Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Netanyahu and bad faith all around

It’s a struggle to manage the frustration this week. Yes, the economy (in the aggregate anyway) continues to go gangbusters. Simon Rosenberg continues to push Hopium like a street hustler. Don’t worry. Be hopey. And yet.

Beneath it all is the nagging sense that the world is teetering. Gaza is a mess. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu looks more and more like a murderous autocrat with familiar echoes of our bumbling homegrown one. Like Donald Trump, he needs to stay in power to stay out of jail. So far, three years after instigating a violent insurrection, that’s one thing at which Trump seems infuriatinglly adept.

Michael Tomasky laments that it’s taken President Biden this long to at least threaten Netanyahu with harsh language:

It’s sad that it takes the tragic killing of seven workers for the great global humanitarian José Andrés, as opposed to the piles upon piles of dead Palestinian babies, to spur this change. And, of course, it’s not even really a change yet. It’s a threat of a change down the road if certain behaviors continue. As has been widely noted, on the same day the World Central Kitchen workers were killed by the Israel Defense Forces, the Biden administration approved sending more than 2,000 additional bombs to Israel. But this new tone from the White House is already yielding some results: Israel took immediate steps to increase the flow of aid to Gaza.

The invasion of Gaza is first and foremost a moral calamity. Alongside the wanton death, there is the imminence of massive famine (well, it was declared “imminent” in a March 18 report; it may be happening right now). A recent U.N. report calculated that the destruction of Gaza has been so severe that it will be—get this—2092 before Gaza is returned to its 2022 GDP levels.

But it is also a potential political calamity for Joe Biden. If this war is still happening in October, he will lose the election. Democrats right now very strongly back a cease-fire. In a March 27 poll, both Democrats and independents disapproved of Israel’s actions; just 18 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of independents approve of how Israel is prosecuting the war.

On top of that, Trump’s judge-in-the-box, Aileen Cannon, is fooling no one with the thumb she’s applying to the scales of justice to benefit her liege lord. Greg Sargent writes of the “shady gamesmanship lurking behind” her ruling on Trump’s Presidential Records Act, a win for special prosecutor Jack Smith. Or is it?

But as constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe put it, this was a “pretend” ruling against Trump that ended up “reserving” Cannon’s ability to decide the case for Trump in a way that cannot be appealed. In short, Cannon seems to recognize that as she moves toward that endgame, it’s essential to maintain plausible deniability throughout.

“Judge Cannon is being canny in her Trump-protective approach,” Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.

Trump doesn’t seem to have noticed the “canny” part. He doesn’t bother hiding his expectation that Cannon—who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020—will put a heavy thumb on the scale in his favor. That complicates Cannon’s efforts to maintain that objective legal aura she’s striving for.

Which points to a larger pattern: On numerous fronts, Trump’s allies—overt and tacit alike—seek to run interference for his corruption and likely criminality in ways that allow them to maintain a veneer of respect for the rule of law. But Trump keeps demanding that they openly pervert the rule of law on his behalf, not least because a central feature of the MAGA movement is explicit contempt for the very idea that the law should apply to him and his supporters at all.

Any Republican pretensions to Americanness are at this point as credible as Trump University.

Excuse me while I go rend my garments.

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But of course they did

President Joe Biden on Friday visited the fallen Key Bridge site in Baltimore and pledged to citizens that “your nation has your back.”

Politico:

“My administration is committed, absolutely committed, to ensuring that parties responsible for this tragedy pay to repair the damage and be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law will allow, but I also want to be clear: We will support Maryland and Baltimore every step of the way to help you rebuild and maintain all the business and commerce that’s here now,” he said at the foot of the downed bridge, with the wind whipping behind him.

Well, not the entire nation. While Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young has requested Congress to authorize “a 100 percent Federal cost share for rebuilding the bridge,” unconditional support is out of fashion for the party dominated by a former president whose every decision is transactional (also Politico):

The House Freedom Caucus signaled Friday that they’re open to giving federal funds to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, but they have a few significant conditions.

The conservative hardliners’ caveats include: They want the Biden administration to reverse course on its pause on new export terminal permits for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and for any spending to be fully offset by cuts elsewhere. Notably, Speaker Mike Johnson had recently floated a proposal to link long-stalled Ukraine aid with easing that same energy policy.

