Democracy gone Astray: Sunday, September 08, 2024

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, September 08, 2024

Israel has long wanted Palestinians out of Gaza – my father saw it firsthand

Fifty-six years ago, after Israel’s victory in the six-day war in 1967, an intensive debate took place in the country regarding the future of the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza. The options ranged from outright annexation of the land by Israel, returning the West Bank to Jordan or the establishment of a Palestinian state.

My father, Aziz Shehadeh, was a proponent of the last. As a lawyer and activist for refugee rights, he proposed a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. Washington urged Israel then to translate its undefined position for a settlement into concrete terms.

Families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas have clashed with far-right Israeli politicians who want to bring in the death penalty as a possible sentence for captured Palestinian militants.

The families said on Monday that even talk of doing so might endanger the lives of their relatives. The row underlines the deep divisions in Israel over how to deal with the hostage crisis.

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan called Donald Trump’s lead in a new poll a “danger” to American democracy.

Trump, he pointed out, has vowed that a second administration would be even more extreme than his first, signaling he would sic the Justice Department on political rivals and the U.S. military on protesters.

TEL AVIV — Benjamin Netanyahu scrambled to quell a revolt by religious nationalists and settler leaders within his increasingly unruly governing coalition demanding he reverse a decision to let two fuel trucks per day enter Gaza — a concession the Israeli prime minister made amid growing U.S. and international pressure.

Rebellious coalition partners demanded to have more say over the conduct of the war after Netanyahu’s decision was announced Friday. They argued there should be no delivery of fuel, however limited, to the Palestinian coastal enclave — or any other humanitarian concessions — until Hamas frees the 240 Israeli hostages the group seized on October 7, when gunmen launched an attack on southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, Israeli officials say.

All at once, major American conservative figures seem to be using the Israel-Hamas conflict as an opportunity to flaunt antisemitic views.

After Hamas’ deadly incursion into Israel last month, and as the death toll continues to climb in Gaza from Israel’s ongoing retaliatory invasion, right-wing leaders from Charlie Kirk to Elon Musk have found a way to fault Jews worldwide.

Essentially, they argue that left-wing Jews who have supported progressive causes have incited racial division and hatred. Antisemitic claims along these lines have been around for years — they’re just usually dressed up as opposition to “cultural Marxism.”

In the early hours of Saturday morning, over piles of concrete and rubble, crowds of doctors and patients walked miles through the destroyed streets of Gaza City, forced to evacuate on foot from what remained of its hospitals. Medics said they feared leaving critically ill patients behind in a city now largely reduced to rubble and overtaken by Israeli forces, where hospitals had been operating without power, fuel, water or food.

“It’s basically hell on earth,” said William Schomburg, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza, describing what remained of life inside the city.

Tamal Sikurel pats her belly, swollen with her sixth child, and smiles. “It is part of the war effort,” she says. Behind her is a school empty of pupils and homes empty of their former inhabitants. Beyond the buildings are dry hills sloping down to the Jordan valley.

“For thousands of generations we have always had to fight to justify our existence … I feel the power of that history every day. We have all the biblical rights, historical rights and moral right to keep ourselves safe here,” Sikurel said.

Israel and Hamas appear to be edging towards a deal that would see the release of a significant number of hostages, possibly in return for a limited ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

Senior US and Israeli officials, as well as the Qatari prime minister, all suggested an agreement was close on Sunday, although observers have cautioned that public statements during such negotiations are often misleading and any potential deal could easily collapse.

Russia has launched several waves of drone attacks on the Kyiv, Poltava and Cherkasy regions of Ukraine, stepping up its assaults on the Ukrainian capital after several weeks of respite, according to Ukrainian officials.

“The enemy’s UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were launched in many groups and attacked Kyiv in waves, from different directions, at the same time constantly changing the vectors of movement along the route,” Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said in a message on Telegram messaging app early on Sunday.

Israel has stormed Gaza’s largest hospital and bombed residential areas and refugee camps in attacks the United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk says have unleashed a “nightmarish” situation in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

There are growing calls for a ceasefire as the humanitarian situation worsens with risks of starvation facing thousands due to the Israeli blockade of the territory – home to 2.3 million people.

Writing on October 27, the Associated Press’s Josef Federman shared some stark observations: “Just three weeks into the deadliest war between Israel and Hamas, it already is clear that the bloodshed has flipped long-standing assumptions in Israel and the region upside down. Israel’s military and intelligence services were exposed as incompetent and ill-prepared … Israelis’ sense of personal security was shattered.”

