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Month: January 2023
During Trump’s final days it was reported that he and Bill Barr were speeding up federal executions to kill as many people as possible before he left office. (I wrote about it here.)He and Bill Barr had gleefully reinstated the federal death penalty and were afraid they’d leave some possible victims alive if they didn’t move quickly.
By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch
Two years before that stretch, Trump had signed perhaps the lone broadly popular major initiative of his presidency: a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill. By 2020, however, his political calculus had changed. As he geared up for another election, Trump White House sources say, the president was telling advisers that carrying out capital punishment would insulate him from criticism that he was soft on crime. And in his attorney general, Bill Barr, a longtime death-penalty advocate, he had the perfect accomplice.
The executions, carried out in the name of law and order, took place at a time of peak lawlessness within the White House. While his administration killed prisoners at an unprecedented clip, Trump spent his final months attempting to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 ransacking of the U.S. Capitol. And though Trump did show some mercy on his way out the door, it was largely reserved for political cronies such as Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
The killing spree ended with Trump’s first term, as President Biden suspended capital punishment on the federal level, but it may only have been a pause. The former president is running again — and opened his 2024 campaign with a speech that promised more executions if he wins: “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “Because it is the only way.”
Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty dates back decades. His first real foray into politics was a public call for executions after five teenagers of color were arrested in the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in New York City in 1989. “bring back the death penalty. bring back our police,” screamed a full-page ad Trump had placed in the New York Daily News at the time. The Central Park Five, as the young men came to be known, were later exonerated by DNA evidence, after they had served years in prison. But Trump never apologized for the ad.
By the time he was preparing for his first presidential run, Trump was pitching capital punishment to the American people again. In a May 2015 appearance on Fox & Friends, responding to the killing of two police officers in Mississippi, Trump said the death penalty should be “brought back strong.” Once in office, he suggested it as a potential remedy to the nation’s opioid crisis, a tool that could be used against dealers as a deterrent. (“If you shoot one person, they give you the death penalty,” he said. “These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people, and nothing happens to them.”)
His public statements on the topic were a nudge to the Justice Department, and Trump’s chief law-enforcement officers took note. In 2018, his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, began the process of lifting the two-decade, unofficial moratorium on federal executions by issuing a memo that urged federal prosecutors to use existing death-penalty statutes against drug traffickers. But it was Sessions’ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter — “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” — to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, “permanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,” and “serves the important societal goal of just retribution.” (Without a hint of irony, he added, “It reaffirms society’s moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.”)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually. The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a “heads-up” that “we would be resuming the death penalty.” Trump — apparently unaware of his own AG’s longstanding philosophy on capital punishment — asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trump’s lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimer’s disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
Trump loves the death penalty. He said so many times. He just wishes it could happen faster. Summary execution is his preferred method. Trials are a silly waste of time.
Merrick Garland ended the barbaric practice upon taking office, thankfully.
Susan Glasser at the New Yorker also takes a look at the GOP field and her observation about Pompeo is especially tart:
Most, like the former Vice-President, take the route of simply avoiding unpleasant facts from the Trump years that do not fit with the story they want to tell. Which pretty much sums up the state of Republican discourse headed into the 2024 election cycle. At least Pence admits that January 6th happened, and that it was wrong.
In the latest example of the genre, Pompeo’s new memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” published this week, manages more or less to skip the catastrophic ending to the Trump Presidency, aside from offhand references to January 6th as “the mayhem at the Capitol” that “the Left wants to exploit for political advantage.” This is known, in my household, as “pulling a Kayleigh”—a feat of political contortion Peter and I have named in honor of Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump press secretary who managed to publish an entire 2021 memoir, “For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond,” that never so much as mentions the insurrection at the Capitol. (In testimony to the House select committee investigating January 6th, the former White House official Sarah Matthews, McEnany’s deputy, said that McEnany was among several White House officials who urged Trump to call his supporters off their violent rampage but that Trump resisted the idea of including any mention of the word “peace.”)
