I know it’s tiresome to follow the ins and outs of Trump’s inevitable 2024 campaign this early — after all, we’ll be immersed in it for at least 2 years. But I also think it’s important to keep abreast of it as it unfolds — and how the media covers it. Here we have Politico giving us a dishy inside look at Trump’s thinking about a VP pick. Some of it makes some sense. The rest of it is batshit crazy. And, needless to say, anyone who agrees to do it is automatically a traitor to democracy:
[A]s Trump gears up for a 2024 bid to recapture the White House, the nascent thinking at Mar-a-Lago surrounding his potential vice president is considerably different. According to conversations with a dozen Trump advisers and close associates, the former president doesn’t feel bound by geographic or ideological considerations — or any standard political rules at all.
Those familiar with his thinking say his selection will be determined by two factors that rate highest in Trump’s estimation: unquestioned loyalty and an embrace of the former president’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“A lot of times, a presidential candidate will pick a running mate to balance out wings of the party. But with Trump, that’s not the issue. He is the party, basically. It’s so united behind him,” said John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s campaign pollsters. “So his choice, if he runs, will come down to what he wants. It would be a much more personal decision this time.”
Trump hasn’t made his 2024 bid official. He’s expected to make a decision after the 2022 midterms. But he has been building a campaign-in-waiting that is already laying groundwork, and the question of a running mate is surfacing with increasing frequency.
He’s name-dropped Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as one possible running mate. Veepstakes speculation rose among insiders who saw him interact recently with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at his Mar-a-Lago club.
“They’re all begging me. They all come here,” Trump boasted to one adviser, who shared the account anonymously with POLITICO.
The issue of a running mate, advisers and allies say, has taken on a new dimension in Trump’s mind as he stews over his decision to pick Pence in 2016, only to watch the vice president help certify the election of Joe Biden as president in January. Though it was Pence’s legal responsibility, Trump considered him disloyal and recently went so far as to say it was “common sense” that the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence.”
The considerations that led Trump to name Pence as his ticket mate in 2016 — an evangelical conservative, Pence was a Rust Belt governor at the time of his selection — are no longer as relevant, Trump’s advisers say. They say Trump is far more likely to go with his gut instinct next time around. Trump partly relied on his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, during the selection process last time, but the two are not expected to play the same role if he runs in 2024.
“Once you get past those two issues — loyalty and Trump going more with his gut — Trump has a lot of leeway in who he would pick,” said Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s lead pollster in 2016 and 2020.
“He’s not necessarily looking to balance the ticket geographically, but what he can do is pick to balance gender, race, ethnicity — a lot of different lanes there,” said Fabrizio, who is polling for a Trump-affiliated super PAC. “It could be everything from a Tim Scott in South Carolina to an Asian American in California, somebody Hispanic in Texas. There are so many choices and paths. And there’s lots of time to go.”
Those familiar with Trump’s thinking say his prospective vice president selection would likely draw from three general lanes of candidates: women, conservatives of color or a trusted adviser — or a “consigliere,” as one adviser described it.
Scott, the first elected Black senator from the South since the Reconstruction era, recently met with Trump in Palm Beach.
“It was a really warm interaction,” said one Republican observer in the room. “Scott was appropriately deferential without being gross, like some people are. What he said was thoughtful, and it was appreciated by the president. There was definitely chemistry there.”
Scott, who is running for reelection in 2022, has proved to be a prodigious fundraiser as well, pulling in $8.4 million in the last quarter. He hasn’t denied his own interest in a presidential bid in 2024, but he has said he wouldn’t run if Trump does. The South Carolina senator has already begun visiting other early presidential nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone said the shadow presidential campaigns from Scott and so many others double as a sort of vice-presidential tryout for Trump.
“This is an audition. And Trump is paying attention,” Stone said. “There’s no question that people running for president are really running for vice president all the time. The key is to make it look like you’re not running for vice president.”
Within Trump’s orbit, there is a belief that a Black running mate could eat into Democratic margins in key swing states, and that Hispanic voters are showing more signs of being up for grabs — especially in crucial battlegrounds like Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Texas.
Among some Trump advisers, Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez is viewed as a promising future star. They say Trump likes her and raved about her speaking role at his nominating convention last summer. But her public and political footprint have been limited under DeSantis, who’s widely seen as an heir apparent to Trump. The two men have a cordial and respectful public relationship, but privately Trump sees the younger DeSantis as a potential rival.
When Trump recently mused about picking DeSantis as a running mate, many in Trump circles said he was putting the governor in his place, not seriously floating him as a name.
“Trump feels he made DeSantis. Trump sees him as a competitor. And he’s not going to have someone with better numbers,” one Trump adviser said.
Yet there is one wrinkle that could potentially limit either Florida politician from getting the nod: a quirk in the Constitution that suggests a presidential candidate would face a unique hurdle with a running mate who hails from the same state.
The former president is also less likely to be concerned with Florida because he perceives it as Trump country after his three-point win last year in his newly adopted home state. And he’s not as concerned about ginning up conservative turnout as he was in 2016, given his strong standing with the party base.
However, Trump is keenly aware that he had a problem with women voters, increasing the likelihood that he might look to strike a gender balance on his ticket. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn have risen in the way-too-early veepstakes chatter because both are “tough as nails and conservative as hell,” one adviser to Trump said.
“Reynolds and Blackburn are definitely in the hunt,” the source added.
One early vice presidential favorite — Nikki Haley, Trump’s former United Nations ambassador and a former South Carolina governor — appears to have been frozen out after she criticized him over the Jan. 6 riot. There’s also relatively little enthusiasm among Trump insiders, they say, for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was being advised by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, until he left the public eye amid a harassment scandal.
If Trump picks another white male as a running mate, those who know his thinking say it’s likely that individual would play the role of a close adviser, a super chief of staff of sorts. That could even include Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, said one Republican who recently discussed the vice presidential issue with Trump in passing.
“Don’t rule out a consigliere lane for vice president, a Meadows-type,” the source said. “There were times when Pence occupied that role. No one wants to admit it now. But I observed it. But obviously Jan. 6 changed everything in that relationship.”
Trump’s former acting national security director, Ric Grenell, has also risen in the estimation of Trump insiders, as has another potential presidential candidate, Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s secretary of state and Central Intelligence Agency director.
I think he should pick Jared Kushner. Or maybe Ivanka. Why not? Evidently his people don’t give a damn who he picks as long as that person is willing to turn themselves into a submissive, boot-licking, supplicant. True heroes.
I was going to tackle this subject but Josh Marshall did it well and I’ll pass on apiece of it. (This is a subscriber only article and you should definitely subscribe. His stuff is always worth reading.)
