motherjones--2020-11-16--The Squad Doubled Its Ranks. Now What?

The Squad Doubled Its Ranks. Now What?

Cori Bush wanted to make something clear when I spoke with her the day after the election .
“ I don ’ t hate police , ” she said gently .
The newly elected House member had unseated a 20-year incumbent in Missouri ’ s safely Democratic 1st District earlier this year based on her record of activism in Ferguson , where the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown turned Black Lives Matter into a national movement .
During her primary , Bush told me that the House ’ s police reform bill , passed a month after George Floyd @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soft ” and criticized its lack of “ real ‘ defund ’ language.
” “ Defund the police ” is shorthand activists like Bush have long used to describe their desire to slash police budgets and reinvest those funds into social services .
But the parlance of her movement , she told me , had been distorted and weaponized by her GOP opponent during the general election , who painted her as “ this anti-police , hateful person , ” she told me in our call after her win .
“ I loathe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ve had problems in their departments , in their unions , that they have not addressed , ” Bush clarified .
“ And the result is dead bodies who look like me.
” Bush didn ’ t aim her explanation at anyone in particular , but it eerily anticipated the criticism that her soon-to-be-colleague Rep. Abigail Spanberger lobbed on a call with her Democratic colleagues the following day .
“ If we don ’ t mean ‘ defund the police , ’ we shouldn ’ t say that , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lost her race in central Virginia , seethed .
She also said , “ We need not ever use the word ‘ socialist ’ or ‘ socialism ’ ever again.
” Bush ’ s tenure in the House begins just as Democrats ’ intraparty warfare reaches a new crescendo .
The brief armistice that pushed President-elect Joe Biden over the finish line ended once the down-ballot results revealed Republicans had taken back at least half a dozen House seats .
Some , like Spanberger , laid the blame at the feet of “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( D-N.Y. ) for tagging the whole party with their left-wing views .
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries ( D-N.Y. ) , a top contender to one day succeed Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker , asked his fellow Democrats on a separate call with House leadership last week : “ Do we want to win , do we want to govern , or do we want to be internet celebrities ?
” But as this proxy war over the party ’ s future plays out in the House , the chamber ’ s progressives find @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Justice Democrats , the left-wing group that backed Ocasio-Cortez in her 2018 primary victory , successfully unseated three moderate Democratic House members with progressive candidates .
In open seats , a number of liberal candidates who supported Medicare for All and the Green New Deal replaced retiring lawmakers who did not .
Joining Bush are a pair of New Yorkers , Jamaal Bowman , a former Bronx principal who unseated Rep. Eliot Engel , and Mondaire Jones , one of House ’ s first-ever openly gay Black members ( who ran as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Justice Democrats ’ backing ) .
A number of them , like Bush , owe their victories to the racial justice uprisings in the wake of George Floyd ’ s murder , for which “ defund the police ” is a rallying cry .
Ocasio-Cortez and her three fellow squad members showed up with big ideas and soapboxes to match two years ago , but no power in an institution where strength is measured in numbers .
“ That ’ s like , five people , ” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ( D-Calif. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with 60 minutes , a summation that was dismissive if not inaccurate .
“ And I said , all right , let ’ s go get more , ” Ocasio-Cortez told the Daily Beast in July.
” And so , we ’ re getting more votes , we ’ re getting more people.
” Now , the squad ’ s ranks will nearly double when the next Congress starts , and the loss of moderate Democrats in swing districts have given the left a larger—if still minority—share of the House Democratic membership than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of progressives enter the hornet ’ s nest , they ’ re grappling with how to best wield their positions and platforms .
To Ocasio-Cortez and her leftist allies , the censure from moderates amounts to an effort to silence the progressive wing instead of grappling with the racial resentment that fueled GOP attacks in the first place .
“ That ’ s their argument with defunding police , right ?
” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times last week .
“ To not agitate racial resentment .
I don ’ t think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( D-Mich. ) questioned why unity always seems to come at the expense of the party ’ s left flank—especially when many of those leftist lawmakers represent marginalized populations .
“ If we truly want to unify our country , we have to really respect every single voice , ” Tlaib said .
“ We say that so willingly when we talk about Trump supporters , but we don ’ t say that willingly for my Black and brown neighbors and from LGBTQ neighbors or marginalized people.
” Incoming House progressives I spoke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We have people who have been , historically , not part of the conversation becoming a central voice in the conversation , ” Bowman , who is Black , tells me .
“ Those who have lost faith in our political system are gaining faith because of candidates like me .
They see people who look like them , who sound like them , to speak about the issues they care about.
” Jones tells me that “ to be silent is to abandon the people who sent me to Washington to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ truth to power and to fight for the big structural changes that are going to meet the moment.
” It ’ s why Jones doesn ’ t plan on giving up his ambitions to expand the Supreme Court—even as his moderate colleagues perhaps wish he wouldn ’ t and he faces a GOP-held Senate undoubtedly hostile to the idea .
Bowman joined Jones for a virtual organizing call on packing the courts last week .
“ I ’ m now faced with a Supreme Court majority that is hostile to my civil rights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voting rights of Black and brown Americans , and to democracy itself , ” Jones says .
But he ’ s also signaling pragmatism .
“ Court expansion wasn ’ t going to happen overnight , ” he acknowledges , and says he ’ s eager to be a “ bridge-builder ” who can unite his colleagues around “ areas of common ground ” with his more moderate colleagues .
Bush has adopted a similar stance .
“ By us being this force that continues to grow , we can apply more pressure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we need to see change , ” she tells me , explaining that Medicare for All in 2016 and the Green New Deal in 2018 are examples of how a persistent progressive bloc can make ideas “ more mainstream.
” But , Bush adds , “ I think that it ’ s going to be something that we ’ ll have to be very careful about because we don ’ t want to lose our voices.
” So far , Bush has kept to her activist roots : She showed up to House @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the name of Breonna Taylor , the 26-year-old Black woman shot to death by police in her home in Lexington , Kentucky , this past spring .
A few of her new Republican colleagues have called her Breonna , assuming it ’ s her name .
“ It hurts , ” she tweeted .
“ But I ’ m glad they ’ ll come to know her name & story because of my presence here .
Breonna must be central to our work in Congress.
” Marie Newman , who defeated anti-abortion Rep. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ever-worsening pandemic is still a good time to make the case for the top items on progressives ’ wishlists .
“ I think there ’ s a huge opportunity for Medicare for All , ” she told me , noting that it ’ s up to lawmakers like her to help make the case for it as a “ practical path forward.
” She hopes that she and her colleagues train their focus on the most popular ideas with broad support , like universal childcare and a green stimulus package .
Bowman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and economic inequality , both at the center of his campaign , are interconnected .
“ We ’ re at an urgent moment that we have to govern aggressively and urgently to get out of , ” Bowman told me .
What they ’ re embarking on , in other words , is a balancing act of scorched-earth activism and party unity .
Rep. Jamie Raskin ( D-Md . )
, a progressive lawmaker just elected to his third term , told me he worried the two runoff races in Georgia that will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a need for factions to tap the breaks .
“ There are times to push and bring things to a head , and there are times to regroup and ready the ground , ” Raskin says , “ We still don ’ t know what time it is.
” But , Raskin adds , that shouldn ’ t involve bending over backward to meet Republican demands .
“ Our rhetoric should not be , ‘ Oh , now that they ’ ve trashed our entire democracy and plunged us into debt , starvation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , let ’ s sit in a circle and sing kumbaya together , ” Raskin says .
“ The last thing anybody wants is a series of establishment lectures about civility and bipartisanship .
”