Even if many older paradigms have collapsed, as some observers have pointed out, Israel has turned with a vengeance to a familiar one: overwhelming brutal violence.

In Gaza, a child is killed every 10 minutes. Since October 7, Israel has killed more than 4,000 children. Now, premature babies at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital are dying because the institution is out of power after over a month of Israel’s siege, and so is unable to operate incubators.

Israel knows it risks losing international support for its ongoing slaughter of children. Western allies like French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who have until now been steadfast in supporting Israel, have in the past week publicly asked the Israeli government to stop killing children, even if Macron has since softened his tone.

It is easy to get distracted by US officials pledging to rally support for a “humanitarian pause” and reducing the number of civilian casualties in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

But what matters is the actions of the Biden administration, not empty platitudes. In early November, the US State Department approved a $320m sale of guided bomb kits, reportedly assisting Israel to more precisely hit targets in Gaza. According to The New York Times, “Modern militaries generally add the guidance systems on their bombs with the goal of minimizing civilian casualties, although the damage can still be devastating, especially in urban areas.”

Airstrikes on crowded UN shelters in north Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp killed more than 80 people on Saturday, as Israeli plans to expand operations into south Gaza deepened fears for hundreds of thousands of civilians who have sought refuge there.

Underlining the reminder that there is nowhere safe for Gaza’s civilians, an airstrike outside the southern town of Khan Younis killed at least 26 people in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Apple announced Friday that it will temporarily pull its advertising from X (formerly known as Twitter) after the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, showed support for an antisemitic X post, Axios and The New York Times reported.

On Wednesday, Musk wrote “You have said the actual truth” in response to another X user’s antisemitic comments, which suggested that Jewish communities support “dialectical hatred against whites.”

NEW YORK — The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s $250 million civil fraud trial on Friday denied his lawyers’ request for a mistrial after they accused the judge and his principal law clerk of bias.

In a four-page ruling, Justice Arthur Engoron defended two actions cited by Trump’s lawyers as having displayed bias: the judge’s own contributions to his high school alumni newsletter, in which he included links to news articles referencing the Trump case, and his clerk’s record of political donations.

It is now days since Israeli forces entered al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and what appears to be happening on Friday is that they are continuing their search for evidence of this being a key Hamas command centre.

We have to remember that there is no independent scrutiny inside the hospital; journalists cannot move freely into Gaza, and any who are reporting from the site are working under the aegis of the Israeli military.

“From the river to the sea, Israel will be free.”

OK, that is not the way it is supposed to go, is it? But at this moment of war and mass death, this proposition is worth reflecting on: Palestine cannot be free without Israel – or at least the Israelis – being free. True freedom between the river and the sea can only be achieved by breaking free from the chains of settler-colonialism but also the narrow bounds of the nation-state.

Before I explain further, let me get into the current debate over the slogan “river to the sea”.

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Thursday that he will not seek reelection, after a House watchdog found “substantial evidence” that he committed fraud, violated ethics rules and illegally used campaign funds for personal purposes.

The scathing report, released earlier that day by the House ethics committee, details what it describes as “a complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos’ campaign, personal, and business finances.”

Former President Donald Trump went on a tirade against the judge overseeing his civil fraud trial on Thursday, just hours after an appeals court paused a gag order against him that limited what he could say about court staff.

A New York Appellate Division judge issued a stay on the gag order after finding it was “unconstitutional,” adding the pause would extend until at least Nov. 27 when a full panel of judges will consider the matter. The gag order was first imposed by Judge Arthur Engoron on the second day of the trial into Trump’s business practices after the former president fired off attacks against the judge’s law clerk.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army raided Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, terrorizing patients, medical staff and families sheltering in the hospital compound. Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a surgeon, told Al Jazeera from inside the hospital that “food and drinking water haven’t come to the hospital for the sixth day now, with no way of getting anything in the hospital.” He expressed shock that “the whole world has been witnessing this crime and seeing everything that is happening and no one has stopped it.”

“No one has said loudly this is not allowed,” he added. “Where is the international community?”

Elon Musk, whose 2022 acquisition of X (then known as Twitter) included major cuts to content moderation around hate speech, drew a fresh wave of backlash this week by endorsing an antisemitic social media post that he described as “the actual truth.”

On Wednesday, an X user shared footage of a PSA created by the Foundation To Combat Antisemitism, which shows a father confronting his teenage son for posting a neo-Nazi message online.

