Sometimes you just have to unburden yourself of the unpleasant truth. A few years back, I was old enough, but not too old, to have self-restraint. That’s by the boards now. So without further adieu, let me list the Seven Items of Bad News — four for the short run, one for the middle run, and two for the (sort of ) long run.
One. The emperor has no clothes. More often recently, conservatives are titling this as something like, “It’s time to say the quiet part out loud,” but one way or the other it’s the same message: The President of the United States has lost it and is incompetent to govern. Indeed, he’s incompetent to run a hardware store much less the nation. This has been evident for some time, but got put irredeemably on the front burner by the Hur report, which concluded that Joe Biden is such a sad sack of a figure that a jury would overlook clear evidence of his guilt because it would be reluctant to send an enfeebled old man to jail.
Biden routinely makes errors characteristic of encroaching senility, mistaking names and dates all the time. This is on top of his history of telling (usually but not always) harmless whoppers.
I was at one time a White House aide (as Special Counsel for Pres. George H. W. Bush). The Presidency takes an enormous amount of energy, agility, breadth, depth and savvy. And the world is a dangerous place. Joe’s not up to it and we all know it. Is this making you feel safe?
Two. This year’s choice for President is very likely to be between two men each of whom is manifestly unfit for the Office. I’ve already discussed Biden (although on top of everything else, for the most part he lacks the will or intelligence to resist the caustically anti-American extremes currently running his Party and, therefore, the executive branch).
Do I really need to say much about Trump? Yes, he did some good things for the country in his term a few years back, and no, he doesn’t hate the country like much of his opposition does, but, good grief, is that supposed to qualify him to lead the Free World? He’s a narcissistic jackass. There is no degree of self-justification unknown to him. And it’s not just that his knowledge of law is nowhere to be seen; worse, it’s that his interest in knowing anything about the law simply doesn’t exist. This is the fellow whose oath, if he takes it again, requires him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Yikes.
And this is not to mention his behavior in refusing to accept his loss in 2020. Yes, there was fraud in the election and yes, the other side falsely denied (and denies) it, but next to no sensible conservative thinks he won. Worse, when he challenged the results in numerous court suits (which he was entitled to do), and lost them all, he would not accept the results. Instead, he egged on a mob to disrupt the processes of peacefully transitioning power, a tradition that is the signature tradition of the greatness of American governance.
And he makes goo-goo eyes at Putin. And he ridiculed McCain for being a prisoner of war. And he invites Russia to invade NATO countries behind on their dues.
Enough. He’s unfit for office. And this would be true even if the Republican Party didn’t have a wealth of mainstream candidates who are both qualified and not insufferably stuck on themselves and How I Wuz Robbed.
Three. This year’s campaign, for the first time in American history, will be run with one major candidate hobbled by prosecutorial strong-arming orchestrated by the other.
The Manhattan DA, leftist Democrat Alvin Bragg, has charged Trump with abstruse campaign finance violations in a case so attenuated that even the New York Times sheepishly says that it’s the “least significant” of the four criminal cases against him. Just today, the New York judge set the trial to start next month:
A judge in Manhattan rejected Donald Trump’s bid to throw out criminal charges against him that stem from a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016, clearing the way for the first prosecution of a former American president in the nation’s history.
The judge, Juan Merchan, scheduled the trial to begin on March 25, ensuring that Trump will face at least one jury before Election Day.
The New York case is generally viewed as the least significant of the four criminal cases against the former president, but it still presents a formidable threat. Trump is facing 34 felony charges and, if convicted, a sentence of up to four years in prison.
There are of course the two federal cases brought Biden’s Justice Department, and the Atlanta case brought by Democratic race-huckster Fani Willis, who was at least able to take time off from funneling money to herself through her boyfriend — oh, excuse me, make that the Assistant DA she hired at a nice salary — to indict Trump.
So the governing Democrats, not content to try to force the main opposition candidate off the ballot altogether with an argument the Justices all but ridiculed last week, aim to kneecap his campaign by using prosecutorial power to keep him tied down in court.
In any other context, the MSM would lambaste this for what it is, namely, the worst machinations of banana republic politics. But because Trump is the target — and so often cooperates by making himself the easiest target this side of Jupiter — it’s now lionized as the “rule of law.”
Rule of law my foot.
Four. The Republicans cave in to fruitcake isolationism by refusing to pass desperately needed aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. There are two components of the Republicans’ stance here, one perverted and the other merely terminally stupid. The perverted part is reluctance to help Israel, the Ukraine and Taiwan because “we need to use the money here at home” or some similar isolationist bromide.
Well, sure, we could use the money at home, but like it or not, we live in a smaller and smaller world, and the enemies of civilized life overseas (like Hamas) are our enemies as well. Malevolent forces beyond our borders proved it at Pearl Harbor and proved it again on 9-11. How many more of our people do we need to get killed to demand more proof? And while the hard-headed safeguarding of strictly American interests should be enough to persuade us to help our friends defeat our enemies, there is something else, too: Some people (I admit to being one of them) think our country has a moral as well as a self-interested obligation to help countries aligned with values of decency resist conquest and murder by forces with the opposite values.
I understand that the Republicans are trying to use the aid bill to try to force Biden into concessions that will strengthen the border and reduce the all-but unmitigated flood of illegal immigration. The goal is laudable but it’s too obvious for argument that this is not going to work.
Here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter what changes in immigration law Biden agrees to because he’s not going to keep any agreement he makes and will not enforce future law he dislikes any more than he’s enforcing present law he dislikes. It mystifies me that the Republicans don’t see this. The only way the border is going to be enforced is to defeat Biden in the election and install a President who takes national sovereignty more seriously.
Five, six and seven. This post has gone on longer than I’d planned, so I’ll just give a brief introduction to the other three things that will ruin your day, together will my promise that I’ll elaborate on them in a future post to ruin yet another day (my father was a member of the Optimist Club, but I never really fit in).
No. 5 is Iran and our failure to confront it as it needs to be confronted in order to prevent it from getting and using the atomic bomb. Half-measures and hope aren’t going to work for a lot longer, as my very smart friend Richard Vigilante spells out here.
No. 6 is our addiction to debt, both public and private. The national debt keeps growing astronomically. Not a single leader in Washington takes this seriously. I guess they think America is going to become the first civilization in history permanently to consume more than it produces. I have my doubts. We need to ask ourselves where and how this is going to end.
No. 7 is America’s disgraceful and failing system of public education. Standards have cratered. We no longer even pay lip service to excellence and now bow down to “equity,” the only poorly disguised term for achieving nothing and learning less. We need to guts and the vision to explore why this has happened and set it right. Right now, I’m not seeing either.
Category: US politics
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Someday, we will all put our feet up, crack a cold one, and look back at those crazy years when America lost its damn mind.
That’s the view of the New York Times’ David French. Never one to sugarcoat the dire state in which modern conservatism finds itself, he nonetheless ended a recent column with a note of optimism.
“This era of American politics will end, one way or the other,” French wrote. “And when it does, historians are likely to debate whether its defining characteristic was stupidity or malice.”
While his point is submerged in a sentence full of acid, his overall outlook demonstrates promise.
But what exactly is the evidence that this era of American politics will eventually end?