So not so fast:

And it’s not just Freedom Caucus Republicans who’ve cautioned against a hasty federal response to the Baltimore tragedy. Many GOP lawmakers have urged that officials exhaust existing federal pots of money before considering new spending.

“If it proves necessary to appropriate taxpayer money to get one of America’s busiest ports back online, Congress should ensure it is fully offset and that burdensome regulations … are waived,” the Freedom Caucus position reads, pointing to various environmental and labor rules.

Biden wants union laborers to rebuild the bridge with “union labor and American steel.” The Freedom Caucus’ conditions include waiving environmental and union wage regulations “to avoid all unnecessary delays and costs.”

At least they didn’t throw in renaming Dulles Airport after Donald Trump as a condition. Democrats responded to that with a snarky proposal to rename a federal prison in Miami after Trump (Axios):

Driving the news: The two-page measure would redesignate the Miami Federal Correctional Institution in Florida as the “Donald J. Trump Federal Correctional Institution.”

• It is being introduced by Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who represents a district that Dulles Airport falls within; Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who represents part of Greater Miami; and John Garamendi (D-Calif.).

Between the lines: The bill is a pithy way of drawing attention to the 91 state and federal criminal charges Trump is facing across four cases.

It’s a wonder anything gets done in this congress. Which if you are the Freedom Caucus is the goal.

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Pygmy Slow Loris babies! Via Zooborns

For the first time, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) is celebrating the birth of two pygmy slow lorises, an endangered species. Small Mammal House keepers reported for duty the morning of March 21 and observed that 3-year-old mother Naga had given birth overnight and was caring for two infants. She and the babies’ 2-year-old father, Pabu, received a recommendation to breed from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan (SSP). These babies are the first offspring for both parents. Keepers have observed Naga carrying, grooming and nursing the babies, which appear to be healthy and strong. Animal care staff will determine the babies’ sexes at their first vet exam, which will take place in a few months.

The family is on view at the Small Mammal House, and keepers say the babies are most active in the late morning and early afternoon.Naga and Pabu arrived at NZCBI in August 2022 from the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois and Little Rock Zoo in Arkansas, respectively. SSP scientists determine which animals to breed by considering their genetic makeup, health and temperament, among other factors.

According to keepers, Naga’s personality is calm and sweet, though she tends to spook easily. She takes her time when exploring her exhibit and rests often. Pabu, on the other hand, seems to be more high energy. He is inquisitive and always the first to approach keepers and participate in training sessions and feedings. Although pygmy slow lorises reach sexual maturity around 9 months of age for females and 1.5 years of age for males, often they do not successfully reproduce until 2 to 3 years of age. Naga and Pabu’s “howdy” introductions took place in September 2023—about a year after they arrived—and the pair bred soon after meeting. This species’ gestation is about six months.    

He might be. His fundraising is anemic and he’s acting panicked

Cruz: Colin Allred is outraising my last opponent 3-1. They are flooding millions of dollars into Texas and the reason is simple. My last reelection was a 3-point race. I won by 2.6% pic.twitter.com/9RB0Hof7Wb

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 4, 2024

It’s hard to imagine that he’s not going to be re-elected in Texas but he is the most unlikable official in politics (and that’s saying something) so maybe even the Texans are sick of him:

THE WALLS ARE closing in around Ted Cruz, and the Republican senator is lashing out. 

Cruz, who has served two terms as Texas junior senator, is facing a tough reelection challenge from former NFL player and current U.S. Rep. ​​Colin Allred (D-Texas), who won Texas’ Democratic Senate primary in a landslide victory last month. 

On Wednesday, Cruz begged for donation on Fox News while complaining that Allred is out fundraising his 2018 challenger, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, by leaps and bounds. 

“The Democrats are coming after me, they are gonna spend more than $100 million this year, George Soros is already spending millions of dollars in the state of Texas,” Cruz told Sean Hannity. “My opponent a liberal Democrat named Colin Allred, is out raising Beto O’Rourke, my last opponent, 3 to 1. They are flooding millions of dollars into Texas — and the reason is simple. You remember my last reelection, it was a 3-point race. I won by 2.6 percent.” 

