Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?

Michael Tomasky

Fri, November 8, 2024 at 9:25 AM CST·11 min read

8.8k

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

Mary Trump slammed her uncle, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, as the “death candidate” in a blistering new edition of her newsletter, “The Good In Us.”

The former president’s niece noted the irony of the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of the Donald Trump-era ban on bump stocks and her uncle’s response that he actually “respected” the decision. Trump has taken the opposite approach with recent legal judgments against him, from his hush money trial conviction to the fines he has been slapped with in civil fraud and defamation cases.

Oh, and she also called out his subsequent boast about being endorsed by the National Rifle Association.

The court’s decision “horrified” Mary Trump, she said. But it also made “so clear what the election in November is all about: life or death” and that her uncle is “the death candidate,” she added.

The ex-POTUS’ ambivalence to gun violence and his kowtowing to the gun lobby wasn’t the only reason for slapping him with the scathing moniker, though, she said.

His “incompetence and malicious inaction” during the coronavirus pandemic, essential killing of the GOP and risking of lives with his stance against abortion rights, denial of the climate crisis and calls for violence are all added reasons for the nickname, she argued.

“The harsh reality is that Donald is a serious national security threat to the American people. This is a life-or-death election,” Mary Trump concluded the newsletter. “And my uncle is the death candidate. Let’s choose life, shall we?”

(Robert Bork is a failed nominee for the high court under Pres. Reagan)

ROBERT REICH
SEP 12

Friends,

One of the most important initiatives of the Biden administration is its attack on corporate monopolies.

Today, the Justice Department’s case against Google goes to trial. The Department alleges that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. It is the government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era.

Later this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will file its lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that Amazon favors its own products over competitors’ on its platforms and uses predatory tactics with outside sellers on Amazon.com.

Whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon and Google scooping up every operation in sight, corporate concentration is on the rise.

Over the past several decades, giant corporations have come to dominate most American industries, as this chart shows:

[Source: “100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration” by Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, Kaspar Zimmermann]

The social costs of corporate concentration are growing.

— The typical American household is paying more than $5,000 a year because corporations can raise their prices without fear that competitors will draw away consumers.

— Such corporate market power has also been a major force driving inflation.

— Huge corporations also suppress wages, because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.

— And corporate giants are also fueling massive flows of big money into politics (one of the major advantages of large size).

Yet the federal courts have been reluctant to do anything about this and are pushing back against the Biden administration’s efforts. Why? Because of a man named Robert Bork.

Let me explain.

I first met Bork in September 1971, when I took his class on antitrust at Yale Law School. I recall him as a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl.

He was only in his mid-40s then, but he seemed impatient and bored with us (also in that class were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton).

We kept challenging his view that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to lower consumer prices.

“What about the political power of giant corporations?” we asked.

His retort: “How do you expect courts to measure political power?”

“But what about the power of big corporations to suppress wages?”

“Employees are always free to find better jobs.”

“What about their power to undercut potential rivals with lower prices?”

“Lower prices are good for consumers.”

“What about the sheer power that comes from their gigantic size?”

“Also good for consumers. Large size means lower costs through efficiencies of scale.”

Bork had an answer to each of our objections, but we were never satisfied. He spouted economic theory based on dubious “Chicago School” assumptions that all economic players have perfect information and face no cost of entering or leaving markets (Bork had attended the University of Chicago and its law school).

Even in our mid-20s, we knew this was bullshit.

Bork refused to recognize power — even though antitrust laws emerged from the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when a central concern was the untrammeled power of giant corporations.

A few years later, Bork wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox that summarized his ideas. The staff of a conservative California governor bound for the White House read it and passed it along to their boss, and Bork’s book formed a basic tenet of Reaganomics.

Federal judges read it, too. Most judges didn’t (and still don’t) know much economics and hated getting bogged down in interminable and almost incomprehensible antitrust trials that could last for years. They found Bork’s simplicity and cogency helpful in limiting such lawsuits.

BORK’S INFLUENCE over the courts represented the culmination of years of work by the monied interests to kill off antitrust law. They’re still at it.