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Israeli troops on Wednesday stormed into Gaza’s largest hospital, searching for traces of Hamas inside and beneath the facility, where newborns and hundreds of other patients have suffered for days without electricity and other basic necessities. The forces also pressed on with their wider ground offensive.

Details from the daylong raid remained sketchy, but officials from Israel and Gaza presented different accounts of what was happening at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City: The Israeli army released video showing soldiers carrying boxes labeled as “baby food” and “medical supplies,” while health officials talked of terrified staff and patients as troops moved through the buildings.

Premier Danielle Smith’s declaration last week that she intended to blow up Alberta’s health-care system came 25 years after then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein literally blew up the Calgary General Hospital.

Klein’s demolition on Oct. 4, 1998, involved tonnes of explosives to bring down a health-care icon the government had declared too old, inefficient and expensive. Ten years after its destruction, however, Calgary was still short of hospital beds and emergency room capacity.

On the other hand, Smith’s announced demolition will be much less dramatic but will involve a massive, long-run restructuring of the province’s system and thus affect every Albertan, for better or worse.

Donald Trump has filed a motion for a mistrial in a New York court, alleging the judge overseeing the $250m fraud case is biased.

Trump’s lawyers are asking the New York judge Arthur Engoron for a mistrial given “bias” and “improper co-judging” on the bench.

“In this case the evidence of apparent and actual bias is tangible and overwhelming,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the motion. “Only the grant of a mistrial can salvage what is left of the rule of law.”

In a new book, the extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claims no Democrats stayed in the House chamber on January 6 to help defend it against rioters sent by Donald Trump to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election win – a claim one Democrat who did stay labeled “patently false”.

Greene’s book, MTG, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson cleared his first major hurdle as the chamber’s new leader: passing a temporary spending bill to avert a shutdown and keep the government funded through the beginning of next year.

The so-called laddered continuing resolution — which passed the House with bipartisan support Tuesday and is likely to pass the Senate later this week — delivered Johnson a much-needed legislative win, averting a politically costly shutdown and buying Republicans a few more months to hammer out full-year spending bills. Under the “laddered” plan, roughly half the government is funded through Jan. 19 and the other half is funded through Feb. 2.

JERUSALEM — Speak to any Israeli official these days, and there is a good chance they will mention the conceptzia. The term traces back to the commission of inquiry after the surprise Yom Kippur war of 1973, a way to describe not just operational failures of intelligence but conceptual ones. Now as then, Israel’s vaunted security services had built policy on a flawed assumption: this time, that Hamas was focused on preserving its grip on Gaza and had lost interest in large-scale confrontation with Israel. The concept made sense — until Hamas proved it grimly wrong by killing more than 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7.

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza is the “right humanitarian solution” for the besieged enclave and for the region, a stance Palestinian officials liken to support of “ethnic cleansing”.

Smotrich made the comments after Knesset members Danny Danon, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, and Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of the intelligence agency Mossad, published a commentary in The Wall Street Journal on Monday suggesting moving some of Gaza’s population to nations that will accept them.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Monday took a bite out of ex-Trump White House policy adviser Stephen Miller as “one of the chief architects” of former President Donald Trump’s reported plans to curb immigration to the U.S. with mass deportations and holding camps if he returns to the White House.

A conservative former federal judge said he is “more worried for America today” than he was on Jan. 6, 2021, when Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the former president’s 2020 election defeat by President Joe Biden.

In an interview with the Guardian published on Monday, J. Michael Luttig predicted a victory for Republican front-runner Trump in the 2024 election “would be catastrophic for America’s democracy.”

A former senior official in Donald Trump’s White House slammed his ex-boss as a “traitor” and “a clear and present danger to our democracy,” according to a new book by ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Karl told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Monday evening that the unnamed official served Trump “loyally” for more than a year “at a very high level inside the West Wing, very close to Donald Trump” and hasn’t been publicly critical of him.

A former attorney for Donald Trump told prosecutors in Georgia that a senior White House official insisted to her that the then-president had no plans to leave office “under any circumstances” despite losing the 2020 election and multiple legal challenges to try to remain in power.

Jenna Ellis, a key figure in Trump’s effort to remain in power, made the remarks in an interview with investigators in Fulton County after pleading guilty to a lesser charge in the state’s indictment of Trump and 18 other co-conspirators. District Attorney Fani Willis charged the group with more than a dozen felonies, alleging participants engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to try to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.

