Month: June 2021

The LA Times’ White House editor, Jackie Calmes, has written a memoir called “Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court“. She had a birds-eye view but as someone who has been reading her dispatches and watching it unfold over the course of the past 30 years, it rings true to me. This is an excerpt.

Since before he became president, Joe Biden has told crowds, “Folks, this is not your father’s Republican Party.” As a political reporter, I’d been hearing that lament since the late 1990s, from far better sources — those Republican fathers’ sons and daughters.

The radicalization of the Republican Party has been the biggest story of my career. I’ve been watching it from the start, from the time I arrived in then-Democratic Texas just out of college in 1978 to my years as a reporter in Washington through four revolutions — Ronald Reagan’s, Newt Gingrich’s, the tea party’s and Donald Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.

From this perspective, it seems clear that the antidemocratic drift of the GOP will continue, regardless of Trump’s role. He didn’t cause its crackup, he accelerated it. He took ownership of the party’s base, and gave license to its racists, conspiracists, zealots and even self-styled paramilitaries, but that base had been calling the shots in the Republican Party for some years, spurred by conservative media. Now, emboldened, its activists will carry on with or without him.

The first elections I covered in 1978, at the midterm of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s reemergence from its Watergate ruins and the shift of its base from the north to the south. In a poll a year earlier, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans had identified as Republicans. Texas was a Democratic bastion. But many Democrats I met there were more conservative than Republicans I knew up north; they often bucked the national party, yet remained “yellow dog Democrats” in state and local elections — so loyal, the saying went, that they’d vote for a yellow dog over a Republican, just like voters elsewhere in the South.

Republicans revived nationally in the late ’70s largely because of the governing Democrats’ misfortunes — a global energy crisis, double-digit inflation, a stagnant economy, party infighting.

Evangelicals threw off their longtime aversion to earthly politics and took over local party organizations, becoming culture warriors. By mid-1978, the property tax revolt in California kindled an anti-tax movement nationwide. With both moderate establishment Republicans and insurgent conservatives seeing the possibility of retaking the White House in 1980, the two camps intensified their decades-long war to define the party.

It’s clear now that the norms-abiding moderates never had a chance. As right-wing activist Paul Weyrich warned, “We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure in the country.” That could stand as conservatives’ mission statement today.

That November, my election-night story for the Abilene Reporter-News included mention of the defeat of a young George W. Bush for a House seat representing Midland and Odessa.

Yet he and other Republicans across the South did better than expected. Some actually won, including third-time candidate Newt Gingrich in suburban Atlanta. Texans elected the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. It all signaled the wave Reagan would ride two years later, carrying other Republicans in his wake. The Democrats who won congressional races across the south, replacing some New Deal liberals who retired, were more conservative and allies-in-waiting for Reagan, many of them future defectors to his party.

By 1984, I’d moved to Washington to cover Congress and got to know Gingrich. While he was a backbencher in House Republicans’ seemingly permanent minority, he led a maverick faction calling itself the Conservative Opportunity Society (Gingrich himself was more opportunist than truly conservative, his lieutenants grumbled to me).

After he read stories I’d written about the ethics scrapes of some Democrats in Congress, Gingrich would have an aide in his congressional office contact me with dirt on others, often just allegations culled from the lawmakers’ local newspapers.

That was just one sign that he was a new breed of Republican, more interested in ruthless partisanship than in passing laws and representing constituents. His goal was nothing short of ending Democrats’ decades-long lock on the House majority and leading the next Republican revolution.

In 1990, Gingrich — by then the second-highest ranking House Republican leader — made a prediction that I found unbelievable: Republicans would win a House majority in the 1994 midterm elections. He explained to me that if George H.W. Bush lost reelection in 1992, with a Democrat in the White House the Republicans could benefit from the midterm jinx for a president’s party, and win enough seats to take control.

Gingrich did his part to weaken Bush. Most famously, he led a conservative mutiny against a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal the president had negotiated, assailing him for violating his “no new taxes” campaign promise.

With Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton, Gingrich immediately looked toward 1994. Since the late 1980s, he had mobilized a nationwide network of right-wing talk-radio hosts emerging in local markets. They echoed his talking points daily.

On election day 1994, Gingrich was confident of big gains — if not a House majority — and certain that conservative media had helped. “I think one of the great changes in the last couple of years was the rise of talk radio, which gives you an alternative validating mechanism,” separate from the mainstream media, he told me. In fact, he was about to be interviewed by a new local host — a young guy named Sean Hannity.

The Republicans triumphed beyond even Gingrich’s messianic dreams, winning House and Senate majorities for the first time since 1952. As the new speaker who’d taken the party to the promised land, Gingrich led a cult of personality presaging Trump’s.

“Be nasty,” he’d tell followers, and he kept conservatives perpetually angry at Democrats and at government generally, with the aid of his right-wing media megaphone.

On the first day of the new Republican-controlled Congress in January 1995, Gingrich had set up “Radio Row” in a Capitol corridor — table after table of talk-show hosts interviewing Republicans for conservative audiences back home. Rush Limbaugh, the king of them all, was declared an honorary House Republican. Collectively, these local celebrities became a power center within the party.

