Fox has a conspiracy theory problem
By Jen Psaki
The peddling of dangerous conspiracy theories is not just a Chris Farrell or a Lou Dobbs problem. This is a Fox in the age of President Donald Trump problem. It is a partnership, long in the making, between a serial liar now occupying the oval office and a major news network that has evolved from the voice of the conservative movement to a forum for racist and divisive conspiracy rants.
And it is one that could not only do lasting damage to the legitimacy of media in the US, but could also spur more anger, division and even violence in the short term.
Fox News and Fox Business have long been the peddlers of conspiracy theories, often for the purpose of damaging the reputations of members of the Democratic party. It was not that long ago that Fox gave oxygen to the bizarre rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was, therefore, an illegitimate President, a theory also driven at the time by none other than Donald Trump.
It was Fox News that recently pushed the line of analysis that the mail bombs sent last week were most likely a "false flag" to frame Republicans and help Democrats in the midterm elections. This notion was echoed by Donald Trump when he used "Bomb" in quotation marks in his tweet on Friday lamenting the focus of news coverage away from politics and toward the pipe bombs sent to his critics.
Then, on Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11. Just hours later, while the country processed this tragedy, Fox re-aired a segment of Lou Dobbs' show, in which Chris Farrell, an official from conservative group Judicial Watch, claimed that the caravan reportedly moving from Honduras through Mexico was funded by the "Soros occupied State Department."
Unsurprisingly, Dobbs and his show on Fox Business came under fire.
In response, a spokesperson for Fox Business issued a statement condemning Farrell's remarks and announcing that the episode had been pulled.
But there is still a problem. Fox has shown that it is in the business of pushing conspiracy theories if they will do damage to members of the Democratic party or critics of the President.
Lou Dobbs has been pushing conspiracy theories himself. Earlier in the week, in a tweet, which has now been deleted, he personally claimed that the bomb threats against critics of Trump and CNN were fake.
And Lou Dobbs isn't even the worst offender. Fox is the home of Laura Ingraham who has promoted the theory that the Clintons were involved in murdering several people. Then there is Sean Hannity who has given voice to theories as nutty as Russia being framed for cyber attacks on the US and as cruel as falsely blaming the death of Seth Rich, a young DNC staffer, on unproven theories that he leaked DNC emails. (While Fox eventually retracted the story, they still stood by Hannity.)
The pushing of right-wing conspiracy theories is their bread and butter. It is seemingly what drives their coverage. It is the click bait of television news and it is working.
So let's stop giving credit for doing the bare minimum. Fox doesn't care if Chris Farrell is a guest or not. They have plenty of other looney tune conspiracy theorists to book in his place.
Their ratings are high. They have the eyes and ears of the President of the United States who is their best echo chamber -- and a growing following of viewers who believe that all of the media personalities there are in fact reporting the news.
This is not a case of both sides need to calm the rhetoric. It is one side -- the side of the White House and a news network. Let's not stop at getting Lou Dobbs pulled from the air. Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham should be next. A voice of conservative thought should be welcomed. But a voice of dangerous and damaging conspiracy theories should not.
October 31, 2018
Hmmm, no
Trump rebukes Ryan, says he'll end birthright citizenship 'one way or the other'
John Wagner and Felicia Sonmez
President Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., over Ryan's comments on birthright citizenship, saying he "should be focusing on holding the Majority."
The extraordinary rebuke from Trump came one day after Ryan pushed back on the president's remarks on the issue, saying "you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order."
"Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about!" Trump tweeted Wednesday afternoon. "Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!"
Earlier Wednesday, Trump vowed to push forward with his call to end birthright citizenship, despite a backlash from legal scholars and some prominent members of his own party against his pledge a day earlier to take executive action on the matter.
In morning tweets, Trump said he would end the 150-year-old practice "one way or the other," seeming to leave the door open to either congressional action or a constitutional amendment, which many legal scholars say would be necessary to achieve his aims.
Trump also said the issue would ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
Trump is seeking to end the long-standing right to U.S. citizenship for children born to noncitizens in the United States, a policy that he said in his tweets "costs our Country billions of dollars and is very unfair to our citizens."
On Tuesday, leading Democrats and immigrants rights activists blasted Trump's pledge to issue an executive order, and Ryan dismissed the idea during a radio interview, saying it is not consistent with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, meanwhile, said the issue is one on which Congress, rather than the president, should take the lead.
In his Wednesday tweet, Trump asserted that birthright citizenship is not subject to the 14th Amendment because of the inclusion of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof."
Legal experts have debated for years how to interpret the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, but the consensus is one-sided: Most agree that it in fact grants citizenship to those born on U.S. soil.
The first section of the amendment says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Some legal scholars argue that the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" seems to give the government some leeway to restrict the right, just as other constitutional principles can be limited. But the mainstream opinion from both right and left is that it is more likely that a constitutional amendment, rather than federal legislation or an executive order, would be needed to change the birthright conferred on people born here.
In his latest tweets, Trump also highlighted a view expressed by then-Sen. Harry Reid in 1993 that "no sane country" would award citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born on its soil. Reid, a Democrat, reversed his position in 1999, at which time he apologized for his earlier stance.
"Many legal scholars agree . . . Harry M. Reid was right in 1993, before he and the Democrats went insane and started with the Open Borders (which brings massive Crime) 'stuff,' " Trump wrote.
In one of his tweets, Trump also said that the term "anchor babies," which has been used to describe children of noncitizens born in the United States, is "nasty." Trump has often used the term himself.
John Wagner and Felicia Sonmez
President Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., over Ryan's comments on birthright citizenship, saying he "should be focusing on holding the Majority."
The extraordinary rebuke from Trump came one day after Ryan pushed back on the president's remarks on the issue, saying "you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order."
"Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about!" Trump tweeted Wednesday afternoon. "Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!"
Earlier Wednesday, Trump vowed to push forward with his call to end birthright citizenship, despite a backlash from legal scholars and some prominent members of his own party against his pledge a day earlier to take executive action on the matter.
In morning tweets, Trump said he would end the 150-year-old practice "one way or the other," seeming to leave the door open to either congressional action or a constitutional amendment, which many legal scholars say would be necessary to achieve his aims.
Trump also said the issue would ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
Trump is seeking to end the long-standing right to U.S. citizenship for children born to noncitizens in the United States, a policy that he said in his tweets "costs our Country billions of dollars and is very unfair to our citizens."
On Tuesday, leading Democrats and immigrants rights activists blasted Trump's pledge to issue an executive order, and Ryan dismissed the idea during a radio interview, saying it is not consistent with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, meanwhile, said the issue is one on which Congress, rather than the president, should take the lead.
In his Wednesday tweet, Trump asserted that birthright citizenship is not subject to the 14th Amendment because of the inclusion of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof."
Legal experts have debated for years how to interpret the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, but the consensus is one-sided: Most agree that it in fact grants citizenship to those born on U.S. soil.
The first section of the amendment says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Some legal scholars argue that the phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" seems to give the government some leeway to restrict the right, just as other constitutional principles can be limited. But the mainstream opinion from both right and left is that it is more likely that a constitutional amendment, rather than federal legislation or an executive order, would be needed to change the birthright conferred on people born here.
In his latest tweets, Trump also highlighted a view expressed by then-Sen. Harry Reid in 1993 that "no sane country" would award citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born on its soil. Reid, a Democrat, reversed his position in 1999, at which time he apologized for his earlier stance.
"Many legal scholars agree . . . Harry M. Reid was right in 1993, before he and the Democrats went insane and started with the Open Borders (which brings massive Crime) 'stuff,' " Trump wrote.
In one of his tweets, Trump also said that the term "anchor babies," which has been used to describe children of noncitizens born in the United States, is "nasty." Trump has often used the term himself.
Such a psychopath...
Trump turns from 'humbling' grief to midterm fire and fury
Analysis by Stephen Collinson
President Donald Trump makes a hard turn Wednesday from offering empathy to grief-stricken Pittsburgh to the fear and fury of a midterm election closing argument designed to drive up Republican turnout despite the risk of deepening national divides.
The President will launch an eight-state, 11-rally race to Election Day next Tuesday brandishing hardline rhetoric on immigration as he tries to wrest back control of a campaign that was muted by a week of tragedy and national anxiety.
Trump had already complained that controversy over mail bombs allegedly sent by one of his supporters to his top targets in politics and the media was being drummed up by his critics to quiet GOP momentum.
Then the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, in which 11 people died, sparked a debate over the extent to which Trump's rhetoric was responsible for offering validation to white nationalists and extremists.
The President and the first lady traveled to Pittsburgh on Tuesday to visit the Tree of Life temple, where the shooting rampage took place, and comforted several police officers wounded in the attack.
The President was keeping a promise that he would visit to show support. His spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump found his time in Pittsburgh very moving and "very humbling and very sad."
Some local and civic leaders had asked him not to come while the funerals took place, and his arrival sparked some protests.
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted his grievance over that visit: "Melania and I were treated very nicely yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Office of the President was shown great respect on a very sad & solemn day. We were treated so warmly. Small protest was not seen by us, staged far away. The Fake News stories were just the opposite-Disgraceful!"
A White House official said there had been discussion of scheduling the visit later in the week but the optics of sandwiching it into a campaign swing were problematic.
The President is making clear he will not tame the incendiary political mood that his critics warn is fostering violence. Quite the opposite. He is signaling an intense and negative end to the campaign.
He is renewing charges that journalists are "enemies of the people" and seeking to whip up fervor among conservatives with an onslaught on immigration, the issue that first animated his political career and to which he returns each time he needs a comfort zone.
In an interview with Axios, Trump dramatically proposed ending birthright citizenship by executive order, even though doing so would be nearly impossible because it would involve the cumbersome process of amending the Constitution.
Trump is also sending 5,200 troops to the US-Mexico border, to prevent what he has styled as an invasion by a group of desperate migrants who are trekking slowly toward the United States.
"Our military is being mobilized at the Southern Border. Many more troops coming. We will NOT let these Caravans, which are also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred, must come in legally. TURN AROUND!" he tweeted Wednesday.
Trump well knows he can't simply change the Constitution with a stroke of a pen. And he understands that the migrants are 1,000 miles from the US frontier and pose no realistic threat to Americans, for months at least.
But by staking out radical positions on immigration and invoking a sense of a nation under siege, he incites a volatile debate that serves to enliven Republican base voters who he needs to turn out in numbers approaching his shock White House win next Tuesday.
And he shows yet again that he is willing to push his constitutional powers and the instruments of his government -- the military, for example -- in politicized efforts to retain and maximize his power.
Fear plus prosperity is closing presidential argument
Trump's counselor Kellyanne Conway denied the President was adopting a scorched earth strategy to whip up enthusiasm among grass-roots conservatives, contradicting legal experts, including her husband, who believe birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
"if only the base had voted for him he wouldn't be President," Conway told reporters.
"I understand that that's the Sesame Grover word of the day -- that, fear and some other stuff -- but no, it's not whipping up the base."
In a more conventional campaign, the President would do more than Trump has to tout the motoring US economy and low jobless numbers, factors that Republicans hope will mitigate the losses that are historically suggested when a President's approval ratings are below 50%.
But while the President often gets distracted from his talking points, his 2020 campaign team is getting to work.
In a new ad that acknowledges the open secret that Trump is interested in the election that's two years off as much as or more than the one next Tuesday, the President's campaign argues that economic prosperity will founder if Democrats win back power in Washington.
"Sometimes success can bring complacency. We have to go remind them. We have to remind them that the economy is not just a given in the United States. It actually takes work," Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told CNN's Dana Bash.
Trump will begin his final midterm election swing on Wednesday night in Florida, the epicenter of two acrimonious and tight races -- for a Democratic-held Senate seat and the Republican-run governor's mansion.
The effort by Repubican Gov. Rick Scott to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and the unexpectedly strong bid by Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum to beat GOP former Rep. Ron DeSantis in the gubernatorial race are playing out as part of a national referendum on Trump's presidency and are steeped in some of the toxic forces percolating in national politics.
Over the weekend, for instance, the President unleashed a fearsome attack on Gillum, who is African-American, branding him a "thief" in what many observers saw as a racially tinged attack.
The President will make further stops in Missouri, West Virginia, Indiana, Montana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio in the coming days, often reeling off a double header of rallies.
His itinerary offers a clue to how the election may turn out. Most of his stops are in support of Republicans who are trying to capture or retain Senate seats in states where he won big during the 2016 election.
Though his rallies will swamp multiple media markets, there is not much sign that Trump can be a lot of help to severely threatened Republican incumbents in suburban districts where his brazen manner could be a liability.
The President did, however, spend time in the last few days tweeting out endorsements of Republicans in wobbling House districts.
It remains unclear how the last week of violence and political recriminations will affect the election in its crucial final days.
But with early voting underway in many states, conventional wisdom is solidifying that Republicans will keep control of the Senate but that Democrats have an increasingly good chance of seizing back the House of Representatives.
In that scenario, Trump's final road trips will at least offer him a chance to claim that he won the Senate election -- even as he girds for two years of misery and investigations should Democrats win back control of House committees.
One prominent Republican, Rep. Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, who is leaving the House, warned on Tuesday that Trump's birthright gambit was a major mistake.
"We all know challenges of suburban R's. The bloc of competitive R held districts less impacted by POTUS thus far are those w high # of immigrants. So now POTUS, out of nowhere, brings birthright citizenship up. Besides being basic tenet of America, it's political malpractice," Costello tweeted.
But there was also evidence that Trump's hardline focus on immigration was increasing the pressure on some Democrats trying to cling to Senate seats in red states.
Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri ventured into Trump's territory on Fox News on Monday to say: "I do not want our borders overrun. And I support the President's efforts to make sure they're not."
Democrats have responded to Trump's broadsides by largely sticking to campaign themes of expanding health care coverage and protecting popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
But some of the party's potential contenders for the 2020 presidential race, which will erupt as soon as the midterm elections are over, have used the midterms to put down early markers in key primary states.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, was in Wisconsin on Tuesday, a state that Trump often crows he snatched from the Democrats in his surprise win over Hillary Clinton two years ago.
"I am sick and tired of this administration. I am sick and tired of what's going on," Biden said, expanding the Democratic election strategy into a broader argument on the need to curtail the Trump presidency.
"I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are too."
Analysis by Stephen Collinson
President Donald Trump makes a hard turn Wednesday from offering empathy to grief-stricken Pittsburgh to the fear and fury of a midterm election closing argument designed to drive up Republican turnout despite the risk of deepening national divides.
The President will launch an eight-state, 11-rally race to Election Day next Tuesday brandishing hardline rhetoric on immigration as he tries to wrest back control of a campaign that was muted by a week of tragedy and national anxiety.
Trump had already complained that controversy over mail bombs allegedly sent by one of his supporters to his top targets in politics and the media was being drummed up by his critics to quiet GOP momentum.
Then the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, in which 11 people died, sparked a debate over the extent to which Trump's rhetoric was responsible for offering validation to white nationalists and extremists.
The President and the first lady traveled to Pittsburgh on Tuesday to visit the Tree of Life temple, where the shooting rampage took place, and comforted several police officers wounded in the attack.
The President was keeping a promise that he would visit to show support. His spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump found his time in Pittsburgh very moving and "very humbling and very sad."
Some local and civic leaders had asked him not to come while the funerals took place, and his arrival sparked some protests.
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted his grievance over that visit: "Melania and I were treated very nicely yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Office of the President was shown great respect on a very sad & solemn day. We were treated so warmly. Small protest was not seen by us, staged far away. The Fake News stories were just the opposite-Disgraceful!"
A White House official said there had been discussion of scheduling the visit later in the week but the optics of sandwiching it into a campaign swing were problematic.
The President is making clear he will not tame the incendiary political mood that his critics warn is fostering violence. Quite the opposite. He is signaling an intense and negative end to the campaign.
He is renewing charges that journalists are "enemies of the people" and seeking to whip up fervor among conservatives with an onslaught on immigration, the issue that first animated his political career and to which he returns each time he needs a comfort zone.
In an interview with Axios, Trump dramatically proposed ending birthright citizenship by executive order, even though doing so would be nearly impossible because it would involve the cumbersome process of amending the Constitution.
Trump is also sending 5,200 troops to the US-Mexico border, to prevent what he has styled as an invasion by a group of desperate migrants who are trekking slowly toward the United States.
"Our military is being mobilized at the Southern Border. Many more troops coming. We will NOT let these Caravans, which are also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred, must come in legally. TURN AROUND!" he tweeted Wednesday.
Trump well knows he can't simply change the Constitution with a stroke of a pen. And he understands that the migrants are 1,000 miles from the US frontier and pose no realistic threat to Americans, for months at least.
But by staking out radical positions on immigration and invoking a sense of a nation under siege, he incites a volatile debate that serves to enliven Republican base voters who he needs to turn out in numbers approaching his shock White House win next Tuesday.
And he shows yet again that he is willing to push his constitutional powers and the instruments of his government -- the military, for example -- in politicized efforts to retain and maximize his power.