Former President Donald Trump “became fixated on an entirely unconstitutional idea” that he could be reinstalled as president eight months after losing the 2020 election, new reporting from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reveals. (You can check out Karl’s report in the clip below)

The report, stemming from Karl’s work on his upcoming book “Tired of Winning,” arrives two years after the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman shared that Trump had told people “he expects he will get reinstated by August” 2021.

As the Israel Defense Forces attack two major hospitals in Gaza, patients and staff are facing imminent danger of dying, prompting more calls for a cease-fire, including from the European Union, according to multiple reports.

Al-Shifa, the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, is without electricity and lacks vital resources as the Israel Defense Forces continues to bombard the facility. The Israeli government says Hamas militants built a command complex under the hospital. Hamas and hospital officials have denied militants are hiding under the facility.

An Israeli cabinet official has publicly admitted to the government’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, saying on television over the weekend that the country is “rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”

On Saturday, security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter sat for a television interview with an Israeli news network. Dichter is part of the right-wing nationalist Likud party, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs.

“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Dichter said when asked if the recent images of northern Gaza residents evacuating south are comparable to images of the 1948 Nakba.

“From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war ― as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza ― with masses between the tanks and the soldiers,” he continued, according to a translation of the interview by Haaretz.

There’s a narrative about San Francisco that is as persistent as it is incorrect: The city’s post-pandemic struggles are the result of progressive policies run amok.

This was certainly the sentiment behind billionaire Elon Musk, who reportedly lives in Texas, calling for me, a democratically elected representative in San Francisco, to be “fired.” His post on X, formerly Twitter, alleged that I was arguably the person “most responsible for the destruction of San Francisco.” In late September, he wrote that I “should go to prison.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog has denied that Israel is striking the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip.

The UN has said the situation at Al-Shifa Hospital is dire, with constant gunfire and bombings in the area.

Doctors there have said newborn babies have died after power for incubators was cut off due to a lack of fuel.

When challenged by the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg about those reports, Mr Herzog rejected them as "spin by Hamas" and insisted there was electricity.

Israel before October 7 was a riven nation. After nine months of mass demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his judicial coup, polarisation was at an all-time high.

The bitterness and determination to bring down his government had galvanised more than half of the country. Remarkably the protests were joined by former officers from the army, Mossad and Shabak, as well as employees of leading high-tech companies which make up the backbone of the Israeli military industrial complex (MIC).

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces have ramped up attacks in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to gain ground near two key front line cities, Ukrainian military officials said Sunday.

Moscow’s troops have begun a push to regain territory near Bakhmut, the eastern mining city that was the site of the war’s bloodiest battle before falling into Russian hands in May, the head of Ukraine’s ground forces wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

London’s Metropolitan Police said that physical violence by far-right thugs and football hooligans on the city’s streets Saturday was more dangerous than the far-larger pro-Palestinian demonstration that was largely peaceful.

An estimated 300,000 people took to London’s streets on Saturday — as protesters did across other major European cities such as Paris and Brussels — to call for a cease-fire in Israel’s bombing campaign on Gaza. The London march was between Hyde Park and the U.S. Embassy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to confirm reports about a possible deal with Hamas to free Israeli hostages trapped in Gaza on Sunday, but attributed any movement toward an agreement to Israel’s deadly ground offensive in the region.

“There could be [a deal], but I think the less I said about it, the more I’ll increase the chances that it materializes,” Netanyahu told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday during an interview on “Meet the Press.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Palestinian civilians being killed en masse are simply “collateral damage” in his military’s destruction of Gaza.

The right-wing leader appeared on multiple cable news shows to speak on the current state Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza, which human rights experts have warned amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes. For much of his appearances, Netanyahu attempted to downplay both his responsibility in the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israelis as well as his military’s role in killing Palestinians.

NEW YORK (AP) — A mass deportation operation. A new Muslim ban. Tariffs on all imported goods and “freedom cities” built on federal land.

Much of the 2024 presidential campaign has been dominated by the myriad investigations into former President Donald Trump and the subsequent charges against him. But with less than a year until Election Day, Trump is dominating the race for the Republican nomination and has already laid out a sweeping set of policy goals should he win a second term.

Until a few years ago, Grey Wilson’s journey as a trans person had largely been a peaceful one.

A week before his 13th birthday, he came out to his mother, Lauren, in a PowerPoint presentation that laid out why he should be allowed to transition. It had previously proven to be a successful method of getting what he wanted: Every time he yearned to adopt a dog or a bunny, he would create a slideshow detailing the costs of pet ownership, appropriate feeding schedules, and where to obtain the animal in question. (Grey only got turned down when he asked Lauren for a snake.)

