House conservatives blocked a Republican bill to avoid a government shutdown, dealing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy another defeat with the clock ticking toward the midnight deadline on Saturday when federal agencies run out of money. The failure is the latest display of the dysfunction that has engulfed Congress in the days and weeks leading up to an increasingly inevitable government shutdown. House Republicans have been mired in internal battles over spending and political tactics that have put them at odds with Democrats and most Republicans in the Senate. The Senate is working on its own bipartisan bill to avert any shutdown, but still has procedural steps to get through and the chamber may not vote before a shutdown begins. McCarthy ignored the Senate's proposal and chose to move ahead on a GOP crafted measure funded agencies through October 31 and included border security provisions that were part of a Republican-passed bill. It also included a provision creating a bipartisan commission to study the national debt. But going into the vote there were already a block of hardliners who said they wouldn't approve any short term bill, many of them demanding that Congress complete action on all 12 spending bills. The vote was 198-232, with 21 GOP members voting against it. At a press conference before the vote McCarthy downplayed internal divisions and essentially dared fellow Republicans to follow through on their threat to block it. "Every member will have to go on record of where they stand. Are they willing to secure the border or do they side with President Biden on an open border and vote against a measure to keep government open?" Republican holdouts were unmoved. Their argument all along has been that Congress should have their work writing spending bills, not pass stop gaps. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., repeated his stance ahead of the vote. > The House had 9 months to pass 12 individual appropriations bills. > I will not be complicit in extending irresponsible Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending levels. > No CRs. > — Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) September 29, 2023 Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., noted the White House already issued a veto threat on the GOP bill, stating during the floor debate, "this is a complete waste of time." Democrats denounced the steep spending cuts in the GOP bill, instead of keeping current spending levels for all agencies, the measure walled off a few departments, but slashed others by 30 percent. "This bill would slash investments in cancer research, leave communities recovering from natural disasters out to dry, undercut allies with a $1 billion cut to Israel and further cuts to our support of Ukraine, defund law enforcement and makes our communities less safe, and take food out of the mouths of millions. This bill raises costs on American families at a time when the cost of living is already too high," Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations bill said. The Senate's spending bill would fund government agencies through November 17. It includes $5 billion for disaster aid and $6 billion for assistance for Ukraine. McCarthy opposed pairing additional money for Ukraine on a stopgap bill, and argued Congress needed to address the situation at the southwest border. A group of Senate Republicans and Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are working on an amendment to the Senate bill that would address border security, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the GOP House. It's unclear whether their efforts will yield a proposal that will get support from Senate Democrats. But some conservative House Republicans remain staunchly opposed to including any additional aide for Ukraine. A group of House Republicans and Democrats have been meeting to push a bipartisan plan in the event of a shutdown, many of them representing swing districts across the country, and warning about the negative impact of any shutdown.

On Sunday, an ABC/Washington Post poll gave us all heart attacks when it showed President Biden trailing former President Trump by ten percentage points. Responsibly, the Post and ABC took pains to say that that result was an “outlier.” But, more than a year before the 2024 election—before any of Trump’s trials or jury verdicts, before House Republicans do or don’t impeach Biden, before another sure-to-be-controversial Supreme Court term, and who knows what else—pretty much every major media outlet has weighed in with headline-grabbing polls showing Trump and Biden to be running even. All of this has created enormous panic – both from Democratic partisans, and from everyone else who dreads a second (and forever) Trump Administration. Could it really be true that Americans are more likely to elect Trump after he tried to overthrow the election than before? If you share this panic, you might be suffering from Mad Poll Disease. Symptoms include anxiety, problems sleeping, loss of affect, and feelings of helplessness about the future of democracy, which are only exacerbated by frantic Twitter exchanges about polling methodology and sample bias. Today, I want to show that, regardless of the methodology, pollster, or publication, horse race polls— more formally known as “trial heats,” which ask respondents whom they intend to vote for—are worse than useless. This is especially true more than a year ahead of the election – but, as I’ll explain, it’s also true in the weeks and months before. # Horse Race Polling Is Punditry in Disguise Imagine that in September 2016 you were watching a panel with five pundits discussing the presidential race in Florida. The first says they think that Clinton is up by 4 points, the second thinks she is ahead by 3, another two think she’s only ahead by 1 point, and the fifth thinks Trump is ahead by 1 point. Because I used the words “pundit” and “think,” you have no trouble understanding that those were opinions. But since polling glosses itself with scientific veneer, many people don’t understand that polling is also dependent on the opinions of the pollster! To do a poll, pollsters have to make their best guess about who will eventually vote, and then “weight” the survey results they get to match the demographic composition of the electorate they expect on Election Day. The pundit panel I described above actually happened—with pollsters—thanks to one of the most useful pieces of political data journalism ever in The New York Times. The Times asked four respected pollsters to independently evaluate the same set of survey data to estimate the margin of victory for Clinton or Trump in Florida. The result: including the Times’s own assessment, the same survey produced estimates ranging from Clinton +4 to Trump +1. The 5-point range had absolutely nothing to do with a statistical margin of error, and everything to do with the opinions each pollster had about who was going to vote. (Forty-nine days after that piece was published, Trump won Florida by 1 and a half points.) But that lesson didn’t stick in The New York Times’s own coverage. In October 2022, the Times blew up the then-conventional wisdom that House Democrats were competitive when it released its survey showing that Republicans had a nearly 4-point lead in the House—an almost 6-point swing since their last poll, just a month before. The problem? Bear with me. In September, the Times made no assumptions about who would vote; it was a survey of registered voters. That survey found House Democrats leading by 2 points. Then, an October interview of registered voters found that the race was tied. But instead of reporting an apples-to-apples comparison that showed Democrats had lost 2 points among registered voters, the Times reported that among likely voters, Republicans now led by nearly 4 points. The Times’s pollsters basically conjured a dramatic 6-point surge to Republicans out of thin air by applying a different model to the October data than they had in September. Their front-page headline also declared that Democrats were losing ground with independents and women. But here’s the thing: Independent voters hadn’t changed their minds; The New York Times changed its mind about which independents would vote. An apples-to-apples comparison of registered voters from that same October survey would have shown not a 9-point net drop for Democrats among Independents since September, but the opposite–a 5-point net gain for Democrats. In every other context, reporters go out of their way to attribute opinions to sources. But political journalists report their survey results as mathematical facts—which makes it more difficult, especially for general readers, to remember the caveats that should accompany all polling results. Any time you read a sentence like “38 percent of white voters support Biden,” it actually means “our survey found that 38 percent of white voters support Biden.” Unfortunately, the media is driving us into an epistemological cul de sac where what’s seen in surveys is presumptively more “true” than other evidence (such as administrative records, other sources of data, real-world observations, and more). To be sure, polling can offer important insights. But, to be useful, the results must always be placed in dialogue with other imperfect sources of signals about the electorate. Our confidence in any particular proposition should depend on the number and credibility of independent sources of evidence corroborating the proposition. By failing to meet this standard, the media has become a reckless super-spreader of Mad Poll Disease. At the same time that media institutions are leading with dire warnings based on their own polling, they are all but ignoring other data showing remarkable Democratic strength in special elections, which has historically been an important harbinger of partisan enthusiasm. Democrats have been significantly overperforming their partisan index in special election after special election. And that’s not even counting Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s 11-point statewide victory in what was technically a non-partisan race, but was well understood by voters in Wisconsin as a MAGA versus anti-MAGA contest. # Horse Race Polling Can’t Tell Us Anything We Don’t Already Know To begin to cure Mad Poll Disease, make this your mantra: Horse race polling can’t tell us anything we don’t already know before Election Day about who will win the Electoral College. All we know, or can know, is this: ### 1\. A popular vote landslide is very unlikely. America is a rigidly divided nation in which the last six presidential elections have been decided by an average of 3 points, and, since 1996 (other than 2008), none have been decided by as much as 5 points. ### 2\. The Electoral College is too close to call. The Electoral College will almost certainly be decided by which candidate wins at least Georgia or Pennsylvania, plus two out of three of the other battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (In a few less likely scenarios, Democrats would need to hold onto Nevada as well.) In both 2016 and 2020, the margin of victory in most of these five states was less than 1 point. Yet FiveThirtyEight found that the best polling had differed from the actual results in 2022 by only 1.9 percentage points on average. In other words, in 2016 and 2020, first Trump and then Biden won the states they needed to win the Electoral College by margins too small for the “best” polling to detect in the weeks before the midterms, when tens of millions of people had already voted. ### 3\. Whether the anti-MAGA vote turns out again in the battleground states will determine the winner. Unlike a voter’s choice between Biden and Trump—which hasn’t changed much in the last several years and is very unlikely to change in the next one—those who do not vote in every election are notoriously poor at forecasting their own behavior even a month before the election. Since 2016, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have been a continuous ground zero for referendums on MAGA candidates. When the stakes of electing a MAGA candidate are clear to voters in those states, MAGA consistently loses. That’s why, in the 2022 midterms, the Red Wave never happened in those states. When Trump won all five of those states in 2016, Republicans had state government trifectas in four of the states, as well as six of the 10 U.S. Senators. Since 2016, Trump and other MAGA candidates have lost 23 of the 27 presidential, Senate, and governors’ races in those states and only Georgia’s state government still has a Republican trifecta. If polls taken weeks or months before the election can’t tell us anything useful about close races (which, again, are the only races that matter in our current system), why on earth would we pay attention to polls taken more than a year out? # Change the Channel! If you are worried that you will miss something crucial by ignoring the polls, consider the following. The FiveThirtyEight forecast for the governors’ races on Election Day last year favored the loser in two of the five states that will decide the Electoral College and, likely, control of the Senate, and their forecast for the Senate races on Election Day last year favored the loser in three of the five battleground Senate races. I’m not saying that FiveThirtyEight did a poor job; indeed, FiveThirtyEight has been essential in modeling best practices and data transparency, and serves as an important check on unscrupulous claims by outlier pollsters. I’m saying that, when elections are very close, it’s simply not possible for any polls or forecasting to tell us anything more specific than “the race will be close.” They’re just not accurate enough; it’s like trying to look for bacteria using a magnifying glass. Now let’s look at FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 Senate forecast. Notice that it began five months before the election, or nine months closer to the election than we are today. In those five months, the odds of Republicans winning a Senate majority started at 60 percent, fell to 30 percent, and then rebounded to 59 percent the day of the election. Then, voters thwarted those expectations by increasing Democrats’ Senate majority, which was obviously even less probable than them simply holding their 50 seats. Furthermore, the same five Senate races in battleground states mentioned above that were actually close on Election Day were also considered competitive a year earlier, when The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter issued its November 2021 set of race ratings. There is nothing that horse race polling could have told you that you didn’t already know. # (The Media Can) Never Tell Us the Odds NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argues, correctly, that the media should cover the stakes of an election rather than the odds, because the stakes are more important. To this, I would add that the media cannot cover the odds in a way that gives voters meaningful information—so the stakes are all we have left. If you are old enough to remember what happened in November 2022, you should be profoundly skeptical of what the polling is telling us now about November 2024. Polling failed to anticipate the anti-MAGA dam that held back the Red Wave, partly because polling cannot tell us in advance who will turn out to vote. This matters because, as I’ve explained before in the Monthly, Democrats turned out in higher numbers in 15 states where the MAGA threat seemed more salient—but in the 35 states that lacked high-profile, competitive MAGA candidates, we saw the expected Red Wave. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that if House races in “safe” blue states like California, New Jersey, and New York had been covered the same way as Senate races in swing states—with a constant emphasis that control of the chamber was at stake—the results in the House could have been quite different, too. While the mainstream media cannot tell us what to think about this or that issue, it has a powerful influence on what we think about. Case in point. In 1974, before the rise of the polling-industrial complex, the midterms were about Watergate—and even though Republicans had mostly abandoned Nixon, they still paid a steep electoral price, losing 49 seats. If the 2022 midterms had been covered in the same way, the central question would have properly been, “Will voters hold Republicans accountable for their efforts to overturn the election?” But, after January 6th, most political reporters didn’t even entertain the notion that the midterms could be about Trump/MAGA. Instead—made savvy by academic research about how midterms are always thermostatic elections—they regularly insisted that, according to their polls, voters only cared about rising prices and crime. Einstein said, “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” So, even after the January 6th hearings began, the media continued to discount the idea that the midterms could be another referendum on Trump and MAGA, relying on polls that showed that the hearings were not substantially increasing the number of Americans who thought Trump was guilty. They couldn’t “observe” the fact that the hearings were re-energizing infrequent anti-MAGA voters who already believed Trump was guilty, and were convincing them of the importance of keeping his MAGA fellow travelers out of office in their states. I am not arguing that journalists have a responsibility to help Democrats get elected; I am arguing that journalists’ most important, First-Amendment-justifying responsibility is to give voters the information they need to be democratic citizens. Instead, the fraternity of leading media pollsters (and it is, sadly, pretty much a fraternity) judge themselves after an election by how well they anticipated what voters would do rather than by how well informed they were, or what they actually cared about. Thus, there has been no public soul searching about how to better understand what motivates voters even after this latest epic miss. # Margin of Error or Margin of Effort? Enough of the statistical stuff. Stressing over polling makes us think election outcomes are like the weather—something that happens to us. In reality, election outcomes are what we make happen—especially in the battleground states, which are so evenly and predictably divided. Remember: any election within the margin of error is also within the margin of effort—the work we must always put in to get enough of those who dread a MAGA future to turn out to vote. The only FDA-approved cure for Mad Poll Disease is to pay attention to what matters: the ongoing MAGA threat.