Gingrich would find governing harder and less popular than campaigning, however. He overreached to please the base, shutting down the government in a doomed bid to force deep cuts in domestic programs, and then impeaching Clinton. Within four years, after election losses and scandals, he resigned.

Back in Texas, then-Gov. George W. Bush positioned himself as the un-Gingrich for mainstream voters — a “compassionate conservative” — while telling those on the right he was different from his father: that Jesus Christ was his personal savior, he’d slash taxes, and his foreign policy would eschew interventionist nation-building. (He’d break that last promise big time in Iraq.)

But even as Bush sought to soften his party’s hard lines to win election, the GOP’s nationalistic, protectionist and even nativist populism ran deep. As president, Bush had hoped to build a broader party — for example, by giving millions of undocumented, longtime residents a path to citizenship. But the growing xenophobia among the party’s increasingly white, older and rural base foiled him.

Trump didn’t unleash those forces 16 years later. He simply harnessed and amplified them.

By the end of Bush’s presidency, conservatives were rebellious against both Bush, for his immigration proposals, Mideast wars and rising debt, and the Republican majority in Congress for its overspending and corruption.

After the near-collapse of the financial system and its bailout by the Bush administration, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first Black American elected president. Almost immediately, the third Republican revolution took shape, this one a headless movement from the bottom up: the tea party.

Republican Party leaders sought to unite with tea party activists against their common enemy — Obama. In the midterm elections of Obama’s two terms, Republicans regained control of the House in 2010 and then the Senate in 2014.

Yet just as Gingrich found with Clinton, sharing responsibility for governing requires occasional compromise with the Democratic president on must-pass bills. And compromise infuriated the Republican base and conservative media. “They don’t give a damn about governing,” former Rep. Tom Latham, an Iowa Republican, told me in 2015. Latham, who was first elected in the 1994 Gingrich revolution, had just left Congress in frustration after 20 years.

A year later, against a field of establishment Republicans vying for the presidential nomination, Trump quickly rose to the top, speaking a language of aggrievement that resonated with the mostly white, less educated voters living in rural America and long-struggling industrial areas like my Ohio hometown.

They jumped on the Trump train and stayed on even after he’d lost reelection and the GOP’s control of Congress. As Donald Trump Jr. said of other Republican officials on Jan. 6, just before the attack on the Capitol, “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”

It was a straight line from Gingrich’s uncompromising, smash-mouth politics to the tea party and then to Trump.

Should Trump remain exiled at Mar-a-Lago, his MAGA army will soldier on, forcing party officials and 2024 presidential aspirants to fall in line. And if Republicans lose in 2022 or 2024, many seem poised to reject the result, turn to force or countenance those who do — Trump or no Trump.

That’s how I remember it. In fact, for years on this blog I was writing abut this GOP radicalization and putting quite a bit of focus on Gingrich and what he did — and I got a ton of blowback from progressives who thought the right was more or less irrelevant. Maybe you had to be there to see the creeping fascism, I dont know.

I think it’s important that people recognize the big picture. After he had success on the circuit jumping on the birther bullshit in 2012, Trump had his people gather all the right wing talking points from talk radio and Fox to use when he ran for president. (He watched CNN in those days, not Fox.) He had a good instinct for which ones went to the wingnut lizard brain, mostly because they went to his lizard brain. He is a natural authoritarian wingnut. But he was riding the wave he didn’t create it. And we will only know that that wave has crested once it has already subsided.

For more on the early part of this story, be sure to read Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge (2014) and Reaganland (2020) if you haven’t already, both of which provide not only the political background in great detail but go deeply into the tectonic cultural changes that drove the dynamic.

The whole world does:

When President Donald Trump used his elbows at international summits, it was to throw them — on trade, on Russia and, once, to help remove the Montenegrin prime minister from his path to a photo-op.

His successor Joe Biden used his elbows differently this week. Arriving to his first global summit, he crooked his arm to extend pandemic-era greetings to a group of leaders who no longer have to tiptoe around a truculent and often angry American president.Officials attending this week’s Group of 7 summit on the Cornish coast in England are emerging shell-shocked after four years dealing with a US president who often appeared intent on injecting animosity into their gatherings. In front of cameras and behind-the-scenes this weekend, officials said the abrasive interjections and lengthy tangents Trump brought to world summits were absent, replaced by a more businesslike and predictable agenda, including on areas of serious disagreement like China.

Asked alongside Biden on Saturday whether the United States was back, French President Emmanuel Macron answered yes.”Definitely,” he said, waves crashing in Carbis Bay in the background.Even the special guest at a Friday night reception took note of the new vibe.”Are you supposed to be looking as if you’re enjoying yourself?” quipped Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who later was pictured in friendly conversation with Biden and his wife outside a futuristic biosphere, her son Prince Charles and his wife Camilla clutching drinks in the background.