If there was a health-care system structure that guaranteed better patient care, lower surgical wait times and impartial and accountable decision-making, then it would be in place everywhere.

But it's not.

British Columbia has five regional health authorities. Québec has 18. Ontario? It's somewhat complicated.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back Saturday against growing international calls for a cease-fire, saying Israel’s battle to crush Gaza’s ruling Hamas militants will continue with “full force.”

A cease-fire would be possible only if all 239 hostages held by militants in Gaza are released, Netanyahu said in a televised address.

The Israeli leader also insisted that after the war, now entering its sixth week, Gaza would be demilitarized and Israel would retain security control there. Asked what he meant by security control, Netanyahu said Israeli forces must be able to enter Gaza freely to hunt down militants.

It is a cold day in Washington. A crowd is gathering on the National Mall for the swearing-in of the 47th president of the United States. At noon on 20 January 2025, Donald Trump places his hand on a Bible, takes the oath of office and delivers an inaugural address with a simple theme: retribution.

This is the nightmare scenario for millions of Americans – and one that they are increasingly being forced to take seriously. Opinion polls show Trump running away with the Republican presidential nomination and narrowly leading Democrat Joe Biden in a hypothetical match-up. Political pundits can offer plenty of caveats but almost all agree that the race for the White House next year will be very close.

The fact that there is a more than remote chance of the twice impeached, quadruply indicted former US president returning to the Oval Office is ringing alarm bells. “I think it would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, said on the ABC talkshow The View this week. “And I don’t say that lightly.”

The former secretary of state noted that history shows how leaders can get legitimately elected and then terminate elections, the opposition and a free press. “Hitler was duly elected,” Clinton added. “All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like, ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”

Trump, notorious for eschewing the politician’s dog whistle in favour of a megaphone, has been characteristically transparent about his intentions in a second term. He set the tone in March when, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, he framed the 2024 election as “the final battle” for America and told supporters: “I am your retribution.”

Trump has promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists in a second term. The Axios website has reported on his plan to dismantle the “deep state” by purging potentially thousands of civil servants and appointing ideological loyalists. A recent New York Times newspaper article told how his team wants to fill the White House and government agencies with aggressive rightwing lawyers who would not challenge the expansion of presidential power.

And the Washington Post reported that Trump is discussing how to use the justice department to investigate or prosecute perceived enemies including his former chief of staff John Kelly, former attorney general William Barr and former joint chiefs of staff chairman Gen Mark Milley. The paper added that he is also considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to use the military domestically to crush protests and dissent.

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “It would be a disaster for America. He’s already made it very clear that his second term is going to be a revenge term. He’s going to use the power of government to persecute and prosecute his enemies and to cement his own power, or at least the power of his allies and cronies.

“He’s already shown he has no respect for the law or for the traditions of American democracy and so a second Trump term would be very frightening. The overwhelming consensus of scientists is that we are getting close to the point of no return on climate change and four years of Trump would be a disaster for the planet. He wants to drill and dig and burn.”

Trump has escaped cross-examination of his policy agenda by skipping all three Republican primary debates so far. But he has given plenty of clues in campaign rallies and online announcements that his second term would make the first look almost modest and moderate by comparison.

He has pledged to extend his signature border wall, deploy special forces to fight drug cartels in Mexico “just as we took down Isis and the Isis caliphate”, and impose the death penalty on drug dealers. Other proposals include punishing doctors who provide gender-affirming care, tightening restrictions on voting in elections and eviscerating diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in education.

Trump has previously branded the climate crisis a hoax and regularly mocks renewable energy sources such as wind; a second term would be sure to activate more drilling for gas and oil. He has also vowed to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours, which many observers interpret as effectively waving a white flag to President Vladimir Putin.

Trump would be unlikely to meet much resistance from the rank and file of the Republican party, which recently elected Mike Johnson, an election denier and ardent opponent of abortion rights, as speaker of the House of Representatives. An election that produces a Trump presidency would also be likely to give Republicans control of both the House and Senate, just as it did in 2016.

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive grassroots movement Indivisible, said: “In that scenario you see the tools of the executive branch being used for retribution, for dismantling our democratic institutions as he is currently promising to do very publicly, but you also see rightwing Maga members of the House and the Senate controlling the legislature.