I think it’s important for people to understand the difference between expertise in virology, epidemiology and public psychology because we keep getting it screwed up. Marshall looks at this article in the Washington Post which makes the case against giving boosters to the whole population instead of just targeting vulnerable populations. The article is written by people who recently quit the FDA over its decision to ok the boosters. He grants them respect for their expertise in their fields:
But two things stand out to me about their argument. The first is that they are fundamentally arguments based on individual care rather than the interests of society at large. We rightly make lots of decisions on that basis. To use an extreme example, we could probably save lots of lives overall if we did basic research on humans. But we don’t do that. Because our whole culture and framework of ethics puts the interests of individuals at the forefront. Still the different prism is key to understand.
That comes into high relief on the second point, when the authors anticipate the ‘what is the downside?’ argument.
Here’s what they say.
The data does not show that every healthy adult should get a booster. Indeed, the push for boosters for all could actually prolong the pandemic. First, such a campaign diverts focus away from the goal of persuading the unvaccinated to get their shots (and persuading parents to get their eligible children shots). Second, and relatedly, exaggerated descriptions of the waning efficacy of the vaccines undermine public confidence in them, and some people may be less likely to accept vaccines that they regard as less effective than originally advertised.
These aren’t health or clinical downsides. Here we’re in the realm of public psychology, politics and public policy. Those are areas in which I have at least some competence. And these are not good arguments at all. Right now it is frankly absurd to think that making boosters available or pushing for them is somehow a zero-sum calculus with persuading holdouts to get vaccinated.
The second argument has some possible logic to it. But I see very little evidence for it in practice. It also partakes of a pattern of thinking that has been one of the true achilles heels’ of public health expertise over the last two years: a tendency to try to game out people’s reactions to evidence and either downplay that evidence or avoid actions in reaction to that evidence in an effort to prevent the public from making bad decisions.
He brings up the obvious example of masking to show where the scientific experts got it wrong. They resisted recommending masks due to the PPE shortage but they weren’t honest about it instead telling people that they didn’t do any good. Once it became clear they did that horse was already out of the barn. The results of that mistake mistake still reverberate today.
And the psychological reasoning behind that whole discussion was frankly, pretty fatuous:
There wasn’t a lot of good science proving the efficacy of masking at the outset. In the absence of clear studies proving efficacy public health officials resisted making it part of formal guidance. But when some made the point that it was hard to see how some additional filtration wouldn’t be at least somewhat beneficial, the go-to argument was that it would give people a false sense of security. People would use masks poorly, get little benefit and based on that false sense of security either reduce their hand washing or engage in riskier activities. Again, efforts to game out peoples’ secondary actions.
[…]
The early weeks of the Pandemic were, to put it mildly, complicated. Resisting giving public guidance in the absence of strong scientific evidence is certainly a laudable impulse. It becomes more complicated in a crisis situation in which a lot of harm may become before the confirmatory evidence can be developed.
But this gaming out peoples’ action argument is of a different character. There’s a good argument for transparency in general. But more specifically, there’s little reason to believe one’s expertise in virology, or vaccine research or clinical cares give you any real insights into public or mass psychology. It’s just operating out of your lane.
The argument here with boosters – a sort of carom double bank shot argument that pushing boosters will make people lose confidence in vaccines – is really totally speculative and frankly out of touch with most of our experience about vaccine resistance and the politics of vaccination in 2021.
He is 100% correct. They are operating out of their lane.
The idea that we shouldn’t encourage boosters because it “takes the focus” off of getting the anti-vaxxers to get their shots is frankly absurd. There is absolutely no evidence that this will work and a ton of evidence that it will make absolutely no difference. Focus is not the problem. Conspiracy theories and misinformation is.
Moreover, boosters are actually necessary and I think the majority of Americans who aren’t out of their minds would be quite upset if they weren’t able to obtain them:
The US markedly lags many countries with boosters, in part because of poor messaging, and lack of priority to get *all* adults with fully restored vaccine effectiveness. Would help vs Omicron, too. Boosters induce a striking increase in level & breadth of neutralizing antibodies. pic.twitter.com/TeervFbhVI
“Boosters induce a striking in level and breadth of neutralizing antibodies.”
The problem of how to get vaccines into the hesitant and recalcitrant is a real one. I wish there was some way to wave a magic wand to make it happen. But the idea that it would happen if only the politicians would “focus” on getting them or make people lose faith in the vaccines in general to do it is not well-founded.
And, by the way, neither is it well founded to suggest that the west is hogging the vaccines for boosters and leaving the rest of the world unvaccinated out of their selfish desire to protect their own people. While it’s absolutely true that there needs to be much more vaccine distributed to the rest of the world, it’s just not the case that it’s not happening because of limited supply. In fact, South Africa reportedly told Pfizer to suspend shipments of the vaccines recently because they were already over-supplied. Their problem, like ours, is not a matter of supply but rather resistance among the public. (According to Zeynep Tufekci, in this country it’s because of the way pharmaceutical companies treated the HIV epidemic and ended up creating massive mistrust among the public.) On the other hand, many other African countries are truly under-supplied, which is a tragedy that must be dealt with as soon as possible if we don’t want to see a new frightening variant emerge every few months.
None of that will be fixed by denying booster shots to Americans or engaging in elaborate ineffectual, counterproductive psychological games to keep them from thinking the vaccines don’t work. As Josh Marshall says, on this, there needs to be a mixture of scientific experts, public psychology experts and political experts weighing in. As I wrote in my piece this morning, you cannot separate the political from the pandemic, at least not in the US. It’s the politics that are killing massive numbers of people just as much as the virus itself.
In case you think my post below was too cynical and hyperbolic about the Republican tactic to keep killing their own supporters to own the libs and make Biden look bad. It is a formal strategy:
Republican officials around the country are testing a creative mechanism to build loyalty with unvaccinated Americans while undermining Biden administration mandates: unemployment benefits.
Driving the news: Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have changed their unemployment insurance rules to allow workers who are fired or quit over vaccine mandates to receive benefits.
The big picture: Extending unemployment benefits to the unvaccinated is just the latest in a series of proposals aligning the GOP with people who won’t get a COVID shot.
Republicans see a prime opportunity to rally their base ahead of the midterms. No matter how successful their individual efforts, the campaign is a powerful messaging weapon.
Details: Nine GOP-controlled states have passed laws requiring exemptions for the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate, or banning private companies from requiring vaccination altogether, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy.
Several states have made it as easy as possible for workers to claim exemptions, allowing them to opt-out on philosophical grounds or requiring businesses to accept all requests for religious or medical exemptions without proof.