During their first session on Friday afternoon, held in front of a picture window at a seaside resort, the world leaders took turns speaking about efforts to contain the pandemic, according to officials familiar with the talks. Biden, seated between British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Canada’s Justin Trudeau, appeared prepared, according to one European official, describing his administration’s recent purchase of Pfizer doses as a major gesture meant to bring other countries along.

A senior administration official said the first session was meant to highlight areas of agreement. A second session on Saturday proved more divisive as world leaders aired serious differences over how best to approach China.The disagreements, aired during a session that at one point became so sensitive that all internet was shut off to the room, pitted European nations against the United States, Britain and Canada, who urged stronger action against China for its authoritarian practices, including forced labor practices in western Xinjiang province.

At one point, Biden made a forceful call to other leaders about vocally calling out China’s anti-democratic practices, officials said, emphasizing the need to take action.Still, though the leaders disagreed, the session was marked by new respect among the leaders after four years of tension under Trump.

“These leaders really seem to like each other and respect each other, and work through where that sweet spot might be,” the senior administration official said, describing real effort at finding consensus on tricky issues, including China.To both sessions, Biden brought with him a large white plastic binder, printed with the presidential seal on the cover, to consult on figures and facts. Biden is a new president, but he’s very at home with this set of leaders. That means he can focus on the substance of the upcoming summit, a senior administration official told CNN.

Biden is offering an altogether different approach than Trump, underscoring warm ties with traditional US allies in an attempt to repair what Trump fractured. His sentiments of friendship often paper over what are real differences between the United States and its allies, in particular on China, trade and global vaccine efforts.

The senior administration official said Biden doesn’t view these summits as just box-checking events, but more of an opportunity to move forward and make progress when it comes to substance and challenges.

More Trumpy whining:

Sad!

“So it’s hardly worth asking whether congressional Republicans will heed Biden’s call for federal voting rights safeguards,” writes CNN’s John Harwood. Republicans have made clear their only move is “No.”

They are after all the conservative party. Preserving the status quo has been their imperative since before the inaugural issue of the The National Review (CNN):

But in the era of partisan polarization, that impulse has hardened into resistance to governance itself. On issues that rile them most — the changing face of America, domestic spending programs, tax increases — congressional Republicans have flashed red lights at Democratic and Republican White Houses alike.

Democrats need to remind voters at every turn of 1) Democrats’ efforts to make their lives better (and paint voters a mental picture), and 2) Republicans’ efforts at every turn to prevent making their lives better. Plus, remind voters of 3) Republicans’ rejection of the fundamental principle of American democracy. Voting and majority rule is baked into the Constitution conservatives once upheld as sacrosanct but now view only as a convenience when they win and invalid when they do not.

On the Democrats’ popular infrastructure package, for example. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York does not want Democrats to settle for Republican minority-dictated legislation. Nor does she want to accept the media’s inclination to blame Democrats for Republican obstructionism. She will, however, call out (indirectly) Democratic senators standing in President Joe Biden’s way.

AOC: "I do think that we need to talk about the elephant in the room, which is Senate Democrats which are blocking crucial items in a Democratic agenda for reasons that I don't think hold a lot of water." pic.twitter.com/t3ixCCQ6cV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2021

But Democrats also need to show that they have more moves than throwing up their hands in frustration at Republican efforts to stymie theirs. The minority party should not get a veto. That power resides in the presidency, and even that is not absolute.

Every House and Senate Republican said no to Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package, then many went home and took credit for elements of it that improved their constituents’ lives.

Harwood continues:

Yet most remain pessimistic that a deficit-financed infrastructure compromise can attract support from at least 10 GOP senators, the minimum needed to join Democrats in surmounting a filibuster. Though congressional Republicans readily swelled the deficit to enact Trump’s tax cuts, for Democratic spending programs their answer tends to be no.

The failure of bipartisan compromise need not quash Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, which in addition to infrastructure investments includes expensive new programs to help struggling families up the economic ladder. Biden could advance it through the special budget process known as “reconciliation,” which requires only a simple majority vote rather than a filibuster-proof 60 ayes in the Senate.

That route, which Democratic leaders have already set in motion, would not require any Republican votes. It would require every Senate Democrat and nearly every House Democrat to say yes.

But passing legislation that defends and uphold voting rights is even more critical than infrastructure when the infrastructure of the republic itself is crumbling. Senate Democrats who swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” etc., need to decide whether their fealty is to that rather than to their abstract notions of bipartisanship for bipartiship’s sake.

Their Republican colleagues have already declared their allegiance to the Constitution and to popular sovereignty conditional on their being able to predetermine the outcome of elections. In their favor, naturally.

“Who do you serve, who do you protect?” applies to more than policing. Recalling Franklin’s admonition about the founding of the republic, history will record whether today’s Democrats were up to the task of keeping it.

Teachers, students, and other concerned citizens rallied in Milwaukee on Saturday to protest efforts by the Republican-dominated legislature to pass legislation they believe would restrict what Wisconsin’s schools can teach about race and racism. The rally was one of over 20 virtual and in-person events organized by local educators in a national “Day of Action.”

Several thousand have signed a pledge refusing “to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events — regardless of the law.”