Cruz’s fundraising concerns may explain a very shady financial arrangement the senator has with iHeartMedia, the hosting platform of his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz. Last week, The Houston Chronicle reported that the radio network paid out $630,850 to a Cruz-affiliated super Pac, Truth and Courage. According to FEC data reviewed by the Chronicle, the six-figure sum represents about a third of the PAC’s fundraising haul since 2023. The LoseCruz PAC, a political action committee challenging the senator’s reelection, first reported a $214,752.98 transfer from iHeartMedia to Truth and Courage in March.  

A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Chronicle that the senator “appears on ‘Verdict’ three times a week for free.” A representative from the company said the funds were the proceeds of sales for the podcast’s advertising inventory, and that Cruz “volunteers his time to host this podcast and isn’t compensated for it.” But if iHeartMedia is sending massive checks to a PAC affiliated with his reelection campaign, is there really no benefit to Cruz? 

Of course there is. He needs money badly because he’s not raising enough.

I still don’t think he’s going to lose. Texas is totally radicalized. But you never know. Sometimes there’s an individual so odious that even people who agree with them can’t stand to look at them anymore.

It must be bad news for Joe Biden

Steve Benen at MSNBC reports:

Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 200,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in March. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job market managed to do much better than that. CNBC reported:

The U.S. economy added more jobs than expected in March in a sign of continued acceleration for what has been a bustling and resilient labor market. Nonfarm payrolls increased 303,000 for the month, well above expectations for an increase of 200,000. … The unemployment rate held steady at 3.8%, as expected.

In addition to the top-line data, we also learned that wage growth continued to outpace inflation. As unemployment rate inched lower again, the jobless rate has now been below 4% for 26 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s.

As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.

According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created over 15.9 million jobs since January 2021 — more than double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.

In recent months, Republicans have responded to developments like these by pretending not to notice them. No one should be surprised if GOP officials keep the trend going today.

For some additional context, consider job growth by year over the past decade, updated to reflect the latest data revisions:

2013: 2.3 million

2014: 3 million

2015: 2.7 million

2016: 2.3 million

2017: 2.1 million

2018: 2.3 million

2019: 2 million

2020: -9.3 million

2021: 7.3 million

2022: 4.8 million

2023: 3 million

Three months into 2024: 829,000

On twitter all the wingnuts are shrieking that the jobs numbers are rigged and that it’s all recovery from the pandemic. As you can see by the numbers above, that’s just not true.

And that’s what they love about him.

Trump in leaked footage at wealthy fundraiser: You’re all wealthy people. You have so much money… We gave you the largest tax cuts in history pic.twitter.com/vDFuQM7nUx

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 5, 2024

He’s selling out the country for personal gain … again

Brian Beutler points out in his fantastic newsletter today (subscribe here) that Trump’s extracurricular foreign policy activity is almost certainly in service of his election in November and suggests that the Democrats take this seriously:

President Biden may have reached his wits end, however belatedly, with Benjamin Netanyahu. A readout of their most recent conversation suggests that, in the wake of the World Central Kitchen killings, and the subsequent flight-to-safety of humanitarian workers, U.S. aid will be conditioned going forward on a rapidly implemented ceasefire (of uncertain length) in order to meliorate the catastrophe on the ground.

But Biden’s larger picture goal—and perhaps the only way to lastingly tie this Israeli government’s hands—is a grand settlement, along the lines he’s been negotiating, that would sweeten the deal for Israel by normalizing its relations with Saudi Arabia. 

He should thus be alarmed at the news (if it is indeed news to him) that Trump has held at least one undisclosed phone call with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, in recent days. 

Trump has been strangely at pains of late to imply that he is at odds with the rest of his party, which lusts for bloody retribution against Palestinians. He recently told a duo of right-wing Israeli journalists, “You have to finish up your war,” and stressed the same thing to the Republican apparatchik Hugh Hewitt, insisting in his television-addled way that Israel is “absolutely losing the PR war.”

