and other criminal organizations and creates accountability for politicians and officials who turn a blind eye to criminals.”

In the end, the issue will be addressed or not, depending on politics and elections. Democratic leaders will be challenged to devise a humane immigration policy, as the number of migrants seeking entrance to the U.S. continues to be large for years to come, stretching border resources, the tolerance of voters, limited by other crises affecting the country, and against the opposition of the Republican Party, their massive electoral base, and the right-wing media.

The extremism built into Trump’s policies and electoral appeal

Bob Sheak, Jan 24, 2024

The elements of political extremism are present and intensifying in the U.S. including: (1) a leader who is widely accepted as such on the Right, (2) who is willing to use violence against opponents, (3) who thinks he is above the law, (4) who is viewed as a “strongman”, (5) who is defied by some supporters, (6) who wants to severely limit immigration, (7) who has support of many among the rich and powerful, (8) who advocates a militarized foreign policy, (9) who benefits from biased constitutional “pillars,” and (10) who ignores, disclaims, or belittles existential threats.

#1 – Trump is, so far, the undisputed leader of the Republican Party, supported by an electoral base of true believers that numbers in the tens of millions, along with wide swaths of the corporate community. Many in his base are drawn to him because they dubiously believe his first presidential term was successful, that a second term will be equally successful, and because he promises in a second term to seek revenge against his opponents, pursue a punitive and restrictive immigration policy, eliminate restrictions on gun ownership, promote Christian Nationalism, support white supremacy, and go along with those who want to ban abortion. Many of the rich and powerful and corporate oligarchs love that if re-elected Trump will lower taxes, eviscerate the Justice system, end the security of tens of thousands of federal government workers, and find ways to punish his opponents, even violently.

#2 – Violence

Thom Hartmann says that revenge Trump seeks may translate into violence. He calls Trump and his political allies “fascists and bullies all” (https://commondreams.org/opinion/donald-trump-classic-fascist-bully). Here’s some of what he writes in this Jan. 17 article.

“Trump dreams of revenge. It’s what fascists do.

“Because fascism trickles down from fascist leadership, it’s what Trump’s cult members are dreaming of, too. As are his toady lawyers.

“Yesterday, for example, Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC Appeals Court that if Trump became president again he could order Seal Team Six to assassinate Joe Biden or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about it.”

#3 – Above the law

There are currently 91 criminal counts against Trump. Ali Velshi has published a book. The Trump Indictments, that includes the texts of all of them. In his Introduction, Velshi refers to the multiple indictments that are included in four cases. Trump’s supporters often view the charges as “witch hunts” with no merit, but they have so far been unsuccessful in proving their case in the courts.

One, of the cases is about the efforts of Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which led to the Jan.6 riots at the Capitol. Another case involves Special Counsel Jack Smith’s charge Trump illegal mishandling of sensitive government documents that Trump took to his residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida and his attempts to obstruct the government from retrieving them. A third, the Georgia case, “alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to overturn the state’s election results and subvert the will of Georgia voters.” The fourth case “alleges that in 2017, Trump falsified Trump Organization business records related to reimbursing his then lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, for payments to the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels” (pp. viii-xi).

Trump’s lawyers want to delay the court proceedings, hoping that Trump’s re-election in November 2024 will then give him the power to put an end to these legal cases. He has also promised that as President he will pardon many or all of the over 700 persons already convicted for their participation in the Jan.6 riots.

What is so troubling is that Trump and his myriad supporters want a strongman [i.e., Trump] in the White House and could care less about whether the U.S. remains a democratic society governed by free and fair elections.

#4 – Viewed as a strongman

Zeynep Tufekci, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, considers how Trump’s voters crave a “strongman” President (https://nytimes.com/2024/01/14/opinion/trump-voters-iowa-caucus.html).

“I first began attending Trump rallies eight years ago, to try to better understand a candidate who was then being described as a joke — someone with little to no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency — and came away struck by his mix of charisma and powerful command of audiences.”

“I recently started going to Trump rallies and following his supporters’ online political conversations once again, to try to better understand something else: his base, and specifically the question of authoritarianism and the American voter.

The authoritarian label has been attached to Trump by critics for years, especially after he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

“What I wanted to understand was, why? Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?”

Tufekci talked to more than 100 voters. No one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” He continues: “But Trump is an authoritarian, projecting “qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style….They are seen as having special or singular strengths, and ‘I alone can fix it’ power.”

What he “heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, ‘don’t mess with me’ absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars.

His supporters also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician, and Trump sells that message very well to his base.”

“Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters. All the politicians say things like that in private, countless Trump supporters asserted to me and argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.”