“The fact that there are so many state legislatures [at least 15] considering legislation that will suppress the teaching of racism and sexism and even prohibit professional training in those areas was, in my mind, outrageous, and had to be publicly denounced,” said Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee Public Schools board.

Valerie Strauss writes at the Washington Post:

Ever since the May 2020 slaying of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis sparked a national social justice protest movement, many public schools have attempted to introduce and expand lessons on the systemic racism that has existed since the nation’s founding.

That sparked a backlash among conservatives. Republican-led legislatures are or have already passed legislation (whose wording is remarkably similar or identical, reflecting a coordinated effort) with such restrictions. On Thursday, Florida’s State Board of Education voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s public schools.

Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework that holds that racism is systemic, embedded in government policies and laws that are evident in any serious examination of American history. Critics say that racism is the work of individual bad actors, and, they say, teachers are improperly injecting race in the classroom. Teachers say it is impossible not to discuss race in any honest discussion or lesson about American history.

In fact, teachers and schools are not attempting to teach the academic theory, but to broaden how American history is taught to include recognition of the impact of slavery and racism on U.S. policies and the law (an earlier Post story):

The issues are widespread. Data consistently shows that students of color are more likely to be disciplined than their White peers and receive harsher punishments for the same infractions. Black and Hispanic students are less likely to be placed in advanced or enriched classes, starting in elementary school. Many experts say school curriculums have failed to adequately reflect the perspectives of Indigenous and marginalized communities. And students and parents themselves often report that school culture does not feel welcoming.

But some White teachers are backing off teaching about race, afraid of losing their jobs.

“The moment you make racism more than an isolated incident, when you begin to talk about it as systemic, as baked into the way we live our lives … people don’t like that,” said Gloria Ladson-Billings, president of the National Academy of Education. “It runs counter to a narrative that we want to tell ourselves about who we are. We have a narrative of progress, that we’re getting better.”

It is important to step back and recognize what is really going on with conservative backlash in the aftermath of the Floyd murder.

Prof. Ian Haney-López (“Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class“) spoke with Eclectablog’s Chris Savage and LOLGOP about the right-wing furor over critical race theory:

What the right is doing is it’s repeating with a new dog whistle the same theme it has been promoting for the last six decades. And that’s a theme that says, “Dear white voters, don’t pay attention to the economic royalty who are running this country. You should really be worried about dangerous and undeserving people of color.” 

Bill Clinton once told Jon Stewart that Republicans use the strategy “because they think it works … And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.” For the last six decades, dogwhistles have not stopped working for them. And so….

Haney-López continues:

I also want to want to make clear that part of their strategy is to convey that message in code in a way that allows the hard right to pretend that this isn’t about race at all. That they’re not being racist. That this is in fact common sense. And so, that’s where dog whistles come in:  illegal alien, welfare queen, terrorist, and now critical race theory. These are terms designed to trigger deeply rooted racist fears, but also to allow plausible deniability, to allow the right to deny that this is about triggering racist fears or anxieties at all.

“It’s a massive campaign of gaslighting,” says Haney-López.

Cue Mr. Abstract, the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater.

Jason Stanley of The Economist explains why the strategy has worked since the 1960s and why Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the latest conservative bugaboo (behind paywall):

Jennifer Richeson and Michael Krouse, both psychologists, along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white family rather than the truth figure of 10%. The research shows a bias toward what Ms Richardson calls a “mythology of racial progress.” As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, “People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially better — and are approaching parity. This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstanding — in a Gallup poll for March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, “blacks have as good a chance as white in your community to get any job for which they are qualified.”

Many Americans believe we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change. That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda. This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.

https://twitter.com/jasonintrator/status/1402683173507457025?s=20

In essence, many White Americans can’t handle the truth. They don’t want their kids to hear about America’s “problems” or about “violent white backlash against emerging black political power” during Reconstruction. Or about 100 years of Jim Crow. It is why the Tulsa massacre virtually disappeared from history. Fear and racial animus are as volatile as nitroglycerin.

Imagine that:

When President Donald Trump faced his first impeachment in 2019, Republicans focused on a firsthand witness who they claimed helped exonerate Trump: Kurt Volker.

But new evidence calls into question a key portion of Volker’s testimony, in which he repeatedly downplayed personal knowledge that the investigations the Trump team sought in Ukraine involved now-President Biden.

Volker, who was Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, was one of the “three amigos” tasked by Trump to work with Ukraine. Despite turning over text messages that detailed the pressure campaign on Ukraine to launch investigations related to the Bidens, Volker’s testimony was frequently highlighted by Trump allies. That’s because he said hadn’t been aware of a quid pro quo in which Ukraine would be given something for launching politically convenient investigations for Trump. And so the GOP called him as its witness. “Ambassador Volker … confirmed what the President has repeatedly said: there was no quid pro quo,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted at one point.

“You know pretty much, Ambassador Volker, you just like took apart their entire case,” Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) said while questioning Volker.

CNN this week published a recording of a call between Volker, Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and a top Ukrainian official, Andriy Yermak, from July 2019. In the call, Giuliani discusses the matters involving the Bidens with Yermak. Details of the call had previously been reported, but this gave us a fuller accounting.