On its face, that suggests agreement with Biden. If we could ever take Trump at face value or trust his motives, his private contacts with MBS might not be so worrisome. There is speculation and reporting to suggest that Trump views Netanyahu as disloyal for having congratulated President Biden on winning the 2020 election—perhaps this is his retribution? And he may see some advantage in getting caught advocating for Israel to end its war, so that he might claim credit if a ceasefire materializes in the coming weeks.

But the clear optimum for him—what is in his best interest, the only interest he cares about—is to scuttle Biden’s efforts to reach a grand diplomatic settlement in the region. And between his secret conversations, his private business arrangements with Saudi royals, and his control over Republicans in Congress, he almost certainly has the clout required to subvert U.S. foreign policy in this way. Just as he’s subverted Biden’s Ukraine policy and border-security negotiations for personal gain.  

He’s also not necessarily working alone. We learned this week that Netanyahu hosted Jared Kushner for dinner in December, and that Trump treats his degenerate former national-security henchman Richard Grenell as an “envoy” to right-wing leaders abroad. 

What’s more likely: that Trump is Biden’s earnest partner seeking an end to the war in Gaza? Or that he would like to create that impression domestically, while working behind the scenes to prolong it? Biden shouldn’t just wonder if Trump and his lackeys are collectively up to no good. He should suspect it. And insofar as he has access to information that confirms his suspicion, he should reveal it to the American public.

This is not unprecedented. Trump’s spirit animal, Richard Nixon, did this in 1968:

On Oct. 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam in hopes of encouraging peace talks to end the Vietnam War. At the time, Johnson knew a secret. Some in the Nixon campaign were secretly communicating with the South Vietnamese Government in an effort to delay the opening of the peace talks. They offered the prospect of a better deal for South Vietnam if Nixon became president.

One of the most visible intermediaries between the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese was Anna Chennault. Chennault was a Chinese-born Republican fundraiser and widow of U.S. Major General Claire Chennault, who led the World War II Flying Tigers.

When he learned of the back-channel communications, President Johnson called the effort “treason.” However, he never made the information public, fearing damaging the presidency as well as having to admit that he used government agencies to spy on Chennault and the South Vietnamese. In addition, Nixon denied involvement in the efforts.

The White House file on the matter was maintained by National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and he kept it after leaving the White House. In 1973, after Johnson’s death, Rostow gave the sealed package to the director of the LBJ Presidential Library. Under the plain outer wrapping, a letter-size envelope was taped to the large inner envelope. Written on the small envelope was “the ‘X’ envelope,” so it became known as the X-File or X-envelope.

At the time the file was kept secret, to be opened 50 years later. However, the LBJ Library opened it in 1994 and released some related telephone conversations in 2008. Some of the documents remain classified.

There’s plenty of evidence that Reagan did the same thing with the Iran hostages in 1980. This is something that Republicans have been doing for half a century and Donald Trump is far likelier to do it than they were — he needs a lot of money on top of election help. (Also he’s a corrupt criminal.)

Biden should listen to party wisemen like Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, and liberal gadflies like me, and let the public know what the government knows about Trump’s betrayals in real time. As Raskin told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent this week, “It would be good to know if we could fill in the blanks in terms of the very specific commitments that he’s making right now. And he has emissaries who are traveling all over the world making common cause with right-wing governments. And those people are doing everything they can to try to make Donald Trump look good.”

I hope they do it but I’m not confident they will. But if there’s ever been a necessity to stop this behavior it’s now. The man is currently under indictment for stealing classified documents, including nuclear secrets, and he’s desperate. This can’t be swept under the rug.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has twisted himself into a pretzel trying to please his fractious caucus and he’s starting to show the strain. Unfortunately, the people of Ukraine are currently paying the price as he struggles with what appears to be a cage match with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who is making it clear that she intends to blow up the House of Representatives in an election year if she doesn’t get her way.

The state of play remains what it’s been for weeks now. The Senate passed a tortuously negotiated bipartisan bill that included funding for Ukraine and the border months ago which the House rejected upon orders from Donald Trump who openly admitted that his motives were purely to benefit his campaign.