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Cori Bush wanted to make something clear when I spoke with her the day after the election. “I don’t hate police,” she said gently. The newly elected House member had unseated a 20-year incumbent in Missouri’s safely Democratic 1st District based on her record of activism in Ferguson, where the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown turned Black Lives Matter into a national movement. During her primary, Bush told me that the House’s police reform bill, passed a month after George Floyd’s death, was “too soft” and criticized its lack of “real ‘defund’ language.”
“Defund the police” is shorthand activists like Bush have long used to describe their desire to slash police budgets and reinvest those funds into social services. But the parlance of her movement, she told me, had been distorted and weaponized by her GOP opponent during the general election, who painted her as “this anti-police, hateful person,” she told me in our call after her win. “I loathe what [police] allow—the fact that they’ve had problems in their departments, in their unions, that they have not addressed,” Bush clarified. “And the result is dead bodies who look like me.”
Bush didn’t aim her explanation at anyone in particular, but it eerily anticipated the criticism that her soon-to-be-colleague Rep. Abigail Spanberger lobbed on a call with fellow Democratic House members the following day. “If we don’t mean ‘defund the police,’ we shouldn’t say that,” the moderate first-term House Democrat, who nearly lost her race in central Virginia, seethed. She also said, “We need not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
Bush’s tenure in the House begins just as Democrats’ intraparty warfare reaches a new crescendo. The brief armistice that pushed President-elect Joe Biden over the finish line ended once the down-ballot results revealed Republicans had taken back at least half a dozen House seats. Some, like Spanberger, laid the blame at the feet of “squad” members like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for tagging the whole party with their left-wing views. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), a top contender to one day succeed Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, asked on a separate call with members of House leadership last week: “Do we want to win, do we want to govern, or do we want to be internet celebrities?”
But as this proxy war over the party’s future plays out in the House, the chamber’s progressives find themselves in a rare posture of strength. Justice Democrats, the left-wing group that backed Ocasio-Cortez in her 2018 primary victory, successfully unseated three moderate Democratic House members with progressive candidates. In open seats, a number of liberal candidates who supported Medicare for All and the Green New Deal replaced retiring lawmakers who did not. Among those joining Bush are a pair of New Yorkers, Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx principal who unseated Rep. Eliot Engel, and Mondaire Jones, one of House’s first-ever openly gay Black members (who ran as a progressive but didn’t have Justice Democrats’ backing). A number of them, like Bush, owe their victories to the racial justice uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, for which “defund the police” is a rallying cry.
Ocasio-Cortez and her three fellow squad members showed up with big ideas and soapboxes to match two years ago, but no power in an institution where strength is measured in numbers. “That’s like, five people,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sniped last summer in an interview with 60 minutes, a summation that was dismissive if not inaccurate. “And I said, all right, let’s go get more,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Daily Beast in July. “So, we’re getting more votes, we’re getting more people.”
Now, the squad’s ranks will nearly double when the next Congress starts, and the loss of moderate Democrats in swing districts have given the left a larger—if still minority—share of the House Democratic membership. As the newest class of progressives enter the hornet’s nest, they’re grappling with how to best wield their positions and platforms.
To Ocasio-Cortez and her leftist allies, the censure from moderates amounts to an effort to silence the progressive wing instead of grappling with the racial resentment that fueled GOP attacks in the first place. “That’s their argument with defunding police, right?” Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times last week. “To not agitate racial resentment. I don’t think that is sustainable.” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) questioned why unity always seems to come at the expense of the party’s left flank—especially when many of those leftist lawmakers represent marginalized populations. “If we truly want to unify our country, we have to really respect every single voice,” Tlaib said. “We say that so willingly when we talk about Trump supporters, but we don’t say that willingly for my Black and brown neighbors and from LGBTQ neighbors or marginalized people.”
Incoming House progressives I spoke with echoed Tlaib’s concerns. “We have people who have been, historically, not part of the conversation becoming a central voice in the conversation,” Bowman, who is Black, tells me. “Those who have lost faith in our political system are gaining faith because of candidates like me. They see people who look like them, who sound like them, to speak about the issues they care about.” Jones tells me that “to be silent is to abandon the people who sent me to Washington to do a job—and that is to speak truth to power and to fight for the big structural changes that are going to meet the moment.”
It’s why Jones doesn’t plan on giving up his ambitions to expand the Supreme Court—even as his moderate colleagues perhaps wish he would and he faces a GOP-held Senate undoubtedly hostile to the idea. Bowman joined Jones for a virtual organizing call on packing the courts last week. “I’m now faced with a Supreme Court majority that is hostile to my civil rights, and of course, to the voting rights of Black and brown Americans, and to democracy itself,” Jones says. But he’s also signaling pragmatism. “Court expansion wasn’t going to happen overnight,” he acknowledges, and says he’s eager to be a “bridge-builder” who can unite his colleagues around “areas of common ground” with his more moderate colleagues.
Bush has adopted a similar stance. “By us being this force that continues to grow, we can apply more pressure in the areas where we feel like we need to see change,” she tells me, explaining that Medicare for All in 2016 and the Green New Deal in 2018 are examples of how a persistent progressive bloc can make ideas “more mainstream.” But, Bush adds, “I think that it’s going to be something that we’ll have to be very careful about because we don’t want to lose our voices.”
So far, Bush has kept to her activist roots: She showed up to House orientation wearing a face mask emblazoned with the name of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman shot to death by police in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, this past spring.* A few of her new Republican colleagues have called Bush Breonna, assuming it’s her name. “It hurts,” she tweeted. “But I’m glad they’ll come to know her name & story because of my presence here. Breonna must be central to our work in Congress.”
Marie Newman, who defeated anti-abortion Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), thinks the ever-worsening pandemic is still a good time to make the case for the top items on progressives’ wishlists. “I think there’s a huge opportunity for Medicare for All,” she told me, noting that it’s up to lawmakers like her to help make the case for it as a “practical path forward.” She hopes that she and her colleagues train their focus on the most popular ideas with broad support, like universal childcare and a green stimulus package. Bowman added that coronavirus revealed how racial justice and economic inequality, both at the center of his campaign, are interconnected. “We’re at an urgent moment that we have to govern aggressively and urgently to get out of,” Bowman told me.
What they’re embarking on, in other words, is a balancing act of scorched-earth activism and party unity. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a progressive lawmaker just elected to his third term, told me he worried the two runoff races in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate might necessitate a need for factions to tap the breaks. “There are times to push and bring things to a head, and there are times to regroup and ready the ground,” Raskin says, “We still don’t know what time it is.”
But, Raskin adds, that shouldn’t involve bending over backward to meet Republican demands. “Our rhetoric should not be, ‘Oh, now that they’ve trashed our entire democracy and plunged us into debt, starvation, drought, international isolation and war, let’s sit in a circle and sing kumbaya together,” Raskin says. “The last thing anybody wants is a series of establishment lectures about civility and bipartisanship.”
*An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the city where Breonna Taylor was murdered as Lexington, Kentucky, not Louisville.


motherjones--2020-11-16--This Guy Is Unhappy With His Health Care Plan, So He Wants SCOTUS to Destroy Obamacare