Sure, someday Donald Trump is going to shuffle off this mortal coil (he’d better not have Alina Habba making his case before Saint Peter), but the incentive for politicians to behave like energy-drink-swigging gremlins isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Trump has unlocked a style of politics in which Congress is a safe home for psychotics like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz but not dignified conservatives like Liz Cheney.
And the sanity in politics is continuing to trend downward. This week, Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington decided, joining other fed-up Republicans such as Patrick McHenry of North Carolina and Kay Granger of Texas, to wash her hands of it. Utah senator Mitt Romney, realizing that urging his colleagues to behave with dignity was like telling a Tyrannosaurus rex to go vegan, will similarly call it quits at the end of the year.
Later last week, Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a future political star in the making, also ejected himself from his congressional cockpit. Gallagher tried to play ball with the MAGA wing, casting some truly head-scratching votes, but in the end it wasn’t enough, and now his political rise is over — or, one can hope, interrupted.
Perhaps clarifying the point, Gallagher is only the most recent Badger State politician to meet this fate. Wisconsin’s most robust export isn’t beer or cheese, it is dark-haired, square-jawed, traditional conservatives built in a factory for the purpose of one day inhabiting the national stage. But Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, and now Gallagher have had their bones crushed to dust by the Trump political machine.
Had there been any sign that the Republican Party was on the cusp of some return to normalcy, perhaps the onetime Washington up-and-comers would have stuck it out. But instead of voting on the floor, they are now voting with their feet and hightailing it out of public life.
Of course, the departing Republicans won’t be replaced by traditional, small-government, low-tax, personal-freedom enthusiasts (or by Republicans at all). Those people are glaring at Congress as if it were the Eye of Sauron and opting to stay away.
No, in 2025, Congress will once again see the levelheaded defectors replaced by people who won GOP primaries where the only disagreement among candidates was whether vaccines or the 2020 election results are more imaginary.
And they will have plenty of backup from the House members and senators they will be joining. They will be sitting beside people like election-denying Ohio senator J. D. Vance, who thinks sending aid to Ukraine is part of a secret plan to impeach Donald Trump in 2025. Or maybe they can cozy up with Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who believes Covid can be cured with mouthwash and who gives interviews to people like Jack Posobiec, a man who thinks Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.
Of course, that is just the people who have actually been elected. In the foreseeable future, Tucker Carlson will continue to command his Army of the Uninformed, and those looking to unseat Carlson as the president of Planet MAGA will veer into even more demented territory.
Again, for both elected officials and Trump-aligned pundits, attention is the only currency that matters. Their incentives are thus to be reflexively contrarian and/or to behave like a buffoon. For as far as our eyes can see into the future, the quickest path to stardom in politics is to comport oneself like a moron.
There is currently a popular YouTube show in which the world’s most famous people try to answer questions while eating hot wings. (If you whispered that sentence to someone ten years ago, they would have had you involuntarily committed.) During their spicy-wing journey, the guests always get to an inedible sauce called “Da Bomb Beyond Insanity,” which makes them contort their face, start screaming, and in some cases, openly weep. It is as if this unholy condiment emanated from Lucifer’s armpit.
But there is no doubt that this sauce is the best-selling flavor on the show. No matter how toxic, people want to try it for themselves because it gets such a reaction. It transforms famous and powerful and beautiful people into whimpering messes. And although it tastes thoroughly wretched, it is undeniably attention-grabbing. It makes you feel alive.
So for those of you wondering how House Republican Conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik is like hot sauce, you have your answer.
Sadly, this is what the people want (terrible politicians, not condiment metaphors). As H.L. Mencken said, this is the democracy people crave, and they are going to get it good and hard.
Further accelerating our acrid politics are the tools used to spread fear, distrust, and misinformation. The role of the modern politician is to scare the public into thinking America is on the brink of an existential crisis that, coincidentally, only they can solve. With artificial intelligence and deepfake videos, we are heading into an era when reality is twisted beyond recognition, and when those who practice that deceit the best will be rewarded with clicks and cash. Who is going to be the first to turn down money or political power just to stand on principle? Future historians debating the causes of the political fever of the 2020s might do so in a TikTok video while hitting each other with folding chairs.
This is even worse news for those holding out hope that a traditional conservative will one day vanquish this nationalist nonsense and return the party to its former Reaganite glory. But that is likely gone forever. By the time the 2028 election rolls around, traditional conservatism will have been absent from the Republican Party for twelve years. Twelve years ago, the biggest hit in America was Korean artist Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” When’s the last time you popped that jam onto Spotify?
Will things continue to devolve forever? They will until voters recognize a daily injection of rage serum doesn’t solve their problems. As folk crooner Sufjan Stevens sings, “Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level.”
So, may David French’s optimistic words make their way from his keyboard to the Lord’s iPhone. But until then, we will all be slathering our politics with a numbing dollop of Da GOP Beyond Insanity.
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The collapse of local news sometimes looks like a big city problem. Alarm bells rang when iconic dailies like the Denver Post and the Baltimore Sun slashed their staffs. The election of George Santos—whose many falsehoods and fabrications came to light only after he won a seat in Congress—cast a spotlight on the anemic local news in New York City.
Since Republicans are more likely to express skepticism than concern about the media, we might conclude that the fate of local news is an issue only for Democrats. In fact, more victims of this trend are probably Republican or conservative Americans, and they should care about strengthening local news.
Using 2020 election results and a dataset collected by professor Penny Abernathy of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, I took a closer look at how local news is faring across the country. The outlook isn’t encouraging for smaller communities, which tend to be more conservative: Of the 205 counties nationwide with no newspapers in the dataset, 93 percent had fewer than 50,000 residents, and 74 percent of those counties without papers voted for Donald Trump in 2020. “More than half of the communities that have lost newspapers are in suburban or rural areas, where the population is shrinking, rather than growing,” Abernathy wrote in a 2022 report on the state of local news.
Between 2004 and 2022, approximately 2,500 weekly publications closed or merged with other papers. In the papers that remain, local coverage has declined more rapidly in smaller towns. “The smallest papers experience the biggest proportional cuts to coverage of local government,” wrote professors Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless in their book News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement, which studied 121 newspapers. “Local coverage was reduced 300 percent more than other topics at the smallest papers but only 30 percent more than at the largest papers.”
This decline has hampered Americans’ ability to get crucial information about topics affecting their daily lives. Take education, for example: “One out of every three stories written about school boards in 2003 had disappeared by 2017,” add Hayes and Lawless in News Hole. The trend was again more alarming at small outlets: “Among those with less than 15,000 circulation, the average reduction in schools’ coverage was 56 percent.”
And it’s likely to get worse. Abernathy concluded that counties with only one newspaper, lower-than-average median incomes, and declining populations are vulnerable to losing that newspaper and not getting a replacement. I looked at the 1,437 vulnerable counties that she identified as having some of these factors, specifically those with only one newspaper and lower-than-average incomes. The vast majority of counties in the dataset, 83 percent, had populations with fewer than 50,000 residents—small town America where Republicans dominate. Indeed, 90 percent of those vulnerable counties voted Republican in 2020.
The conservative community of Ogdensburg, New York, which is represented by Rep. Elise Stefanik, lost its newspaper, the Ogdensburg Journal, for two years. “To lose the Journal really hurt the city – hurt the city a lot,” said Laura Pearson, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, in a virtual town hall organized by Editor & Publisher. “It’s where we get our personal stories. It’s where we get our announcements for weddings and births and obituaries. It’s where we sing the praises for student of the month or for their sports activities they’re involved in.”