The House Republicans have been promising that the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was going to be filled with fireworks from the word go. We would see evidence of bribery and extortion and payoffs from foreign companies in the tens of millions of dollars, the "Biden Crime Family" would finally be exposed as the international gangsters they are Donald Trump would be exonerated. Or something. They held their first hearing yesterday and all those fireworks blew up in their faces. Keep in mind that they decided to hold this preposterous hearing two days before the government is set to shut down because a tiny rump faction of extremists in their party is demanding that they get everything they ever wanted or they'll hold their breath until they turn blue. Nobody knows exactly what that is other than to torture Speaker Kevin McCarthy and make America miserable again. It's been reported that they have no plans to table their "inquiry" when the government is shut down even though their staff won't be paid and all regular business is usually curtailed until an agreement is reached. Not this time. It's full speed ahead. It would be one thing if they had even bothered to prepare for this silly hearing. But clearly they did not. The day before the hearing we caught a glimpse of just how bad it was going to be when Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the committees tasked with pursuing the "inquiry," was asked a question by NBC News reporter Ryan Nobles during a press conference. That was a perfect preview of what was to come in the hearing the next day. They have been blatantly manufacturing what look like WhatsApp messages based upon IRS summaries of what was allegedly in them. In the hearing on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., caught them red-handed creating a fake Whats App message that totally distorted the actual text. Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious. The fabricated text message implied that back in 2018 Joe Biden's brother James told Hunter Biden that he would "work with" his father alone for some nefarious purpose to give Hunter a "safe harbor." Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious. But more importantly, the rest of the summary, which they left out, showed that Hunter (then in the throes of substance abuse disorder) needed help from his father to pay for his alimony and his kid's school tuition and his uncle Jim was offering to talk to his Dad to help out. This had nothing at all to do with business of any kind. It's a personal text dealing with a family matter. They knew that and they purposefully doctored the text to make it sound fishy. I doubt it's the only time their "evidence" has been similarly manufactured. That was pretty much how it went all day long with Republicans stepping in it over and over again. The Democrats, led by the extremely competent Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and aided by excellent committee members, Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, Jasmine Crockett, D-Tx., Maxwell Frost, D-Fl., and more all of whom obviously did much more homework than any of the Republicans who babbled their way through the hearing, casting aspersions and throwing out innuendo with no evidence that the president had done anything wrong. Even their "star witnesses" who had no evidence of their own to present, testified that a president could not be lawfully impeached with the evidence that has been presented although one of them, the perennial GOP impeachment witness Jonathan Turley, did say it was absolutely fine to go on a fishing expedition to see if they can find something that would fit the bill. (He didn't say it quite that way, but that's the gist of it.) It's clear that the plan is to use the hearings to curry favor with their Dear Leader, smear Biden and hope that a smoking gun emerges that they can use as an excuse to vote to impeach. But it seems that they themselves have lost the thread and no longer even know what they are accusing the president of doing. When confronted with facts, they can't explain it. Their Republican colleagues were dismayed. Stephen Neukam of The Messenger reported that one GOP aide told him "Comer and staff botched this bad. So much confusing info from Republicans and Dems are on message. How can you not be better prepared for this?" The right-wing media, or certain elements of it, also seem to be shocked that the hearing was such a train wreck. Fox News' Neil Cavuto seemed somewhat befuddled by what he'd just watched: > I don't know what was achieved over these last six-plus hours. The way this was built up — where there's smoke there would be fire…but where there's smoke today, we got more smoke...The promise of explosive testimony and proof …did not materialize today. The best they could say now after this six-plus hours of testimony back and forth is that they're going to try to get more bank records from Joe Biden and his son. Said that they're needed to determine if a crime was committed. Understood. But none of that was presented today, just that they would need those records to further the investigation after months of Republican probes that failed to provide anything resembling concrete evidence. That is exactly correct. On the other hand, some of his colleagues were convinced that this was all part of a master plan: I think we can all agree that blowing witnesses at a House inquiry would be a risky strategy. That's something you definitely want to save for the trial. Sadly, this will not be the end of it. It's very likely that they will proceed to an impeachment vote and it's also quite likely it will fail which is going to make Donald Trump very, very unhappy. They'd better hope that he is so busy with the two civil cases and 91 felony indictments he's juggling that he doesn't have time to pay close attention to this farce.

One of Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia lawyers is moving to withdraw himself from representing the former New York mayor and Trump co-defendant. David Wolfe filed notice Thursday to withdraw from the Fulton County 2020 election conspiracy case. Giuliani was among the 19 individuals, including former President Donald Trump, indicted in a sprawling Georgia racketeering case centered around the group’s efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results. Earlier this month, Giuliani pleaded not guilty to 13 charges related to his role in the alleged conspiracy. Still, the charges in Georgia are just a splash in the bucket amid a growing torrent of legal problems. Last week, Giuliani’s former attorneys sued him for almost $1.4 million worth of unpaid legal fees, all accumulated through a myriad of lawsuits, investigations, and litigation brought against their ex-client. These include the Georgia case, an investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation, his disbarment proceedings, and 10 other civil lawsuits brought against Giuliani. In May, Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy sued him, alleging she had been subjected to sexual harassment and abuse while under his employment. On Monday, an excerpt of former White House aid Caddisy Hutchinson’s upcoming book included claims that Giuliani had groped her as they waited backstage during Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 2021. Earlier this year a D.C. disciplinary committee recommended Giuliani be disbarred. The committee wrote that “Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy. His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar.” The way lawyers are Ditching Giuliani, he soon may find himself struggling to find representation, even his own.

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani. Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick. But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.) As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full [statement](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23997405-johnathan-buma-42023-statement-to-judiciary) to the House committee, which recently became public.) In both statements, the active FBI agent said that his own experience belied claims by GOP lawmakers that the Justice Department obstructed efforts to investigate Hunter Biden while more zealously probing Donald Trump and Trump’s allies. Buma, who says he personally developed leads that helped launch federal probes into Hunter Biden, said his bureau bosses welcomed his Hunter-related information. By contrast, Buma says, his efforts to investigate potential Russian influence over Giuliani were thwarted by FBI higher-ups during both the Trump administration and the Biden administration. The FBI declined to comment on his claims. Buma, as Mother Jones has reported, said in his July statement that he learned that Pavel Fuks, a wealthy Ukrainian developer who hired Giuliani in 2017, paid Giuliani $300,000, supposedly for security consulting work. But Buma says that the FBI suspected Fuks was a “co-opted asset” of a Russian intelligence service and that his payments were potentially part of an effort to gain influence over Giuliani, who in 2018 became Trump’s personal lawyer. Fuks denies working for Russia. “Mr. Fuks has never cooperated with Russian intelligence,” a spokesperson says. A Giuliani spokesperson did not respond to questions about Buma’s account. Giuliani working for a Russian agent would be an obvious security risk. Buma’s allegations are an additional data point, among many, suggesting that America’ Mayor may have been manipulated by Russian agents as he scoured Ukraine for political dirt that could damage Trump’s top rival. The memo Mother Jones obtained is Buma’s account of his interactions with the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican staff. It details a June 14, 2023, phone call during which Buma made his case to two former FBI agents working for the committee. Buma writes that after one of the ex-agents referred to the FBI supposedly “slow playing” its Biden probe, “I explained that I was perhaps the first FBI Agent to collect and report information from Ukrainian sources concerning Hunter Biden.” Buma says he told the investigators that his FBI superiors were “happy to receive the information” and that “I never experienced any intelligence suppression when I collected and reported information concerning the Bidens.” Buma reports that he then described information he received indicating that Giuliani had “collected money from a Ukrainian agent who had been co-opted by the Russian Intelligence Service, Pavlo Fuks…, as well as a group of political operatives located in California, in and around 2020. I said that reporting concerning Giuliani was corroborated extensively by follow up investigations.” Buma says he told the investigators that “my reporting concerning Giuliani and those surrounding Giuliani was suppressed and my reputation was also blackballed.” That’s when the committee staffers cut him off, according to Buma: “When I tried to explain what was actually going on in Ukraine and where I actually experienced suppression, [the investigators] interjected and said that they were only interested in matters pertaining to Biden.” A Judiciary committee spokesperson said the staffers involved remembered the phone call differently. “This is not an accurate depiction and misrepresents the Committee’s exchanges with Mr. Buma,” the aide said. “Their discussions with Mr. Buma covered a wide range of topics under the Committee’s purview, including the FBI and Hunter Biden.” The spokesperson did not specify exactly what the committee disputed. Still, in Buma’s account, committee staffers were explicit: They only wanted to hear about the Bidens. That suggests they didn’t want to consider evidence indicating that a key adviser to Trump might have been compromised by Russian agents. And they didn’t want to deal with the possibility that the president’s lawyer was used to pass along phony claims that helped launch the investigation House Republicans are now pursuing. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said at Thursday’s hearing that lawmakers should hear from Giuliani because he an author “of the lie on which this sham impeachment is based.” Republicans clearly contest that, but they don’t seem too interested in the details of how their investigation really got started.

Ever since debt was invented in ancient Sumer, there have probably been people enriching themselves through bad investments. The trick is to make these investments using other people’s money. Suppose, for example, that a wheeler-dealer uses borrowed funds to make risky investments in New Jersey casinos. If the investments somehow end up making money, he can pocket the profits. But if the investments fail, he may — if he’s been tricky about the wording in his loans or manages to persuade his creditors not to go after his other assets — be able to walk away and leave other people holding the bag. That is, it’s heads he wins, tails the creditors lose. He may also be able to siphon off some of the borrowed money, say by having the casinos pay him or businesses he owns large sums for various services before they go bust. As readers may have guessed, this isn’t a hypothetical example. It is the story of Donald Trump’s New Jersey casino empire, a venture ending in multiple bankruptcies that was a disaster for outside investors but appears to have been quite profitable for Trump. The problem for someone who wants to play that game is how to persuade lenders to play along. Why would any people risk their money in such dubious ventures? Well, there are a couple of ways to pull this off. One, perhaps the main story with those casinos, is sheer power of persuasion, perhaps supported by a cult of personality: Convince lenders that these dubious ventures are actually good investments or that you’re a uniquely effective businessman who can turn straw into gold. Alternatively, you can try to persuade lenders that they’re safe by offering collateral that seems sufficient to protect them but isn’t, because you’ve inflated the value of the assets you put up and possibly also inflated your personal wealth to make it seem you are both a brilliant businessman and a reliable borrower. Which is why making false claims about the value of assets you control is illegal. And on Tuesday, Justice Arthur F. Engoron ruled in New York that Trump did, in fact, persistently commit fraud by overvaluing his assets, possibly by as much as $2.2 billion. Trump and his lawyers offered, as I read it, three main defenses against accusations of fraud. First, they argued that the value of real estate is, to some extent, subjective. Indeed, if you own a building, you don’t know for sure what it’s worth until you try to sell it. But while there’s some wiggle room in valuing real estate, it’s limited. And Engoron ruled that Trump went far beyond those limits, creating a “fantasy world” of indefensible valuations. For example, the Trump Organization treated rent-regulated apartments as being worth as much as noncontrolled apartments. The judge made special note of Trump’s claim that he had a 30,000-square-foot residence in New York, when the true number was only 11,000; square footage isn’t subjective. Second, Trump’s lawyers argued that banks that lent to him got repaid in full, so there was no harm done. Of course, that wasn’t true for lenders caught up in Trump’s earlier bankruptcies. More generally, playing heads-I-win-tails-you-lose based on fraudulent valuations isn’t legal even if sometimes the bets come up heads. Finally, Trump declared on social media that “my Civil Rights have been taken away from me” and that he borrowed money from “sophisticated Wall Street banks” that presumably wouldn’t have been easily deceived by fraud. If you know anything about Wall Street’s attitudes toward Trump, that’s a real hoot. For years, only one major Wall Street player, Deutsche Bank, was willing to deal with him at all, leading to much puzzlement about that bank’s motives. And eventually Deutsche Bank also pulled the plug, citing concerns about his financial claims. Trump did manage to pay off that debt, although it’s a mystery where he found the cash. But as I just explained, getting lucky is no excuse for fraud. What’s remarkable about Engoron’s finding that Trump committed large-scale fraud (it’s now a ruling, not a mere accusation) is what it says about the man who became president and the voters who supported him. Back in 2016, some observers warned conventional political analysts that they were underrating Trump’s chances because they didn’t appreciate how many Americans believed that he was a brilliant businessman — a belief based largely on his role on the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” What we now know is that the old joke was, in Trump’s case, the simple truth: He wasn’t a real business genius; he just played one on TV. But the truth is that this was obvious, to anyone willing to see, from the beginning of Trump’s political rise. I’d like to predict that this ruling will finally destroy Trump’s public persona. In reality, however, his supporters will probably brush this ruling off, partly because they’ll view it as the product of a left-wing conspiracy, partly because at this late date, few of those who backed him will be willing to admit that they were taken in by a charlatan. But they were. And the fact that so many Americans were and remain fooled should lead to some serious national soul-searching.