Legal uncertainty created by a wide variety of new vaccine exemptions in Florida – including for past COVID-19 infections and “anticipated future pregnancy” – prompted Disney World to suspend its vaccine mandate on Tuesday.
In Congress, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) is leading a formal challenge against the federal vaccine mandate using the Congressional Review Act, the official process for Congress to eliminate an executive branch rule.
The resolution is “guaranteed a vote on the Senate floor,” according to Braun’s office, which could come as early as December.
At least 20 bills have been introduced to chip away at Biden’s mandates.
The backdrop: On Sept. 8, President Biden announced a new rule requiring businesses with more than 100 employees to implement vaccine mandates, affecting roughly 80 million private sector workers, as well as millions of federal workers and contractors.
They are literally spending taxpayer dollars to prolong the pandemic for political gain. It just doesn’t get any more cynical than that.
And if you think this will create some kind of backlash, note the bland way that Axios reports this as just another political tactic, not as a grotesque scandal that should send everyone who is promoting it straight to hell. They are being aided and abetted by the Village 2.0. As usual.
By the way;
During a weekend broadcast of morning show Fox & Friends, for instance, all three hosts implied that the White House was overplaying the danger of COVID variants to sway the next election. Fox News contributor Sean Duffy, meanwhile, said Democrats would use Omicron as a way to change election rules, all while asserting that the party “stole” last year’s election due to COVID.
Americans woke up on Black Friday this year to more than a food hangover and big crowds at the malls. Along with the rest of the world, we were greeted with news of a frightening new COVID variant that appears to have characteristics that may make it more dangerous than the previous strains. After the stock market fell out of bed, the news networks went on full “breaking news alerts” all day, before governments around the world reacted with travel bans. Within hours, the World Health Organization named the new variant Omicron, B.1.1.529, and put it into the category of “variant of concern” citing the possibility that it has greater potential to escape prior immunity. Great. Just what we need.
Over the weekend, things calmed down a bit as the experts weighed in and told everyone to be patient and wait for real evidence before panicking. Most seemed to think that the vaccines would still have at least some effect and there were even those who suggested that the news that 10% of people testing positive in the Netherlands following flights out of South Africa, where the mutation is believed to have originated, may mean that Omicron is actually less virulent than those that came before.
The fact is that we just don’t know much at the moment.
Quite a few public health experts sounded alarms that the U.S. and other countries are needlessly banning people from certain African countries, arguing that it unfairly punishes them even though the virus doesn’t respect borders or passports in any case. As critics noted, there are already Omicron cases in Europe and Asia — and it’s almost assured that it’s in the U.S. already.
Still, as Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times points out in an excellent piece on Sunday, a time-limited travel ban buys a little time for countries to prepare for this new strain if it does turn out to be a major setback. She offers a number of suggestions, from mass rapid testing (apparently, this new variant can easily be detected by the standard PCR test which is a lucky break) to getting vaccine manufacturers working on a specific vaccine immediately. In fact, Pfizer put out a statement that they could get a new vaccine online in about three months. Her point is that this early warning will be of little use if all countries do with it is offer what she calls “pandemic theater” instead of a tangible response that’s flexible enough to pull back quickly if this fizzles out. That seems like sound advice and we’ll find out soon enough if all this is going to be necessary.
But the fact is that you can’t divorce politics from this problem.
For all the concern about punishing countries with travel bans, I don’t think there is a lot of choice in moments like these. As public health expert Dr. Leana Wen told CNN, “imagine the counterfactual if the Biden administration did not at this point and there were a major spike in cases due to this variant, what would we have said? We would say they should have taken action much more promptly.”
All you have to do is look back to last week to see how perilous the politics of COVID have become. Consider the Wall St. Journal editorial that ripped the Biden administration for failing to contain COVID as it passed the milestone of more deaths in 2021 than 2020. (This is a fatuous complaint, of course. The virus didn’t take off until April of 2020 and the worst spike, so far, began peaking in January of 2021, just as Biden was taking office.) The editorial excoriated Biden for running on the promise of dealing more effectively with the crisis than Trump did and now it turns out that people died in great numbers anyway.
This is an old Republican trick. They leave the country in shambles when they are voted out of office, obstruct the Democrats every step of the way when they try to fix it and then blame them for failing to fulfill their promises. And they’re doing it again:
The Times’ David Leonhardt recently laid out the tragic consequences of this cynical strategy:
The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened…
The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.
That’s a hell of a thing to do just to make Biden look bad but, apparently, there is nothing Republicans and their propagandists in the right-wing media won’t do to secure power in Washington again.
And lest anyone forget, the Trump administration’s record on the pandemic was nothing short of horrific. From his obsession with not testing in order to “keep his numbers down” to pushing snake oil cures and sabotaging public health measures, his performance was an epic failure that ended up persuading his own followers that they should ignore the experts and listen to quacks and con artists instead. The results speak for themselves. They would rather die than get life-saving vaccines.
The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which is chaired by Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., has been holding hearings and releasing documents showing that it was even worse than we knew in real time. Trump senior officials repeatedly leaned on the Centers for Disease Control to keep the public uninformed about the pandemic for political reasons. David Corn of Mother Jones reminds us of this horrific data point:
As researchers from UCLA noted in March 2021, the United States could have avoided 400,000 COVID deaths if the Trump administration had implemented a more effective health strategy that included mask mandates, social distancing, and robust testing guidelines. [Dr. Deborah]Birx made a similar statement at that time.
Blaming President Biden for the ongoing COVID tragedy when efforts to contain it have been sabotaged at every step of the way by Republicans is predictable. It’s what they do. And anyone who says that this is not something that the administration has to consider when they try to fashion responses to the crisis, whether it’s desperately trying to persuade these anti-vaxxers to save their own lives or reacting to a possibly dangerous new variant, are not living in the real world.
This obscene dynamic is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and the stunning fact that despite our advanced health care system and easy access to life-saving vaccines, we have still lost more people in this pandemic than any other country in the world. You cannot blame the administration for acting with an abundance of caution under these circumstances.
Cliff Schecter drew my attention back to Politico’s non-Omicron coverage of the D.C. soap opera. Donald Trump’s non-official campaign is already sparking speculation about who he might pick for a vice presidential candidate:
But as Trump gears up for a 2024 bid to recapture the White House, the nascent thinking at Mar-a-Lago surrounding his potential vice president is considerably different. According to conversations with a dozen Trump advisers and close associates, the former president doesn’t feel bound by geographic or ideological considerations — or any standard political rules at all.