“We have a white Christian nationalist now who is speaker of the House and would in all likelihood be speaker of the House in 2025, not in a Democratic or Republican split government scenario but one in which he can actually set policy. That is one where you see abortion bans, national book bans, defunding of education, a tax on contraceptives – the entirety of the agenda that they tried to push in 2017 and more because the Republican party in the intervening years has only gotten more extreme as the moderates have been pushed out by Trump supporters.”

Levin, a former congressional staffer, added: “It is right to focus on what Trump is promising to do, but remember it’s not just Trump because he brings a lot of other bad actors along with him in the legislative branch, and they are going to do enormous amounts of damage with his support.”

The enactment of such an agenda seemed far-fetched in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and as criminal indictments against Trump piled up in four jurisdictions. Yet he has proved remarkably politically resilient and dominates the Republican primary field by more than 40 percentage points.

A string of opinion polls one year out from election day spooked Democrats. The New York Times and Siena College found Trump leading Biden in five of the six states crucial to deciding the electoral college. Emerson College Polling also had Trump ahead in five out of six swing states. CNN put Trump ahead of Biden by 49% to 45% nationally as voters express dissatisfaction with the economy and rising prices.

Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, warned: “The fact that Donald Trump in polling is beating Joe Biden in five out of the six battleground states is mind-numbingly painful to believe because it says to me that you value the country and its constitution far less than you value your own self-gratification. I get it; times are not equally good for everybody at the same time; people are going through stuff, absolutely.

“But I’m not going to sit back and say that the guy who tried to overthrow the government, who botched the most consequential pandemic in modern times, resulting in the death of over a million Americans, who plays footsies with our enemies in Russia and China, is going to be the answer to high inflation which, by the way, is half of what it was a year ago. I’m not buying what folks out there are trying to sell with thinking that it will be better with Donald Trump.”

Steele added: “He represents a clear and present danger. He is a threat and I take him at his word. When a candidate says, ‘I am your retribution’ to his base, that’s not good for the rest of us. People need to get their heads out of their behinds when it comes to what that threat is.”

The 45th president suffered a setback, however, when Democrats achieved sweeping victories in this week’s off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere, powered in part by voters’ demand for abortion rights. Trump’s primary opponents cited it as proof that he is electoral poison and bears responsibility for a long run of Republican defeats at the ballot box.

The results were enough to steady nerves about whether Biden, who turns 81 later this month, is the right man for a gruelling election campaign. Trump, meanwhile, spent Monday in a New York courtroom for a fraud case that threatens to break up his business empire – a preview of legal trials and tribulations that could still undermine his candidacy next year.

Should the man seen as an autocrat-in-waiting overcome those hurdles and return to power in January 2025, the obituaries of American democracy are sure to be written. But not everyone believes that Trump 2.0 would be quite so apocalyptic.

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank who served in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “There’s a little bit of an exaggeration, a little bit of hysteria going on about this. The guardrails of American democracy are still in pretty good shape.”

The supreme court and lower courts overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Kamarck noted. “That’s not changed. If anything, the judiciary now has more non-Trump people because Biden has had three years of appointing judges – and he’s appointed a lot of judges.”

A President Trump would also be checked by Congress where Republicans would be unlikely to have the 60-vote Senate majority required to pass legislation. A true autocrat also enjoys control of the military. “Look at all the top aides that have come out against Trump as president. There’s no indication that they would proceed to follow illegal orders from him; it doesn’t work that way.”

Kamarck acknowledged: “I do think it would be bad for America and he would certainly try to be a dictator but this is where we trust in the founding fathers. They anticipated a Trump, but in a white wig with curls, and they built the system to prevent him. I think that system will work.”

Original Article
Source: theguardian.com
Author: David Smith in Washington

Biden Campaign Denounces ‘Racist, Cruel’ Alleged Trump Immigration Proposals

If he wins a second term, former President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to wage war on immigration, implementing a vast array of policies dreamed up with Stephen Miller, the adviser behind his most controversial first-term immigration policies.

A New York Times story published Saturday provided details: Trump would round up millions of undocumented people and put them in detention camps while they await deportation, using reassigned federal law enforcement and National Guard members to help with the sweeps.

KHERSON, Ukraine — One year since Ukraine retook the city of Kherson from occupying Russian forces, residents have grown accustomed to hearing outgoing fire from the left bank of the Dnieper river, where Russian troops are positioned. They know that familiar crackle means they have seven seconds to find a shelter, or a sturdy wall to hide behind.

Their lives are mostly limited to the comfort of home and the necessity of the supermarket. Many shops are still shuttered. Municipal workers wear bullet-proof vests and wait to be dispatched to sweep up the rubble from yet another impact.