One of the House Republicans' witnesses in their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden doesn't believe enough evidence has been presented. Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar and George Washington University law professor, was questioned during Thursday's first impeachment inquiry hearing by the House Oversight Committee as conservatives move forward with their effort to impeaching the president for allegedly aiding his son, Hunter Biden, in business dealings in Ukraine and China. The mounting evidence as claimed by Republicans has drawn strong responses from Turley, who has been critical of the Bidens following whistleblower testimony in the summer alleging that federal agencies hid or covered up Hunter Biden's tax affairs and other potential criminality. "I have previously stated that, while I believe that an impeachment inquiry is warranted, I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment," Turley wrote in his written statement, which he read verbatim during the hearing. Turley said that the purpose of his testimony was to discuss how past inquiries pursued evidence of potentially impeachable conduct, adding that the House has passed the threshold for an inquiry into whether President Biden was directly involved or benefited from Hunter Biden's practices. "However, I believe that the record has developed to the point that the House needs to answer troubling questions surrounding the president," Turley added. "Polls indicate that most of the country shares those concerns while expressing doubts over the Biden administration investigating potential criminal conduct." A CNN poll conducted in late August found that 61 percent of respondents think the president—who was vice president at the time the alleged conversations and deals occurred—had at least some involvement in his son's business dealings, while 42 percent said he acted illegally. Another 55 percent believed that Biden acted inappropriately. The president's perceived involvement tends to fall along party lines. While about half of Americans in an Associated Press-NORC poll from mid-September felt little to no confidence in the Justice Department for its handling of the Hunter Biden investigation, just one in three respondents were highly concerned about the president's wrongdoing. That translated to a party breakdown of 67 percent of Republicans but just 7 percent of Democrats. "I do not believe there is a constitutional basis for impeaching President Biden," attorney Alan Dershowitz told Newsweek via email following Turley's statement. "He has not committed treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors while serving as president." "The entire impeachment inquiry is based on politics, not evidence, so it's no surprise that their own legal expert threw cold water on it," Dave Aronberg, a state attorney for Florida's Palm Beach County, told Newsweek via social media. Rather than focus on the impeachment inquiry, the White House is channeling Republicans' efforts by comparing their "chaos and inability to govern" to a looming government shutdown that could take hold this weekend.

The most remarkable and unique feature of American politics is one that is rarely discussed: the Republican Party’s extreme anti-statist ideology. The Republican party is the only major conservative party in the world whose governing doctrine rejects higher taxes on absolute principle, refuses to acknowledge anthropogenic global warming, and denies that health insurance should be a right of all citizens. This last point surfaced during the second Republican presidential debate when Ron DeSantis was asked to explain why his state ranks near the national bottom in health insurance coverage. Because these moments occur so rarely, it was highly revealing. The backdrop is that the Affordable Care Act provided health insurance to poor people by expanding Medicaid. A conservative Supreme Court ruling gave states the right to opt out of the expansion, turning down free funding from Washington if they wished. Originally, just 24 states joined Medicaid expansion. Over time, the sheer economic logic brought more states into the program. Turning down the money not only hurts people who can’t get health coverage, but it also hurts hospitals, which legally must treat people who show up in the emergency room, even if they lack coverage. In other words, states were not choosing between spending money and hurting people. Helping people get insurance was practically free. (The federal government covers 90 percent of the cost, and the economic benefit of getting health care for the uninsured, both to covered workers and their health providers, easily exceeds the remaining 10 percent cost, paying for itself.) The states that refused to join Medicaid expansion literally had to accept economic sacrifices in order to pay for the privilege of denying health insurance to low-income citizens in their state. Florida is now one of only ten states that reject Medicaid expansion. DeSantis almost never has to explain or justify this position. Shockingly, he had to do so at the debate. Stuart Varney asked DeSantis why 2.5 million Floridians lack health insurance, which is a rate much higher than the national average. (Florida ranks fourth from the bottom in residents with health insurance). DeSantis first tried deflecting the problem to overall inflation: > DESANTIS: Well, I think this is a symptom of our overall economic decline. Everything has gotten more expensive. You see insurance rates going through the roof. People that are going to get groceries, I’ve spoken with a woman in Iowa. And she said, you know, for the first time in my life, I’m having to take things out of my grocery cart when I get to the checkout line … This is obviously a total non sequitur. The uninsured rate in Florida did not get worse due to inflation. Indeed, it got temporarily much better because the Biden administration made emergency COVID-19 funds available to people in non-expansion states, like Florida. In any case, inflation is a national phenomenon that could not possibly explain why Florida ranks near the bottom in health insurance coverage. Varney, amazingly, pointed this out. He asked DeSantis why Florida’s health insurance rate was “worse than the national average.” “It’s not,” DeSantis replied. This was a pure lie. (Florida’s uninsured rate is in fact well above the national average, according to the Census Bureau). But then, DeSantis proceeded to give something like an explanation for his position: > “Our state’s a dynamic state. We’ve got a lot of folks that come. Of course, we’ve had a population boom. > We also don’t have a lot of welfare benefits, in Florida. We’re basically saying we want to — this is a field of dreams, you can do well in the state. But we’re not going to be like California and have massive numbers of people on government programs without work requirements. We believe in your work, and you got to do that. And so, that goes for all the welfare benefits. > And you know what that’s done, Stuart? Our unemployment rate is the lowest, amongst any big state. We have the highest GDP growth events (ph) of any big state. And even CNBC, no fan of mine, ranked Florida the No. 1 economy in America.” In the middle of this word salad, some coherent thought can be extracted. Florida is a “field of dreams.” It rejects “welfare benefits.” DeSantis never uttered the word “Medicaid” or “Obamacare,” which explains why his state’s citizens lack health insurance at such high levels. Yet he did manage to express his belief that health insurance ought to be an earned benefit, not a right. If people get jobs working in construction or day care or at a convenience store, and those jobs do not have employer-provided health insurance, the state should not step in. Those people should work harder. Indeed, to give them subsidized access to medical care will sap their incentive. Poor people need motivation to work hard, and denying them the ability to see a doctor and get medicine is part of that necessary motivation. And while Florida is now a minority among states refusing Medicaid expansion, DeSantis’s fanatical stance lies comfortably within the heart of conservative movement thinking. Indeed, this is what is considered “normal” conservatism. The horrifying nature of this normality is generally invisible. It fell to Fox Business host Stuart Varney, of all people, to make DeSantis explain himself.

Poverty in the U.S. is a choice directly reflecting federal, state, and local policies. The expansion of safety net programs in response to the pandemic-driven recession reduced poverty rates nationally in 2021 to below pre-pandemic levels. However, because policymakers ended many of these programs—including expanded unemployment insurance, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and economic impact/stimulus payments—poverty rates rose from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022. Child poverty, which had fallen to record lows in 2021, increased from 5.2% to 12.4% in 2022.

Two bills due for House Ways and Means Committee consideration this week contain a slate of provisions that would expand health savings accounts (HSAs) — increasing tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit high-income people, exacerbating racial and ethnic differences in wealth, and costing over $70 billion combined, without tackling the most urgent problems people with low incomes face in accessing affordable health care. Under current law, people enrolled in high-deductible health plans that meet certain standards can establish and set aside money in an HSA. These accounts offer a unique “triple tax advantage” enjoyed mostly by high-income people: (1) contributions are not taxed; (2) contributions can be invested for years in stocks and bonds with tax-free earnings; and (3) withdrawals are not taxable if they are used for qualified medical expenses that occurred after establishment of the HSA. People with low and moderate incomes are far less likely to be able to contribute substantial savings to their HSAs compared to high-income people. And people with low and moderate incomes benefit much less for each dollar contributed, because they are in lower marginal income tax brackets. For example, a married couple earning $80,000 per year can deduct 12 cents for each dollar contributed to an HSA from their taxes, while a married couple earning $700,000 per year can deduct 37 cents for each dollar put into an HSA. Data show that the benefits of HSAs skew heavily toward people with high incomes. An analysis of 2017 IRS data found that tax returns exceeding $500,000 in adjusted gross income were the most likely to report individual HSA contributions, and returns between $200,000 and $1 million were the most likely to report employer contributions. According to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates for tax year 2023, 77 percent of the total deductible value of HSA contributions goes to households with incomes over $100,000. (See graph.) Only 4 percent of the value goes to households with incomes $50,000 or below, and 44 percent goes to those with incomes over $200,000. The House bills would expand HSA tax benefits, primarily helping high-income people, in various ways: by allowing more types of health plans to qualify for use with them, increasing how much people can contribute to their accounts, and allowing new health services to be covered pre-deductible without running afoul of federal tax rules. For example, one provision would allow health plans that cover $500 of mental health services pre-deductible to qualify for HSA tax breaks. Another would let people who get care from a worksite clinic to get HSA tax benefits. Other provisions would newly allow Medicare enrollees to contribute to an HSA, allow people 55 and older to put more money in their accounts, and deem “bronze” and catastrophic plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as qualifying for HSA tax breaks. While making health care more affordable is a critical priority, and some of the provisions are directed at populations or health care services in need of support, they do not target help to the people who need it most ― especially those with low and moderate incomes who are struggling to access health coverage and care. Also making these bills counterproductive is their promotion of racial wealth differences. Privately insured Latino and Black people are about half as likely to have HSAs than are white and Asian people. This, combined with the accounts’ use as lucrative tax shelters, represents one of the many ways in which access to economic opportunity is inequitable, and it exacerbates long-standing differences in wealth, under which a typical white family in 2019 had eight times the wealth of a typical Black family and five times the wealth of a typical Latino family. HSA tax breaks also come at a steep cost; they are already projected to cost the federal government $180 billion over the next ten years. The new provisions, which are assumed to be in effect after 2025, are estimated to cost over $70 billion combined over the eight years from 2026 through 2033, with costs increasing each year. Instead of throwing more money into these tax breaks, policymakers should target federal resources toward expanding coverage, increasing affordability, and improving health equity. For example, for states that haven’t adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion, the federal government should close the Medicaid coverage gap, which would focus resources squarely on helping uninsured people below the poverty line — 60 percent of whom are people of color. Policymakers should also permanently extend enhanced premium tax credits for ACA marketplace plans, which are set to expire after 2025. These tax credits, unlike HSAs, have made health insurance more affordable for millions of people, narrowed racial differences in coverage rates, and helped fuel record coverage gains.