Even more than McEnany, Pompeo was an internal skeptic of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 results and deeply concerned about the former President’s volatile post-election behavior. According to reporting for our book, Pompeo rushed to the home of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, when Trump fired Pompeo’s former West Point classmate, Mark Esper, as his Secretary of Defense after the election and warned that “the crazies” were in charge in the White House and the Pentagon. They also initiated regular 8 a.m. “land the plane” phone calls with Milley and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, hoping to get the country to a peaceful transition to the Biden Presidency. And he privately made it clear that he was opposed to Trump’s “rigged election” campaign. “He was totally against it,” a senior State Department official told us.
Pompeo’s memoir mentions none of this, which perhaps should not be a surprise from an official who a Trump adviser once told me was among the most slavish suckups in a White House full of suckups or, as a former Ambassador put it, “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” Others emerged from the Trump Administration claiming to have always been worried about his erratic behavior and to have tried to protect the country from it; Pompeo stands out as one who had some of the right instincts behind the scenes but now finds it untenable to publicly admit.
Most of the attention to the Pompeo book so far has, understandably, been focussed on his reprehensible criticism of the late Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist murdered on the apparent orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. “He didn’t deserve to die,” Pompeo writes, “but we need to be clear about who he was,” lecturing the media that Khashoggi was not really a journalist but more of an activist. It’s hard to imagine any professional editor—or any advance reader who actually liked Pompeo—agreeing to print such a sentence.
Throughout the book, Pompeo presents himself as a tough-minded realist who relished being the instrument of Trump’s fights, whether with the liberal media or the “evil” leftists at the State Department. Whatever you think of Pompeo’s politics, one inescapable conclusion from his score-settling book is that he was quite possibly the least diplomatic person ever appointed to be America’s chief diplomat.
Reading the book was also a reminder to me of yet another reason that Trump may again benefit from this group of former officials who have not had the chutzpah to challenge him: their blinding hatred of one another. Pompeo, while taking much care to avoid offending the former President by admitting publicly all the ways he disagreed with him privately, drips with disdain for many of his former colleagues. Haley was a quitter, he writes, and she and Bolton were “NOT TEAM PLAYERS.” Pompeo also quotes Trump as calling Bolton a “scumbag loser” and accuses him of “treason” for publishing his own score-settling 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”
Trump loved this sort of gladiatorial battling among his advisers. It was how he ran his business for decades, how he ran his White House, and what he would do again if given another four years in power. Trump and his imitators, like Pompeo, hurl insults because they think that it makes them look strong. But the truth is that it makes them look very, very small. The image that I am left with from Pompeo’s vicious, misleading memoir is of a wannabe tough guy, one who envisions himself a possible President of the United States while admitting to the nickname that Donald Trump gave him: “My Mike.” These self-styled strongmen are so remarkably weak.
The competition for asshole of the century is going to be something else …
I’ve been writing and saying on various radio shows and podcasts over the past few months that even in his weakened state, at this point in the cycle (granted way too early to make any serious predictions) Trump is still the most likely nominee for the GOP nomination. There are reasons for this that have little to do with his popularity (which is still pretty strong in the base.) It’s a structural problem for the GOP which they refuse to deal with. This piece in the Daily Beast spells it out well:
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who want desperately for the country to move on from Donald Trump and his toxic brand of politics, I’ve got some bad news—he’s the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president.
I don’t make the rules here (and I’m not happy about it either), but the numbers don’t lie. In the latest poll from the polling firm Morning Consult, Trump is winning 49 percent of the GOP field, which gives him a 19 percentage point lead over his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. These results are mirrored in nearly every recent poll of GOP voters as Trump continues to garner the support of 40 to 50 percent of Republicans.
Those numbers could certainly change before next year when GOP voters head to the polls. But what would Trump have to do to lose their support? He’s already incited an insurrection, continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election, and mishandled a pandemic that has, to date, killed more than one million Americans. Other than praising Barack Obama as the greatest president in U.S. history, calling for critical race theory curricula to be adopted nationwide, or endorsing drive-thru abortion clinics, it’s hard to see what would cause these true believers to abandon Trump.