The call doesn’t necessarily add a ton to the known facts about what Giuliani et. al. requested of Ukraine. We knew they wanted dirt on the Bidens, as Giuliani himself acknowledged very early on.

As Mother Jones noted, though, Volker in his later testimony downplayed his knowledge of Biden’s proximity to that push.

“At no time was I aware of or took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former vice president Biden,” Volker said in his Oct. 3, 2019, deposition. “You will see from the extensive text messages I am providing, which convey a sense of real-time dialogue with several different actors, Vice President Biden was never a topic of discussion.”

He echoed this in his later testimony: “At no time was I aware of or knowingly took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former vice president Biden. As you know from the extensive real-time documentation I have provided, Vice President Biden was not a topic of our discussions.”

The idea that the Trump team’s push might somehow not actually have been about the Bidens was a very fine line walked by another member of the “three amigos” whose testimony Republicans initially played up, then-European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland. Then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry also tried to make a similar argument. The problem with all of that: Giuliani himself had explicitly connected the requested investigations to Biden in his public comments months before. The motivation here would seem to have been no secret, especially for someone who actually pays regular attention to U.S.-Ukraine relations.

And the recording obtained by CNN shows Giuliani indeed making those connections in a call featuring Volker himself.

“All we need from the [Ukraine] President [Volodymyr Zelensky],” Giuliani says on the call, “is to say, I’m going to put an honest prosecutor in charge, he’s gonna investigate and dig up the evidence that presently exists, and is there any other evidence about involvement of the 2016 election, and then the Biden thing has to be run out.”

Giuliani adds: “Somebody in Ukraine’s got to take that seriously.”

At another point, Giuliani refers to his conversations with former Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin. Giuliani had worked with Shokin to push the theory that there was something wrong with then-Vice President Biden’s role in applying pressure on Ukraine to fire Shokin.

Again, Giuliani invokes Biden.

“My interest in it was about the collusion, let’s call it — I hate that word — I guess ‘conspiracy,’ to affect the 2016 election,” Giuliani said. “But here I was stuck with this allegation about Biden. And I don’t know what — I mean, now it’s out of my hands, it’s being investigated. But at the time, I didn’t know who would investigate it.”

[…]

Volker’s testimony is worth a careful parse. He also referred specifically to the idea that Biden wasn’t brought up in the text messages he turned over — rather than at all in any conversations. And whether he was specifically party to “an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former vice president Biden” is also debatable, for reasons mentioned above. Another issue: Volker in his deposition presented the Giuliani-Yermak call as “just an introductory phone call so they could talk to each other.”

“It was literally, you know, ‘Let me introduce,’ you know, ‘Mr. Giuliani,’ ” Volker said. “ ‘Let me introduce Mr. Yermak.’ ” Volker might have been referring narrowly to his own role, but the call lasted more than 40 minutes and dealt with plenty of the substantive subjects that would later come up in the impeachment trial.

[…]

Volker has already clarified his testimony, to some degree, allowing that perhaps there was more of a quid pro quo than he had personally been aware of. His testimony that he was unaware of a quid pro quo was also called into question by a contemporary text message in which he seemingly referred to one of the key carrots in the Giuliani-Trump effort: Zelensky’s much-desired White House meeting.

We know they all lied and Trump got away with it. And worst of all, the impeachment acquittal seems to have created a new norm that it’s just fine for a president to leverage foreign aid to sabotage his domestic political rivals. I fully expect it will happen again.

“Normalization” wasn’t really about Trump himself. Yes, it was shocking and appalling that his ignorant antics came to define presidential leadership for tens of millions of people. But even worse is the fact that the entire Republican party leadership gladly went along with it in border to maintain power. They won’t be going back either.

I found Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter to be a very interesting look back at the recent history of American Asia trade bashing and where we are today in the wake of the ignoramus Trump’s simple-minded trade war and the supply line issues exposed by the pandemic:

If you’re under 50, you probably don’t remember when Japan was going to take over the world. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many people were obsessed with Japan’s economic success and feared American decline. The supposedly nonfiction sections of airport bookstores were filled with volumes featuring samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese management. Michael Crichton had a best-selling novel, “Rising Sun,” about the looming threat of Japanese domination, before he moved on to dinosaurs.

The policy side of Japanophilia/Japanophobia took the form of widespread calls for a national industrial policy: Government spending and maybe protectionism to foster industries of the future, notably semiconductor production.

Then Japan largely disappeared from America’s conversation — cited, if at all, as a cautionary tale of economic stagnation and lost decades. And we entered an era of self-satisfied arrogance, buoyed by the dominance of U.S.-based technology companies.

Now the truth is that Japan’s failures have, in their own way, been overhyped as much as the country’s previous successes. The island nation remains wealthy and technologically sophisticated; its slow economic growth mainly reflects low fertility and immigration, which have led to a shrinking working-age population. Adjusting for demography, the economies of Japan and the United States have grown at about the same rate over the past 30 years:

In any case, however, we seem to be entering a new era of worries about the role of the United States in the world economy, this time driven by fears of China. And we’re hearing new calls for industrial policy. I have to admit that I’m not entirely persuaded by these calls. But the rationales for government action are a lot smarter this time around than they were in the 1980s — and, of course, immensely smarter than the economic nationalism of the Trump era, which they superficially resemble.