PHOENIX (AP) — President Joe Biden is arguing that “there is something dangerous happening in America” as he revives his warnings that Donald Trump and his allies represent an existential threat to the country’s democratic institutions. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement,” Biden says in excerpts of the speech Thursday in Arizona, released in advance by the White House, referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Although voting in the 2024 Republican primary doesn’t begin for months, Biden’s focus reflects Trump’s status as the undisputed frontrunner for his party’s nomination despite facing four indictments, two of them related to his attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Biden’s speech is his fourth in a series of presidential addresses on the topic, a cause that is a touchstone for him as he tries to remain in office even in the face of low approval ratings and widespread concern from voters about his age, 80. He’s also facing fresh pressure on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans are holding the first hearing in their impeachment inquiry. On the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Biden visited the Capitol and accused Trump of continuing to hold a “dagger” at democracy’s throat. Biden closed out the summer that year in the shadow of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, decrying Trumpism as a menace to democratic institutions. And in November, as voters were casting ballots in the midterm elections, Biden again sounded a clarion call to protect democratic institutions. The location for Thursday’s speech, as was the case for the others, was chosen for effect. It will be near Arizona State University, which houses the McCain Institute, named after the late Arizona Sen. John McCain — a friend of Biden and the 2008 Republican presidential nominee who spent his public life denouncing autocrats around the globe. “I have come to honor the McCain Institute and Library because they are home to a proud Republican who put country first,” Biden says in the excerpts. “Our commitment should be no less because democracy should unite all Americans – regardless of political affiliation.” The late senator’s wife, Cindy McCain, said the library, still to be built, is the result of bipartisan support from Biden, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and her predecessor, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. “President Biden has been a longtime friend, tough political opponent and strong leader,” McCain said in a statement. “All traits that my husband, John, also possessed.” As Biden has tried to do in the past, Thursday’s speech is designed to avoid alienating moderate Republicans while confronting the spread of anti-democratic rhetoric. “Not every Republican -– not even the majority of Republicans –- adhere to the extremist MAGA ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with Republicans my whole career,” Biden says. “But there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists.” Republicans competing with Trump for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination have largely avoided challenging his election falsehoods. In addition, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are only becoming more emboldened as he eggs them on, including toward a looming government shutdown that appears all but inevitable. In closed-door fundraisers, Biden has spoken at length about reelection, imploring supporters to join his effort to “literally save American democracy,” as he described it to wealthy donors this month in New York. “I’m running because we made progress — that’s good — but because our democracy, I think, is still at risk,” Biden said. Advisers see Biden’s continued focus on democracy as both good policy and good politics. Campaign officials have pored over the election results from last November, when candidates who denied the 2020 election results did not fare well in competitive races, and point to polling that showed democracy was a highly motivating issue for voters in 2022. Candidates who backed Trump’s election lies and were running for statewide offices with some influence over elections — governor, secretary of state, attorney general — lost their races in every presidential battleground state. In few states does Biden’s message of democracy resonate more than in Arizona, which became politically competitive during Trump’s presidency after seven decades of Republican dominance. After Biden’s victory, the state was a hotbed of efforts to overturn or cast doubt on the results. Republican state lawmakers used their subpoena power to obtain all the 2020 ballots and vote-counting machines from Maricopa County, then hired Trump supporters to conduct an unprecedented partisan review of the election. The widely mocked spectacleconfirmed Biden’s victory but fueled unfounded conspiracy theories about the election and spurred an exodus of election workers. In the 2022 midterms, voters up and down the ballot rejected Republican candidates who repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election. But Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, has never conceded her loss to Hobbs and plans to launch her a bid for the U.S. Senate. Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, also repeated fraudulent election claims in their respective campaigns. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who defeated Masters, said the importance of defending democracy resonates not only with members of his own party but independents and moderate GOP voters. “I met so many Republicans that were sick and tired of the lies about an election that was two years old,” Kelly said. Indeed, Republicans privately concede that the election denialism rhetoric that dominated their candidates’ message — as well as the looming specter of Trump — damaged their efforts to retain the governor’s mansion and flip a hotly contested Senate seat, according to three Republican officials who worked in statewide races last cycle. The issue of democracy resonated more in Arizona than in other competitive states, and to have candidates deny basic facts on elections helped reinforce other claims from Democrats about GOP extremism on other, completely separate issues, said the Republican officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly describe the party’s shortcomings last year. Though Trump-animated forces in the party dominate public attention, many Republican voters were concerned about other issues such as the economy and the border and did not want to focus on an election result that was two years old. Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is seeking the Democratic nomination in next year’s Senate race, said a democracy-focused message is particularly important to two critical blocs of voters in the state: Latinos and veterans, both of whom Gallego said are uniquely affected by election denialism and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. “You know, we come from countries and experiences where democracy is very corrupt, and many of us are only one generation removed from that, but we’re close enough to see how bad it can be,” Gallego said. “And so Jan. 6 actually was particularly jarring, I think, to Latinos.” As he pays tribute to McCain on Thursday, Biden will also announce new federal funds being directed to build the McCain Library, which the White House says will offer various programs for underserved communities. The money comes from a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in the early months of Biden’s presidency, and the project is in partnership with the with the McCain Institute and Arizona State University.

The president expressed solidarity with union members on strike, while the former president told them their movement is worthless The United Auto Workers went on strike against the Big Three car manufacturers earlier this month. The historic labor stoppage could have broad ramifications for the economy, the labor movement, and beyond — but it’s already having an impact on the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump, who has long been trying to win support of the union, traveled to Michigan on Wednesday to speak to autoworkers as his Republican primary competitors debated in California. The trip comes a day after Joe Biden visited the state, where he became the first president ever to join a picket line. Biden gave limited remarks while standing next to UAW President Shawn Fain, while Trump bloviated for over an hour onstage at an invitation-only event at a nonunion auto parts factory. The forums couldn’t have been more different, nor could their respective messages to autoworkers. “You guys, UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before,” Biden said on Tuesday. “Made a lot of sacrificers, gave up a lot, and the companies were in trouble. Now they’re doing incredibly well, and you should be doing incredibly well too. Stick with it, because you deserve the significance raise you need and other benefits. Let’s take back what we lost. We saved them; it’s about time for them to step up for us.” Trump told autoworkers the strike is misguided and ultimately pointless, while repeatedly casting Biden as evil and himself as the industry’s savior. “Biden’s cruel and ridiculous electrical — he wants electric-vehicle mandates that will spell the death of the U.S. auto industry,” Trump said. “You’re negotiating a contract, you’re all on picket lines and everything, but it doesn’t make a difference because in two years you’re all going to be out of business. You’re not getting anything.” It wasn’t the only time Trump railed against the impact electric cars could have on the industry, seemingly unaware that part of what the UAW is striking for is a share of the electric-vehicle economy. The only message he could communicate was that the strike is worthless, and all autoworkers need to do is vote for him next year. “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think,” Trump said. “I watch you out there with the pickets, but I don’t think you’re picketing for the right things.” The “you” here is misleading, though. Trump was speaking before a crowd at a nonunion plant that employs about 150 people, according to The Detroit News, although the event was stocked with 400-500 of the former president’s supporters. The outlet noted that though some held signs that read “Union Members for Trump” and “Autoworkers for Trump” — in clear view of the cameras, of course — at least two of the people holding such signs acknowledged that they weren’t union members or autoworkers. Nevertheless, Trump emphasized the importance of getting “your leadership” to endorse him. Fain, the UAW president, hasn’t just refused to do so, he’s attacked Trump at every turn. “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” he said in a statement last week, after Trump announced he was coming to Michigan. Earlier this week, Fain told CNN that he found a “pathetic irony” in the fact that Trump was holding a rally ostensibly for union workers from a nonunion business. “All you have to do is look at his track record,” he continued. “In 2008, during the Great Recession, he blamed UAW members. He blamed our contracts for everything that was wrong with these companies. “I see no point in meeting with him,” Fain added, “because I don’t think the man has any bit of care for what our workers stand for or what the working class stands for. He served the billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.” Biden seemed to acknowledge this while speaking to union members alongside Fain on Tuesday. “Wall Street didn’t build the country, the middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class,” the president said. “That’s a fact. So let’s keep going. You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.”

Donald Trump is skipping another GOP primary debate this week and the theories abound as to why. Some paint it as a smart strategy, setting his opponents to take each other apart while he sails into the presidential nomination. Others, including the right-wing editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, have accused Trump of being afraid to debate. But watching clips of some recent Trump speeches, I have a different theory: His team is worried Trump will start talking about how he bested Teddy Roosevelt in a bear-hunting competition, before trouncing the 26th president in the 1904 presidential election. To be sure, Trump was never playing with a full deck. Never forget when he recommended bleach injections for "cleaning" COVID-19 from lungs. Lately, however, his brain functioning, as impossible as it may be to believe, seems even worse. He appears to believe he's won every presidential election in the last two decades, instead of that one electoral college-based win against Hillary Clinton in 2016. During a campaign stop in South Carolina, Trump spun out a whole story about defeating a famous military leader named "Bush." "When I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win," he rambled, saying it was "because Bush supposedly was a military person." Then he added, "He got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East. How did that work out, right?" Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only. Trump did prevail over Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in the 2016 GOP primary. But he appears to believe he defeated President George W. Bush, Jeb's older brother, who is actually the guy who "got us into the Middle East," when he invaded Iraq. Before bragging about besting two-term winner George W. Bush, Trump gave another speech boasting about his imaginary win against another two-termer, President Barack Obama. "With Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn't be won," he prattled on in a speech in Washington, D.C. last week. In the same speech, he confused Obama with President Joe Biden, and warned that, if he didn't win in 2024, we would enter "World War II," which famously ended the year before Trump himself was born. Flat-out dumbassery or overt bigotry from Republicans is shrugged off, because of the belief that their base voters don't care anyway. While Trump, who likes to call Biden "cognitively impaired," got widely mocked on social media for this, the audience he's speaking to doesn't seem to notice their god is brain-farting. That's because Trump fans, as I've written about before, don't actually listen when Dear Leader is talking. Instead, they wait for him to say buzzwords they can cheer, like "lock her up," but otherwise they tune him out. After all, MAGA is an authoritarian movement based on tribalist politics. Merit-based systems allow women and people of color to rise up, which is intolerable to the GOP base. What Trump says is not imporant. What they like about him is he's rich, white, male and a bully. There's no way to know from afar what's going on with Trump. On one hand, he's 77 years old, and his own father died of Alzheimer's. On the other hand, Trump's narcissism has long fueled a willingness to lie shamelessly about his own supposed accomplishments, from making up golf scores even pros can't achieve to pretending he had a chance with women who hated him to falsifying charitable donations to claiming his inauguration drew crowds it didn't. But claiming to have won elections he didn't run in would be next-level lying, even by Trump standards. Plus, it doesn't explain really his confusing Biden with Obama, or confusing the two Bush brothers. The likelier explanation is he's confusing his fantasies with memories. Nor does it explain how his social media presence, which was always ungrammatical and silly, has become even more unhinged and incoherent. Perhaps we've all become numb to it, but stepping back, it's really remarkable that he regularly issues violent threats on Truth Social that get ignored mainly because they're as incomprehensible as they are terrible. That the press understands Trump isn't doing well is evident in the way they all politely ignore him screaming for the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, much like one would smile patiently at a dementia patient yelling invective about long-dead relatives. But of course, this is unbelievably unfair, because the very same press is in an endless hype cycle about "concerns" that Biden, who does not issue grammar-challenged murder threats regularly, is slowing down from age. "Biden is old" is swiftly turning into one of those self-perpetuating B.S. media cycles that only end up seeming to smear Democrats unfairly, such as "Hillary Clinton's emails." First, the press runs a million pieces on this non-story, creating the illusion of controversy where none exists. Then voters start to parrot the "concerns" back in polls, concerns they only have because they're being told by a 24/7 news cycle to worry about this. Then those polls are used to justify even more coverage of a non-controversy, making sure a candidate is defined by something that was never a real problem. With Biden, the rejoinder is "but he actually is old!" But of course, so is Trump. Worse, Trump, who is only 3 years younger, is clearly feeling his age a lot more than Biden, who does not forget what elections he ran in or how many world wars there were. Crucially, Biden isn't displaying the loss of impulse control we see with Trump, whose baseline of self-control was not good to begin with. Trump struggles to get through interviews without confessing to his crimes. Good for prosecutors, but also a reminder that a man who can't be a passable steward of his own freedom has no business running the country. As Salon's Heather "Digby" Parton pointed out on Twitter, the press actually knows they're treating Biden and Trump very differently, even though the latter is way worse. Part of this is the same old bothsiderism that has cobbled Beltway journalism for decades. The press exaggerates the flaws of Democrats while minimizing the transgressions of Republicans, in order to create a false sense that the two parties are equal. They do this to seem "fair," even though it's the opposite of fair to handicap one party so thoroughly. They also do it for market reasons, because horse race coverage benefits from false equivalence, while giving audiences clear and accurate information would take some of the sport out of it. It gets to downright silly levels the closer elections get: A lot of the double standard is driven by perceptions of what the two voting bases care about. Mainstream journalists believe, with good reason, that Democratic voters care about qualities like intelligence, competence, and mental fitness. They also believe, with good reason, that Republican voters don't care if their candidates are babbling morons, so long as they a rich, white men. Indeed, being seen as "too" smart can hurt you with the GOP base, which suspiciously eyes intelligence as a gateway drug to rationality. So the Beltway press, in an attempt to be "objective," ends up covering candidates through these perceived partisan biases. A Democrat saying something wrong or off is "news" because his own party members won't like it, even if the mistake is inconsequential. Meanwhile, flat-out dumbassery or overt bigotry from Republicans is shrugged off, because of the belief that their base voters don't care anyway. And it's true enough that most Democratic voters care about competence and most Republican voters do not. But that doesn't excuse the press's wild double standard on this. For one thing, it's basic journalistic ethics to report the truth without worrying whether their most loyal voters care. But also, it's foolish to think that giving audiences greater context doesn't matter. There are a lot of swing voters, independents, and people who haven't decided if they're going to vote yet. Those folks can actually have their opinion shaped by the information they're taking in. If the media focuses on Biden's age while ignoring that Trump is worse, a lot of those fairweather citizens may vote in ways they come to regret — or not vote at all. That's bad news in any environment, but especially bad considering how much of a threat Trump is to our democracy and the nation's future. He was bad enough in his first term where he, as much as the media might often forget, attempted a coup. If, as all public signs indicate, his already fragile mental state is getting more disjointed and reckless, that's terrifying. What may be more dangerous than Trump's idiocy is that, while he's always been sociopathically impulsive and evil, he seems to be getting worse in his late 70s. If he gets power again, there's little that could contain him.