Local Republican leader James E. Reagan of St. Lawrence County, New York, suggested that misinformation spread more rapidly in the absence of local news. “Once the Journal closed down so many people were turning to social media, to Facebook, anonymous blogs where people could make whatever accusations and allegations they wanted to without identifying who they were,” he said. “There is no one to sort out the truth from the fiction.” As a result of the outcry, a nearby publisher recently revived the Ogdensburg Journal.
One consequence of the local news contraction is the increased concentration of reporters in what Republican voters might consider coastal elite meccas. In 2004, 1 in 8 reporters were located in Los Angeles, New York City, or Washington, D.C. By 2017, it was 1 in 5.
As a result, some Republicans feel that local voices are being overwhelmed by national sensibilities. Josh Holmes, the former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell, put it well:
“You won’t hear a conservative say this often enough but [please] support your local media … Locals are underfunded and overextended and forced to fall into the clickbait competition with national outlets that only exacerbate the problem. The result is national media misunderstanding/misinterpreting local politics.”
“If you don’t want someone on the coasts to tell the world what your life is like, what your business does, what you believe or what national policy means for your family, then subscribe to a local outlet …”
Among the types of local coverage that these voters miss out on: economic development, high school sports, obituaries, religion, and schools. In other words, they miss out on the types of information that connect them to others in their communities. As Republican Dan Newhouse, co-author of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, recently put it:
“Local journalism, no matter what form it’s in, truly does contribute to the fabric of a community — keeps people informed about what’s going on … I don’t always like to read what reporters write about me or say about me. But I think having that kind of transparency is just part of our system — it’s really an important part of keeping our communities vibrant and strong.”
What’s more, communities with less local news had lower bond ratings, higher financing costs, and higher taxes. Researchers found that with fewer watchdogs, governments became more wasteful. This also hurt economic development efforts, reinforcing an urban-rural divide. News deserts also tend to have more government corruption.
Todd Novak, a conservative assemblyman in Wisconsin, has suggested an innovative, Republican-friendly proposal: a tax credit to small businesses that advertise in local news. The primary beneficiary would be the restaurant, bar, or bank that gets the marketing credit (which is probably why the Tavern League of Wisconsin supports it), and the small business, not the government, would decide where to spend their ad dollars. But local news would be supported in the process.
Some cynics might wonder: Why would Republicans do anything to help fill the local-news void if they are already winning in these areas? The answer is because the victims of the collapse of local news are Republican (and other) voters. They get worse information to help them make decisions for their families, and their communities are less able to address their problems. Lawmakers across political parties may differ in their priorities, but not in their desire to see government function. The accountability provided by local news is essential for making sure that the government works for its constituents, so that their families, schools, and communities can thrive.
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Is a journalist’s trip to a hostile country “treason?” Should that journalist be barred from the U.S. on the chance that he’s performing an act of journalism, such as interviewing a foreign leader? The answer to both of these questions, for anybody who isn’t a jackass, is “no.” And yet Tucker Carlson’s presence in Russia has excited a frenzy of speculation and protest because of the controversial talking head’s populist politics.
“Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” The Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol snarked on reports that Carlson was in Moscow.
Former GOP congressman Adam Kinzinger went further, calling Carlson a “traitor” for visiting Russia’s capital amidst rumors that the journalist traveled to interview Russia’s thuggish President Vladimir Putin. Carlson later confirmed the rumors on X (formerly Twitter.)
“If so, Mr. Carlson would be the first American media figure to land a formal interview with the Russian leader since he invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago,” observed Jim Rutenberg and Milana Mazaeva for The New York Times. Rutenberg and Mazaeva noted that Russia’s own journalists face tight strictures, and that “Mr. Putin’s government has been holding Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, in jail for nearly a year.”
This is entirely true. But it’s not at all uncommon for journalists to interview foreign political leaders, including complete scumbags. Gathering information is core to the job and powerful figures on the world stage are and should be of interest to the public—especially if they pose potential or real danger.
Vladimir Putin was the subject of an interview with Barbara Walters back in 2001. In 2015, Reuters interviewed China’s President (probably for life) Xi Jinping about his intentions on the world stage. Orla Guerin of the BBC spoke with Venezuela’s dictatorial Nicolás Maduro in 2019. Last October, in the wake of Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel, The Economist‘s Zanny Minton Beddoes sat down with Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior official with the terrorist group, to try to understand his thinking.
For that matter, CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace interviewed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for “60 Minutes” while Iran had American hostages. ABC-TV’s Ted Koppel once interviewed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein for “Nightline” during the Iran–Iraq War.
That interview with Marzouk may come the closest to a present-day interview with Putin because of the context of Hamas’s attack and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For most Americans, both figures are wildly unsympathetic. But it’s not the job of journalists to speak only with popular figures who give their audiences warm and fuzzy feelings. They’re supposed to gather news about everybody, including terrible people who are responsible for war, tyranny, and murder. And there’s a real value in understanding the motives and goals of people who play an important role on the world stage.
“How does Hamas justify the atrocities committed in Israel?” The Economist wrote of the Marzouk interview. “Why has it done this? What does it plan to do with the hostages?”
Putin plays a comparatively bigger role on the world stage, controlling an entire major country and its nuclear arsenal. Some insights into where he’s coming from could be helpful.
“I can’t believe the idea that @TuckerCarlson is a traitor for doing an interview with anyone is taken seriously. Are people two years old? I remember when it was destination television if U.S. anchors scored interviews with the Ayatollah or a Soviet premier,” journalist Matt Taibbi, who has built an independent presence on Substack, pointed out in an effort to bring a measure of sanity to the discussion.
Of course, Tucker Carlson raises eyebrows because he’s a nationalist and populist and seen as, among other unpleasant things, overly sympathetic to Putin’s government. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple called Carlson a “Putin apologist” while MSNBC’s Alex Wagner referred to him as “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia.”
Honestly, Russian officials seem to agree; they’ve highlighted his coverage for years as representing a relatively friendly voice in the United States media.
But that doesn’t matter. In free societies, people have the right to embrace whatever political views they like, whether in their personal lives or their professional careers. Those views are certainly fair game for criticism and, the more public the figure, the more legitimate a target they are for high-profile takedowns. But a person’s ideology is neither a ticket to ride nor a bar to entry for trying to make a living as a journalist—or at least it shouldn’t be if we’re going to have anything resembling free media.
Having been fired from Fox News, Carlson built a following on X. Whatever anybody may think of the man and his views—I’m not a fan—it’s to all of our benefit that there’s space for diverse viewpoints espoused by people who don’t need permission from gatekeepers to gather and report news, comment on events, and build followings. The more people engaging in journalism with whom we disagree, especially if we disagree with them in different ways, the more likely that media is uncensored, healthy, and making a fair attempt at getting the job done. If we agree with a few voices, too, so much the better.
Besides, if Tucker Carlson is sympathetic to a foreign dictator, or authoritarian in his beliefs, or just plain politically repulsive, he wouldn’t exactly be breaking new ground among journalists. The excellent 2019 film Mr. Jones documented Gareth Jones’s uphill struggle to reveal the truth of the Holodomor, the deliberate famine inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Joseph Stalin’s communist regime. Among the obstacles to reporting the story were pro-Soviet journalists such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for propagandizing on behalf of Stalin.