“…Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world. Right after his recent landslide re-election, Orban said his party had won despite everyone being against them, and now he would ensure that Hungary would be “strong, rich and green.” In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: ‘For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.’”

“So what about democracy, then? I pressed many Trump supporters about the events around Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol. I didn’t encounter a single outright supporter of what happened, but many people explained the events away. Increasingly separate information environments and our fractured media ecology shape the way people view that day.

“Some Trump supporters told me that whatever happened was carried out by a fringe faction that did not represent Trump’s base.

“Many also didn’t trust the government or traditional media’s telling of what happened on Jan. 6.

“It’s easy to see why Trump’s political message can override concerns about the process of democracy for many. What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?

“Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.”

#5 – The deification of Trump

On January 17, 2024 in his weekly column for the New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall reviewed the opinions and research findings of experts, many of them political scientists, on a variety of political and economic topics. The focus in this column is on “the deification of Donald Trump”

(https://nytimes.com/2024/01/17/opinion/trump-god-evangelicals-anointed.html). Edsall writes:

“Trump, his family and his supporters have been more than willing to claim that Trump is ordained by God for a special mission, to restore America as a Christian nation.

“In recent weeks, for example, the former president posted a video called ‘God Made Trump’ on Truth Social that was produced by a conservative media group technically independent of the Trump campaign. He has also screened it at campaign rallies.

“The video begins as a narrator with a voice reminiscent of Paul Harvey’s declares: ‘On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.’”

“Why was Trump chosen? The video continues:

“God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump.

“The video claims to quote God directly:

“God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”

“The ‘God Made Trump’ video was created by the Dilley Meme Team, described by Ken Bensinger of The Times as

an organized collective of video producers who call themselves ‘Trump’s Online War Machine.’ The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, characterizes himself as Christian and a man of faith, but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church. He says that Mr. Trump has ‘God-tier genetics’ and, in response to the outcry over the ‘God Made Trump’ video, Dilley posted a meme depicting Mr. Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.

The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father ‘literally saved Christianity’ and the image Trump himself reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raise a question: Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?”

#6 – Anti-Immigration

Philip Bump, who writes columns for the Washington Post, posted on Jan 15 2024 that “Half of Americans agree with Trump’s ‘poisoning the blood’ immigration rhetoric” (https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/15/trump-poisoning-blood-immigration-policy).

“There’s always been a symbiosis between Donald Trump and right-wing rhetoric. His 2016 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was successful — surprisingly successful — because of his willingness to embrace arguments and assertions that were considered beyond the pale for his more traditional opponents.

“By picking out and then defending (to whatever extent was necessary for his audience) claims about immigrants and terrorism, among other things, he tapped into a strain of argumentation that was often kept out of sight. He helped bring the rhetoric into the mainstream.

“On Sunday [Jan. 14, 2024], CBS News presented the results of a new poll conducted by the polling firm YouGov — results that offered a stark example of this pattern, of how even extreme right-wing arguments are now barely outside the norm.

“Respondents were asked by YouGov whether they agreed with Trump that immigrants entering the United States illegally had the effect of ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country. This is not just right-wing rhetoric, mind you, but a reflection of some of the most extreme racial politics in modern history. It is an explicit depiction of immigrants as dangerous, but specifically in the context of posing a threat to national identity. It is the language of fascism.

Nearly half of Americans agreed with it.

“That was largely because more than three-quarters of Republicans agreed with Trump’s framing. Fewer than half of Democrats and independents agreed.

Interestingly, when the comments weren’t attributed to Trump, support was lower. Republicans were 10 points more likely to indicate agreement with Trump when they were told it was Trump with whom they were agreeing. Democrats were slightly less likely to agree.”

#7 – Trump’s appeal to the rich and powerful

Robert Reich gives us an insight on how the rich and powerful endorse Trump, focusing on Jamie Dimon, the chair and CEO of one of the largest and most profitable banks in the United States and one of the most influential CEOs in the world

(https://commondreams.org/opinion/donald-trump-jamie-dimon-groveling-fascism). The article was published on Jan. 20, 2024.

On Wednesday [Jan. 17, 2024], “speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon…heaped praise on Donald Trump’s policies while president. Dimon said:

“Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China. He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.”

Reich argues that Dimon supports Trump because “he thinks Trump has a good chance of becoming president, and Dimon wants to be in his good graces.”

“So now, Dimon — like Republican lawmakers across America, like other leaders of American institutions — feels it necessary to cave into the integrity-crushing intimidation of a Trump administration, and lick Trump’s backside.

And when Dimon does this, you can bet many other CEOs and financial leaders will now follow his example.”

