Month: October 2022

Democrats, run on what you’ve delivered

Yes, inflation, saving democracy, and women’s reproductive health are on the ballot this fall. The Dobbs decision in June weighs on many people’s minds. How much it will affect voting patterns remains unknown. Republicans are tripling down on hyping crime with the most vile, openly racist attack ads we’ve ever seen.

Still, someone on one of my listservs complained that Democrats are not talking about all the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act, student loan forgiveness, etc., for which they deserve credit. New polling shows that “voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.” So examine why Democrats are more show and less talk.

If you are one of 40 million Americans who qualify for President Biden’s student loan forgiveness, you can apply online as of last Friday. Tell your friends (Buzzfeed News):

The program covers more than 40 million Americans, who are eligible if, in 2021 or 2020, they earned under $125,000 as an individual or $250,000 for families. Applicants can receive up to $20,000 if they were a Pell Grant recipient or up to $10,000 if they were not.

The application — which is due over a year from now, on Dec. 31, 2023 — is extremely short and straightforward, requiring little more than the applicant’s contact info and Social Security number.

Eighty-seven percent of program benefits go to people earning less than $75,000 per year.

All those “Shingles doesn’t care” ads? Here’s something to care about. Even with Medicare, the shots cost nearly $200. Each. (It’s a series of two. The spouse hasn’t received them yet.) But they won’t cost Medicare recipients beginning in January. Why? The Inflation Reduction Act:

People with Medicare drug coverage will pay nothing out-of-pocket for adult vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), including the shingles and Tetanus-Diphtheria-Whooping Cough vaccines, starting in 2023.

I had to hear about that word-of-mouth.

The IRA will cap monthly out-of-pocket costs for insulin to $35 per month starting January 1 (with no deductible). Medicare Part B premiums will decline for the first time ever.

Social Security recipients (about 70 million Americans) will get the largest cost-of-living increase in decades beginning in either December or January: an 8.7-percent increase in their monthly payments.

Out friend Mike Lux at American Family Voices cautions that Democrats need to address inflation on the stump and in ads. It only beats them if they don’t talk about it. Polling suggests voters in small- and medium-sized towns are not blaming inflation on Joe Biden. But it’s still their top issue this fall.

If voters never hear ads from candidates mentioning inflation; if the mail they receive never mentions it; if they only hear it touched on in stump speeches; if the answers to the inflation question in debates are mushy; voters are going to decide those Democratic candidates are not prioritizing the issue they are most focused on in their day-to-day lives.

Lux offers five key inflation-related points Democratic candidates should hammer home:

1. Wealthy corporations with monopoly power are jacking up their prices, and their profits are going through the roof. Big oil, food, shipping, health care, and real estate companies have been making record profits over the last two years. I will crack down on price gouging, but to be clear – my opponent has proposed nothing to combat this abuse.

2. Drug prices and health insurance premiums are going to go down because of the Inflation Reduction Act, and I will fight to do even more to build on that and put more money in your pocket. I want to do even more to lower costs, but the Republicans want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, while having no plan of their own.

3. Seniors will be getting the biggest increase in their Social Security payments in 40 years; their Medicare premiums are going down for the first time in over a decade; and their drug costs will go down because Democrats passed a law forcing the big drug companies to negotiate with Medicare. Republicans are talking about ending Social Security and repealing the bill that lowers drug costs.

4. Manufacturing jobs are coming back to the United States; new plants are opening; new jobs in solar and wind energy manufacturing and semiconductor chips have been created; and our infrastructure is being rebuilt. All of this will end our supply chain problems and create millions more good jobs. My opponent opposes most or all of these measures.

5. I will fight for the Child Tax Credit, which will give parents up to $600 a month to help with groceries, gas, and housing. And I’m going to pay for it by taxing wealthy corporations and millionaires who are paying little or nothing in taxes right now. My opponent is against the Child Tax Credit.

Women’s reproductive freedom is a major issue. But it competes with Russia-Ukraine, gun policy and immigration for voters’ attention. Economic concerns remain the top issue for 2022. Democrats have to talk about the economy while reminding voters, despite recent polling, that Republicans have no plans for fixing anything. Democrats have delivered.