Which is why the new view of antitrust now being pioneered by the Biden administration through the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department is so important.

This new view regards corporate concentration as a problem even if it provides economies of scale that might allow lower consumer prices in the short term. That’s because corporate concentration also means less innovation, more wage suppression, predatory behavior, price-push inflation, and increased political power.

Besides their lawsuits against Google and Amazon, the FTC and the Justice Department have proposed new merger guidelines to keep monopolies in check. Not surprisingly, giant corporations are doing whatever they can to stop these new protections from taking effect.

The optimist in me thinks that as the public becomes more aware of the close connections among corporate power, predation, inflation, wage suppression, and political corruption, the new antitrust movement will eventually succeed.

What do you think?

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Worse than inflation: Let’s remember Trump’s real record in office

Anyone who looks back on the Trump years as a golden time when things were so much better isn’t remembering reality

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Columnist

PUBLISHED JUNE 7, 2024 9:48AM (EDT)

Public opinion polls about the current presidential race are mystifying in a lot of ways. How can it be that the twice impeached, convicted felon Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party again? As inexplicable as it is to many of us, I think after eight years we have to accept that almost half the country is beguiled by the man while the other half looks on in abject horror and carry on from there. But as much as we may be dismayed by this adoration and fealty to Trump the man, it’s still maddening that so many voters — including even Democrats — insist that everything was so much better when Donald Trump was president. I can’t believe that people have forgotten what it was really like. By almost any measure it was an epic sh**show. 

One obvious explanation is that Trump lies relentlessly about his record. So after a while people start to believe him. According to Trump, we had unprecedented prosperity, the greatest foreign policy, the safest, the cleanest, the most peaceful world in human history and it immediately turned into a toxic dystopia upon his departure from the White House. 

What people think they miss about the Trump years was the allegedly great pre-pandemic economy and the world peace that he brought through the sheer force of his magnetic personality.

The reality, of course, was far different.

From the day after the election, Trump’s presidential tenure was a non-stop scandal. Even in the early days of the transition, there were substantial and well-founded charges of corruption, nepotism and collusion with foreign adversaries. There was the early firing of Trump’s national security advisor, the subsequent firing of the FBI director and eventually the appointment of a special counsel. He did manage to set a record while in the White House: the highest number of staff and cabinet turnovers in history, 85%. Some were forced out due to their unscrupulous behavior, others quit or were fired after they refused to carry out unethical or illegal orders ordered by the president. This continued throughout the term until the very last days of his presidency when a handful of Cabinet members, including the attorney general, resigned over Trump’s Big Lie and refusal to accept his loss. 

Yes, those were really good times. Let’s sign on for another four years of chaos, corruption and criminality.

Don’t let MAGA theatrics fool you: Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions are not helping him

But, let’s face facts. What people think they miss about the Trump years was the allegedly great pre-pandemic economy and the world peace that he brought through the sheer force of his magnetic personality. None of that is remotely true. The Trump economy was the tail end of the longest expansion in history begun under President Barack Obama and the low interest rates that went with it. Nothing Trump did added to it and he never lived up to even his own hype:

Trump assured the public in 2017 that the U.S. economy with his tax cuts would grow at “3%,” but he added, “I think it could go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%, ultimately.”If the 2020 pandemic is excluded, growth after inflation averaged 2.67% under Trump, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Include the pandemic-induced recession and that average drops to an anemic 1.45%. By contrast, growth during the second term of then-President Barack Obama averaged 2.33%. So far under Biden, annual growth is averaging 3.4%.

Inflation started its rise at the beginning of the pandemic (Trump’s last year) and continued to rise sharply in the first year of the Biden administration before it started to come back down. The reasons are complex but the fact that it was lower under Trump is simply a matter of timing. Trump’s economy was good but it wasn’t great even before the pandemic. He had higher unemployment than we have now, he blew out the deficit with his tax cuts and his tariffs accomplished zilch. Sure, the stock market was roaring but it’s even higher now.

Unlike Trump, who simply rode an already good economy, Biden started out with the massive crisis Trump left him and managed to dig out from under it in record time. No other country in the world has recovered as quickly and had Trump won re-election there’s little evidence in his record that he could have done the same. All he knows is tariffs and and tax cuts and he’s promising more of the same. 

