There is no RNC. Only Trump.

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended. Trump has begun turning the RNC into his legal defense fund.

Shane Goldmacher, Michael C. Bender and Chris Cameron at NYT:

Days after allies took over the Republican National Committee, Donald J. Trump’s advisers are imposing mass layoffs on the party, with more than 60 officials, including senior staff members, laid off or asked to resign and then reapply for their jobs, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The swift changes amount to a gutting of the party apparatus eight months before the November election, with one person familiar with the operations estimating that the R.N.C. had only about 200 people on payroll at the end of February, and about 120 at its headquarters near Capitol Hill. The heads of the communications, data and political departments were among those let go.

On Friday, Michael Whatley, a close ally to Mr. Trump, and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, were unanimously elected as the committee’s chair and co-chair. Mr. Trump had pushed out Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, and endorsed Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump to take the reins of the national party.

Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers, was tapped to serve as the chief operating officer, and he was at the party headquarters meeting with senior staff on Monday.

The purge of R.N.C. staff members was first reported by Politico. It is not clear that Mr. Trump is done clearing house.

One person with direct knowledge of the changes said the party’s full finance and digital teams were now planned to be moved to Palm Beach, Fla., where the Trump campaign is based. Another person described the party and Trump operations as being functionally fused into one.

Mark Meadows Update

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  

Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer at NYT:

Mark Meadows, the final chief of staff for President Donald J. Trump, was told that plans to try to overturn the 2020 election using so-called alternate electors were not “legally sound” and that the events of Jan. 6 could turn violent, but he pushed forward with a rally anyway, the House committee investigating the Capitol attack alleged in a Friday night court filing.

In the 248-page filing, lawyers for the committee highlighted the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a White House aide in Mr. Meadows’s office, who revealed new details about the events that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress by a pro-Trump mob.

“I know that there were concerns brought forward to Mr. Meadows,” Ms. Hutchinson told investigators at a deposition on March 7, adding: “I know that people had brought information forward to him that had indicated that there could be violence on the 6th. But, again, I’m not sure if he — what he did with that information.”

Glenn Kessler at WP:

“I don’t want my vote or anyone else’s to be disenfranchised. … Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around? … Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m re-registering.’

— Mark Meadows, then White House chief of staff, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Aug. 16, 2020

After Donald Trump lost the presidential election, falsely claiming election fraud, Meadows became senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which promotes “election integrity” efforts. The organization’s “citizen’s guide” urges activists to determine that the registrations of their neighbors are legal by checking on “whether voters have moved, or if the registrations are PO Boxes, commercial addresses or vacant lots” and then “obtaining evidence: photos of commercial buildings? Vacant lots?” and “securing affidavits from current residents that a registered voter has moved.”

Voter-list maintenance is one of the dividing lines in American politics. Republicans argue that if voter-registration records are not regularly purged and updated, election fraud can take place. Democrats push back that too many voter-list purges are conducted haphazardly, removing eligible voters who don’t learn they are no longer listed until they show up to vote.

Now it turns out that until last week, Meadows was simultaneously registered to vote in three different states — North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina — according to state records obtained by The Fact Checker.

The overlap lasted about three weeks, and it might have continued if revelations about Meadows’s voting record had not attracted scrutiny in North Carolina. Meadows is still registered in Virginia and South Carolina.

 

An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.  


[This open letter is being published simultaneously by The Bulwark and the New Republic.]

We are writers, academics, and political activists who have long disagreed about many things.

Some of us are Democrats and others Republicans. Some identify with the left, some with the right, and some with neither. We have disagreed in the past, and we hope to be able to disagree, productively, for years to come. Because we believe in the pluralism that is at the heart of democracy.

But right now we agree on a fundamental point: We need to join together to defend liberal democracy.

Because liberal democracy itself is in serious danger. Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger.

The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020 and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.

So we, who have differed on so much in the past—and who continue to differ on much today—have come together to say:

We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to change state election laws to limit voter participation.

We vigorously oppose ongoing Republican efforts to empower state legislatures to override duly appointed election officials and interfere with the proper certification of election results, thereby substituting their own political preferences for those expressed by citizens at the polls.

We vigorously oppose the relentless and unending promotion of unprofessional and phony “election audits” that waste public money, jeopardize public electoral data and voting machines, and generate paranoia about the legitimacy of elections.