Now, as Nathaniel Rakich points out in FiveThirtyEight, there is an unusual dynamic in the GOP polling that suggests Trump is vulnerable. When pollsters ask GOP voters about multiple presidential candidates, Trump is well ahead. But in a mock head-to-head matchup with DeSantis, it’s the Florida governor who emerges as the winner. That suggests supporters of single-digit Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Ted Cruz, or former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley don’t want to see Trump get the nod again. If none of these candidates throw their hats in the ring—and DeSantis had the “Anyone But Trump” vote to himself—he could prevail.
But likely the opposite will happen. Take Haley, for example. In April 2021 she said that she wouldn’t get in the presidential race if Trump ran. Now she is hiring staff, reaching out to donors, and preparing to hit the hustings in 2024. Part of the reason for Haley’s about-face, undoubtedly, is the popular notion that Trump is vulnerable to an intra-party challenge. Paradoxically, that means the weaker Trump looks, the more it encourages GOP aspirants to run in 2024…but more candidates actually increases the likelihood that Trump ends up as the nominee.
Indeed, one of the quirks of the Republican primary process is that it’s largely a winner-take-all system. Delegates are not distributed proportionally (as is the case with Democrats). So a Republican candidate who wins a state primary in a crowded field, with, say 30-40 percent of the vote, still wins all the delegates. This is, by the way, precisely how Trump emerged victorious out of a crowded GOP field in 2016.
“Paradoxically, that means the weaker Trump looks, the more it encourages GOP aspirants to run in 2024…but more candidates actually increases the likelihood that Trump ends up as the nominee.”
Yet, there’s another dynamic from seven years ago that also benefited Trump: Republican candidates ganged up on each other and left him largely untouched. Famously, in a crucial debate before the New Hampshire primary, then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ripped the bark off Florida Sen. Marco Rubio—believing that if he weakened Rubio, it would push him up the polls and make him the most likely alternative to Trump. How did that work out?
That same process could get a reprise in 2024.
Right now, DeSantis has emerged as the most likely non-Trump GOP alternative. But rather than attack Trump—which Republicans have largely avoided for fear that he would post something mean about them on Truth Social—the 2024 wannabes are far more likely to go after DeSantis. This is not a unique dynamic. In presidential nominating contests, with crowded multi-candidate fields. The also-rans frequently try to tear down the candidate who is in second and ignore the one in first.
But for Republicans, there’s another dynamic at play—attacking DeSantis is a sure-fire way to curry favor with Trump, which could pay long-term dividends. Case in point: earlier this month, the press secretary for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another 2024 GOP aspirant, laid into DeSantis for reconciling himself to Florida’s 15-week abortion ban and not pushing for a more restrictive law. “Does he believe that 14-week-old babies don’t have a right to live?” Noem’s chief spokesperson said in an interview with the conservative-leaning National Review.
According to The Daily Beast, Noem’s gambit was a message to Trump. She wants to be his running mate in 2024, and what better way to increase her odds than going after his chief rival, DeSantis?
Noem is making a shrewd, arguably inspired political calculation. Pretty much everything would need to fall her way to emerge as the 2024 GOP nominee. Her better path to the White House is running with Trump. Even if they lose (which is probably the most likely outcome in a head-to-head race with Joe Biden), Noem would be well-positioned to run in 2028. Not only would she have garnered invaluable name recognition, but she can likely count on Trump’s support. If somehow they win, she gets to be vice president!
Other Republicans, staring at single-digit poll results and anemic fundraising numbers, might make the same calculation as Noem.
It creates the other paradox of the 2024 campaign: the political incentive for nearly every Republican running is to attack DeSantis and not Trump. Considering that DeSantis’ national numbers are likely inflated (few Republicans outside Florida know all that much about him), it could make for a brutal campaign. And that’s not even mentioning that his refusal to bend a knee to Trump ensures that the former president will take every opportunity he can to lacerate him. As we saw in 2016, Trump will not fight fair—and will likely spend his time mocking DeSantis’ height, weight, and voice, all the while claiming that he’d never have become governor without Trump’s support (which is kind of true).
Again, if all this sounds like a repeat of the nightmare that was the 2016 campaign…it’s because it is.