John Nantz doesn ’ t like his health insurance plan .
At $ 266 a month , he thinks the bronze plan he buys off the federal health exchange is too expensive , plus the $ 6,500 deductible is too high .
The single , childless , 34-year-old management consultant in Austin says he doesn ’ t need much health care anyway , just the sports therapists and chiropractors he pays for out of pocket or through a health savings account .
Hating your health insurance plan is a time-honored American tradition .
Many of those lucky enough to have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deductibles and narrow networks of provider options .
But Nantz has taken more drastic action to do something about it than , say , grousing to colleagues or going uninsured .
He has joined 18 red states as a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act that last week reached the Supreme Court for oral arguments .
He has asked the high court to overturn the entire law so he can get what he thinks will be better insurance in the “ competitive ” free market .
Unfortunately for Nantz , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ any indication , being unhappy with your health insurance plan may not be enough to persuade the Supreme Court that you ’ ve got a case for blowing up the ACA and causing 20 million of your fellow citizens to lose their coverage .
California v. Texas is the latest challenge to Obamacare that has reached the Supreme Court since the law was enacted in 2010 .
This particular case was filed after Congress essentially eliminated the law ’ s individual mandate , the provision requiring people to purchase health insurance or pay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t repeal the provision .
Instead , as part of the 2017 Trump tax cut bill , it simply reduced the fine for being uninsured to zero .
In response , opponents of the bill , led by the state of Texas , went to court to attack the law once more , arguing that without the fine to enforce the individual mandate , the rest of the law should be ruled unconstitutional .
Their case was weak from the outset , as the states first had to prove that they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ individual mandate—a tough order given that it only applies to individuals .
The states argued , somewhat improbably , that when Congress abolished the fine for being uninsured , it somehow caused more people to enroll in state-funded health programs like Medicaid and the Children ’ s Health Insurance Program , which cost the state money and thus gave them standing to sue .
Lawyers for the states were unable to find a single person who would testify to the fact that they actually had done this , so they also argued that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ burdens .
That argument may have been enough to get them through the courthouse door , but it wasn ’ t one that would hold up to much scrutiny .
That ’ s where John Nantz comes in .
The Texas Public Policy Foundation , a conservative think tank , recruited him and another self-employed man , Neill Hurley , to join the case as plaintiffs to hedge against the possibility that a federal judge would toss the states ’ case for lack of any recognizable harm from the law they were challenging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ latest in a string of plaintiffs in federal challenges to the ACA who have had extremely dubious claims of having been harmed by a law designed to give them better and cheaper health insurance .
Since the law was passed as one of Obama ’ s signature achievements , it ’ s become a lightning rod for conservative rage at government overreach , while it has continued to remain popular with the greater public .
More than 70 times , Republicans have tried to repeal the law and failed , even when they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ White House .
As a result , opponents of the law have turned to the courts to try to achieve what they haven ’ t been able to do through legislation .
But the popularity of the law has also hampered their ability to find sympathetic and qualified people to headline their lawsuits , and fewer still who were willing to sabotage a law that ’ s extended health insurance to 20 million people .
Those they have already deployed haven ’ t inspired confidence in the righteousness of their cause .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Virginia small-businessman David Klemencic was a plaintiff in Halbig v. Burwell .
He sued the Department of Health and Human Services over the ACA because the law forced him to either pay a fine of at least $ 100 for being uninsured or buy a bronze insurance plan off the federal health exchange that , with a generous subsidy , would have cost him a mere $ 21 a year .
And there was a Virginia woman , Brenda Levy , then 64 , with a host of health problems who ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health insurance and was recruited by a conservative think tank to be a plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case King v. Burwell .
How did Obamacare hurt her ?
Court documents showed that thanks to the ACA , she could get a bronze plan off the exchange for $ 148 a month .
That apparently did nothing to assuage her opposition to Obamacare , which , she insisted in an interview with me , was that it gave the government too much control over Americans ’ medical treatment .
During oral arguments @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Circuit Court of Appeals , Judge Andre Davis repeatedly expressed skepticism about the plaintiffs and their alleged injuries .
He quizzed the lead lawyer on the case , Michael Carvin , a partner at the law firm Jones Day , on why he hadn ’ t brought the suit as a class action—the traditional vehicle for public interest litigation that usually covers many potential plaintiffs .
Davis suggested that the reason was that “ nobody wants what you ’ re after here !
” Nonetheless , that case made its way to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also grilled Carvin about the plaintiffs ’ alleged injuries from the ACA .
A plaintiff , she declared , “ has to have a concrete stake in the question…you would have to prove the standing if this gets beyond the opening door.
” Indeed , Brenda Levy would qualify for Medicare before the court even decided the case , making her concerns about the ACA moot .
The court upheld the health care law but didn ’ t really address the question of whether the plaintiffs had standing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t been raised in the lower courts .
This time , though , in Californa v. Texas , standing is at the heart of the case , and the Supreme Court has been asked directly to rule on the question of whether Nantz , Hurley , and the states have suffered any harm that would entitle them to seek redress in federal court .
Nantz had been a member of the Texas Public Policy Institute ’ s young professional group in Austin .
After graduating from Stanford , he went to work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ started his own consulting firm , Redwood Advisors , where , according to court filings , he advises clients “ on maximizing growth potential.
” Some of those clients are health care companies—including at least one that is opposing him in the ACA case .
According to the company ’ s website , Redwood Advisors has done work for Blue Cross Blue Shield .
The health insurance giant has filed an amicus brief in the case supporting the ACA and excoriating Nantz and his fellow plaintiffs for “ ask [ ing ] this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ system in the United States.
” Nantz ’ s personal experience with what health insurance was like before the Affordable Care Act is limited : He was still in college when the bill passed .
Nonetheless , opponents of the ACA hoped that individual plaintiffs like him might fare better in court than the states challenging the law .
Both he as an individual and states like Texas must attempt to prove that the law has inflicted harm on them .
That ’ s not so easy now that there ’ s no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nantz can simply opt out of insurance if he wants to , penalty free .
But according to his statements in the case , Nantz doesn ’ t want to do that—not because he ’ s worried that he needs insurance lest he get hit by a bus , catch COVID-19 , or get caught in the crossfire of a mass shooting .
Instead , he says he buys insurance because he believes that “ following the law is the right thing to do.
” ( Nantz ’ s lawyer , Robert Henneke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Mother Jones . )
In 2018 , Tom Miller , a resident health policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute told Politico that Nantz and Hurley were like people who don ’ t “ take a tag off of their mattress ” because of the legal warning , even though there ’ s no possible chance the government will go after them for it .
Nantz is not wrong that his bronze plan could be more expensive than it might have been before the ACA passed in 2010 .
He makes too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the individual insurance market is still a hot mess , in part because the risk pool is so small .
High costs have driven healthy young people out of the individual market , leaving only older and sicker Americans seeking coverage .
But the number of people , like Nantz , who don ’ t get insurance from an employer or a government program like Medicare or Medicaid and who buy coverage through the exchange but are also too rich to qualify for a subsidy is pretty small—about 3.4 million in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 15 million people gained insurance through the ACA ’ s Medicaid expansion .
Nantz ’ s bronze plan is likely to be much more comprehensive than what was available at that price before the law passed thanks to the ACA ’ s requirements for basic minimum coverage .
And then again , no one is forcing him to buy it .
Even if he succeeds in persuading the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA , Nantz ’ s insurance problems aren ’ t likely to improve .
Experts predict that individual insurance might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people drop coverage and the markets skew towards sicker and older customers .
Despite the weakness of the plaintiff ’ s claims of injury , the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor in December 2019 .
The court found that the plaintiffs did have standing to sue , and it upheld a lower court ruling that the individual mandate is now unconstitutional , even if the penalty it carries is zero .
In a scathing dissent , 5th Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King focused on the plaintiffs ’ lack of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suffered the sort of harm or threat of government action that would qualify them to sue in federal court .
She described Nantz ’ s alleged injury in the case as “ entirely self-inflicted , ” and noted that federal law doesn ’ t allow someone to challenge a statute based on a self-inflicted injury .
Further , King wrote , the law that ended the individual mandate “ does nothing more than require individuals to pay zero dollars to the IRS if they do not purchase health insurance , which is to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ standing to challenge a law that does nothing.
” If the Supreme Court rules on the standing question in favor of Nantz , the implications extend far beyond the Affordable Care Act .
By doing so , it could widely expand the range of people who could claim the right to sue in federal court without proving any concrete injury—a possibility that puts the court ’ s conservatives in an especially tricky bind .
Over the past half-century , conservative justices have sharply limited access to the courts in environmental and civil rights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 2013 , a conservative majority tossed out a lawsuit filed by Amnesty International , media , labor and other human rights organizations challenging the federal government ’ s warrantless wiretapping program , ruling that they had no standing to sue .
“ The law of Article III standing , which is built on separation-of-powers principles , serves to prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches , ” wrote Justice Samuel Alito .
Chief Justice John Roberts reiterated that point during oral arguments in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s an important doctrine , ” he told Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall , who represented the Trump administration .
“ The only reason we have the authority to interpret the Constitution is because we have the responsibility of deciding actual cases , and that ’ s what standing filters out.
” Allowing such weak plaintiffs to pursue the ACA case might also open the federal courts to a flood of exactly the sort of litigation they don ’ t want to hear—nuisance suits .
As California Solicitor General Michael Mongan noted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the law would allow a host of crazy challenges to the ACA to go forward .
There are many provisions in the ACA that have nothing to do with health insurance , for instance , such as the requirement that chain restaurants post calorie counts on their menus .
Anyone who doesn ’ t like them could bring suit in federal court to overturn the entire 900-page law , without having to prove that the provision actually harmed them .
“ Your theory of standing is that a person who ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ law can challenge that part of the law and , through that , try to strike down other parts of the law that do challenge him or that do injure him , ” Roberts told Wall later .
“ I think that really expands standing dramatically.
” While Roberts ’ s position on standing seemed pretty clear during oral arguments , University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley says it ’ s hard to know where the court will come down on the issue in the end .
“ The justices were all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he says .
“ In general , conservatives have been more hawkish on standing than liberals , but the doctrine is malleable , and this case is unusual .
That may scramble our normal assumptions.
” The Chief Justice is a well-known standing hawk , as is Justice Brett Kavanaugh .
The court ’ s newest justice , Amy Coney Barrett , could also fall into that camp .
While she has little record to reflect her views one way or another , she is a protégé of the late Justice Antonin Scalia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the seminal 1992 case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife , which held that a group of environmentalists lacked standing to challenge environmental regulations and sharply limited Congress ’ s power to allow private citizens to bring cases in federal court .
Scalia wrote that plaintiffs must have a concrete injury to bring suit in federal court , not a “ conjectural or hypothetical one.
” On Tuesday , even Justice Clarence Thomas , who rarely speaks during oral arguments , chimed in to question how Nantz and Hurley were actually injured by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has no enforcement mechanism , ” he told Kyle Hawkins , the Texas solicitor general , who argued the case for the law ’ s opponents .
“ So it ’ s really hard to determine exactly what the threat is of an action against you .
Could you just give us an understanding of what your injury is ?
”