Sept 27 (Reuters) - The United Auto Workers (UAW) union plans to strike additional Detroit Three automotive facilities on Friday absent serious progress, a source told Reuters. UAW President Shawn Fain plans to announce new targets at 10 a.m. in online remarks and workers would walk out of additional facilities at 12 p.m., the source added. On Sept. 22, the UAW expanded its strikes against Detroit automakers General Motors (GM.N) and Chrysler parent Stellantis (STLAM.MI), but kept its Ford (F.N) walkout limited to a single plant. It is unclear whether Ford will be targeted in the next round of actions. The union historically has picked one of the Detroit Three to negotiate with first as the so-called target that sets the pattern on which subsequent deals are based. This time, Fain targeted all three companies simultaneously. GM, Ford and Stellantis were not immediately available for comment. The automakers and the UAW remain far apart on core issues of pay, retirement benefits and time off. Fain has stuck with a demand for 40% pay increases over four years. The automakers, in separate proposals, are offering roughly 20%. The UAW is pushing automakers to eliminate the two-tier wage system under which new hires can earn far less than veterans. Long walkouts at factories producing large pickup trucks could cost the automakers billions in revenue and profit. Analysts estimate GM, Ford and Stellantis earn as much as $15,000 per vehicle on each of their respective large pickup models. The automakers, like their global counterparts, have been focused on cost reductions, which in some cases include job cuts, to help accelerate a shift to electric vehicles (EVs) from gasoline-powered vehicles. The UAW, which represents 46,000 GM workers, 57,000 Ford employees and 43,000 Stellantis workers, kicked off negotiations with the companies in July.

Members of former President Donald Trump's legal team have been fined for "indefensible" arguments made about the properties associated with The Trump Organization. New York Judge Arthur Engoron ruled on Tuesday that Trump, his sons and The Trump Organization committed fraud by overvaluing several of their business properties by over $400 million. The ruling, made in relation to a $250 million civil case originally brought forward by New York Attorney General Letitia James' office, has been described by some as a "corporate death penalty" due to business licenses being ordered to be rescinded and handed over to independent receivers. Engoron's order included $7,500 fines for each of Trump's lawyers for their continued arguments in defense of their client, including one that the square footage of an apartment could be subjective. "That is a fantasy world, not the real world," Engoron wrote in the order. The fines, which were reportedly greater than James had requested, followed efforts by Trump's legal team to move the case to another judge. They also sued Engoron. Last week, following a series of statements made by Trump attorney Christopher Kise, Ergoron reportedly pounded on the bench, stating, "You cannot make false statements and use them in business." Newsweek reached out to Trump's legal team via email for comment. Attorney Andrew Lieb told Newsweek that the Ergoron ruling is an indictment not just on Trump, his sons and their organization but on Trump's attorneys for not properly advocating for their legal roles and instead essentially "letting the patient run the asylum." "Trump's lawyers need to get a backbone fast as following the Trump legal strategy keeps getting them personally damaged," Lieb said. "We've previously seen criminal charges against Trump's attorneys. There have been disbarments and don't forget about the many civil cases. "Now, we have sanctions for frivolous conduct where his lawyers made the judge feel like he was watching Groundhog's Day in rehearing the same, previously rejected arguments," he said. Trump himself was quick to rebuke Ergoron's order, calling the judge a "Democratic operative" and claiming on Truth Social that his Mar-a-Lago property appraised between $18 million and $27.6 million "could be worth almost 100 times that amount." Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, said Tuesday on CNN that if penalties imposed on Trump and company exceed $600 million, there is not enough liquid cash available which will lead to bankruptcy. Even a fine over $250 million, the same number in James' litigation, would be difficult to pay off, Cohen added—even if Trump was able to sell his 40 Wall Street building in Manhattan, New York, for $400 million. "Many of the assets that he owns, he has limited to no basis in them like 40 Wall Street, $1 million basis. You also have, say, a $100 million mortgage onto it," Cohen said. "He's also going to have to pay Uncle Sam tax on the money between the basis and the sale price.

America faces a crisis of democracy, as the intellectual soil of the Republican Party has eroded. Authoritarian sentiments have overtaken the country’s conservative movement, which has come to realize it lacks the numbers to succeed democratically. Long-held laissez-faire conservative policies have no answers for modern problems like the climate crisis, global pandemics, monopolization, or wealth inequality. Social conservative policies on race, gender, and religion have no answers for a diverse, increasingly secular society where two incomes are required to make ends meet. Conspiracy theories have replaced policy principles as the unifying elements of the GOP, and one load-bearing pillar of our two-party system is buckling under their weight. But this crisis of democracy is exacerbated by a crisis of information. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” But the converse is also true: When the public is woefully misinformed there can be terrible consequences for democracy. A few recent polls illustrate some shocking discrepancies between public opinion and basic reality. The Harris poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that unemployment is nearing a 50-year high, even though the actual unemployment rate is nearing a 50-year low. An Associated Press poll showed that Donald Trump is perceived as more corrupt than Joe Biden by only 8 percent of voters, despite the former’s lifetime reputation for real estate corruptions and multiple concurrent indictments. Whatever the knocks on Biden may be, there have been virtually no history, current evidence, or even significant whispers of personal corruption. It is consequently unsurprising that in the latest Quinnipiac poll 51 percent of voters thought that Trump would do a better job handling a national crisis compared to 44 percent for Biden—despite the reality that Trump badly mismanaged the COVID crisis, while Biden enacted a raft of beneficial legislation and steered the country to economic recovery. Of course, as my Washington Monthly colleague Bill Scher noted, there can be a significant lag time between good economic conditions and presidents receiving credit for them. Inflation, though now tapering, has colored voters’ perceptions of the economy, but those views may change by Election Day of next year. Also, real ongoing structural economic issues—especially, the worsening housing crisis—can make people feel that their material conditions are worse than macroeconomic indicators might suggest. Still, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a broken media environment has led to degradation of public knowledge. Media critics such as Jay Rosen, Dan Froomkin, and Will Stancil have long argued that imbalances in the fundamental constructs of both traditional and social media are responsible for the pervasive misinformation in American society and its deleterious impact on the health of our democracy. The conservative movement maintains a large and relentless propaganda machine with a massive audience, spanning every media platform. It is dominant in most traditional media channels. Fox News usually leads the ratings in cable news. Right-wing talk and Christian radio are often the only options on the AM band. Local TV news leads with sensationalist stories about crime and danger that activate conservative instincts, and the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast group owns stations reaching over 40 percent of American households. Conservative interest groups have been rapidly buying up local newspapers around the country. The social media situation is even worse. As Max Fisher’s recent book The Chaos Machine persuasively argues, the algorithms that drive engagement (and profits) to social media companies tend to overemphasize far-right content. Conservative groups dominate the top Facebook pages, while YouTube relentlessly drives even viewers with left-leaning profiles to right-wing, conspiratorial content. And now Elon Musk is rapidly converting X, the former Twitter, into a far-right space while alternatives such as BlueSky, Post, and Mastodon struggle to gain traction. There is no real left-wing counterpart to this. Cable news channel MSNBC caters to a center-left audience, but its reach is much smaller than Fox News. More importantly, much of MSNBC’s programming—particularly in the daytime hours—is not partisan or ideological but neutral journalism. Explicitly progressive content in traditional media outlets is virtually nonexistent. Progressive social media content is often eclipsed by the right, and what does exist tends to lack coordination or message discipline. What conservatives bemoan as the “liberal media” is in reality a bevy of organizations like The New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN which have general editorial slants that may veer from center-right to center-left depending on the issue, but typically attempt above all to maintain an air of balance and neutrality between opposing partisan sides. Jay Rosen calls this posture the “View from Nowhere,” and describes it as a pretense at neutral objectivity that by its very existence imposes an artificial equality between partisan perspectives that the actual facts do not support. Trump’s outrageous lies have precipitated a minor shift in which many traditional media organizations have become more comfortable with presenting a less artificially balanced perspective on political arguments, but this is mostly specific to Trump personally. Statements from other Republican leaders and conservative organizations are still typically treated at face value, despite often being obviously misleading or false. As commentators Will Stancil and Oliver Willis frequently point out, the media imbalance often leads to strategic errors on the part of Democratic politicians. Democrats pass bills and put out press releases hoping that doing and saying popular and effective things will reap intrinsic rewards. But when conservative media is blatantly propagandistic and traditional media is doing its best to pursue artificial balance, those rewards fail to materialize. In turn, the public remains wildly misinformed about objective realities—such as which political actors are actually working to solve problems and do popular things. Building a more effective and unabashedly liberal media apparatus has long been a challenge, as evidenced by the ‘00s-era failure of Air America Radio to compete with conservative talk radio. More educated and open-minded audiences are inherently resistant to one-sided claims and tend to consume a more sophisticated media diet. Yet a true liberal media would enrich that diet, correcting a destructively imbalanced information environment. It’s an expensive and difficult task, but as an old Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Five days out from an increasingly likely government shutdown, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is once again demonstrating a willingness—if not a downright enthusiasm—to cave to the demands of far-right members of his caucus. The Washington Post reports on the latest from the spending negotiations, with McCarthy now embracing steep cuts to a slew of safety net programs that provide food assistance for children, veteran housing benefits, and home heating assistance. It’s an astonishing proposal that also includes a potential 80 percent cut in funding for low-income schools, as well as the slashing of funding for food assistance for poor pregnant mothers. The list represents yet another attempt to placate the very people McCarthy himself accused last week of being behind a “whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn things down.“ (As I said this weekend, the assertion is laughable; McCarthy is far more familiar with these people than he lets on.) Will these latest concessions convince his fractured party to play ball? Who knows. Even if McCarthy succeeds in flipping the far-right, his plans are dead on arrival at the Senate and White House, proving that the top Republican is unserious about avoiding a shutdown. But regardless of how negotiations shake out, it’s McCarthy’s eagerness to screw over some of the most vulnerable people in society that shouldn’t be forgotten. For all the talk of a new GOP, Republicans are pushing for the same thing as usual: cutting programs that help poor people.