Republicans, unwilling to attack Trump, sic themselves on his chief rival as they jockey for the non-Trump mantle. Doing so leaves him unscathed and fails to weaken his unshakable base of support in the party, which is less than a majority but, in a winner-take-all primary system, is good enough to run the table and win the party nod.
Of course, a lot can happen in the next year to alter this potential outcome. Trump could get indicted. Republican voters may finally decide that they’ve had enough of him. The party could unite around DeSantis in a desperate effort to stop Trump.
Anything is possible, and only a fool would predict how a Republican nomination fight will play out. But the emerging dynamic of the race is becoming increasingly clear: It’s Trump’s to lose.
This is sadly correct. He’s still the frontrunner but he’s just weak enough that the rest of the field isn’t likely to give up. And each one thinks that if it does come down to one lone survivor who can beat him, he or she will be the one.
A lot of people scoff at this scenario because “people know who he is now.” Well… it was pretty clear who he was in 2016 and 2020 too and it didn’t stop GOP voters from coming out in massive numbers to vote for him. I would argue that for a large number of them, maybe even a majority, they love him much more than they did then. They believe he was robbed — that they were robbed. Those people are going to be very hard to budge. More importantly, if Desantis or some other candidate does end up edging him out, he will insist they stole it from him too. You know he will.
Polling right now doesn’t mean much. But these structural issues do, and the huge egos of right wing wannabe presidents are epic. It very well could end up as a reprise of 2016.
The best thing Biden ever did was to refuse to give Trump the customary ex-president security clearance:
He said creating a new health care plan would be “so easy” too….
This is the new GOP establishment
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made good on his promise this week to exact revenge on Democrats for denying committee assignments to far-right extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Az. He booted two California congressmen, Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, from the Select Committee on Intelligence. AS Speaker, McCarthy has the power to make this move unilaterally. But he is also proposing to kick Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Relations Committee, which will require a vote of the full House.
The cycle of revenge has officially begun.
It should be noted that the removal of Greene and Gosar, both of whom have addressed white nationalist gatherings and publicly advocated for the deaths of Democratic officials, was decided by a bipartisan vote by the full House. But that was an earlier, more innocent time. A golden era when death threats against Democratic colleagues were considered bad form by at least a handful of Republicans. It was all the way back in 2021, a lifetime ago. In the Republican Party of 2023, Kevin McCarthy’s clown show, such behavior is rewarded with plum committee assignments while prominent critics of Donald Trump are politically sacrificed in ritual acts of retribution.
There is no difference now between McCarthy, Jim Jordan of Ohio, a Freedom Caucus founder, and Florida’s Matt Gaetz, a former MAGA gadfly. They are all the Republican establishment now. And nothing illustrates that better than the relationship between the Speaker of House McCarthy and his rightwing-woman Greene, whom he vowed to never abandon:
“I will never leave that woman. I will always take care of her … If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole. When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”
The New York Times describes this new MAGA establishment this way:
Their political union — a closer and more complex one than has previously been known — helps explain how Mr. McCarthy rose to power atop a party increasingly defined by its extremes, the lengths to which he will go to accommodate those forces, and how much influence Ms. Greene and the faction she represents have in defining the agenda of the new House Republican majority.
It feels as if this has all happened overnight.
Greene was just elected to the House in 2020. She never even served when Trump was president. During his tenure, she was just an average QAnon housewife pushing conspiracy theories on Facebook. A scant two years later she’s being discussed as a possible running mate for Donald Trump in 2024. How on earth did it come to this?
Well, it was actually a long time percolating in the party.
We can go all the way back to Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and then Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich to see the evolution of what was once the party of Main Street into an ideologically extreme political faction. The seeds were sown all through those eras. But this new MAGA establishment is a direct outgrowth of a specific movement of the past decade or so: the Tea Party.
The whole Tea Party phenomenon seems sort of quaint now but it had a powerful influence on the Republican Party. There were a lot of rationales for its formation, springing up as it did in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, but the real impetus was the election of the first Black president which seemed to send a good number of Republicans into a frenzy of revolutionary zeal.