No doubt, Carlson sees himself in the Jones truth-teller role here, though he may well be more of a Duranty stand-in. But that’s a verdict to be rendered by public debate and the passage of time, not by a mob screaming “traitor” at somebody who wanders from the ideological reservation.
And there’s certainly nothing to be gained by speculating about barring a journalist from the country because you disagree with his views or his work. Even if we allow that Kristol is just joking, he’s written some terrible things himself—cheerleading for the Iraq War comes to mind—that invite harsh judgment.
But Kristol, like Carlson, shouldn’t be barred from the country or from journalism for wrongthink. A free society and a free press demand that all voices be welcome to speak. Then, once they’ve spoken, they’re fair game for whatever heat is directed their way.
Tuccille’s appears to be a minority view, as Tom Jones (not the singer) chronicles):
I wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter that Tucker Carlson is in Russia and now it has been confirmed: He has, indeed, interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. That interview is expected to air today, most likely on Carlson’s streaming site and on X.
In teasing the interview, Carlson took a shot at other journalists by saying, “… not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour snapped back on X, saying that it’s “absurd” to think Western journalists haven’t tried to interview Putin.
Even the Russians called out Carlson’s ridiculous claim.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “Mr. Carlson is wrong. We receive many requests for interviews with the president.”
Peskov said the Kremlin has denied interview requests from large Western outlets, but it granted Carlson’s request because “his position is different” from what the Kremlin calls “Anglo-Saxon media.” Peskov said of Carlson, “It’s not pro-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian, it’s pro-American.”
Oh, so now the Kremlin wants to cooperate with someone because they are “pro-American?”
The Washington Post’s Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova wrote, “The Kremlin’s decision to allow the interview demonstrated Putin’s interest in building bridges to the disruptive MAGA element of the Republican Party, and it seemed to reflect the Kremlin’s hope that Donald Trump would return to the presidency and that Republicans would continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, back here in the United States, Carlson has very little, if any, credibility among real journalists or media observers.
Political commentator Steve Schmidt — a strategist who worked on campaigns for John McCain, George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger and helped found The Lincoln Project — wrote on Substack, “Why is Tucker Carlson in Russia? The answer is simple. Carlson despises America as much as Putin does, though for different reasons. Tucker Carlson is what the Russians call a ‘useful idiot.’”
Schmidt added, “He is a vessel for foreign poison to reach our free society, in which he seems to delight, undermining with lies, omissions and utter nonsense. It is important to remember that Tucker Carlson is not engaged in an act of dissent or speech. He is a propagandist carrying water for a Russian war criminal who hates the United States, and is committed to conflict with the west. He is a purveyor of racial malice, election denialism and dozens of conspiracy theories. He is being covered in Russia by state TV like the NFL covers Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game. It is a sickening display. Tucker Carlson has become a dangerous demagogue in recent years. His actions and conduct are reprehensible. He is no journalist. He is a very bad American. Tucker Carlson is a stooge, and specifically he is Putin’s stooge. What a disgrace.”
During his show on NewsNation, anchor Chris Cuomo said, “Tucker Carlson is getting exactly what he wants: attention. Now, frankly, I don’t care. His explanation of why he’s doing it — that he’s a journalist and he needs to inform people; he can call himself whatever he wants. I think his work is demonstrable as not being just about giving people information. He has a point of view and often it’s not aligned with the facts.”
Anne Applebaum, the staff writer for The Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, tweeted, “Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches. Carlson’s interview is different because he is not a journalist, he’s a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.”
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, took a jab at Carlson for claiming no Western media bothered to interview Putin, tweeting, “Poor, poor Vladimir Putin. Until now, nobody in the West has had the chance to hear him explain all the excellent reasons for why he had to invade Ukraine. Not in the speech that was broadcast live on every global network the morning of the invasion, and not in countless others.”
It should be noted that Trofimov is a colleague of the Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned in Russia on trumped-up charges of espionage since March 2023.
I wonder if Carlson grilled Putin about that?
Finally, there is this tweet from Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats about Carlson’s bragging that he is the only one with a journalist’s determination to interview Putin: “Unbelievable! I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1000 Ritz suite in Moscow.”
Censorship is not part of a free society.
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President Biden doesn’t need a bill to fix the border. He just needs to enforce the law. The law is section 212(f) of the immigration and nationality act, which gives the President authority to suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens.
It’s similar to Title 42, but even bigger. It also includes travel restrictions implemented by President Trump. In 2018, the Supreme Court supported section 212(f). The trouble is, Mr. Biden won’t enforce it.
And that’s one of many reasons why we don’t need a new piece of legislation. Especially when that legislation would virtually codify somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 illegals per day entering America.
Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social earlier that “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.”
The liberal Connecticut senator, Chris Murphy, who was the Democratic negotiator, keeps gloating “the border never closes.” What does that tell you? Tells me the Bidens don’t want to close the border.
And so-called reforms for asylum and processing, will just encourage more illegal entries. Ditto for so-called parole migration. And green cards. And work permits.
Years ago, the Trump administration proposed a checklist of criteria for legal immigration including rudimentary things like speaking English, a civics lesson on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, some American history, proof of a job.
Heaven forbid migrants should speak the language and know a little bit about the country. Of course, none of that is in the Biden bill. And if Mr. Trump wins the election, why should he be stuck with numerical targets that are way too high?
Much higher than his own crackdown on illegals before he left office four years ago. I’m also interested in the discussion of Governor Abbott that putting up barbed wire around Eagle Pass, Texas, has dramatically reduced the number of illegals.
Of course, the Bidens oppose any barriers, but barbed wire reminds me of building the wall. Which is another good Trump idea. And all this reminds me of Remain in Mexico, which has been ignored in this new bill.
So has any updating of Title 42. Like so many institutions in Mr. Biden’s America, the border is completely broken. In a real sense, America is broken. The border is just a symptom. The problem is much larger.
The Justice System, the economy, the Middle East and foreign policy, schools, universities, government censorship, law and order. All broken.
In another sense, the Biden administration is broken. And Mr. Trump is working very hard to get a chance to fix it.
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The Hill reports:
Conservative social media is engulfed with a Taylor Swift conspiracy theory centered on the idea that the NFL is rigging games to ensure the pop superstar and boyfriend’s team both make and win the Super Bowl — just in time to give a nod to President Biden in the presidential election.
Swift, coming off a year in which her “The Eras Tour” broke records, her concert movie boosted the box office and her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce broke the internet, is perhaps at the peak of her popularity and fame.
That’s attracted attention from the political world, with the Biden campaign said to be interested in a “dream” endorsement from Swift, according to an article published Monday by The New York Times. Swift endorsed Biden in 2020 and has been somewhat active in politics, also endorsing Democrat Phil Bredesen against Republican Marsha Blackburn when the latter was first elected to the Senate in 2018.
Swift’s incredible popularity is also bringing to the forefront various ugly sides of 21st century American life, from explicit AI-generated deepfakes of the superstar that briefly closed down Taylor Swift searches this week on X to unfounded conspiracy theories.
Kansas City has been to three Super Bowls in five years and won Sunday in a game that featured terribly timed turnovers and careless penalties by the losing Baltimore Ravens. While Kansas City was the underdog, the victory was hardly a big surprise.