On the world stage, he was a disaster. From his ill-treatment of allies to his sucking up to dictators from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, everything Trump did internationally was wrong. He was impeached for blackmailing the leader of Ukraine to get him dirt on Joe Biden, for goodness sakes! Does that sound like a sound foreign policy decision? The reverberations of his ignorant posturing will be felt for a generation even if he doesn’t win another term.

And despite the alleged peacenik’s boast that he never had a war while he was president, it’s actually a lie. The US had troops in Afghanistan fighting throughout his entire term despite his promise to withdraw and there was a very ugly drone war carried out throughout his term. Trump bombed Syria and assassinated Iranian leaders and did all the things American presidents had been doing ever since 9/11. His only answer today to the vexing problems that are confronting Biden in Ukraine and Israel is to fatuously declare “it never would have happened” if he were president. On Gaza, Trump’s solution is “finish the problem” and I don’t think there’s any question about what he means by that. 

Trump’s labor record was abominable, his assaults on civil rights and civil liberties were horrific and he did nothing positive on health care. There was the Muslim ban, family separations, the grotesque response to the George Floyd protests and the rollback of hundreds of environmental regulations. And then there was January 6.

---

Trump, who called himself the greatest jobs president in history, was the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to depart office with fewer jobs in the country than when he entered. He can say that doesn’t count because of the pandemic but so much of that was his fault that it actually is. It was his crucible and he failed miserably.

His administration had disbanded the pandemic office and failed to replenish the stockpiles of medical supplies so we already started out ill-prepared. He denied the crisis at first, and we learned from Bob Woodward’s interview that he knew very well how deadly it was, he lied, he put his son-in-law and some college buddies in charge of logistics. He pushed snake oil cures and disparaged common sense public health measures because they threatened his desire for a quick economic revival despite the fact that Americans were dropping dead by the thousands every single day. And, as always, he blamed everyone else for his problems. COVID killed far more Americans than other peer nations and it was due to Trump’s failed leadership. 

For all these reasons, anyone who looks back on the Trump years as a golden time when everything was so much better isn’t remembering the reality of those four awful years. There are worse things in life than inflation. 

• “The American Dream is dying”: Democrats’ main selling point “is not a winning message”
• “Trump is all dominance, all the time”: New research reveals “his most formidable political asset”
• Biden baits Trump into a debate trap

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

The GOP Then!

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

AUG 7, 2023

On August 6, 1880, Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield gave one of his most famous speeches. Then a congressional representative from Ohio, Garfield was in New York City to make peace with Roscoe Conkling, a Republican kingmaker who hated him and his insistence on clean government.

In the evening, Garfield spoke to a crowd of well-wishers, made up in large part of men who had fought in the Civil War, as Garfield had. The one-time college professor spoke directly to the “Boys in Blue,” telling them “how great a thing it is to live in this Union and be a part of it.” He told them that they, the soldiers of the Civil War, represented the same ideas of union embraced by the men who framed the Constitution.

“Gentlemen,” said Garfield to great applause, “ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet to-night as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought. And while we have life to meet and grasp the hand of a comrade, we will stand by the great truths of the war.”

In 1880, four years after unreconstructed southern Democrats had taken control of all the former Confederate states and cemented the process of taking the vote away from Black men, Garfield promised that “we will remember our allies who fought with us.” He explained: “Soon after the great struggle began, we looked behind the army of white rebels, and saw 4,000,000 of black people condemned to toil as slaves for our enemies; and we found that the hearts of these 4,000,000 were God-inspired with the spirit of liberty, and that they were all our friends.”

As the crowd applauded, he continued: “We have seen white men betray the flag and fight to kill the Union; but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a black skin.” To great cheers, he went on: “Our comrades escaping from the starvation of prison, fleeing to our lines by the light of the North star, never feared to enter the black man’s cabin and ask for bread.” “That’s so!” yelled a man in the crowd. “In all that period of suffering and danger, no Union soldier was ever betrayed by a black man or woman.”