Trump says he sabotaged the bipartisan deal to secure the border because “it made it much better for the opposing side” pic.twitter.com/yAysQiWrkX

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 2, 2024

Since then Johnson has been running around in circles insisting one day that he won’t bring any Ukraine funding bill to the floor and the next suggesting that he has an agreement on Ukraine that would include a provision that would seize frozen Russian assets and categorize the Ukrainian aid as a loan, an idea floated by Donald Trump and S. Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. As of Thursday, he was back insisting that there must be more border security or it’s a no-go. Nobody seems to be sure what, if anything, is going to come to the floor.

Greene, meanwhile, is having a monumental temper tantrum ostensibly because Johnson managed to avoid shutting down the government by making a deal with Democrats to keep it funded through next fall. The idea that he would agree to further fund the Ukraine assistance has infuriated her to the point that she’s filed a motion to vacate the chair and seems ready to call for the vote with the GOP’s now minuscule majority and turn the body into chaos once again.

In an interview with Manu Raju of CNN on Wednesday, Greene let fly, claiming that Republican voters are “furious that our so-called Christian conservative, Republican Speaker of the House did this to the went on to compare Johnson to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saying “people are fed up with Republicans that say one thing and turn around and literally join the flock and just continue the same old crap everybody’s tired of…and here, Mike Johnson, he’s literally turned into Mitch McConnell’s twin and worse. He’s a Democrat. There’s not even any daylight between him and Nancy Pelosi at this point.” I’m not sure she could have insulted him any worse.

There are quite a few members of the MAGA caucus who are extremely hostile to Ukraine aid but Greene seems to be making it a red line issue for her even though Trump himself has tried to ease away from his hard line position by offering up the loan idea. She told Raju that idea is “the biggest bunch of heaping, steaming pile of bullsh*t. … That is so insulting to the American people.” She’s not wrong. It’s a meaningless, irrelevant policy that only someone as inept and out of his depth as Trump would have the nerve to propose. Graham knows this too but he actually wants to get aid to Ukraine, as does Johnson, and they see it as a way to appease Trump by giving him the ability to tell his followers that he’s the very stable genius running foreign policy. Apparently, many Democrats are willing to let him have that if it means getting this over with.

Greene is so worked up that she went to the one place where she knew she’d find a fellow Ukraine hater and Vladimir Putin aficionado: Tucker Carlson’s Twitter/X podcast. (How the mighty have fallen.) She went even further in her condemnation of Johnson:

NEW: Marjorie Taylor Greene Speculates Speaker Johnson Is "Being Blackmailed" — "What Do They Have On Him?"

GREENE: But now Mike Johnson has made a complete departure of who he is and what he stands for, and to the point where people are literally asking, is he blackmailed? What… pic.twitter.com/trjGjYUqpZ

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 3, 2024

GREENE: But now Mike Johnson has made a complete departure of who he is and what he stands for, and to the point where people are literally asking, is he blackmailed? What is wrong with him because he’s completely disconnected with what we want?

CARLSON: Do you think he is being blackmailed?

GREENE: I have no idea. I can’t comprehend, Tucker, what radically changes a man…

Carlson added that he thinks Johnson and McConnell may be being blackmailed over issues in their personal lives.

It’s hard to imagine how she’s going to deal with Johnson in their scheduled meeting today after all that but it’s pretty clear that she’s very close to calling for his ouster under the assumption that it’s what Republican voters are begging for.

She doesn’t have a lot of support in the caucus, however. CNN’s Jake Tapper noted the other day that Rep. Don Bacon, R-NE., said of Johnson’s predicament, “he’s got a gun to his head right now, but we need to have a Churchill, not a Chamberlain right now. He could be on the right side of history.” Tapper tartly commented, “I’m not sure that Marjorie Taylor Greene knows who Churchill or Chamberlain are” which is almost certainly the case.

Johnson’s problems with Greene are complicated by the fact that he’s going to have to rely on Democrats to not only vote for the Ukraine bill but possibly to save his speakership should she decide to go for it. According to Axios, some Democrats are pushing their advantage by demanding humanitarian aide not just for Ukraine and Gaza but also Sudan, Haiti, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Venezuela and Lebanon. Many of them also don’t like the idea of seizing frozen Russian assets and are opposed to a GOP demand to lift an administration pause on liquified natural gas exports. It’s clear that cobbling together a bipartisan bill in the House won’t be easy even without Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hissy fit.