But that seems to matter little with those fanning the conspiracy on the right.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote the morning after Chiefs victory.
“And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months,” said Ramaswamy, no stranger to conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, later retweeted another post on the subject from Ramaswamy with this message: “Exactly.”
Jack Lombardi, a conservative activist who ran an unsuccessful bid for the House in 2022, also posted on social media he has “never been more convinced that the Super Bowl is rigged.”
“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open,” claimed far-right influencer Laura Loomer. “It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion [get out the vote] Campaign.”
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Matt Taibbi, who is neither a Trump fan nor a conservative:
The fix is in. To “protect democracy,” democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.
On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.
The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:
“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy.” Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.”
Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:
We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.
The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.
The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.
NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.
For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.
Authored by former NAACP director Ben Chavis, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, former North Carolina Governor Dennis Blair, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Iran-Contra Special Counsel Dan Webb, the No Labels letter described a meeting of multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party. In the 80-minute confab, audio of which was obtained by Semafor, a dire warning was issued to anyone considering a third-party run:
Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.
The Semafor piece offered a rare glimpse into the Zoom-politics culture that’s dominated Washington since the arrival of Covid-19. If this is how Beltway insiders talk about how to keep Joe Lieberman or Ben Chavis out of politics, imagine what they say about Trump?
We don’t have to imagine. Three and a half years ago, in June and July of 2020, an almost exactly similar series of features to the recent NBC story began appearing in media, describing another “loose network” of “bipartisan officials,” also meeting “quietly” to war-game scenarios in case “Trump loses and insists he won,” as the Washington Post put it.
That group, which called itself the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), involved roughly 100 former officials, think-tankers, and journalists who gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios. The “loose” network included big names like former Michigan governor and current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and former Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, who in his current role as special advisor to President Joe Biden overseeing the handout of roughly $370 billion in “clean energy” investments is one of the most powerful people in Washington.
The TIP was hyped like the rollout of a blockbuster horror flick: In a second Trump Term, No One Will Hear You Scream… Stories in NPR, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and over a dozen other major outlets outlined apocalyptic predictions about Trump’s unwillingness to leave office, and how this would likely result in mass unrest, even bloodshed. A typical quote was from TIP co-founder, Georgetown law professor, and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, who told the Boston Globe that every one of the group’s simulations ended in chaos and violence, because “the law is… almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”
Podesta played Joe Biden in one TIP simulation, and in one round refused to accede to a “clear Trump win,” threatening instead to seize a bloc of West Coast states including California (absurdly dubbed “Cascadia”) and secede. Podesta’s “frankly ridiculous move,” as one TIP participant described it, was so over the top that a player leaked it to media writer Ben Smith of the New York Times.
The latter in Timesian fashion stuck the seeming front-page tale near the bottom of an otherwise breezy August 2nd story titled, called “How The Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong”:
A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat… They cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede…
But Mr. Podesta… shocked the organizers… he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office…
News that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief rejected a legal election result, even in a hypothetical simulation, was obvious catnip to conservative media, which took about ten minutes to repackage Smith’s story using the same alarmist headline format marking earlier TIP write-ups. Breitbart published “Democrats’ ‘War Game’ for Election Includes West Coast Secession, Possible Civil War,” and a cascade of further red-state freakouts seemed inevitable.
“At that point,” says Nils Gilman, COO and EVP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, who served alongside Brooks as TIP’s other co-founder, “we decided we needed to be out about having run this exercise, to prevent the allegation that this was a ‘shadowy cabal’ — not that that narrative didn’t take hold anyways.”
The final TIP report was released the next day, August 3rd, 2020. Titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” the full text was, as any person attempting an objective read will grasp, sensational.
The Podesta episode was worse than reported, with the secession proposal coming on “advice from President Obama,” used as leverage to a) secure statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico b) divide California into five states to increase its Senate representation, and c) “eliminate the Electoral College,” among other things. TIP authors also warned Trump’s behavior could “push other actors, including, potentially, some in the Democratic Party, to similarly engage in practices that depart from traditional rule of law norms, out of perceived self-defense.”
More tellingly, there were multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness. TIP authors concluded that “as an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage” in the upcoming election, and chided participants that “planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” They added the key observation that “a reliance on elites observing norms are [sic] not the answer here.”
Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.”
This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.”
That incident acquires new significance now in light not only of this NBC story, but also the dismal 2024 poll numbers for Biden, a host of unusually candid calls for preemptive action to prevent Trump from taking office, the bold efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in states like Colorado and Maine, and those lesser-publicized, but equally important campaign to keep third party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy from gaining ballot access in key states.
The grim reality of Campaign 2024 is that both sides appear convinced the other will violate “norms” first, with Democrats in particular seeming to believe extreme advance action is needed to head off a Trump dictatorship. Such elevated levels of paranoia virtually guarantee that someone is going to cheat before Election Day in November, at which point the court of public opinion will come into play. The key question will be, who abandoned democracy first?
The TIP report provided an answer. It contained long lists of theoretical Trump abuses that sounded suspiciously more like the extralegal maneuvers already deployed against Trump dating back to mid-2016, particularly during the failed effort to prosecute him for collusion with Russia. Interpreted by some as a literal plan to overturn a legal Trump victory, its greater significance was as a historical document, since it read like a year-by-year synopsis of all the home team rule-breaking. In other words, the TIP read like a Team Clinton playbook, only with hero and villain reversed.
Bearing in mind that many of the people involved were also Russiagate actors, here’s a abbreviated list of abuses the TIP authors supposedly feared Trump would commit:
“The President’s ability… to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents.”
It’s true a president so inclined can do these things, and possible a re-elected Trump might, but they were clearly done first to Trump in this case. The FBI’s road-to-nowhere Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russian collusion, which made use of illegally obtained FISA surveillance authority, began on July 31, 2016. Trump opponents have been “launching investigations” really without interruption ever since, with many (including especially the recent Frankensteinian hush-money prosecution) obviously politicized.
Likewise, the office of the Director of National Intelligence published an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017, again before Trump’s inauguration, that used information from the bogus Steele dossier to conclude that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” If that isn’t using intelligence agencies to “cast doubt on election results,” what is? Worse, the trick would be repeated, over and over:
“The President and key members of his administration can also reference classified documents without releasing them, manipulate classified information, or selectively release classified documents for political purposes, fueling manufactured rumors.”
This phenomenon also began before Trump’s election, notably with the story leaked on January 10, 2017, about four “intel chiefs,” including FBI Director James Comey, who presented then-President-elect Trump with “claims of Russian efforts to compromise him,” including the infamous pee tape. “Selective” release of “classified documents” then continued through the Trump presidency. Other incidents involved the “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story (February 2017), a Washington Post story about Jeff Sessions speaking to the Russian ambassador (March 2017), the (incorrect) story about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen being in Prague (April 2018), the infamous “Russian bounty” story (June 2020), and many, many, others.
Podesta himself participated in one of the first and most damaging “manufactured rumor” episodes, beginning in late 2016, involving the use of the Elias-commissioned Steele dossier to illegally obtain a FISA warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page. Podesta, who of course knew the real source of the story, reacted to it as if it was news generated by government investigators and publicly derided Page as a Russian cutout, before adding that the 2016 election “was distorted by the Russian intervention.” This was a textbook example of using “manufactured rumors” from intelligence agencies to “cast doubt” on election results as you’ll find.