We urge the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass effective, national legislation to protect the vote and our elections, and if necessary to override the Senate filibuster rule.

And we urge all responsible citizens who care about democracy—public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.

Now is the time for leaders in all walks of life—for citizens of all political backgrounds and persuasions—to come to the aid of the Republic.

Todd Gitlin
Professor of Journalism, Sociology and Communications
Columbia University

Jeffrey C. Isaac
James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science
Indiana University, Bloomington

William Kristol
Editor at Large, The Bulwark
Director, Defending Democracy Together
Cosigners

Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.

Sheri Berman
Professor of Political Science
Barnard College

Max Boot
Senior Fellow
Council on Foreign Relations

James Carroll
Writer

Leo Casey
Assistant to the President
American Federation of Teachers

Mona Charen
Policy Editor
The Bulwark

Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jelani Cobb
Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

Eliot A. Cohen
Robert E. Osgood Professor
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

David Cole
National Legal Director
American Civil Liberties Union

Laura K. Field
Senior Fellow
Niskanen Center

Carolyn Forché
University Professor
Georgetown University

Francis Fukuyama
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University

William A. Galston
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Michael E. Gellert Professor Emeritus
New School for Social Research

Hahrie Hahn
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science
Director, SNF Agora Institute
Johns Hopkins University

Roya Hakakian
Writer

John Judis
Writer

Ira Katznelson
Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History
Columbia University

Michael Kazin
Professor of History
Georgetown University

Randall Kennedy
Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard University

Steven R. Levitsky
Professor of Government
Harvard University

Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.
Psychiatrist and author

Susie Linfield
Professor of Journalism
New York University

Damon Linker
Senior Correspondent
The Week

Dahlia Lithwick
Senior Editor
Slate

Jane Mansbridge
Charles F. Adams Professor, Emerita
Harvard Kennedy School

Win McCormack
Editor in Chief
The New Republic

John McWhorter
Professor of Linguistics
Columbia University

Deborah Meier
Educator

James Miller
Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies
New School for Social Research

Susan Neiman
Director
Einstein Forum

Nell Irvin Painter
Edwards Professor of American History Emerita
Princeton University

Rick Perlstein
Writer

Katha Pollitt
Writer

Claire Potter
Professor of History
New School for Social Research

Jedediah Purdy
William S. Beinecke Professor of Law
Columbia University

Jonathan Rauch
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Adolph Reed
Emeritus Professor of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania

Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Princeton University

Charles Sykes
Founder and Editor at Large
The Bulwark

George Thomas
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions
Claremont McKenna College

Michael Tomasky
Editor, The New Republic
Editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas

Jeffrey K. Tulis
Professor of Government and Law
University of Texas

Joan Walsh
Writer
The Nation

Michael Walzer
Professor Emeritus of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study

Dorian T. Warren
President
Community Change

Sean Wilentz
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History
Princeton University

Benjamin Wittes
Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism, sociology and communications at Columbia University. Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. William Kristol is the editor at large of The Bulwark and the director of Defending Democracy Together.

Blue COVID and Red COVID

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process.

It may threaten red states, but that threat did not show up in April data.

Philip Klinkner has some fascinating analysis at Vox:

[At] the federal level, we have seen lawmakers advocating for economic aid on a bipartisan (albeit asymmetrical) basis, resulting in the implementation of programs like the Paycheck Protection Program. But the parties have been divided more on public health measures. Passage of last week’s small business relief bill was held up because Democrats insisted, over Republicans objections, on including money for hospitals and more testing.

The differential impact of the pandemic also gives us clues about how the 2020 election might play out. Democrats will likely continue to criticize President Trump’s erratic and ineffectual response to the crisis and the need for the federal government to provide funding to meet the ongoing medical and economic emergency. President Trump, meanwhile, might argue that his actions have limited the pandemic at least in the areas where most of his voters reside, while Republicans might accuse Democrats of hyping the crisis in order to ramp up government spending for their voters in large urban areas.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office has already called aid to state and local governments devastated by the pandemic “Blue State Bailouts.” Such a message is all the more pernicious and perhaps more effective since it triggers prejudices related to race, religion, and immigration. If so, it seems likely that the pandemic will only deepen America’s chronic social and political divides.

Trump Botches Coronavirus Speech

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's approach to governing. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Justin Sink at Bloomberg:

The America First presidency collided with a global pandemic Wednesday night. The result did not appear to reassure skittish markets or a nervous nation.