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John Nantz doesn’t like his health insurance plan. At $266 a month, he thinks the bronze plan he buys off the federal health exchange is too expensive, plus the $6,500 deductible is too high. The single, childless, 34-year-old management consultant in Austin says he doesn’t need much health care anyway, just the sports therapists and chiropractors he pays for out of pocket or through a health savings account.
Hating your health insurance plan is a time-honored American tradition. Many of those lucky enough to have insurance still chafe under high premiums and deductibles and narrow networks of provider options. But Nantz has taken more drastic action to do something about it than, say, grousing to colleagues or going uninsured. He has joined 18 red states as a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act that last week reached the Supreme Court for oral arguments. He has asked the high court to overturn the entire law so he can get what he thinks will be better insurance in the “competitive” free market.
Unfortunately for Nantz, if oral arguments in the case were any indication, being unhappy with your health insurance plan may not be enough to persuade the Supreme Court that you’ve got a case for blowing up the ACA and causing 20 million of your fellow citizens to lose their coverage.
California v. Texas is the latest challenge to Obamacare that has reached the Supreme Court since the law was enacted in 2010. This particular case was filed after Congress essentially eliminated the law’s individual mandate, the provision requiring people to purchase health insurance or pay a fine to the IRS. Congress didn’t repeal the provision. Instead, as part of the 2017 Trump tax cut bill, it simply reduced the fine for being uninsured to zero. In response, opponents of the bill, led by the state of Texas, went to court to attack the law once more, arguing that without the fine to enforce the individual mandate, the rest of the law should be ruled unconstitutional.
Their case was weak from the outset, as the states first had to prove that they were harmed by the elimination of the individual mandate—a tough order given that it only applies to individuals. The states argued, somewhat improbably, that when Congress abolished the fine for being uninsured, it somehow caused more people to enroll in state-funded health programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which cost the state money and thus gave them standing to sue. Lawyers for the states were unable to find a single person who would testify to the fact that they actually had done this, so they also argued that the states had also incurred various paperwork burdens. That argument may have been enough to get them through the courthouse door, but it wasn’t one that would hold up to much scrutiny.
That’s where John Nantz comes in. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, recruited him and another self-employed man, Neill Hurley, to join the case as plaintiffs to hedge against the possibility that a federal judge would toss the states’ case for lack of any recognizable harm from the law they were challenging. Nantz and Hurley are just the latest in a string of plaintiffs in federal challenges to the ACA who have had extremely dubious claims of having been harmed by a law designed to give them better and cheaper health insurance.
Since the law was passed as one of Obama’s signature achievements, it’s become a lightning rod for conservative rage at government overreach, while it has continued to remain popular with the greater public. More than 70 times, Republicans have tried to repeal the law and failed, even when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. As a result, opponents of the law have turned to the courts to try to achieve what they haven’t been able to do through legislation. But the popularity of the law has also hampered their ability to find sympathetic and qualified people to headline their lawsuits, and fewer still who were willing to sabotage a law that’s extended health insurance to 20 million people. Those they have already deployed haven’t inspired confidence in the righteousness of their cause.
For example, back in 2014, West Virginia small-businessman David Klemencic was a plaintiff in Halbig v. Burwell. He sued the Department of Health and Human Services over the ACA because the law forced him to either pay a fine of at least $100 for being uninsured or buy a bronze insurance plan off the federal health exchange that, with a generous subsidy, would have cost him a mere $21 a year. And there was a Virginia woman, Brenda Levy, then 64, with a host of health problems who’d been paying $1,500 a month for health insurance and was recruited by a conservative think tank to be a plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case King v. Burwell. How did Obamacare hurt her? Court documents showed that thanks to the ACA, she could get a bronze plan off the exchange for $148 a month. That apparently did nothing to assuage her opposition to Obamacare, which, she insisted in an interview with me, was that it gave the government too much control over Americans’ medical treatment.
During oral arguments in the King case before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Andre Davis repeatedly expressed skepticism about the plaintiffs and their alleged injuries. He quizzed the lead lawyer on the case, Michael Carvin, a partner at the law firm Jones Day, on why he hadn’t brought the suit as a class action—the traditional vehicle for public interest litigation that usually covers many potential plaintiffs. Davis suggested that the reason was that “nobody wants what you’re after here!” Nonetheless, that case made its way to the Supreme Court in 2015, where the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also grilled Carvin about the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries from the ACA.
A plaintiff, Ginsburg declared, “has to have a concrete stake in the question…you would have to prove the standing if this gets beyond the opening door.”
A plaintiff, she declared, “has to have a concrete stake in the question…you would have to prove the standing if this gets beyond the opening door.” Indeed, Brenda Levy would qualify for Medicare before the court even decided the case, making her concerns about the ACA moot. The court upheld the health care law but didn’t really address the question of whether the plaintiffs had standing to bring the case because it hadn’t been raised in the lower courts.
This time, though, in Californa v. Texas, standing is at the heart of the case, and the Supreme Court has been asked directly to rule on the question of whether Nantz, Hurley, and the states have suffered any harm that would entitle them to seek redress in federal court.
Nantz had been a member of the Texas Public Policy Institute’s young professional group in Austin. After graduating from Stanford, he went to work for McKinsey & Company and in 2014 started his own consulting firm, Redwood Advisors, where, according to court filings, he advises clients “on maximizing growth potential.” Some of those clients are health care companies—including at least one that is opposing him in the ACA case. According to the company’s website, Redwood Advisors has done work for Blue Cross Blue Shield. The health insurance giant has filed an amicus brief in the case supporting the ACA and excoriating Nantz and his fellow plaintiffs for “ask[ing] this court to wreak havoc on the healthcare system in the United States.”
Nantz’s personal experience with what health insurance was like before the Affordable Care Act is limited: He was still in college when the bill passed. Nonetheless, opponents of the ACA hoped that individual plaintiffs like him might fare better in court than the states challenging the law. Both he as an individual and states like Texas must attempt to prove that the law has inflicted harm on them. That’s not so easy now that there’s no longer any fine for going uninsured; Nantz can simply opt out of insurance if he wants to, penalty free.
But according to his statements in the case, Nantz doesn’t want to do that—not because he’s worried that he needs insurance lest he get hit by a bus, catch COVID-19, or get caught in the crossfire of a mass shooting. Instead, he says he buys insurance because he believes that “following the law is the right thing to do.” (Nantz’s lawyer, Robert Henneke, did not respond to an inquiry from Mother Jones.) In 2018, Tom Miller, a resident health policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute told Politico that Nantz and Hurley were like people who don’t “take a tag off of their mattress” because of the legal warning, even though there’s no possible chance the government will go after them for it.
Nantz is not wrong that his bronze plan could be more expensive than it might have been before the ACA passed in 2010. He makes too much money to receive a federal subsidy, and the individual insurance market is still a hot mess, in part because the risk pool is so small. High costs have driven healthy young people out of the individual market, leaving only older and sicker Americans seeking coverage. But the number of people, like Nantz, who don’t get insurance from an employer or a government program like Medicare or Medicaid and who buy coverage through the exchange but are also too rich to qualify for a subsidy is pretty small—about 3.4 million in 2019.
By comparison, more than 15 million people gained insurance through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Nantz’s bronze plan is likely to be much more comprehensive than what was available at that price before the law passed thanks to the ACA’s requirements for basic minimum coverage. And then again, no one is forcing him to buy it. Even if he succeeds in persuading the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA, Nantz’s insurance problems aren’t likely to improve. Experts predict that individual insurance might get even more expensive as healthy young people drop coverage and the markets skew towards sicker and older customers.
Despite the weakness of the plaintiff’s claims of injury, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor in December 2019. The court found that the plaintiffs did have standing to sue, and it upheld a lower court ruling that the individual mandate is now unconstitutional, even if the penalty it carries is zero. In a scathing dissent, 5th Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King focused on the plaintiffs’ lack of standing and their thin claims to having suffered the sort of harm or threat of government action that would qualify them to sue in federal court. She described Nantz’s alleged injury in the case as “entirely self-inflicted,” and noted that federal law doesn’t allow someone to challenge a statute based on a self-inflicted injury. Further, King wrote, the law that ended the individual mandate “does nothing more than require individuals to pay zero dollars to the IRS if they do not purchase health insurance, which is to say it does nothing at all…Nobody has standing to challenge a law that does nothing.”
“Nobody has standing to challenge a law that does nothing.”
If the Supreme Court rules on the standing question in favor of Nantz, the implications extend far beyond the Affordable Care Act. By doing so, it could widely expand the range of people who could claim the right to sue in federal court without proving any concrete injury—a possibility that puts the court’s conservatives in an especially tricky bind. Over the past half-century, conservative justices have sharply limited access to the courts in environmental and civil rights cases by curtailing the rules for standing. In 2013, a conservative majority tossed out a lawsuit filed by Amnesty International, media, labor and other human rights organizations challenging the federal government’s warrantless wiretapping program, ruling that they had no standing to sue. “The law of Article III standing, which is built on separation-of-powers principles, serves to prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito.
Chief Justice John Roberts reiterated that point during oral arguments in the ACA case Tuesday. “It’s an important doctrine,” he told Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, who represented the Trump administration. “The only reason we have the authority to interpret the Constitution is because we have the responsibility of deciding actual cases, and that’s what standing filters out.”
Allowing such weak plaintiffs to pursue the ACA case might also open the federal courts to a flood of exactly the sort of litigation they don’t want to hear—nuisance suits. As California Solicitor General Michael Mongan noted during oral arguments, such a reading of the law would allow a host of crazy challenges to the ACA to go forward. There are many provisions in the ACA that have nothing to do with health insurance, for instance, such as the requirement that chain restaurants post calorie counts on their menus. Anyone who doesn’t like them could bring suit in federal court to overturn the entire 900-page law, without having to prove that the provision actually harmed them. “Your theory of standing is that a person who’s not actually injured by part of the law can challenge that part of the law and, through that, try to strike down other parts of the law that do challenge him or that do injure him,” Roberts told Wall later. “I think that really expands standing dramatically.”
While Roberts’s position on standing seemed pretty clear during oral arguments, University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley says it’s hard to know where the court will come down on the issue in the end. “The justices were all over the map on standing,” he says. “In general, conservatives have been more hawkish on standing than liberals, but the doctrine is malleable, and this case is unusual. That may scramble our normal assumptions.”
The Chief Justice is a well-known standing hawk, as is Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The court’s newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, could also fall into that camp. While she has little record to reflect her views one way or another, she is a protégé of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who authored the majority decision in the seminal 1992 case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, which held that a group of environmentalists lacked standing to challenge environmental regulations and sharply limited Congress’s power to allow private citizens to bring cases in federal court. Scalia wrote that plaintiffs must have a concrete injury to bring suit in federal court, not a “conjectural or hypothetical one.”
On Tuesday, even Justice Clarence Thomas, who rarely speaks during oral arguments, chimed in to question how Nantz and Hurley were actually injured by the ACA. “The individual mandate now has no enforcement mechanism,” he told Kyle Hawkins, the Texas solicitor general, who argued the case for the law’s opponents. “So it’s really hard to determine exactly what the threat is of an action against you. Could you just give us an understanding of what your injury is?”