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I wish I was surprised that people still think this way but I’m not

Trump-endorsed Michigan GOP Gov. nominee Tudor Dixon went after her rival Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for her support of single, working women:

“‘Families look all different ways.’ They’re the ones telling me that on a regular basis but apparently they’re refusing to see one dynamic here. A lot of people wanna have families. This state, we don’t have support from the governor for families, unless they look exactly the way she wants. And you know what that looks like these days? Looks like single moms — not single moms, single women — working. That’s like her dream for women. Single women working. Last time I checked that was a pretty lonely life.”

Uhm, no. Most single, working women are not lonely and many of them have chosen to remain single and childless. A whole lot of them are divorced and decided that they didn’t need to be married to be happy and many single working moms are creating fulfilling lives for themselves and have no need to stay in bad relationships. Virtually all women, married or single, work and even those who don’t work outside the home would argue that they too have jobs. This is bullshit.

If women don’t get out and vote against people like this they are sowing the seeds of the demise of their freedom and agency. Throwbacks like Dixon may not be able to turn back the tide to 1952 (actually 1852) but they will make policies that make women’s lives as miserable as possible. Between the forced childbirth, the insistence on raising the birthrate along with the growing objections to birth control and the ongoing vilification of women’s freedom to define their own lives how they see fit, we’re seeing a full scale attempt a rolling back the advances women have made in the 60 years or so.

They’re just going for it

We just went through this in LA with the baseball playoffs. it’s enough to turn your stomach. Philadelphia’s Will Bunch takes a look at who’s doing this:

If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.

Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.

You won’t be shocked to learn that the ads are deliberately dishonest, conflating Democratic immigration policies, for example, with the horrific case of one undocumented immigrant named Christopher Puente accused of raping a toddler at a fast-food restaurant in Chicago (”She was 3 … years … old,” the narrator intones, milking the pathos). What’s not said is that the alleged assault occurred in February 2020, more than three years into the presidency of Republican Donald Trump, well before Biden took office.

That’s appalling, but that’s not what’s most upsetting about these ads, which, according to social media, have been broadcast nationally during the baseball telecasts on Fox Sports 1. There is absolutely no filter of jarring and often violent imagery, the racist overtones and the xenophobic innuendo, and the unrelenting darkness of the “American carnage” vibe. No one cares that this is afternoon baseball and little girls and boys are watching. This is America now.

In fact, the comparison to that infamous “Willie” (really William) Horton ad isn’t even fair. That spot — which attempted to stir up racial panic by (misleadingly, of course) linking Democrat Michael Dukakis to a Black inmate who committed a rape and murder after a weekend pass — only aired on TV one time, because just 34 years ago even most Republicans found it too crude, and over the edge. Listen to that 1980s spot and the tone that offended many folks back then seems calm and measured compared to the Natural-Born-Killers-on-acid vibe of the 2022 attack ads. Today, any and all guardrails have been taken down.

One other thing that won’t surprise you about the new attack ads is that the people behind them aren’t eager for you to know exactly who they are.

The required tagline lists the sponsor as a new group calling itself Citizens for Sanity. On one level, thanks to some excellent research by the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets, we know a lot about who these Citizens for Sanity are: the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump, offering America not just a new low for the 2022 midterms but a sneak preview of the nightmare that the 45th president’s 2024 comeback crusade is likely to be.

Open Secrets reports a close overlap between the trustees of Citizens for Sanity — as identified to the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC — and the pro-Trump America First Legal Foundation, which is spearheaded by Stephen Miller, the former Trump White House official behind harsh immigration policies such as family separation at the southern border.

Of course this is a Stephen Miller special…

It says three political operatives involved with the Miller-founded legal group — Gene Hamilton, John Zadrozny and Ian Prior — are also listed as involved with Citizens for Sanity. Zadrozny’s path, for example, has taken him from the fiercely anti-migrant Federation for American Immigration Reform — which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group — to the Trump administration, including a stint as a top U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service official, to the vile ads you’re seeing on TV now. Citizens for Sanity treasurer Hamilton was point man on Trump’s efforts to kill the program seeking legal status for young migrant “Dreamers.”

[…]

Before this weekend’s ad blitz, Citizens for Sanity was engaged in coast-to-coast political trolling in the crude, “owning the libs” style that Trumpism has brought into the mainstream. Many are sarcastic broadsides that Democrats are “pro-criminal.”