“[S]o long as we live we will stand by these black allies,” Garfield said. “We will stand by them until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of our Constitution, shall shine with equal ray upon every man, black or white, throughout the Union. Fellow-citizens, fellow-soldiers, in this there is the beneficence of eternal justice, and by it we will stand forever….” To wild cheers, Garfield concluded: “[T]he Republic rises on the glorious achievements of its dead and living heroes to a higher and nobler national life. We must stand guard over our past as soldiers, and over our country as the common heritage of all.”

In an era in which the smart money said the Democrats, with their promise to overturn the Reconstruction laws that established a legal framework for racial equality, would win the 1880 election, Garfield squeaked into the White House.

But he did not live long enough to put his vision into law. After his death, the Republican Party slid away from the protection of equal rights, focusing instead on protecting big business, its leaders looking the other way as state laws increasingly kept Black Americans and immigrants from voting so long as that same focus on state power prevented national regulation of business.

But those who believed in civil rights never gave up. In 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States,” and worked to secure “complete equality before the law,” including voting rights.

NAACP members publicized racial atrocities and insisted that authorities enforce the laws already on the books. By the 1960s, those protecting Black rights ramped up their efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. When voter registration workers disappeared during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, popular anger at their disappearance gave Democratic president Lyndon Baines Johnson leverage to pressure Congress to act. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in part to make it easier to vote.

After voters put Johnson back into the White House in November 1964, voting rights activists stepped up their efforts. In Selma, Alabama, where the voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans, law enforcement officers harassed activists. After officers beat and shot an unarmed man marching for voting rights in a town near Selma, Black leaders planned a march from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to voter suppression.

Law enforcement officers met the protesters on March 7, 1965, with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. On March 15, Johnson addressed a national televised joint session of Congress to ask it to pass a national voting rights act. “Our fathers believed that if [their] noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy,” he said. “The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people.”

He submitted to Congress voting rights legislation, and Congress delivered.

On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to guarantee Black Americans the right to vote.

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” Johnson told the American people in a televised joint session of Congress. The Civil War had promised equality to all Americans, but that promise had not been fulfilled. “Today is a towering and certain mark that, in this generation, that promise will be kept.”

“I pledge you that we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy,” Johnson said.

That resolve did not hold. In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republican-dominated states immediately found ways to keep minority voters from the polls and their votes from being counted, and in 2020, then-president Trump tried to throw out the votes of people in majority Black districts in order to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election. On July 10, 2023, House Republicans introduced a sweeping “election integrity” bill that would loosen campaign finance regulations and make it harder to vote.

Eight days later, on July 18, Democrats in the House and Senate reintroduced the Freedom to Vote Act, which would make it easier for all Americans to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, require transparency in campaign donations to try to limit dark money in elections, and protect state and local election officials. “The story of American democracy is one of a relentless march towards further equality,” said Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “The Freedom To Vote Act would rectify one of the great historic harms of our past and put us closer to our goal of a fully representative democracy.”

And then, on August 1—last Tuesday—the Department of Justice charged Trump under laws Congress passed during Reconstruction to protect the Black Americans’ political rights. Trump is charged with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding—violating a law passed to stop Ku Klux Klan terrorists from breaking up official meetings in the late 1860s—and obstructing that proceeding: the counting of electoral votes.

Trump is also charged with conspiring “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

—

Notes:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.12900200/?sp=2&st=text

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-6-1965-remarks-signing-voting-rights-act

Click to access US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf

https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ID=DCA59415-4DFA-4D55-B5E7-392B81285BD3

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-the-american-promise

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What Constitutes “National Security?”

The need for a broader definition

DAN RATHER

 AND 

ELLIOT KIRSCHNER

MAY 26, 2023

What constitutes “national security?” 

It’s not meant to be a trick question, but it is one that perhaps needs to be rethought for our modern world. 

This has become all the more apparent as the White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy work on a possible deal to avert a United States debt default. We wrote earlier why this is not really a “negotiation” (more like a hostage crisis), but if legislation emerges (still in doubt at the time of this writing), it’s going to contain spending caps. 