motherjones--2020-11-15--Trump’s Refusal to Start the Transition Process Is Crippling America’s Coronavirus Response

The Trump administration ’ s ongoing refusal to recognize Joe Biden as the election ’ s legitimate winner and initiate the transition process is endangering the nation ’ s ability to fight the coronavirus .
That was the message delivered Sunday by doctors serving on Biden ’ s pandemic task force , by Biden ’ s incoming chief of staff , and even by a Republican governor .
“ There is a lot of information that needs to be transmitted , ” Atul Gawande , a surgeon and Harvard Medical School professor named to Biden ’ s team , said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It can ’ t wait until the last minute.
” Gawande said that “ it is in the national interest ” for Biden ’ s team of experts to have access to the latest coronavirus threat assessments .
He added that knowing vaccine distribution plans and the status of mask and gloves supplies would also be crucial for Biden ’ s planning .
Ron Klain , who was recently named Biden ’ s White House chief of staff , told NBC ’ s Chuck Todd that the transition team has had no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ members of the Trump administration ’ s coronavirus task force .
The key information Biden ’ s team wants is the status of vaccine distribution plans , Klain added .
For now , Biden ’ s team must rely on the private sector for insights—Klain said Biden is scheduled to meet this week with drug companies such as Pzifer about the status of their vaccine development .
Even Asa Hutchinson , the Republican governor of Arkansas , expressed concerns about the Trump administration ’ s unwillingness to work with the incoming president .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a smooth transition , especially when it comes to the vaccine distribution [ and ] the coronavirus ” so “ everybody understands what we ’ re doing there and what the plan is for the future , ” he told Todd .
As his first act as president-elect , Biden appointed an advisory board of doctors and scientists to help him navigate the pandemic , which has reached staggering rates of infection over the last week .
Under federal law , the General Services Administration is supposed to provide the president-elect ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ office space , funding to support transition efforts , and , crucially , access to federal agencies and their staff , as well as to daily briefings .
The point , of course , is to assure that power is transferred in an orderly manner—something that is even more important during a national health crisis .
But as Trump continues to reject the election ’ s outcome , GSA administrator Emily Murphy , a Trump appointee , has refused to issue the “ letter of ascertainment ” that would grant Biden ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We can ’ t until we get that GSA ascertainment , ” Klain said Sunday .
Biden will not take office until January 20 , and , as Klain noted , “ there ’ s not much Joe Biden can do right now to change ” the nation ’ s response to the pandemic .
But Biden ’ s medical advisers are recommending measures that scientists have long prescribed , such mask-wearing .
Michael Osterholm , an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota who was named to Biden ’ s task @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we don ’ t take basic steps like stop swapping air ” with people , hospitals will soon reach their breaking point .
Biden has called for a nationwide mask mandate .
As the holidays and attendant travel approach , Osterholm called for a nationwide , standardized response on safety measures .
Gawande said the advisors are “ not in support of a nationwide lockdown ” because targeted measures at the local level—including mask-wearing , widespread testing , and capacity restrictions—are sufficient when properly implemented .

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The Trump administration’s ongoing refusal to recognize Joe Biden as the election’s legitimate winner and initiate the transition process is endangering the nation’s ability to fight the coronavirus. That was the message delivered Sunday by doctors serving on Biden’s pandemic task force, by Biden’s incoming chief of staff, and even by a Republican governor.
“There is a lot of information that needs to be transmitted,” Atul Gawande, a surgeon and Harvard Medical School professor named to Biden’s team, said on ABC’s This Week. “It can’t wait until the last minute.”
Gawande said that “it is in the national interest” for Biden’s team of experts to have access to the latest coronavirus threat assessments. He added that knowing vaccine distribution plans and the status of mask and gloves supplies would also be crucial for Biden’s planning.
Ron Klain, who was recently named Biden’s White House chief of staff, told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the transition team has had no contact with Anthony Fauci or any of members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force.
The key information Biden’s team wants is the status of vaccine distribution plans, Klain added. For now, Biden’s team must rely on the private sector for insights—Klain said Biden is scheduled to meet this week with drug companies such as Pzifer about the status of their vaccine development.
Even Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas, expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s unwillingness to work with the incoming president. “We want to make sure there is a smooth transition, especially when it comes to the vaccine distribution [and] the coronavirus” so “everybody understands what we’re doing there and what the plan is for the future,” he told Todd.
As his first act as president-elect, Biden appointed an advisory board of doctors and scientists to help him navigate the pandemic, which has reached staggering rates of infection over the last week. Under federal law, the General Services Administration is supposed to provide the president-elect’s transition team—including advisers such as these—with office space, funding to support transition efforts, and, crucially, access to federal agencies and their staff, as well as to daily briefings. The point, of course, is to assure that power is transferred in an orderly manner—something that is even more important during a national health crisis.
But as Trump continues to reject the election’s outcome, GSA administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, has refused to issue the “letter of ascertainment” that would grant Biden’s transition access to those resources. “We can’t until we get that GSA ascertainment,” Klain said Sunday.
Biden will not take office until January 20, and, as Klain noted, “there’s not much Joe Biden can do right now to change” the nation’s response to the pandemic. But Biden’s medical advisers are recommending measures that scientists have long prescribed, such mask-wearing. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota who was named to Biden’s task force, told Todd that “if we don’t take basic steps like stop swapping air” with people, hospitals will soon reach their breaking point. Biden has called for a nationwide mask mandate.
As the holidays and attendant travel approach, Osterholm called for a nationwide, standardized response on safety measures. Gawande said the advisors are “not in support of a nationwide lockdown” because targeted measures at the local level—including mask-wearing, widespread testing, and capacity restrictions—are sufficient when properly implemented.


motherjones--2020-11-17--On January 20, Trump Will Lose His Twitter Protections

Twitter has long been one of President Donald Trump ’ s biggest megaphones for spouting disinformation , yet the social media platform has been unwilling to aggressively censor the sitting president .
So what will happen when Trump is no longer in office ?
Sen. Mazie Hirono ( D-Hawaii ) put the question to Jack Dorsey , the company ’ s CEO , at a Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing .
“ What are each of you prepared to do regarding Donald Trump ’ s use of your platforms after he stops being president ?
” she asked both Dorsey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Will he still be deemed newsworthy , and will he still get to use your platforms to spread his misinformation ?
” Dorsey answered by first explaining the company ’ s existing policy , and how it can allow elected officials to make posts that would otherwise violate the company ’ s rules .
“ We do have a policy around public interest where , for global leaders , we do make exceptions in terms of if a tweet violates our terms of service .
We leave it up , but we leave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are not allowed to share that more broadly , ” Dorsey responded .
“ If an account is suddenly not a world leader anymore , that particular policy goes away , ” Dorsey explained .
Of course , how Twitter actually responds to Trump after January 20 , 2021 and whether he will become subject to the terms of service like any other user remains to be seen .
But Dorsey ’ s acknowledgment that current protections will no longer apply indicates Trump could no longer have such free reign .
Facebook may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ directly answer the question .

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Twitter has long been one of President Donald Trump’s biggest megaphones for spouting disinformation, yet the social media platform has been unwilling to aggressively censor the sitting president. So what will happen when Trump is no longer in office?
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) put the question to Jack Dorsey, the company’s CEO, at a Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “What are both of you prepared to do regarding Donald Trump’s use of your platforms after he stops being president?” she asked both Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Will he still be deemed newsworthy, and will he still get to use your platforms to spread his misinformation?”
Dorsey answered by first explaining the company’s existing policy, and how it can allow elected officials to make posts that would otherwise violate the company’s rules.
“We do have a policy around public interest where, for global leaders, we do make exceptions in terms of if a tweet violates our terms of service. We leave it up, but we leave it up behind an interstitial and people are not allowed to share that more broadly,” Dorsey responded.
“If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away,” Dorsey explained.
Of course, how Twitter actually responds to Trump after January 20, 2021, and whether he will become subject to the terms of service like any other user remains to be seen. But Dorsey’s acknowledgment that current protections won’t apply indicates Trump could no longer have such free rein.
Facebook may be another story. Zuckerberg did not directly answer the question.
This post has been updated to accurately quote Sen. Mazie Hirono’s question and Jack Dorsey’s response.


motherjones--2020-11-17--Let This Bit of Gossip Haunt Ivanka as She Claws Back to Manhattan Life

As her father clings to the remnants of a sad coup , Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner are apparently over their West Wing life , with the soon-to-be-former first daughter reportedly busy laying the groundwork for a return to Manhattan ’ s ultrawealthy art scene .
While some predict a difficult transition back into New York high society , as one PR executive recently told the New Republic , complete pariah life for them appears unlikely : “ Recent history has taught me that ’ ll only happen if they go broke.
” But if their ghoulishness within the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difference in their social standing , perhaps a reliable tell-all , chock full of ugly details revealed by a former best friend , will .
That ’ s what we have from Lysandra Ohrstrom in Vanity Fair today , in an essay filled with gossipy anecdotes extending from their days together at the elite all-girls ’ school Chapin to their partying when they were in their early 20s .
There was the time young Ivanka trashed a necklace that had Arabic writing— “ It just screams , ‘ terrorist , ' ” she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s literary criticism of Richard Russo ’ s Empire Falls .
“ Why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people ?
” Not much is surprising until you reach this : One of the earliest memories I have of Ivanka from before we were friends is when she blamed a fart on a classmate .
Some time later , she goaded me and a few other girls into flashing our breasts out the window of our classroom in what has since been labelled the “ flashing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lore .
Ivanka had basically been the ringleader , but she pleaded her innocence to the headmistress and got off scot-free .
The rest of us were suspended .
Ivanka concealing a fart ?
At once petty and telling ( here we see young Ivanka throwing people under the bus to preserve her image ) , this new revelation offers , for me , a moment of true joy .
I can ’ t think of a better one with which to follow her efforts to rebrand back to Manhattan .