We don't get rid of the filibuster and pass voting rights bills you should all prob get used to the phrase "Vice President Steven Seagal" pic.twitter.com/8NBZ2EOQju
Those familiar with his thinking say his selection will be determined by two factors that rate highest in Trump’s estimation: unquestioned loyalty and an embrace of the former president’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“A lot of times, a presidential candidate will pick a running mate to balance out wings of the party. But with Trump, that’s not the issue. He is the party, basically. It’s so united behind him,” said John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s campaign pollsters. “So his choice, if he runs, will come down to what he wants. It would be a much more personal decision this time.”
[…]
“They’re all begging me. They all come here,” Trump boasted to one adviser, who shared the account anonymously with POLITICO.
Is anyone buying that? Did anyone buy overpriced Trump vodka described as “exceptionally harsh” and “tastes awful—needs a lot of tonic and lime”?
What Republican potentials Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Mike Pompeo and others are doing, Roger Stone tells Politico, is auditioning.
“There’s no question that people running for president are really running for vice president all the time,” Stone said. “The key is to make it look like you’re not running for vice president.”
As for Schecter’s observation, Politico does not mention Steven Seagal. But he would get Vladimir Putin’s nod as VP. Putin made his pal a Russian citizen in 2016 and made him a special envoy for improving U.S.-Russia relations in 2018. As VP, Seagal might finally help Donald land that Trump Tower Moscow deal Putin’s been dangling.
Forget nuclear winter. Think Covid winter. Again. The spreading Omicron variant infects landing pages this morning from Sydney to London to Los Angeles. The Supreme Court does not hear the Mississippi abortion case that threatens Roe until Wednesday. For now, Omicron rules.
Fauci: US could face ‘fifth wave’ of Covid as Omicron variant nears declares The Guardian in case you’d lost track. (I had.) The White House’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, hopes existing vaccines will “provide a degree of protection against severe cases of Covid.”
First image of Omicron shows many more mutations than Delta reports Agence France-Presse. But don’t panic yet, says AFP. “This does not automatically mean that these variations are more dangerous, just that the virus has further adapted to the human species by generating another variant,” a team of Italian researchers said.
Could Omicron be our way out? The Sydney Morning Herald echoes those Italian researchers with this interesting and hopeful observation on the outbreak:
Could the emergence of Omicron, possibly a more infectious, less virulent variant of coronavirus, be a good thing for public health? Some of our leading infectious disease experts, while stressing it is too early to make a call, are daring to hope.
Since the start of the pandemic, epidemiologists have thought this might be our way out, that the virus could eventually mutate into a more benign form that continues to spread but kills fewer people and sends fewer of us to hospital.
This is what happened to the H1N1 influenza virus and it may explain the origins of the common cold, a coronavirus some virologists have linked to the deadly Russian Flu pandemic of the late 19th century.
The early indications from South Africa, where Omicron already appears to be replacing Delta as the dominant strain, is that the radically mutated Omicron could be the SARS-CoV-2 variant experts have been waiting for.
“We don’t know yet, but there are a few clues coming out that it may be less virulent,” says University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely. “Whilst it is all a bit nerve-racking at the moment, it might work out to our advantage.”
“The measure of success is keeping people out of hospital, keeping people safe and at the same time, opening up the economy to keep people in work and keep businesses open,” says New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet.
(Politico is too busy with the D.C. soap opera to invest much of its attention in people’s health.)
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus analyzes the living nightmare we are confronting with this extremist Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell’s legacy achievement will have the greatest effect on Americans’ lives of any Republican of the last century. He can die happy:
…A six-justicemajority, such as the one now firmly in control, is the judicial equivalent of the monarchy’s “heir and a spare.” The pathways to victory are enlarged. The overall impact is far greater than the single-digit difference suggests.
On the current court, each conservative justice enjoys the prospect of being able to corral four colleagues, if not all five, in support of his or her beliefs, point of view or pet projects, whether that is outlawing affirmative action, ending constitutional protection for abortion, exalting religious liberty over all other rights or restraining the power of government agencies.
A six-justice majority is emboldened rather than hesitant; so, too, are the conservative advocates who appear before it. Such a court doesn’t need to trim its sails, hedge its language, or abide by legal niceties if it seems more convenient to dispense with them.
A conservative justice wary of providing a fifth vote for a controversial position can take comfort in the thought that now there are six; there is strength in that number. Meantime, a court with a six-justice majority is one in which the justices on the other side of the ideological spectrum are effectively consigned to a perpetual minority. They craft dissents that may serve as rebukes for the ages but do little to achieve change in the present. The most they can manage is damage control, and that only rarely.
That is the reality — exhilarating for conservatives, chilling for liberals — as the court, with a membership that has not been this conservative since the 1930s, embarks on what could be its most consequential term in decades. The October 2021 term is the first with six conservatives in place from Day One; the newest, Amy Coney Barrett, was not confirmed until several weeks into the court’s previous term, and the first year for any new justice tends to be a time of settling in.
Now, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who occupies what passes for this court’s center, holds the reins but is no longer firmly in control of his horses. Some of his most conservative justices are champing at the bit. Sometimes he can curb them, but not always; sometimes he is delighted to head in the same direction. And if any five agree, they can go galloping off anywhere they choose. If Roberts isn’t with them, the court’s most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas, has the power to assign the majority opinion or write it himself.
“The difference between six and five is exponential,” said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, which worked to confirm conservative judges during the Trump years. “With five justices to the chief’s right, they no longer need to compromise with the chief to win. And this means it is much more likely that the court is going to get to the conservative result most of the time.”
The justices have defied some earlier liberal predictions of catastrophe, but there’s reason to believe this term may be different — and if not this term, then one not far off.
[…]
The following is what stuns me. How can we call ourselves a democracy? This Court revolution is taking place at a time when the Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 30 years:
Republican appointees have been in a majority on the court and at its helm for half a century, since President Richard M. Nixon named Warren E. Burger to be chief justice in 1969, after Earl Warren’s retirement. Nixon had the remarkable good fortune tobe able to fill three additional seats in the next two years: Justices Harry A. Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell Jr. and William H. Rehnquist, who would eventually succeed Burger as chief justice.
The luck of Republican presidents held. From Gerald R. Ford until Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Republicans controlled the White House for 23 years and named nine justices. Democrats were in the presidency for 20 years, nearly as long, but had just four justices confirmed. By 1991, when Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall, only one justice nominated by a Democratic president remained on the court, Kennedy appointee Byron R. White, and he was no reliable liberal.
Even so, the Republican-dominated high court failed to produce consistently conservative rulings. A book of essays on the Burger court bore the subtitle, “The counter-revolution that wasn’t.” Over the following decades, certainly,the court moved steadily and at times sharply to the right, limiting the power of the federal government against the states, reducing criminal defendants’ ability to seek redress in federal court, lowering the wall of separation between church and state, hobbling efforts to regulate money in politics, dismantling protection for voting rights and declaring that the Constitution protects an individual right to bear arms.