Everyone has already taken Social Security and Medicare off the table, so that leaves so-called discretionary spending, which can be divided into two buckets: the defense budget and everything else. 

The Republican viewpoint is that defense spending should remain unaffected while deep cuts are made in the “everything else” category. The Biden administration, which actually asked for more money for defense in its budget, still wants to protect as much of “everything else” as possible. 

Republicans make the point that we live in a dangerous world, with rising threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others. This is true. And they argue that cuts to the defense department could harm “national security.”

Senate Republican Whip John Thune of South Dakota recently told The Hill, “Once they do the caps, the big fights in the appropriations process will be how money gets prioritized and allocated. For sure, the Republican priority is going to be national security” (emphasis ours). 

The phrase “national security” is often used as a synonym for the military and related functions intended to curb threats from abroad. The Department of Defense website says the agency “provides the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.” The CIA says on its website homepage that “the work we do … is vital to U.S. national security.” Then there’s the Department of Homeland Security, which basically has a synonym of “national security” in its very name. And of course the National Security Agency itself.

But if we were to define “national security” in more holistic terms as the general safety and security of the United States and its people, perhaps we should see it through a much wider aperture. The State Department is vital for our national security. So is our investment in science, the health of our children, education, our infrastructure, mitigating the dangers from the climate crisis, and on and on. 

Many Democrats are making a version of this point. “There are a lot of federal agencies that contribute directly or indirectly to national security,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed of Rhode Island in the same article from The Hill. “They’re trying to set up a zero-sum game: defense wins, domestic loses. But it doesn’t make sense because national security embraces so many different agencies.” 

While this argument is more expansive than the Republican talking points, it’s still too rooted in Washington-speak about agencies and budgets. Yes, those are currently in the crosshairs. But there is a much broader narrative that could resonate with the public to reframe the debate more permanently and may be particularly appealing for younger voters. 

For those raised during the Cold War and with memories of World War II still recent, national security could be readily envisioned in tangible military assets like aircraft carriers, missile systems, and standing armies. 

These still remain necessary aspects of the defense of the homeland and our global interests (while recognizing that the defense budget is prone to bloat and even corruption, as we did in this previous Steady piece). 

At the same time, what about national security in an age of a pandemic? Rising sea levels? And artificial intelligence? 

There are some who argue that we don’t need a strong military or that we can slash the defense budget by large percentages. But these are not mainstream positions or likely to happen. Much more concerning are those who still view national security through the antiquated lens of the 20th century. 

And recently, it’s gotten even worse. In fact, many elected officials who rage about the prospect of cuts to defense spending support actual measures that undermine our national security. 

Allowing weapons of war on our streets while obstructing commonsense gun laws undermines our national security, an effect we can measure in thousands of lost lives and the terror and trauma of mass shootings. 

Attacking marginalized groups also undermines our national security because we are weakened by division.

Promoting the “Big Lie” about stolen elections threatens our national security because it undermines our democracy. 

Banning books threatens our national security because we need a citizenry of informed critical thinkers. 

Our adversaries measure our vulnerabilities not only via our troop deployments and fighter jets. They see our political extremism, our animosities, our anger, and our selfishness and seek to exploit them. 

And frankly, they see a faction willing to blow up our economy by threatening to default on the debt unless they get their way. Talk about a threat to national security.

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

“After the 2020 election and the attack of January 6th, my fellow Republicans wanted me to lie. They wanted me to say that the 2020 election was stolen, that the attack of January 6th wasn’t a big deal, and that Donald Trump wasn’t dangerous. I had to choose between lying and losing my position in House leadership. America cannot remain a free nation if we abandon the truth. So as you go out to change the world, resolve that you will stand in truth. Those who are trying to unravel the foundations of our republic, who are threatening the rule of law and the sanctity of our elections, know they can’t succeed if you vote. So Class of 2023, get out and vote. This means listening and learning, including – especially – from those with whom we disagree. This means running for office.  We need you to work to defend our Constitution and defeat those who deny the sanctity of our elections.  We are entrusting our nation – and the future of freedom – to your care.”