Which brings me to the 250-page report on supply chains that the Biden-Harris administration released a few days ago. This was one of those reports that may turn out to be important, even though few people will read it. Why? Because it offers a sort of intellectual template for policymaking; when legislation and rules are being drafted, that report and its analysis will be lurking in the background, helping to shape details of spending and regulations.

Now, the world economy has changed a lot since the days when American executives were trying to reinvent themselves as samurai. Countries used to make things like cars and airplanes; nowadays they make parts of things, which are combined with other parts of things that are made in other countries and eventually assembled into something consumers want. The classic — and at this point somewhat tired — example is the iPhone, assembled in China from bits and pieces from all over. Last year’s World Development Report from the World Bank, obviously written prepandemic, was devoted to global value chains and had a nice alternative example: bicycles.

Spinning globalization.World Bank

I’m a bit surprised, by the way, to learn that Japan and Singapore have so much of the market for pedals and cranks. I thought America really led the world in cranks (charlatans, too).

Anyway, the World Bank offers a measure of the global value chaininess of world trade — the share of exports that cross at least two borders on the way to their final buyers:

Global value chaininess on the rise.World Bank

This measure shows that the big growth of globe-spanning supply chains isn’t new; in fact, it took place mostly between 1988 and 2008. But the dangers associated with fragmented production have been highlighted by recent events.

The Biden-Harris report focuses on four sectors: semiconductor chips, batteries, pharmaceuticals and the rare earths that play a key role in much technology. It’s not hard to see why.

The modern economy uses chips with practically everything — and the production of chips is very globalized. So we have a situation in which U.S. auto production is being crimped, thanks to drought in Taiwan and a factory fire in Japan disrupting the supply of these tiny but essential components. Moreover, much of the world’s supply of rare earths comes from China, whose regime isn’t noted for being shy about throwing its weight around.

And vaccine nationalism — countries limiting the export of vaccines and key components for making them — has become a real problem in the age of Covid.

As you might guess, then, a lot of the Biden-Harris report focuses on national security concerns. National security has always been recognized as a legitimate reason to deviate from free trade. It’s even enshrined in international agreements. Donald Trump gave the national security argument a bad name by abusing it. (Seriously, is America threatened by Canadian aluminum?) But you don’t have to be a Trumpist to worry about our dependence on Chinese rare earths.

That said, the supply-chain report goes well beyond the national security argument, making the case that we need to retain domestic manufacturing in a wide range of sectors to maintain our technological competence. That’s not a foolish argument, but it’s very open-ended. Where does it stop?

One thing is clear: If you thought the revival of economic nationalism was purely a Trumpist aberration, you’re wrong. The Biden administration isn’t going to go in for dumb stuff like Trump’s obsession with bilateral trade imbalances, but it isn’t going back to the uncritical embrace of globalization that has characterized much U.S. policy for decades. Will this lead to a new era of trade wars? Probably not — but don’t expect a lot of big trade deals in the years ahead.

Krugman’s expertise in economics and politics is very deep, obviously. But on these subjects he is particularly knowledgeable. His Nobel Prize was awarded “for his work associated with New Trade Theory and the New Economic Geography.In the words of the prize committee, ‘By having integrated economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models, Paul Krugman has deepened our understanding of the determinants of trade and the location of economic activity.'”

Where’s Jared? Where’s Ivanka? Molly Jong Fast at the Daily Beast catches us up with the spawn:

The family that held the entire Republican Party in their death grips for the last four years is now doing what all formerly famous people do, signing autographs and being sort of pathetic.

Their father may not have power anymore, but the kids have even less. Remember when Donnie Junior could control a news cycle with a tweet? Remember when Ivanka Trump could command a sea of news stories with a “sources close to” leak about how she was “working hard behind the scenes”? Remember when Mitch McConnell had to take calls from the former president’s completely unqualified son-in-law? Remember when the president’s dimwitted spawns held court at Daddy’s hotel and cast shadows that extended across MAGA Washington?Advertisement

Well, that time is over. The baby Trumps and their lousy spouses are drifting off into the weird political afterlife of people who used to matter.

Remember when Don Junior posed with a “Don Jr 2024” banner at the Fallon Nevada Livestock Auction? That was in October, or, as I think of it, a lifetime ago. Since then junior has been a busy bee, making apparently false statements in a deposition and maybe being investigated by Manhattan Attorney General Cy Vance’s office for his role in the family crimi—oops, real-estate business.