It placed an ad in Philadelphia’s oldest African American newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune, sarcastically applauding Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman for “the courage to wear a hoodie in even the most formal settings. The courage to grow a ratty goatee and wear it proudly. The courage to demand cold-blooded killers — murderers — be freed from prison.” Giant billboards in a similar, hyper-ironic style attacking prominent Democrats have gone up from California to Massachusetts.

The common theme is demonizing “out groups,” or The Other — alternating between transgender youth, refugees crossing America’ southern border, or images that play to stereotypes about Black criminality. Students of history have seen this ugliness before, and things usually get worse. Tomorrow’s textbooks about this momentous midterm election of 2022 are being written today, and we will look back on this moment when secret billionaires worked to make white supremacy and political hate as all-American as baseball and cherry pie.

This is getting nuts. I think we all hope that it’s turning off more people than it’s turning on. But I honestly don’t know.Something has snapped in American culture and this kind of hate has become mainstream again. It’s more like the 50s than the 80s.

Warning: spine chilling interview below

DANA BASH: DHS says less than 1 percent of migrants encountered at the border have a criminal record

KARI LAKE: I have to disagree with you on that figure … we have murders coming in, we have people with rape records

BASH: The stat that I just cited comes from DHS

Kari Lake flails when Dana Bash pushes her to cite actual evidence of fraud in the 2020 election: "There's plenty of evidence, you can find it — I'm happy to send it to your team."

Kari Lake's CNN interview is not going well

Kari Lake refuses to commit to accepting the result of the Arizona gubernatorial election

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on October 16, 2022.

I’m not sure why she’s opted for the vaseline-on-the-lens strategy but it’s quite striking. She’s clearly a media professional and that really helps when you are selling lies as she is. Bash does a pretty good job of nailing her down but her robotic confidence will likely get her over. She’s an extremist with a lot of poise and a glibness that makes her dangerous. If she makes it to the governorship there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll be Trump’s pick for VP.

The Institute for the Study of War reports:

Russia continues to conduct massive, forced deportations of Ukrainians that likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign in addition to apparent violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin stated on October 14 that “several thousand” children from Kherson Oblast are “already in other regions of Russia, resting in rest homes and children’s camps.” As ISW has previously reported, Russian authorities openly admitted to placing children from occupied areas of Ukraine up for adoption with Russian families in a manner that may constitute a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Russian authorities may additionally be engaged in a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing by depopulating Ukrainian territory through deportations and repopulating Ukrainian cities with imported Russian citizens.

Ethnic cleansing has not in itself been specified as a crime under international law but has been defined by the United Nations Commission of Experts on violations of humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area” and “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” According to the UN definition, ethnic cleansing may be carried out by forcible removal, among other methods. These definitions of ethnic cleansing campaigns are consistent with reports of the forcible deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children, as well as reports by Ukrainian sources that reconstruction projects in Mariupol are intended to house “tens of thousands of Russians” who will move to Mariupol.

It’s clear that Russia is committing atrocities and ethnic cleansing. It’s happening right before our eyes. I think Europe and America are reacting as best they can — it’s a complicated situation with a terrible threat overhanging it. But anyone who excuses this as somehow justified really needs to take a gut check. This is a nightmare.

Yes, they killed their own audience

The abstract:

COVID-19 vaccines have reduced infections and hospitalizations across the globe, yet resistance to vaccination remains strong. This paper investigates the role of cable television news in vaccine hesitancy and associated local vaccination rates in the United States. We find that, in the earlier stages of the vaccine roll-out (starting May 2021), higher local viewership of Fox News Channel has been associated with lower local vaccination rates. We can verify that this association is causal using exogenous geographical variation in the channel lineup. The effect is driven by younger individuals (under 65 years of age), for whom COVID-19 has a low mortality risk.

Consistent with changes in beliefs about the effectiveness of the vaccine as a mechanism, we find that Fox News increased reported vaccine hesitancy in local survey responses. We can rule out that the effect is due to differences in partisanship, to local health policies, or to local COVID-19 infections or death rates. The other two major television networks, CNN and MSNBC, have no effect. That, in turn, indicates that more differentiated characteristics, like the networks’ messaging or tendency for controversy, matter and that the effect of Fox News on COVID-19 vaccine uptake is not due to the general consumption of cable news. We also show that there is no historical effect of Fox News on flu vaccination rates, suggesting that the effect is COVID-19-specific and not driven by general skepticism toward vaccines.

This is apparently a well designed study that proves Fox is literally a toxic influence. But you knew that.