“Additional presidential powers subject to misuse include… his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”
As for restricting internet communications “in the name of national security,” Racket pauses to laugh. The growth of state-aided censorship initiatives like the ones we studied all last year in the Twitter Files began well before Trump’s election, for instance with the creation in Barack Obama’s last year of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which later worked with Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership to focus heavily on posts deemed to be attempts at “delegitimization” in the 2020 election. Stanford’s group even flagged a story about the TIP in its final report as “conspiracy theory.”
Not to say that these bureaucracies couldn’t be abused by a second Trump administration, but so far they’ve been a near-exclusive fixation of Democratic politicians and security officials. There’s a reason Joe Biden is the only candidate slated to enjoy a censorship-free campaign season, while Trump and third-party challenger Robert F. Kennedy have been repeatedly removed or de-amplified from various platforms.
“There is considerable room to use foreign interference, real or invented, as a pretext to cast doubt on the election results or more generally to create uncertainty about the legitimacy of the election.”
This may have been the most amazing line in the TIP report, given that the entire Trump presidency was marked by stories like “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump” (New Yorker) “Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable” (Wired), “Russia ‘turned’ election for Trump, Clapper believes” (PBS), “Yes, Russian Election Sabotage Helped Trump Win” (Bloomberg), and a personal favorite, “CIA Director Wrongly Says U.S. Found Russia Didn’t Affect Election Result” (NBC). There was so much “Russia hacked the election” messaging between 2016 and 2020, in fact, that our Matt Orfalea made two movies about it. Here’s one:
In the 2018 midterm elections, officials warned that Russia was going to “attack” the congressional vote. Stories like “U.S. 2018 elections ‘under attack’ by Russia” (Reuters) and “Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections” (New York Times) were constants, until the Democrats retook the House in a “blue wave,” at which point headlines began saying the opposite (“Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says” from the Times was a typical take). The TIP was written during a repeat version, as stories like “Lawmakers are Warned that Russia is Meddling to Re-Elect Trump” (New York Times) were near-daily fixtures in 2020 pre-election coverage. After Biden won, headlines like “Putin Failed to Mount Major Election Interference Activities in 2020” again became fixtures in papers like the Washington Post.
This brings us to the last and most controversial angle on the TIP report. When the original TIP text came out, Michael Brendan Daugherty in National Review wrote in an offhand tone that he got the feeling “some progressives are steeling themselves for a Color Revolution in the United States,” because winning a normal election “just isn’t cathartic enough.”
To this day, the color revolution idea makes TIP organizers laugh.
“The idea that some rando in Los Angeles,” Gilman says, referring to himself, “was secretly planning a color revolution (which he published a report about months in advance, which you gotta admit is a pretty weird move for a guy allegedly plotting a revolution) is a textbook example of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style.”
Brooks is also incredulous, saying the color revolution thesis is a “profound misunderstanding” of the TIP report. “They aren’t plans or predictions, they’re efforts to understand how things might play out,” she wrote, adding that the TIP participants were merely asking, “What could go wrong?”
They may have asked that. Still, the group’s final report contained a string of references to “plans and predictions,” with entries like “Plan for a contested election,” “Plan for large-scale protests,” and “Make plans now for how to respond in the event of a crisis.” As for the “profound misunderstanding,” Brooks gave a friendly interview to a New York Times writer who was apparently laboring under the same “profound” delusion.
Weeks after the National Review piece, Michelle Goldberg in the Times wrote of Daugherty: “He’s right, but not in the way he thinks.” She explained that Democrats don’t relish the thought of an uprising, but look upon it as something to be dreaded, that “must nonetheless be considered.”
She then quoted Brooks. The Georgetown professor, who in her most recent book about life in the Defense Department described getting “a coveted intelligence community ‘blue badge’” to pass into “the sacred precincts of the CIA,” told Goldberg that in the event of a Trump power grab, “the only thing left is what pro-democracy movements and human rights movements around the world have always done, which is sustained, mass peaceful demonstrations.”
That did sound like a description of the Eastern European color revolutions, which generally involved mass street actions, sustained negative press pressure, and calls by NGOs and outside countries for the disfavored leader to step down. A major reason the “color revolution” theme struck commentators in connection with TIP had to do with the presence in the TIP simulation of Barack Obama’s former chief ethics lawyer, Norm Eisen. Eisen wrote a manual called The Democracy Playbook for the Brookings Institution that is often referred to as the unofficial how-to guide for America-backed regime-change operations abroad. Anyone who’s been forced to read a lot of “democracy promotion” literature, as I had to in Russia, will recognize familiar themes in the TIP report.
One of the controversial features of “color revolution” episodes is that the U.S. has at times supported ousters of perhaps unsavory, but legally elected, leaders. Was the TIP group contemplating the “sustained” protest scenario only in the event of Trump stealing an election, or if he merely won in an unpleasant way, i.e. via the Electoral College with a popular vote deficit? Brooks at first indicated she didn’t understand the reference.
“I am not sure what the question is?” she wrote. “Peaceful protests, mass or otherwise, are constitutionally protected.”
I referred back to the Times piece and the “movements around the world” quote, noting that while those outcomes might arguably have been desirable, it’d be hard to call them strictly democratic.
“I am not an expert on the color revolutions,” she replied. “It is certainly true that on both left and right, in both the US and abroad, there are nearly always… I guess I’d say spoilers, or violence entrepreneurs — who try to hijack peaceful protest movements.”
Lastly: one TIP simulation also predicted, with something like remarkable anti-clairvoyance, that Trump would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of “insurrection” for protesting a “clear Trump win”:
The Trump Campaign planted agent provocateurs into the protests throughout the country to ensure these protests turned violent and helped further the narrative of a violent insurrection against a lawfully elected president.
That passage was published on August 3, 2020, long before most Americans knew or cared that the word “insurrection” had political significance. We’d be instructed in its use within hours of the riots, when Joe Biden said, “It’s not protest. It’s insurrection,” and everyone from Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell to media talking heads to the authors of the articles of impeachment like Jamie Raskin fixated on the word. Still, not until December 2021 did a public figure explain how the 14th Amendment might be deployed strategically in the post-January 6th world. The insight came from Elias, who has since deleted the tweet:
We’re of course now seeing that litigation, notably in the form of a Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, which was handed down after complaints filed citing the 14th Amendment provision alluded to by Elias.
All this is laid out as background for the coming nine months of campaign chaos, if we even end up having a traditional campaign season. Revolt of the Public author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri summed up the situation in a piece for The Free Press titled “Trump. Again. The Question is Why?” The money quotes:
The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks… The implications are clear. Not only Trump, but the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him, must be silenced and crushed. To save democracy, it must be modified by a possessive: “our democracy.”
The Biden campaign, stuck in a seemingly irreversible poll freefall, has put all its rhetorical chips on the theme of “protecting democracy.” Biden mentions Trump’s “assault on democracy” at every opportunity, and even recently resorted to Apollo Creed-style imagery, campaigning at Valley Forge flanked by a dozen American flags and red, white, and blue lights. (Red-and-white striped trunks can’t be far off.) The DNC’s daily “talkers” memos for months have asked blue-party pols and friendly reporters to stress “the existential threat to freedom and democracy that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent,” while pointing to stories like Vanity Fair’s, “There Is No ‘Both Sides’ to Donald Trump’s Threat to Democracy,” in its CONTENT TO AMPLIFY section.