Reich refers to and challenges Dimon’s reasons for embracing Trump’s efforts in the forthcoming 2024 presidential election that are not “kind of right,” but mostly or entirely wrong.

Kind of right about NATO? Trump wanted the U.S. to withdraw from NATO — and may get his way if he becomes president again. This would open Europe further to Putin’s aggression.

Kind of right on immigration? Even the conservative CATO Institute found that Trump reduced legal immigration but not illegal immigration. Trump refused to grant legal status to children of immigrants born in the United States or who grew up in the U.S. He banned Muslims from America, and when the Muslim ban was found to be unconstitutional, banned people from Muslim countries. He fueled the flames of nativism by describing poorer nations as ‘shit holes’ and has used Nazi terms to describe foreigners as ‘poisoning the blood’ of Americans.

Grew the economy quite well? In fact, under Trump the economy lost 2.9 million jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth was slower than it has been under Biden. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%. The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016. The number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by 3 million. The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.

Tax reform worked? Trump’s tax cut conferred most of its benefits on big corporations and the rich, while enlarging the budget deficit. Giant banks and financial services companies got huge gains based on the new, lower corporate rate (21%), as well as the more preferable tax treatment of pass-through companies.

…these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57% of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90% of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100% of the increase.

Right about China? As the Brookings Institution found, Trump’s China policy only made China less restrained in pursuit of its ambitions. Confrontation has intensified, areas of cooperation have vanished, and the capacity of both countries to solve problems or manage competing interests has atrophied.

#8 – A militarized foreign policy

Glenn Kessler considers evidence rebutting Trump’s claims that during his presidency there were no terrorist attacks and no wars (https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/13/trump-falsely-claims-no-terrorist-attacks-no-wars-during-his-presidency).

No terrorist attacks – false

Kessler identifies evidence to the contrary writing: “But Trump is wrong when he claims there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency. Laying aside domestic terrorism by right- or left-wing groups, the authoritative Global Terrorism Database maintained by the University of Maryland shows two major incidents tied to Islamist militants that resulted in fatalities.

Dec. 6, 2019: “A member of the Saudi Air Force, identified as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, opened fire on a classroom in the Naval Air Base in Pensacola, Florida, United States. Four people, including the assailant, were killed and eight others were injured in the attack. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility for the incident. Alshamrani posted criticism of U.S. wars and quoted Osama bin Laden on social media hours before the attack.”

Dec. 17, 2017: “An assailant driving a Home Depot rental truck entered a bike path in an attempt to run over civilians on the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. Following the initial attack, the assailant exited the vehicle and was shot by a police officer after displaying imitation firearms. At least eight people, including two citizens from the United States, five Argentinian tourists, and one Belgian tourist, were killed and 13 other people, including the assailant, were injured in the attack. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed that the assailant, identified as Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, was ‘one of the caliphate soldiers;’ however, sources doubted the veracity of this claim. Authorities also recovered a note from the vehicle in which Saipov pledged allegiance to ISIL.”

“Both of these incidents garnered enormous attention, and Trump himself commented on the cases at the time. He even called the Saipov case a “terrorist attack” in his 2018 State of the Union address.

The other case listed in the database that Trump referenced in his address (the 2019 incident had not yet happened) was this one, though it did not result in fatalities:

Dec. 11, 2017: “A suicide bomber detonated explosives [a pipe bomb] at Port Authority Bus Terminal between Seventh and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. In addition to the assailant, three civilians were injured in the blast. Akayed Ullah, a jihadi-inspired extremist, claimed responsibility for the incident and stated ‘They’ve been bombing in my country and I wanted to do damage here,’ and ‘I did it for the Islamic State.’ In April 2021, Ullah was sentenced to life plus 30 years.”

“Ullah, who came to the United States from Bangladesh in 2011, had obtained a green card as the child of a sibling of a U.S. citizen. Saipov, from Uzbekistan, arrived in the United States in 2010 through the diversity visa lottery.

“The database also lists four other incidents attributed to jihadi-inspired extremists, though no one was killed except, in two cases, the assailant.

No wars – false

Trump said at his farewell address as president that “he was the first president in 72 years not to have any wars.” Trump ignores Jimmy Carter’s presidency, from 1977 to 1981. Carter “not only never formally declared war or sought authorization to use force from Congress during his presidency, but military records show not a single soldier died in hostile action during his presidency. Eight military personnel died during the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, but the military deems those as non-hostile deaths. (A helicopter collided with an aircraft.) A marine and an army soldier were also killed when a mob burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.”