As is usual when a Democrat wins the White House after a GOP president has run up the national debt, Republicans suddenly claimed to be intensely concerned about deficits, spending and the size of government, which soon came to be symbolized by their rabid opposition to the Affordable Care Act. It was a heavily astroturfed movement, supported by big-money donors like the Koch Brothers, but it was a genuine grassroots movement as well, largely enabled by the right-wing media and emerging social media platforms.
Their organizing was impressive with big marches, cross-country bus tours and, once they got rolling, riotous Town Hall protests against the health care reform. And soon they were electing people to Congress carrying their message. In 2010, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida were both Senate Tea Party candidates. In the House, there were a number of Tea Party winners who signed something they cleverly called “The Contract From America” and went on to form the Freedom Caucus. (Founding member Jim Jordan was a back-bencher elected in 2006 who joined this new “revolutionary” movement.)
The Freedom Caucus went on to engineer the ousting of the Speaker of the House John Boehner, shut down the government more than once and refused to negotiate in good faith or compromise on anything. They were drunk with power and did what they wanted damn the consequences. But then Donald Trump came along and the Freedom Caucus rebels, with their hardcore adherence to free market capitalism, global trade and slashing government programs got very, very quiet. They did get some massive tax cuts in the first year of Trump’s term but they were passed by acclamation — there were suddenly no dissenters in the party on that one.
Meanwhile, the MAGA movement, under Trump, took up what was once the undercurrent of the Tea Party movement, the culture war, and brought it to center stage. No longer did anyone have to pretend that all they cared about was spending cuts. They could hate on immigrants and Black people and gays and liberals right out in the open and could do it in the crudest terms possible. Conspiracy theories were encouraged to flourish and loyalty to Trump was the only “issue” they needed to care about.
This new Congress finally brings it all to the fore. It’s all come together. The anti-tax, government-slashing extremists are one with the revolutionary MAGA culture warriors. Today Speaker Kevin McCarthy embraces Freedom Caucus member and MAGA heroine Marjorie Taylor Greene while Freedom Caucus founder and MAGA leader Jim Jordan leads a crusade to “take down the deep state” and Freedom Caucus member and MAGA superstar Matt Gaetz plots ways to destroy the economy if they don’t get their way. They are all one. These former gadflies and bomb throwers are the establishment now. They are the Republican Party. The metamorphosis is finally complete.
Take a deep breath
Anand Giridharadas suggests (not in so many words) that if we want to defeat nascent fascism the left needs to get over itself:
We need to build a movement like we never have before: attractive, fun, substantive, visionary, tomorrow-oriented, rooted in people’s lives, open-armed, fiery, merciful.
A movement that understands the emotion and psychology and anxiety that are at the heart of politics. The right gets this; the left largely doesn’t. We need a new movement that does.
A movement that isn’t tedious and hairsplitting and gatekeeping and purist and more interested in petty internal beefing than outward expansion. We need a small-e evangelical movement more interested in finding converts than heretics.
If you’ve read “The Persuaders,” the roots of this post are obvious. The left needs to focus more on building critical mass than on criticism. A movement with a tribal language and that finds a dark cloud in every silver lining isn’t inviting. A real movement doesn’t erect barriers to entry.
A movement that has a sense of humor. That can tell the difference between people awkwardly trying to catch up with progress and people who are vicious threats to that progress.
A movement that knows how to provoke and command attention, get people talking, play to emotion, tell stories, constructively address anxiety and fear — a movement that doesn’t look down on communicating on more guttural levels, that isn’t wonk-drunk.
A movement that finally gets over any aversion to patriotism. A movement that reclaims patriotism from those who befoul it. A movement that understands that regular people love their country, and that if you don’t sound like you do, too, you’re doomed.
“Freedom has always been a contested value,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio, to whom Giridharadas devotes an entire chapter. “It is not coincidental that freedom to vote is the name of the newer form of what was the For the People Act. That name was very deliberately chosen.” The left cannot forfeit the word to MAGA Republicans. It’s a winner with Americans across the political spectrum.
A movement “vividly paints the beautiful tomorrow it seeks.” It stands “for something.”