Fauci on fire

This is a sort of exit interview since he’s leaving at the end of the year. But I doubt it’s the last we’ll see of him. If voters make the horrible mistake of voting in a GOP House majority we are going to be seeing a lot more of him. They want to haul him up before the congress for endless hearings and are threatening to take away his pension. The Trump cult hates him with a burning passion and they need to throw him on pyre to appease them.

After 54 years at tlhe National Institutes of Health and 38 years as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci will be stepping down from public e mistake of putting  at the end of the year.

“I have been driving onto that campus every single day, every single weekend for the last 54 years,” Fauci told ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent and “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl in an interview that aired Sunday. “So I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to be like when I drive off the campus for the last time … That idea just gives me chills just thinking about that.”

In an intimate interview at his home, Fauci sat down with ABC News to talk about his tenure in public service, the COVID-19 pandemic during which he became perhaps the country’s most famous doctor and the controversies that have consumed the last two and a half years — and sometimes ensnared him.

Fauci has lived in the same home since 1977. Pictures hang next to the banister stairwell, dozens of framed photos sit atop a bookshelf and the floor is scuffed from years of use, the carpet worn down too. The mismatched red and brown chairs in the living room are cozy; on one sits an overstuffed pillow that has Fauci’s face on one side and, on the other, a quote reading “‘It is what it is.’ – Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.”

“You became an icon,” Karl told him. “It was kind of wild to see. There were Fauci bobbleheads. People had Fauci shirts that said ‘In Fauci We Trust.’ You became somebody the whole country was turning to. What was that like?”

“I was pretty well known among my peers in science, but certainly not to the extent it is now,” Fauci answered. “You know, I actually think both extremes, Jon, are aberrations of a reflection of the divisiveness in our country.”

As much as Fauci — who served under presidents of both parties as a nonpartisan health official — was respected by many amid the pandemic, he was lambasted and even despised by others. Conservatives on Capitol Hill have criticized his recommendations on COIVD, called for investigations into him, he’s received death threats and at a rally just days before the 2020 election, supporters of former President Donald Trump chanted “Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!”MORE: Republicans vow to investigate Fauci after he steps down in December

“When did it all get so political?” Karl asked.

“It got political very, very quickly,” Fauci responded. “Because we had the misfortune of an outbreak, and a double misfortune of an outbreak in a divided society, and the triple misfortune of a divided society in an election year. I mean, you couldn’t get more — getting the cards stacked against you, than right there. It was a triple whammy.”

Fauci said he has remained dedicated to his work, despite the threats of violence against him and his family.

“I look upon the country, in many respects, as my patient,” he went on to say. “And when you — if you’re a really good physician, you are concerned and worry about every element of your patient.”

“Including how your patient is going to react to something you said?” Karl asked.

“Exactly,” Fauci responded. “Exactly. And even if the patient is somebody who’s not the most attractive person in the world in the sense of personality, you still got to treat them the way you would treat anybody else. We learned that in medical school.”

While Fauci said he hasn’t communicated with Trump since Trump left office, he did praise the former administration on Operation Warp Speed, the program that developed the COVID-19 vaccines in record time.

“Just as he takes the blame for things in the administration, he should take the credit for things in the administration,” Fauci said. “That was a positive thing, Operation Warp Speed. And they should take credit for that.”

COVID-19 has killed more than a million Americans, a death toll higher than any war in which the U.S. has fought. And Fauci was one of the faces of the government’s response. For a time, he appeared nearly constantly at White House briefings and in the media to share the government’s latest, sometimes shifting, pandemic guidance.

“There were a lot of dark days, obviously a lot of deaths,” Karl said. “Was there a day that sticks out to you or a time period that sticks out to you as the darkest?”

“It wasn’t a day,” Fauci answered. “It was a period. I’ve trained a lot of Italian scientists in my lab in the arena of infectious diseases, many of whom went back to Italy and were in the epicenter of the northern Italy disaster there.”

“And when I got on the phone and heard them describe what was going on in the ward, where they were having people packed up in the hallways — who they had to decide who to give a ventilator to, or who to take care of,” Fauci later added. “I knew these people. So I knew what effect it would have on them. And then I said, ‘Whoa, we got a real problem here. We have a real, real problem.'”

For months, cities were locked down. Schools in many areas were closed even longer.