Fear plus prosperity is closing presidential argument
Trump's counselor Kellyanne Conway denied the President was adopting a scorched earth strategy to whip up enthusiasm among grass-roots conservatives, contradicting legal experts, including her husband, who believe birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
"if only the base had voted for him he wouldn't be President," Conway told reporters.
"I understand that that's the Sesame Grover word of the day -- that, fear and some other stuff -- but no, it's not whipping up the base."
In a more conventional campaign, the President would do more than Trump has to tout the motoring US economy and low jobless numbers, factors that Republicans hope will mitigate the losses that are historically suggested when a President's approval ratings are below 50%.
But while the President often gets distracted from his talking points, his 2020 campaign team is getting to work.
In a new ad that acknowledges the open secret that Trump is interested in the election that's two years off as much as or more than the one next Tuesday, the President's campaign argues that economic prosperity will founder if Democrats win back power in Washington.
"Sometimes success can bring complacency. We have to go remind them. We have to remind them that the economy is not just a given in the United States. It actually takes work," Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told CNN's Dana Bash.
Trump will begin his final midterm election swing on Wednesday night in Florida, the epicenter of two acrimonious and tight races -- for a Democratic-held Senate seat and the Republican-run governor's mansion.
The effort by Repubican Gov. Rick Scott to unseat Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and the unexpectedly strong bid by Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum to beat GOP former Rep. Ron DeSantis in the gubernatorial race are playing out as part of a national referendum on Trump's presidency and are steeped in some of the toxic forces percolating in national politics.
Over the weekend, for instance, the President unleashed a fearsome attack on Gillum, who is African-American, branding him a "thief" in what many observers saw as a racially tinged attack.
The President will make further stops in Missouri, West Virginia, Indiana, Montana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio in the coming days, often reeling off a double header of rallies.
His itinerary offers a clue to how the election may turn out. Most of his stops are in support of Republicans who are trying to capture or retain Senate seats in states where he won big during the 2016 election.
Though his rallies will swamp multiple media markets, there is not much sign that Trump can be a lot of help to severely threatened Republican incumbents in suburban districts where his brazen manner could be a liability.
The President did, however, spend time in the last few days tweeting out endorsements of Republicans in wobbling House districts.
It remains unclear how the last week of violence and political recriminations will affect the election in its crucial final days.
But with early voting underway in many states, conventional wisdom is solidifying that Republicans will keep control of the Senate but that Democrats have an increasingly good chance of seizing back the House of Representatives.
In that scenario, Trump's final road trips will at least offer him a chance to claim that he won the Senate election -- even as he girds for two years of misery and investigations should Democrats win back control of House committees.
One prominent Republican, Rep. Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, who is leaving the House, warned on Tuesday that Trump's birthright gambit was a major mistake.
"We all know challenges of suburban R's. The bloc of competitive R held districts less impacted by POTUS thus far are those w high # of immigrants. So now POTUS, out of nowhere, brings birthright citizenship up. Besides being basic tenet of America, it's political malpractice," Costello tweeted.
But there was also evidence that Trump's hardline focus on immigration was increasing the pressure on some Democrats trying to cling to Senate seats in red states.
Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri ventured into Trump's territory on Fox News on Monday to say: "I do not want our borders overrun. And I support the President's efforts to make sure they're not."
Democrats have responded to Trump's broadsides by largely sticking to campaign themes of expanding health care coverage and protecting popular programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
But some of the party's potential contenders for the 2020 presidential race, which will erupt as soon as the midterm elections are over, have used the midterms to put down early markers in key primary states.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, was in Wisconsin on Tuesday, a state that Trump often crows he snatched from the Democrats in his surprise win over Hillary Clinton two years ago.
"I am sick and tired of this administration. I am sick and tired of what's going on," Biden said, expanding the Democratic election strategy into a broader argument on the need to curtail the Trump presidency.
"I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are too."
Now all they have are lies
Republicans used to have a health care plan. Now all they have are lies.
Why Republicans can’t tell the truth about their health care plans.
By Ezra Klein
The scale of the Republican Party’s lying about their health care policy is, as Sarah Kliff writes, stunning.
The Republican Party is driving legislative and judicial efforts to gut protections for people with preexisting conditions that are now the law of the land. At the same time, they are running ads about their commitment to protecting people with preexisting conditions that feature the very elected officials suing to negate those protections, and President Donald Trump is saying, well, this:
Twit:Donald J. Trump
"Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican."
That’s not exaggeration. It’s not spin. It’s not misleading. It’s a lie. It’s pure up-is-downism. It’s a flagrant foul committed against reality. It’s scandalous, and it should be treated as a scandal. As Sarah notes, 14 percent of voters say protecting people with preexisting conditions is their top priority. The essence of elections is that voters have a clear idea of what the two parties intend to do so they can make an informed choice between them. The fact that the president is trying to utterly deceive them is important.
But there’s another question all this raises: Why are Republicans spending so much time lying about their health care policy? Why not just adopt the popular protections for preexisting conditions they claim to support? How did Republicans get here?
I have a theory.
A bit of health policy history is necessary here. In the early 2000s, it looked like Democrats and Republicans were converging around an approach to health care both could live with, built atop some of the Republican ideas offered in response to Bill Clinton’s 1994 proposal.
These Republican proposals, in a bid to show that costs could be contained using regulated markets and individual responsibility, included an individual mandate alongside regulations stopping insurers from discriminating against the ill or the old. The theory was that you brought everyone into the market and forced insurers to compete for their business by offering higher-quality plans at lower costs, not by separating the healthy from the unwell.
Mitt Romney passed a plan based on those ideas in Massachusetts, and it worked pretty well. Democrats looked at that plan and saw a compromise they could live with, so it became the base of the 2008 proposals from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama (though Obama initially omitted the mandate). Obama was elected president and tried to pass that plan into law.
Republicans, under Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s leadership, decided they had to unite against Obama’s proposal, and so they turned completely on ideas they had once supported. The scale of the about-face was stunning: A bunch of GOP senators voted for a resolution calling the individual mandate unconstitutional even though they were still, at that very moment, co-sponsors of the Wyden-Bennett Healthy Americans Act, which included an individual mandate.
“I would characterize the Washington, DC, relationship with the individual mandate as truly schizophrenic,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told me with some wonder.
Over the next decade, opposition to Obamacare became the central feature of Republican policy thought. This had two downstream consequences. One was that it wrecked the central political theory behind the Obamacare compromise — that Democrats, in giving up the policy advantages of single-payer, would gain the political benefits of bipartisan support — and sent Democrats toward Medicare-for-all, which is better at cutting costs, simpler to explain, and more difficult to challenge legally.
The other was that it forced Republicans to abandon a basically reasonable vision of health care policy and left them with, well, nothing. Opposing Obamacare isn’t a policy vision, but it had to be made into one, and so Republicans tried: They began attacking Obamacare’s weak spots — its high premiums and deductibles — and proposing to lower them by permitting insurers to once again discriminate against the sick and the old.
Deregulating the insurance market so healthy people could pay less for skimpier, higher-deductible care at the expense of their older, sicker neighbors — many of whom would now be uninsurable again — was not what people were asking for. But it’s what Republicans ended up embracing. It was all they had left. Every time they inched toward more popular ideas, like retaining protections for people with preexisting conditions, they quickly found themselves forced to support something too close to Obamacare.
The problem with the Republican health care vision is that it’s hideously unpopular; that’s why the GOP’s Obamacare replacement efforts collapsed. And it’s left Republicans with two choices. They can level with the public about their health care plan and lose the election or they can lie to the public about their health care plan in a bid to keep their jobs. So far, they’ve chosen lying.
Why Republicans can’t tell the truth about their health care plans.
By Ezra Klein
The scale of the Republican Party’s lying about their health care policy is, as Sarah Kliff writes, stunning.
The Republican Party is driving legislative and judicial efforts to gut protections for people with preexisting conditions that are now the law of the land. At the same time, they are running ads about their commitment to protecting people with preexisting conditions that feature the very elected officials suing to negate those protections, and President Donald Trump is saying, well, this:
Twit:Donald J. Trump
"Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican."
That’s not exaggeration. It’s not spin. It’s not misleading. It’s a lie. It’s pure up-is-downism. It’s a flagrant foul committed against reality. It’s scandalous, and it should be treated as a scandal. As Sarah notes, 14 percent of voters say protecting people with preexisting conditions is their top priority. The essence of elections is that voters have a clear idea of what the two parties intend to do so they can make an informed choice between them. The fact that the president is trying to utterly deceive them is important.
But there’s another question all this raises: Why are Republicans spending so much time lying about their health care policy? Why not just adopt the popular protections for preexisting conditions they claim to support? How did Republicans get here?
I have a theory.
A bit of health policy history is necessary here. In the early 2000s, it looked like Democrats and Republicans were converging around an approach to health care both could live with, built atop some of the Republican ideas offered in response to Bill Clinton’s 1994 proposal.
These Republican proposals, in a bid to show that costs could be contained using regulated markets and individual responsibility, included an individual mandate alongside regulations stopping insurers from discriminating against the ill or the old. The theory was that you brought everyone into the market and forced insurers to compete for their business by offering higher-quality plans at lower costs, not by separating the healthy from the unwell.
Mitt Romney passed a plan based on those ideas in Massachusetts, and it worked pretty well. Democrats looked at that plan and saw a compromise they could live with, so it became the base of the 2008 proposals from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama (though Obama initially omitted the mandate). Obama was elected president and tried to pass that plan into law.
Republicans, under Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s leadership, decided they had to unite against Obama’s proposal, and so they turned completely on ideas they had once supported. The scale of the about-face was stunning: A bunch of GOP senators voted for a resolution calling the individual mandate unconstitutional even though they were still, at that very moment, co-sponsors of the Wyden-Bennett Healthy Americans Act, which included an individual mandate.
“I would characterize the Washington, DC, relationship with the individual mandate as truly schizophrenic,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told me with some wonder.
Over the next decade, opposition to Obamacare became the central feature of Republican policy thought. This had two downstream consequences. One was that it wrecked the central political theory behind the Obamacare compromise — that Democrats, in giving up the policy advantages of single-payer, would gain the political benefits of bipartisan support — and sent Democrats toward Medicare-for-all, which is better at cutting costs, simpler to explain, and more difficult to challenge legally.
The other was that it forced Republicans to abandon a basically reasonable vision of health care policy and left them with, well, nothing. Opposing Obamacare isn’t a policy vision, but it had to be made into one, and so Republicans tried: They began attacking Obamacare’s weak spots — its high premiums and deductibles — and proposing to lower them by permitting insurers to once again discriminate against the sick and the old.
Deregulating the insurance market so healthy people could pay less for skimpier, higher-deductible care at the expense of their older, sicker neighbors — many of whom would now be uninsurable again — was not what people were asking for. But it’s what Republicans ended up embracing. It was all they had left. Every time they inched toward more popular ideas, like retaining protections for people with preexisting conditions, they quickly found themselves forced to support something too close to Obamacare.
The problem with the Republican health care vision is that it’s hideously unpopular; that’s why the GOP’s Obamacare replacement efforts collapsed. And it’s left Republicans with two choices. They can level with the public about their health care plan and lose the election or they can lie to the public about their health care plan in a bid to keep their jobs. So far, they’ve chosen lying.
Brazil great???
Decoding Bolsonaro’s “make Brazil great” foreign policy
Brazil’s new far-right leader could apply his nationalistic message in ways that will have consequences abroad.
By Jen Kirby
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new far-right president-elect, has promised to “make Brazil great again.”
For Bolsonaro and many of his supporters, that primarily means restoring “law and order” and rooting out government corruption. But that nationalistic message will have consequences outside Brazil’s borders, and could even shift the country’s role in the region and the world.
To be clear, Bolsonaro’s foreign policy is still coming into focus. He seemed muddled at times during the campaign — declaring he would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, for example, before changing his position and promising to stay in.
But he has expressed disdain for international institutions, including the United Nations, which he’s called a gathering “for communists” and threatened to leave. He has also said he prefers bilateral deals, especially on trade. But whether his stances hint at a real rejection of multilateral engagement or represent political pandering during campaign season will reveal themselves more clearly when he takes office on January 1.
Bolsonaro’s far-right views could also bring Brazil closer to more conservative governments in the region, such as Colombia and Chile. It may also mean tighter ties with the United States. The president-elect has often been compared to President Donald Trump and has expressed admiration for him in the past, telling supporters in the US last year, “Trump is an example to me ... I plan to get closer to him for the good of both Brazil and the United States. We can take his examples from here back to Brazil.”
The primary example Bolsonaro seems to have taken is Trump’s “Make America Great Again” strategy, reconfigured for Brazil. Bolsonaro promised — and his voters seem to crave — Brazil’s return “to the roots of religion, of character, of national pride,” Britta Crandall, a Latin American studies professor at Davidson College, told me. That means a focus inward on domestic priorities, such as cracking down on crime and corruption, that will restore Brazil’s status as a rising power. Bolsonaro is responding to the desire of Brazilians, Crandall, said, “to serve as a model for the world.”
Bolsonaro may shuffle regional and global partnerships
Bolsonaro’s campaign attacks against the leftist Workers’ Party in Brazil spilled over into his critiques of other left-leaning foreign governments. Given that, it seems likely that Brazil’s global partnerships may shift to reflect his worldview. And the obvious one here is Venezuela, which is dealing with a spiraling economic and political crisis under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Brazil’s leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known popularly as Lula), who was in power from 2003 to 2010, embraced a “South-South” policy — emphasizing partnerships with developing countries — and tried to build up Brazil’s influence in the region and the world. Lula also built strong ties with other left-leaning governments in the region, most notably Venezuela.
Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, largely maintained the status quo, though she wasn’t as foreign policy-oriented as Lula, and domestic problems, including a deepening recession, crept in during her tenure. Under current center-right President Michel Temer, who took over after Rousseff was impeached in 2016, Brazil’s relationship with Venezuela has become strained, heightened by a growing refugee crisis at the Venezuela-Brazil border.
Bolsonaro will likely be even tougher on Venezuela, given his past criticisms of the regime. During his campaign, he used the country’s current state of economic and political turmoil under Maduro as a way to dissuade voters from continuing to elect leftist leaders.
Shortly after Bolsonaro’s election, a report circulated in Brazilian media, attributed to a Colombian diplomat, that Colombia would support Bolsonaro should he attempt to oust Venezuela’s Maduro.
Colombian officials later rejected the news report — as did Bolsonaro’s likely future defense minister, who denied any plans for military action in Venezuela. But the existence of the report speaks to an impending shift in Brazil-Venezuela relations and Maduro’s increasing isolation in the region.
Bolsonaro could still increase pressure on Venezuela — and here is where a close friendship with the United States is likely to come in. The Trump administration has condemned Venezuela’s government for fomenting an escalating humanitarian and economic crisis, and has sanctioned top Venezuelan officials. Bolsonaro could turn out to be an eager partner in this campaign.
“Brazil will move closer to the US on the Venezuela issue, perhaps defending the application of economic sanctions against the Maduro government,” Maurício Santoro, a professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University, told the Financial Times on Tuesday.
A shift toward the US would not be insignificant. Relations between the two countries have sometimes been frosty, particularly when leftists held power in Brazil. But things look likely to change: Trump and Bolsonaro spoke after the latter’s victory. Both enthusiastically tweeted about their conversation and reaffirmed the partnership between the two countries.
There’s one small issue with closer Brazil-US relations: China. Brazil is one of China’s biggest trading partners, and some sectors of Brazil’s economy are benefiting from the US’s ongoing trade war with Beijing. But Bolsonaro has criticized China’s investments in Brazil’s economy, citing them as undue foreign influence.
These realities may constraint Bolsonaro in how deeply he can reorient Brazil’s foreign policy. But it’s clear that in some areas — most obviously with Venezuela — he looks poised to break with tradition in a big way.
How domestic politics could feed into Bolsonaro’s foreign policy
Bolsonaro has bashed the United Nations. He’s promised to move the Brazilian Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, following the US’s lead. And he threatened to withdraw from the Paris climate deal, though he eventually walked back that threat.
These promises seem straight from a Trumpian playbook, but how Bolsonaro will interact with multilateral institutions once he takes office is still an open question. For example, Bolsonaro may go along with the climate agreement, but his close ties to the agriculture and mining industries have raised fears that he will roll back environmental protections, particularly for the Amazon, and undermine global climate change goals. At the same time, despite his harsh words for the UN, he’s already called on the organization to help mitigate the Venezuelan refugee crisis.
A former military officer and congress member, Bolsonaro has never been known as a foreign policy specialist and will likely have to rely on the expertise of his ministers. His prospective defense minister, Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, a retired general, has said Brazil’s fundamental foreign policy rule will be “noninterference.” Another official from Bolsonaro’s party, Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Bragança, who’s a favorite for foreign minister, has embraced an isolationist approach, decrying foreign influence in Brazil.