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As her father clings to the remnants of a sad coup, Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner are apparently over their West Wing life, with the soon-to-be-former first daughter reportedly busy laying the groundwork for a return to Manhattan’s ultrawealthy art scene. While some predict a difficult transition back into New York high society, as one PR executive recently told the New Republic, complete pariah life for them appears unlikely: “Recent history has taught me that’ll only happen if they go broke.”
But if their ghoulishness within the Trump administration won’t make a difference in their social standing, perhaps a reliable tell-all, chock full of ugly details revealed by a former best friend, will. That’s what we have from Lysandra Ohrstrom in Vanity Fair today, in an essay filled with gossipy anecdotes extending from their days together at the elite all-girls’ school Chapin to their partying when they were in their early 20s. There was the time young Ivanka trashed a necklace that had Arabic writing—“It just screams, ‘terrorist,'” she allegedly said. Then there was Ivanka’s literary criticism of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. “Why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people?” Not much is surprising until you reach this:
One of the earliest memories I have of Ivanka from before we were friends is when she blamed a fart on a classmate. Some time later, she goaded me and a few other girls into flashing our breasts out the window of our classroom in what has since been labelled the “flashing the hot dog man” incident in Chapin lore. Ivanka had basically been the ringleader, but she pleaded her innocence to the headmistress and got off scot-free. The rest of us were suspended.
Ivanka concealing a fart? At once petty and telling (here we see young Ivanka throwing people under the bus to preserve her image), this new revelation offers, for me, a moment of true joy. I can’t think of a better one with which to follow her efforts to rebrand back to Manhattan.


motherjones--2020-11-17--Trump Wants to Withdraw Troops From Afghanistan. The Antiwar Movement Is Cheering Him On.

President Donald Trump only has about two months left in office—despite his persistent claims to the contrary—and in that span of time , his administration seems intent on withdrawing a significant number of US troops from Afghanistan .
Nothing is definite in Trumpworld until it happens , but on Monday night , CNN reported that the Defense Department is planning to reduce the number of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to 5,000 total by the end of Trump ’ s term .
( On Tuesday , after this article was published , acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miler formally announced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t accomplish Trump ’ s stated goal of bringing all US troops in Afghanistan home by Christmas , but it would slice the total number of US personnel serving there and in Iraq by about one-third , based on a rough understanding of current deployments .
The Pentagon would not confirm for me the total number of US troops currently serving in Afghanistan and has not been exactly forthcoming in the past about how many troops are stationed overseas .
( Case in point : Ambassador James Jeffrey , the outgoing US @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last week that his team was “ always playing shell games ” to mask the fact that more troops had stayed in northeast Syria than Trump had agreed to leave there . )
If Trump is able to push even further and end all US military operations in Afghanistan , that would itself be a milestone moment , especially for a lame duck president obsessed with shoring up his own legacy .
To accomplish the plan , he would need to overlook enormous logistical concerns , as well as the presence of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assert control at a time when Taliban attacks on that country ’ s security forces are rising .
His party , which has generally been loyal to a fault , is also not clamoring to support this particular effort .
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ( R-Ky. ) , one of many hawkish Republicans to sound off about the plan to Politico , said it would “ would hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm.
” Then there is the antiwar movement , which has its own complicated relationship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about avoiding wars , Trump has still signed massive defense budgets and has made a show of completing controversial arms sales to allies like Saudi Arabia , which has used American weapons in attacks that have killed scores of civilians in Yemen .
He ’ s also aggravated tensions with Iran by ordering the assassination of one of its generals , and he nearly approved a series of strikes against Iranian military targets last year .
Last week , Trump again debated whether to strike Iran , but was dissuaded by his advisers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Few progressives are rushing to support Trump on any issue , but a full Afghanistan withdrawal would align with their foreign policy vision and dial the pressure up on Joe Biden to get serious about reining in the US military ’ s presence overseas .
Dan Caldwell , a senior adviser to the libertarian-leaning , Koch-backed Concerned Veterans for America , which has allied with progressive groups to support a more restrained US foreign policy , told me that Trump ’ s approach to Afghanistan should be applauded by progressives , however nauseous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other behavior and policies .
“ If the president ultimately announces that he is going to complete a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan in January , then I would hope those on the progressive left who have been advocating for this for years are supportive of this despite their discomfort with President Trump , ” Caldwell told me .
“ I understand there are some concerns with how this is happening , but this is in reality the best opportunity we have to close the book on America ’ s longest war.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is occurring against the backdrop of Trump ’ s decision to purge the Pentagon ’ s senior ranks last week , firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and replacing other top officials with inexperienced loyalists .
The new DoD policy chief , Anthony Tata , is an outright conspiracy theorist who once called Islam the “ most oppressive violent religion I know of.
” Some of these appointments reek of blatant cronyism and are of a piece with loyalty purges underway throughout the Trump administration , from the Department of Homeland Security to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But with Trump diehards in place , there is less of an organized resistance to his push for a rapid Afghanistan withdrawal .
Esper and General Mark Milley , who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff , have long been critical of the administration ’ s plan for a total withdrawal .
Before he was fired , Esper sent a classified memo to the White House outlining problems with any additional cuts to US forces in Afghanistan , the Washington Post reported last week .
Looking at the people who Trump elevated in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it wasn ’ t hard to notice a trend .
Douglas Macgregor , a retired Army colonel who was brought on as an adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller , has argued for Trump to remove US troops from Syria , Afghanistan , and even South Korea .
Miller , in a November 13 letter to Defense Department personnel , said , “ We met the challenge ; we gave it our all .
Now , it ’ s time to come home.
” In a follow-up message on Monday , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his goals is to bring the “ current war to an end in a responsible manner that guarantees the security of our citizens.
” Andrew Bacevich , president of the Quincy Institute , a nonpartisan think tank that supports military restraint , told me it would be “ daunting ” for Trump ’ s ragtag national security team to complete a full withdrawal from Afghanistan .
But he said , “ It would delight me if the president were able to pull this off.
” Medea Benjamin , co-founder of antiwar group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s push to remove troops from Afghanistan but “ noticed that we were out on a limb because others were too afraid to talk about him doing well.
” “ It ’ s amazing—the backlash for any kind of troop reduction in wars we ’ ve been in for almost 20 year now , ” she said .
A complicating factor for progressives intent on bringing US troops home is the looming Biden presidency and the likely selection of Michèle Flournoy as Defense secretary .
In a 2017 interview , Flournoy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US forces in Iraq showed “ the dangers of a precipitous withdrawal ” and argued that “ we don ’ t want to see a repeat of that in Afghanistan.
” Her opinion aligns with the other candidates for major national security roles in a Biden administration , including Susan Rice and Sen. Tammy Duckworth ( D-Ill. ) , who said Monday on CNN that an immediate drawdown during the transition period “ is just prime ground for our adversaries to look and see what they can get away with while we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pump the brakes as well , telling Stars and Stripes in September that he thinks “ 1,500 to 2,000 ” soldiers should remain in Afghanistan .
If Trump sticks with the plan to withdraw roughly one-third of the US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan , Biden could essentially maintain the status quo .
A February peace agreement brokered in Qatar with the Taliban commits the United States to a phased withdrawal of troops , but it ’ s possible for a reserve force to stay behind as a bulwark against al-Qaeda and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a full withdrawal , the pressure on Biden to maintain that policy could be significant .
Already pro-withdrawal conservatives have been sounding that drum .
On Tuesday , Will Ruger , who Trump nominated in September to be ambassador to Afghanistan , co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed calling for Trump to bring US troops home “ with all due haste , ” in part because that will make it “ more difficult politically to unwind.
” When I asked Ruger in an email to clarify if he was advocating for a full @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the goal should be a full military withdrawal ( minus those needed to secure the embassy , of course ) .
And it should be done in a speedy fashion lest mischievous hands take an opportunity to undermine the Doha agreement and keep troops there ad infinitum.
” If Trump does deliver on a full withdrawal , Benjamin and the other activists cheering for that outcome are ready to support it , even if a figure as loathed as Trump is the one to do it .
“ We have to love @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she said .