President Donald Trump relied on a familiar playbook as he spoke in a prime-time address from the Oval Office, announcing sweeping new restrictions on travel from Europe and scattered executive actions to help workers and businesses rocked by what he labeled a “foreign virus.”

He blamed allies for not adopting tough immigration measures that he said had prevented a wider outbreak in the U.S. But the combative approach and small-bore measures seemed only to highlight the president’s struggles to confront the most consequential moment of his presidency.

And even in a 10-minute address, Trump couldn’t stick to the facts.

He overstated the European travel restrictions, saying he was “suspending all travel” from the continent, and suggested they would also apply to trade. He tweeted later that trade wouldn’t be affected, and the Department of Homeland Security clarified that the restriction applies generally to foreigners who’ve been in Europe within 14 days.

He said U.S. health insurers had agreed to waive co-payments for coronavirus treatment. A spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, said its members had agreed only to waive co-payments for testing.

To those claiming what Trump said the speech was correct, here’s the transcript of the relevant section pic.twitter.com/40L0YOTQec

— Frida Ghitis (@FridaGhitis) March 12, 2020

The White House inadvertently aired Trump talking off-camera before giving his address, including him saying "ah, fuck" and asking if "anybody has any white stuff" pic.twitter.com/gygZIPlsOa

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) March 12, 2020

Trump immediately after his #COVID19 speech, when he didn’t realize the cameras were still on—you have to see this for yourself.

WATCH 🚨👇🏼🚨pic.twitter.com/DEpaqE4L85

— Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈 (@leahmcelrath) March 12, 2020

A Hurricane of Lies

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character and record of dishonesty. The update -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Salvador Hernandez at Buzzfeed:

Showing no signs of backing down or even the slightest inclination to admit he was wrong, President Trump has insisted for five days straight that his false claim that Hurricane Dorian was set to smash into Alabama — contradicting forecasts from government meteorologists — was correct.

But the president's relentless arguments and memes trying to prove himself right reached a tipping point Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service, issued a statement from an unnamed spokesperson backing up the president's claim and casting doubt on a local weather service forecast office which had tried to reassure Alabama residents that despite the president's tweet, there would be "no impacts" from the hurricane felt in the southern state. (The local forecast office proved to be correct.)

Let me assure you the hard working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight #NOAA

— Dan Sobien (@pres_nwseo) September 6, 2019

A little som’som’ about the Director of Communications of #NOAA who sent out the statement backing up President Bonkers’ hurricane forecast. pic.twitter.com/RXS2FkxXXl

— Coastal Elite (@cmkinmia) September 7, 2019

We have checked with several dictionaries and a fourth-grade grammar workbook and although the use of "their" seems to be entirely incorrect, officials at NOAA, NWS and Attorney General Barr now say the president's statement is correct and also not malignantly narcissistic. https://t.co/yvIYQuisLa

— David Simon (@AoDespair) September 7, 2019

(He has been making that spelling mistake for years.)

Trump and the Russian Electric Power Grid

In Defying the Odds,we discuss Trump's approach to governing. The update --recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth at NYT:

 The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.
...
Officials at the National Security Council also declined to comment but said they had no national security concerns about the details of The New York Times’s reporting about the targeting of the Russian grid, perhaps an indication that some of the intrusions were intended to be noticed by the Russians.

... 

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

.....ALSO, NOT TRUE! Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019

Trump Lies About Fraud

ABC's David Muir interviewed Trump:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: And you're gonna find ...
DAVID MUIR: ... those people who are on the rolls voted, that there are millions of illegal votes?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I didn't say there are millions. But I think there could very well be millions of people. That's right.
DAVID MUIR: You tweeted though ...
PRESIDENT TRUMP: And I also say this ...
DAVID MUIR: ... you tweeted, "If you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally, I won the popular vote."
PRESIDENT TRUMP: David, and I also say this, if I was going for the popular vote I would've won easily. But I would've been in California and New York. I wouldn't have been in Maine. I wouldn't have been in Iowa. I wouldn't have been in Nebraska and all of those states that I had to win in order to win this. I would've been in New York, I would've been in California. I never even went there.
DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask you, you did win. You're the president. You're sitting ...
PRESIDENT TRUMP: That’s true.
DAVID MUIR: ... across from me right now.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: That's true.
DAVID MUIR: Do you think that your words matter more now?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yes, very much.
DAVID MUIR: Do you think that that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, not at all.
(OVERTALK)
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Not at all because many people feel the same way that I do. And ...
DAVID MUIR: You don't think it undermines your credibility if there’s no evidence?
(OVERTALK)PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, not at all because they didn't come to me. Believe me. Those were Hillary votes. And if you look at it they all voted for Hillary. They all voted for Hillary. They didn't vote for me. I don't believe I got one. Okay, these are people that voted for Hillary Clinton. And if they didn't vote, it would've been different in the popular.