But that’s not all Donnie has been up to. He spends his days “blasting the liberal media” on Twitter, doing reply videos on something called Rumble, and being enraged that people don’t pay enough attention to Hunter Biden’s malfeasances. Don flipped his Bridgehampton home for double what he paid for it in a year, which is not at all suspicious. But despite this real-estate win, the former president’s eldest son still has joined other luminaries like Sarah Palin, Mama June, and a dog called “tuna melts my heart” on Cameo, a service where you can get down on your luck celebrities to make personalized videos for your friends. Junior is listed on the site under the category of “activist,” and is charging fans $500 a video with some undisclosed part of that being donated to the Shadow Warriors Project that supports not wounded service members but wounded military contractors and is run by right-wing celebrity Mark “Benghazi” Geist.

And then there’s Eric’s wife Lara, who looks like a bootleg version of Eric’s big sister. Lara was toying with a run for the North Carolina Senate but at Trump’s speech last weekend she told the crowd, “I’m saying no for now, not no forever.” But here’s the thing, if her father-in-law doesn’t run again, now will become forever soon enough as she remains someone who used to be someone, like poor gummy Eric who I guess runs his dad’s chain of failing hotels and shitty condos? Speaking of that, the Associated Press reports that, “Bargain hunters are swooping in to take advantage of prices in Trump buildings that have dropped to levels not seen in over a decade, a crash brokers attribute to a combination of the former president’s polarizing image and the coronavirus pandemic.” Oh well.

Remember Ivanka, the future of the GOP? Well, she’s been in the witness protection program, not really but sort of. Since buying a $30 million empty parcel of land in Miami, the political genius has spent her time “focusing on family time,” walking her tiny white dog on the beach and wearing hideous peach-colored athleisure. She’s not going to primary Lil’ Marco for the Florida Senate. She hardly has time with all the beach walks and decorating.

And then there’s Pop. The former president has spent the winter months in Palm Beach being a baffling uninvited guest at the occasional memorial service and wedding. The rest of the time, senior has spent lined up at the omelet station and pretty much behaving like a retiree, which was sort of how he behaved when he was president. Now Trump is planning a series of “live conversations” (is there any other kind?) with the only person who has more sexual harassment allegations than he does, Bill O’Reilly. What a pair! Women hide your daughters and mothers and yourselves. It’s gonna be like Frost/Nixon except with morons.

Look, there’s a chance, a horrible, miserable chance, that Trump does get re-elected in 2024 and democracy dies, and the Trump kids go back to using our tax dollars to promote themselves as members of government who govern with lots of meaningless initiatives. After 2016, I know better than to say that couldn’t happen. But if it does not, the baby Trumps have let their moment escape them. Junior could have won a congressional seat, and Eric’s horrible wife could have at least grifted a lot of money running for the Senate in North Carolina.

How are the kids going to pay for all their lawyers’ bills if they can’t grift campaign donations like their dad? Never mind, I don’t care.

And what about Jared? Well, he’s spending time walking on the beach and boogie boarding with Ivanka and pretending that he’s backing out of the Trump dynasty building:

With Father’s Day 2021 on the horizon, Jared Kushner has been doing some thinking about the dads in his life. Not about his own, i.e. ex-felon Charles Kushner, to whom Kushner the Younger has remained steadfastly devoted despite the time Charlie got revenge on his brother-in-law for cooperating with the Feds by setting him up with a sex worker, filming the encounter, and then sending the video to his own sister, a move Jared reportedly maintains law enforcement had no business sticking its nose in. No, that’s obviously a perfectly normal father-son relationship that requires no reflection or analysis whatsoever. Instead, Jared has reportedly been thinking about his relationship with his wife Ivanka Trump’s dad, his father-in-law, Donald Trump.

You see, while many a son-in-law/father-in-law relationship involves the odd game of golf here or there, Jared and Donald’s, for the approximate period between 2016 and 2020, centered around a slightly different pursuit: destroying the country. Kushner, of course, helped Trump get elected in 2016, and from there it was off to the races. Did Kushner have any business in the White House? No! Was he even able to obtain a top secret security clearance without his father-in-law overriding the concerns of the intelligence officials who assess such things? No again! But Kushner, obviously, didn’t let any of those things stop him. Instead, he had a hand in virtually all presidential business, from shutting down the government in an attempt to get Nancy Pelosi to fund the wall, to letting autocrats get away with grisly bone-saw murders, to so badly screwing up the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis that hundreds of thousands of people died.

But, like we said, Kushner’s been thinking. And what he’s apparently decided is that while all of that was fun, he’d rather his relationship with Trump— currently possibly planning a coup of the U.S. government—  transition to the sort where they see each other on holidays and the awkward moments between them simply concern the wildly creepy things the ex-president has said about his oldest daughter. Per Business Insider:

Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and a former White House senior adviser, has reportedly told some of Trump’s closest advisers that he wants “a simpler relationship” with the former president, according to The New York Times. While former Trump campaign managers Bill Stepien and Brad Parscale are still tied into Trumpworld, Kushner, who is married to the former president’s oldest daughter, Ivanka, has stepped back. According to the Times, Kushner “wants to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship” with the former president.

With Kushner out of the spotlight, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, has become the most politically-active member of the family in the former president’s orbit at the moment. The news would confirm a new trajectory for Kushner, who was intimately involved in a myriad of legislative and political initiatives in the Trump years, from engaging in peace talks in the Middle East to aiding the president’s reelection campaign.