But Bolsonaro’s campaign has been defined by his vow to put Brazil first. That may ultimately mean domestic priorities take precedent. Yet the new president — and Brazil — knows the whole world is watching. “There’s a real frustration among Brazilians. They’re embarrassed by the violence, by the corruption, by the crime,” Crandall said.
If Bolsonaro can reverse those trends, then Brazilians see that as a chance to regain their stature in the world. They feel that “Brazil is better than this,” Crandall said. “And that’s for the world to see as much as for the Brazilians.”
Brazil’s new far-right leader could apply his nationalistic message in ways that will have consequences abroad.
By Jen Kirby
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new far-right president-elect, has promised to “make Brazil great again.”
For Bolsonaro and many of his supporters, that primarily means restoring “law and order” and rooting out government corruption. But that nationalistic message will have consequences outside Brazil’s borders, and could even shift the country’s role in the region and the world.
To be clear, Bolsonaro’s foreign policy is still coming into focus. He seemed muddled at times during the campaign — declaring he would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, for example, before changing his position and promising to stay in.
But he has expressed disdain for international institutions, including the United Nations, which he’s called a gathering “for communists” and threatened to leave. He has also said he prefers bilateral deals, especially on trade. But whether his stances hint at a real rejection of multilateral engagement or represent political pandering during campaign season will reveal themselves more clearly when he takes office on January 1.
Bolsonaro’s far-right views could also bring Brazil closer to more conservative governments in the region, such as Colombia and Chile. It may also mean tighter ties with the United States. The president-elect has often been compared to President Donald Trump and has expressed admiration for him in the past, telling supporters in the US last year, “Trump is an example to me ... I plan to get closer to him for the good of both Brazil and the United States. We can take his examples from here back to Brazil.”
The primary example Bolsonaro seems to have taken is Trump’s “Make America Great Again” strategy, reconfigured for Brazil. Bolsonaro promised — and his voters seem to crave — Brazil’s return “to the roots of religion, of character, of national pride,” Britta Crandall, a Latin American studies professor at Davidson College, told me. That means a focus inward on domestic priorities, such as cracking down on crime and corruption, that will restore Brazil’s status as a rising power. Bolsonaro is responding to the desire of Brazilians, Crandall, said, “to serve as a model for the world.”
Bolsonaro may shuffle regional and global partnerships
Bolsonaro’s campaign attacks against the leftist Workers’ Party in Brazil spilled over into his critiques of other left-leaning foreign governments. Given that, it seems likely that Brazil’s global partnerships may shift to reflect his worldview. And the obvious one here is Venezuela, which is dealing with a spiraling economic and political crisis under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Brazil’s leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known popularly as Lula), who was in power from 2003 to 2010, embraced a “South-South” policy — emphasizing partnerships with developing countries — and tried to build up Brazil’s influence in the region and the world. Lula also built strong ties with other left-leaning governments in the region, most notably Venezuela.
Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, largely maintained the status quo, though she wasn’t as foreign policy-oriented as Lula, and domestic problems, including a deepening recession, crept in during her tenure. Under current center-right President Michel Temer, who took over after Rousseff was impeached in 2016, Brazil’s relationship with Venezuela has become strained, heightened by a growing refugee crisis at the Venezuela-Brazil border.
Bolsonaro will likely be even tougher on Venezuela, given his past criticisms of the regime. During his campaign, he used the country’s current state of economic and political turmoil under Maduro as a way to dissuade voters from continuing to elect leftist leaders.
Shortly after Bolsonaro’s election, a report circulated in Brazilian media, attributed to a Colombian diplomat, that Colombia would support Bolsonaro should he attempt to oust Venezuela’s Maduro.
Colombian officials later rejected the news report — as did Bolsonaro’s likely future defense minister, who denied any plans for military action in Venezuela. But the existence of the report speaks to an impending shift in Brazil-Venezuela relations and Maduro’s increasing isolation in the region.
Bolsonaro could still increase pressure on Venezuela — and here is where a close friendship with the United States is likely to come in. The Trump administration has condemned Venezuela’s government for fomenting an escalating humanitarian and economic crisis, and has sanctioned top Venezuelan officials. Bolsonaro could turn out to be an eager partner in this campaign.
“Brazil will move closer to the US on the Venezuela issue, perhaps defending the application of economic sanctions against the Maduro government,” Maurício Santoro, a professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University, told the Financial Times on Tuesday.
A shift toward the US would not be insignificant. Relations between the two countries have sometimes been frosty, particularly when leftists held power in Brazil. But things look likely to change: Trump and Bolsonaro spoke after the latter’s victory. Both enthusiastically tweeted about their conversation and reaffirmed the partnership between the two countries.
There’s one small issue with closer Brazil-US relations: China. Brazil is one of China’s biggest trading partners, and some sectors of Brazil’s economy are benefiting from the US’s ongoing trade war with Beijing. But Bolsonaro has criticized China’s investments in Brazil’s economy, citing them as undue foreign influence.
These realities may constraint Bolsonaro in how deeply he can reorient Brazil’s foreign policy. But it’s clear that in some areas — most obviously with Venezuela — he looks poised to break with tradition in a big way.
How domestic politics could feed into Bolsonaro’s foreign policy
Bolsonaro has bashed the United Nations. He’s promised to move the Brazilian Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, following the US’s lead. And he threatened to withdraw from the Paris climate deal, though he eventually walked back that threat.
These promises seem straight from a Trumpian playbook, but how Bolsonaro will interact with multilateral institutions once he takes office is still an open question. For example, Bolsonaro may go along with the climate agreement, but his close ties to the agriculture and mining industries have raised fears that he will roll back environmental protections, particularly for the Amazon, and undermine global climate change goals. At the same time, despite his harsh words for the UN, he’s already called on the organization to help mitigate the Venezuelan refugee crisis.
A former military officer and congress member, Bolsonaro has never been known as a foreign policy specialist and will likely have to rely on the expertise of his ministers. His prospective defense minister, Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, a retired general, has said Brazil’s fundamental foreign policy rule will be “noninterference.” Another official from Bolsonaro’s party, Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Bragança, who’s a favorite for foreign minister, has embraced an isolationist approach, decrying foreign influence in Brazil.
But Bolsonaro’s campaign has been defined by his vow to put Brazil first. That may ultimately mean domestic priorities take precedent. Yet the new president — and Brazil — knows the whole world is watching. “There’s a real frustration among Brazilians. They’re embarrassed by the violence, by the corruption, by the crime,” Crandall said.
If Bolsonaro can reverse those trends, then Brazilians see that as a chance to regain their stature in the world. They feel that “Brazil is better than this,” Crandall said. “And that’s for the world to see as much as for the Brazilians.”
A really bad idea.....
How to cool the planet with a fake volcano
If the world doesn’t get its act together on climate change, this could be our last resort.
By Dylan Matthews and Byrd Pinkerton
Nature has a method of cooling the planet very rapidly: volcanos.
Volcanic eruptions have, historically, caused sudden (but temporary) changes to global climate. The sulfur particles they shoot into the atmosphere reflect sunlight back at the sun, reducing temperatures back on the ground. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines caused a reduction in Northern Hemisphere temperatures of about 0.6 degrees Celsius; for comparison, man-made global warming has heated the planet by about 1 degree Celsius so far, and a United Nations report this fall urged policymakers to limit total warming to 1.5 degrees.
The scale of volcanic cooling has given some climate scientists an idea: Could we forestall the worst consequences of global warming by spraying sulfur particles into the atmosphere — basically, by using technology to emulate a massive volcano?
In the latest episode of Future Perfect, we explain solar geoengineering, as experts call this idea. If it sounds scary to you, it should! It has for years been a somewhat taboo subject among scientists. Spraying chemicals into the atmosphere sounded outlandish and reckless, and, worst of all, like a distraction from the key task of reducing carbon emissions. And to be clear, we absolutely need to reduce climate emissions, no matter what.
But as the US withdraws from the Paris climate deal, and Brazil’s new far-right president threatens to do the same, scientists and advocates are increasingly recognizing that we need to research unconventional ways to fight climate change. And they see solar geoengineering as a last resort to prevent utter catastrophe. We might need to know how to do it, even if we just keep it behind a glass door marked “Break in Case of Emergency.”
And we need to be talking about it in case one country decides to go it alone and geoengineer without international cooperation. Given that any government could conceivably engage in this project for only about $10 billion a year (a pittance for a number of large or rich countries affected by climate change, like India, China, or the whole developed world), it will become very tempting for a country looking to avoid displacing citizens due to sea level rise, or trying to prevent catastrophic weather events, to spray aerosols into the atmosphere unilaterally.
“I don’t know whether that’ll happen in five or 10 or 50 years,” Gernot Wagner, a Harvard economist and expert on geoengineering, told us, “but somebody somewhere will attempt to pull the trigger on this. And even if you think it’s nuts that anyone would consider this to be part of a semi-rational climate policy portfolio … wouldn’t it be good to know more about this technology, about the impact, about the efficacy, about the risks, if and when somebody is compelled to pull the trigger?”
If the world doesn’t get its act together on climate change, this could be our last resort.
By Dylan Matthews and Byrd Pinkerton
Nature has a method of cooling the planet very rapidly: volcanos.
Volcanic eruptions have, historically, caused sudden (but temporary) changes to global climate. The sulfur particles they shoot into the atmosphere reflect sunlight back at the sun, reducing temperatures back on the ground. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines caused a reduction in Northern Hemisphere temperatures of about 0.6 degrees Celsius; for comparison, man-made global warming has heated the planet by about 1 degree Celsius so far, and a United Nations report this fall urged policymakers to limit total warming to 1.5 degrees.
The scale of volcanic cooling has given some climate scientists an idea: Could we forestall the worst consequences of global warming by spraying sulfur particles into the atmosphere — basically, by using technology to emulate a massive volcano?
In the latest episode of Future Perfect, we explain solar geoengineering, as experts call this idea. If it sounds scary to you, it should! It has for years been a somewhat taboo subject among scientists. Spraying chemicals into the atmosphere sounded outlandish and reckless, and, worst of all, like a distraction from the key task of reducing carbon emissions. And to be clear, we absolutely need to reduce climate emissions, no matter what.
But as the US withdraws from the Paris climate deal, and Brazil’s new far-right president threatens to do the same, scientists and advocates are increasingly recognizing that we need to research unconventional ways to fight climate change. And they see solar geoengineering as a last resort to prevent utter catastrophe. We might need to know how to do it, even if we just keep it behind a glass door marked “Break in Case of Emergency.”
And we need to be talking about it in case one country decides to go it alone and geoengineer without international cooperation. Given that any government could conceivably engage in this project for only about $10 billion a year (a pittance for a number of large or rich countries affected by climate change, like India, China, or the whole developed world), it will become very tempting for a country looking to avoid displacing citizens due to sea level rise, or trying to prevent catastrophic weather events, to spray aerosols into the atmosphere unilaterally.
“I don’t know whether that’ll happen in five or 10 or 50 years,” Gernot Wagner, a Harvard economist and expert on geoengineering, told us, “but somebody somewhere will attempt to pull the trigger on this. And even if you think it’s nuts that anyone would consider this to be part of a semi-rational climate policy portfolio … wouldn’t it be good to know more about this technology, about the impact, about the efficacy, about the risks, if and when somebody is compelled to pull the trigger?”
Same Deadly Weapon
Pittsburgh Shooter Used the Same Deadly Weapon That Led to Mass Murders in Parkland and Las Vegas
A 97-year-old Holocaust survivor was among the 11 who died.
ARI BERMAN
At a press conference Sunday morning, federal officials announced new details about the deadly shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue Saturday morning. They said the accused gunman Roberts Bowers killed 11 people, ranging from 54 to 97 years old. The victims included a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor, a pair of brothers, and a husband and wife.
The 46-year-old Bowers used three Glock .357 handguns and an AR-15 assault rifle, the same weapon used in mass shootings that have taken place in Parkland, Las Vegas, San Bernardino, Newtown, Orlando, and Aurora.
The attack is being treated as a hate crime, and Bowers will make his first appearance in court Monday to face 29 federal charges. Scott Brady, the US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said Bowers “made statements about genocide and his desire to kill Jewish people.” According to the criminal complaint, Bowers said during his deadly attack “They’re committing genocide to my people. I just want to kill Jews.”
Bowers’ social media posts indicate he blamed Jewish organizations, specifically the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), for helping to bring refugees to the US. He frequently posted about the migrant “caravan” from Central America that Donald Trump and conservative news outlets have repeatedly highlighted as bringing “an onslaught of illegal aliens” in recent weeks. Yesterday, just before he entered the synagogue, Bowers wrote on the social network Gab, which hosts extremist right-wing views, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
The Pittsburgh shooting has reignited the national debate over gun control. Donald Trump said on Saturday that the shooting could have been prevented with armed guards at the synagogue and dismissed the need for stricter gun laws. At the press conference on Sunday, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, rejected his dismissal, saying, “I think the approach we need to be looking at is how we can take the guns, which is the common denominator of every mass shooting in America, out of those that are looking to express hatred and murder.”
Trump held a campaign rally on Saturday night in southern Illinois, where he said “this evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us,” and then ended the night by tweeting about the flawed managerial decisions of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.
A 97-year-old Holocaust survivor was among the 11 who died.
ARI BERMAN
At a press conference Sunday morning, federal officials announced new details about the deadly shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue Saturday morning. They said the accused gunman Roberts Bowers killed 11 people, ranging from 54 to 97 years old. The victims included a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor, a pair of brothers, and a husband and wife.
The 46-year-old Bowers used three Glock .357 handguns and an AR-15 assault rifle, the same weapon used in mass shootings that have taken place in Parkland, Las Vegas, San Bernardino, Newtown, Orlando, and Aurora.
The attack is being treated as a hate crime, and Bowers will make his first appearance in court Monday to face 29 federal charges. Scott Brady, the US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said Bowers “made statements about genocide and his desire to kill Jewish people.” According to the criminal complaint, Bowers said during his deadly attack “They’re committing genocide to my people. I just want to kill Jews.”
Bowers’ social media posts indicate he blamed Jewish organizations, specifically the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), for helping to bring refugees to the US. He frequently posted about the migrant “caravan” from Central America that Donald Trump and conservative news outlets have repeatedly highlighted as bringing “an onslaught of illegal aliens” in recent weeks. Yesterday, just before he entered the synagogue, Bowers wrote on the social network Gab, which hosts extremist right-wing views, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
The Pittsburgh shooting has reignited the national debate over gun control. Donald Trump said on Saturday that the shooting could have been prevented with armed guards at the synagogue and dismissed the need for stricter gun laws. At the press conference on Sunday, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, rejected his dismissal, saying, “I think the approach we need to be looking at is how we can take the guns, which is the common denominator of every mass shooting in America, out of those that are looking to express hatred and murder.”
Trump held a campaign rally on Saturday night in southern Illinois, where he said “this evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us,” and then ended the night by tweeting about the flawed managerial decisions of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.
Media Is Repeating Lies
The Media Is Repeating Trump’s Lies About Birthright Citizenship
While an Axios reporter appears visibly thrilled with having goaded Trump into an explosive, anti-immigrant quote.
INAE OH
On Tuesday, Axios released the first clip of its upcoming four-part HBO series, which featured President Donald Trump floating the possibility of ending birthright citizenship for babies of non-US citizens and undocumented immigrants, a constitutional right enshrined in the 14th Amendment.
“Some legal scholars believe you can get rid of birthright citizenship without changing the Constitution,” reporter Jonathan Swan asserts to Trump in the interview. Trump then interrupts to finish Swan’s thoughts, “with an executive order.”
“Exactly!” he replies, appearing visibly thrilled with the prospect of having goaded Trump into an explosive, anti-immigrant quote. “Tell me more!” Swan encourages the president.
As the clip continues, Trump goes on to incorrectly complain that the United States was the only country in the world to offer birthright citizenship. In reality, at least 30 countries worldwide offer it. According to Trump, though, that right has unfairly provided benefits to people he apparently believes are undeserving of them. “It’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous,” he says. “And it has to end.”
The interview continues, but Swan doesn’t counter the president’s blatant falsehood. It was then breathlessly repeated in headlines without qualification or mention that the proposal is likely unconstitutional.
As many noted the dangers of failing to fact-check the president, Axios eventually added a note to the clip’s corresponding post. The Associated Press also deleted its tweet reiterating Trump’s remarks without context.
While Trump probably lacks the legal authority to carry out his supposed plans for an executive order, the mere raising of its possibility has likely already accomplished what the Trump administration has often sought to do with such issues, and that is to threaten his targets with fear-mongering rhetoric while at the same time fomenting his base. Trump has escalated those tactics in the final push ahead of the midterms, and his latest threat of an executive order fits right into the pattern.
While an Axios reporter appears visibly thrilled with having goaded Trump into an explosive, anti-immigrant quote.
INAE OH
On Tuesday, Axios released the first clip of its upcoming four-part HBO series, which featured President Donald Trump floating the possibility of ending birthright citizenship for babies of non-US citizens and undocumented immigrants, a constitutional right enshrined in the 14th Amendment.