Still, the court, despite dire predictions to the contrary, protected and reaffirmed abortion rights. It cut back on affirmative action but did not eliminate it. Rehnquist himself, who repeatedly expressed his disdain forMiranda, the 1966 decision protecting the rights of suspects in custody, voted as chief justice to reaffirm the ruling. Having found in 1986 that it was constitutional for states to criminally prosecute private homosexual conduct, the court, in the span of a dozen years from 2003 to 2015, reversed itself on that question, overturned the Defense of Marriage Act protecting states from having to recognize same-sex unions and, finally, declared the existence of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Yet over time, and under the tutelage of the conservative Federalist Society, Republican presidents, beginning with George W. Bush and intensifying with Trump, became better at picking reliablyconservative justices. There were to be no more David Souters, who turned out to be a solid liberal vote; no more Sandra Day O’Connors, whose background as an Arizona state legislator often inclined her to compromise; no more Anthony M. Kennedys, the pale-pastel conservative named to the court after Ronald Reagan’s first choice, Robert H. Bork, was resoundingly defeated.
Future justices would have judicial paper trails to provide assurance of their conservative bona fides on everything from explosive social issues to government regulation, a topic important to legal conservatives and their financial backers. And so the post-Rehnquist years produced the Roberts court, adding not only the chief justice but also Samuel A. Alito Jr. and, with Trump’s election and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) stage-managing, three new conservative justices: Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Barrett.
“It’s not like it was this moderate court and Trump made it conservative,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center. “It was a conservative court and Trump made it extremely conservative.”
McConnell’s role cannot be overstated. The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 offered liberals a glimpse of a court reshaped, with President Barack Obama poised to appoint a justice to join the four liberals: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “When we lost Justice Scalia … it looked like we were fated to lose even more,” then-Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo recalled in a speech the next year. “It seemed the court would once and for all become the instrument of the progressive liberal agenda. In one of history’s sharper turns, however, that proved not to be so inevitable after all.”
McConnell’s audacious stonewalling of Merrick Garland’s nomination, with 10 months remaining in Obama’s term, eliminated Leo’s worries; McConnell’s sprint to confirm Barrett after Ginsburg’s death, scarcely seven weeks before the 2020 election, cemented the conservative takeover.
The Rule of Six was about to commence.
Mitch McConnell eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, stole one Supreme Court seat and then rushed another one through in the final 6 weeks of a presidential campaign. This is on him.
Do not mistake today’s lineupfor a 3-3-3 court — three conservatives, three moderates, three liberals. There are three extremely conservative, extremely impatient justices — Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch — who would go to extraordinary lengths to undo some of the most entrenched constitutional doctrine. Thomas, for instance, has called for revisiting New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark press freedom case that provides a shield against libel suits brought by public officials; in an enterprise later joined by Gorsuch, Thomas termedNew York Times and subsequent cases “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.” Again joined by Gorsuch, he has questionedGideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed a right to appointed counsel for those who cannot afford to hire their own lawyers. He has said the Constitution does not prohibit states from establishing an official religion.
But even the more patient justices — Roberts, sometimes Kavanaugh, and, at least judging from her first year, Barrett — are no moderates. All three, for instance, joined a particularly radical Alito opinion last term that neutered the remaining major enforcement mechanism in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “I dislike the fact that journalists refer to the six as conservative,” said Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under Reagan. “They’re not. They’re reactionaries. That’s the only correct term for them.”
Marcus runs down the 2018 and 2019 terms which she characterizes as “The Roberts Court” — conservative but not radical. Well, those days are gone. In just the few months of the new court majority we’ve seen an extreme turn to the right in explicitly partisan terms. Marcus goes into great detail about the “shadow docket” (and the conservative hypocrisy involved in its use) and especially the hardcore partisan majority’s ruling on voting rights.
It’s enough to make you sick. And they are not finished by a long shot.
[…]
before the 2020-2021 term had drawn to a close, the court set the stage for the potentially watershed term now underway.
After years of dawdling and ducking, the court agreed in April to decide its first significant gun rights case in a decade, clarifying the scope of its 2008 decision that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. The next month, the court agreed to review an abortion law, although the case satisfied none of the usual criteria for review: There was no split in the circuits, no conflict “with relevant decisions of this court,” no unsettled question of federal law.
Before leaving for the summer recess, the court added a religion case to its docket that could remove another cornerstone in the separation of church and state. The case comes from Maine, where some areas of the state are so rural there are no public schools; the state instead offers tuition vouchers to attend public schools in other areas or private institutions. Does the Constitution require — not just allow, but require — Maine to make these vouchers available to religious schools, for explicitly religious instruction? The likely answer from this court seems obvious.
Meantime, other high-profile disputes appear headed to the court. Can Trump successfully claim executive privilege to stop the release of documents or prevent former aides from testifying before the House select committee investigating Jan. 6? Is Biden’s vaccine-and-testing mandate for private employers legal? Must states with vaccine mandates provide religious exemptions?
Marcus looks at the polls showing the Court is suffering unprecedented disapproval by a majority of the country and suggests that may have been why Breyer, Alito and Barrett all gave speeches in recent weeks insisting that the Court is anything but partisan. And she looks at the conservatives’ apparent jaundiced view of the Texas abortion law, most likely only because they realize that the legal reasoning that underlies it makes them irrelevant and empowers liberal states to enact similar laws to curb gun rights and religious “freedom” laws that they value.
Conservative lawyers were none too pleased with the squishiness they heard. “The Warren Court Lives?!?” read the headline on a National Review piece by legalblogger Ed Whelan.
Yeah, no:
The new, radicalized court revealed itself earlier this year, when it agreed to review Mississippi’s abortion law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks. To be sure, 15 weeks was just a step along the way for Mississippi; the state had already enacted another measure, blocked in court, that would bar abortions after six weeks, and it had one prohibiting almost all abortions waiting in the wings if Roe were overturned.
In June 2020, when Mississippi first asked the court to hear the case — a court with Ginsburg still alive — it took pains to assure the justices this was no head-on challenge: “To be clear, the questions presented in this petition do not require the Court to overturn Roe or Casey,” the state’s petition said. The latter referred to the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, in which the court had reaffirmed the right to abortion.
A year later, with the case accepted for review, Ginsburg dead and Barrett in her seat, Mississippi decided to go for broke. Its new brief dispensed with the fiction that the Mississippi ban could be upheld with a bit of tinkering around the edges. “Nothing in constitutional text, structure, history, or tradition supports a right to abortion,” the state argued. “Overruling Roe and Casey makes resolution of this case straightforward.” A single footnote raising that prospect became almost the entire brief.