As an aside, those Middle East peace talks obviously didn‘t go as well as Kushner would have had people believe, but, uh, never mind that. The Times report seemingly confirms one from CNN last March that Kushner had “tapped out” of Trump’s political comings and goings and wanted “a fresh start, one that doesn’t include advising his father-in-law on a daily basis.”

The article goes on to point out that it’s ludicrous to think that Kushner won’t be back in the fold once Trump announces his revenge campaign. He’ll be back. The lure of power and a possible return to throne is much too tempting.

It’s hard to believe this is going anywhere, but Miller will no doubt have a very nice payday no matter what:

Longtime senior Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller is taking over as chief executive officer of a tech startup company that could be used by the former president.

Miller’s company is currently developing a social media platform that is being considered for use by Trump. People familiar with the discussions stress that no final decision has been made by the former president about which platform he will use.

Trump was kicked off major social media outlets, including Twitter and Facebook, following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The aide is expected to remain with Trump’s team, but not in a full-time, day-to-day role, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, having worked on his 2016 and 2020 campaigns in a senior capacity.

Since the end of the Trump administration, Miller had been serving as an on-the-record spokesperson for the former president, a role he is no longer expected to have. Trump has begun receiving interest from potential replacements to Miller, and has started interviewing candidates.

Conservatives have been seeking out a new social media platform since Trump’s removal from Twitter and Facebook. Miller has spent recent days in conversation with top right-leaning figures about his new project. Other hires may soon be announced.

Banned from Facebook until at least January 2023 and permanently booted from Twitter, Trump has been looking at alternative social media platforms where he can engage with his supporters, share statements and updates about appearances. Potential social media platforms have been teased by aides, including Miller, for months but none have been revealed to the public.

[A] person familiar with the new venture maintained that the technology under consideration by Trump is “next-generation” and “blows away anything else currently on the market.”

That person “familiar with the project” is Jason Miller I’d guess.

Jason Miller has evaded paying child support for years because he is a slimy piece of work. But he won’t be able to hide forever. He needs money. It appears they’ve got some tech suckers ready to help him out with that.

I posted this a while back on twitter when I got tired of hearing every Capitol Hill reporter say that Manchin has plenty of support among Senate Democrats but couldn’t name any names:

Jake Sherman says that there are many Democratic Senators who don't want to blow up the filibuster. I believe it.

Let's have some names, goddamnit.

— digby (@digby56) June 7, 2021

The Daily Beast’s Sam Brody named some of them today:

It was March 5, right before the Senate’s doomed vote to raise the minimum wage to $15, and, as usual, Sen. Joe Manchin was the center of attention.

But there was no need for reporters to swarm the West Virginia moderate. On that day, he was far from the only Democrat who’d give the thumbs-down to a progressive priority. Seven other Democratic senators would vote the same way—and draw far less recognition or criticism.

That tally surprised observers outside the U.S. Capitol building, but few within it.

Manchin may find himself nationally relevant, and widely loathed on the left, for his willingness to buck mainstream positions within the Democratic Party. But over the years, Senate insiders have developed a view that on the toughest and thorniest issues, Manchin isn’t only speaking for himself; there’s usually a handful of senators who agree with him, quietly, and are happy to let him take the heat.

Which senators are counted within this category changes based on the issue or vote at hand. The minimum wage vote provided a rare, clear look at how Manchin can be a tip of a Senate Democratic iceberg on a key issue.

But exactly who’s aligned with him, even discreetly, on another consequential question—whether to end the legislative filibuster—is less clear. Only one other Democrat, Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), has been as strident about keeping the Senate’s 60-vote threshold as Manchin. A handful of others, such as Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH), have sounded concerned notes or have avoided answering the question entirely.“It’s something of a symbiotic relationship. There are certainly more senators with reservations about the filibuster that are giving Manchin steam to stay firm. But I have also heard from colleagues that none of those other Senators want to play Manchin’s role.”— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)

Some Democrats look at that and argue that Manchin, who has defiantly insisted he will not gut the filibuster under any circumstances, is publicly voicing concerns that this group agrees with privately.

“There are other Democratic members who share his reservations about eliminating the filibuster,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who strongly differs with Manchin on the issue. “Perhaps they’re less outspoken, and perhaps less vehement.”

[…]

Among those whose job it is to influence lawmakers, it’s widely understood that Manchin is almost never on an island. When Manchin speaks, said one lobbyist for a major D.C. firm, “everyone’s ears perk up.”

“He represents not just a significant swing vote,” this lobbyist said. “He represents a handful of the party.”

There is also a belief among both Democrats and Republicans that Manchin’s current status as a black hole of left-wing outrage and media attention spares these other senators from the same treatment. A Democratic aide told The Daily Beast in a May story on Manchin that a lot of members are “happy Joe Manchin is the tip of the spear, getting shot at every day. Seven or eight of them stand behind him.”

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer’s piece last March on the Koch Network pressuring Senators is a must read to fill out the backstory here:

On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters.

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

Guess what?

With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”

I’m sure Manchin isn’t the only one they’ve been in touch with.