On Trump’s watch, “At least 65 active duty troops died in hostile action in Trump’s presidency, the records show, as he ramped up commitments in Iraq and Syria to fight the ISIS terrorist group while also launching airstrikes on Syria as punishment for a chemical weapons attack. (During the town hall, Trump bragged, “We beat ISIS, knocked them out.”) Trump also escalated hostilities with Iran, including the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Trump said at the time the strike was carried out in accordance with the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of 2001.”

“Trump often has a poor memory and a tenuous grasp on history, as these examples yet again show. There were jihadi-inspired terrorist attacks in the United States during his presidency, as he himself noted at the time. It’s also false to claim that he’s the first president since 1948 not to have had any wars on his watch. Jimmy Carter earns that honor.”

#9 – The pillars of minority (right-wing) rule have grown.

This is the position taken by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book, Tyranny of the Minority(publ. 2023). The anti-democratic pillars they consider, that favor Republicans, include the following.

#1 – The Electoral College “distorts the popular vote in two ways.

First, nearly all states (with the exception of Maine and Nebraska) allocate Electoral College votes in a winner-take-all manner. This means that if a candidate wins a state by a narrow margin of 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent, the candidate will receive 100 percent of the state’s electoral votes. This disproportionality creates problems when state’s electoral votes are aggregated in the Electoral College, because it allows the loser of the national popular vote to win.” This was exemplified in the 2016 presidential election in four swing states. “Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by narrow margins…which allowed him to capture all 46 of those states’ electoral votes. Hillary Clinton won New by 1.7 million votes., carrying its 29 electoral votes. Summing up the votes in those four states, Clinton won the popular vote by 1.6 million votes, but Trump won the Electoral College vote among those states by 46 to 29. The loser won.” (p. 173).

Second, there is also a “small-state” bias in the Electoral College that favors Republicans. The number of presidential electors allocated to each state is equal to the size of its congressional delegation: the number of representatives in the House plus the number of senators.” The effect is that “U.S. presidential elections have not been very democratic in the twenty-first century. Between 1992 and 2020, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election except 2004,” but “won the presidency three times during this period” (p. 175).

Third, the Supreme Court represents “a third pillar of minority rule.” “The court’s partisan bias is indirect but nevertheless is consequential. Given the nature of the Electoral College and the Senate, Supreme Court justices may be nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by Senate majorities that represent only a minority of Americans. And given the Republican advantage in the Electoral College and the Senate, such justices are more likely to be Republican appointees” (pp. 176-177).

Four, “an electoral system that manufactures artificial majorities and sometimes allows parties that win fewer votes to control legislatures. Nearly all U.S. congressional and state legislative elections employ a first-past-the-post (or winner-take-all) system….the Democratic Party’s voters are concentrated in metropolitan centers, whereas Republican voters, based in small towns and suburbs, tend to be more evenly distributed. As a result, Democrats are more likely to ‘waste’ votes racking up large majorities in urban districts while losing in most non-urban ones” (p.178).

#10 – Ignoring rising existential threats

Ralph Nader addresses this issue in article published on Jan. 15 2024https://commondreams.org/opinion/omnicides-that-threaten-humanity

Nader Identifies 5 Omnicides that threaten humanity, including (1) the growing climate crisis, (2) viral and bacterial pandemics that are looming larger by the decade, (3) the “perils of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are not being confronted with the requisite international arms control treaties, (4) “Artificial Intelligence” or “A.I.” is viewed by leading scientists and technologists as the ultimate tool capable of advancing an out-of-control doomsday future. Machines replicating themselves and turning on their creators is no longer science fiction.” – (5) Political and corporate power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. In most countries, the political economy has converged into an ever-maturing Corporate State which President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned about in a 1938 message to Congress:

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

Kleptocratic regimes come in various styles, depending on the nation’s stage of development, and operate by stealing from the future to enrich and entrench themselves in the present. Both in so-called developed and developing countries, they are displacing any semblance of modestly functioning democracies able, with the primacy of civil values and the rule of law, to foresee and forestall these approaching omnicides.

Concluding thoughts

To defeat Trump and Republicans in the November 2024 elections will require a big turnout of Democratic voters along with a good share of Independents. It will require that Biden’s domestic and economic policies, progressive tax policies, and his support of workers and unions are widely recognized. It will require that his attempts to deal with the climate crisis, his support for reproductive rights, Social Security and Medicare, his position on banning assault weapons and instituting other restrictions on gun ownership, his rejection of white supremacy, will also boost his chances for re-election in November 2024. It will require, additionally, that the “minority” biases built into the election system will not be sufficient to unduly suppress the center/left vote.