“Obviously, these are local decisions. But was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities, to see schools closed as long as they were?” Karl asked.

“I think in some — I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’ Jon, because if I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci said. “And I don’t want to do that because that’s just happened too many times over the last years with me.”

“Did we pay too high a price?” Karl pressed.

“Yeah, I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that,” Fauci answered.

“That’s the reason why I continually would say on any media appearances I’ve had: We’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open,” Fauci said. “The most important thing is to protect the children.”

As the evidence on how the virus changed, the medical advice changed, too. At the very beginning of the pandemic, Fauci told the public that there was no need to wear masks. But that guideline was soon reversed.

“If you are true to the data and the evidence, if something is evolving, means it isn’t the same as it was before and therefore the data are going to allow you to upgrade and update — whether it’s a recommendation, whether it’s a guideline, whether it’s the communication to the public,” Fauci explained.

“Would you take back what you said about masks?” Karl later asked.

“Yeah,” Fauci answered. “I mean, sure, if I had to do it over again. Of course. Again, if I tell you why we did it, it would be interpreted as making an excuse, and I don’t want to go there because that creates nothing but backlash. If I had to do it over again, I would have analyzed it a little bit better.”

Fauci has been the national leading expert on infectious diseases longer than many Americans have been alive. And for 38 years, he hasn’t even changed desks, telling Karl with a laugh that he “didn’t want to ruin taxpayers’ money.”

But as he reaches the final months of his tenure as a public servant, he reflected on how he wants to be remembered.

“I want to be remembered as someone who gave everything they had for the public health of the American public and indirectly for the rest of the world, because we’re such a leader in science and public health,” Fauci said. “I mean, I just want people to know that I gave it everything I had and didn’t leave anything on the field. I was all there.”

My favorite thing is that the virulant anti-makers are the first one to condemn Fauci for not recommending masks at the very beginning of the pandemic. But then they aren’t the brightest people on the planet are they?

Could it be …. fascism?

Looks like they’re all going to let their F-flag fly:

Before it’s too late for what? Yellow stars? Camps?

And here’s our hip-hop genius going on about the Jews too:

I think perhaps that when fascism goes mainstream antisemitism just automatically goes on the menu.

We could dismiss Marjorie Eva Braun and Yeezy as outliers. But now the once and future president is getting in on it which is always an indicator that the right wing is going on about it. He’s always got his finger on its pulse.

We’ve gone through the looking glass

The former president and some of his key co-conspirators have yet to be held to account for their alleged conspiracy to interfere with a federal proceeding and seditious conspiracy in the events of January 6, 2021. The violence and mayhem of that day was no accident, evidence shows. There were hundreds of injuries and millions in property damage. Multiple perpetrators have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. Hundreds of other arrestees have yet to be adjudicated. The dead are the dead. Trumpism kills.

It is clear that Donald J. Trump is an avatar of MAGA-nation’s status anxiety. He says what they feel. He hates the people they hate and gave them permission to do so publicly. Including releasing the racists, the xenophobes, and fascists among them from under rocks where public pressures had driven them in the latter half of the 20th century.

What remains a mystery is why any of them would fight and even die for a man who cares not a rat’s ass for any of them. Nothing, except for the political and economic support they represent and for the fawning adulation they supply him like heroin to his damaged and bottomlessly needy soul.

Whatever legal reckoning Trump faces will never address his culpability for the vast, uncounted number of MAGA followers who died following his mislead in dismissing the dangers of COVID 19. People who refused to wear masks because Freedom! People who refused vaccines for the same reason. People who bought into conspiracy theories about tracking microchips. People who sought quack cures Trump tossed out like chum. Even now, the survivors have committed themselves to claims that the vaccines for which Trump repeatedly claimed credit were themselves a hoax.

Thousands upon thousands died needlessly. Their families will never be whole.

I write this because I caught a piece of a story Saturday on This American Life of a father and brother who died of Covid. They were (I’m assuming from the snippet I heard; I will listen to the whole thing when it’s posted) among the MAGA victims of Covid whose ideological rigidity made them reject treatment and deny the severity of their illness. Their stories stand in for millions of others whose stories will never be heard, their numbers never be counted. There will be no justice for their surviving loved ones.

Even after millions died of Covid in 2020, many of them from Trump’s disinformation and incompetence, their bereaved families swarmed to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to fight and die for the unfeeling narcissist whose misrule contributed to killing their loved ones.