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By the summer of 2016, Donald Trump had secured the Republican nomination for president. In the eyes of the elite media, a Trump presidency no longer seemed an outlandish fantasy but rather a menacing if unlikely outcome. Angry and anxious, prominent journalists asked in earnest whether the old norms – report the facts, get the story right, separate news gathering from opining – were still adequate.
The obvious answer should have been yes. One could accurately report Trump’s loopy and alarming statements, his many character flaws, and his dubious policy pronouncements – along with his preternatural ability to give voice to many people’s discontent with elites of both parties – without embellishing the facts, inventing misdeeds, and adopting an oppositional stance.
Instead, having convinced themselves that Trump posed a fatal threat to democracy in America and apparently doubting that citizens could be trusted to evaluate the facts about his candidacy on their own, some of our most prestigious journalistic outlets decided to scrap the old norms. They downplayed or obscured Hillary Clinton’s unlawful use of a private email server to conduct State Department business (including the transmission of highly classified information) while sugarcoating the extraordinary indulgences Clinton and her team received from investigators in the Obama administration FBI and Department of Justice. At the same time, elite journalists took the lead in convicting Trump in the court of public opinion of Russia collusion based on a dossier of tall tales marketed to the public and the FBI by the Clinton campaign.
As part of The 1735 Project – a special RealClearPolitics series that explores the precipitous decline in public trust in the media, the consequences for freedom and democracy, and remedies to the deepening crisis – RCP Washington Bureau Chief Carl Cannon recently revisited questions that journalists raised in 2016 concerning the norms that should guide their coverage of Trump. In “The Art of Covering Politicians Who Lie,” Cannon observed that elite journalists largely concur with the elastic new legal theory advanced by the Biden administration Justice Department’s criminal indictment of Trump for his conduct in relation to the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots: A president breaks the law by lying to the public to hold onto power.
Cannon identifies three problems with the theory shared by Special Counsel Jack Smith and prominent journalists. First, it flies in the face of the First Amendment, which above all protects political speech, including political speech that is hateful and untrue.
Second, the theory presupposes knowledge of Trump’s state of mind on Jan. 6. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a lie as “a false statement made with intent to deceive,” notes Cannon. But there is reason to suppose that Trump’s singular personality led him to ignore the chorus of voices on his own staff and instead embrace the far-fetched theories of informal advisers Rudy Giuliani and then-Chapman University Law School Professor John Eastman that the election had been stolen and that on Jan. 6 he was within his rights under the Constitution to challenge the results in the House of Representatives.
Third, as Cannon reminds with several colorful examples – FDR, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton, for starters – U.S. presidents and their loyal minions have routinely uttered falsehoods to the public for political gain. Acknowledging that “Donald Trump presented problems of a whole new order of magnitude,” Cannon also recognized that many Trump supporters take his boasts, embroideries, and outright fabrications – his grandiosity and narcissism – with a grain of salt.
Showing more than telling, Cannon indicates that the old norms were adequate to covering Trump and still furnish the best approach to keeping citizens informed. Select journalists could (and did) accurately report his wild exaggerations, boorish behavior, and ignorance of policy and governance without boasting of their fidelity to a new and higher ethic. The new standards, however, gave many in the elite media leave to embroider Trump’s questionable conduct and participate in the fabrication of treasonous deeds. Adhering to the old norms would have required trust in the public and understanding of the journalist’s vital but limited role in a liberal democracy.
To recover an appreciation of the journalist’s calling, one could hardly do better than read “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” in which Lance Morrow offers elegiac observations on what journalism once was and restrained ruminations on what it has become.
An award-winning essayist of uncommon perceptiveness and elegance, Morrow provides in “The Noise of Typewriters” a loose and flowing meditation on the mechanics of publishing newspapers and magazines; the peculiarities and indispensable contributions of publishers, editors, and reporters; and the frustrations and joys, the tedium and rush, the private vanity and public spiritedness of writing and disseminating the first draft of history. Bringing a light touch to profound issues and eminent individuals and eliciting striking insights from seemingly casual occurrences and ordinary people, Morrow’s explorations of ideas, events, and people revolve around a simple proposition: The purpose of journalism is to search for and communicate the truth.
A senior fellow at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center whose occasional writings now appear in the Wall Street Journal and City Journal, Morrow joined Time magazine in 1965. Over the course of more than three decades, he covered culture and politics in America and diplomacy and war abroad. The search for and communication of the truth, the veteran journalist well knows, are no simple matters, particularly on a looming deadline.
Nevertheless, “Journalism in the twentieth century proceeded on the assumption that there was such a thing as objective reality,” Morrow writes. “But in the writing and editing, objective reality tended to become subjective reality; facts were well enough, but important facts needed to be evaluated, judged – characterized.”
Accordingly, journalism required both the intelligence to distinguish between the way the world really is and how we would like it to be and the moral character to respect the distinction: “A journalist needs a disciplined reverence for the facts, because the temptations of storytelling are strong and seductive.”
Those temptations, amplified by the reach and convenience of the Internet and social media, have proven difficult to resist. “In the twenty-first century, on the other hand, journalism would find itself plunged into the metaverse,” according to Morrow. “Politics and culture would migrate into the country of myth, with its hallucinations and hysterias – the floating world of a trillion screens. There might come to be no agreed reality at all.”
Morrow is living proof that the temptation to replace the facts with storytelling can be resisted, and his thoughtfully meandering recollections and reflections illustrate why the temptation should be resisted. He returns again and again to the remarkable career of Henry Luce who founded Time along with Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. Through consideration of the publishing mogul’s long tenure at the apex of American journalism, Morrow brings into focus “essential questions – about the nature of journalism, about the politics of storytelling, about the morals of power.”
He admiringly quotes his old friend, Carl Bernstein – half of the Washington Post’s famed Watergate reporting team of Woodward and Bernstein – who said that journalism’s task “was to obtain ‘the best available version of the truth.’” The best available version, Morrow advises, will combine respect for “hard, quotidian, worldly facts” and “the essential truth of things, the inner truth, the poetic truth.” Responsible journalism puts storytelling in the service of the truth.
Morrow illustrates the point in a recollection of the 1964 Georgetown murder of the socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, which he covered as a young reporter for the old Washington Star. The story was Morrow’s “initiation into certain mysteries of storytelling, and into the follies of conspiracy theories and the truth that sometimes you can never know the truth.”
If he had served on the jury, Morrow states, he would have voted to acquit the defendant: “They never found the gun. There was no evident motive. Two eyewitnesses were on the other side of the canal, a little too far away to be absolutely certain about the man they saw on the towpath.”
Yet the “reasonable doubt” that governs trials is not the last word on the truth. Morrow thinks the acquitted defendant killed Mary Pinchot Meyer.
While the hard, factual truth about Pinchot Meyer’s murderer has proven elusive, Morrow’s graceful storytelling illuminates the larger truth about the truth’s frequent murkiness and refines appreciation of the difference in the kind of judgments that confront jurors and journalists.
With election 2024 approaching, nerves fraying across the political spectrum, and the self-indulgent passions of scorn and resentment all the rage, we could use a thousand more journalists like Morrow – and Cannon – in the national media.