This was a bold, and potentially risky, gambit. It was a safe bet that the six conservative justices were no fans of Roe and would never have signed on to a finding that the Constitution includes a right to abortion. Three were all but guaranteed votes for overruling.
But were Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett — or any two of those three — preparedto take the momentous step of abandoning a 50-year-old precedent, one that had been reaffirmed time after time? That was less clear, especially after confirmation hearings in which Kavanaugh pledged that he consideredRoe “an important precedent of the Supreme Court” and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) had pronounced herself convinced that Kavanaugh would not vote to overrule it.
Pushing the court to take a step it hadn’t agreed to consider — indeed, that Mississippi had at first assured was entirely unnecessary — posed a danger of backfiring. The justices, if they are annoyed by this bait-and-switch, have the power to dismiss the case as “improvidently granted” — to “DIG” it, in the parlance of the court. The Biden administration, in its brief, suggested the justices do precisely that. Mississippi has “now dramatically changed course, devoting their merits brief to a frontal assault on Roe and the fifty years of precedent reaffirming its central holding. The Court has previously declined to indulge such tactics,” it argued.
There is no indication they are inclined to do that.
The more probable course is that the court will proceed to decide the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and to uphold the 15-week ban. But how? Will it overrule Roe outright or do so,as the court says, “sub silentio,” eviscerating the right, and setting the stage for future cutbacks, without explicitly acknowledging what it isdoing?
That underlines the difficulty presented for abortion rights advocatesby Mississippi’s audacious strategy. If the court now stops short of explicit overruling, the public might conclude the justices have taken a restrained, middle-ground approach. But it’s hard to imagine a decision that stops at 15 weeks. If the court upholds the Mississippi law, there’s no logical stopping point.
Marcus explains the legal tangle the Justices are in with this proposed 15 week ban, and how upholding it will create massive uncertainty in the states.
In short, the court is on the brink of a mess — doctrinal, practical and political — and it’s hard to see how it is going to extricate itself. Overruling Roe would get the court largely out of the abortion-deciding business, but it would create a political firestorm, just before the midterm elections. Upholding the law without taking that explicit step would invite more states to enact ever more aggressive restrictions — without any clear standard for judging them.
The correct answer would be for the court to apply its existing precedents and declare flatly that pre-viability prohibitions are unconstitutional. It is all but impossible to imagine five votes on this court for taking that sensible step.
Guns are next.And wait until you see the meat ax they are planning to take to the ability of the government to enact regulations:
What could be the sleeper case of the term concerns the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to combat climate change. That’s an important topic, but the case is even more significant, as a measure of the court’s eagerness to roll back the power of regulatory agencies.
In recent years, conservative justices have been pressing numerous changes in this area: reviving pre-New Deal limits on Congress’s ability to delegate its power to agencies; empowering courts to second-guess agencies’ decisions rather than defer to their expertise; strengthening presidential control over independent agencies.
Taken together, these initiatives could achieve what Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon described as the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — at the very time that legislative gridlock makes it hard for Congress to step in to address urgent issues itself or clarify regulators’ authority to act.
The court once again took the extremist position, agreeing to hear a case that is moot just so they could have the chance to enact Bannon’s vision for America.
Marcus notes that conservatives insist that the Court is disappointing them and wring their hands that in the first few months the court hasn’t turned back the clock to 1800. That’s a joke. For all the caterwauling about liberal activist groups hectoring the Democrats to do things that make them unpopular, they are amateurs compared to the right wingers.
Marcus reluctantly concludes that the liberals have the much better argument for hand wringing. (No kidding.)
[F]or those who believe the court has a vital role to play in protecting democracy, promoting civil rights and achieving justice, “the outlook is not good at all,” said Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who served as solicitor general in the Obama administration. “Things may unfold more slowly or less completely than our worst fears. But I think most of our worst fears are going to be realized. It’s just a question of at what pace.”
Marcus throws up her hands and says there’s nothing to be done. She says that court packing is the worst thing in the world (doesn’t explain why) and that term limits are “hard to administer” and wouldn’t be in effect for years. So basically, they won, we lost and the country is going to hell in a handbasket.
This was one of the main reasons I took to my bed for a week after Trump won in 2016. We all knew this would enable the wingnuts to take advantage of McConnell’s unethical gambit and preserve the ultra conservative majority for decades. Replacing Scalia with a sane person was our last chance.
Yes, it’s worse that there’s a six seat majority than a five seat majority but it’s on the margins. Five seats with Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas formed the hardcore bloc and there was every reason to believe that Kennedy would retire under a GOP president so they could put a real extremist on the court. Replacing Ginsburg with Barret was just icing on the cake. They already had everything they needed to foment a legal revolution. Now, even if Thomas goes, there are five younger whippersnappers to keep the flame burning.
This is McConnell’s doing, working hand in hand with the Federalist Society, not Trump’s. The GOP’s most elite establishment figures have brought us here. And it’s going to be bad, very bad.
When NYT (mistakenly) axed Public Editor role four years ago, part of the rationale was that Twitter etc would do the job instead. Eg see memo from publisher, below:
The reality is that people playing that role on Twitter, Substack, and elsewhere re NYT framing of US politics inevitably end up feeling like cranks, or being cast as such.
But the framing of this latest story is *really* unfortunate. Deserves reflection, and correction.
Hed makes it sound as if “attacks” were out of the blue. (“Then the attacks started.”) Again, look at it:
Leaves out an extremely important point. Namely: all of these people had been doing everything possible to mock and discredit vaccine advocates, and to *prevent* other people from taking Covid seriously—before their own unfortunate deaths from the disease.
And, the “attacks” on them are uses of their examples—mockery of vaccine, followed by death from Covid—as cautionary illustrations for others.
Story itself makes that clear. But headline—what most “readers” will get from the story, and its official “frame”—says the reverse.
The paper, overall our greatest news organization, should have made it possible to have accountability-from-within, as w its strong public editors. (Like Okrent and Sullivan.)
Someone should explain this framing. And correct it.
To be honest, I’m not sure that headline didn’t mean exactly what they wanted it to mean.
Here’s another useful thread from Jay Rosen:
Last week @jonkarl of ABC News was asked this by @brianstelter: “Have you started to think about how you would approach the 2024 candidacy of Donald Trump?”
Karl’s replies got too little attention, in my view. This thread tries to correct for that.
I would call Jon Karl a consensus figure within the US press. I don’t mean a public consensus. I mean he’s liked and respected by his peers. Seen by them as a “straight shooter.” Past president of @whca, the White House Correspondents Association. And elected by its members.