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President Donald Trump only has about two months left in office—despite his persistent claims to the contrary—and in that span of time, his administration seems intent on withdrawing a significant number of US troops from Afghanistan. Nothing is definite in Trumpworld until it happens, but on Monday night, CNN reported that the Defense Department is planning to reduce the number of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to 5,000 total by the end of Trump’s term. (On Tuesday, after this article was published, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miler formally announced this drawdown.)
That drawdown wouldn’t accomplish Trump’s stated goal of bringing all US troops in Afghanistan home by Christmas, but it would slice the total number of US personnel serving there and in Iraq by about one-third, based on a rough understanding of current deployments. The Pentagon would not confirm for me the total number of US troops currently serving in Afghanistan and has not been exactly forthcoming in the past about how many troops are stationed overseas. (Case in point: Ambassador James Jeffrey, the outgoing US envoy to Syria, told Defense One last week that his team was “always playing shell games” to mask the fact that more troops had stayed in northeast Syria than Trump had agreed to leave there.)
If Trump is able to push even further and end all US military operations in Afghanistan, that would itself be a milestone moment, especially for a lame duck president obsessed with shoring up his own legacy. To accomplish the plan, he would need to overlook enormous logistical concerns, as well as the presence of a weak Afghan government that has struggled to assert control at a time when Taliban attacks on that country’s security forces are rising. His party, which has generally been loyal to a fault, is also not clamoring to support this particular effort. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), one of many hawkish Republicans to sound off about the plan to Politico, said it would “would hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm.”
Then there is the antiwar movement, which has its own complicated relationship to Trump. For all his talk about avoiding wars, Trump has still signed massive defense budgets and has made a show of completing controversial arms sales to allies like Saudi Arabia, which has used American weapons in attacks that have killed scores of civilians in Yemen. He’s also aggravated tensions with Iran by ordering the assassination of one of its generals, and he nearly approved a series of strikes against Iranian military targets last year. Last week, Trump again debated whether to strike Iran, but was dissuaded by his advisers, the New York Times reported.
Few progressives are rushing to support Trump on any issue, but a full Afghanistan withdrawal would align with their foreign policy vision and dial the pressure up on Joe Biden to get serious about reining in the US military’s presence overseas. Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to the libertarian-leaning, Koch-backed Concerned Veterans for America, which has allied with progressive groups to support a more restrained US foreign policy, told me that Trump’s approach to Afghanistan should be applauded by progressives, however nauseous they may be about Trump’s other behavior and policies. “If the president ultimately announces that he is going to complete a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan in January, then I would hope those on the progressive left who have been advocating for this for years are supportive of this despite their discomfort with President Trump,” Caldwell told me. “I understand there are some concerns with how this is happening, but this is in reality the best opportunity we have to close the book on America’s longest war.”
This withdrawal, if it even happens, is occurring against the backdrop of Trump’s decision to purge the Pentagon’s senior ranks last week, firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and replacing other top officials with inexperienced loyalists. The new DoD policy chief, Anthony Tata, is an outright conspiracy theorist who once called Islam the “most oppressive violent religion I know of.” Some of these appointments reek of blatant cronyism and are of a piece with loyalty purges underway throughout the Trump administration, from the Department of Homeland Security to the US Agency for International Development. But with Trump diehards in place, there is less of an organized resistance to his push for a rapid Afghanistan withdrawal.
Esper and General Mark Milley, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have long been critical of the administration’s plan for a total withdrawal. Before he was fired, Esper sent a classified memo to the White House outlining problems with any additional cuts to US forces in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported last week. Looking at the people who Trump elevated in the wake of Esper’s firing, it wasn’t hard to notice a trend. Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who was brought on as an adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, has argued for Trump to remove US troops from Syria, Afghanistan, and even South Korea. Miller, in a November 13 letter to Defense Department personnel, said, “We met the challenge; we gave it our all. Now, it’s time to come home.” In a follow-up message on Monday, he hedged slightly, stating that one of his goals is to bring the “current war to an end in a responsible manner that guarantees the security of our citizens.”
Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that supports military restraint, told me it would be “daunting” for Trump’s ragtag national security team to complete a full withdrawal from Afghanistan. But he said, “It would delight me if the president were able to pull this off.”
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of antiwar group CODEPINK, said her organization always commended Trump’s push to remove troops from Afghanistan but “noticed that we were out on a limb because others were too afraid to talk about him doing well.”
“It’s amazing—the backlash for any kind of troop reduction in wars we’ve been in for almost 20 year now,” she said.
A complicating factor for progressives intent on bringing US troops home is the looming Biden presidency and the likely selection of Michèle Flournoy as Defense secretary. In a 2017 interview, Flournoy said the events following the exit of US forces in Iraq showed “the dangers of a precipitous withdrawal” and argued that “we don’t want to see a repeat of that in Afghanistan.” Her opinion aligns with the other candidates for major national security roles in a Biden administration, including Susan Rice and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who said Monday on CNN that an immediate drawdown during the transition period “is just prime ground for our adversaries to look and see what they can get away with while we’re distracted.”
Susan Rice, NSA to Obama & possible SecState for Biden, says of Afghanistan that a Biden admin will seek to end the forever wars but says it “needs to be thoughtful & measured,” without doing things like putting allies at risk & harming the US relationship with the Afghan govt. — Kylie Atwood (@kylieatwood) November 17, 2020
Biden seems inclined to pump the brakes as well, telling Stars and Stripes in September that he thinks “1,500 to 2,000” soldiers should remain in Afghanistan. If Trump sticks with the plan to withdraw roughly one-third of the US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden could essentially maintain the status quo. A February peace agreement brokered in Qatar with the Taliban commits the United States to a phased withdrawal of troops, but it’s possible for a reserve force to stay behind as a bulwark against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. But if Trump commits to a full withdrawal, the pressure on Biden to maintain that policy could be significant. Already pro-withdrawal conservatives have been sounding that drum. On Tuesday, Will Ruger, who Trump nominated in September to be ambassador to Afghanistan, co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed calling for Trump to bring US troops home “with all due haste,” in part because that will make it “more difficult politically to unwind.” When I asked Ruger in an email to clarify if he was advocating for a full withdrawal, he said, “Yes, the goal should be a full military withdrawal (minus those needed to secure the embassy, of course). And it should be done in a speedy fashion lest mischievous hands take an opportunity to undermine the Doha agreement and keep troops there ad infinitum.”
If Trump does deliver on a full withdrawal, Benjamin and the other activists cheering for that outcome are ready to support it, even if a figure as loathed as Trump is the one to do it.
“We have to love peace more than we dislike Donald Trump,” she said.


motherjones--2020-11-17--Donald Trump’s Reign Is Ending as It Began: With a Conspiracy Theory