A “new mindset is apparent”
President Joe Biden exceeds expectations. (He’s exceeded mine.) But in several non-flashy ways people may not have noticed. David Dayen notices that Uncle Joe is taking on corporate concentration and bringing the busting back to trust busting (American Prospect):
On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.
Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”
Joe had me with that line. He gets it. I’ve used similar formulations for years. The root problem isn’t that the economy doesn’t work for people; it is that people work for the economy. People should be holding the corporation’s leash; instead it feels as if we’re wearing the collar.
I spent a career working inside small and large engineering companies with national and international clients. You probably have some of their products. I wouldn’t trust any farther than I could throw them.
But I digress.
Biden’s order proposed 72 different actions to take to “to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras,” Dayen writes. A new mindset has appeared in the agencies. There’s a new sheriff in town.
Bringing change to large bureaucracies is often likened to turning around a battleship. One way to get things moving is to have the captain inform every crew member of the intention to turn the battleship around, counseling them to take every action from now on with that battleship-turning goal in mind. The small team that envisioned and executed the competition order put the weight of the presidency behind it, delivering a loud message to return to the fight against concentrations of power. It’s alarming and maybe a little disconcerting that you have to use a high-level form of peer pressure to flip the ship of state. But that battleship is starting to change course.
Tim Wu, the brains behind the order, has since left government. Dayen describes the “collection of policymakers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and experts, sometimes known as the New Brandeis movement,” (in which Wu is a player) that aggitates against economic concentration.
A new White House competition council oversees the executive order, Dayen writes. Biden himself has attended two or three meetings. This creates “a kind of show-and-tell dynamic” in which agencies want to show up with progress to present before the president. A “new mindset is apparent.”
“We wanted the president personally involved,” Wu said. “If you have an agency that feels all alone, their friends become industry. It’s about getting into the heads of agencies and making them feel supported to do things they might not like.”
The rest gets further into the policy weeds. A ban on noncompete agreements here. New merger guidelines there. Crushing the hearing aid cartel. Taking on Big Ag. A “government-wide initiative on so-called ‘junk fees’—unexplained and deceptive charges from hotels, cable companies, ticket brokers, banks, and more.” Industries like airlines and pharmaceuticals are slow to come to heel, but the administration’s actions are turning the battleship little by little without making headlines.
Just about everything on competition has been hard-fought. But there’s plenty of evidence of real movement. Agencies like the Department of the Interior, Department of Education, and the Small Business Administration, none of which are mentioned in the order, told the Prospect about their efforts to maximize competition in procurement and support small business. The lead agencies have gone beyond the order, reinvigorating dormant anti-monopoly laws like the Robinson-Patman Act (which prevents chain retail stores from gaining unfair advantage) or Section 8 of the Clayton Act (which bars directors and officers from sitting on the corporate boards of multiple competitors). Congress chipped in with the first new antitrust law in nearly a half-century, which gives state attorneys general a better chance to win antitrust cases.
Mergers and acquisitions slowed sharply in the second half of 2022, and while a lack of cheap money from the Federal Reserve is partially responsible, so is an enforcement team that is more undaunted than it’s been in decades. And aggressive antitrust agencies translate across government. For example, the FTC’s definition of unfair or deceptive acts and practices is used by other agencies; when the FTC tightens its guidelines, other agencies follow.
Corporate power won’t concede without a fight. And there are more hearts and minds to win inside the government. But once a course has been corrected, it’s hard to switch back. The engineers of this shift in competition policy have done more than change a policy; they’re changing the country’s direction.
Biden was “very clear,” as he likes to say:
Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation. Without healthy competition, big players can change and charge whatever they want and treat you however they want. And for too many Americans, that means accepting a bad deal for things that can’t go — you can’t go without.
So, we know we’ve got a problem — a major problem. But we also have an incredible opportunity. We can bring back more competition to more of the country, helping entrepreneurs and small businesses get in the game, helping workers get a better deal, helping families save money every month. The good news is: We’ve done it before.
Yes, we have. Between the terms of two Roosevelts, Biden noted. Then the corporate empire struck back. The result has been a second Gilded Age, epic wealth inequality, decades of flat wage growth, and a hollowing out of a middle class that was once the envy of the world. People left behind, working for an economy that views them as servants, inputs.