A disclaimer to start. We do not know if Trump is going to run. Everyone around Trump says he will, Jon Karl reported. But he’s not so sure.
I’m not sure, either. Say he does not run. What are the chances of a Trumpified Republican Party and candidate in 2024? I would say high.
Now let’s turn to what Jon Karl said when Brian Stelter asked him: how do you cover a figure like Trump if he decides to run again? He gave several answers.
“It’s an immense challenge because you’re covering— you’re covering essentially an anti-democratic candidate.”
Bingo.
A caution: You probably had bingo about this years ago. But Jon Karl saying it on CNN still matters, I think. Why? Because ABC cannot credibly turn to its existing model for election coverage when its chief correspondent has said it: “essentially an anti-democratic candidate.”
Second caution. I’m not saying the big national newsrooms won’t do what they always do in covering a second Trump run. They might. But it won’t be credible even to themselves for the reasons Jon Karl and Brian Stelter articulated on CNN.
We know they know better, is my point.
About covering Trump if he runs, Jon Karl also said: “You’re covering somebody running in a system that is trying to undermine that very system.”
Yes. And he’s extremely likely to be running against a normal candidate operating within the election system, a glaring asymmetry.
Not only is Trump an anti-democratic force and clearly trying to bring down the system, but you know from the start he’s “going to be perpetually lying,” Karl said.
“He is trying to repeat a lie so many times that people will believe it… we can’t [be] a conduit for that.”
Trying to imagine it, Karl took note of the normal practices that will break if Trump runs.
“What does the debate look like with Donald Trump in it?”
“You can’t air Trump’s speeches unfiltered as often happened in the 2016 campaign.”
“Interviews are incredibly challenging.”
Again: the breakage is not new. What’s striking is how slow the replacement work has been.
Karl: “I don’t really have the answer yet, except to say that we have to do what we always must do, and that is, pursue the truth and pursue it relentlessly and without fear or favor.”
“This is definitely the conversation that’s starting to happen in newsrooms,” Stelter said. “And I can hear it very loudly on the outside, critics asking these questions, but it is happening inside newsrooms as well.”
I did not know that. 😎
Not saying Brian is wrong. He has sources I lack. But I have seen no evidence that this conversation — given all we’ve learned about him since 2015, what the hell do we do if Trump runs again? — is meaningfully underway in American newsrooms.
If true that certainly is news.
One thing seems clear. The old way, the model of election coverage that repeats itself every four years, is simply not viable if Trump runs.
@brianstelter put it like this: “We know normal is not the answer, but we don’t know necessarily what the answer might be.”
An anti-democratic candidacy. A political figure trying to win back power by undermining the election system. The near certainty of a campaign based on the Big Lie— the lie that Trump won in 2020. Each poses major problems of principle AND practice for American journalism.
It would make a lot of sense for newsrooms like ABC and CNN to claim a much stronger public identity in 2024: pro-truth, pro-democracy, pro-voting. But for each there has to be a list: what we WILL do that we didn’t do before, what we WON’T do that we routinely did before.
Each change in practice is likely to trigger controversy. New rules adopted because we know who Trump is by now will be demagogued by his supporters as one-sided journalism, designed to defeat one man.
Easy to imagine their resolve melting as the “refs” get worked.
To political pressures add commercial ones. As everyone knows, Trump was good for ratings. Jon Karl said we in journalism can’t be a conduit for the Big Lie. But if amplifying Trump is bad for the country, it can also be good (or safe) for the company.
“Normal is not the answer.”
If that becomes the consensus view in journalism (and the interview with Karl suggests it already has, thus this thread…) then for newsrooms the work ahead is clear.
If he runs again, our old model won’t work. Where do we turn for a new one?
Everything I’ve said so far highlights the asymmetry between an anti-democratic candidacy, and a normal one (with normal flaws) for the Democrats.
Circuits fried, the press will have to decide what to do: New wiring for its election coverage, or wing it and see what happens. It can also decide by not deciding.
France is inducting Josephine Baker — Missouri-born cabaret dancer, French World War II spy and civil rights activist — into its Pantheon, the first Black woman honored in the final resting place of France’s most revered luminaries.
On Tuesday, a coffin carrying soils from the U.S., France and Monaco — places where Baker made her mark — will be deposited inside the domed Pantheon monument overlooking the Left Bank of Paris. Her body will stay in Monaco, at the request of her family.Recent Stories from ABC News
French President Emmanuel Macron decided on her entry into the Pantheon, responding to a petition. In addition to honoring an exceptional figure in French history, the move is meant to send a message against racism and celebrate U.S.-French connections.
“She embodies, before anything, women’s freedom,” Laurent Kupferman, the author of the petition for the move, told The Associated Press.
Baker was born in 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. At 19, having already divorced twice, had relationships with men and women, and started a performing career, she moved to France following a job opportunity.
“She arrives in France in 1925, she’s an emancipated woman, taking her life in her hands, in a country of which she doesn’t even speak the language,” Kupferman said.
She met immediate success on the Theatre des Champs-Elysees stage, where she appeared topless and wearing a famed banana belt. Her show, embodying the colonial time’s racist stereotypes about African women, caused both condemnation and celebration.
“She was that kind of fantasy: not the Black body of an American woman but of an African woman,” Theatre des Champs-Elysees spokesperson Ophélie Lachaux told the AP. “And that’s why they asked Josephine to dance something ‘tribal,’ ‘savage,’ ‘African’-like.”ADVERTISING
Baker’s career took a more serious turn after that, as she learned to speak five languages and toured internationally. She became a French citizen after her marriage in 1937 to industrialist Jean Lion, a Jewish man who later suffered from anti-Semitic laws of the collaborationist Vichy regime.
In September 1939, as France and Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, Baker got in touch with the head of the French counterintelligence services. She started working as an informant, traveling, getting close to officials and sharing information hidden on her music sheets, according to French military archives.
Researcher and historian Géraud Létang said Baker lived “a double life between, on the one side, the music hall artist, and on the other side, another secret life, later becoming completely illegal, of intelligence agent.”
After France’s defeat in June 1940, she refused to play for the Nazis who occupied Paris and moved to southwestern France. She continued to work for the French Resistance, using her artistic performances as a cover for her spying activities.
That year, she notably brought into her troupe several spies working for the Allies, allowing them to travel to Spain and Portugal. “She risks the death penalty or, at least, the harsh repression of the Vichy regime or of the Nazi occupant,” Letang said.
The next year, seriously ill, Baker left France for North Africa, where she gathered intelligence for Gen. Charles De Gaulle, including spying on the British and the Americans — who didn’t fully trust him and didn’t share all information.