Joe Biden became the first president to ever walk a picket line on Tuesday as he rallied striking autoworkers in Michigan. Donald Trump has taken a rather different tack with the United Autoworkers strike. Last week, the GOP frontrunner expressed sympathy for the UAW and announced that he would be traveling to the Detroit area to speak to autoworkers. In doing so, he generated myriad headlines about how he was courting striking autoworkers, in a populist departure for a Republican presidential candidate. Then, his campaign disclosed that Trump will actually be addressing a nonunion auto-parts plant that is effectively undermining the strike. These two approaches to the UAW’s fight perfectly encapsulate the two parties’ disparate orientations toward labor issues writ large. Democrats and Republicans both wish to portray themselves as champions of the American worker. To an extent, this has always been true; to win power in a democracy, you need to claim some affinity for the most populous social class. But the competition for America’s populist mantle has intensified in recent years. For decades, non-college-educated voters have been drifting rightward while university graduates shifted left. Trump’s 2016 campaign accelerated these trends, peeling off a critical mass of working-class Obama voters in pivotal Rust Belt states. This development, in combination with an ascendant progressive movement, led the Democratic Party to align itself more tightly with organized labor, and loosen its attachment to a meritocratic conception of social justice. Whereas Barack Obama sometimes posited access to higher education as the antidote for inequality, Biden has concentrated both rhetorically and substantively on improving employment prospects for blue-collar laborers. In his first address to Congress, the president advertised that “nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created” in his economic plan “do not require a college degree; 75 percent don’t require an associate’s degree.” At the same time, the Biden administration has abandoned its Democratic predecessor’s fight with teachers unions over education-reform policy. And it has also curried favor with unions in the manufacturing sector by federally subsidizing domestic production and seeking to re-shore critical industries. More fundamentally, the president’s National Labor Relations Board has taken aggressive steps to abet union organizing. Meanwhile, at the state level, Democrats have sought to improve working conditions by raising the minimum wage and creating statewide boards empowered to set minimum standards in certain sectors. The Democrats will never be mistaken for a labor party. Unions are too weak in the U.S. for a party unequivocally committed to workers’ interests to wield national power. This reality was made manifest in the fight over Biden’s proposal to establish a special tax credit for union-made electric vehicles. Although the AFL-CIO fought hard for that provision, Democratic senators in low-union-density states resisted it, as it would have effectively encouraged auto companies to ramp up production in Michigan instead of building new factories in West Virginia, Georgia, or Arizona. Further, myriad business lobbies exert influence within the Democratic tent, as do upper-middle-class voters whose aversion to higher taxes constrains the party’s redistributive ambitions. Nevertheless, organized labor is the most powerful mass-membership institution within the Democratic coalition. And as competition for working-class voters’ allegiances has intensified, the party has increased its support for organized laborers in their conflicts with management. The GOP’s bid to claim the title of “workers’ party” has been far more superficial. The party has popularized cultural controversies that cleave highly educated liberals from the median working-class voter, even when those conflicts have few policy implications or material stakes. Trump, for his part, has an eye for publicity stunts that convey an ostensible solidarity with working people, as when he used the bully pulpit to pressure Carrier Global Corp to refrain from relocating production to Mexico, advocacy that failed to avert hundreds of layoffs at that firm once the media spotlight had shifted. Trump and the GOP can make substantive appeals to blue-collar workers in discrete sectors. Although Republican officialdom has no interest in siding with unions in their conflicts with management, it is perfectly comfortable backing extractive industry in its disputes with environmentalists. And it is plausible that some workers in the fossil-fuel and mining industries have material reasons to favor Republicans over Democrats, although the substantive difference between the two parties on these issues is commonly exaggerated (under Biden, U.S. oil production hit record highs). When it comes to policymaking that concerns all working people as working people, however, Republicans remain as committed to the interests of bosses as they’ve ever been. Under Trump, the GOP restricted workers’ rights to organize certain categories of workplaces, made it easier for employers to bust unions, denied guaranteed overtime pay to 12.5 million workers, effectively transferring $1.2 billion from their paychecks to their bosses’ bank accounts, proposed a rule allowing companies with fewer than 250 workers to cease reporting workplace injuries and illness statistics to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), asked the Supreme Court to uphold the right of employers to include forced arbitration clauses in contracts (thereby denying workers the capacity to press complaints against their bosses in open court), and restored the right of serial labor-law violators to compete for government contracts, among other things. Biden and Trump’s approaches to the UAW strike illustrate these two distinct orientations in miniature. Biden initially resisted calls for him to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers. There is no precedent for a president to intervene in a private-sector labor dispute in quite that manner. And the administration needs the cooperation of auto executives in order to meet its goals for the electric-vehicle transition. Nevertheless, with the UAW withholding its 2024 endorsement, Trump threatening to woo the union’s membership, and persistent lobbying from the AFL-CIO, Biden chose to do the unprecedented. Speaking to workers in Michigan, Biden declared, “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country. The unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going, you deserve what you’ve earned. And you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” Asked by a reporter whether he was specifically endorsing the UAW’s demand for a 40 percent pay increase over the life of the next contract, a chorus of chanting workers pressured Biden into saying “yes.” Trump, by contrast, never actually endorsed the UAW in its fight with the management of the Big Three automakers. Rather, he suggested that the real threat to UAW members’ interests are the environmentalists pushing the “all Electric Car SCAM” (a narrative that weaves a tapestry of lies around a single important half-truth). He then insinuated that he would be addressing striking workers, a gambit that succeeded in generating a week of headlines about the Republican front-runner’s heterodox courting of the union vote: And yet, as Jacobin’s indispensable labor reporter Alex Press noted, Trump’s rally with striking autoworkers proved to be entirely fictional. In reality, the Republican candidate accepted the invitation of a (seemingly) conservative small business owner to speak to a crowd of nonunion auto-parts manufacturing laborers, whose ongoing work directly reduces the leverage of striking workers in their sector. The business in question, Drake Enterprises, is a prime venue for a diatribe against electric vehicles; since EV powertrains require far fewer parts than internal combustion engines, the green transition poses a profound threat to parts makers. But holding a rally at a nonunion shop amid a strike is the opposite of demonstrating solidarity with striking unionists. One party is capable of rallying to labor’s side, when presented with sufficient intra-coalitional pressure and electoral incentive. The other party will project a populist image while channeling workers’ grievances toward targets other than their employers and partnering with low-road businesses to erode labor’s bargaining power. Whatever else comes out of the UAW’s strike, it has at least made the choice facing American workers clear.

PEN America just released a new report that illuminates how far-reaching the right-wing movement against free expression in schools has become. Book bans increased by 33 percent during the 2022–23 school year, compared to 2021–22—which was already an exceptional year for literary censorship. More than revealing the scale of the bans, the report also offers insight into a few of the organizations behind them: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education. According to the report, a staggering 86 percent of book bans last year occurred in school districts with a local chapter of one of these three groups. The groups use a range of tactics to shape the ideology of their local curricula—from taking over school boards to enlisting parents to protest, to promoting restrictive legislation. To understand the extent of their commitment is to understand what it will take to fight back. These groups make little effort to hide their intentions. The Vermont chapter of Parents’ Rights in Education hosted an event earlier this year for “parents fed up with transgender and DEI education,” while the national organization claims that schools are “utilizing material from Marxist doctrine” to perpetuate “anti-American, anti-white, and anti-capitalist sentiments amongst students.” They don’t just air grievances. Their website offers free trainings for parents to help them testify to school boards—or even get elected to them. They advocate for bathroom bills and teacher restrictions and laws requiring school staff to out queer students to their parents. And of course, they’re pushing for book bans—though the organization’s executive director would have you believe these aren’t real bans, because you can still purchase the books in question “via booksellers or the Internet.” Citizens Defending Freedom is even less subtle—their site boasts endorsements from disgraced former Trump adviser Mike Flynn and disgraced current MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. They successfully campaigned for the Texas State Board of Education to dissociate from the American Library Association (which they call a “woke organization”), and want other states to do the same. One chapter recently challenged over 100 books as “age-inappropriate” for Fort Worth’s school libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale—even though banning The Handmaid’s Tale sounds like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Then there’s Moms for Liberty. When it launched in 2021, the organization was originally focused on fighting against Covid-19 protections—like mask and vaccine mandates—in schools. Now they spend their time electing school board members who share their concerns, and flooding board meetings with parents who are outraged that their kids are reading books about interracial relationships, hurricanes, and male seahorses carrying eggs. When Moms for Liberty gets a book banned, not only does it deprive one district of that specific text; it can set a dangerous standard. Earlier this year, the group successfully banned a graphic-novel version of The Diary of Anne Frank from a Florida high school—which included passages about puberty that other adaptations omitted. Flash-forward to last week in Texas: a teacher was fired for assigning the same book to her eighth grade reading class. Never mind that those eighth graders are the same age Frank was when she wrote her diary, experiencing puberty themselves and asking similar questions about their bodies—including, as Frank wrote, curiosities about “the little hole underneath.” Parents are supposed to pretend that exposure to that level of graphic detail will permanently warp the minds of their 14-year-olds. Meanwhile, in February, a South Carolina high school teacher assigned her AP English students Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Two students objected to the book’s discussion of Blackness in America, and reported their teacher to a school board member who was endorsed by Moms for Liberty. Because a state proviso explicitly prohibits lessons that make students “feel discomfort” about their race, the curriculum was immediately abandoned, and the books taken away. But for all the dystopian stories about students’ being “protected” from an honest education, these censorious groups have to reckon with a powerful adversary: the students themselves. According to the PEN report, students across the country are pushing back. In Lancaster, Pa., middle school students staged a walkout to protest the potential removal of LGBTQ content from their school libraries. In Plattsmouth, Neb., a school board meeting had to be moved to a larger venue because a flood of students and parents were set to protest a similar move. And two high school sophomores in Orchard Park, N.Y., have founded an organization of their own to fight book bans: Students Protecting Education. These students are speaking up, organizing, and crucially, recognizing just how much power is held by school boards. As know-nothings continue to invest time and resources into showing up at meetings and winning these seats, those who care about the freedom to read can’t afford not to do the same. Too often, even the most well-intentioned adults forget how mature and intelligent kids can be. They can handle challenging material. They can learn and grow from discomfort. And as their rights to do those things are challenged, they might just lead their own resistance.

The Guardian US and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (Cpost) at the University of Chicago are co-hosting an event on Tuesday focusing on dangers to democracy and anticipated threats to the 2024 election. The Guardian’s Fight for Democracy project has been working with Cpost since June 2023, reporting on the project’s Dangers to Democracy surveys which dive into Americans’ views on political violence, conspiracy theories and threats to US elections. The first survey found that a staggering 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House. The latest September survey found that Trump’s presidential candidacy and the now mounting indictments against him are radicalizing Americans on both sides of the aisle to support violence to achieve political goals. More specifically, the survey found that 5.5% of Americans, or 14 million people, believe the use of force is justified to restore Trump to the presidency, while 8.9% of Americans, or 23 million people, believe force is justified to prevent Trump from being president. The Guardian is committed to reporting on these threats as the 2024 election approaches, including what election officials and other policymakers are doing to combat them, how voters may be affected, how misinformation might amplify them, and how the country could be better prepared to prevent another violent attack like what occurred on 6 January 2021. In the past few months alone, the Guardian has tracked Republican efforts to use conspiracy theories to oust Wisconsin’s respected and bipartisan top election official, reported on various rightwing attempts to skew electoral maps to dilute the power of minority voters, and featured deep dives into the people trying to hold Trump and his allies accountable for attempting to steal the 2020 election. The Fight for Democracy team will continue to track these efforts and more as the next presidential election nears and threats become more pervasive, including publishing Cpost’s latest findings. “We are now in the age of what I call ‘violent populism’ where violent ideas by a dedicated minority are moving from fringe to mainstream, creating an environment where incendiary political rhetoric can stimulate violent threats to our democracy,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who directs Cpost. The September survey found that Americans are more deeply distrustful of their democratic institutions and democratically elected leaders and more supportive of violence than in January 2023, when the survey about political violence was started, according to Pape. The survey has been assessing nine measures of antidemocratic attitudes, including the beliefs that elections won’t solve America’s fundamental problems and that political elites are the most corrupt people in the US. Eight of the nine measures are worse today than at the beginning of 2023, Pape said. Still, a vast majority of all Americans think Republicans and Democrats in Congress should make a joint statement condemning any political violence. “We need to lean into this finding with bipartisan cooperation among our frontline democratic institutions to safeguard democracy,” Pape said. “If incendiary rhetoric stimulates political violence, calming rhetoric can diminish it.”