“Some legal scholars believe you can get rid of birthright citizenship without changing the Constitution,” reporter Jonathan Swan asserts to Trump in the interview. Trump then interrupts to finish Swan’s thoughts, “with an executive order.”
“Exactly!” he replies, appearing visibly thrilled with the prospect of having goaded Trump into an explosive, anti-immigrant quote. “Tell me more!” Swan encourages the president.
As the clip continues, Trump goes on to incorrectly complain that the United States was the only country in the world to offer birthright citizenship. In reality, at least 30 countries worldwide offer it. According to Trump, though, that right has unfairly provided benefits to people he apparently believes are undeserving of them. “It’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous,” he says. “And it has to end.”
The interview continues, but Swan doesn’t counter the president’s blatant falsehood. It was then breathlessly repeated in headlines without qualification or mention that the proposal is likely unconstitutional.
As many noted the dangers of failing to fact-check the president, Axios eventually added a note to the clip’s corresponding post. The Associated Press also deleted its tweet reiterating Trump’s remarks without context.
While Trump probably lacks the legal authority to carry out his supposed plans for an executive order, the mere raising of its possibility has likely already accomplished what the Trump administration has often sought to do with such issues, and that is to threaten his targets with fear-mongering rhetoric while at the same time fomenting his base. Trump has escalated those tactics in the final push ahead of the midterms, and his latest threat of an executive order fits right into the pattern.
Ended Its NRA Discount
FedEx Just Ended Its NRA Discount
After Parkland, the shipping giant had refused to cut ties with the gun group.
KARA VOGHT
Days after a mass shooting at at Pittsburgh synagogue left 11 people dead, FedEx announced it would no longer offer discounts to National Rifle Association members, according to Reuters. It’s the latest organization to sever ties with the gun rights group in the wake of mass shootings that have sparked nationwide demands for stricter gun laws—legislation the NRA adamantly opposes.
More than a dozen companies dropped the discounts and special offers they awarded NRA members in the wake of the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Those businesses included First National Bank, Delta, and United Airlines. The decisions came in response to a pressure from gun violence prevention advocates, who waged a campaign on social media with the hashtag #BoycottNRA.
But FedEx, which provided up to a 26-percent discount rate to NRA Business Alliance members through its FedEx Advantage program, stuck with the controversial gun rights group after Parkland. At the time, the company released a statement affirming that it would continue to provide benefits to the group’s members because it had never changed rates “in response to their politics, beliefs or positions on issues,” even though the FedEx’s positions on “issues of gun policy and safety differ from those of the National Rifle Association.” At the end of February, ThinkProgress reported that FedEx’s refusal to sever its relationship with the NRA occurred in the larger context of the company’s efforts to court the business of gun manufacturers.
Now, the shipping giant has reversed course. Though the decision comes just three days after the Pittsburgh massacre, Reuters reported that it had nothing to do with any particular shooting. According to the news outlet, the NRA is among the several organizations FedEx plans to move to a new pricing program because the gun rights group apparently did not generate enough business to make a bespoke discount deal worthwhile.
FedEx has had its own first-hand experience with gun violence. In 2014, a FedEx package handler shot six colleagues at the company’s suburban Atlanta facility before killing himself.
After Parkland, the shipping giant had refused to cut ties with the gun group.
KARA VOGHT
Days after a mass shooting at at Pittsburgh synagogue left 11 people dead, FedEx announced it would no longer offer discounts to National Rifle Association members, according to Reuters. It’s the latest organization to sever ties with the gun rights group in the wake of mass shootings that have sparked nationwide demands for stricter gun laws—legislation the NRA adamantly opposes.
More than a dozen companies dropped the discounts and special offers they awarded NRA members in the wake of the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Those businesses included First National Bank, Delta, and United Airlines. The decisions came in response to a pressure from gun violence prevention advocates, who waged a campaign on social media with the hashtag #BoycottNRA.
But FedEx, which provided up to a 26-percent discount rate to NRA Business Alliance members through its FedEx Advantage program, stuck with the controversial gun rights group after Parkland. At the time, the company released a statement affirming that it would continue to provide benefits to the group’s members because it had never changed rates “in response to their politics, beliefs or positions on issues,” even though the FedEx’s positions on “issues of gun policy and safety differ from those of the National Rifle Association.” At the end of February, ThinkProgress reported that FedEx’s refusal to sever its relationship with the NRA occurred in the larger context of the company’s efforts to court the business of gun manufacturers.
Now, the shipping giant has reversed course. Though the decision comes just three days after the Pittsburgh massacre, Reuters reported that it had nothing to do with any particular shooting. According to the news outlet, the NRA is among the several organizations FedEx plans to move to a new pricing program because the gun rights group apparently did not generate enough business to make a bespoke discount deal worthwhile.
FedEx has had its own first-hand experience with gun violence. In 2014, a FedEx package handler shot six colleagues at the company’s suburban Atlanta facility before killing himself.
92 percent of the time
This Republican Congressman Has Really Twisted Himself Into a Pretzel With This One
Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder has voted with the president 92 percent of the time but says his Democratic opponent wouldn’t stand up to Trump, probably.
OLIVIA EXSTRUM
Kevin Yoder, a Republican congressman who is facing a tough reelection battle in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, is criticizing his Democratic opponent, Sharice Davids, for failing to stand up to President Donald Trump—even though Yoder himself consistently votes with Trump and carries the president’s endorsement.
“What is it in her track record that tells us she would actually stand up to President Trump when she worked for him?” Yoder said in a story in the Kansas City Star last week. “She worked for the agenda. I just think it seems to be a pretty weak promise…when she already had a chance to do it and she didn’t.”
Yoder is referring to Davids’ participation in the prestigious, yearlong White House fellowship program. Although her fellowship began in August 2016, while former President Barack Obama was in office, it continued into the Trump administration. Davids dismissed the claim to the Star, and a University of Kansas political scientist pointed out in the article that the fellowship in question is essentially a “nonpartisan internship.”
Davids is an openly gay professional mixed-martial arts fighter who hopes to become the first Native American woman elected to Congress. She’s a Democrat who supports Medicaid expansion and gun control and has been critical of Yoder’s support for the president and of Trump himself. Yoder, on the other hand, has voted with Trump 92 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, and was first endorsed by the president in July after he included $5 billion for a border wall in the Department of Homeland Security budget bill in his capacity as chair of the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee.
Yoder preemptively defended himself, telling the Star that he protested the family separation policy in the DHS congressional committee. However, as McClatchy notes, Yoder ultimately voted for a hardline immigration bill, sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), later that week.
In the candidates’ first and only debate before the midterms Tuesday, Yoder made a point of saying he’s willing to stand up to Trump when he disagrees with him. He then accused Davids of “rooting against” Trump—despite his earlier criticism that she wouldn’t stand up to him. Davids shot back by saying Yoder “votes with this president through thick and thin.”
According to the most recent polling, Davids leads Yoder by 9 points. The Kansas district was the only one in the state to narrowly voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder has voted with the president 92 percent of the time but says his Democratic opponent wouldn’t stand up to Trump, probably.
OLIVIA EXSTRUM
Kevin Yoder, a Republican congressman who is facing a tough reelection battle in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, is criticizing his Democratic opponent, Sharice Davids, for failing to stand up to President Donald Trump—even though Yoder himself consistently votes with Trump and carries the president’s endorsement.
“What is it in her track record that tells us she would actually stand up to President Trump when she worked for him?” Yoder said in a story in the Kansas City Star last week. “She worked for the agenda. I just think it seems to be a pretty weak promise…when she already had a chance to do it and she didn’t.”
Yoder is referring to Davids’ participation in the prestigious, yearlong White House fellowship program. Although her fellowship began in August 2016, while former President Barack Obama was in office, it continued into the Trump administration. Davids dismissed the claim to the Star, and a University of Kansas political scientist pointed out in the article that the fellowship in question is essentially a “nonpartisan internship.”
Davids is an openly gay professional mixed-martial arts fighter who hopes to become the first Native American woman elected to Congress. She’s a Democrat who supports Medicaid expansion and gun control and has been critical of Yoder’s support for the president and of Trump himself. Yoder, on the other hand, has voted with Trump 92 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, and was first endorsed by the president in July after he included $5 billion for a border wall in the Department of Homeland Security budget bill in his capacity as chair of the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee.
Yoder preemptively defended himself, telling the Star that he protested the family separation policy in the DHS congressional committee. However, as McClatchy notes, Yoder ultimately voted for a hardline immigration bill, sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), later that week.
In the candidates’ first and only debate before the midterms Tuesday, Yoder made a point of saying he’s willing to stand up to Trump when he disagrees with him. He then accused Davids of “rooting against” Trump—despite his earlier criticism that she wouldn’t stand up to him. Davids shot back by saying Yoder “votes with this president through thick and thin.”
According to the most recent polling, Davids leads Yoder by 9 points. The Kansas district was the only one in the state to narrowly voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Mars 2020 Parachute a Go
Third ASPIRE Test Confirms Mars 2020 Parachute a Go
In the early hours of Sept. 7, NASA broke a world record.
Less than 2 minutes after the launch of a 58-foot-tall (17.7-meter) Black Brant IX sounding rocket, a payload separated and began its dive back through Earth's atmosphere. When onboard sensors determined the payload had reached the appropriate height and Mach number (38 kilometers altitude, Mach 1.8), the payload deployed a parachute. Within four-tenths of a second, the 180-pound parachute billowed out from being a solid cylinder to being fully inflated.
It was the fastest inflation in history of a parachute this size and created a peak load of almost 70,000 pounds of force.
This wasn't just any parachute. The mass of nylon, Technora and Kevlar fibers that make up the parachute will play an integral part in landing NASA's state-of-the-art Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet in February 2021. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) project conducted a series of sounding rocket tests to help decide which parachute design to use on the Mars 2020 mission.
Two different parachutes were evaluated during ASPIRE. The first test flight carried almost an exact copy of the parachute used to land NASA's Mars Science Laboratory successfully on the Red Planet in 2012. The second and third tests carried chutes of similar dimensions but reinforced with stronger materials and stitching.
On Oct. 3, NASA's Mars 2020 mission management and members of its Entry, Descent, and Landing team met at JPL in Pasadena, California, and determined that the strengthened parachute had passed its tests and was ready for its Martian debut.
"Mars 2020 will be carrying the heaviest payload yet to the surface of Mars, and like all our prior Mars missions, we only have one parachute and it has to work," said John McNamee, project manager of Mars 2020 at JPL. "The ASPIRE tests have shown in remarkable detail how our parachute will react when it is first deployed into a supersonic flow high above Mars. And let me tell you, it looks beautiful."
The 67,000-pound (37,000-kilogram) load was the highest ever survived by a supersonic parachute. That's about an 85-percent higher load than what scientists would expect the Mars 2020 parachute to encounter during its deployment in Mars' atmosphere.
"Earth's atmosphere near the surface is much denser than that near the Martian surface, by about 100 times," said Ian Clark, the test's technical lead from JPL. "But high up – around 23 miles (37 kilometers) – the atmospheric density on Earth is very similar to 6 miles (10 kilometers) above Mars, which happens to be the altitude that Mars 2020 will deploy its parachute."
With the ASPIRE tests complete, the endeavors of Clark and his compatriots will be confined to the lower part of the stratosphere for the time being. But that doesn't mean the fun times are over.
"We are all about helping 2020 stick its landing 28 months from now," said Clark. "I may not get to shoot rockets to the edge of space for a while, but when it comes to Mars – and when it comes to getting there and getting down there safely – there are always exciting challenges to work on around here."
The Mars 2020 project's parachute-testing series, ASPIRE, is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with support from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, for NASA's Space Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Sounding Rocket Program is based at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Northrop Grumman provides mission planning, engineering services and field operations through the NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract. NASA's Heliophysics Division manages the sounding-rocket program for the agency.
In the early hours of Sept. 7, NASA broke a world record.
Less than 2 minutes after the launch of a 58-foot-tall (17.7-meter) Black Brant IX sounding rocket, a payload separated and began its dive back through Earth's atmosphere. When onboard sensors determined the payload had reached the appropriate height and Mach number (38 kilometers altitude, Mach 1.8), the payload deployed a parachute. Within four-tenths of a second, the 180-pound parachute billowed out from being a solid cylinder to being fully inflated.
 |
| In this image, the second stage of the Black Brant IX sounding rocket separates from the ASPIRE payload. |
It was the fastest inflation in history of a parachute this size and created a peak load of almost 70,000 pounds of force.
This wasn't just any parachute. The mass of nylon, Technora and Kevlar fibers that make up the parachute will play an integral part in landing NASA's state-of-the-art Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet in February 2021. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) project conducted a series of sounding rocket tests to help decide which parachute design to use on the Mars 2020 mission.
Two different parachutes were evaluated during ASPIRE. The first test flight carried almost an exact copy of the parachute used to land NASA's Mars Science Laboratory successfully on the Red Planet in 2012. The second and third tests carried chutes of similar dimensions but reinforced with stronger materials and stitching.
On Oct. 3, NASA's Mars 2020 mission management and members of its Entry, Descent, and Landing team met at JPL in Pasadena, California, and determined that the strengthened parachute had passed its tests and was ready for its Martian debut.
"Mars 2020 will be carrying the heaviest payload yet to the surface of Mars, and like all our prior Mars missions, we only have one parachute and it has to work," said John McNamee, project manager of Mars 2020 at JPL. "The ASPIRE tests have shown in remarkable detail how our parachute will react when it is first deployed into a supersonic flow high above Mars. And let me tell you, it looks beautiful."
The 67,000-pound (37,000-kilogram) load was the highest ever survived by a supersonic parachute. That's about an 85-percent higher load than what scientists would expect the Mars 2020 parachute to encounter during its deployment in Mars' atmosphere.
"Earth's atmosphere near the surface is much denser than that near the Martian surface, by about 100 times," said Ian Clark, the test's technical lead from JPL. "But high up – around 23 miles (37 kilometers) – the atmospheric density on Earth is very similar to 6 miles (10 kilometers) above Mars, which happens to be the altitude that Mars 2020 will deploy its parachute."
With the ASPIRE tests complete, the endeavors of Clark and his compatriots will be confined to the lower part of the stratosphere for the time being. But that doesn't mean the fun times are over.
"We are all about helping 2020 stick its landing 28 months from now," said Clark. "I may not get to shoot rockets to the edge of space for a while, but when it comes to Mars – and when it comes to getting there and getting down there safely – there are always exciting challenges to work on around here."
The Mars 2020 project's parachute-testing series, ASPIRE, is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with support from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, for NASA's Space Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Sounding Rocket Program is based at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Northrop Grumman provides mission planning, engineering services and field operations through the NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract. NASA's Heliophysics Division manages the sounding-rocket program for the agency.
R Leporis - The blood Star...
Walking Into trap?
David Axelrod: Democrats Are Walking Into Trump’s Trap
David Axelrod on 2020, his prediction for the midterms and whether he sees any politician who can recapture the Obama magic.
By TIM ALBERTA
David Axelrod doesn’t like the path the country—or the Democratic Party—is on.
The chief strategist who steered Barack Obama’s winning White House campaigns worries that President Donald Trump has laid a trap—and that his party is walking right into it. “Escalation breeds escalation,” Axelrod said in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “And within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries. He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so, there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.”
Stressing that “civility actually is a really important element of politics,” Axelrod criticized Hillary Clinton and former Attorney General Eric Holder for recent comments they’ve made, and described the backlash he has faced for urging Democrats to avoid confrontation. The best way to defeat Trump, Axelrod argued, is by nominating someone who can appeal to an exhausted electorate.
“I don’t think people will be looking for a Democratic version of Trump,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll be looking for people who can go jibe for jibe and low blow for low blow. I think people are going to be looking for someone who can pull this country out of this hothouse that we’re in.”
At his offices in Chicago, where he directs the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, we discussed Axelrod’s predictions for the midterm elections, the risk of overreach with a new House majority, and the strengths and vulnerabilities of the top-tier 2020 Democratic hopefuls.
This transcript has been edited for length, readability and clarity.
ALBERTA: We had a string of bomb threats [last] week. Your former boss, President Obama, was one target, and your current employer, CNN, was another one. I just wonder where you see the country now in terms of the escalating polarization that we’ve been witnessing, and if there’s any way to bring the temperature down?
AXELROD: I think that what we’ve discovered is that there is political capital in polarization; there’s political capital in incitement. The president’s a master at it. But there are also consequences to that. We’re a country of 330 million people, and there are people out there whose violent inclinations are going to be activated by what they hear. And so, the question is whether the country itself demands something different.
I know it is unpopular to say this among some of my own friends, but escalation breeds escalation, and one of the things that troubles me—civility actually is a really important element of politics. We’ve had uncivil times before. We’ve had civil war, so it’s not like this is new to American politics, but we need to somehow find some common qualities in each other, common concerns that join us as Americans and we have to stop this mad cycle. I’ve been very critical of the president because I think he has incited and encouraged violence through his rhetoric. You know, people tweeted back to me and said, “Well, do you still think we should be civil?” and I’m trying to understand what that means. Does that mean that if they send out bombs, we should send out bombs? That, to me, is a mad cycle that leads only to really dark places.