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Martin Gurri wrote this before the Iowa caucuses:
We are a nation of rules. American politics and government are defined by rules. “Our democracy” is an empty abstraction: it doesn’t really exist. Instead, we have rules and procedures for choosing those who govern us and for holding them accountable. The rules aren’t immutable; they evolve, but slowly and with care. This feels boring and uninspiring. It was designed to be that way and it is precisely what makes our country great. If you want excitement, you’ll get a Fidel Castro. That’s the place I came from—a land of political overstimulation and seven decades of tyranny.
We are a nation of rules and the rules are boring. Embrace that. In times of difficulty, go with the boring option. When faced with a frightening crisis, tamp it down with ultra-boring moves. No matter what, stick with the rules.
I can’t avoid talking about Donald Trump, but I’m going to make it brief. I know a lot of you don’t like him. Neither do I. But let’s assume he’s only a politician. He’s not Hitler, Godzilla, or the Beast of the Apocalypse—just a guy with a loud mouth and a desperate need for attention. Most Americans think of him that way.
This is not about him. It’s about you.
When you demonize those who disagree with you, you invite treatment in kind. When you refuse to engage in political argument and resort to performative moralizing, you make it clear to any neutral observer that, for you, there’s only one side, one opinion, one conformist crowd that can ever govern legitimately. The rest are disgusting subhumans who should never be tolerated near the levers of power. When you trample on the rules that say “all are created equal” like that, you are destroying the fabric that holds the country together. And believe me when I say this: you will reap the whirlwind.
Free speech is a rule among us. It’s closely bound to the search for truth. When you justify state censorship, you pitch your camp in the kingdom of lies. And believe me: the chaos you impose from above will erupt with a million times the force and consume you from below.
The law exists to maintain order. It’s not for settling our political disputes. That’s the rule. When you criminalize dissent and equate nonconformity with terrorism, you have lost the thread of how this country works. When you joke about putting opponents in reeducation camps so they can be converted into loyal followers, you channel the regime in Cuba. When you prosecute an opposition presidential candidate, you practice the same style of mafia politics as Vladimir Putin in Russia. When you ban a candidate’s name from the ballot to preserve “our democracy,” you sound, frankly, like you have gone nuts. And believe me: it will come back to haunt you.
You and I may disagree but I have no wish to dismiss you as a moral abomination, or prosecute you for your political views, or disqualify the candidates you prefer. Disagreement is information—it’s a favor you do for me by calling out the potential gaps and the mistakes in the opinions I hold. I realize that, in the excitement of the moment, it feels like an enormous gulf separates us. But that is only true if you want it to be. Distance is always a matter of perspective. And you know perfectly well that in your family and among your friends, there are individuals who disagree with you politically—people just like you except for this one little thing. You are not so different from them. From where I stand, you and I are not so distant, either.
The two big parties will nominate their candidates. A few outsiders may find their way onto the ballot. We, the American people, as we have done for more than two centuries, will choose among them. The results will be counted state by state and sent to the Electoral College. Those are the rules. If you mess with them, there will be hell to pay. If your side wins, be boring about it—no censorship, no demonization, no show trials. People will love you for it. If your side loses, ask yourself why. Fake news? Russian manipulation? Systemic racism? The totalitarian temptation? Each of those narratives is an insult to the American people, for whom you must retain some vestige of affection and respect.
If your side loses, look in the mirror. You are the reason your side lost in 2016. A man like Trump can only get elected because he’s not you and there are few alternatives. Reflect on how you can win back those who feel so disenfranchised that they would vote for such a man over your choice.
Whatever the outcome, we’ll have to live together. Talk of resistance and civil war is exciting but self-destructive. Be boring instead. Look for common ground in politics. If there is none, then look to our common humanity. Our differences of opinion may seem profound, but all of us want what is best for our families, the neighborhoods we live in, and the country we love. We can raise our voices in anger but there should be no malice in this debate. If after 700,000 Americans died in battle, Lincoln felt no malice toward the enemy, we can do the same after a presidential election—win or lose.
I’m only a voice crying out from inside a media ghetto, but I wish that you could hear me and we could find a way to talk. I wish we could push aside the worst among us and bring the best forward to be the beating heart of this crazy pluralistic society. I wish I could open your eyes and let you see yourself the way people see you. For all our sakes, I wish I could persuade you that the rules are the rules, and breaking them is suicide. And don’t take it the wrong way, friend, but I’m going to wish you—and all of us—a very boring 2024.
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We are about to embark on what might be one of the wildest years in the history of American politics, and it may end up merely as a prelude.
If 2024 is set to be tumultuous and unpredictable, just wait until 2025 if Donald Trump wins the presidency again later this year.
His adversaries don’t have a history of accepting his victories with equanimity. Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 launched conspiracy theories about how Russia had helped him win, catalyzed a yearslong law-enforcement investigation into him and his campaign based on those theories, and set off protests in the streets.
All that was mild, given what may yet be in the offing.
Trump’s opponents are sincerely, and to some extent understandably, alarmed by his conduct after the 2020 election and how he’s branded his political comeback as a revenge tour.
For most of them, though, saving democracy doesn’t mean upholding the rules no matter what and letting the voters decide the election and the fate of the next president. No, it means blocking Donald Trump by any means necessary, regardless of the consequences for the rule of law, democratic politics, or faith in our system of government.
In this view, democracy has only one legitimate outcome, and it doesn’t involve Donald Trump back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Some Democrats deserve minimal credit for distancing themselves from the Colorado and Maine decisions striking Trump from the ballot and arguing that the right way to defeat Trump is via the voting booth, although this isn’t much of a concession.
What’s already happened has put the country in an unprecedented place. It is hard to imagine what’s more extreme than one side in our politics indicting its leading opponent, creating the real prospect of jailing him in the months prior to an election, and excluding him from the ballot in select states.
Yet, if Trump wins, we have to assume that this is only a taste of things to come. It’s not as though his enemies are going to conclude that Trump was an intolerable threat as a candidate, but once he’s been elected president again, the voters have spoken and everyone should revert to politics as usual.
The Washington Post ran a long, much-discussed essay by respected foreign-policy writer Robert Kagan arguing that Trump has brought the U.S. to the brink of dictatorship. If he returns to power, it will mean “the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom.”
This dire view depends on every institutional bulwark of America’s system — from the courts to the military to public opinion — surrendering to a one-term president who, if history is any guide, will get rebuked in the midterms and become a lame duck by his third year in office.
But if tyranny is where you think we are headed, what’s the appropriate response? Running anti-Trump super-PAC ads this year? Canvassing for President Biden? Going on CNN panels to sound very concerned? In other words, simply all the standard means of political organization and persuasion?
And if Trump emerges victorious, and the alleged dictatorship is underway in earnest?
Certainly, the reaction will make the pro-Hamas protests that have roiled college campuses and disrupted transportation nodes around the country look small-scale by comparison. If the republic is supposedly on the verge of falling, extra-legal means of resistance are justified.
At least some portion of the Left will convince itself that only a color revolution can save the country.
Prior to the 2016 Trump–Clinton contest, one school of Trump supporters posited that it was the “Flight 93 election” — possibly the last chance to save the country. The consequences of failure were so awful that anything was justified to win. Now, that’s the way the Left feels, except Trump won his Flight 93 election, and Joe Biden could well lose his.
If so, there will be much to fear from democracy’s self-styled defenders.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 