Almost everyone in journalism is a fan of "Succession," which meant that the HBO show heavily shaped the reaction to last week's announcement that Rupert Murdoch was stepping down as the chair of Fox Corp. and News Corp. All eyes landed on Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son who is taking over from his father as the official head of the right-wing media empire. Influenced by the soap opera machinations of "Succession," most discourse was over what direction the younger Murdoch would take the company and whether his father was actually stepping down — or whether he was secretly controlling his son. It's all interesting stuff, but in focusing on the internal family dynamics of the Murdochs, the discussion was too quickly turned away from what is likely to be the much bigger story for right-wing media: The multitude of outside challengers to the Fox News throne. For years now, there's been a growing network of well-funded GOP propaganda outlets that, using social media to expand their reach, have positioned themselves well to cannibalize the Fox News audience. Murdoch's departure may provide the opening they've needed to get even more money and influence. This should alarm everyone, because as god-awful as Fox News is, the competitors are worse: They lie more often and more boldly. They're more explicitly racist, homophobic, and sexist. And they worship Donald Trump like a god. A new CNN-University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll underscores how, as bad as Fox News is, its increasingly strong competition is even scarier. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post analyzed the statistics on media consumption and found some alarming results. > While 43 percent of likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters who watch Fox News and 45 percent of conservative radio listeners say they're voting for Trump in the GOP primary — similar to his overall share of 39 percent — those numbers rise to 65 percent for Rogan's listeners and a remarkable 76 percent of Newsmax viewers.... > Newsmax viewers are also significantly more favorable toward Trump. While 64 percent of likely GOP voters who watch Fox have a favorable view of Trump, 95 percent of Newsmax viewers do. A full 90% of the polled Joe Rogan listeners are supporting either Trump or unapologetic charlatan Vivek Ramaswamy. At least those who have long been skeptical of claims that Rogan and his audience are "independent" now have rock solid proof that they were always right-wing shills. The bad news is that Rogan is already one of the most successful contenders for the Fox News throne. He gets an estimated 11 million listeners an episode. The highest-rated show on Fox News, "The Five," typically has between 2 and 3 million viewers. The perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda. Rogan is probably the most successful but is just one in a growing crowd of propagandists who want to take a bite out of the Fox News audience. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire claims over a million subscribers. Charlie Kirk's TPUSA has reportedly grown into a $80 million company. PragerU claims over 8 billion video views. Still, Fox News has maintained its position as the 800-pound gorilla of right-wing media. Unsurprisingly, then, many of these smaller competitors didn't bother to hide how much they hoped, without Rupert Murdoch in charge, Fox News would falter, giving them a chance to gobble up more of the MAGA audience. Steve Bannon raved that Fox is "TV for stupid people." Glenn Beck implied that Lachlan Murdoch hates conservatives. (In reality, most reports suggest the younger Murdoch is more right-wing than his father.) Newsmax went in for kill by publicizing Trump's snide anti-Murdoch comments, and claiming Murdoch is in bed with the hated Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Right now, as historian Nicole Hemmer told Slate, these contenders see Fox News as a wounded animal that will be much easier to take out than it was a few years ago. That's because, she explained, "I still don't think people outside of right wing circles fully appreciate how disillusioned and even angry many on the right are towards Fox." Bluntly put, the perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda. Murdoch envisioned Fox News being just news-like enough to garner a reputation as a legitimate press outlet. For a long time, that was fine with the audience, who also wanted to participate in the illusion that this is "news." But what the Fox competitors offer is a different vision: One where any fact that gets in the way can be dismissed out of hand, and "truth" is whatever the right-wing audience wants to believe. These tensions came to a head during the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Fox initially reported the truth, which is Joe Biden had won the White House. As court documentation made clear, what happened then was that the audience revolted and, fearful of losing audience share to even shadier outlets, Fox pivoted towards championing Trump's false claims that the election was stolen. In the short term, that worked. Viewers, satiated with the lies they desired, stayed on board. But in the longer term, there were serious consequences. Fox News lost a massive defamation lawsuit to Dominion Voting Systems, who was repeatedly smeared in "news" segments advancing the Big Lie. Murdoch then fired one of the network's most aggressive liars, host Tucker Carlson. The one-two punch convinced many viewers that Fox News had lost its taste for disinformation. Fox has been able to claw some of its audience back, by playing fast and loose with the facts. A lot of viewers, however, worry Fox will never provide the high-octane bullshit they crave, and so they're permanently relocating to media outlets that are even less ethical. Fox alternatives know that their relative freedom to lie is a selling point to right-wing audiences. Earlier this year, the New York Times published a story about which podcasts are the worst purveyors of disinformation, and Bannon's "War Room" topped the list. His response? To brag about it openly and praise his audience for "helping us spread misinformation." For the MAGA crowd, lying is good and consuming lies is how they demonstrate their right-wing bona fides. Fox News, which is hamstrung by fear of lawsuits and Murdoch's lingering desire to be treated as a respectable figure, has lost esteem with the lie-addicted GOP base. No one should write a premature obituary for Fox News yet, however. By all accounts, Lachlan Murdoch is more right-wing than his father, and less worried about the consequences of blasting out disinformation. There's a not-small chance that, under the younger Murdoch's leadership, Fox will start to move harder to the right and, despite all the lawsuits, more determined than ever to mislead viewers. After all, the market pressures that led Fox News to embrace the Big Lie haven't gone away. If anything, they're getting worse, as the network faces increasing challenges from small but hungry outlets who will say anything, no matter how false or outlandish, to get an audience. But whether Fox News survives or not, one thing is certain: Right-wing media will get worse. All the incentives push GOP propagandists into more lurid and dishonest rhetoric. In a crowded field, the way to stand out is to outdo other right-wing outlets with racist vitriol, wild conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric. As long as there's a huge audience ready to pay for so much ugliness, there will be shameless people eager to create it.

During a campaign trip to South Carolina, Donald Trump took some time to visit the gun store that sold weapons to the racist Jacksonville, Florida, mass shooter. Trump visited Palmetto State Armory on Monday, where he admired a handgun engraved and decorated in his honor. He repeatedly said he wanted to buy a gun there—which would be a violation of federal law given his many indictments. A lot of the media has focused on whether Trump actually purchased a gun and violated the law, but less attention has been paid to Trump’s decision to visit Palmetto State Armory, as opposed to any other gun store in South Carolina. In late August, a white man opened fire in a Dollar General store in a predominantly Black Jacksonville neighborhood, killing three people, all of whom were Black. The shooter, who then killed himself, used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, at least one of which was painted with a swastika. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the shooter “hated Black people” and acted alone. At least one of the guns came from Palmetto State Armory, a store in Summerville, South Carolina. The Jacksonville sheriff’s office shared photos of the firearms used in the attack on its Facebook page. One of the guns is clearly engraved with the Palmetto State Armory logo. The shooter had also drawn swastikas on the gun. When the Jacksonville shooting happened, Trump did not issue any statement on the tragedy. But you could argue that this campaign stop is a kind of tacit statement. He put the spotlight on Palmetto State Armory, praised its inventory, and tried to offer it business. Palmetto State Armory has openly embraced far-right ideology. In 2020, it began marketing its products using imagery and language associated with the “boogaloo,” slang for racist violence and even a call for full-on race war. It has also come to mean war to topple the government. The Jacksonville shooter shouldn’t have been able to buy the guns in the first place. He was held in Florida state custody in 2017 for mental health issues, disqualifying him from owning a gun under a statute called the Baker Act. With so many eyeballs on Trump, Palmetto State Armory would never have gotten away with selling him a gun. But as Philadephia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch pointed out, the store “could sell an AR-15 to a young, mentally troubled white supremacist.”

Landmark net neutrality rules rescinded under former President Donald Trump could return under a new push by U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel. The rules would reclassify broadband access as an essential service on par with other utilities like water or power. “For everyone, everywhere, to enjoy the full benefits of the internet age, internet access should be more than just accessible and affordable,” Rosenworcel said at an event at the National Press Club. “The internet needs to be open.” The proposed rules would return fixed and mobile broadband service to its status as an essential telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act. It would also prohibit Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from selling “fast lanes” that prioritize some traffic over others in exchange for payment. The move comes after Democrats took majority control of the five-member FCC on Monday for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 when new FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was sworn in. Rosenworcel said the FCC will vote in October to take public comment on the proposed rules. Net neutrality is the principle that internet providers treat all web traffic equally, and it’s pretty much how the internet has worked since its creation. But regulators, consumer advocates and internet companies were concerned about what broadband companies could do with their power as the pathway to the internet — blocking or slowing down apps that rival their own services, for example. The FCC in 2015 approved rules, on a party-line vote, that made sure cable and phone companies don’t manipulate traffic. With them in place, a provider such as Comcast can’t charge Netflix for a faster path to its customers, or block it or slow it down. The net neutrality rules gave the FCC power to go after companies for business practices that weren’t explicitly banned as well. For example, the Obama FCC said that “zero rating” practices by AT&T violated net neutrality. The telecom giant exempted its own video app from cellphone data caps, which would save some consumers money, and said video rivals could pay for the same treatment. Under current chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC spiked the effort to go after AT&T, even before it began rolling out a plan to undo the net neutrality rules entirely. A federal appeals court upheld the rules in 2016 after broadband providers sued. However, the FCC junked the Obama-era principle in 2017. The move represented a radical departure from more than a decade of federal oversight.

Congress returns to Washington Tuesday with a government shutdown less than five days away and lawmakers are still scrambling for ways to avoid it. That wasn't supposed to be the case. It has been less than three months since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., reached an agreement with President Biden that set spending levels for the year. That agreement was part of a bipartisan debt limit package that overwhelmingly passed the House in a 343-117 vote. McCarthy negotiated that plan. House Democrats agreed. So did Senate Republicans. And Senate Democrats. But a small group of hard-line conservatives in the House immediately rejected the plan for failing to agree to deeper spending cuts. The group pressured McCarthy into backing away from the agreement. Details of a possible Senate-led spending stopgap began to emerge Monday night as Senate leaders worked on a bill. Any Senate-led solution would require unanimous agreement to move fast enough to avoid a shutdown, and even then, a deal would almost certainly require votes from House Democrats in order to pass. For the past several months, McCarthy has accepted the conservative demands as he attempts to navigate a razor-thin majority of just four votes. McCarthy has said, repeatedly, that he does not want to see the government shut down. "I don't think anybody wins a shutdown," McCarthy told reporters in the Capitol last week. "Think for one moment what a shutdown does. It stops paying our troops. How do you have more leverage in that situation? I've watched shutdown after shutdown, everybody loses." House Republicans spent the weekend setting up a plan to hold votes on several of the 12 annual funding bills that include deep spending cuts. Those bills align with conservative demands, but they will not prevent a shutdown. # Senate takes spending steps Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has been working with Republican counterparts on their own solution, though the fate of a bill is far from certain. Last week, Schumer moved a legislative vehicle forward that could be used as a stopgap spending bill and sent to the Republican-led House. The Senate could take a procedural vote to start floor work on the plan Tuesday evening when they return from their holiday recess. "As I have said for months, we must work in a bipartisan fashion to keep our government open, avoid a shutdown and avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on the American people. This action will give the Senate the option to do just that," Schumer said. However, the process could take days even with the objection of one member of the Senate. It's unclear if the Senate could muster enough bipartisan support for the plan if it includes additional aid for Ukraine or several, recent U.S. public disasters, including the deadly fires in Maui, a key objective for Democrats. # House could still block a stopgap spending bill Even if the Senate is able to move quickly on a stopgap, it's unclear if McCarthy would allow a Senate plan to get a vote. Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz has threatened to begin the formal process to remove McCarthy as speaker if he does not comply with far-right demands. McCarthy is also under pressure from former President Trump, who has pushed for spending cuts. Trump is in close contact with some of the GOP holdouts in the House and has posted publicly in favor of cuts. "The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!" Trump posted Sunday on his social media site Truth Social. Trump went on to criticize Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been supportive of a stopgap spending bill and has said he supports the agreement McCarthy reached with Biden during the debt limit talks. A small bipartisan group of lawmakers known as the Problem Solvers Caucus has begun work on a plan to use a House procedure known as a discharge petition to get around McCarthy and force a vote on spending. That plan could take weeks and would require at least 218 votes, meaning Democrats and Republicans would have to agree to the strategy. For now, that leaves the fate of government spending largely in McCarthy's hands.