ALBERTA: To your point about escalation begetting escalation, Hillary Clinton came under fire recently for her comment that Democrats cannot be civil with Republicans right now.
AXELROD: I think she rightly came out after she and President Clinton were the target of this attempted bombing, and said, ‘We need to come together as a country.’ But you know, you can’t say in one week, ‘We should be uncivil,’ and then the next week say, ‘Come together.’ We need to have a consistent commitment to that. And within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries. He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.
ALBERTA: So, here we are on the doorstep of the midterm elections, and for first-term presidents, the first midterm historically is always a little bit rocky. You lived through one of those back in 2010. Sorry to remind you.
AXELROD: Yes, rocky would be an understatement. I was completely drowned by the wave in 2010.
ALBERTA: You knew that it was going to be a rough year; you knew Democrats were probably going to lose the House. But how surprised were you and the president at just how big that wave wound up being?
AXELROD: I told President-elect Obama—we had a briefing on December 16, it was so searing, I’ll never forget the date—at our transition office, where we got briefed on the state of the economy. And it wasn’t pervasively known just how severe the crisis was at that moment; it really was in the next few weeks and months that the depths of it became completely clear. And I walked out of that briefing and I said, 'We are going to get our asses kicked in the midterms.' It was just unavoidable. The depths of it were—I wouldn’t say surprising, but depressing. Clearly, the margin was. I always say, we lost 63, but Roosevelt lost 78 in 1938, so we did better than Roosevelt.
ALBERTA: 2018 has been a roller coaster of an election cycle—Democrats are poised to take back the House, but Republicans are playing on such a favorable Senate map. From 30,000 feet, fill in this blank: The smartest thing Democrats have done in this cycle, strategically, is what?
AXELROD: I think the smartest thing has been to generally talk about issues that actually touch people’s lives, like health care, which I think has been a really galvanic issue for a lot of candidates out there. Back in 2010, Republicans ran against the Affordable Care Act, and that was central to everything they did. Now, they’re trying to run toward at least the principle of it, and even though they don’t have a plausible plan to protect people with pre-existing conditions, I think they now understand that the Affordable Care Act has spoken to real-life concerns of people.
ALBERTA: And from a strategic standpoint, what is the smartest thing you have seen Republicans do in this cycle?
AXELROD: I’ve thought one of the most interesting hinge moments in this race has been around the Kavanaugh hearings. Midday after Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford testified, it looked like a disaster for Republicans, and they made a decision—and I think it was a decision the president was involved in, and McConnell and others—that they were going to go tribal on the thing, and by the afternoon, that’s when they started talking about Democratic mobs, Democratic tactics, and making it a test of sort of party loyalty. They needed to light a tribal fire. What happens in midterm elections often is that the party in power—the voters of the party in power become complacent. And I think the president, by blowing out that issue in ways that I think were unfortunate—this caravan arrived at just the perfect time for him, because immigration is a hot-button issue for his voters. So, I think that’s why, as we sit here today, they’re sending troops to the border. They’re doing everything they can.
ALBERTA: So, look into your crystal ball. You feel as though the Senate is probably out of reach, but do Democrats take back the House? And if so, by what margin?
AXELROD: I’ve always thought that Democrats will take the House back. I’ve always thought that 30 seats would be a good showing. On the average, the party out of power wins 32 seats. Given everything—all of the sort of structural obstacles because of redistricting—30 seats would be an accomplishment. I still think they’re going to land in that zone, and I don’t think it’s likely to go much higher. I think the Senate—I’ve said from the beginning that if Democrats could hold the margin at 51-49, given the historic obstacles they face, that would be an accomplishment. It may be that Republicans add a seat or two.
There are a couple of other storylines I’d watch on election night. One is governorships. I think Democrats are going to take a significant number of statehouses, which is not inconsequential going into both the presidential election and redistricting. So, you look at states—including Florida and a crescent from Kansas to Iowa across the Midwest all the way to Pennsylvania—and I think Democrats are going to make some significant gains in governorships. And the last part of that storyline is, when you consider the states that delivered the presidency to Trump—Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania—you’ve got incumbent Democratic senators up in all of those states. I think it’s more likely than not that every one of those senators is going to be reelected, and that you’re going to see governorship[s] shift in several of those states.
So, I think that should be a sobering result for the White House and for Republicans, and it has some augurings for 2020.
ALBERTA: There are two big questions looming, and they’re interconnected, if in fact Democrats take back the House. The first pertains to the danger of Democratic overreach; the second pertains to who is the leader of the Democratic Party. Take the second part first: Many Democrats across the country have said they will not vote for Nancy Pelosi. But if Democrats do take control of the House, do you think Pelosi becomes speaker?
AXELROD: I worked with Nancy Pelosi when I was in the White House. Much of what was accomplished would not have been accomplished without her, because she is a tough, canny, effective leader of the caucus. I think she will have a strong sense of where she is, and I would never bet against her in an internal vote. I also don’t think that Democratic members are going to deliver the leadership of the House to the Republican Party. That said, I think it’s not entirely clear what’s going to happen, and it’s not clear who the alternative is going to be. A secret ballot is a treacherous path. So, we’ll see. That will certainly be an interesting story. One thing I would say is that there’s no doubt that if Pelosi survives, she’s going to have to make accommodations to these younger members who are restive. You’ve got three leaders who are all in their upper-70s, and there’s a restlessness among members to shake up the dynamic there and advance some of the younger members.
ALBERTA: And what about the risk of overreach? Do you see any danger for Democrats if they take back the House and there’s a push toward impeachment, or they go too far with their oversight? How do they thread that needle?
AXELROD: Well, look, there was talk of impeachment almost after Trump got elected. I’ve been opposed to that. Every political norm that you break, process norm that you break, it’s very hard to put that genie back in the bottle. And my argument was that impeachment can’t be a political tool, even though it is to some degree. But it hasn’t been invoked very often, and it ought to be on solid grounds, and there’s a probe going on that will yield some information and judgments, and people ought to act on the basis of that.
I have to tell you, Bob Mueller was the FBI director when I was in the White House. I was in a couple of meetings with him, and I never said a word in those, frankly, because he scared the shit out of me. I mean, he is the portrait of rectitude. And I’ve told Democrats, 'Look, if Bob Mueller comes back and says there’s nothing there, then I’m willing to say I believe that, because I know that he’ll have been thorough in his investigation. But if he comes back with something that is damning, then I think Democrats have an obligation to act.'
And likewise, I think that the complete absence of oversight in the first two years of the Trump administration has been a dereliction on the part of Republicans; they simply won’t do it. Oversight is necessary, it’s part of the job of Congress, and there are egregious things that are happening that need to be looked into. But in each and every case, it ought to be done on the premise of sound evidence, and not just for malicious purposes or malicious mischief—like the sort we saw under the Obama administration when the Republicans took control of the Congress. The real danger for the country is this sense of a kind of bloodless coup, or that the system isn’t legitimate, and so on. As people who believe in government and the importance of government, Democrats need to proceed in a way that is respectful of the process, even if the president is not.
ALBERTA: Looking to 2020, it’s very possible that Trump has maxed-out his base. You were referencing in the Midwest earlier, for all the talk of how Trump may have redrawn the electoral map in some sort of a durable way, the fact is that Mitt Romney won more votes in Wisconsin in 2012 than Trump did in 2016. So if the Democratic base is mobilized—and we’re certainly seeing that in this election cycle—then you would have to think the president would need to do something to expand upon his existing coalition, if he’s going to be reelected.
AXELROD: You would think so. You know, you’re always tenuous in betting on things relative to Trump because he’s so audacious that you just don’t know, but, yes, I mean, I think that he pulled an inside straight in 2016, and he hasn’t done that much to change his cards, so he may have to pull another inside straight. And when you look at how competitive the races are in the states in which he won the election and how Democrats—you know, we’ll see. We could be sitting here on November 7, having a different conversation. But if the results are what they look to be, I think it’s an important harbinger for him that Republicans just didn’t do well in those states that delivered the presidency to him.
ALBERTA: Before we get deeper into 2020, let’s clear the air first: Could you see yourself working for any of these prospective 2020 candidates? Are you informally advising anyone?
AXELROD: Well, people come to me for advice all the time. I think I’ve talked to, you know, a dozen people who are running for president, and, you know, Republicans come under the dark of night and talk to me as well. But look, I said when the 2012 campaign was over that that was my last campaign. I run the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. It is a joy, and it’s a thing that keeps me hopeful every day. I have my duties at CNN, I have my podcast, and that’s what I expect I’ll be doing throughout 2020. I can see no set of circumstances under which I’d be working for any candidate. So consider the air cleared.
ALBERTA: And you reached the mountaintop twice with Barack Obama. When you look at the potential class of 2020 Democratic candidates, are there people you look at in whom you see that same flicker, that same raw political potential that could be harnessed in the way that you saw it in Obama all those years ago?
AXELROD: That’s unfair. That’s like saying, 'Well, which of these horses reminds you of Secretariat?' People should forget about that. There’s not going to be a Barack Obama every four years. But there are talented people out there and formidable people.
There are the obvious. I mean, the vice president is out there, very seasoned, very talented, but then there are people who are less known. Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans, has political chops that are really prodigious, and we saw that when he spoke to the removal of the monuments in New Orleans. He’s a very talented person. It’s been written and it’s no secret that Deval Patrick was a client of mine; he’s a friend of mine. And I saw him in Massachusetts go from an asterisk to kind of storm the Democratic field when he got elected governor of Massachusetts. And he has formidable skills that I don’t think people recognize because they haven’t observed him as closely as I have, but if he were to spend a year in Iowa, I suspect he’d make a lot of friends there, as he did in Massachusetts. And then you have this bevy of senators. And someone we’re not thinking about may emerge.
But I don’t think people will be looking for a Democratic version of Trump. I don’t think they’ll be looking for people who can go jibe for jibe and low blow for low blow. I think people are going to be looking for someone who can pull this country out of this hothouse that we’re in.
ALBERTA: So Michael Avenatti is not your personal choice for the Democratic nomination?
AXELROD: No. I know Avenatti. I’ve met him in greenrooms, and we’ve had conversations and so on, so, but I disagree with him. And I disagree with my friend Eric Holder when he said, “When they go low, we kick them.” I think we should challenge them, but I think the country is not looking for a continuation of the rancor that we’ve seen with Trump every single day. I mean, and there are a lot of people who voted for Trump or a significant number of people who voted for Trump because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton, because they thought Washington needed a kick in the ass and that he could deliver that. But it’s also true that he’s exhausting.
I mean, this constant state of churning and combat and insults and so on, they’re exhausting. I think one mistake the Democrats should not make is to, in combatting Trump, assume that everybody who voted for him should be disqualified as well.
ALBERTA: What you’re saying is that a Democrat in 2020 should not just be looking at this as a base-mobilization campaign, but that there should be persuasion involved?
AXELROD: I believe that. And this is a big debate. And I understand the debate, because the demographics are such that they would argue that if Hillary Clinton had just mobilized, for example, African-American voters in [Detroit] or Milwaukee, that she would have won those states. And, you know, I think that the two are not mutually exclusive. First of all, I think Donald Trump is going to mobilize base voters all by himself. I don’t think you need to gild the lily; I don’t think you need to help that process along. But there are voters who are going to be important in some of these swing states who are open to voting for a Democrat, but aren’t necessarily eager to continue this kind of poisonous politics we’ve seen. And they need to be given something more.
ALBERTA: One person who’s drawn comparison to Barack Obama is Beto O’Rourke, and there’s an emerging narrative that even if he loses the Texas Senate race, he would be positioned as a top-tier Democratic candidate in 2020. How difficult is it, in your view, to come off of a losing campaign and yet still launch into a viable campaign for the presidency?
AXELROD: You know, I don’t know, because he has a national following among young people. I sat with a group of young people the other day, really well-connected, smart, young people who said, 'Well, if he comes close, he’s got to turn around and run for president.' I mean, he has touched a lot of people, so I’m sure there will be a lot of pressure on him to think about it, if in fact that race is close in Texas. If he gets blown out, I think it’s much harder, but he’s raised a prodigious amount of money.
ALBERTA: Let’s talk about another progressive hero, Elizabeth Warren, who’s been in the news quite a bit recently with the release of the DNA findings. What do you make of that?
AXELROD: Yeah, let me say that of all the people who are running that I can see from my perspective—and I don’t have visibility into everything everybody is doing—there isn’t anybody who had done more to position themselves for 2020 than she had up to that point. You know, I’ve talked to a bunch of candidates who said, 'You wouldn’t believe who called me on election night. Like, the first call I got was from Elizabeth Warren,' winners and losers. And she has a full staff going just to service 2018 candidates and provide assistance in whatever way they need it. That’s shrewd. I mean, she’s laid out some policy positions on reform, for example, that are shrewd positions, important positions. I’ve been impressed by that.
That [DNA test release] was a head-scratcher. I mean, it was a gamble. First of all, the timing of it was odd: Why intrude on this midterm process that way? Secondly, it was instructive for everyone. It’s hard to get the upper hand with Trump in a kind of skunk fight. And I think she was trying to push back because she didn’t want to have him continue on what is another version of, like, birtherism, and she thought she could end that discussion. But what she mostly did was elevate the issue, and that was the gamble. And I would say they lost that gamble.
ALBERTA: Let’s close with a lightning round. I will name a prospective Democratic presidential candidate, and I want you to concisely analyze their greatest strength and greatest vulnerability. First: Kamala Harris.
AXELROD: Well, she’s very, very bright, and I think she makes a really great presentation. Her disadvantage is she can be cautious, and she comes from California, which is not a great training ground for presidential candidates because you never really have to meet a voter; it’s just too big a state, so it’s all TV. And you don’t really have a genuine general election, so adjusting to a national context is going to be hard for her, and she’s briefly on the national scene. But she is promising.
ALBERTA: Bernie Sanders.
AXELROD: Well, Bernie is what Bernie is. His strength is that he’s been saying the same thing for 50 years; he’s utterly authentic; he’s fearless. The downside is that he’s been saying the same thing for 50 years, that he’s been around 50 years to say the same things, and that he can be a little brittle and unyielding. But, you know, he is kind of a remarkable figure in our politics.
ALBERTA: Julián Castro.
AXELROD: Yeah, Julián Castro is someone I know. Full disclosure: he’s been on the board of my Institute of Politics. I like him a lot. He is smart; he is earnest, very thoughtful, and a fresh face. Obviously, he is Hispanic and he has a base, potentially, among those voters but not limited to it. The downside is he has run for mayor of San Antonio, he’s been in the cabinet, but never been exposed to the national scene. And I’ll leave it there, but I think highly of him.
ALBERTA: A dark horse for me: Amy Klobuchar.
AXELROD: Yeah, well, she is also very, very bright. She can be more nuanced than some of the candidates. I mean, she knows—she has a range, so she doesn’t get to 11 on a scale of 10 on every issue, but is thoughtful about them. And she’s got a great sense of humor, which is useful. And she’s from Minnesota, which borders on Iowa, which is, I think, very helpful. The downside is she hasn’t made herself as well-known as some of her Senate colleagues. Sometimes being more vituperative is also a benefit, at least in the short run, in terms of raising money online and doing those kinds of things. So the question is—and it’s true of Castro as well—is she too low key? But certainly someone to watch.
ALBERTA: Pete Buttigieg.
AXELROD: Yeah, also a friend of mine, so more full disclosure. And, look, I know all these folks and like them. But, look, Pete is a remarkable guy, incredible story, you know, elected mayor of South Bend at 27, went to Afghanistan while he was mayor to do a tour of duty because he was in the reserves, came back. He disclosed to his constituents that he’s gay, you know, in South Bend, Indiana—the home of Notre Dame, in the center of the Rust Belt—got 80 percent of the vote and in his reelect. And as mayor, has had a real vision for how you rebuild an economy in the digital age in a Rust Belt city. He’s got a lot of upside. I thought that he would be a great chairman of the Democratic Party when he ran for that. The downside is he’s in his 30s and he’s not at all well-known—raising the money, that’s an issue. I mean, I think it’s going to take $100 [million] to $150 million to get through the first four contests and beyond in this cycle, and so that would be challenging for him. But he’s one of the most promising young leaders in the Democratic Party.
ALBERTA: Kirsten Gillibrand.
AXELROD: Well, she has an instinct for issues that motivate, and on the whole #MeToo issue she has been very much identified with it, both in terms of the dealing with assaults on women within the military and on the issue more broadly. I think the downside of her is that there are some people who feel that she has been exploitative at times on that issue, and there’s some rancor, I think, among some Democrats about how she handled the Franken issue, and she’d have to deal with that.
ALBERTA: Who else should we be talking about?