She also raised funds, including from her personal money. It is estimated she brought the equivalent of 10 million euros ($11.2 million) to support the French Resistance.
In 1944, Baker joined a female group in the Air Force of the French Liberation Army as a second lieutenant. The group’s logbook notably mentions a 1944 incident off the coast of Corsica, when Senegalese soldiers from colonial troops fighting in the French Liberation Army helped Baker out of the sea. After her plane had to make an emergency landing, they brought “the shipwrecked to the shores, on their large shoulders, Josephine Baker in the front,” the logbook writes.
Baker also organized concerts for soldiers and civilians near combat zones. After the defeat of the Nazis, she went to Germany to sing for former prisoners and deportees freed from the camps.
“Baker’s involvement in politics was individual and atypical,” said Benetta Jules-Rosette, a leading scholar on Baker’s life and a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego.
After the war, Baker got involved in anti-racist politics. She fought against American segregation during a 1951 performance tour of the U.S., causing her to be targeted by the FBI, labeled a communist and banned from her homeland for a decade. The ban was lifted by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and she returned to be the only woman to speak at the March on Washington, before Martin Luther King’s famed “I Have a Dream” speech.
Back in France, she adopted 12 children from all over the world, creating a “rainbow tribe” to embody her ideal of “universal fraternity.” She purchased a castle and land in the southwestern French town of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, where she tried to build a city embodying her values.
“My mother saw the success of the rainbow tribe, because when we caused trouble as kids, she would never know who had done it because we never ratted on each other, risking collective punishment,” one of Baker’s sons, Brian Bouillon Baker, told the AP. “I heard her say to some friends ‘I’m mad to never know who causes trouble, but I’m happy and proud that my kids stand united.’”
Toward the end of her life, she ran into financial trouble, was evicted and lost her properties. She received support from Princess Grace of Monaco, who offered Baker a place for her and her children to live.
She rebuilt her career but in 1975, four days after the triumphant opening of a comeback tour, she fell into a coma and passed away from a brain hemorrhage. She was buried in Monaco.
While Baker is widely appreciated in France, some critics of Macron question why he chose an American-born figure as the first Black woman in the Pantheon, instead of someone who rose up against racism and colonialism in France itself.
The Pantheon, built at the end of the 18th century, honors 72 men and five women, including Baker. She joins two other Black figures in the mausoleum: Gaullist resister Felix Eboué and famed writer Alexandre Dumas.
I guess this was happening for years under the US Government’s and the Afghan government’s noses. Wow:
Undercover Taliban agents—often clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and sporting sunglasses—spent years infiltrating Afghan government ministries, universities, businesses and aid organizations.
Then, as U.S. forces were completing their withdrawal in August, these operatives stepped out of the shadows in Kabul and other big cities across Afghanistan, surprising their neighbors and colleagues. Pulling their weapons from hiding, they helped the Taliban rapidly seize control from the inside.
The pivotal role played by these clandestine cells is becoming apparent only now, three months after the U.S. pullout. At the time, Afghan cities fell one after another like dominoes with little resistance from the American-backed government’s troops. Kabul collapsed in a matter of hours, with hardly a shot fired.
“We had agents in every organization and department,” boasted Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad, a senior Taliban leader who directed suicide-bombing operations and assassinations inside the Afghan capital before its fall. “The units we had already present in Kabul took control of the strategic locations.”
Mr. Saad’s men belong to the so-called Badri force of the Haqqani network, a part of the Taliban that is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. because of its links to al Qaeda. Sitting before a bank of closed-circuit TV monitors in the Kabul airport security command center, which he now oversees, he said, “We had people even in the office that I am occupying today.”
The 20-year war in Afghanistan was often seen as a fight between bands of Taliban insurgents—bearded men operating from mountain hide-outs—and Afghan and U.S. forces struggling to control rural terrain. The endgame, however, was won by a large underground network of urban operatives.
On Aug. 15, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul, it was these men who seized the capital city while the Taliban’s more conventional forces remained outside.
Mohammad Rahim Omari, a midlevel commander in the Badri force, was working undercover at his family’s gasoline-trading business in Kabul before he was called into action that day. He said he and 12 others were dispatched to an Afghan intelligence service compound in the east of the city, where they disarmed the officers on duty and stopped them from destroying computers and files.
Other cells fanned out to seize other government and military installations and reached Kabul airport, where the U.S. was mounting a massive evacuation effort. They took control of the airport’s perimeter until better-armed Taliban troops arrived from the countryside in the morning. One agent, Mullah Rahim, was even dispatched to secure the Afghan Institute of Archaeology and its treasures from potential looters.
Mr. Omari said the Badri force had compartmentalized cells working on different tasks—armed fighters, fundraisers and those involved with propaganda and recruitment.
“Now these three types of mujahedeen have reunited,” he said. Mr. Omari himself is now deputy police chief in Kabul’s 12th District.
Their success has helped boost the influence of the Haqqanis within the overall Taliban movement. Badri was founded by Badruddin Haqqani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2012. It now is under the ultimate command of his brother, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is in charge of Afghanistan’s internal security as its new interior minister.
Named after the Battle of Badr that was won by Prophet Muhammad in 624, the Badri force includes several subgroups. The best known is its special-operations unit, Badri 313, whose fighters in high-end helmets and body armor were deployed next to U.S. Marines at the Kabul airport in the two weeks between the fall of Kabul and the completion of the American airlift.
Kamran, who didn’t want his surname to be used, was tasked with taking over his alma mater, Kabul University, and the Ministry of Higher Education.
A 30-year-old from Wardak province west of Kabul, he said he became a Taliban recruiter when he was pursuing a master’s degree in Arabic at the university in 2017. He estimates that, over the years, he persuaded some 500 people, mostly students, to join the insurgency. To maintain his cover, he shaved his chin, wore sunglasses and dressed in suits or jeans.
“Many of our friends who had beards were targeted,” he recalled. “I was above suspicion. While many of our low-ranking friends were arrested, I wasn’t. Even though I was their leader.”
Many of his acquaintances—former classmates, teachers and guards—first realized he was a member of the Taliban when he showed up with a gun on Aug. 15, he said. “Many employees of the ministry and the entire staff of the university knew me. They were surprised to see me,” said Kamran, whose new job is head of security for Kabul’s several universities.
Kamran has since adopted the Taliban’s trademark look: a black turban, a white shalwar kameez and a long beard. As for his suits and jeans, they are gathering dust in his closet. “Those aren’t our traditional outfits,” he said. “I don’t think I will have to wear them again.”
Good lord. What an amazing intelligence failure by the US Government. Incredible.