Donald Trump is leaving the presidency the way he began his political career : as an unhinged peddler of conspiracy theories .
Trump laid the foundation for his 2016 campaign for president by becoming the right ’ s No .
1 Barack Obama hater .
And he did that by championing the racist birther conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that the first Black president had been born in Kenya , not Hawaii .
The point of slinging this swill was to suggest that Obama was an illegitimate commander in chief .
( Under the Constitution , only a “ natural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be president . )
That was , of course , total bunk .
Yet Trump kept pushing this accusation , claiming he had investigators who were getting the goods on Obama .
It was a lie .
A big lie .
Trump had nothing .
His investigators had nothing—if they even existed .
Yet the truth didn ’ t matter .
Not to many Republicans .
Trump was mounting a disinformation operation to win over the get-Obama crowd in preparation for a potential presidential bid .
And it worked .
As the loudmouth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who had never run for any office , quickly developed a conservative constituency that he then mobilized during the Republican primary contest .
Being a conspiracy theorist didn ’ t disqualify Trump within the Fox-driven GOP cosmos .
It boosted his prospects and helped him become president .
Dishonesty paid off .
Through his presidency , Trump repeatedly sought to protect himself by encouraging paranoia and disseminating baseless tales of conspiracy .
To escape the taint on his 2016 electoral victory caused by the Russian attack and his efforts that aided Vladimir @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Trump promoted various false counter-narratives : the Obama administration and the Deep State had spied on and schemed against him ; Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 contest to thwart him ; and the Russian attack on the Democratic Party was a hoax .
The dissemination of these fake stories also worked , in a way .
They muddied up what should have been a clear picture : Trump had betrayed the nation by abetting the Russian attack , which he sought to exploit .
But Trump was able to generate enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ issue and to turn the Trump-Russia scandal into a debate between fact and disinformation .
Once more , spreading conspiracy theories helped Trump .
To keep his hold on the presidency , Trump again turned to this tactic .
He and his henchmen cooked up false stories about Joe Biden and the business dealings of his son Hunter .
And Trump muscled the president of Ukraine to support the fraud .
These actions did lead to Trump ’ s impeachment .
But Trump , thanks to his GOP enablers , survived the Senate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And perhaps the anti-Biden propaganda Trump and his crew concocted did help gin up Trump ’ s base or turn off some potential Biden voters .
Now , as Trump faces the biggest loss in his public life , he is whipping out the same game plan : issue outlandish charges that focus on underhanded plots .
With Biden the apparent winner in a decisive electoral and popular vote count , Trump is refusing to acknowledge reality and spinning dark allegations of a massive plot against him .
The counting was rigged .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a drowning man , he grabs on to whatever false accusation he can as a lifeline .
Last week , Trump embraced an unfounded conspiracy theory that claimed a software company had switched millions of Trump votes to Biden votes .
As Mother Jones reported , this claim had originated with an anonymous internet poster who had previously accused Biden of being a sex criminal and of being bad for white people .
This particular conspiracy theory jumped from this poster to a rightwing blogger and then was picked up by OAN , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confirmation of the details .
And after OAN reported on this “ analysis , ” Trump tweeted it out , citing OAN .
A conspiracy theory with no basis had hit the right-wing disinformation transmission belt and ended up being blessed and exploited by the president of the United States .
The details—and the truth—don ’ t matter for Trump .
Since even before the vote-counting began , he was claiming that a cabal would try to cheat him out of the presidency .
( He started concocting this cover story four years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election would be rigged against him . )
And once he began losing key states , he kicked his conspiracy-mongering into high gear .
He has hurled tweet after tweet declaring the election was stolen from him .
And Rudy Giuliani , his consigliere who took over the assorted going-nowhere Trump campaign legal challenges in swing states , has been dutifully echoing the nonsense .
On Sunday night , the Trump campaign sent out a fundraising email signed by Trump with a subject heading befitting a tyrannical autocrat : “ I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ @ @ win.
” The message declared , “ I am the American People ’ s ALL-TIME favorite President , ” and it proclaimed that Democrats and “ the Left…RIGGED THE ELECTION !
” The evidence ?
Well , no evidence was presented .
But the email included an electoral map that showed Trump ahead of Biden 232 electoral votes to 227 .
( A candidate needs 270 to win . )
It claimed the key swing states—Pennsylvania , Michigan , Wisconsin , Arizona , Nevada , and Georgia—had not yet been decided .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these states “ should immediately be put in the Trump WIN column .
Biden did not win , he lost by a lot !
” Where did this map come from ?
The source : The Epoch Times , a publication affiliated with a secretive Chinese spiritual movement called Falun Gong ( which opposes the Chinese regime ) .
As The New York Times recently reported in an investigation of The Epoch Times , this publication and its affiliates “ have grown , in part , by relying on sketchy social media tactics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” The Times noted The Epoch Times “ has been one of the most prominent promoters of ‘ Spygate , ’ a baseless conspiracy theory involving claims that Obama administration officials illegally spied on Mr. Trump ’ s 2016 campaign .
Publications and shows linked to The Epoch Times have promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and spread distorted claims about voter fraud and the Black Lives Matter movement .
More recently , they have promoted the unfounded theory that the coronavirus…was created as a bioweapon in a Chinese military lab.
” So the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relying on a conspiracy rag to sell his supporters on the idea that he was robbed of a second term .
This is sad and dangerous .
It is a fitting denouement to the Trump years .
Conspiracy theories spread distrust and suspicion .
That ’ s the point .
They undermine honest public discourse .
Trump ’ s fact-free claims about cheating will not rescue him .
He may have finally encountered a situation where lying , demagoguery , and hawking false allegations will not succeed .
At least , not in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ House .
Still , he is accomplishing one of his aims .
He is injecting ( more ) poison into the body politic .
He is inflaming passions .
He is encouraging doubt , uncertainty , and anger among his supporters .
He entered politics spewing venom .
He is leaving the presidency doing the same .
And his defeat will not fully decontaminate the system .
Though Trump ’ s current predicament demonstrates the limited power of conspiracy theories to beat back reality , this moment—in which Trump continues to rally his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of how well they served Trump , how much damage they can wreak , and how vulnerable the American political systems remains to scoundrels who trade in such deceit .

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Donald Trump is leaving the presidency the way he began his political career: as an unhinged peddler of conspiracy theories.
Trump laid the foundation for his 2016 campaign for president by becoming the right’s No. 1 Barack Obama hater. And he did that by championing the racist birther conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that the first Black president had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii. The point of slinging this swill was to suggest that Obama was an illegitimate commander in chief. (Under the Constitution, only a “natural born” American citizen is eligible to be president.) That was, of course, total bunk. Yet Trump kept pushing this accusation, claiming he had investigators who were getting the goods on Obama.
It was a lie. A big lie. Trump had nothing. His investigators had nothing—if they even existed. Yet the truth didn’t matter. Not to many Republicans. Trump was mounting a disinformation operation to win over the get-Obama crowd in preparation for a potential presidential bid. And it worked. As the loudmouth questioning Obama’s legitimacy, Trump, who had never run for any office, quickly developed a conservative constituency that he then mobilized during the Republican primary contest. Being a conspiracy theorist didn’t disqualify Trump within the Fox-driven GOP cosmos. It boosted his prospects and helped him become president. Dishonesty paid off.
Through his presidency, Trump repeatedly sought to protect himself by encouraging paranoia and disseminating baseless tales of conspiracy. To escape the taint on his 2016 electoral victory caused by the Russian attack and his efforts that aided Vladimir Putin’s assault on American democracy, Trump promoted various false counter-narratives: the Obama administration and the Deep State had spied on and schemed against him; Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 contest to thwart him; and the Russian attack on the Democratic Party was a hoax. The dissemination of these fake stories also worked, in a way. They muddied up what should have been a clear picture: Trump had betrayed the nation by abetting the Russian attack, which he sought to exploit. But Trump was able to generate enough baloney to deflect attention from the core issue and to turn the Trump-Russia scandal into a debate between fact and disinformation. Once more, spreading conspiracy theories helped Trump.
To keep his hold on the presidency, Trump again turned to this tactic. He and his henchmen cooked up false stories about Joe Biden and the business dealings of his son Hunter. And Trump muscled the president of Ukraine to support the fraud. These actions did lead to Trump’s impeachment. But Trump, thanks to his GOP enablers, survived the Senate trial. He was not penalized. And perhaps the anti-Biden propaganda Trump and his crew concocted did help gin up Trump’s base or turn off some potential Biden voters.
Now, as Trump faces the biggest loss in his public life, he is whipping out the same game plan: issue outlandish charges that focus on underhanded plots. With Biden the apparent winner in a decisive electoral and popular vote count, Trump is refusing to acknowledge reality and spinning dark allegations of a massive plot against him. The counting was rigged. The election software was rigged. Like a drowning man, he grabs on to whatever false accusation he can as a lifeline. Last week, Trump embraced an unfounded conspiracy theory that claimed a software company had switched millions of Trump votes to Biden votes. As Mother Jones reported, this claim had originated with an anonymous internet poster who had previously accused Biden of being a sex criminal and of being bad for white people. This particular conspiracy theory jumped from this poster to a rightwing blogger and then was picked up by OAN, the to-the-right-of-Fox network. There was no confirmation of the details. And after OAN reported on this “analysis,” Trump tweeted it out, citing OAN. A conspiracy theory with no basis had hit the right-wing disinformation transmission belt and ended up being blessed and exploited by the president of the United States.
The details—and the truth—don’t matter for Trump. Since even before the vote-counting began, he was claiming that a cabal would try to cheat him out of the presidency. (He started concocting this cover story four years ago, when he contended the 2016 election would be rigged against him.) And once he began losing key states, he kicked his conspiracy-mongering into high gear. He has hurled tweet after tweet declaring the election was stolen from him. And Rudy Giuliani, his consigliere who took over the assorted going-nowhere Trump campaign legal challenges in swing states, has been dutifully echoing the nonsense.
On Sunday night, the Trump campaign sent out a fundraising email signed by Trump with a subject heading befitting a tyrannical autocrat: “I’m not going anywhere. Biden did NOT win.” The message declared, “I am the American People’s ALL-TIME favorite President,”and it proclaimed that Democrats and “the Left…RIGGED THE ELECTION!” The evidence? Well, no evidence was presented. But the email included an electoral map that showed Trump ahead of Biden 232 electoral votes to 227. (A candidate needs 270 to win.) It claimed the key swing states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia—had not yet been decided. They have, but the email asserted that these states “should immediately be put in the Trump WIN column. Biden did not win, he lost by a lot!”
Where did this map come from? The source: The Epoch Times, a publication affiliated with a secretive Chinese spiritual movement called Falun Gong (which opposes the Chinese regime). As The New York Times recently reported in an investigation of The Epoch Times, this publication and its affiliates “have grown, in part, by relying on sketchy social media tactics” and “pushing dangerous conspiracy theories.” The Times noted The Epoch Times “has been one of the most prominent promoters of ‘Spygate,’ a baseless conspiracy theory involving claims that Obama administration officials illegally spied on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Publications and shows linked to The Epoch Times have promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and spread distorted claims about voter fraud and the Black Lives Matter movement. More recently, they have promoted the unfounded theory that the coronavirus…was created as a bioweapon in a Chinese military lab.”
So the most powerful man in the world is relying on a conspiracy rag to sell his supporters on the idea that he was robbed of a second term. This is sad and dangerous. It is a fitting denouement to the Trump years.
Conspiracy theories spread distrust and suspicion. That’s the point. They undermine honest public discourse. Trump’s fact-free claims about cheating will not rescue him. He may have finally encountered a situation where lying, demagoguery, and hawking false allegations will not succeed. At least, not in terms of keeping him in the White House. Still, he is accomplishing one of his aims. He is injecting (more) poison into the body politic. He is inflaming passions. He is encouraging doubt, uncertainty, and anger among his supporters. He entered politics spewing venom. He is leaving the presidency doing the same. And his defeat will not fully decontaminate the system. Though Trump’s current predicament demonstrates the limited power of conspiracy theories to beat back reality, this moment—in which Trump continues to rally his cult-like devotees with fraudulent swill—is a reminder of how well they served Trump, how much damage they can wreak, and how vulnerable the American political systems remains to scoundrels who trade in such deceit.