Looking Glass world made more sense.

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Surviving a global inflection point

New revelations about former President Donald Trump’s treachery came thick and fast during the January 6th Committee’s final(?) hearing on Thursday. So fast, in fact, that evidence presented by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.)  that Trump meant to sabotage the incoming Biden administration’s foreign policy went by too quickly to process properly.

Yes, a presidential directive the Pentagon ultimately ignored further demonstrated that Trump knew he had lost the election and was destined to exit the White House. Trump nonetheless “made the deliberate choice” to ignore all around him and the rule of law to pursue a criminal conspiracy that would keep him in power. But Kinzinger set an order issued to the Pentagon among several examples proving Trump knew he’d lost. The potential impact got lost in his recitation.

“Knowing he was leaving office,” Kinzinger began, Trump “acted immediately and signed this order on November 11th, which would have required the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Afghanistan, all to be complete before the Biden inauguration on January 20th.”

Besides being neither militarily feasible nor wise, Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley considered the rogue order “nonstandard” and “potentially dangerous.”

Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter considers the deeper implications of what Trump meant to accomplish with a temper tantrum during his final act. The country dodged catastrophe, she explains. Somalia and Afghanistan were just the start:

Indeed, according to an Axios investigation by Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu last May, two days before that order, on November 9, 2020, John McEntee, Trump’s hand-picked director of the Presidential Personnel Office, told retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor that Trump wanted him to “Get us out of Afghanistan. Get us out of Iraq and Syria. Complete the withdrawal from Germany. Get us out of Africa.” When Macgregor, who was brought on to the administration on November 11, said he didn’t think that was possible, McEntee told him to “do as much as you can.” 

Was Trump in a fit of pique simply focused on scorching the earth as he left power? Or was he perhaps executing in his final months latent directives he felt would improve his prospects for a soft landing post-presidency? The world still does not know what he and Vladimir Putin discussed privately in Helsinki.

A global struggle between democracy and rising autocracy

The Biden administration released its annual National Security Strategy (NSS) on Wednesday. It lays out the geopolitical stakes Biden has already voiced in speeches about defending democracy here and abroad:

Just as Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria left a vacuum for Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian president Vladimir Putin, and as Trump’s planned but not executed withdrawal of troops from Germany would have hamstrung the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) so it could not have countered Putin’s Russia, so would the abrupt disengagement of the U.S. around the world have created a giant vacuum for authoritarian countries to fill.

Biden’s National Security Strategy reiterates his belief that we are in a global struggle between democracy and rising autocracy and that the world is at an inflection point that will determine “the security and prosperity of the American people for generations to come.”

The document makes a strong call for American leadership to defend democracy and to reinforce the rules-based international system on which the world has depended since World War II. This system is now under attack as Russia has claimed the right to invade a neighboring country and redraw its boundaries by force, and as authoritarian governments seek to control global trade and power by withholding key resources—like energy—from other nations.  

The NSS promises that the U.S. will work to strengthen democracy around the world “because democratic governance consistently outperforms authoritarianism in protecting human dignity, leads to more prosperous and resilient societies, creates stronger and more reliable economic and security partners for the United States, and encourages a peaceful world order.” It also calls for the domestic development of key resources, especially energy, to reduce the ability of other nations to pressure us. 

The document notes strategic rivalries and challenges both regional and global, including climate and pandemic diseases.

“The post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next,” the NSS says. “No nation is better positioned to succeed in this competition than the United States, as long as we work in common cause with those who share our vision of a world that is free, open, secure, and prosperous. This means that the foundational principles of self-determination, territorial integrity, and political independence must be respected, international institutions must be strengthened, countries must be free to determine their own foreign policy choices, information must be allowed to flow freely, universal human rights must be upheld, and the global economy must operate on a level playing field and provide opportunity for all.”

What is at stake in 2022 is whether Americans will embrace such a strategy for strengthening global stability or lean into Trumpist isolationism and domestic extremism aimed at destabilizing the U.S. and the world. That would certainly benefit plutocratic and political actors who prefer authoritarianism to democracy. Republican candidates this fall are a menagerie of conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and rejectors of democratic principles. Indeed, principles of any kind are in short supply among them.

What havoc Trump meant to accomplish on his way out the door, the barbarians mean to wreak once they get their feet inside it.

Prevention may not be the cure but may hold back the spread of the sickness.

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