If she decides to go ahead and call for Johnson to vacate the chair, the big question is whether a few Democrats will cross the line and save his bacon. Newly elected centrist Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-NY, says he won’t vote for removal and there may very well be a few others in swing districts who believe this will endear them to their constituents. That’s just how “moderate” Democrats roll.

But that will probably be the end of Johnson’s short reign anyway. From that point on his power as speaker will be gone — the only thing that could shame a Republican in the MAGA era is to be seen as having been saved by Democrats. He will be speaker in name only. It remains to be seen if Greene will lose power or gain it as a result of her actions and I’d say it’s 50-50 either way. Stay tuned.

Salon

Rebecca Solnit speaks with Anand Giridharadas

It’s a feature of our minds that we remember the coincidences, the little serendipities, and quickly forget events in life that, but for a second here or there, might have radically altered our lives, Brian Klaas writes in “Fluke.”

We also too easily forget what’s accomplished and obsess over what’s not.

“One thing I have taken to saying a lot is that amnesia leads to despair and it also leads to powerlessness,” Rebecca Solnit tells Anand Giridharadas. “People don’t trace the trajectory of change.”

I find that a feature of some on the left, the humorless glass-half-empty set I sometimes refer to as left-wing fundamentalists.

At The Ink, Solnit traces some of the many accomplishments progressive organizers have won over the last decade or so on human rights and on climate. But they are quickly forgotten as we tackle issues yet unresolved.

“I think that a lot of American hopelessness, despair, cynicism, and defeatism is so tied to the inability to trace the arc of change,” Solnit says.

Girdharadas asks why that is:

I don’t fully understand it because I am all for celebrating them, but I do feel like there’s something deeply puritanical in the left and progressive movements that I also think is pretty wrongheaded. There’s a weird sense that somehow being grumpy and negative is a form of solidarity with the oppressed.

And then you go and look at actually oppressed people: the Zapatistas, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, people facing climate change head-on in the small Pacific Island nations, and they’re not grumpy and defeatist. And I don’t think anybody in a gulag, in a famine, feels like, “Someone is sitting on their nice sofa at home in the United States feeling grumpy and that’s very helpful.”

Also, there’s a whole equation between being serious and radical with being tough in a very masculine mode that doesn’t invite in a lot of good cheer and celebration. And there’s a kind of absolutist idea that doesn’t accept imperfect and interim victories, even though that’s probably all we’ll ever get because the total revolution, paradise on earth, is not in my view going to happen.

Solnit sees reflexive judgmentalism of imperfection among allies as self-defeating.

Giridharadas recalls that in certain evangelical churches, the best parking is reserved for first-timers. The irony is striking, he notes:

And I just thought, that’s what the right is often able to do. What may be happening inside the church may be incredibly intolerant and exclusionary and hateful, but there’s an openness, there’s an open invitation to join the exclusionary tribe. And I often feel like the left has the opposite dynamic: the program indoors is profoundly inclusionary, but the parking thing hasn’t quite been figured out.

That’s a callback to another The Ink conversation about the left’s failure to build community in red, rural America: “The left offers help but no love, and the right offers love but no help.“

There is a lot to love about this country that we celebrate too little while focused on its flaws, Solnit believes. Sure, its founding myths are false, its founding ideal of equality for all unrealized. But we’re getting there.

Solnit adds:

And it’s funny because I think another habit people fall into is thinking that if you say not everything is bad, you must be saying everything is good. Part of the anti-Americanism within the U.S. is based on forgetting that while the U.S. has done very bad things, and it’s true, it’s also done very good things.

But those often get lost in “uninformed all-or-nothing oversimplifications,” Solnit suggests. Like Robert Jay Lifton’s term “thought-terminating clichés” deployed to end conversation rather than stimulate inquiry.

So many of the problems that you’re bringing up I think are habits of thought, of all or nothing, oversimplification, short-term thinking, dismissiveness, purity politics, that reduce the ability to engage with the complexity that we’re given into something much more cartoonish, which may make people feel more confident, but at the cost of understanding and engaging with the reality out there.