AXELROD: Terry McAuliffe. He is relentless. He is uncowed. And he could probably strike a tone that would be interesting against Trump, you know, pairing him with kind of humor. And he’s got a pretty good story to tell from Virginia. The downside is he’s been so thoroughly identified with the Clinton Project for so long, and I don’t know that that would be viewed as advantageous. And he is avowedly a centrist, and he would be testing that premise that the party is not going to nominate a white, male centrist.
You know, Governor Hickenlooper from Colorado. He’s an interesting guy. He’s a quirky communicator. And whether he can conform to an environment in which one has to express oneself more pithily than I am right now, I don’t know, but he’s an interesting guy.
There are others. Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington has talked about running. Steve Bullock appears to be running, the governor of Montana. And then there are the outsiders. You know, the Howard Schultzes, for example. We haven’t talked about Mike Bloomberg, you know, people who can bring great resources to this. So I think this is a wide-open situation.
ALBERTA: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, after mentioning all those names, about Joe Biden. What does your gut tell you? Do you think he runs?
AXELROD: He sure seems to be headed in that direction. You know, I think two things. One is I think he’s genuinely offended by the way Trump is governing and not governing, the way he is dividing the country. That seems clear. It’s also true that this is a guy who has been talked about as a presidential nominee since the time he arrived in the Senate in 1973. He has run twice before. He knows the job as well as anybody. He really was an important counselor to President Obama, and he had 35—whatever number of years in the Senate.
And so it’s hard to say, “No, I don’t think so. I’m going to pass on this one.” I think he feels he would have won last time if he had been the nominee. I think there are a lot of things that are pulling him in that direction. There may be personal things that are pulling him in the other. That’s a commitment, and the question is whether, at the end of the day, he wants to make it, but right now, I would guess he is running.
David Axelrod on 2020, his prediction for the midterms and whether he sees any politician who can recapture the Obama magic.
By TIM ALBERTA
David Axelrod doesn’t like the path the country—or the Democratic Party—is on.
The chief strategist who steered Barack Obama’s winning White House campaigns worries that President Donald Trump has laid a trap—and that his party is walking right into it. “Escalation breeds escalation,” Axelrod said in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “And within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries. He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so, there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.”
Stressing that “civility actually is a really important element of politics,” Axelrod criticized Hillary Clinton and former Attorney General Eric Holder for recent comments they’ve made, and described the backlash he has faced for urging Democrats to avoid confrontation. The best way to defeat Trump, Axelrod argued, is by nominating someone who can appeal to an exhausted electorate.
“I don’t think people will be looking for a Democratic version of Trump,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll be looking for people who can go jibe for jibe and low blow for low blow. I think people are going to be looking for someone who can pull this country out of this hothouse that we’re in.”
At his offices in Chicago, where he directs the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, we discussed Axelrod’s predictions for the midterm elections, the risk of overreach with a new House majority, and the strengths and vulnerabilities of the top-tier 2020 Democratic hopefuls.
This transcript has been edited for length, readability and clarity.
ALBERTA: We had a string of bomb threats [last] week. Your former boss, President Obama, was one target, and your current employer, CNN, was another one. I just wonder where you see the country now in terms of the escalating polarization that we’ve been witnessing, and if there’s any way to bring the temperature down?
AXELROD: I think that what we’ve discovered is that there is political capital in polarization; there’s political capital in incitement. The president’s a master at it. But there are also consequences to that. We’re a country of 330 million people, and there are people out there whose violent inclinations are going to be activated by what they hear. And so, the question is whether the country itself demands something different.
I know it is unpopular to say this among some of my own friends, but escalation breeds escalation, and one of the things that troubles me—civility actually is a really important element of politics. We’ve had uncivil times before. We’ve had civil war, so it’s not like this is new to American politics, but we need to somehow find some common qualities in each other, common concerns that join us as Americans and we have to stop this mad cycle. I’ve been very critical of the president because I think he has incited and encouraged violence through his rhetoric. You know, people tweeted back to me and said, “Well, do you still think we should be civil?” and I’m trying to understand what that means. Does that mean that if they send out bombs, we should send out bombs? That, to me, is a mad cycle that leads only to really dark places.
ALBERTA: To your point about escalation begetting escalation, Hillary Clinton came under fire recently for her comment that Democrats cannot be civil with Republicans right now.
AXELROD: I think she rightly came out after she and President Clinton were the target of this attempted bombing, and said, ‘We need to come together as a country.’ But you know, you can’t say in one week, ‘We should be uncivil,’ and then the next week say, ‘Come together.’ We need to have a consistent commitment to that. And within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries. He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.
ALBERTA: So, here we are on the doorstep of the midterm elections, and for first-term presidents, the first midterm historically is always a little bit rocky. You lived through one of those back in 2010. Sorry to remind you.
AXELROD: Yes, rocky would be an understatement. I was completely drowned by the wave in 2010.
ALBERTA: You knew that it was going to be a rough year; you knew Democrats were probably going to lose the House. But how surprised were you and the president at just how big that wave wound up being?
AXELROD: I told President-elect Obama—we had a briefing on December 16, it was so searing, I’ll never forget the date—at our transition office, where we got briefed on the state of the economy. And it wasn’t pervasively known just how severe the crisis was at that moment; it really was in the next few weeks and months that the depths of it became completely clear. And I walked out of that briefing and I said, 'We are going to get our asses kicked in the midterms.' It was just unavoidable. The depths of it were—I wouldn’t say surprising, but depressing. Clearly, the margin was. I always say, we lost 63, but Roosevelt lost 78 in 1938, so we did better than Roosevelt.
ALBERTA: 2018 has been a roller coaster of an election cycle—Democrats are poised to take back the House, but Republicans are playing on such a favorable Senate map. From 30,000 feet, fill in this blank: The smartest thing Democrats have done in this cycle, strategically, is what?
AXELROD: I think the smartest thing has been to generally talk about issues that actually touch people’s lives, like health care, which I think has been a really galvanic issue for a lot of candidates out there. Back in 2010, Republicans ran against the Affordable Care Act, and that was central to everything they did. Now, they’re trying to run toward at least the principle of it, and even though they don’t have a plausible plan to protect people with pre-existing conditions, I think they now understand that the Affordable Care Act has spoken to real-life concerns of people.
ALBERTA: And from a strategic standpoint, what is the smartest thing you have seen Republicans do in this cycle?
AXELROD: I’ve thought one of the most interesting hinge moments in this race has been around the Kavanaugh hearings. Midday after Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford testified, it looked like a disaster for Republicans, and they made a decision—and I think it was a decision the president was involved in, and McConnell and others—that they were going to go tribal on the thing, and by the afternoon, that’s when they started talking about Democratic mobs, Democratic tactics, and making it a test of sort of party loyalty. They needed to light a tribal fire. What happens in midterm elections often is that the party in power—the voters of the party in power become complacent. And I think the president, by blowing out that issue in ways that I think were unfortunate—this caravan arrived at just the perfect time for him, because immigration is a hot-button issue for his voters. So, I think that’s why, as we sit here today, they’re sending troops to the border. They’re doing everything they can.
ALBERTA: So, look into your crystal ball. You feel as though the Senate is probably out of reach, but do Democrats take back the House? And if so, by what margin?
AXELROD: I’ve always thought that Democrats will take the House back. I’ve always thought that 30 seats would be a good showing. On the average, the party out of power wins 32 seats. Given everything—all of the sort of structural obstacles because of redistricting—30 seats would be an accomplishment. I still think they’re going to land in that zone, and I don’t think it’s likely to go much higher. I think the Senate—I’ve said from the beginning that if Democrats could hold the margin at 51-49, given the historic obstacles they face, that would be an accomplishment. It may be that Republicans add a seat or two.
There are a couple of other storylines I’d watch on election night. One is governorships. I think Democrats are going to take a significant number of statehouses, which is not inconsequential going into both the presidential election and redistricting. So, you look at states—including Florida and a crescent from Kansas to Iowa across the Midwest all the way to Pennsylvania—and I think Democrats are going to make some significant gains in governorships. And the last part of that storyline is, when you consider the states that delivered the presidency to Trump—Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania—you’ve got incumbent Democratic senators up in all of those states. I think it’s more likely than not that every one of those senators is going to be reelected, and that you’re going to see governorship[s] shift in several of those states.
So, I think that should be a sobering result for the White House and for Republicans, and it has some augurings for 2020.
ALBERTA: There are two big questions looming, and they’re interconnected, if in fact Democrats take back the House. The first pertains to the danger of Democratic overreach; the second pertains to who is the leader of the Democratic Party. Take the second part first: Many Democrats across the country have said they will not vote for Nancy Pelosi. But if Democrats do take control of the House, do you think Pelosi becomes speaker?
AXELROD: I worked with Nancy Pelosi when I was in the White House. Much of what was accomplished would not have been accomplished without her, because she is a tough, canny, effective leader of the caucus. I think she will have a strong sense of where she is, and I would never bet against her in an internal vote. I also don’t think that Democratic members are going to deliver the leadership of the House to the Republican Party. That said, I think it’s not entirely clear what’s going to happen, and it’s not clear who the alternative is going to be. A secret ballot is a treacherous path. So, we’ll see. That will certainly be an interesting story. One thing I would say is that there’s no doubt that if Pelosi survives, she’s going to have to make accommodations to these younger members who are restive. You’ve got three leaders who are all in their upper-70s, and there’s a restlessness among members to shake up the dynamic there and advance some of the younger members.
ALBERTA: And what about the risk of overreach? Do you see any danger for Democrats if they take back the House and there’s a push toward impeachment, or they go too far with their oversight? How do they thread that needle?
AXELROD: Well, look, there was talk of impeachment almost after Trump got elected. I’ve been opposed to that. Every political norm that you break, process norm that you break, it’s very hard to put that genie back in the bottle. And my argument was that impeachment can’t be a political tool, even though it is to some degree. But it hasn’t been invoked very often, and it ought to be on solid grounds, and there’s a probe going on that will yield some information and judgments, and people ought to act on the basis of that.
I have to tell you, Bob Mueller was the FBI director when I was in the White House. I was in a couple of meetings with him, and I never said a word in those, frankly, because he scared the shit out of me. I mean, he is the portrait of rectitude. And I’ve told Democrats, 'Look, if Bob Mueller comes back and says there’s nothing there, then I’m willing to say I believe that, because I know that he’ll have been thorough in his investigation. But if he comes back with something that is damning, then I think Democrats have an obligation to act.'
And likewise, I think that the complete absence of oversight in the first two years of the Trump administration has been a dereliction on the part of Republicans; they simply won’t do it. Oversight is necessary, it’s part of the job of Congress, and there are egregious things that are happening that need to be looked into. But in each and every case, it ought to be done on the premise of sound evidence, and not just for malicious purposes or malicious mischief—like the sort we saw under the Obama administration when the Republicans took control of the Congress. The real danger for the country is this sense of a kind of bloodless coup, or that the system isn’t legitimate, and so on. As people who believe in government and the importance of government, Democrats need to proceed in a way that is respectful of the process, even if the president is not.
ALBERTA: Looking to 2020, it’s very possible that Trump has maxed-out his base. You were referencing in the Midwest earlier, for all the talk of how Trump may have redrawn the electoral map in some sort of a durable way, the fact is that Mitt Romney won more votes in Wisconsin in 2012 than Trump did in 2016. So if the Democratic base is mobilized—and we’re certainly seeing that in this election cycle—then you would have to think the president would need to do something to expand upon his existing coalition, if he’s going to be reelected.
AXELROD: You would think so. You know, you’re always tenuous in betting on things relative to Trump because he’s so audacious that you just don’t know, but, yes, I mean, I think that he pulled an inside straight in 2016, and he hasn’t done that much to change his cards, so he may have to pull another inside straight. And when you look at how competitive the races are in the states in which he won the election and how Democrats—you know, we’ll see. We could be sitting here on November 7, having a different conversation. But if the results are what they look to be, I think it’s an important harbinger for him that Republicans just didn’t do well in those states that delivered the presidency to him.
ALBERTA: Before we get deeper into 2020, let’s clear the air first: Could you see yourself working for any of these prospective 2020 candidates? Are you informally advising anyone?
AXELROD: Well, people come to me for advice all the time. I think I’ve talked to, you know, a dozen people who are running for president, and, you know, Republicans come under the dark of night and talk to me as well. But look, I said when the 2012 campaign was over that that was my last campaign. I run the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. It is a joy, and it’s a thing that keeps me hopeful every day. I have my duties at CNN, I have my podcast, and that’s what I expect I’ll be doing throughout 2020. I can see no set of circumstances under which I’d be working for any candidate. So consider the air cleared.
ALBERTA: And you reached the mountaintop twice with Barack Obama. When you look at the potential class of 2020 Democratic candidates, are there people you look at in whom you see that same flicker, that same raw political potential that could be harnessed in the way that you saw it in Obama all those years ago?
AXELROD: That’s unfair. That’s like saying, 'Well, which of these horses reminds you of Secretariat?' People should forget about that. There’s not going to be a Barack Obama every four years. But there are talented people out there and formidable people.
There are the obvious. I mean, the vice president is out there, very seasoned, very talented, but then there are people who are less known. Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans, has political chops that are really prodigious, and we saw that when he spoke to the removal of the monuments in New Orleans. He’s a very talented person. It’s been written and it’s no secret that Deval Patrick was a client of mine; he’s a friend of mine. And I saw him in Massachusetts go from an asterisk to kind of storm the Democratic field when he got elected governor of Massachusetts. And he has formidable skills that I don’t think people recognize because they haven’t observed him as closely as I have, but if he were to spend a year in Iowa, I suspect he’d make a lot of friends there, as he did in Massachusetts. And then you have this bevy of senators. And someone we’re not thinking about may emerge.
But I don’t think people will be looking for a Democratic version of Trump. I don’t think they’ll be looking for people who can go jibe for jibe and low blow for low blow. I think people are going to be looking for someone who can pull this country out of this hothouse that we’re in.
ALBERTA: So Michael Avenatti is not your personal choice for the Democratic nomination?
AXELROD: No. I know Avenatti. I’ve met him in greenrooms, and we’ve had conversations and so on, so, but I disagree with him. And I disagree with my friend Eric Holder when he said, “When they go low, we kick them.” I think we should challenge them, but I think the country is not looking for a continuation of the rancor that we’ve seen with Trump every single day. I mean, and there are a lot of people who voted for Trump or a significant number of people who voted for Trump because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton, because they thought Washington needed a kick in the ass and that he could deliver that. But it’s also true that he’s exhausting.
I mean, this constant state of churning and combat and insults and so on, they’re exhausting. I think one mistake the Democrats should not make is to, in combatting Trump, assume that everybody who voted for him should be disqualified as well.
ALBERTA: What you’re saying is that a Democrat in 2020 should not just be looking at this as a base-mobilization campaign, but that there should be persuasion involved?
AXELROD: I believe that. And this is a big debate. And I understand the debate, because the demographics are such that they would argue that if Hillary Clinton had just mobilized, for example, African-American voters in [Detroit] or Milwaukee, that she would have won those states. And, you know, I think that the two are not mutually exclusive. First of all, I think Donald Trump is going to mobilize base voters all by himself. I don’t think you need to gild the lily; I don’t think you need to help that process along. But there are voters who are going to be important in some of these swing states who are open to voting for a Democrat, but aren’t necessarily eager to continue this kind of poisonous politics we’ve seen. And they need to be given something more.
ALBERTA: One person who’s drawn comparison to Barack Obama is Beto O’Rourke, and there’s an emerging narrative that even if he loses the Texas Senate race, he would be positioned as a top-tier Democratic candidate in 2020. How difficult is it, in your view, to come off of a losing campaign and yet still launch into a viable campaign for the presidency?
AXELROD: You know, I don’t know, because he has a national following among young people. I sat with a group of young people the other day, really well-connected, smart, young people who said, 'Well, if he comes close, he’s got to turn around and run for president.' I mean, he has touched a lot of people, so I’m sure there will be a lot of pressure on him to think about it, if in fact that race is close in Texas. If he gets blown out, I think it’s much harder, but he’s raised a prodigious amount of money.
ALBERTA: Let’s talk about another progressive hero, Elizabeth Warren, who’s been in the news quite a bit recently with the release of the DNA findings. What do you make of that?
AXELROD: Yeah, let me say that of all the people who are running that I can see from my perspective—and I don’t have visibility into everything everybody is doing—there isn’t anybody who had done more to position themselves for 2020 than she had up to that point. You know, I’ve talked to a bunch of candidates who said, 'You wouldn’t believe who called me on election night. Like, the first call I got was from Elizabeth Warren,' winners and losers. And she has a full staff going just to service 2018 candidates and provide assistance in whatever way they need it. That’s shrewd. I mean, she’s laid out some policy positions on reform, for example, that are shrewd positions, important positions. I’ve been impressed by that.
That [DNA test release] was a head-scratcher. I mean, it was a gamble. First of all, the timing of it was odd: Why intrude on this midterm process that way? Secondly, it was instructive for everyone. It’s hard to get the upper hand with Trump in a kind of skunk fight. And I think she was trying to push back because she didn’t want to have him continue on what is another version of, like, birtherism, and she thought she could end that discussion. But what she mostly did was elevate the issue, and that was the gamble. And I would say they lost that gamble.