We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power. And where- — what have we gotten from it? Less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses. Too many Americans who feel left behind. Too many people who are poorer than their parents.
I believe the experiment failed. We have to get back to an economy that grows from the bottom up and the middle out.
Maybe this guy should run for another term.
Will they do what Trump wants? Sure they will. They want it too:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has released the names of the Republicans who will serve on a pair of subcommittees as part of the GOP’s promise to launch investigations into the Biden administration.
McCarthy in a tweet Tuesday announced the GOP membership of two select subcommittees on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The House voted along party lines to establish the weaponization committee earlier this month to probe ongoing investigations from the Department of Justice. The subcommittee was part of a list of demands that hard-line GOP House members had for McCarthy to win their support to become Speaker.
McCarthy later promised to create both the weaponization and COVID-19 subcommittees a couple of days ahead of the Speaker vote. Republicans have described the weaponization subcommittee as “Church-style,” referring to a Senate select committee led by former Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) that looked into intelligence agencies.
McCarthy said in a letter to his Republican colleagues that the subcommittee will expose the “weaponization of government against our citizenry, writ large.”
The subcommittee will be led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who was a close supporter of McCarthy during his Speaker bid and who serves as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. McCarthy said earlier this month that Jordan would chair the subcommittee.
The other GOP members of the committee will be Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), Mike Johnson (La.), Chip Roy (Texas), Kelly Armstrong (N.D.), Greg Steube (Fla.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Kat Cammack (Fla.) and Harriet Hageman (Wyo.).
Roy and Bishop withheld their support for McCarthy through more than 10 ballots of the Speaker vote before switching to back him after McCarthy agreed to additional concessions.
Will they overreach? Probably. They are very extreme and not that bright. But it’s going to be a terrible spectacle anyway. It would be fine to look into the Intelligence and law enforcement agencies. That’s a legitimate function of congress. But just look at that Trump video to see what this is really all about and it’s downright chilling.
It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.
Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.
But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.
Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.
Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.
–Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.
–Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.
–There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)
Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.
Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and Ms. Dannehy declined to comment. The current and former officials who discussed the investigation all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal, political and intelligence sensitivities surrounding the topic.
A year into the Durham inquiry, Mr. Barr declared that the attempt “to get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016 “cannot be, and it will not be, a tit-for-tat exercise. We are not going to lower the standards just to achieve a result.”
But Robert Luskin, a criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor who represented two witnesses Mr. Durham interviewed, said that he had a hard time squaring Mr. Durham’s prior reputation as an independent-minded straight shooter with his end-of-career conduct as Mr. Barr’s special counsel.
“This stuff has my head spinning,” Mr. Luskin said. “When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?”
This gift link may work to take you to the whole article which you should read all the way through.
My favorite revelation is the fact that the when it was revealed that they had turned the investigation into a criminal probe ( which we all naturally assumed was about suspected criminal conduct on the Russia investigation) it was really a completely unrelated investigation into some evidence presented by the Italian government that Trump was involved in financial crimes! And then Barr gave it to Durham anyway and Durham cleared him (covered it up?) Wow.
And the guy who actually brought a case about the allegedly fake Steele Dossier wanted to use suspected Russian disinformation himself, was batted down by a federal judge twice, went around her to a Grand Jury making his most trusted longtime prosecutor colleague quit the case and the Justice Department.
He was so far in the tank he had grown gills. But of course he was:
While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.
In some ways, they were an odd match. Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. Administrations of both parties had assigned him to investigate potential official wrongdoing, like allegations of corrupt ties between mafia informants and F.B.I. agents, and the C.I.A.’s torture of terrorism detainees and destruction of evidence.
By contrast, the vocal and domineering Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.
But the two shared a worldview: They are both Catholic conservatives and Republicans, born two months apart in 1950. As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.
As we know, every Special Prosecutor has to be a Republican. ( This is because of Democratic cowardice, but that’s the way it is.) They may say these prosecutors are neutral, just-the-facts, straight arrow, and maybe sometimes they are. But there’s also a very good chance they’re infected with Fox News brain worms. This was one of those cases.