At Dartmouth, David Cottrell, Michael C. Herron and Sean J. Westwood have a study titled "Evaluating Donald Trump’s Allegations of Voter Fraud in the 2016 Presidential Election." The abstract:

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the presidential election would be tainted by massive voter fraud. Despite winning the presidency, Trump has maintained that position through November. We suspected prior to the election that fraud allegations might dominate the post-election political landscape, and to this end we initiated a research project with the objective of evaluating the relationship between election returns and potential sources of fraud in the vein of Trump’s claims. Our research focuses on non-citizen populations, deceased individuals, the timing of results, and voting technology, and we do not uncover any evidence consistent with Trump’s assertions about widespread voter fraud. Moreover, we do not observe any striking abnormalities in two sets of states recently highlighted as potentially problematic: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the subject of ongoing recount efforts) and California, New Hampshire, and Virginia (three states cited personally by Trump). Our results do not imply that there was no fraud at all in the 2016 presidential contest, nor do they imply that this contest was error-free. They do strongly suggest, however, that the voter fraud concerns fomented and espoused by the Trump campaign are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 presidential election.

American Crossroads, The Truman Strategy, and The Canary

The president's political needs are not the same as those of congressional Democrats. Explosions can happen, and American Crossroads CEO Steven Law writes at The Hill that Montana Senator Jon Tester is the canary in the coal mine:

Since August, President Obama has made “running against Congress” a centerpiece of his reelection strategy, as President Truman did in 1948. But the comparison between 1948 and 2012 contains one inconvenient fact: the Senate is still controlled by the President’s own party, and that happens to be the part that is giving him the greatest trouble.

Numerous Senate Democrats – including top brass like Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Max Baucus – have made clear they are not going to “pass this bill” without major changes. Sen. Begich, Ben Nelson, Casey, Landrieu, Webb, McCaskill and others are openly uncomfortable with defending another fat stimulus package – this time funded with the kicker of broad tax increases.

...

More likely, those facing tough reelection fights will smell the same danger Tester has: that President Obama’s latest jobs bill is less a real jobs program with any chance of passage than a reelection strategy that could end up pushing Obama’s remaining congressional majority – the Democrat-held Senate – over a cliff.

House Democrats fell into this trap in 2010: putting their careers on the line for Obama initiatives like “cap and trade” that had no chance of becoming law. One term later, Senate Democrats are poised to do the same for a stimulus and tax plan that has no chance of becoming law – but serves up a useful sound bite for a president “running against Congress.”
...
Since President Obama began launching attacks against Congress in August, congressional Democrats have awakened to the fact that Obama views them as collateral damage in his pathway to reelection – in the same way that his ambitious agenda helped wipe out dozens of their House colleagues and chairmanships last year.

Despite a long record of rubberstamping Obama’s radical big government agenda, Tester has finally decided he doesn’t want to be a casualty of Obama’s reelection stimulus.

The question is whether Tester’s reality check will extend to other Democrats with their re-elections on the line.

The Truman Analogy

At the Atlantic, screenwriter Erik Tarloff writes:

Like Obama, Truman had suffered a resounding defeat in the 1946 Congressional elections. In fact, it was even worse for him; he lost control of both the House and the Senate. And like Obama, he confronted an emboldened Republican Congress that refused to pass his program (and unlike Obama, he had several of his vetoes overridden). And when he ran for re-election, here's what he didn't do: talk about amity and compromise and cooperation. The other side wasn't interested, and Truman knew it. So what he did was draw clear lines and make a principled fight.

This version is Hollywood, not history. As Brendan Nyhan noted last November, Truman won because of a good economy, not a good acceptance speech. Moreover, Dewey was a fine governor who might have made a first-rate president, but in 1948 he was a weak candidate who ran a bland campaign. The 2012 GOP candidate will probably be a tougher foe than Dewey was.