ALBERTA: Let’s close with a lightning round. I will name a prospective Democratic presidential candidate, and I want you to concisely analyze their greatest strength and greatest vulnerability. First: Kamala Harris.
AXELROD: Well, she’s very, very bright, and I think she makes a really great presentation. Her disadvantage is she can be cautious, and she comes from California, which is not a great training ground for presidential candidates because you never really have to meet a voter; it’s just too big a state, so it’s all TV. And you don’t really have a genuine general election, so adjusting to a national context is going to be hard for her, and she’s briefly on the national scene. But she is promising.
ALBERTA: Bernie Sanders.
AXELROD: Well, Bernie is what Bernie is. His strength is that he’s been saying the same thing for 50 years; he’s utterly authentic; he’s fearless. The downside is that he’s been saying the same thing for 50 years, that he’s been around 50 years to say the same things, and that he can be a little brittle and unyielding. But, you know, he is kind of a remarkable figure in our politics.
ALBERTA: Julián Castro.
AXELROD: Yeah, Julián Castro is someone I know. Full disclosure: he’s been on the board of my Institute of Politics. I like him a lot. He is smart; he is earnest, very thoughtful, and a fresh face. Obviously, he is Hispanic and he has a base, potentially, among those voters but not limited to it. The downside is he has run for mayor of San Antonio, he’s been in the cabinet, but never been exposed to the national scene. And I’ll leave it there, but I think highly of him.
ALBERTA: A dark horse for me: Amy Klobuchar.
AXELROD: Yeah, well, she is also very, very bright. She can be more nuanced than some of the candidates. I mean, she knows—she has a range, so she doesn’t get to 11 on a scale of 10 on every issue, but is thoughtful about them. And she’s got a great sense of humor, which is useful. And she’s from Minnesota, which borders on Iowa, which is, I think, very helpful. The downside is she hasn’t made herself as well-known as some of her Senate colleagues. Sometimes being more vituperative is also a benefit, at least in the short run, in terms of raising money online and doing those kinds of things. So the question is—and it’s true of Castro as well—is she too low key? But certainly someone to watch.
ALBERTA: Pete Buttigieg.
AXELROD: Yeah, also a friend of mine, so more full disclosure. And, look, I know all these folks and like them. But, look, Pete is a remarkable guy, incredible story, you know, elected mayor of South Bend at 27, went to Afghanistan while he was mayor to do a tour of duty because he was in the reserves, came back. He disclosed to his constituents that he’s gay, you know, in South Bend, Indiana—the home of Notre Dame, in the center of the Rust Belt—got 80 percent of the vote and in his reelect. And as mayor, has had a real vision for how you rebuild an economy in the digital age in a Rust Belt city. He’s got a lot of upside. I thought that he would be a great chairman of the Democratic Party when he ran for that. The downside is he’s in his 30s and he’s not at all well-known—raising the money, that’s an issue. I mean, I think it’s going to take $100 [million] to $150 million to get through the first four contests and beyond in this cycle, and so that would be challenging for him. But he’s one of the most promising young leaders in the Democratic Party.
ALBERTA: Kirsten Gillibrand.
AXELROD: Well, she has an instinct for issues that motivate, and on the whole #MeToo issue she has been very much identified with it, both in terms of the dealing with assaults on women within the military and on the issue more broadly. I think the downside of her is that there are some people who feel that she has been exploitative at times on that issue, and there’s some rancor, I think, among some Democrats about how she handled the Franken issue, and she’d have to deal with that.
ALBERTA: Who else should we be talking about?
AXELROD: Terry McAuliffe. He is relentless. He is uncowed. And he could probably strike a tone that would be interesting against Trump, you know, pairing him with kind of humor. And he’s got a pretty good story to tell from Virginia. The downside is he’s been so thoroughly identified with the Clinton Project for so long, and I don’t know that that would be viewed as advantageous. And he is avowedly a centrist, and he would be testing that premise that the party is not going to nominate a white, male centrist.
You know, Governor Hickenlooper from Colorado. He’s an interesting guy. He’s a quirky communicator. And whether he can conform to an environment in which one has to express oneself more pithily than I am right now, I don’t know, but he’s an interesting guy.
There are others. Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington has talked about running. Steve Bullock appears to be running, the governor of Montana. And then there are the outsiders. You know, the Howard Schultzes, for example. We haven’t talked about Mike Bloomberg, you know, people who can bring great resources to this. So I think this is a wide-open situation.
ALBERTA: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, after mentioning all those names, about Joe Biden. What does your gut tell you? Do you think he runs?
AXELROD: He sure seems to be headed in that direction. You know, I think two things. One is I think he’s genuinely offended by the way Trump is governing and not governing, the way he is dividing the country. That seems clear. It’s also true that this is a guy who has been talked about as a presidential nominee since the time he arrived in the Senate in 1973. He has run twice before. He knows the job as well as anybody. He really was an important counselor to President Obama, and he had 35—whatever number of years in the Senate.
And so it’s hard to say, “No, I don’t think so. I’m going to pass on this one.” I think he feels he would have won last time if he had been the nominee. I think there are a lot of things that are pulling him in that direction. There may be personal things that are pulling him in the other. That’s a commitment, and the question is whether, at the end of the day, he wants to make it, but right now, I would guess he is running.
Blame trade wars and worries about capital investment
Markets aren’t struggling because investors fear Democrats
By BEN WHITE
Markets are not hitting turbulence because investors fear Democrats gaining power on Capitol Hill. Instead, blame trade wars and worries about capital investment.
That’s the view of Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, who said on the latest edition of the POLITICO Money podcast that investor concerns are deeper than the Trump administration has been indicating lately.
“Markets aren't dumb. They can read the same polls as everybody else,” Shepherdson said. “They know that at the moment there is a very high probability that Democrats will take the House. I think from a rational market perspective, that news is pretty much in the price at this point."
President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration in recent days have attributed volatility in the stock market to fear that Democrats could make gains in the midterms, including taking back the House.
Shepherdson said much of the volatility instead stems from concern over the impact of Trump's trade war with China and signs of a slowdown in capital investment by businesses that appeared in the recent third-quarter report on gross domestic product.
“I’m going to be one of those people who does complain about the third-quarter number, because it was paid for with a lot of borrowed money which has driven up consumption to an insane 4 percent,” Shepherdson said.
“And it hasn’t really done anything for business capital spending even though the administration said it would. It’s given us a fast-growing, but very unbalanced economy that’s running on sugar, which will run out.”
By BEN WHITE
Markets are not hitting turbulence because investors fear Democrats gaining power on Capitol Hill. Instead, blame trade wars and worries about capital investment.
That’s the view of Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, who said on the latest edition of the POLITICO Money podcast that investor concerns are deeper than the Trump administration has been indicating lately.
“Markets aren't dumb. They can read the same polls as everybody else,” Shepherdson said. “They know that at the moment there is a very high probability that Democrats will take the House. I think from a rational market perspective, that news is pretty much in the price at this point."
President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration in recent days have attributed volatility in the stock market to fear that Democrats could make gains in the midterms, including taking back the House.
Shepherdson said much of the volatility instead stems from concern over the impact of Trump's trade war with China and signs of a slowdown in capital investment by businesses that appeared in the recent third-quarter report on gross domestic product.
“I’m going to be one of those people who does complain about the third-quarter number, because it was paid for with a lot of borrowed money which has driven up consumption to an insane 4 percent,” Shepherdson said.
“And it hasn’t really done anything for business capital spending even though the administration said it would. It’s given us a fast-growing, but very unbalanced economy that’s running on sugar, which will run out.”
It’s disturbing
‘It’s disturbing’: Fox News host slams Trump’s anti-media rhetoric
Martha MacCallum says it’s wrong for the president to label journalists ‘the enemy of the people’
By REENA FLORES
As President Donald Trump amplifies his attacks on journalists, one Fox News host is calling out the chief executive for his hostile rhetoric.
Martha MacCallum, host of the network’s prime-time show “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” said she took it “personally” when the president applied blanket labels to the news media.
“When he points at the press in the back of the room and calls them the enemy of the people, that is wrong,” MacCallum said in a Women Rule podcast interview earlier this fall. “And it exacerbates the situation.”
When asked her perspective on the president’s calling the media “fake news,” the host added: “I find it disturbing. I think it’s a mistake.”
MacCallum, who’s leading the network’s midterm elections coverage, also noted, however, that “there have been mistakes on all sides of this equation.”
“Often the media doesn’t cut him a break,” she said. “I think they, many times, don’t give him credit for anything. … I think it makes some members of the media unfair to him, and I think it makes him unfair in his broad strokes about fake news.”
In recent days, Trump has come under increasing scrutiny for his anti-press sentiments. Last week, explosive devices were mailed to the Atlanta and New York offices of CNN, a frequent target of the president’s ire. Other would-be victims of the mail bomber included several prominent Democratic figures, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and megadonor George Soros.
In the interview with MacCallum, conducted before last week’s bomb threats, the Fox host said Trump had “never come after me individually.”
“He has said to me, ‘Sometimes you’re nice to me; sometimes you’re not,’ which I take as a compliment,” she added. “Because that’s exactly the role that I see myself in. I do like to make sure that I’m being as objective as possible in covering him.”
Martha MacCallum says it’s wrong for the president to label journalists ‘the enemy of the people’
By REENA FLORES
As President Donald Trump amplifies his attacks on journalists, one Fox News host is calling out the chief executive for his hostile rhetoric.
Martha MacCallum, host of the network’s prime-time show “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” said she took it “personally” when the president applied blanket labels to the news media.
“When he points at the press in the back of the room and calls them the enemy of the people, that is wrong,” MacCallum said in a Women Rule podcast interview earlier this fall. “And it exacerbates the situation.”
When asked her perspective on the president’s calling the media “fake news,” the host added: “I find it disturbing. I think it’s a mistake.”
MacCallum, who’s leading the network’s midterm elections coverage, also noted, however, that “there have been mistakes on all sides of this equation.”
“Often the media doesn’t cut him a break,” she said. “I think they, many times, don’t give him credit for anything. … I think it makes some members of the media unfair to him, and I think it makes him unfair in his broad strokes about fake news.”
In recent days, Trump has come under increasing scrutiny for his anti-press sentiments. Last week, explosive devices were mailed to the Atlanta and New York offices of CNN, a frequent target of the president’s ire. Other would-be victims of the mail bomber included several prominent Democratic figures, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and megadonor George Soros.
In the interview with MacCallum, conducted before last week’s bomb threats, the Fox host said Trump had “never come after me individually.”
“He has said to me, ‘Sometimes you’re nice to me; sometimes you’re not,’ which I take as a compliment,” she added. “Because that’s exactly the role that I see myself in. I do like to make sure that I’m being as objective as possible in covering him.”
Never wrestle with a pig
Gillum responds to Trump attacks: 'Never wrestle with a pig'
By CAITLIN OPRYSKO
Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum slapped back at Donald Trump late Monday in a post to Twitter, comparing the president to a pig even as he claimed to be unwilling to trade insults with Trump.
Trump, an endorser of GOP nominee Ron DeSantis in Florida's tight gubernatorial race, labeled Gillum — without elaborating — a “stone cold thief” in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday night.
Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, Fla., responded to the president on Twitter, writing: “I heard @realDonaldTrump ran home to @FoxNews to lie about me. But as my grandmother told me — never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it. So ignore him and vote, Florida!”
Gillum has been the subject of criticism in recent days after records released by the Florida Commission on Ethics showed that he accepted tickets to the Broadway musical “Hamilton” from an undercover FBI agent in 2016, though Gillum’s campaign has insisted that the proper procedures were followed on the trip.
Trump has also attacked Gillum over his track record as mayor of Tallahassee, telling Ingraham that Florida’s capital city “is known as the most corrupt in Florida and one of the most corrupt in the nation.”
There is an ongoing FBI investigation into possible corruption at Tallahassee's City Hall, and though Gillum has not personally been implicated in the probe thus far and says he's been told he is not a focus of the investigation, he has faced accusations of ethics violations throughout the campaign.
Gillum and Trump also exchanged barbs earlier Monday, after the president tweeted praise of DeSantis noting that the GOP nominee was a "Harvard/Yale educated man" and not a "thief" like Gillum.
Gillum responded by calling out the president for not having the "courage" to tag him in the tweet. Trump "is howling because he's weak," he added.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday would not elaborate on the president's claims that Gillum is a "thief," telling reporters that "that individual's under FBI investigation. I would refer you to that."
By CAITLIN OPRYSKO
Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum slapped back at Donald Trump late Monday in a post to Twitter, comparing the president to a pig even as he claimed to be unwilling to trade insults with Trump.
Trump, an endorser of GOP nominee Ron DeSantis in Florida's tight gubernatorial race, labeled Gillum — without elaborating — a “stone cold thief” in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday night.
Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, Fla., responded to the president on Twitter, writing: “I heard @realDonaldTrump ran home to @FoxNews to lie about me. But as my grandmother told me — never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it. So ignore him and vote, Florida!”
Gillum has been the subject of criticism in recent days after records released by the Florida Commission on Ethics showed that he accepted tickets to the Broadway musical “Hamilton” from an undercover FBI agent in 2016, though Gillum’s campaign has insisted that the proper procedures were followed on the trip.
Trump has also attacked Gillum over his track record as mayor of Tallahassee, telling Ingraham that Florida’s capital city “is known as the most corrupt in Florida and one of the most corrupt in the nation.”
There is an ongoing FBI investigation into possible corruption at Tallahassee's City Hall, and though Gillum has not personally been implicated in the probe thus far and says he's been told he is not a focus of the investigation, he has faced accusations of ethics violations throughout the campaign.
Gillum and Trump also exchanged barbs earlier Monday, after the president tweeted praise of DeSantis noting that the GOP nominee was a "Harvard/Yale educated man" and not a "thief" like Gillum.
Gillum responded by calling out the president for not having the "courage" to tag him in the tweet. Trump "is howling because he's weak," he added.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday would not elaborate on the president's claims that Gillum is a "thief," telling reporters that "that individual's under FBI investigation. I would refer you to that."
Pittsburgh Shooter Hated
What the Pittsburgh Shooter Hated: Squirrel Hill Values
I grew up in the Jewish community near Tree of Life synagogue. I know firsthand that we're stronger than hate.
By ROBERT WHELAN
The British satirist Jonathan Swift is often credited with the most-cited aphorism about the power of rumors: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
On Saturday morning, I woke up to the unimaginable news that a terror attack had struck the Jewish community in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Over the years, I’ve attended many services at Tree of Life, including the bar and bat mitzvot of high school friends.
Now, a gunman had reportedly killed 11 people at the synagogue and wounded six others, shouting anti-Semitic slogans as he was taken away by police.
As a journalist based in Mexico, I’m used to covering violence and tragedy. But this was a shock. This was home. Tree of Life is a pillar of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, and its unassuming gray stone and stained-glass structure sits in the heart of Squirrel Hill on Wilkins Avenue, one of the main arteries that connects the neighborhood to the universities and shopping districts bordering downtown.
After calling around to ensure that my family and friends were accounted for, and after the initial wave of horror and sadness washed over me, it soon became clear what had happened: A vicious lie had traveled the world, from the Middle East to Europe to Latin America, and had landed with deadly finality in my hometown.
That lie, of course, is the ugly libel that Jews are coordinating a genocidal war against “white” culture by paying for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to storm the borders of the United States and the nations of central Europe.
Robert Bowers, the 46-year-old from the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh who is accused of storming into Tree of Life as Sabbath worship services began and murdering congregants with an assault rifle, was unequivocal about his views on Jews.
On Gab, the social media platform of choice for the alt-right, he wrote that “Jews are the children of Satan” and ranted about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a 140-year-old nonprofit that was founded to help victims of 19th-century anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia emigrate to the U.S. Today, the group provides assistance for migrants from all over the world, Jewish and not, including those from Latin America, torn by criminal violence, and Syria, torn by war.
The caravans of Central American migrants making their way through Mexico toward the U.S. border had caught Bowers’ attention in recent weeks. He reposted claims on Gab that the caravans were “hostile invaders” and that Jewish organizations were paying for the caravans and providing trucks to transport immigrants.
In most of the U.S., Bowers’ hateful views are seen as fringe conspiracy theories. But all over the world, from Syria to Hungary to Honduras to Mexico to Florida, anti-Semitic libels related to a global plan by Jews to corrupt the white race and otherwise dominate world culture are gaining traction.
This month alone George Soros, the billionaire Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, has been accused of funding the migrant caravans on social media, in TV newscasts and by mainstream elected officials.
There is no evidence to date—none—that Soros is funding the Central American migrant caravans. As my colleagues and I have reported, most of the thousands of migrants crossing Mexico right now are dirt poor. To survive the nearly 3,000-mile journey north to the U.S. border, they rely on their own limited means, as well as donations from local church groups and the residents of the towns they pass through on the rough migrant trail.