Tomorrow night, seven GOP candidates will debate in California. Their task is a complicated one: to set themselves apart from President Donald Trump while making themselves appealing to voters who largely still support him. To woo those Republican primary voters, these candidates may end up taking some positions that put them outside the mainstream of public opinion — which could hurt them if they wind up making it onto the general election ballot next year. According to a 538 analysis, the people who vote in Republican primaries look very different demographically and think very differently than Americans as a whole when it comes to key political issues. We took a look at Cooperative Election Study data from Harvard University, a survey of at least 60,000 Americans on a range of issues taken before the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms. We found that on key topics like immigration, abortion and government regulation, what GOP primary voters want is not the same as the country as a whole. That could box the ultimate Republican nominee into positions that are pretty unpopular with the general public. # GOP primary voters are whiter, older and more evangelical than Americans overall The vast majority of Republican primary voters (92 percent) were white in 2020, the last presidential election year, compared to 69 percent of the general electorate, according to our analysis of the CES data. (Republican primary voters were those verified as active registered voters who voted in the Republican primary, while the general electorate refers to all respondents who were at least 18 years old. For more information on methodology, see the italicized section below.) They’re also older: Eighty-three percent was age 45 and older in 2020. That year, 45 percent of the general electorate was under 45 and 55 percent was 45 and over. There was a similarly sized difference between the Republican and general electorate in 2022. Another demographic point hints at the different values shaping political views: Sixty percent of Republican primary voters identify as born-again or evangelical Christians, while only 34 percent of the general electorate does. It’s a group that has more traditional, conservative views on gender roles and marriage, among other issues, which helps explain the big differences we see on hot-button topics like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. These demographic differences mean that the group of voters choosing the Republican candidate have a completely different history, worldview and peer group from the generally younger and more diverse voters that could head to the polls in the November elections. That can shape the candidates’ views on a number of issues, from immigration to the future of the environment. # GOP voters are more anti-immigrant than Americans overall Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was based, in part, on his anti-immigrant views, including his promise to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. Immigration policy emerged as a major partisan split in that initial campaign, and Trump ran on the issue again in 2020. In the 2024 race, most of his leading opponents largely support his policies: continue building the border wall, spend more to secure the border and ban sanctuary cities. Immigration remains a top issue for likely Republican primary voters, according to a recent FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. But it’s also an issue where they differ a great deal from the general voting population, which means even if the candidates’ hardline stances are popular in the primary, the ultimate nominee may have to pivot in the general election. In the last two cycles, Republican primary voters departed from the general electorate on almost every issue the survey asked about regarding immigration. (We used both 2020 and 2022 data in our analysis. The presidential election year in 2020 may be most similar to 2024 in terms of who votes and why, but we also looked at 2022 as a point of comparison because that data is more recent.) But the biggest gap was on the question of whether respondents supported increasing “spending on border security by $25 billion, including building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.” In 2020, 89 percent of Republican primary voters supported that proposition, compared with 45 percent of the general electorate. (Two years later, there was a 39-percentage-point difference between the Republican and general electorate on this question.) Among the general electorate, a slim majority — 55 percent in 2020 and 51 percent in 2022 — opposed that policy. If anything, the voters who turned out in the last presidential year were more divided on this issue than those who voted in the midterms. Republican primary voters were also much more likely to support increasing border patrols, withholding federal funds from police departments that don’t report immigration status to federal officials and reducing legal immigration. The differences in these issues ranged from 20 to 35 points. The general public was also much more likely to support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, by 68 percent both years, while 62 and 64 percent of Republican primary voters opposed such a move in 2020 and 2022, respectively. All of this means that there’s much more of an appetite for hard-line stances on immigration among GOP primary voters than among the public as a whole. It’s also something that Republicans just care more about: Immigration is a less salient issue for the electorate as a whole, with 9 percent ranking it as a top issue in a Center for Immigration Studies poll released in June. So while Republican voters might be prioritizing promises to curb immigration, the general electorate may be less motivated on the issue. # Republican primary voters are much less supportive of abortion rights Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion has emerged as a major issue for the general electorate, with abortion-rights supporters and the Democratic Party winning elections across the country. In this year’s primary, the GOP candidates have waffled so far on abortion and it’s not hard to see why — embracing positions that primary voters agree with could end up being a huge liability in the general election. According to the 2020 CES data, only 16 percent of Republican primary voters said they support the proposal to “always allow a woman to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice,” compared with 56 percent of the general electorate, a 40-point difference. In 2022, there was a 39-point difference between the two groups. Republican primary voters were also more likely to say that abortion should be permitted only in the case of rape of incest, that all abortions should be banned after the 20th week of pregnancy, that employers should be allowed to decline abortion coverage in insurance plans and that federal funds shouldn’t be used in abortions. So it’s not hard to see why Republican candidates are having trouble taking a stand on this issue — particularly since there actually isn’t a big divide when it comes to the restrictive abortion policies that more than 20 states have embraced since last summer. (Though some legislation remains tied up in courts.) In 2022, only 24 percent of Republican primary voters agreed that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances, just 7 points higher than the general public. That was down from 32 percent in 2020, and could mean that the near-total abortion bans in those states may be too extreme for even Republican voters. # Less government spending and control is a big issue for Republicans During the 2020 election, then-President Trump called Democrats’ Medicare for All proposal “socialism.” Attacking universal health care as a Trojan horse of socialism has a long history in conservative American politics. Health care may be less of a rallying cry in 2024, but the idea of expanding Medicare remains a dividing line, and that may be in part because it can serve as a proxy issue for different ideas in how big the government should be. The Republican Party passed a resolution denouncing socialism earlier this year, after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. That suggests that socialism and big government in general will remain a line of attack against Democrats and their likely nominee, President Joe Biden — but that’s a position that will resonate much more with Republican primary voters than the public as a whole. A solid majority, 68 percent, of the general public supported the idea of expanding Medicare into a single comprehensive public health program in 2022, 46 points more than Republican primary voters. That’s similar to the gap from 2020, which was 49 points. Suspicion of government regulation shows up in other places, too. Republican primary voters view environmental regulation with more skepticism than the general public does. There was a nearly 40-point gap in support for issues such as giving the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate carbon emissions, giving the agency more power to enforce the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, and requiring states to use a minimum amount of renewable energy in 2022. Those gaps were similar in 2020. Republicans haven’t changed their views on climate change much in the past decade, even as most adults started to see it as a major threat, according to the Pew Research Center. (The CES doesn’t ask this question directly.) Fifty-four percent of all adults think climate change is a major threat, while only 23 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults do, according to Pew’s figures published in August. That’s especially true of young voters: Fifty-nine percent of voters under the age of 30 think addressing climate change should be a priority, according to an NPR/Marist poll from July. Republican voters seem to care more about whether a candidate shares the same views than whether they’re electable, which means they’re likely to be evaluating the primary race on these issues. Because of those pressures, the primary can steer the candidates further and further from the mainstream. # Methodology The Cooperative Election Survey is administered by YouGov and consists of a nationally representative sample of American adults. The 2020 pre-election survey included 61,000 adults (referred to as the general electorate above), of which 3,593 were considered Republican primary voters. The 2022 pre-election survey included 60,000 adults, of which 4,121 were considered Republican primary voters. The general electorate was the broadest group of adult Americans: all adults aged 18 or older, regardless of their status as active registered voters. If we limited our analysis only to those who were active voters at the time of the survey, the analysis might not be representative of the broader general electorate that is currently eligible to vote, as an individual’s status as an active registered voter can easily change. We compared adult Americans to voter-validated electorates from the last two elections and found that opinions were fairly similar across all groups. Republican primary voters consisted of respondents who the CES verified as active registered voters who voted in the Republican primary, according to Catalist (2020) or TargetSmart (2022) records. For 2020, we included respondents who voted specifically in the presidential primary, as some states hold those primaries separately from their state or federal primaries.

There are currently two clown shows — sorry, but let’s be honest — going on in the Republican Party. One is the intraparty fighting that seems extremely likely to cause a government shutdown a few days from now. The other is the fight over who will come a distant second to Donald Trump in the presidential primaries. There are many strange aspects to both shows. But here’s the one that has long puzzled me: Everyone says that with the rise of MAGA, the G.O.P. has been taken over by populists. So why is the Republican Party’s economic ideology so elitist and antipopulist? Listen to the rhetoric of the people making Kevin McCarthy look like a fool or of the presidential candidates, and it’s full of attacks on elites — but also of promises to cut taxes for the rich and slash government spending that benefits the working class. For example, Nikki Haley — who is making a credible bid to be Trump’s also-ran, given Ron DeSantis’s implosion — is calling for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. As I write this, McCarthy is reportedly trying to appease MAGA dissidents with a temporary funding bill that would cut nonmilitary discretionary spending outside of Veterans Affairs by 27 percent — meaning savage cuts to things like the administration of Social Security (as opposed to the benefits themselves). The thing is, such proposals are deeply unpopular. It’s true that Americans tell pollsters that the government spends too much, but if you ask them about specific types of spending, the only area on which they say we spend too much is foreign aid, which is a trivial part of the budget. Oh, and most Americans still support aid to Ukraine. So there would seem to be an opening for politicians who are right wing on social issues like immigration and wokeness but are also genuinely populist in their spending priorities. Such politicians exist in other countries. For example, Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, whose party has deep links to the nation’s fascist past, ran last year on a platform calling for earlier retirement for some workers and increases in minimum pensions and child benefits. So why aren’t there such figures in the G.O.P.? To be fair, during the 2016 campaign Trump sometimes sounded as if he might turn his back on Republican economic orthodoxy, but once in office he pursued the usual agenda of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy combined with benefit cuts for the rest. Part of the answer may lie in the American right’s general mind-set, which valorizes harshness, not empathy. People who are drawn to MAGA tend to imagine that solving society’s problems should involve punishing people, not helping them. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of ignorance: MAGA politicians, who generally disdain any kind of expertise, may not have any clear idea of what the federal government does and where tax dollars go. Finally, there’s the Clarence Thomas factor. What I mean is that part of the explanation for the absence of genuine Republican populists may involve the gravitational pull of big money, which is both broader and subtler than the way it’s often portrayed. If the accusations against Senator Robert Menendez are true — and it’s not looking good — old-fashioned bribery, payments to politicians in exchange for favors, hasn’t gone away. But it’s probably not shaping party ideology. Campaign contributions, on the other hand, definitely do shape ideology; DeSantis was touted as a rival to Trump because he got a lot of support from big donors who believed he would serve their interests and had real political skills. (Being rich doesn’t necessarily come with good judgment.) But there’s a sort of gray area that doesn’t involve outright bribes in the sense of money given in return for specific actions but nonetheless involves a form of soft corruption. For the fact is that public figures whom the very rich see as being on their side can reap considerable personal rewards from their positions. Recent revelations about Justice Thomas show how this works. ProPublica reports that he has received many favors from ultrawealthy conservatives, notably lavish free vacations. These reports are shocking because we don’t expect such behavior from a Supreme Court justice, and Thomas may have violated the law by failing to disclose these gifts. But does anyone doubt that many politicians who favor tax cuts for the rich and reduced benefits for the working class, even as they rail against elites, receive similar favors? And the hermetic information space of the American right surely facilitates this soft corruption. Suggestions of improper influence on right-wing officials and politicians won’t get much coverage on Fox News, except possibly for claims that they’re the victims of a liberal smear campaign. Now, I don’t know how important these different factors are to the fact that America’s “populists” are anything but populist in practice. But we do need to ask why people who denounce elites somehow always manage to avoid targeting corporations not named Disney and billionaires not named George Soros.