Continuing the conversation, Solnit reflects on the white Protestant backlash to a diversifying America and how demagogues manipulate that to hold onto power. Stopping them is still possible. But she also makes a distinction between hope and optimism:

In closing, I’ll say for me, hope is always a sense of the possibilities and the commitment to them, which knows that the future is being determined in the present, versus optimism, which I always equate with pessimism, cynicism, and the rest, which essentially assumes that the outcome has already been determined and nothing is required of us.

We are in a fight for the future of this country and it’s extremely winnable, but we need people to commit to it, show up, and participate. Nothing’s going to happen automatically, but I do believe we’re the majority and that the job always has been — and this is contrary to what I see some people think about climate and other things — the job is not to convert our enemies. The job is to motivate our friends. 

And that means getting people to understand that we don’t go into the voting booth to have a pure experience of self-affirmation by voting for our identical twin, because in a country of 300 million, you’re not going to be offered that very often, if ever. It means being strategic, keeping your eyes on the prize, understanding how we move towards our larger goals with all these forms of engagement, all these decisions, however imperfect they may seem individually.

As I’ve put it more crudely, this is politics. If you want a soul mate, try Match dot com. Or as Joe Biden often says, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

One alternative is leaving the country should Trump prevail in November. Giridharadas and Solnit count themselves among the stay-and-fight brigade. Being native-born, white, and living in California, Solnit sees no immediate danger to herself. She’s staying.

But I had an unnerving conversation Tuesday with a dual-citizen expat living in Spain. He tells me E.U. consulates are flooded with Americans’ requests for visas. They’re looking to leave the U.S. for sanctuary in Europe. But if Trump wins in November and pulls the U.S. out of NATO, my friend says, there will be no security there. Or anywhere else. The alliance will falter and Russia will look first to pick off the Baltics and then who knows. E.U. countries are upgrading their defense industries. Even his native Sweden that since the end of the Cold War has taken for granted their security and only now just joined NATO.

Better to kick Trump’s ass this fall, you think?

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Inhumanity is policy on Day 1

Donald Trump and his MAGA followers find community in “rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018. If Republicans reoccupy the White House in 2025, they plan to make a formal project of it.

The Biden-Harris campaign wants to be sure you don’t miss that.

Tonight, Donald Trump is holding a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago with architects of his family separation policy.

It’s part of his Project 2025 plan to rip children from their mothers.

A thread pic.twitter.com/xNMzv9smAo

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 4, 2024

Trump wants to rip away children from the arms of their mothers again in a second term:

Q: But would you re-implement family separation?

Trump: Well, we have to save our country…

Q: Sounds like that’s a yes?

Trump: We will say to families, we’re going to break you up pic.twitter.com/rGBrOIa661

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 4, 2024

Last term, Trump separated thousands of vulnerable children from their families.

More than 4,000 children were ripped away pic.twitter.com/0cdXxkOvHM

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 4, 2024

Trump calls immigrants “animals,” “not people,” “sick,” “monsters,” “poison.”

He wants to round them up in mass detention camps in a military-style operation larger than one called “Operation Wetback.”

And he wants to orphan children from their families pic.twitter.com/3K6nqiWfot

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 4, 2024

We are all horrified by Israeli policy in Gaza, and by President Joe Biden’s tardiness in issuing a “tense” ultimatum to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “protect Palestinian civilians and foreign aid workers” (Reuters):

“There was always going to be a point at which the Biden administration felt that the domestic and international cost of supporting Israel’s campaign in Gaza outweighed the benefit of what Israel was able to achieve on the ground,” said Mike Singh, a former National Security Council official on the Middle East.

“What is remarkable is not that this is happening but that it took so long.”

“Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces,” wrote chef Jose Andres after Israelis killed seven of his World Central Kitchen relief team in Gaza.

“Biden’s frustration with how the war is being conducted, and with Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, has reached an apex,” Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, tells Reuters.

For all the good he’s done domestically, Biden has hurt himself by not calling out the cruelty of Israel’s war and not doing more to stop it sooner.

But make no mistake regarding Trump’s intentions or his MAGA cult’s. If Trump retakes the White House, inhumanity will become official U.S. policy on Day 1.

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