I have traveled to the Central American countries where these migrants come from, and reported on the violence and abject poverty they are trying to escape. I’ve written for my newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, about migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were apprehended in Texas, steps from the Mexican border, after crossing the Rio Grande on a raft in search of a better life.
I’ve interviewed migrants who have settled in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo, grateful to be able to work even low-paying factory jobs in peace instead of facing daily extortion and death threats from the street gangs that have overrun much of their home countries.
Not one of them was well-funded or provisioned for their journey, and every single one of them cited safety, a better job or reuniting with family as the principle reason for trying to enter the United States. None of them talked about changing U.S. culture or invading the country at the bidding of the Jews.
But even dignifying the libel of the Jewish immigration conspiracy theory with an answer feels wrong and offensive to me. Engaging with anti-Semitic rumors as though they are legitimate points of view is like buying an airline ticket for a lie—the more reasonable people who mention it, the faster it travels the world.
On Sunday, while I was still processing the brutal attack that tore apart my community, I called an old college professor of mine, David Nirenberg, to help me better understand how the Tree of Life attack could have happened.
Professor Nirenberg, who now serves as dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, is a historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on anti-Semitism. He described what he calls the “classic form of anti-Judaism”: The idea that shadowy Jewish agents are working from within a society to corrupt it and manipulate its leaders.
White supremacists, he told me, cannot brook the notion that a minority group (Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, to name a few of these bigots’ favorite targets) is receiving special treatment from society (via affirmative action education policies, for example, or by gaining asylum status).
In the anti-Semite’s warped worldview, these inferior groups could never have achieved favored status on their own merits, and must have help from within the system, and that means from the Jews, a group they see as duplicitous manipulators who are pretending to be white.
What’s different today, and much more disturbing, is that this view seems to have moved much closer to the mainstream than it has been since World War II. And the Soros obsession is dangerous because it legitimizes the views of accused violent criminals like Bowers.
“Now, just as in the mid-1920s, mainstream figures are willing to flirt with these anti-Semitic memes and adopt these really fringe viewpoints in exchange for some sort of electoral advantage,” Nirenberg said. “That is what really has given these ideas resonance. In the past, you’d rarely find people willing to say these things on TV or in public, but that all changed because of moments like Charlottesville,” he said, referring to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists in Virginia.
“It empowers these people in an entirely new way,” Nirenberg explained.
The horrors of Saturday’s shooting are all the more disturbing for being in my backyard. My sister held a baby-naming ceremony for her first daughter in the Tree of Life sanctuary a few years ago, before moving away from Pittsburgh for her medical residency. I shudder to think what might have happened if she were still a member there today.
If a conspiracy theory about the role of Jewish groups in immigration is the lie, then what is the truth that got stuck lacing up its boots on Saturday morning while Bowers was allegedly killing worshippers at Tree of Life?
The truth is that communities are stronger, and people become better, when they are exposed to people who are different, and compelled to learn about them, live alongside them and engage them in dialogue in the hopes of developing an understanding and empathy for them and their ways of life. And to me, that truth is best exemplified by the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.
You feel this sense every day in Squirrel Hill, a place teeming with first- and second-generation immigrants, a place where families of all backgrounds are welcome, a place that feels inviting and refreshingly unconcerned with the things that make people different: race, wealth or social status. It’s a neighborhood that has taken on the character of its most famous denizen, the late Fred Rogers—who lived just three blocks from the shooting.
As I seek to process my own reactions to the Tree of Life attacks, I’m reminded of my own childhood. I was raised in a dual-religious household in Squirrel Hill, about a mile and a half from the synagogue.
My mother, an Ashkenazi Jew with roots in Russia, Germany and Lithuania, was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and since the 1980s has been a member of the reform Jewish congregation of Temple Sinai, about a mile from Tree of Life.
My father, on the other hand, is an Episcopalian from Baltimore with Scots-Irish and Irish Catholic ancestors. Shortly after accepting a position as a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, he joined the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, a few blocks down Forbes Avenue from my mom’s synagogue.
Inside our household, my siblings and I were taught both traditions. We hosted a Passover Seder each spring and decorated a Christmas tree in the living room each winter. Shortly after I celebrated my bar mitzvah at Temple Sinai in 1997, I joined the church choir at Redeemer, singing bass alongside my father each Sunday for four years of high school.
But outside our house, the communities were wonderfully stitched together as well. Rabbi James Gibson of Temple Sinai would often be found in the pews at our church during Easter; our rector would often attend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Temple Sinai and incorporated Hebrew prayers into her Sunday Eucharist service. We would occasionally see both of them volunteering at the monthly men’s shelter dinners organized by East End Cooperative Ministries, an interfaith group.
Years after high school, a college course on the Old Testament reignited my interest in Judaism, and I stopped telling people I was “half-Jewish.” When I married a Jewish woman, we decided to raise our family according to Jewish traditions, and now I identify as Jewish. But Squirrel Hill, and the open-armed pluralism that defines it, has undoubtedly shaped my religious identity and who I am as a husband, a father and a person.
At Taylor Allderdice High School at the southern end of Squirrel Hill, I sat in classrooms with students who were of white, black, Indian, Korean, Chinese, Jewish and Christian heritage. They were the children of Russian refuseniks who lived in settlement housing at the foot of Murray Avenue and the kids of wealthy doctors and documentary filmmakers who lived in rambling Tudor houses on Beechwood Boulevard and the leafy lanes north of Forbes Avenue.
We all cheered the Dragons, our championship high school soccer team, together during the City League playoffs, drank beer in Frick Park on Friday nights (sorry, Mom), and ate cheesesteaks at Uncle Sam’s Subs after school. The most bitter ideological differences were between those who bought delicious, Neopolitan-style pizza from Mineo’s on Murray Avenue and those who preferred Aiello’s, the (inferior!) slice shop up the street.
How does something so horrible happen to a community this strong? If it can happen here, a place where the truth guides people to be good to one another and ideas are shared and debated, rather than weaponized, can’t it happen anywhere?
On Sunday, I also called Rabbi Gibson, who stood on the bima with me the first time I read Torah at Temple Sinai, and asked him to help me sort through these questions.
He reminded me that Bowers, the alleged gunman, was obviously not from our community, and did not share our values. Rabbi Gibson pointed out that just a few miles away from where I grew up is a totally different place, culturally, politically and ethnically: The Southern Poverty Law Center has ranked Pennsylvania as the U.S. state with the fourth-highest number of hate groups, many in the southwestern part of the commonwealth, where Pittsburgh sits.
“For me, Squirrel Hill values are not just live and let live, but that people who are different have something really interesting to bring to the conversation,” he said. “We’re interested in each other.”
Squirrel Hill values. Maybe that’s why a white supremacist would choose to gun down people in a house of worship—maybe that’s what bigots hate about places like my old neighborhood.
Rabbi Gibson noted reports from Sunday afternoon that Pittsburgh’s tiny Muslim community had raised more than $70,000 in 24 hours to help pay funeral costs for the murdered Jews at Tree of Life. He assured me that life would go on.
“I don’t think the fundamental calculus of Jewish life in the neighborhood has changed as a result of this terrible thing, but it was a terrible thing,” Rabbi Gibson said. “If we become armed camps in our own synagogues, it will defeat our very purpose to exist.”
I grew up in the Jewish community near Tree of Life synagogue. I know firsthand that we're stronger than hate.
By ROBERT WHELAN
The British satirist Jonathan Swift is often credited with the most-cited aphorism about the power of rumors: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
On Saturday morning, I woke up to the unimaginable news that a terror attack had struck the Jewish community in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Over the years, I’ve attended many services at Tree of Life, including the bar and bat mitzvot of high school friends.
Now, a gunman had reportedly killed 11 people at the synagogue and wounded six others, shouting anti-Semitic slogans as he was taken away by police.
As a journalist based in Mexico, I’m used to covering violence and tragedy. But this was a shock. This was home. Tree of Life is a pillar of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, and its unassuming gray stone and stained-glass structure sits in the heart of Squirrel Hill on Wilkins Avenue, one of the main arteries that connects the neighborhood to the universities and shopping districts bordering downtown.
After calling around to ensure that my family and friends were accounted for, and after the initial wave of horror and sadness washed over me, it soon became clear what had happened: A vicious lie had traveled the world, from the Middle East to Europe to Latin America, and had landed with deadly finality in my hometown.
That lie, of course, is the ugly libel that Jews are coordinating a genocidal war against “white” culture by paying for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to storm the borders of the United States and the nations of central Europe.
Robert Bowers, the 46-year-old from the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh who is accused of storming into Tree of Life as Sabbath worship services began and murdering congregants with an assault rifle, was unequivocal about his views on Jews.
On Gab, the social media platform of choice for the alt-right, he wrote that “Jews are the children of Satan” and ranted about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a 140-year-old nonprofit that was founded to help victims of 19th-century anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia emigrate to the U.S. Today, the group provides assistance for migrants from all over the world, Jewish and not, including those from Latin America, torn by criminal violence, and Syria, torn by war.
The caravans of Central American migrants making their way through Mexico toward the U.S. border had caught Bowers’ attention in recent weeks. He reposted claims on Gab that the caravans were “hostile invaders” and that Jewish organizations were paying for the caravans and providing trucks to transport immigrants.
In most of the U.S., Bowers’ hateful views are seen as fringe conspiracy theories. But all over the world, from Syria to Hungary to Honduras to Mexico to Florida, anti-Semitic libels related to a global plan by Jews to corrupt the white race and otherwise dominate world culture are gaining traction.
This month alone George Soros, the billionaire Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, has been accused of funding the migrant caravans on social media, in TV newscasts and by mainstream elected officials.
There is no evidence to date—none—that Soros is funding the Central American migrant caravans. As my colleagues and I have reported, most of the thousands of migrants crossing Mexico right now are dirt poor. To survive the nearly 3,000-mile journey north to the U.S. border, they rely on their own limited means, as well as donations from local church groups and the residents of the towns they pass through on the rough migrant trail.
I have traveled to the Central American countries where these migrants come from, and reported on the violence and abject poverty they are trying to escape. I’ve written for my newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, about migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were apprehended in Texas, steps from the Mexican border, after crossing the Rio Grande on a raft in search of a better life.
I’ve interviewed migrants who have settled in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo, grateful to be able to work even low-paying factory jobs in peace instead of facing daily extortion and death threats from the street gangs that have overrun much of their home countries.
Not one of them was well-funded or provisioned for their journey, and every single one of them cited safety, a better job or reuniting with family as the principle reason for trying to enter the United States. None of them talked about changing U.S. culture or invading the country at the bidding of the Jews.
But even dignifying the libel of the Jewish immigration conspiracy theory with an answer feels wrong and offensive to me. Engaging with anti-Semitic rumors as though they are legitimate points of view is like buying an airline ticket for a lie—the more reasonable people who mention it, the faster it travels the world.
On Sunday, while I was still processing the brutal attack that tore apart my community, I called an old college professor of mine, David Nirenberg, to help me better understand how the Tree of Life attack could have happened.
Professor Nirenberg, who now serves as dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, is a historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on anti-Semitism. He described what he calls the “classic form of anti-Judaism”: The idea that shadowy Jewish agents are working from within a society to corrupt it and manipulate its leaders.
White supremacists, he told me, cannot brook the notion that a minority group (Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, to name a few of these bigots’ favorite targets) is receiving special treatment from society (via affirmative action education policies, for example, or by gaining asylum status).
In the anti-Semite’s warped worldview, these inferior groups could never have achieved favored status on their own merits, and must have help from within the system, and that means from the Jews, a group they see as duplicitous manipulators who are pretending to be white.
What’s different today, and much more disturbing, is that this view seems to have moved much closer to the mainstream than it has been since World War II. And the Soros obsession is dangerous because it legitimizes the views of accused violent criminals like Bowers.
“Now, just as in the mid-1920s, mainstream figures are willing to flirt with these anti-Semitic memes and adopt these really fringe viewpoints in exchange for some sort of electoral advantage,” Nirenberg said. “That is what really has given these ideas resonance. In the past, you’d rarely find people willing to say these things on TV or in public, but that all changed because of moments like Charlottesville,” he said, referring to last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists in Virginia.
“It empowers these people in an entirely new way,” Nirenberg explained.
The horrors of Saturday’s shooting are all the more disturbing for being in my backyard. My sister held a baby-naming ceremony for her first daughter in the Tree of Life sanctuary a few years ago, before moving away from Pittsburgh for her medical residency. I shudder to think what might have happened if she were still a member there today.
If a conspiracy theory about the role of Jewish groups in immigration is the lie, then what is the truth that got stuck lacing up its boots on Saturday morning while Bowers was allegedly killing worshippers at Tree of Life?
The truth is that communities are stronger, and people become better, when they are exposed to people who are different, and compelled to learn about them, live alongside them and engage them in dialogue in the hopes of developing an understanding and empathy for them and their ways of life. And to me, that truth is best exemplified by the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.
You feel this sense every day in Squirrel Hill, a place teeming with first- and second-generation immigrants, a place where families of all backgrounds are welcome, a place that feels inviting and refreshingly unconcerned with the things that make people different: race, wealth or social status. It’s a neighborhood that has taken on the character of its most famous denizen, the late Fred Rogers—who lived just three blocks from the shooting.
As I seek to process my own reactions to the Tree of Life attacks, I’m reminded of my own childhood. I was raised in a dual-religious household in Squirrel Hill, about a mile and a half from the synagogue.
My mother, an Ashkenazi Jew with roots in Russia, Germany and Lithuania, was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and since the 1980s has been a member of the reform Jewish congregation of Temple Sinai, about a mile from Tree of Life.
My father, on the other hand, is an Episcopalian from Baltimore with Scots-Irish and Irish Catholic ancestors. Shortly after accepting a position as a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, he joined the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, a few blocks down Forbes Avenue from my mom’s synagogue.
Inside our household, my siblings and I were taught both traditions. We hosted a Passover Seder each spring and decorated a Christmas tree in the living room each winter. Shortly after I celebrated my bar mitzvah at Temple Sinai in 1997, I joined the church choir at Redeemer, singing bass alongside my father each Sunday for four years of high school.
But outside our house, the communities were wonderfully stitched together as well. Rabbi James Gibson of Temple Sinai would often be found in the pews at our church during Easter; our rector would often attend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Temple Sinai and incorporated Hebrew prayers into her Sunday Eucharist service. We would occasionally see both of them volunteering at the monthly men’s shelter dinners organized by East End Cooperative Ministries, an interfaith group.
Years after high school, a college course on the Old Testament reignited my interest in Judaism, and I stopped telling people I was “half-Jewish.” When I married a Jewish woman, we decided to raise our family according to Jewish traditions, and now I identify as Jewish. But Squirrel Hill, and the open-armed pluralism that defines it, has undoubtedly shaped my religious identity and who I am as a husband, a father and a person.
At Taylor Allderdice High School at the southern end of Squirrel Hill, I sat in classrooms with students who were of white, black, Indian, Korean, Chinese, Jewish and Christian heritage. They were the children of Russian refuseniks who lived in settlement housing at the foot of Murray Avenue and the kids of wealthy doctors and documentary filmmakers who lived in rambling Tudor houses on Beechwood Boulevard and the leafy lanes north of Forbes Avenue.
We all cheered the Dragons, our championship high school soccer team, together during the City League playoffs, drank beer in Frick Park on Friday nights (sorry, Mom), and ate cheesesteaks at Uncle Sam’s Subs after school. The most bitter ideological differences were between those who bought delicious, Neopolitan-style pizza from Mineo’s on Murray Avenue and those who preferred Aiello’s, the (inferior!) slice shop up the street.
How does something so horrible happen to a community this strong? If it can happen here, a place where the truth guides people to be good to one another and ideas are shared and debated, rather than weaponized, can’t it happen anywhere?
On Sunday, I also called Rabbi Gibson, who stood on the bima with me the first time I read Torah at Temple Sinai, and asked him to help me sort through these questions.
He reminded me that Bowers, the alleged gunman, was obviously not from our community, and did not share our values. Rabbi Gibson pointed out that just a few miles away from where I grew up is a totally different place, culturally, politically and ethnically: The Southern Poverty Law Center has ranked Pennsylvania as the U.S. state with the fourth-highest number of hate groups, many in the southwestern part of the commonwealth, where Pittsburgh sits.
“For me, Squirrel Hill values are not just live and let live, but that people who are different have something really interesting to bring to the conversation,” he said. “We’re interested in each other.”
Squirrel Hill values. Maybe that’s why a white supremacist would choose to gun down people in a house of worship—maybe that’s what bigots hate about places like my old neighborhood.
Rabbi Gibson noted reports from Sunday afternoon that Pittsburgh’s tiny Muslim community had raised more than $70,000 in 24 hours to help pay funeral costs for the murdered Jews at Tree of Life. He assured me that life would go on.
“I don’t think the fundamental calculus of Jewish life in the neighborhood has changed as a result of this terrible thing, but it was a terrible thing,” Rabbi Gibson said. “If we become armed camps in our own synagogues, it will defeat our very purpose to exist.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)